Maeve's Times

by Maeve Binchy

  ‘You approve of all that sort of thing,’ she said in a kind of hiss.

  ‘Oh yes, I think people have the right to buy contraceptives,’ I said, wishing somebody else would come along and stand at the bus stop and shout ‘good girl yourself’ at me.

  ‘And you’d like to see them in public places,’ she said, eyes glinting madly.

  ‘Well not in parks or concert halls or places like that. But on shelves in chemists, certainly. Then, if people want to buy them they can and if they don’t, nobody’s forcing them to.’ I thought I had summed up the case rather well.

  ‘On shelves so that everyone can see them,’ she said, horrified.

  ‘Well they’re in packets,’ I said, ‘with kind of discreet names on them. They don’t leap up off counters and affront you.’

  ‘And how might you know all this?’ she asked.

  ‘Well I’ve seen them in chemists in London,’ I said defensively.

  ‘If they’re so discreet, how did you know what they were?’ she asked, tellingly.

  ‘Well, you’d sort of know. I mean people have to know where they are, for God’s sake. I mean they shouldn’t have to go playing hide and seek around the chemist’s with the assistant saying warmer and colder.’

  The woman wasn’t at all amused. ‘I’m sure you know where they are because you buy them,’ she said.

  I began to wonder why it is increasingly less likely that I ever have a normal conversation with anyone. ‘I once bought a huge amount,’ I said reminiscently. ‘As a kind of favour to a lot of people. They knew I was going to be in London, and they kept asking me to bring some home.’

  She was fixed on me with horror. All her life she knew she would meet someone as wicked as this, and now it had happened.

  ‘I didn’t know what kind to get or what the names of them were, so I asked for four dozen of their best contraceptives and a receipt. They looked at me with great interest.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said the woman.

  ‘But imagine smuggling them all in for people, and not making any profit on them and not even … you know … well, getting any value out of them myself as it were.’

  She stared ahead, two red spots on her cheeks, and mercifully the bus came. She waited to see if I went upstairs or downstairs so she could travel on a different deck.

  The Happy Couple

  29 July 1981

  It would be impossible for you to know the amount of goodwill there is directed towards the royal couple unless you were here in London. For a month, the shops and buildings all along the wedding route have been smartening themselves up. There isn’t a space that doesn’t have the faces of the young couple decorated with flags and coats of arms and loyal greetings.

  Men and women who have sparse and drab weddings themselves, people who had no honeymoons, even those who don’t have a proper home to live in, let alone a palace, are out on the streets cheering and laughing and wishing Charles and Diana a happy wedding day. It’s a combination of a lot of things. It’s going to be a great spectacle; everyone feels like a festival; it’s a day off but, most important, people think they know Charles and Diana now and what they know, they like. The couple are very, very popular.

  Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people in Britain have been feeling a real concern for Prince Charles, and worrying about his lonely life. They read endless descriptions of the evenings he spent at home and how he is secretly a family man at heart. Now, they are overjoyed that he has fallen in love and is having a fairytale wedding to a beautiful girl.

  Hundreds and thousands of girls all over the country are identifying like mad with Lady Diana, whom they see as one of themselves but a bit posher. They will never marry a prince and have carriages and horses and fanfares and the works but she is doing it for them, in a way. In fact, it is touching to see how little envy and how much genuine enthusiasm there is around the place.

  Charles has always been very well liked in England. He was educated, if not exactly like an ordinary person, at least like an ordinary upper-class person, which gave him some kind of touch with reality. He was trained in the various armed forces and learned how to do all kinds of things like deep-sea diving and flying a helicopter and playing a cello. He also had to learn about meeting total strangers and expressing an interest in whatever it was that had to have an interest shown in it. At this, he has been very good. He decided somewhere back along the line that if he was going to have to do it, he might as well do it properly, so instead of saying ‘how fascinating’, he says, ‘what is this, how does it work, what’s it for?’

