by Maeve Binchy
Phones? Well you could stop using them, and there was the widely held belief that if you started making suspicious conversations down them they would be tapped, and when your phone is tapped apparently it can’t be cut off even if you never pay your bill at all
But what we were really after was some big quick money, and we hit on the idea of writing a porn book between us. With ten of us, that would only be 3,000 words each, which is nothing. A 30,000-word novel full of sex, it would have to make us a fortune, and it wouldn’t take us a week to write. So carried away with the sheer brilliance of it, we wrote out an outline plan. It was going to be the story of an innocent young American girl who came to Ireland to see the land of her ancestors. She was choosing Ireland because she was fed up with all the immorality in the United States and wanted to be somewhere good and pure. Our boon was going to be the tale of her disillusionment.
We were each ‘to do a chapter on the kind of thing we knew best’. A sudden silence fell on the group at that stage. What did we mean ‘the thing we knew best’? A great unwillingness to admit that we knew ‘anything best’ came over us and there was a lot of shuffling and the outline plan looked as if it were to be abandoned at birth. Then somebody bought a round of drinks and the price of them shocked us into action again. Why didn’t we each describe the kind of ordinary life we knew best, and do a chapter of that, adding all kinds of torrid sexual overtones to it, so that it would be a book of merit as well as hardcore porn? That suited everyone and we divided it up happily.
There was an American in our midst and he was to write chapter one, ‘Magnolia Leaves America’. He was to write about the filth and perversion that was making life unbearable for her there. He asked anxiously how deeply did he have to go into the filth and perversion, because he had lived in a small town, and probably didn’t know in detail the great degrees of all that went on in big cities. Nonsense, we told him, all small towns in America are much, much worse than Peyton Place, use your imagination.
Chapter two, ‘Magnolia Arrives in Ireland’, was to be written by the man who had once worked in a summer job in Aer Lingus. He could do all the steamy scenes aboard the plane. He too started backtracking a bit and said that he had worked on the ground and he wasn’t sure that he would have all the sex scenes aboard the plane absolutely accurate. That didn’t matter at all, we told him firmly, he must draw on his background of working in an airline, otherwise he couldn’t be in on it at all. Hastily and greedily he agreed that there must be something wildly sexual going on on most flights and he’d check it all out.
Because I was writing about tourism in those days I was asked to write chapter three, ‘Magnolia Checks into Her Hotel’. Very easy chapter that, they said, hotels are full of vice and corruption, and I knew a lot of hotel managers, I’d do the thing in an hour. I bleated that most of the hotel managers I met used to talk to me more about getting tourists and getting better grading with Bord Fáilte than about the lust and licentiousness of their staff and clients, but I was assured that I had got an easy number and if I didn’t take it I’d be given something more difficult, so I took it.
‘Magnolia Looks for a Job’ was to be done by a girl who worked in an insurance office, and she was told that she was lucky too because nobody else would have the access she did to what went on behind filing cabinets. She said that in her office the worst thing that ever went on behind a filing cabinet was that she went there alone sometimes to eat a chocolate biscuit so that the other girls wouldn’t tell her she was greedy, and we said she’s got to liven it up a bit.
Chapter five, ‘Magnolia Has a Night Out’, was to be written by a sort of glamorous man who always says I was at this place last night or the other place and the joint was swinging. He looked a little troubled when we said this was to be the most pornographic chapter of all to retain the readers’ corrupt interest. ‘Why do I have to write the most important chapter?’ he whinged. ‘Because you are a very good writer and you know all the joints that swing,’ we said firmly and he was a bit pleased though still troubled and agreed to do it.
Chapter six, ‘Magnolia Goes to the Dáil’, was to be written by a reporter who sometimes does Dáil reporting. He said that you don’t get much training for lusty arousing kind of descriptive pieces when you are just taking down what the TDs are saying but we said nonsense. He didn’t have to make Magnolia go through the whole business of getting elected, just have her as a simple-minded tourist coming in and asking to visit the Irish Parliament the way people do, and then sort of go on with the usual. ‘But I think the usual kind of thing is that they come in and sit in the gallery and then go home,’ he said in a nit-picking way and was advised he’d better make it a hell of a lot racier than that.
Chapter seven, ‘Magnolia Takes Up Sport’, was to be written by a journalist who works on the sports pages of a newspaper. ‘What sport?’ he asked. Any sport, we said. Anything at all from watching greyhound racing to playing squash. His brief was so nice and vague that we all felt he was getting off too lightly, but he kept saying that we didn’t understand how difficult his wife would prove if ever any of this was made public and we all said nonsense that we’d all get into appalling trouble with someone if it did, we would have a great pseudonym, and just divide the half million quid or whatever we earned into ten parts. We’d use a post office box number for all the correspondence about it, and all the dealings about the film rights and everything.
‘Magnolia on Stage’ would be chapter eight and an actress was going to write that. She was the most cheerful about it and said she’d have all kinds of terrible things happening to Magnolia in her dressing room, and in the wings, but particularly at the party on the first night of the play. So that was very trouble-free and we all thought deep silent thoughts about the private life of the actress which we had assumed to be blameless and even rather dull up to this.
