Dear Maeve

by Maeve Binchy

  One of my friends didn’t come with me; she said that when it said House Private it really meant Funeral Private. She said we would be in the way.

  The very short line of sympathisers went up and shook hands with the family.

  “Please come back to the house,” the woman I know said.

  “No, no, it says House Private,” I said.

  “It doesn’t mean you, PLEASE come, there’s hardly anyone here,” she said with a different kind of tears in her eyes now, tears that her kind, gregarious father was not being given the send-off he deserved.

  So I went to the house where they had glasses ready and bottles, and rooms cleared to receive people and plates of things covered in cling-film in the kitchen. And it was very sad, not just because he was dead and they had lost their father, but because, inadvertently, they had sent out the wrong signal and given him the wrong farewell.

  It was hard to know whether you were making it better or worse by saying that people might have been kept at a distance by the House Private. I thought it might explain why the doorbell wasn’t ringing. This was the first funeral that the family had had to organise; their mother had died many years ago, long before they were old enough to be involved in the arrangements.

  “I don’t know why we put that in the paper,” the woman I know said.

  “We must have had some reason,” her sister said. They had regarded it as some part of a formula, one of the things that happened at this odd, unreal time, something they saw other people put in the paper, like Rest in Peace. They hadn’t thought about it at all.

  It’s many months later. The woman wrote to me and suggested I use her example for this column. She said there must be many other people who might learn from this, might just pause before they fell into a form of words and made a gesture which was regarded by some as snobbish, as if they were excluding those who might come to the house, those who would not have been entertained in the normal course of events. This was what grieved her most.

  Also, she said that the funeral director had asked them twice if they really wanted the house to be private; he had said that sometimes it was a comfort to have the presence of friends and that we were lucky in Ireland where we had the vocabulary of sympathy, unlike other cultures where death was treated as a personal sorrow to be endured and recovered from in private. But for some reason they got locked into the phrase. They thought, in their grief, that it had some dignity, instead of working out what it meant.

  If all his friends had been there it would not have been a grotesque Irish wake, a roaring party with people forgetting the reason for their gathering; it would have been something that might have given them strength and banished the bleakness of the time.

  There may well be good and sensitive reasons for saying House Private but she urged me to advise those who do so, merely from some sense of thinking it the Right Thing, to ask themselves who they are shutting out and why.

  Advance Planning

  “Making an arrangement in advance to meet friends is truly

  not a sign that we have arrived in a yuppie culture dictated

  by slamming filofaxes down on tables”

  I was at a friend’s house recently, partly to set something up in aid of a charity and partly to have a great chat. There we were at the kitchen table when there was a knock on the door. It was a neighbour who had called in for a chat. She was a very nice woman and her chat was perfectly pleasant and, if she had been invited in, I would have been delighted to meet her. But because she had just dropped in I thought it spoiled everything. The fund-raising idea was left up in the air and the marvellous stories were half-finished because you wouldn’t try to bring a stranger up to date on the whole cast of characters involved.

  The neighbour had a telephone but she hadn’t thought to ring. “I just took the chance that you’d be in,” she said with a beaming smile, and down she sat.

  Eventually I left before her, with a great sense of dissatisfaction and frustration and also with some self-doubt. Was it perhaps churlish to resent someone calling uninvited? Not at all. I deeply resent it. I wouldn’t do it to anyone and I wouldn’t want anyone to do it to me.

  My friend rang the next day to apologise. “I‘m so sorry,” she wailed, “but what on earth could I do? I couldn’t tell her not to come in when she had arrived on the doorstep, could I? I had to make her a cup of coffee too, didn’t I?”

  I think not.

  She could have said: “Listen, come in and say hello for a minute, but Maeve and I are doing some work and we honestly have to get on with it or it will never be done.” That was true. Well, 80 per cent true. The neighbour was a reasonable and intelligent woman; she wouldn’t think a door was being slammed in her face. And it would have been a perfectly courteous way to ask her not to make a night of it. We had papers and lists out on the table.

  I honestly think that the hostess was to blame just as much as the woman who came in. After all, if people crow with delight that it’s lovely to see you, even when it isn’t, how are you to know that it’s an awkward time and you are not at all the welcome guest that they keep insisting you are?

  But, my friend would say, that’s a very Dublin attitude. It’s not what people do in the country; they are much more casual there. In the country, the art of friendship and calling to see one another hasn’t fallen away.

  Excuse me a moment. So where do we live?

  Exactly, we live in Dublin. So I think we need not apologise for doing things in a Dublin way, even if that is meant to be some kind of a swipe at Dubliners for being ungracious fortress-holders who hate unlocking their ramparts.

  And I bet you anything that in the country they don’t light up with joy at the sight of an uninvited guest bowling along through the green fields or across the mountain passes. No one is going to convince me that our rural friends are going to be dewy-eyed with delight when they see a couple of bores, or even nice people who have time on their hands, arriving unexpectedly at the door.