  He is always courteous and able to send himself up. When he went through that stage of falling off every horse he sat on, he laughed at himself, and he even asked one of his aides to buy the disrespectful mug which has his ears sticking out as handles. He doesn’t yawn and look at his watch like his father does, nor does he look as tense and strained as his mother sometimes does. Very few people envy him his wealth or his estates. Hardly anyone envies him his job. He is a Good Guy.

  Lady Diana is the living proof that men don’t respect you if you give in to them, and that princes certainly won’t marry you if there’s even a question that you might have given in to anyone at any stage.

  Lady Diana Spencer has had a hard few months and if she can stand up to this, she is thought to be able for whatever else is in store. After all, very few brides have to go through the embarrassment of having their uncle announce proudly that they are virgins. Lord Fermoy, the brother of Lady Diana’s mother, made this statement, ‘My niece has no past.’ She has had to have a gynaecological examination to ensure that she is capable of bearing children, she has had to move in with her husband’s grandmother in order to get a crash course on how to behave like a royal. She has been instructed to keep her mouth shut, to say nothing in public. She has been asked to lose weight and to lose some of her old friends because they are not suitable any more. To be the future Queen Diana is exciting but there are a lot of hard things to be done on the way.

  But Diana Spencer is very popular too, not just because she is young and pretty. She has the kind of background that people like to read about. Old noble family, young princes as playmates when she was a toddler, nice exclusive girls’ schools, Riddlesworth then West Heath and then a smart Finishing School in Switzerland where she learned to ski and speak a little French.

  She had a lot of unhappiness, the kind that everyone can sympathise with; being the child of a broken marriage and because she wasn’t very intellectual, she didn’t try for A Levels. Instead, she asked her father if he could buy her a flat in London and she would get a job. Her father bought her a flat for £100,000 and she asked three friends to share it, they paid her the rent each month and very shortly after they moved in, she got a job helping at a kindergarten school which had been set up by two friends of hers.

  She never did a season, or came out as a deb. She wasn’t a girl who went to smart nightclubs like Wedgies or Tokyo Joe’s. Perhaps because of her own lack of home life she tried to make her flat into a home. She and Virginia and Carolyn and Ann lived like other debbie girls who liked shopping at Harrods and having little supper parties but they were quieter than most and spent a lot of evenings looking at television.

  The telephone directory is hardly big enough for the list of names that Prince Charles was going to marry at one time or another, but very few of these are among his close friends nowadays. Only Lady Jane Wellesley remains from the old flames, and she doesn’t count because she was always meant to be more interested in her work than marrying the Prince of Wales.

  Another lady called Lady Tryon is a close friend. She is Australian and Charles calls her Kanga and takes her advice about everything, it is said … including the suitability of the new bride.

  He has a hard core of male friends including Nicholas Soames, Lord Tryon, Lord Vestey and Lord Romsey … they are thought to be secure in their circle and don’t fear that marriage will take the prince away from them complet
ely.

  For Diana, it may be different. Even though she was able to give her flatmates a phone number of the Palace at Clarence House and begged them to ring her up for chats, they keep finding that she’s in the middle of this or that and it is frowned on to interrupt her. The flatmates have been so discreet and refused very tempting bribes to tell their stories about life with Lady Di that it is believed they may well be rewarded by being allowed to remain friends. The trouble is, of course, that they are not quite upper class enough … but if they behave nicely it may be overlooked.

  It’s easy to know all this kind of gossip and speculation about Charles and Diana. In fact in the London of the last month, it would be difficult not to know it. There is a determination to celebrate and indulge and even wallow in it all. People want to read the same old stories over and over – how he proposed, what she said, what he thought, what they said then …. They are like children wanting to hear the same fairytales over and over. And the best bit of the fairytale is today, which is why hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have been up all night to share in it, to be a part of a world where princes are strong and kind and princesses are young and beautiful and virtuous and if you position yourself rightly you might get a wave or a smile from them.