Chapter nine, ‘Magnolia in High Finance’, was the lot of a man who had always claimed that he had made a bit of money on stocks and shares in his time. He was appalled at his task. ‘Have you ever seen the stock exchange?’ he begged. ‘You couldn’t write anything vaguely pornographic about it, it’s ridiculous.’
We advised him to think of the money he’d be losing by opting out and he said he’d rack his brains.
The final chapter, ‘Magnolia Leaves Again’, was to be written by a teacher because she had absolutely refused to write anything whatsoever concerning the school she taught in. We told her that the nuns were unlikely to be buying cellophane-wrapped porn and would never read it, and the book would be banned in Ireland anyway. But she said no, the nuns found out everything you did, and she wasn’t going to be sacked and pronounced unhireable for the rest of her life, no matter how many millions she earned from the film rights of the book. Grudgingly she said she’d do the bit where Magnolia was sitting alone in her flat with the door barred against rapists and perverts and would write the big crisis part about Magnolia saying that wicked though the United States were they were like cloisters compared to Ireland. The book would end with her getting on a boat to America, not wanting to risk the horrors of chapter one and whatever had happened to her on the plane. And everyone went home happy with their instructions and promising to meet with the completed chapter next Saturday.
The only pornographic book I had at home was Fanny Hill and I read it again and again but there was nothing about hotels in it, so I rang a friend in London and asked her to send me something particularly foul from some seedy bookshop, and she kept asking me had I gone mad and said she wouldn’t dream of doing it for me until she knew why. I said it was a secret and I was sworn not to tell anyone and she said that everyone seemed to be going off their heads in Dublin. By a great stroke of good luck I was sent to London for two days myself and I went into a terrible shop where I was the only woman and a small evil man kept asking me not to finger the books unless I was going to buy them. I humbly told him that I wanted something about sex in hotels and he became more benign and said he
’d see what he could do. I stood for what seemed like a fortnight in the shop until he came back with a book called Hot Honeymoon Hotel which cost £2. I was too embarrassed to check it with him so I paid him and ran. It was an amazing book certainly, but it was mainly photographs, that kind with so many limbs in them it’s like a puzzle in a child’s book and you’d have to colour them in to see which arm or leg belonged to whom. It made me very uneasy, and I kept thinking how awful it would be if I dropped dead on the street while I had it in my handbag and people would think that this was my normal reading matter.
Anyway I copied down a few useful phrases out of it in a sort of code for myself and I left the book in a litter bin at Heathrow Airport where someone must have got a nice surprise later on, and came home to write the chapter. It took me about 14 hours to write and I kept wondering who would want to read it, but then the memory of Hot Honeymoon Hotel and its price tag of £2 came back and I persevered. Ten nice neat pages of typing with 300 words each on them. I put it in an envelope on the Saturday and wondered had the other nine found it as difficult as I had or were they all deep down much more experienced and sophisticated. Almost everybody was there, and I was waiting for someone to call the meeting to order. Nobody had envelopes or typescripts on the table or anything. I supposed like myself they were keeping them out of sight.
The chat went on, and on, and on, and nobody mentioned putting all the chapters together and sort of editing out any discrepancies. And finally I couldn’t bear it any more and said, ‘Well, did we all find the porn-writing difficult?’ And somebody looked at me blankly and said ‘porn-writing?’ That was the damn sportswriter who had all the sports in the world to choose from. I knew his fear of his wife was too great, I knew it and the girl in the insurance company said, ‘It was all a joke, wasn’t it?’ A bit nervously and hopefully I thought. And the man who had worked for a bit in Aer Lingus gave a sigh of pure relief and said, ‘Oh yes, of course it was a joke.’ And the others all ratted, so I ratted too and said naturally I was only joking, and went up to the ladies and tore up ‘Magnolia Checks into Her Hotel’ into little pieces and burned it in an ashtray and gave up my chance of being a millionaire.
A Week of Self-Improvement
11 October 1976
During the weekend I made the mistake of reading one of those magazines written by a new brand of unreal woman. These are the dames who are on their third and finally happy marriage, who behave like an angelic drama mum to his children, her children and their children, who earn £9,000 a year in some dynamic career, run a boutique and a charity shop in their spare time, give dinner parties, look magnificent, travel all over the world with pigskin luggage and 21-year-old male admirers, and still find time in their bionic hearts to advise the rest of us how to live our lives.
One of these hard-faced Hannahs suggested that I and the other million fools who would be hanging on her words should try a week of self-improvement. We would be astonished, she pontificated, at how much more alive we would feel. No, we were to make no excuses, everyone had a lunch hour, hadn’t they? We were to forswear lunch and start improving ourselves instead. We would thank her later.
Monday: Learn a new skill: yoga? calligraphy? a language?
Well determined and all as I was to test this dame’s theory, the lotus position was something that I didn’t see fitting happily into my life. Slow, beautiful handwriting was for monks in the eighth century, not for journalists in the twentieth. Fast, accurate typewriting would be a much more intelligent thing to do. But since I taught myself to type despairingly eight years ago and worked out a great hit and miss system which involves five fingers out of the 10 that I have, and means that its mainly readable, I don’t think I’d learn anything from someone who tried to force me to do hard things like use all the fingers and not look at the keys. It had better be a language. So on Monday, yet again I took up Italian. I love it, of course, the only trouble is that I’m never able to remember a word of it, or create a sentence in it. But there was no excuse.
