by Maeve Binchy
‘I want to vote,’ said the five-year-old.
‘Not now, darling, later … look at the nice pictures on the wall.’
‘You never let me vote.’
The seven-year-old was examining the artwork. ‘These are no good. Our school is better,’ he pronounced.
‘Shush, darling, they’re doing their best, it’s a very little school.’
‘It’s a normous school,’ said the child.
‘I meant they don’t have all the marvellous classrooms and lots of good teachers like your school does.’
‘It’s an awful school, Mummy, why are you voting here?’
‘It’s where we vote, darling, now do look after Charles.’
‘I want to vote,’ said Charles in the querulous tones that he may still have in 13 years’ time when he is allowed to vote.
‘Charles, darling, just a little patience for Mummy then we buy mangoes and ice-cream, all go to Grandmother’s garden for a lovely, lovely visit.’
‘I hate Grandmother,’ said Charles.
Most people smiled tolerantly at each other as if to acknowledge that children always speak their minds.
‘I bet she hates you, too,’ said an old unshaven man bent over a stick, a bottle of ginger wine peeping from his pocket.
It did the trick and silenced Charles and his discontented elder brother. They stood fearfully in the small, run-down school, worrying about what the future might hold for them.
In the restaurant the waitress said that she was doing her own poll. She asked every single person who came in which way they had voted and amazingly as soon as they had got over the shock of breaching the secret ballot, they all told her.
‘It’s going to be a landslide,’ she said cheerfully to the owner as she bustled through the In door and the Out door of the kitchen.
‘You wish,’ said the dour owner, who had worked out with two accountants and a man from a money house that he would be marginally better off if the Tories won, but that the country was going down the tubes no matter who won.
‘Aren’t you excited?’ the waitress asked him.
‘Takes a lot more than a bit of unscientific research bothering the customers to make me excited,’ he said.
‘It’s not unscientific, we get them from every walk of life here.’
‘I’ll bet my whole week’s wages Labour gets in with a majority of over 160,’ she said.
‘Your week’s wages? Don’t be so foolish, woman.’ It was easy winnings but he didn’t want to bankrupt the staff at the same time. She was determined, however. She asked three customers to be witnesses to the deal. Even those of us who were not regulars could telephone and make sure that he would honour the bet if she won – or lost.
‘Don’t be specific about the majority,’ people warned her. But she was a confident, New Dawn Woman. She wouldn’t reduce it – 160 or more, she said – and went on serving tables, her face full of smiles.
I rang the place yesterday to check the situation. Apparently they had all stayed up most of the night watching the television. When the majority topped 160 the waitress had bought champagne.
‘Fine bloody socialist she turned out to be,’ said the owner glumly. A hangover, a lost bet, the wrong government in power – it was not a good Friday.
‘Did you tell her that?’ I wondered.
He had, of course, several times during the night but as she poured the champagne she had said that this was what it was all about, champagne for everyone, not just the fat cats.
‘Fine bloody grip on reality she has,’ the owner added, as he bid me farewell.
A woman who works in a factory reports that they all began the day yesterday by dancing round in a conga line singing ‘They’ve gone and dumped Portillo … They’ve gone and dumped Portillo … da da da da da.’ And it proved so catchy that even the supervisors and management side of things thought it was funny and sang it too.
The phrase got into people’s heads and at lunchtime when they went to the pub they started it again and this time the whole pub joined in.
‘What’s Portillo done to them?’ the barman asked.
‘He looks like a prat,’ said a man at the bar.
‘Not fair to judge the poor fellow by his face,’ said the barman.
‘He talks like a prat.’
‘Oh well, then,’ said the barman, as the pub danced on.
Mrs Perfect
13 December 1997
Mrs Perfect got married in May 1970 and to this day she has never forgiven Charlie Haughey for upstaging her at the wedding. The guests talked of nothing but the arms-smuggling charges that had just been announced. She felt nobody gave her even a passing glance as she walked up and down the aisle. Their wedding seemed only like a supporting act to the dramas that were going on elsewhere. She was 25 years old, she looked wonderful – she can show you the wedding pictures to prove it – but they were more interested in Blaney and Haughey that day.
She knew that you have to work at marriage – her mother told her that long, long ago. Let nobody tell you that running a home was easy, her mother had always said; it involved ceaseless vigilance and planning.
So Mrs Perfect had done exactly that, and never more so than at Christmas.
Hers was going to be the Christmas that would be remembered by everyone. Planning began in early summer, when she would start the present list. Her gifts were never extravagant but very thoughtful.
If you ever said to Mrs Perfect that you liked chutney, she would write it down, and she would cross-reference this on her chutney list.
She made two summer shopping trips to the North, where many things were much cheaper, and she never travelled without her list, plus the list of what she had given for the past five years.
She knew how dangerously easy it would be to give the same person an aromatic herb pillow year after year if you didn’t keep proper records.