  Making an arrangement in advance to meet friends is truly not a sign that we have arrived in a yuppie culture dictated by slamming filofaxes down on tables and checking dates like tycoons. I am delighted if someone writes or rings and says he or she will be in the area and what about a drink or a meeting.

  Delighted. And then I regard it as a highpoint of the day and get all my work finished for a spurious deadline. On the other hand, I am enraged if I am with someone I haven’t seen for a long time and there is a knock or ring at the door.

  So why not ignore it, you might ask? The world is divided into those who can let a phone ring without answering it and those who cannot. And what kind of atmosphere do you have if you are cowering in your own house while someone is belting at the door?

  The young just love the adventure and the excitement of the Unknown in the ring of a doorbell. It could be their Future waiting out there. The rest of us find little joy in the appearance of someone who was Just Passing or who was Wondering How We Were. It’s a sign of age, I suppose, maturity – the realisation that there aren’t unlimited years left of visiting people and being visited, and you want to do it right.

  It’s a question of experience, too. One casual dropper-in I know was cured when he went to a house where there was a huge argument in progress and bad feeling hung like ectoplasm at shoulder level around the place. Then he went to a house where they were having a supper party and almost all his friends were there, so everyone was mortified.

  He gave up dropping in unexpectedly when he went to see his aunt and uncle on a Sunday afternoon and got the distinct impression they had been summoned from a connubial bed to answer the door. His own view, that they were much too old for that sort of thing anyway and if it had been wild and wonderful they wouldn’t have answered the door, was not credited by any of us as satisfactory. He telephones nowadays and is a much more welcome guest.

  It’s not just the high fliers, the decision-makers, the self-conscious superwomen who can’t bear to be discovered
unawares: it’s the people who have decided to take out the contents of all the kitchen drawers and sort them; the workers who are terminally tired and are dozing in front of the television. It’s the parents who have decided to spend proper time with their children; the couples who have made a bit of time to talk about a holiday; the woman who is just getting to like her sisters-in-law; the man who has decided to touch up the hair at his temples with a little dark colour; the mother whose baby has finally gone to sleep; the old people who hate answering the door after dark; the person who has just thought how peaceful this is . . . a good book, a nice dog asleep by the fire and a hot whiskey. Those are the kind of people you are interrupting when you call unannounced, and, unless you are as entertaining as Peter Ustinov, I advise you to think very carefully before you ring that doorbell.

  Rash Decisions

  “I’d prefer to have roast cocker spaniel than rabbit, but people don’t serve it very often so there is hardly a regular confrontation . . .”

  When this couple accepted an invitation to go out to dinner last week, the wife did not say beforehand that spicy food brings her face out in blotches and her husband did not say that fish has always reminded him of cod-liver oil ever since his days in boarding school and that he literally can’t swallow it.

  Now the reason they didn’t mention these two facts was because they did not want to sound like guests from the funny farm, finicky, faddish and laying down the law about what they were going to eat when they arrived at someone else’s table. But they were served a fish starter and, as everyone else was devouring it, he pushed it around his plate wishing there was even a lettuce leaf to hide it under, wishing there was a paper napkin he could wrap it up in like he used to do at school, wishing that he didn’t feel like gagging every time he brought it up to his mouth.

  Eventually his wife came to his rescue and told a funny story about how mad we are to think of fish as a penitential dish and doesn’t it really show your age . . . And everyone took it in their stride, except for the woman who had prepared the meal, who said in a slightly aggrieved way: “But you should have said. I’d have made you something different.”

  That was the first course.

  In came the main course. A dish of chicken done with ginger and cardamom and garlic. The woman who had just managed a reprieve for her husband and saved him from having to eat a fillet of plaice looked in horror as the spicy dish was served onto her plate. As a couple they had already commanded enough attention as fusspots, she thought, and the conversation had moved on to happier channels.

  She looked sadly at the plate in front of her and decided to go ahead and get blotches. First her neck reddened then the bits in front of her ears. She could feel the heat of the rash. Twice she saw her husband try to explain and twice she shook her head.

  By the end of the evening, several people asked if she was feeling all right. Flushed and itchy, she looked as if she had an unpleasant rash, aggravated perhaps by drink.

  She said there was nothing she could have done. You can’t turn yourself into some kind of self-regarding hypochondriac and go about listing the foods you find unacceptable, not when it’s hospitality that is being offered in someone else’s home, she said. She agreed that, if she was a vegetarian, then she would say so in advance but she thinks it would be pretentious to mention the two kinds of food that didn’t agree with them. Normal people are able to eat a little of everything and she and her husband are normal, even though they mightn’t have shown too many signs of it on this particular occasion. She said that most of the time there wasn’t a problem: people were going in more and more for buffets and more often than not you would be asked to help yourself. So the question of being faced with a plate of food you couldn’t eat rarely occurred. On balance, she said, she would prefer to take the risk.