The Inner London Education Authority has provided classes in a place off Fleet Street which is actually 54 paces from my office. They have lunchtime Italian classes on a Monday. It would be nice and familiar anyway, I thought, all that ‘Ecco il Maestro’ and ‘Come sta? Bene grazie, e Lei?’ In fact I was really looking forward to the familiar business of getting as far as lesson four in yet another instant and painless way to master the language. There were 12 of us in the class. We sized each other up as playmates for the year; I thought they looked very good value. We all told each other eagerly that our ambition was to be able to sit in the middle of a huge Italian group, exchanging jokes and shouting and realising that everyone else wasn’t fighting just because they were shouting.
The teacher came in, she was splendid. She looked about 80, and was full of extravagant gestures, and delighted to meet us all. She was actually so nice and beaming and full of charm that she looked like a stage Italian mama sent over by Central Casting. And we all thundered out ‘Ecco la classe, ecco il libro, ecco il maestro’, terribly happily with her, and this time – perhaps this time – I might stick to it. She was so damn nice, and she believed that we were all doing splendidly. I mingled with my classmates afterwards, because the awful article had said I would make friends of my own age and different sexes when learning a new skill. But they were harder working than I, and they kept talking about putting the definite pronoun before words like studenta and porta, and weren’t at all into asking me to marry them or have a brief and brittle affair. But perhaps that will come later, I thought happily and put a few definite pronouns in with the best.
Tuesday: Brighten yourself up, have a facial.
The Italian class had been such a success that I ploughed ahead with all the rest of the advice. Indeed brightening myself up would be a fine thought, I decided, having examined myself in a magnifying mirror for the first time since I was a teenager, and it wasn’t a joyous experience.
‘Do you want the full facial, the mini facial, the city skin breather, or just a cleanse and make-up?’ asked the voice from the big store.
‘How much is the full?’ I asked humbly.
‘Well it would depend, Madam, it could be as little as £4 depending on what you want done.’
But I wanted them to tell me what I wanted done; I dithered for a while.
‘Of course if you wanted eyelashes tinted, facial hair removed, unsightly blemishes covered up, skin peeling, and vapour masks, it would all add up,’ the voice said.
This made my crumbling brain come to a decision. ‘I’ll have the mini facial,’ I said firmly and went along at lunchtime to have it.
It was horror from the word go. I longed for the self-improvement of ‘ecco il maestro’. Instead I had ‘Good heavens, we do need a little work here, don’t we? Did you say you only booked for the mini facial? Ah, well, we’ll see what we can do.’
I spent an hour and £2.80 fighting off offers to tear off my eyebrows, refusing to pay another 60p to have my face hoovered with some electric vacuum cleaner that had come in that week from America, and denying utterly that I wanted my ears pierced, even though there had been some mistake and a piercing girl came into the cubicle with what she called sleepers saying that cubicle eight had ordered them.
The beautician was nice but single-minded, she saw a course of treatments for my face, she saw them every week, the full not the mini variety. She saw herself selling me creams to plump out tissues and to beat back lines, she saw a rich heavy night cream, and a light nongreasy day cream. She saw much more than just Brightening Myself Up, which was what I saw. I regard it as the major achievement of the week that I was grown up enough not to see any of these things with her, and be able to leave with the lying promise that I would think about what she said. I didn’t look any brighter at all, and I will never think about what she said. It’s too dispiriting.
Wednesday: Help other people, it will make you feel good inside.
It seemed an odd if not
selfish reason to help other people, but maybe these hard, brittle women phrase things oddly. Perhaps it was just a ploy to get us out there doing something instead of just talking about it. I rang an old people’s home and asked could I help them serve lunch, they said they’d be delighted and off I went.
I was in the room where they served the wheelchair lunch, which meant gathering everyone together and assembling them around the table. You had to tie bibs around people, long plastic ones which practically covered the whole chair. I thought this was very undignified and said that I was sorry to the old man that I was tying into his bib first.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I’d much prefer a pinny, the old hands aren’t what they used to be, and all this convenience food, you know, it slips off the fork. Much prefer to be well covered up.’
They were having soup, and then bacon casserole and mash, and then stewed apricots and custard.
‘Why aren’t you wearing a uniform?’ asked one old lady to me as I was passing her food.
‘They didn’t have one to fit me,’ I said.
‘People are getting much fatter nowadays,’ she said thoughtfully and not in any way insultingly. ‘I suppose it’s the lack of exercise, and so much food available and everything since the last war.’
She told me about her son who was married to a very fat selfish woman, which was odd since fat people are meant to be jolly, but her daughter-in-law was sour and selfish, and she had three sour fat grandchildren. It was a sad thing to end up having been responsible for three sour grandchildren.
‘Perhaps they’ll get thinner,’ I said hopefully.
‘But will they get less sour?’ she wondered, and there was no answer to that.