Dear Maeve

by Maeve Binchy

  Years ago, when the London friend and the American friend had been together, of course they had got up to things. But they had been over 20 then. Not 17. But then, hadn’t the world changed in those years? And anyway, weren’t there always things that your parents were better off not knowing even if you were 50 and your parents 90?

  As people unable to reach a decision, they did an intelligent thing. They left the house early next morning so as not to face the 17-year-old and the young man that she was either going to invite to breakfast or else bundle out the door. They asked their friends.

  It’s 1993. Were they mad to let her have this fellow in her room? Were they mad if they made a scene about it? They liked the girl, they could do with the rent. They didn’t want to set the child adrift. They didn’t want to have her staying with them fuming and mutinous. They didn’t want to encourage adult, and possibly indiscriminate, relationships in a girl who might not be old enough to handle them. They didn’t want to tell tales and have her shipped home.

  There was no use in saying it was discourteous to bring an uninvited guest back to stay since everyone knew we weren’t talking about courtesy, we were talking about sex. It was “asked-for advice”.

  I said she should ring the American friend immediately and say that, when they were making the checklist of things, like a glass of wine with dinner and what time she could travel on the Underground, she had forgotten to ask about having guys stay over. As if it hadn’t happened yet. Then if she got an anguished squawk of “certainly not”, she could pass this message on.

  If she got a laid-back “what the hell; it’s the end of the 20th century”, she could think again and decide whether she wanted to go along with it or not. That way the loco parentis duty would have been fulfilled. If she were the 17-year-old’s real mother, she’d have to make up her mind about things the way parents all over the world have to make up their minds, in the knowledge that whatever they do will be wrong.

  But what she and her husband should not do is to lose another night’s sleep over it. They must decide and act. There is probably no absolute right or wrong whatever they decide to do. In six months that girl will be old enough to make up her own mind.

  They should ask for no more advice. What they were getting was an almost evenly divided “of course not” or “let them at it”.

  When you find yourself believing the last person you spoke to, you are in no position to make a decision. I think those of us who occasionally act in the place of real parents have as much right to make a mess of it as their own mothers and fathers do. But we have no right to dither and let them think, however accurately, that we don’t know what we’re doing.

  Shady Dealers

  “How is he to know that society thinks what he does is wrong, and that his fellow men and women do not believe it’s good to make money out of shady financial set-ups?”

  They rang up and asked would we come to supper next week. They were having a few friends round to meet this man . . . we didn’t know him by any chance? No, but we knew his name. He was in business in a big way and then that business collapsed, owing a lot of money to people who had invested in it. These weren’t friends of his or shareholders or gamblers who had taken a chance. They were people who thought it was an ordinary place to put their savings and now they had lost them.

  The thing is that this man’s lifestyle hasn’t changed very much, from what we hear.

  I didn’t want to go to a party to meet him, so I said I wasn’t free that night. Oh dear, what a huge statement of moral principle there, you will say. There’s real courage and commitment in telling a social lie, right? But I didn’t have the arrogance – or what others might call courage – to say to people, who had asked me to supper, that I disapproved of their having invited such a man to their house. I don’t have the words to say a sentence about not wanting to share a room or a meal with someone who, from all reports, thinks little of having left other people’s lives in ruin.

  It’s not because I am so fair-minded and generous that I’m giving him the benefit of doubt or anything. In fact, I’m almost certain he’s a selfish go-getter who would open another company in his wife’s name without a backward glance, if he thought he could get away with it.

  It’s not that I’m afraid I would be unpopular if I were to say that it’s wrong to treat people who cheat as half-heroes; to nod and wink and say wouldn’t we all have done it, if we could.

  But it’s the gratuitous criticism that I would find hard to say. I would hate someone to tell me they wouldn’t come to my house because they didn’t like one of my friends. Similarly, if I were to discover later that someone had a deep-seated objection to another guest, then I would greatly prefer if they had made an excuse and not turned up. So I was doing as I would be done by.

  Blameless, I thought.

  Three other people I know were invited to the same party. One, a woman, found the vocabulary I couldn’t find and said she couldn’t possibly go because she so strongly disapproved of his behaviour. The second, a man, said he’d be delighted to go. When he meets the financier, he is going to ask him face to face how he can live with the fact that other people now have no reasonable living, due to him.

  The third, a woman, said I had gone off my head. What right had I to pass judgement on other people? Did I operate a Back to Basics policy in relation to every guest, at every event, vetting them to know were they guilty of anything that offended a chic mode of behaviour before I agreed to join their number? She said, for all she knows, half the people she meets socially could beat their wives, falsify their tax returns, drive drunk and put the milk bottle on the table and yet she doesn’t take pretentious decisions about whether or not she will admit them to her company.

  “Would you seriously advise people not to go to a social gathering where they know they are going to meet him?” she asked, eyes round in amazement.

  Yes, I think I would.

  I am almost certain.

