A Few of the Girls (17 page)

Seán was helping the guests into their coats and waving them good-bye. He came back in and stood behind her as she looked in the mirror. He put his arms around her shoulders.

“The mirror was a mistake, Seán,” she admitted in a small voice.

He smiled into her hair.

“Maybe, but it wasn't a
total
mistake,” he said to her, and held her tighter.

“I don't know.” She wasn't convinced.

“Well, don't the pair of us look fine in it,” he said. “Doesn't that make it the bargain of the century?”

They had this teacher at their boys' boarding school, and he was called Mr. Mangan. Apparently he'd been there for years and years and all you ever had to do was to mention his name and they would all talk about him for hours.

He had very pale blue eyes and nobody knew anything about his background. It was thought that he had once been a priest but that was never confirmed. There was no Mrs. Mangan, and he had lived in a boardinghouse one mile from the school. He walked there and back every day, sunshine, rain, or snow.

As boys, they had been very incurious about what kind of life he led. Only later, when the women wanted to know about him, did they ask each other and themselves what Mr. Mangan did to sustain his life in that remote part of the country.

He could hardly have been propping up the local bars, of which there were many in the small town. Word would have reached the religious community; it would not have been viewed favorably.

He certainly had no romantic interest that had ever reached their ears. That too would surely have been frowned on.

There was no theater, no real library; the cinema changed its film every Sunday night in those days twenty years ago. It was hard to imagine Mr. Mangan going out to play bridge with the local ladies. He didn't have a car or a bicycle to take him further afield. He was known to be against blood sports, so he would not have gone hunting or shooting with the local farmers. He would shake his head and say that sadly he was not a gladiator when they asked him about sport.

So what
did
he do?

He must have read a lot, thought his pupils, who last saw him when they left their school in 1975. Read a lot and thought a lot—this was all they could produce when pressed hard to come up with some explanation of his lifestyle. He seemed to know everything and be interested in everything.

In theory, he taught them geography. In fact, he taught them everything: how to do crosswords, to interpret political dynasties, to translate road signs, to read palms, to make real mayonnaise, to explain proportional representation, to identify trees by their leaves, to avoid congeners in alcohol as the source of hangovers, to look at buildings, and to think about what words meant.

In two decades they must all have remembered and repeated the things he had said over and over. And whenever they got together it was intensified. It was as if they were back in his classroom again.

The wives and girlfriends sighed a lot whenever he was quoted—everything he had said seemed very banal, very obvious. Perhaps he was one of these people who was better to meet than to hear about, they decided.

Renata, their beautiful friend who was single and glamorous and much feared by all the wives and girlfriends, was highly dismissive of him. “Sounds like a daft old queen to me,” she would say. But she could say that because she wasn't involved with any of them.

Officially, Renata was the one who had got away. She was her own woman—stylish, confident, and much lusted after. All the wives pretended a greater warmth towards Renata than they actually felt.

Mr. Mangan was still there in the school, they heard from younger brothers and cousins. He was still hugely admired and widely quoted.

“He must be a great age now,” said Hugh, who was going to be forty just before New Year and didn't like the notion at all.

Hugh's wife, Kate, was already weary from the possible midlife crisis that lay ahead. First Hugh was going to have no party, then he was going to have a huge party, then just a gathering of old friends, then he decided to add new clients to the guest list and make it more of a business do.

Renata would be there, of course. The Queen Bee.

“He can't be
that
old surely. He is still teaching after all. Why don't you invite your famous Mr. Mangan to your party?” Kate suggested.

It was an amazing suggestion—imagine seeing him again.

They tried to work out how old he would be. Seventy? No, they retired at sixty, didn't they? Still, he'd be able to walk and everything. Eat probably, and drink. Then all the men went back into an orgy of remembering all the subtle and enlightening things that Mr. Mangan used to say. Each one sounded more like a blinding glimpse into the obvious than the one before. Kate and the other wives looked at each other as mystified as ever. “Be good at some one thing, at one thing, find one area of excellence and revel in it. An old man once told me that we should all be brilliant at just one thing.” That was one of Mr. Mangan's major pronouncements, apparently. It had seemed like something mint new to them when they heard it, and they all honestly believed that by following it they had changed their lives.

Look at the way it had all turned out!

Kevin was doing well in antiques, Martin was a barrister, Brian a dentist, Hugh had concentrated on cars. He had taken Mr. Mangan's advice, and now he had the agency for the car that everyone would die for.

What would they have done without this brilliant man?

Privately, Kate thought that the man had the brains of a motto in a fortune cookie. A geography teacher mouthing platitudes to generations of impressionable schoolboys, and they all thought of him as one of the world's great thinkers. What was so unusual about boys from an expensive boarding school ending up as dentists, doctors, lawyers, antique dealers, and souped-up car salesmen? That's what the middle classes
did.

“What was his own area of excellence?” Kate had wondered.

None of them knew.

Boys, and indeed men, could be amazingly uninquisitive, and even uninterested in other people's lives, Kate thought.

