Dear Maeve

by Maeve Binchy

  The neighbours really and truly think that the whole business of getting passports and visas, and studying maps of the east coast of the US, is only laying up a store of unhappiness in the long run. The word they use is unrealistic. They say it’s unrealistic for people, who live at the level that they do, to raise the expectations of the children who are, after all, only 12 and 10 and would be content with something a quarter the cost, and much nearer home.

  I don’t think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s about the most realistic thing they could do. They have been earning around £45 extra a week between them, and the children have been encouraged to do baby-sitting in order to have some pocket-money to spend when they get there.

  If you are going to work in a supermarket, sweep up in a hairdressing salon on late nights, do deliveries, or a couple of nights washing up in a restaurant, then surely the best thing is to have a nice near goal that you can actually see ahead of you.

  I would prefer to work for a ticket from Shannon to Miami and to look at the picture of the car I was going to rent, the apartment where we would all stay, to imagine the faces of children brought to Disney World in Orlando, than to think in some vague terms of improvement of lifestyle. I don’t go along with the theory that because saving for a holiday is, in fact, buying a dream, we shouldn’t do it.

  Of course it’s a dream. We can’t buy certain happiness. That family will probably find the heat too much, the children may be difficult and not grateful enough, or delighted enough, the apartment might well be too small, or too remote. They might meet nobody from home and be lonely, they might meet everyone from home and feel crowded out; they might, on the other hand, have a ball. But whatever happens, they will have gone to a different place, a place miles from here, and they will have been able to show that kind of a place to their children.

  Why should that privilege belong only to those who were born to it, or those who had worked for so many decades to earn it that they were too feeble to enjoy it once they felt they had saved enough to go there?

  There is, still, a snobbish begrudging attitude that the needy shouldn’t have a holiday – an idea which holds no water at all, since the lowest brain must accept that they should have one much sooner than those whose everyday life is full of treats and variety. But you would not have to dig deep to find the view that, if people knew their place, they should realise that this place was not as a part of a foreign holiday.

  The argument went on long about this family. I was accused of being a reverse snob, my attitude equally patronising, if not more so. I was just patting them on the head, I was told. I was encouraging them to go on and take a holiday that was out of step with their economic circumstances because I wanted to appease my own conscience and feel good that others too had trips abroad.

  It became fairly heated, which is not necessarily bad. But it may be one of those insoluble things, like those who are cold not being able to understand those who are hot. The neighbours, the people who say this family is just increasing its downwards economic spiral, can see nothing but waste in handing over £1,300 to a travel agency.

  They remind me that I was fiercely intolerant of the people who threw away their money in Las Vegas. I remember my attitude there as being mature, wise, tolerant but mystified. Still, I take the argument and run with it. In gambling you risk losing all you worked for. In spending it on a two-week blast, you have made a choice of how you are going to spend it. If you want to sit under the sun and drink strange, coloured drinks, like lots of us do, then why, if you are not cheating anyone else, should you not do so?

  This is the same as my encouraging people to waste money on Communion frocks, they said. No it’s not. It’s different. That’s so that a child won’t feel left out of a cultural scene. Not even on my most giddy highs could I think that it’s part of the norm to go to Florida, and that those two children will be scarred if they don’t get there.

  It would be indeed patronising and reverse snobbery to pretend that I was ever very poor but I didn’t have much to spend as a young teacher. I think it’s fair to say that there wasn’t anything sizeable. And of course I should have bought a good winter coat and leather shoes but I didn’t; I saw the world.

  There were many of my parents’ friends who would have liked them to buy a car, or go out to restaurants for a meal, or put in central heating. But my parents didn’t want what people said were sensible things. What was left over from educating the lot of us, they spent on taking us on a holiday every year. It wasn’t Fort Lauderdale by plane, it was Ballybunion by train – but for seven of us, for a month, that was pricy too. And in terms of memory and widening of horizons and seeing another world, it was worth every penny.

  Some time in the middle of the next millennium those children whose house is a mess, whose garden is a wilderness and whose parents are needy will remember the holiday in Florida. Surely it’s not patronising to wish them well?

  Mister Wrong

  “Nobody else has had the guts to say anything except

  squeak about how romantic it is . . .”

  Sometime soon, within the next few months, this couple will get married. That’s the plan anyway. I am not on the guest list of 60 people, and I only know the bride very indirectly. But I do know that at least four of the people who will attend the wedding think very strongly that she should not be getting married at all.

  I don’t know anyone on the groom’s side, so we have no reading from his side of the church. Four people who know her well, is this a very sizeable amount of opposition? Or is it the norm?

  For all we know. Maybe weddings are filled with people dressed to kill and fuming inside about the union that is taking place in front of their eyes. Maybe most people believe most marriages are unwise and forecast doom under their breath as they cheerfully throw handfuls of confetti.

  And, of course, most people shut up about it. The words just don’t exist to tell someone that you think they have made a poor choice of a life-mate.

  If, in return for your wedding invitation, you handed out a great chunk of Unasked-for Advice, and pointed out the weak links in the chain, the glaring incompatibilities and the wisdom of celibacy at this point, you would find yourself fairly friendless.