  She says I am being judgemental in the extreme. We have no idea what is going on in his mind; he could be giving money back to people secretly, hand over fist. Is he meant to go around wearing a hair shirt with a bell around his neck announcing his unclean arrival everywhere, so that he doesn’t offend people like me who might accidentally be in the same room as him?

  She said you wouldn’t go out very often in Ireland if you were to check the credentials of everyone in the room. And perhaps there are people who mightn’t like to meet you. Far better, she says, to keep an open mind about such things, meet everyone, smile at everyone. After all, you don’t have to live with them or write them a reference.

  But how is he to know that society thinks what he does is wrong, and that his fellow men and women do not believe it’s good to make money out of shady financial set-ups? Does not the business of everyone accepting an invitation to meet him and smile at him not reinforce his feelings that his way of going on is perfectly acceptable?

  I’m all for an easy life and, if I were to meet him casually somewhere, I think I would be civil, certainly in someone else’s home. But I wouldn’t go to meet him and I don’t think it’s despicable to pretend unavailability. I admire the courage of the man who said he would accept the invitation and then have a confrontation. But is it fair? On anyone? On the host? On the other guests? Even on the crooked financier, who may be under the impression that he had been invited for a pleasant night out?

  I admire the courage of the woman who would state her reasons for not going, but she reminds me too much of another woman I know who says, accusingly, that I Speak As I Find. It has never really been a wise thing to do in terms of personal relationships.

  And I’m not entirely sure that I admire myself in the middle of all this; mine is certainly the easiest option. But I have thought about it a lot. Suppose everyone had taken my advice. Suppose they had all said they weren’t free that evening. Then the gathering would not be taking place.

  Suppose they were all strong-minded enough no
t to go out and meet him but gentle enough not to damn by association the host who had invited them . . . then there would be no supper party. Life would go on, the crooked guy would see fewer smiling faces around him than, perhaps, he is used to seeing. I’m almost certain I’m right. The only trouble is that I keep getting a whiff of the Daughters of the American Revolution, with visions of social registers and people being blackballed if they are bankrupt. It would make you think of all those years when people were not allowed into the royal enclosure at Ascot if they were divorced until, suddenly, that included all the royals and the goal-posts were moved.

  He’s not in jail, he hasn’t been prosecuted, he hasn’t lost all his assets. I wouldn’t lose any sleep if he lost a bit of social life and didn’t find that everyone accepted that what he did was normal business behaviour.

  Teetotal Tolerance

  “Publicans, who used to collapse like a Bateman cartoon

  if anyone asked for coffee, now want to know if you

  want decaf or cappuccino”

  A very agreeable, social sort of man, he says he won’t come to Ireland for this particular gathering because he couldn’t bear all the flak he will get about not taking a drink. He remembers Ireland in the old days, he says, when you brailled your way from the early Bloody Mary to the lunch-time pints and everyone was defined by the amount they could put away, while abstainers were mocked as Holy Joes, Cute Hoors or possibly Not Real Men.

  Not the place for a man, four years into a different way of life, he says. Why draw it on himself? He’s not afraid that he’ll weaken or anything; it’s just that he couldn’t take all the explanations, the defensive attitude he will have to adopt, the rationalising, the assuring people that he doesn’t object to their lifestyle, it’s just that his own is not the same. He’s been here before, he says; he knows of what he speaks. No, life is too short to take on that hassle. He’s going to miss the reunion.

  I advise him to think again and ask a few people, as well as myself, before he pleads an excuse not to meet classmates who were great pals in the years gone by. He may be very pleasantly surprised. The Ireland of his student days, 20 odd years ago, which he revisited 10 years ago, is not today’s Ireland regarding attitudes to drink.

  He will not find people calling him Matt Talbot or Father Mathew if he asks for mineral water. They will not ask for an explanation, nor will they want one. And best of all, they will not turn red, watery eyes on him and sob into their own drinks about how they wished they had his strength. There are lots of nice pink livers in Ireland.

  Ah, but Maeve was always one to see what she wanted to see, he says. I would like him to come and meet his fellow students so I could be expected to create a rose-tinted world for him where people are mature and wise and tolerant. This is not what he hears.

  Right, I tell him, this is what I hear and see and notice. I notice that pubs, which love selling soft drinks anyway and always thrived on the mixers because they constitute almost pure profit, not attracting any tax, now have a whole rake of alcohol-free beers and low-alcohol lagers, and they are being wooed senseless by the various mineral-water manufacturers, dying to get their particular shade of bottle and label in.

  Publicans, who used to collapse like a Bateman cartoon if anyone asked for coffee, now want to know if you want decaf or cappuccino. In recent years, I have not heard a barman make a joke about serving a Real Man a non-alcoholic drink. I haven’t seen a sigh, or heard a groan. I have never heard an explanation about someone being a Pioneer, it being Lent, or the breathalyser, or the price of gargle being offered. Maybe I don’t go to enough macho bars but I do go to a reasonable cross-section and in recent times I have never heard anyone being challenged after ordering the drink of his or her choice.