Not for the first time. Hugh's obsessions with being forty and flattening his stomach and halting the retreat of his hairline were becoming increasingly tedious. His hopes that he might be taken for the elder brother of their teenage daughter were embarrassing. The male bonding with Kevin, Martin, and Brian about the wonders of Mr. Mangan seemed more and more surreal.

She sighed heavily and arranged the party. She gave him a present of a hand-tailored jacket that accentuated the positive. The cunning tailor pretended that he thought it was a thirtieth birthday and threw his hands up in the air at the thought of such a young man being forty.

The house looked festive and Christmasy when the guests began to arrive. Kate was busy coping with a recently separated man, and trying to lower the volume of his complaints about the ex-wife who was demanding monstrous sums.

She knew everyone except Mr. Mangan, and he didn't seem to have turned up. Hugh and the fellows would be so disappointed, and she wished she had never suggested it. He had let them down by not appearing, even though he had sent a pleasant letter saying he would be delighted to attend.

Renata was there, beautiful, cool, and never fussing like the wives fussed. Well, she had nothing to do except lavish attention on herself. No children, no in-laws, company entertaining, no patting down a forty-year-old husband. No wonder she looked well. She was the same age as all of them, very late thirties, but she looked twenty-five. And she had brought a man with her. That would annoy the fellows. They regarded her as their property.

They were still buzzing around her as always. Kate narrowed her eyes and studied the scene. Renata had her hand lightly laid on the arm of a handsome man, mature, graying, maybe fiftyish. Confident but not arrogant, casually dressed but not sloppy. Trust Renata to find someone like that.

And wasn't it odd? The fellows, including the newly forty-year-old Hugh, seemed to be delighted with Renata's new flame—they circled him as they had always circled the Queen Bee.

Kate went to investigate. It was not a new flame, it was the old teacher. It was Mr. Mangan. There he stood, ten or twelve years older than the boys who had idolized him, a man without pretensions, and also, Kate realized instantly, a man without any real insights either.

They introduced her rapturously and she was courteous and cool in her welcome. What did this pied piper have that excited these men? Some strange quality that brought a sparkle to them which no well-dressed trophy wife seemed able to do.

“You are a magnificent wife for Hugh,” he said to her admiringly when they were alone.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you make him very happy and confident and you have given him two wonderful children. Who could ask more from a partner?”

Kate was pleased but she would not let it show.

“And you taught geography, Mr. Mangan. Why is it that they think you were a psychologist?” She tried to keep the irritation, the impatience—and indeed, the sheer jealousy—out of her tone. A man who had never been in this house until ten minutes ago, already knew and remembered that she had two children, and already had the lovely Renata laying claim to him, marking him out as her territory. Where did he find all this homespun philosophy?

If Mr. Mangan noticed an edge in her question, he gave no sign of it.

“Oh, I don't think they saw me as anything but a pathetic old teacher, Kate, and I gather I wouldn't have been invited here if you hadn't suggested it. Schoolboys are very fickle, you know, they forget.”

“They never forgot you. They go on and on about you.”

“No, that can't be so.”

“Believe me, it is. All kinds of things you told them, like sunsets are good and killing small birds is bad.”

“Oh, please, may I have said something less banal. Please!” He held his hands up in despair.

“Nothing they remember.”

He looked at her quizzically. Now Kate realized that her tone had been a little too sharp.

“You talked about areas of excellence. What was your area of excellence, Mr. Mangan?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Well, it seems to me that anything you said to them about being good at one thing just reinforced what they already thought and hoped already.”

“And if that were true, would it be so bad?”

“You haven't answered my question,” she said.

“Which was?”

“What were you good at?”

“I wasn't particularly good at anything.” He had a very warm smile.

“And what do you
do
all the time buried in that remote part of the country? What kind of a life do you live that makes us all think you have some secret? Some inner track?”

“Oh, I never claim to have that.”

“Not in words, you don't.” She knew she was going too far, that her face was flushed; she was weary from organizing this party, assuring Hugh that he was a young man, fearing that he was having an affair with Renata. It irritated her beyond measure that this smug man could hold her husband's attention and admiration so easily.

“What were you good at? You told them an old man told you that everyone should be really good at some one thing. Did you just make that up?”

“No, indeed I did not.”

“So?”

“So I became very, very good at stain removal,” Mr. Mangan said.

Kate took a deep breath.

“I realize I may sound hectoring and overintrusive, but please do not make a fool of me,” she said.

“You asked me my area of excellence, that is it.” He spoke simply and pleasantly.

All around them others were dying to join in their conversation—Kevin the antiques dealer, Brian the dentist, Martin the barrister, and her own husband, Hugh, who could not have been more pleased if he had Frank Sinatra as a guest.

But by his body language alone, Mr. Mangan managed to exclude them all, even the lovely Renata.

“Stains?” she said.

“Stains,” Mr. Mangan repeated. “You have no idea how pleased people are to know that you make a hardened stain soft and much easier to remove by applying glycerin, and where to use alcohol and where to use white vinegar. You can make a paste of vinegar, salt, and flour and your brasses will just gleam. My landlady was very grateful for this piece of information. Very grateful indeed,” he said, with a look in his eye that seemed to speak of hours and hours of enthusiastic gratitude shown by the landlady in a narrow bed.