Maeve's Times

by Maeve Binchy

  It’s altogether a very unsettling and unpleasant diary, which is obviously going to sell enormously well and delight the jogging recipients before their fingernails turn purple.

  Happy Hypochondria

  28 May 1979

  I am a very nervous person about my own health; when I get a headache I wonder if it is meningitis, when I have a twinge in my stomach I wonder has my liver finally packed it in. If I get the smallest cut I watch the tiny drops of blood in horror in case I have haemophilia and will bleed to death there and then.

  For years and years I tried to disguise this terror, and put a big brave face on it. I would try desperately to be casual when they were taking blood pressure, searching in the face of whoever was wrapping the terrible bit of canvas around my arm for some sign that I was finished. ‘I suppose that’s nice and normal,’ I would say in what I thought was a healthy, uncaring voice, but inside my heart would be thumping in great booms of terror and my eyes were wild for reassurance.

  I used to read magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms until the words became a red blur of misery in front of me. Everyone else looked so uncaring about their bodies as they sat there genuinely absorbed in some out-of-date colour supplement, while I’d be afraid to glance at the horoscopes in case Gemini was missing, or it would say that I should make the most of the short bit of time I had left.

  If ever I got a spot I thought it was a harbinger of a skin disease that would peel back all the covering on me and expose veins and muscles. A piece of grit in my eye and I was wondering about Moshe Dayan and whether he left the patch on or took it off at night.

  But all the time I hid this hypochondria from the world, because I thought grown-ups were meant to be brave and uncaring about themselves and their illnesses. The impassive faces around me in terrifying places like an outpatient ward, this must be the norm.

  But now I’ve changed. Now I admit I’m terrified, and it’s much, much better. You have to persuade people that you’re not joking, because some of these hard-boiled medics actually think it’s unlikely that you could be weeping with nerves inwardly. They think it’s a fairly pleasant thing to come up against the medical profession and that we should be pleased rather than fearful.

  I began to Come Out as a Bad Patient with the dentist. A gentle softspoken Englishman who had never as he said himself met my type of person before. I explained to him that I was probably more nervous of dentists than anything in the world except flying, and could he show me his hands to ensure that he had no hidden weapons on them. He did this and I relaxed a fraction.

  We had a depressing discussion about my teeth and I managed to jump out from under his arms and nearly knocked both of us on the floor.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ he said sadly, putting on his glasses again.

  ‘I thought you were going to pounce,’ I said. ‘I’m very nervous.’

  He said he’d have to look at them.

  ‘Could you look at them without instruments?’ I asked.

  He couldn’t. He needed a mirror and a pickaxe. He promised me that he couldn’t take out teeth suddenly with a mirror and a pickaxe so I’d be safe.

  Since then life with this dentist has been easy. He explains everything, he shows me his hands and lets me examine the pockets in his white coat. He doesn’t say ‘Aha’ any more because it terrifies me. He explains why it wouldn’t be a good idea to have a card with me at all times saying ‘I am a nervous person. In case of an accident, if I am unconscious, please remove all my teeth so that I won’t ever have to worry about fillings and injections again.’ He says that is not the act of a nervous person, it’s the act of an insane person and I mustn’t do it.

  Now that he knows I’m nervous and self-dramatising, the whole relationship is on an honest basis. It’s the same with the doctor. I told him that I was possibly the most nervous person he would ever meet in his whole career.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘a nice big cheerful person like you, nervous. Ridiculous.’

  I argued this with him logically. Indeed I was very nice and very big and cheerful but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be nervous as well. The things weren’t mutually exclusive. Why should he accept that a small, horrible, depressed person was nervous and I wasn’t? It floored him.

  ‘You don’t look nervous,’ he came back with a bit weakly.

  So I was very glad that I had told him. Now I remind him each time I see him that I’m nervous in case he’s forgotten.

  ‘I know,’ he said the last time, shaking his head. ‘I know you think you’re nervous, I’ve written it in your file. I’m not to use long words. I’m not to say “Aha” and I’m not to assume that you’re brave.’

  Life would be a lot more comforting for everyone, doctors and patients alike, if people admitted that they were very frightened when they are. You don’t get a sudden strength from pretending to be brave, you just get treated like a brave person, while if you admit humbly to being appallingly feeble about things the chances are you’ll get someone to be kind and gentle to you when they would have been brisk otherwise.

  There’s strength in unity, and if all of us cowards come out openly and honestly they’ll have to take us seriously. They can’t laugh us all out of the waiting rooms and the hospital beds, can they?

  The Man in South Anne Street

  6 June 1979

  The man in the phone box in South Anne Street was like a lighting devil. First he had lost his five pence, then he had lost his second five pence, and the box was full of litter and bad smells, and the walls were daubed with things, and, God, could things get any worse he asked rhetorically into the air and at myself. They could. At that precise moment a blast of electioneering nearly lifted us bodily out of the street, and the man’s face turned such a frightening colour I thought he was choking. I tried to remember what you did when people choked and since it didn’t come back to me immediately I was about to contact a competent-looking person but he recovered. It was Stress, he told me, Stress and Fury brought on by living in this country.

