Free A Week in Summer: A Short Story by Maeve Binchy

A Week in Summer
     
    Do you know what I think should be banned? Those advertisements for cruise holidays for mature people. You get this suave man in a dinner jacket, hair lightly streaked with gray, looking into the eyes of a woman with a pashmina stole around her slim, firm shoulders, to protect her against the night breezes as they stand on deck together. There is a hint that they have been at it like rabbits all afternoon and that they can’t wait for the captain’s cocktail party and gala dinner to end, so they can be at it all over again.
    Are there people like this or is it just a fantasy dreamed up by an advertising agency, to sell holidays to us middle-aged Americans? Something that will leave the rest of us unsettled and unhappy? In any event, it is not important; it’s not relevant to us. We had never had a real vacation. Not even when the girls, Mel and Margy, were children. Brian used to say, in his farming days: “Find me a cow that doesn’t need to be milked for three weeks, and then we’ll have a vacation.”
    And when the bottom fell out of the dairy-cattle market, as it did—for Brian, anyway—he was into growing corn in Illinois and flax in North Dakota, and in those days you couldn’t take a vacation, either, because there was always something to be planted or watered or reaped or saved. And when the bottom hadfallen out of flax and corn—for Brian, anyway—he studied mathematics and became a math teacher at a private school.
    Other teachers had vacations. In fact, people were always saying they met teachers on vacations. But not Brian, because there were papers to mark, or courses to do, or students to tutor, and he liked going up to the attic and writing little bits of poetry that he never showed to anyone. But anyway, what with all this … hey presto, the vacation was soon over.
    Me? Oh, I have worked forever at the same thing. Like my mother before me, I bake things. I used to work as a patisserie chef in a big hotel, but after I met Brian I had to think up something a bit more mobile. Something that could move easily when he did. So now I make cakes and casseroles and pies and deliver them to people’s homes. I had to be ready to get up and go to the next place, so it was good to have a craft or trade or skill, whatever you might call it, to take with us.
    People everywhere want to eat, and lots of younger women don’t have time to cook. You’d be surprised how many deep-dish apple pies I make in their own pottery dishes. They even pretend to their husbands that they cooked it themselves. I have to be very careful about how and when I make my deliveries.
    Now, I know I could have taken a vacation on my own. There was nothing to stop me from going to Europe or on a cruise or to theGrand Canyon. But that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t just to be able to say that I had been somewhere. I’m way too old for that. My customers who buy deep-dish apple pie and lamb stew wouldn’t think more of me if I said I had been on a cruise to Alaska or on a train through the capitals of Europe. No, I just wanted to travel with Brian, and he
just
didn’t want to go anywhere at all.
    I wanted it for Brian and me. Something to remember. Something to look back on during the long evenings when we were on our own.
    Mel and Margy were away a lot; there was always something for them to do during the summer holidays, when the school term was finished. There was this camp and that camp; the children loved camp. And because Brian had had so many careers and we had moved so much and so often, we thought it best for the girls to go to boarding school. It would give them more stability and enable them to keep their friends. And, heavens, they had so many friends.
    A lot of these friends had parents who were much younger than we were. We are conscious of being older parents. I mean, Brian was forty when we married, and I was thirty-eight. We didn’t want to seem too geriatric. All parents live on different