Maeve Binchy - Tara Road

Marilyn picked up her keys and drove to work.

Ria sat down and held on to the table very tightly. Not since she was a teenager had she been abroad alone. And with Danny very few times. Well, at least she had a passport and a few weeks to get everything organised at this end.

Marilyn had said she was perfectly happy to feed Annie's cat. The children would love a trip to America, a house with a swimming pool. Marilyn said it was easy to learn to drive on the wrong side of the road because the place was so quiet. Ria had warned Marilyn against any such foolhardy courage in Dublin, which was filled with traffic hazards and mad drivers.

Marilyn had said she would prefer to walk anyway.

From force of habit, Ria got a piece of paper, wrote the word List and underlined it. As she began to write down what she had to do, her chest tightened. Was she completely mad? She knew nothing about this woman. Nothing at all except they had both cried on the telephone. When you paused to think about it, wasn't it very odd that she should approach the business of exchanging her house this way? There were agencies, firms specialising in such things. There was the whole Internet waiting for the opportunity to match people together, find them the ideal house-swap.

What kind of a person would remember Danny's handsome face from years ago and try to track him down? Perhaps she had fancied him all that time ago; he was a striking-looking man after all. Maybe she had in fact been closer to him than she was saying; it might have been a fling, a whirl or whatever. This whole idea of taking his house could be a ploy, a ruse to get involved in his life.

Ria had seen so many movies where mad people sounded totally plausible, where innocent trusting folk admitted them willingly into their lives. These could be the first hours of a nightmare that could wreck them. She must try and be rational about all this and work out what she wanted. Why did it seem such a good idea? Was it only so that she wouldn't have to look at Hilary, her mother, Rosemary, Frances and Gertie and see the sympathy in their eyes? Was there any other reason that was taking her across the Atlantic Ocean?

I might half forget him out there, Ria told herself. I might actually not see his face everywhere I look. Suppose she was sleeping in a strange bed in America she might not wake up at four o'clock frightened, thinking he was very late, could he have been in a car crash, and then with the even more sickening realisation that he was not coming back at all. America might cure that.

And the awful belief that there may have been other Bernadettes. People always said that the man doesn't leave on the first affair. There could have been other people entertained in this house, even that had slept with her husband. How great to go to a place where nobody had met Danny, heard of him, and certainly not slept with him.

But still it was a very sudden decision to have made. Promising a total stranger that she could live here in Tara Road. In normal times she would not have done anything so wildly lacking in caution. But these were not normal times, they were times when two months in America might actually be what was needed. And it was idiotic really to think that this woman Marilyn might be a serial killer.

Ria remembered that Marilyn had not wanted this house in particular, and it was Ria who had pushed Tara Road. Marilyn had sounded apologetic and had tried several times to end the conversation, it was Ria who had made all the running. She had said she would send photographs and banker's references, and Ria would do the same. Of course she was above-board and normal. She wanted to escape and have time to get her head together; that was American-speak for exactly what Ria wanted to do. It wasn't so outrageous a coincidence that two people with identical needs should meet accidentally at the right time.

Why do I want it so much? Ria asked herself. When I got up this morning I hadn't a notion of going to a house in Connecticut for the summer. Is it for the children so that I'll be able to offer them something the equivalent of their father's trip on the Shannon? Is it that I want to be somewhere where Danny Lynch isn't the centre of the world and we are all waiting for what he will do next so that we can react?

She felt the answer was a mixture of all these things, but she still wasn't sure that she had the strength to go ahead with it. Should she talk to Rosemary about it? Rosemary was so clear-headed she cut straight to the chase on everything.

But Ria firmed up her shoulders. She was a strong person despite a lot of evidence to the contrary. She would not allow circumstances to turn her into one of those dithering women she despised so much when she served them at the charity shop. The ones who couldn't make up their mind between a blue tablecloth and a yellow one; they'd have to talk to a husband, a daughter, a neighbour about it all before they came back and paid three whole pounds.

She liked the sound of Marilyn; this woman was not a psychotic, deranged killer coming over to waste the neighbourhood of Tara Road. She was someone who had appeared just when she was needed. With bleak determination Ria applied herself to the list.

The meal with Annie and Brian was not going well.

Danny had taken them to Quentin's which he thought would be a treat for them, but was turning out to be a great mistake. For one thing they weren't dressed properly. Any other young people having an early dinner there with parents and grandparents were elegantly turned out. Brian wore scruffy jeans and a very grubby T-shirt. His zipped jacket had a lot of writing on it, the names of footballers and dead pop stars; he looked very like a young tearaway who might have been harassing tourists in Grafton Street, Annie was also in jeans, far too tight in Danny's opinion. Her blonde hair was not washed and shiny, it was greasy and pushed behind her ears. She wore an old sequinned jacket to which she was inordinately attached. It belonged to some old lady in St Rita's and was described as a genuine fifties garment if you commented on it at all.

'Would you look at the prices!' Brian said, astounded. ' Look what they charge for steak and kidney pie. Mam makes that for free at home.'

'Not for free, you eejit,' Annie said. 'She has to buy the steak and the kidney and the flour and the butter for the pastry.'

'But that's all there already,' Brian protested.

'No, it's not. It doesn't grow in the kitchen, you fool. That's so typical of a man. She has to go out and pay for it in the shops and then there's the cost of her labour; that has to be taken into consideration.'

Danny saw that in a way Annie was trying to justify the cost of the expensive meal that he was treating them to, but as a conversation it was going nowhere. 'Right, now do we see anything we like?' He looked from one of them to the other hopefully.

'What are porcini, is it roast pork?' Brian asked.

'No, it's mushrooms,' his father explained.

'Eejit,' Annie said again, even though she hadn't known either.

'I might have a hamburger but I don't see it on the menu,' Brian said.

Danny hid his annoyance. 'Look here, they say ground beef served with a tomato and basil salsa, that's more or less it,' he pointed it out.

'Why don't they call it a burger, like normal places?' Brian grumbled.

'They expect people to be able to read and understand things,’ Annie said dismissively. 'Do they have vegetarian things, Dad?'

Eventually the choice was made and Brenda Brennan, the suave manageress, came and took their order personally.

'Pleasure to see you with your family, Mr Lynch,' she said, showing not an iota of displeasure at the fact that the children were dressed like tramps.

Danny smiled his gratitude.