All her Christmas cards are sent on December 6th; she books her Christmas Eve hair appointment in November to make sure she gets the right time. The turkey, ham and spiced beef are ordered weeks in advance and the shopping list, the Christmas countdown and two stuffing recipes are photocopied and pasted to the back of a cupboard door by the beginning of the month.
She knows a place where you can get a non-shedding tree, and bought it long before the rush so that she could get the right shape. The lights have been tested, a candle bought for the window, a holly wreath for the door.
The fridge and the freezer are filled with things that can be brought out instantly for unexpected guests, though there seems to be fewer of those than there once were.
Still, it’s good to be prepared.
The children have all left home now, so you would think it would be less pressurised than it used to be. But Mrs Perfect laughs at this notion. It’s worse than ever, she says: you have to remember all their in-laws – a tin of mince pies here, a potted plant there. Not that in-laws is the right word, more like common-law in-laws. None of them married, all in what people call ‘relationships’ and not a sign of a grandchild from anyone.
Mrs Perfect says it doesn’t look at all good at the bridge club, where she has no pictures to show. You can’t show snaps of your gorgeous home – only grubby faces of little toddlers are acceptable, followed by screeches from the others saying that you don’t look old enough to be a granny.
No brownie points for having made the cakes and the puddings in November, tippexed-out the changes of address in the Christmas card list book, polished the brasses and decorated the house within an inch of its life.
They have a drinks party about two weeks before Christmas and Mrs Perfect used to love the way people oohed and aahed over the way the house was already festive and decorated.
People groaned and said they hadn’t even begun their shopping yet and everything was so rushed and there was so much to do and the Christmas season started earlier and earlier, preventing them from doing anything at all. She used to think this was just a way of goi
ng on, a style of speaking, until she noticed that it was quite possibly true. She saw neighbours dragging home a tree on Christmas Eve, and she would get the same, guilty poinsettia from apologetic friends who said it was so hard to think of anything but at least this would be colourful.
Mrs Perfect had been thinking of their presents for at least six months. Wasn’t it odd that other people didn’t do the same?
It’s hard to know who to talk to about it. Mrs Perfect’s considerably less than perfect husband isn’t around all that much. He seems very delighted with his comfortable, well-run home. Well, she thinks he is. But honestly, it’s hard to know. Things have changed, probably, from the way they were in her own mother’s day when you were judged by how you ran a house.
Nowadays, people possibly had different goals, but it was complicated trying to work out what they were.
Mrs Perfect’s husband told her to stop fussing round like an old hen when she said something totally innocent like how they need to get up at six o’clock on Christmas morning to have everything ready.
She had actually said it so that he wouldn’t come home at all hours from a do like he did last Christmas Eve.
That’s when he snapped at her and called her an old hen. He said the children were in headlong flight from her because she made such an almighty fuss over everything. All people wanted to do at Christmas was get on with it, for heaven’s sake. Why couldn’t she take that on board?
He had apologised, of course, for his outburst, and said it was harsh of him, particularly when she went to so much trouble and wore herself out for everyone else. All he had been trying to say was that a tin of soup would do people fine rather than weeks of boiling bones. He hadn’t meant to sound bad-tempered.
And of course Mrs Perfect had forgiven him, her mother always said that men hate a woman who sulks.
But it is worrying her.
None of her four children and their ‘partners’, as they call them, is going to be with her for Christmas Day this year. Is this pure chance, or the way things happen, or is it more sinister? Does she fuss them all to death?
At the Christmas drinks party this week she wondered were people annoyed with her and even slightly pitying rather than impressed with her perfect home.
Who moved the goalposts?
And when were they moved?
Mrs Perfect thinks we should have been told.
Death in Kilburn
19 December 1997
The response to ‘Death in Kilburn’ was such that Maeve made it the basis of a play, Deeply Regretted By. First produced as a television drama by RTÉ in December 1978, the play won a Jacob’s Award that year, the award for best script at the Prague TV Festival, and was chosen to represent Ireland at the Prix Italia and the New York TV Festival.
Patrick went into hospital on December 1st. He was sure he would be well home for Christmas, because it was only a light form of pneumonia, they told him. Modern drugs cured that kind of thing easily.
They didn’t cure Patrick. He died on Wednesday, 7th, without very much pain.
Stella was negotiating about the Christmas Turkey when the news came from the hospital. She couldn’t believe it, she kept thinking that it was a huge hospital and they must have made a mistake.
She asked the priest to come with her to the hospital. He was a nice new priest who had come to the area a couple of years before, he wasn’t attached to the parish church, he worked in welfare.
Father O’Brien went to the hospital with Stella and he asked all the right questions. It was a viral pneumonia, it hadn’t responded to antibiotics. Nothing could have been done, his coming into hospital had just meant that he died with less discomfort and he had aids to his breathing up to the very end. They were very sorry and they gave Father O’Brien and Stella cups of coffee out of a machine without asking them to pay for them. They told them to sit there as long as they liked.
Stella said they had better send telegrams to his mother and his brothers in the west of Ireland, and Father O’Brien brought her back to his office to do this. They gave his office number as somewhere to ring, because Stella and Patrick didn’t have a phone.