  The pubs in Anne Street weren’t open, mercifully, or I might be there still with him on the self-deluding pretext that I was actually interviewing him and getting an insight into how Stress-Filled Dubliners lived. As it was we just leaned up against the wall of the deserted post office and calmed each other down.

  It was the electioneering that had finished him off. Send Your Best to Europe. Was he the only person who found that funny? If we were sending the Best to Europe, what were we keeping for ourselves? The second best? The worst? Answer him that. I said I didn’t think that was the way they meant it. They meant more that if you were sending people to Europe you should imagine that you were sending great people. It was a measure of how important you thought Europe was. What he thought Europe was could not be printed. In fact it should hardly be said, I told him disapprovingly. Well, he couldn’t help that. That’s what he thought about it. Send our best. He’d like to send the lot, actually, and not only to Europe, further. What did I as a normal, ordinary woman think about Ireland these days? Wasn’t I ashamed of my life to be living in such a madhouse? I said that I was sort of only half here, and half there and all round the place. He said he knew how I felt. I explained that I meant that I lived in England. His eyes went piggy with envy.

  ‘You live in England?’ he said like you might say to someone, ‘You mean you eat as much as you like and you don’t get fat?’

  I explained that I did mainly.

  ‘That would be lovely,’ he said, calming down like the way a child forgets a tantrum when the thought of something pleasant is put into his mind.

  ‘But it’s lovely here,’ I said with the fierce possessive love I feel for Dublin which I would never have admitted until a few years ago.

  ‘In England,’ he said, as one who spoke in a dream, ‘you can post a letter. You can go out to a post office and buy a stamp, a postal order, send a telegram. You can ring up and get information, and directory enquiries. You can get petrol. Th
ey empty rubbish bins. And they’re having no European elections to dement themselves further.’

  Oh, but they are, I told him. They’re definitely having European elections. In fact, I am meant to be there now writing about them.’

  Nothing could have displeased him more. People who wrote about the European elections were almost worse than anyone else in the whole sorry business. It was bad enough having to join up with a lot of foreigners in a meaningless sort of group to make the farmers richer than they already were and butter dearer than it already was. It was bad enough having to change our money system from what it used to be and to what everyone knew it was to desperate, complicated things which varied every day, and nobody could change for you in any bank in the world because nobody knew what it was any more. It was bad enough to live in a country which slowly collapses, and that was becoming a living joke, but people who wrote about these things only encouraged the decline.

  I got fed up with him. I had been sorry for him about the phone box. I had lost two shillings in it myself and there was a rotten smell in it, but I felt he was taking things too far to deny any enthusiasm for Europe. ‘What would cheer you up?’ I said to him in a schoolmistress sort of way.

  Before he could tell me, a girl with a nice, friendly face approached us with election literature for the Labour Party. The man studied it, his colour beginning to mount again. ‘I hate people with double-barrel names,’ he said about Jane Dillon-Byrne.

  ‘At least they’re good names,’ I said. ‘It’s not Fossington-Fossington or Chomondly-Chomondly.’

  ‘The trouble about people like you is that you see good in everything,’ he said, and he tore the leaflet into a thousand pieces and increased the litter in the city.

  A Magic Meeting

  Published in My First Book by Maeve Binchy (Irish Times, 1976)

  Hello, don’t I know you from somewhere?’

  It’s always happening to Audrey Hepburn, but this guy was no Cary Grant either, so I decided that it happens to us ordinary people too.

  ‘I don’t know, do you?’

  ‘Well I think I do, you look sort of familiar, like someone I would know, if you know what I mean.’

  I looked windswept and wet, but then perhaps he was used to wet climates.

  ‘I’m not desperately sure, I know a lot of people,’ I said. Why did I say that? It sounds like boasting, it sounds idiotic. I rush on to say something that will take the harm out of it. ‘I mean I’m from Dublin,’ I gushed, ‘and everyone in Dublin knows a lot of people.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Dublin,’ he said.

  ‘You should, you should,’ I said. Bord Fáilte would have been proud of me and taken me to their Baggot Street bosom instead of shying away from me every time I meet them individually or collectively.

  ‘Dublin is lovely, especially in May. I always think May is the best month.’

  ‘Do you?’ he said, ‘I thought it would have been appalling in May.’

  ‘It’s not,’ I said, thinking that the magic meeting was palling a bit.

  ‘But I do know you,’ he said. ‘I have a distinct memory of talking to you for hours and hours sometime. Can’t you remember where it was?’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, biting back the next boastful thing I was going to say, which was that it could have been anywhere because I go so many places.

  ‘We talked about tax evasion,’ he said, happiness dawning on his face.

  Now that’s something I never talk about, because, honestly, I have nothing at all to say on the subject. Not, of course, that this would necessarily strike it from the topics I discuss, but it’s something that would bore me rigid. People saying, ‘You should claim for the light and heating of the room where you work,’ or ‘You write me a cheque and I’ll write you a cheque.’

  It’s too wildly beyond anything I could grasp.