  I agree that years ago the order would go, “Four pints, two gin-and-tonics, three large Paddies and a Cidona for your man!” Your man was thereby marked as being outside the tribe. Nowadays it’s just as often the reverse; it could be a round of white wine and soda and many varieties of non or low-alcohol drinks and someone saying apologetically, “Do you mind if I have a short, it has been a bad day?”

  Like smoking. People don’t say they’ve given up apologetically. The apology is from the one who asks for the ashtray. I told the man who thinks that attitudes are frozen, that when I gave up smoking I was afraid to answer the telephone in case I had to have a cigarette before I spoke; I was unused to the experience of one without the other. Not a good example, he says. The phone wouldn’t take me by the throat and say I was no fun without a cigarette – go on, have just one.

  But I told him that he was guilty of over-dramatising himself. Everyone he will meet at his reunion will have read the bad news about how many units are safe per week. Some of them, admittedly, may have decided to take no notice, but they will know about them, they will not think he is wearing a hair-shirt and chains around his middle if he doesn’t lower a bottle of sherry at the reception. Some of his colleagues and friends will have read the tests under the heading “Are you an alcoholic”? and by question three realised that they should be in treatment. Some will have done something, some will have said these questionnaires are run by some backlash pressure group. But they will have read them. There will be colleagues who have had friends die of drink-related illnesses, or passed over for promotion because of being a bit unreliable in that department.

  He will discover that the liquid lunch is no longer a permanent feature of Irish middle-class life in the mainstream, as it might have been when he left. Not an eyebrow is raised if a captain of industry or a politician or even a successful journalist asks for a glass of water; heads will not wag. They will not say that’s what has him where he is, either for good or evil. It’s just one more choice people make. Like having no car and walking to work can be as high in the pecking order as having a car the size of a house. I advise him to give it a lash.

  The profession that he is in has changed. Its ideas of machismo have altered greatly and not just because his colleagues have become middle-aged. New attitudes are all the more apparent among the younger generation. He may not find Ireland an entirely pluralist society but at least he will find his countrymen and women broad-minded enough to know that we owe no explanations for what forms of pleasure or madness we deny ourselves. And he will also have a great time.

  Sense and Censure

  “One day the mother or father will meet a sympathetic

  prelate or friend who will say something simple . . . but

  it will be too late”

  Their only daughter was married in a far-off land last May. Neither of her parents was there. They couldn’t attend a ceremony which was a sacrilege and a farce.

  The man was already married. Well, he had gone through a form of “divorce” of course. His first marriage was over. “Over” was a word people used now when it suited them to say that a binding commitment was about to be abandoned for something marginally more interesting.

  They had no personal hostility toward the man himself, but they will not allow you to call him their son-in-law. They had actually liked him when their daughter had brought him home, when they hadn’t realised that he was already a married man.

  They would never accuse him of having seduced their daughter, or having made false promises. She had known from the very outset what the situation was and had gone along willingly. Don’t get them wrong: they weren’t casting him as a villain and her as a helpless wronged woman.

  But it’s the principle of the thing.

  You have to have principles and stick to them; it’s easy to shake your head and wag your finger at the deterioration of standards in other people and in other places. The crunch comes when it’s in your own life. They are being tested, like the early Christians were tested – worship the Emperor and your life will be spared, say that you believe in the One True God and you will be thrown to the lions.

  They had to stand up for what they believed was right. They had to tell her that it was no marria
ge and they couldn’t lend it credibility and authority by attending it, by regarding it as anything except what it was.

  Now they’d like you to know that it would have been much easier to have gone. Much. It wasn’t a question of being afraid of what the neighbours would say, or what the priests in the parish would think. This was no stance taken for fear of public opinion. They are in their 50s; they don’t consider themselves religious maniacs.

  They just think they have a duty to say – however hard it is to say it – that their daughter has broken the rules of their faith and they will not go along with it.

  If they truly believe this, then why can’t they let her break the rules? They are not their daughter’s keepers.

  They say: you wouldn’t look aside if your child stole or cheated or was a drunken driver.

  But surely they couldn’t compare any of these things with marrying a man she loved, according to her own conscience?

  They could and did, because the same situation prevailed: their daughter was in Mortal Sin and in danger of going to Hell for eternity. If they were to pretend that nothing was amiss, they would be helping their daughter towards damnation.

  They found it alarming that people should say that Hell was all gone now in the new teaching of the church. Where did people find this comforting view? They admitted that there had been some changes: the Latin Mass, the nature of guardian angels, the rules on fast and abstinence – and they were not against these changes. Please don’t believe they were members of some Old Guard resisting every forward step.

  But the whole purpose of being on earth was to work for Salvation, wasn’t it? And no one ever said it was going to be easy.