  Encounters at the Airport

  7 November 1981

  At the shop in London Airport, there was a young man studying the display of postcards. Then he went to a section which had simply big words on the front like THANK YOU and I LOVE YOU. His eyes went up and down the shelves until he found what he wanted, and he bought 12 of the one that said ‘SORRY’.

  He was tall and fair-haired and blameless looking. I haven’t had a wink of sleep wondering what he did. Two women on the plane were discussing a friend they had seen in London who had got amazingly slim.

  ‘Unnaturally slim, I’d call it,’ said the one with the velvet beret.

  ‘You wouldn’t even call it slim, it’s downright thin,’ said the fur hat.

  ‘Fashionably thin is one thing, but this is verging on the bony,’ said the Beret.

  ‘Yes, the face is getting kind of gaunt,’ said the Hat.

  At that point the air hostess passed with the coffees.

  ‘Two vodka and tonics, please,’ said the Beret.

  The air hostess broke the news that ordinary people aren’t allowed to buy drink on planes any more; you have to call yourself Executive and pay a fortune and sit in the front, and they’ll pour drink on you free. The Hat and the Beret received this news glumly, as indeed have we all in our time. But they thought back to their slim friend.

  ‘Probably just as well,’ said the Hat.

  ‘Maybe it was meant as an omen,’ said the Beret.

  As we waited for the luggage to come out, my mind was a red blur of relief that we had landed and filled with resolutions never to go up there into those skies again. Dublin Airport is grand about luggage trolleys these days; there were dozens of them where you could see them, unlike a lot of places where they hide them behind huge cardboard walls. A woman and daughter who were having a hard time relating to each other were leaning on a trolley.

  ‘There, now, the bank’s open in the airport on a Sunday. Wouldn’t that be a handy thing to know?’

  ‘Why would it be handy?’ asked the girl.

  ‘If you wanted to cash a cheque, you could come out here.’

  ‘God,’ said the girl, ‘twenty-four miles to cash a cheque, God.’

  Mothers are slow to take offence at tones and dismissiveness. This woman chattered on about how the cases would soon be out and then they’d be on their way, and how grand it was to be home and how great it had been to be away. The girl grunted and eyed the crowd in a hopeless quest for an Airport Encounter with a young man who would whisk her away to less tedious chat.

  ‘When all’s said and done, I think it’s best to fly by plane.’ The mother looked pleased that she had come to this decision.

  ‘Aw, God,’ said the girl, ‘what else would we fly by but a plane? Seagull?’

  Out in the place where people wait to meet the Arriving Passengers, a family was peering nervously as there seemed to be no sign of their son.

  ‘Is there anyone else left?’ his mother asked me.

  ‘There are a few people fighting with the Customs men,’ I said with my terrific sense of humour, which was like a lead balloon.

  The family went ashen at the thought of it.

  ‘I meant talking to Customs men,’ I said humbly.

  That still didn’t please them; what could he be talking to the Customs men for?

  ‘Perhaps he bought presents,’ said the father.

  The mother’s face registered a belief that he had been carrying a potato sack full of cocaine. ‘Please God he’s not in any trouble,’ she said.

  I went around and hid behind a pillar so that I could see what happened. In a minute he came out, and the family nearly fainted communally with relief.

  ‘What did they want, what were they looking for?’ demanded the father.

  ‘Did they find anything?’ begged the mother.

  The unfortunate boy had been to the lavatory, had made a phone call, and his case had come off last anyway. He had walked innocently past the Customs men, he had nothing only one bottle of gin as a present anyway. What was all the fuss? What, indeed? I tiptoed away.

  At the phones, which look like Space Age things with us all clustered around what seemed like a big squat tree with telephones growing on it, there was a man flushed and triumphant. ‘I don’t know what the country’s coming to,’ he said happily. ‘I’ve got on to Wexford in no time, no crossed lines, nobody bit the nose off me. Maybe it’s the end of the world.’