She went home by herself to tell the children when they got back from school. They had four children, and they all came home around four p.m. She bought a cake for tea because she thought it would cheer them up, and then she decided that it was too festive, the children would think they were celebrating or something, so she brought it back to the shop and they gave her the 65p back.
On Thursday December 8th, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the children were off school anyway. They sat around in the house while a neighbour made cups of tea for Stella and told her that she should thank her maker every hour of the day that Patrick hadn’t been on The Lump like so many other men, and that there would be something to feed his wife and children now that he was gone.
Stella agreed mechanically, felt a sense of cold all through her stomach. She still thought that Father O’Brien might run in the door with his face all smiles, saying that it was a mistake, that it was another Patrick who had died of this thing that drugs couldn’t cure.
But Father O’Brien was having a very different kind of conversation. Two men had arrived in his little office. They were Patrick’s brothers, they had got the night boat over and come up on the train to Euston. It was their first time in London.
They hoped Father O’Brien would understand why they had come and appreciate the urgency of what they were doing. They were bringing Patrick’s body back with them to the west. They had been given the name of an Irish undertaker who arranged funerals across the channel and they were going to see him now.
‘But he’s lived all his life here,’ said Father O’Brien. ‘Won’t he want to be buried here where his wife and children can visit his grave?’
‘No,’ said the older brother. ‘He’d want to be buried in the parish church at home, where his wife and seven children can visit the grave.’
Oh dear God, thought Father O’Brien to himself. Here we go. ‘Well I think you’ll have to discuss this with Stella,’ he began.
‘We don’t know anything about Stella,’ said the brothers.
‘I’ll take you to Stella’s house,’ said Father O’Brien firmly.
The brothers agreed reluctantly that if it would avoid trouble they supposed they’d better go.
Father O’Brien got someone to look after his telephone and they walked off past the shops that were all lit up with Christmas lights and plastic holly sprigs. Father O’Brien got rid of the children and the neighbours and sat through the worst conversation of his 15 years as a priest.
Somehow anything he had to take before was easier than watching a woman realise she had been deceived for years, seeing the peeling back of layer after layer, realising that on five occasions when Patrick had gone home alone to see his old mother he had managed to conceive another child.
He could barely look at Stella’s face when the halting, inarticulate sentences came out of the brothers, each one filling in a dossier of deceit and weakness and double dealing.
‘What’s she like … your sister-in-law?’ Stella said eventually.
‘Like?’ Well she’s a grand girl, Maureen. I mean she’s had a hard life what with Patrick having to work over here and all, and not being able to get home except the once every summer.’
‘But we were married in a church,’ said poor Stella. ‘We must be really married, mustn’t we, Father?’
There was a throat-clearing silence and Father O’Brien started to talk about God understanding, and Stella being truly married in the sight of God, and nobody being able to make hard and fast judgments about anything, and his voice petered out a bit.
The brothers were even more restless than Father O’Brien. With some kind of instinct that he still doesn’t know how he discovered, he suggested that he take them for a pint because the pubs had just opened, and that he would come back and talk to Stella later.
He settled the
m in the corner and listened. The story was simple, Patrick’s funeral had to be at home, otherwise it was not a funeral. Otherwise his whole life cycle would have no meaning. It would be like being lost at sea not to be brought home to rest.
And that Englishwoman couldn’t possibly come home with him and behave as a wife. They had nothing against the poor creature, it was obvious there had been some misunderstanding, but Father could see, couldn’t he, how much scandal there would be if she came the whole way over in black and brought her children with her, it would be flying in the eyes of God.
Father O’Brien’s pint tasted awful.
And then there was the mother to think of, she had worked her fingers to the bone for the family, she was 83 now, they couldn’t have a common-law Englishwoman turning up at the Mass, now surely that was reasonable enough, wasn’t it?
Stella was sitting where he had left her. She couldn’t have moved from the table, and the door was on the latch the way he had left.
‘Maybe there’s a case for what they want to do?’ he began.
‘Sure,’ said Stella.
‘It has nothing to do with the rules or laws or what the neighbours think, maybe there’s just a case for letting him go back there to rest. It will give a lot of other people a lot of peace ….’
‘Oh yes, that’s true,’ said Stella.
‘And we can have a proper Mass for him here, too, you know,’ said Father O’Brien desperately.
‘That would be lovely,’ said Stella.
‘I’ve got to go back and tell them if you agree,’ he said glumly.
‘What do you think is best?’ she asked sadly.
‘Well, I don’t think anything is best, it all looks terrible and bitter, and I feel hopeless, but if you ask me what I want, I want Patrick to be buried here with you and his family all there to say goodbye.
‘If you ask me what would bring the greatest happiness to the greater number then I think that you should let him be buried in Ireland.’
‘It’s a bit hypocritical, isn’t it Father? Up to this morning you regarded us as a good Catholic family, part of your flock. Now suddenly I am an “outsider”, a woman living in sin, someone who can’t go to a funeral in Holy Catholic Ireland in case I give scandal.