  I think she is wrong. When you invite people to your house presumably it’s because you like them and you want to feed them things they would like to eat rather than force them to eat their greens and their crusts and take spoonfuls of stuff that might even make them ill.

  If you invite friends for a meal, it takes money to buy the food, time to cook it and you are hoping that it will all make for a successful evening. Wouldn’t you much prefer someone to tell you casually what they couldn’t or didn’t want to eat in advance? There are ways of doing this – as a race we are not known to be short either of a word or the right words.

  “All right,” this woman said to me. “What would you do?”

  Alas, in my case, I can eat anything, and have all the signs of it. The only thing I couldn’t eat is rabbit. I’d prefer to have roast cocker spaniel than rabbit, but people don’t serve it very often so there is hardly a regular confrontation between me and the bunnies.

  Nowadays, however, people are using more oriental herbs and spices so it would be reasonable to expect things to have a more exotic flavour than in the more bland times of the past. The country has also become converted to fish, so it’s almost an even bet that some sort of seafood will turn up.

  To answer her question: what would I do?

  I would put myself in the position of the woman who had cleaned her house, bought the food and prepared a meal for her friends. And I would not have wanted to see a friend push food around a plate like an enemy. And I would not have wanted to see another guest go purple with allergies in front of my eyes.

  I would have been perfectly content with a short and undramatic explanation of the foods that did not suit. But I would have liked it in advance and then not have it referred to again.

  If someone says they are on a diet and don’t want big helpings, I think that is perfectly fair if they tell you quietly, but I think it is destructive and anti-celebratory if they say it like a Christian martyr during the meal and make everyone else feel guilty or gluttonous.

  A friend of mine who is a caterer agrees with me, and says that Irish people can be uncharacteristically reticent about saying what they can’t eat. She thinks it comes from a fear of being thought a crank or being seen to have pretensions which our grandparents wouldn’t have had the luxury to entertain.

  She does suggest, however, that if you plan to serve shellfish, that you should always offer an alternative, and leave it nearby so that your guests can choose a slice of melon as a replacement starter, say, or a large salad which would cover a main course. It is no trouble, she said, even at a formal dinner party, to prepare a special plate in advance. But it can create great trouble and disappointment when someone turns out to be not able to eat what you have prepared.

  Airlines offer alternatives nowadays, so do caterers for functions and conferences – even at formal weddings, vegetarian dishes are available as a matter of course. So if exceptions can be made quite happily in public places among strangers, it seems odd to think that it would not be acceptable among friends.

  Part 2 Principles and Prejudices

  Faith, Hope and . . .

  “The danger would be that we become so watchful and

  politically correct in not falling for the con men that we

  may forget those who are relying on us . . .”

  The woman in the red jacket did not have a closed mind. She wasn’t a killjoy, or someone who wanted to write off any celebration of Christmas. She didn’t have to go into intensive care if she saw Santa Claus in November, but she did draw the line at some things. And one of those things was charity Christmas cards.

  She never sends them, she says, because only a fraction of what you pay for them goes to the cause. She says she knows this for a fact. And also, she doesn’t like the feel of it. She says, it’s like the people who used to ring bells and call a crowd if they were giving alms. Why didn’t those who want to support a charity do so quietly, as in the case of the Widow’s Mite, without drawing attention to it by sending a printed proof of their generosity to friends?

  I didn’t agree. I thought that if you were going to spend maybe 50 pence on a card, many times over, then why not let a portion o
f that go to help a cause? And the fact that the charity’s name is printed on it isn’t really boasting and braying and saying how good we are, it’s reminding people of the charity in the most minimal way and possibly telling them of your commitment to it.

  But the woman in the red jacket said that, although she accepted the purity of my motives, she felt it was a dangerous thing to do in many ways. Firstly, those of us who bought such cards were being conned because of the huge proportion that went to middlemen. Secondly, we might start feeling good and thinking that we had contributed in some significant way to a cause we believed in, whereas in fact we had only given a pittance.

  The conversation was amicable and ended well. We both agreed to think about it.

  To take just one charity of the many as an example, in my case I had already ordered my Christmas cards, as I always do, from the Irish Cancer Society, so I wasn’t going to think about the issue very deeply. Because, though I claim to have a terrifically open mind, this is something I don’t feel I will change my view about. But to be fair in terms of the discussion, I thought I’d ring and inquire how much of the money did go to the Irish Cancer Society, and how much got taken up along the way.

  The Irish Cancer Society says that if you buy one of their cards through a shop, say for 50 pence, they will get 60 to 70 per cent of what you pay, in other words, 30-35 pence. Yes, they would get a higher percentage if you bought it directly from them, but they stress that they are more than happy to sell though the retail trade. They depend on it utterly to reach the great mass of people who go into shops to choose cards. They are happy to pay a percentage for the normal business of commerce and also to pay 21 per cent VAT. This is the way things are. It’s not as if there are any nefarious middlemen out there, hawking them around and taking a huge amount off the top.