  Up in the Clouds with Charlie Haughey

  4 February 1982

  Charlie Haughey got up at seven-thirty a.m. yesterday morning and had a cup of tea. Later on he had another cup of tea and a third. That’s his breakfast, not only during the campaign but always. ‘I don’t bother with breakfast,’ he says fastidiously, as if those who do are somehow gross.

  By eight o’clock he was washed and dressed and ready for the economic advisers who were going to prepare him for the morning’s press conference. He emerged ready for anything. He likes to look presentable, he says, he knows that people often judge by appearances, and he doesn’t find it a waste of time to have to keep himself looking Milan.

  He thinks that if you are in the public eye you owe it to people to look well. He often remembers Seán Lemass telling them all in the old days that people are entitled to seeing you looking your best. ‘Seán Lemass’s great phrase was “who did your haircut?”,’ not just to Charlie but to all of them.

  Charlie’s own hair is very silvery and well groomed these days. If he hadn’t taken his father-in-law’s advice literally he has certainly taken the spirit of it. Did he give it a lot of attention?

  ‘Well, Maureen Foley of Clontarf has always kept it in order for me, she’s made me look respectable for the past while, and then for the debate my son Ciaran’s girlfriend did it. She’s qualified as a hairdresser so she had a go for that night.’

  Was he pleased with the debate?

  ‘Very. It’s hard to know,’ he says, ‘how much the general public will be swayed by two men talking to each other,’ but he thinks it was civilised and that they covered a fair amount of ground.

  He had no complaints about Brian Farrell. He was a very professional chairman and he didn’t favour either one of them. Was it nerve-wracking? It was undoubtedly stress-creating. He had cleared the previous day to have a proper rest and time on his own or with just a few advisers to clear his mind and to marshal his thoughts. Did he sleep at all during the day waiting for the debate? Not really, a couple of snoozes but not going to bed and drawing the covers over him and going in to a deep sleep. Nothing as deliberate as that.

  After the debate he had come home and there had been a crowd in and yes indeed they had talked about it. No they had not played it over on
the video; they remembered the bits they wanted to talk about. Were people over-flattering to him, did he think, in fear of inferring his wrath? He smiled beatifically. Wrath? He seemed not to have heard of such a possibility. But seriously he said he did hear the bad as well as the good and his family in particular were all very frank with him.

  There’ll be no fear that he would live in an ivory tower out in Kinsealy. He had a busy day yesterday, not too much time to sit and brood over what the papers said about the confrontation. He is sunnier about the papers this time round. He thinks they have managed to dilute some of the more extravagant plunges at the jugular. He has always felt and still believes that there is a kind of media fog about things like elections, where everyone in papers and on the radio believes their own preferences.

  Just look how wrong they all were about the divorce referendum, to take just one example. But he agreed that he’s getting an easier passage this time. People are not hostile. ‘Perhaps they’ve just got used to me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been around so long now they know I don’t eat babies.’

  Or indeed much else. Charlie Haughey wasn’t planning on having any lunch. He doesn’t bother with lunch on the campaign, he says, in the same way that he dismisses breakfast. But it’s because he’s never anxious to break the momentum.

  It’s a delay, a diversion, a bit of a waste of time to have to go and sit down for lunch somewhere. A cup of tea out of his hand would be enough for him. A sandwich if he was pushed. We drove from Kinsealy into the Berkeley Court Hotel in Ballsbridge, his mind now clear about what he would say at the press conference to launch the plan for an international financial services centre in Dublin.

  At the hotel handlers and television teams and people in good suits who had all had their hair cut stood around. The lights, the thumping music played low but insistently, the television screens and the paraphernalia of a press conference were all underway. After eleven he would go to the helicopter pad in Vincent’s Hospital and fly to Limerick, and then to Listowel. No, nobody was in trouble, just trying to get around and see everyone, that’s all.