  ‘Were you for it or against it?’ I asked jovially.

  ‘I was neither,’ he said, ‘but you were very well up in it all.’

  This was taking a bad turn. He couldn’t be some spy sent out from the tax office in Dublin to hound me down in a London street and get me to admit everything? There’s nothing to admit, for God’s sake, except that I pay too much PAYE because I can’t understand the forms.

  ‘I don’t think I know anything about it at all,’ I said, trembling with guilt, and reddening and prepared to hand myself over.

  ‘I’m rarely wrong about these things,’ he said. ‘I have a memory of you smoking a cheroot and saying you had a scheme which would mean that you would never pay tax again.’

  ‘I don’t smoke cheroots,’ I cried desperately.

  ‘You were about to give them up at the time,’ he said. ‘I suppose you didn’t, though, it seemed to be causing you some pain.’

  Cary Grant was never like this. In one of his pick-ups he would have remembered my eyes, or the song that they were playing at the time, we would have gone to a wine bar or a skiing chalet to discuss it. We would have fallen hopelessly in love. Cary would never have droned on about cheroots and tax evasion. I said what I should have said at the outset.

  ‘I think that you must be mixing me up with someone else.’

  A look of desperation came into his eyes. He was obviously for some reason determined to keep me there, which was flattering. He seemed to need to know me so badly, I almost relented. Perhaps he was just gauche and hadn’t seen enough Cary Grant films, perhaps he was a rough diamond. Perhaps as the women’s magazines are always saying, he was the strong, worthy type, few words, those few foolish, but worth a million of your other kind of man.

  ‘Well, I met someone like you somewhere,’ he said firmly. ‘And I have an hour to kill and I was wondering would you like to come and have a hamburger so that we can think where it was. Oh, come on. You look as if you have nothing to do either.’

  ‘You could read the evening paper,’ I said, because I am so extremely kind I would never hurt anyone’s feelings. I wouldn’t tell him to get lost, that he was an offensive bore.

  ‘I’ve read the evening paper,’ he said.

  I was silent.

  ‘Well, make up your mind,’ he said. ‘It’s starting to rain, do we have a hamburger or don’t we? It’s stupid standing here getting wet.’

  All right, all right, in years to come you’ll tell me I missed my big chance, that I could have developed an interest in smoking small black cigars and evading taxes even if it meant understanding them first in order to evade them. Perhaps we could have been sitting in his baronial hall with 28 guests and telling them the funny way we met all those years ago.

  Perhaps you are right, and I was wrong, but I said, ‘I hate people talking about “killing time”. There’s very little of it left, we shouldn’t kill what there is. I’m afraid I must go on home. Thank you for the offer all the same.’

  As I squelched off in the rain, he shouted, ‘You were always too bloody intense, I remember that about you. Go back to your cheroots and your tax forms, I don’t care.’

  Oh Trevor Howard and Cary Grant, why did you have to louse up our lives making us think that chance meetings were great?

  Do It Honestly or Not At All

  Published in My First Book by Maeve Binchy (Irish Times, 1976)

  I got a pen and paper and did the whole thing very systematically. It was on a train going to Ipswich and the man opposite me was doing it also, writing sneaky figures in the margin. Occasionally we would put our hands around the page like children at school who didn’t want anyone to see how they were getting on. At first it looked pretty good.

  Age group between 31 and 39, which is grand and vague, means that I should live until I was 77.

  Place where you live. Greater London nowadays, so that’s another year, 78.

  I suppose journalism is laughingly called ‘professional job’. It isn’t ‘skilled’ in my case, and with all the modesty in the world I think it doesn’t fit into their classification for ‘unskilled’ so I add another two years, 8
0.

  How do friends and relations describe you? Fortunately you never hear most of their descriptions. Calm is not an adjective I have ever heard about myself in any of its variations like always, or usually, or even moderately. On the other hand, people are inclined to say things like ‘hopelessly overwrought again’. So to be honest define that as moderately tense, and subtract one year. Back to 79.

  Single and under 40 I am, so it’s down another two years. Why? Why? But actuaries must know their job is to know what weakens people. 77.

  I knew it was coming – the cigarettes. I think I smoke 40, but I know I have to go into the third packet, so it’s age 67 now.

  Drink. What’s an average day? Well if it was the previous Thursday … no forget that. If it were this particular Sunday there would be no drink at all. Come on, be honest, it works out at what they revoltingly call ‘six tots’ a day. I know, I know, but either do the thing honestly or not at all. Subtract five. 62.

  Exercise. Run six miles a day? Are these actuaries insane?

  Let’s see. It’s about three minutes to the bus, and about one minute from the bus to the tube. And about 30 seconds when you get off the tube. The same going home. Come off it. No exercise. Subtract five years, 57.

  Weight. By the worst luck ever, hadn’t I weighed myself at Liverpool Street Station while waiting for the train. Otherwise I might have fooled myself a bit. No, the truth was just over two stone overweight. That was half an hour ago, there was no reason to believe that I had got thinner since then. Subtract six years. 51.