  But suppose, just suppose for a moment that you were right. Suppose that you could see why these two people might be making a mistake, spurred on by all the pressures of society and a series of shallow attitudes. Suppose you truly believed it. Should you say anything, or should you forever hold your peace?

  One of the wedding guests is on the verge of doing the unthinkable and actually saying what others are thinking. She thinks that this girl is marrying because she is 30, because she feels it’s her last chance. Because all her friends are married and she feels out of it.

  She believes that, in spite of the giant steps made in giving self-confidence to women, many of them still feel that their place is, if not in the kitchen, at least marching two-by-two with a male of the species to shopping malls on a Saturday, to garden centres on a Sunday, and through all the paraphernalia that being married brings in its wake.

  But surely an intelligent girl in the 1990s wouldn’t marry just to say she was married, rather than because she had met a real person to share her life with properly?

  Ah, says the Courageous Wedding Guest, there’s another side of this. There’s the aspect of loneliness. It’s hard to see everyone else sharing, and having someone to talk to, if you don’t have it yourself. When she comes home from work, there’s nobody to tell about the horrors of the day. At breakfast, there’s no one to tell her she looks well or has a run in her tights or to make plans with.

  But, if this is the problem, why doesn’t she look for a flatmate? Or a lodger? Or indeed a lover? Marriage seems a bit drastic a solution to ease a small sense of isolation, or a need-more-conversation phase. No, there’s something makeshift and temporary about such arrangements. And anyway, the bride-to-be has looked around her. If everyone else on Planet Earth has
found a spouse, so can she. It’s as simple and as deeply unsatisfactory as that.

  All right, let’s suppose that her frame of mind has been correctly analysed. Lots of people marry unlikely-seeming people. What’s so wrong with this one that people seem to be going into conclave over him?

  The answer was that he was, basically, a very stupid man. Something that the faint-hearted would find hard to speak aloud as a reason for his betrothed to renounce him at this late stage. But that is what he was.

  He read nothing except magazines concerned with a hobby. He looked at sport on television but didn’t like any current affairs programmes or films. He shrugged at politics. “They’re all the same, they’re in it for what they can get.”

  I asked whether everyone else’s objections were based on a similar set of premises – basically that she was too bright for this guy. Well, yes and no. The man was a bit restless. He had been in a relationship for three years and that had not worked out. He had changed jobs often. He never kept a car for a full year.

  Someone has to play the Devil’s Advocate . . . These could be good signs, I argued. He knew the last relationship wasn’t right so they hadn’t married. He’s not stuck in a rut as regards work. Maybe the car thing has something to do with tax?

  He had nothing to say to her friends, she seemed constantly defensive about him . . . she moved the conversation from topics that bored him to things that the tabloid newspapers might have on page one.

  The Courageous Wedding Guest was, I believe, a really good and honourable friend. She didn’t live in the same town as the bride-to-be. It wasn’t a simple matter of jealousy, the sense of loss we all feel when a friend gets married and isn’t available as much as before. I may have made her sound a total snob and an elitist, but it was very hard for her to articulate those criticisms; they weren’t dismissive, middle-class attitudes that would trip easily off a class-ridden tongue.

  She is not a killjoy by nature, she believes in the magic of ritual and in the triumph of hope. She doesn’t think marriage is outdated or a form of servility for women. Her own marriage did not last but that has never soured her, either against the man or the institution. She doesn’t know whether her own marital status makes her uniquely well or uniquely ill-qualified to judge the situation.

  She says that when she speaks – if she speaks – the bride-to-be will cease to be her friend. Whatever happens, one way or the other, she will be out of their lives. If they marry, she will be excluded from everything except triumphant announcements of new babies, anniversaries and assurances of how wrong she was. If they do not marry, she will be held vaguely to blame for it all. So why speak?

  Because her own friendship with the bride-to-be is not important, the girl’s future is. Nobody else has had the guts to say anything except squeak about how romantic it is and how they’re looking forward to the wedding. Even the conclave who say it’s going to be a disaster are saying nothing. All the Courageous Wedding Guest is looking for is a set of words that doesn’t sound patronising, hurtful or sour. Words that might make her look at the situation again.

  She wondered did I have any help with those words.

  None at all. They should never be said. A woman is just as entitled as a man to marry a dumbo – just as men say they have been doing for years. It might be a nice rest after work. That’s what men always say.

  Part 3 On Kith, Kin and Close Encounters

  A Blast of it

  “People with a touch or a blast of arthritis love those who don’t talk about it, but do heed it . . .”

  I have got a lot of support from people who are going to write torrents of abuse to Aer Rianta about their cavalier attitude to people’s legs. Since I complained about it, some readers were kind enough to inquire if I had become an invalid. The answer is no, but the Touch of Arthritis that lurks in most of us who live in a damp country has become a Blast of Arthritis.

  I have a kind doctor who says that nobody ever died of it and it has never appeared on a death certificate, which is quite comforting in the reaches of the night when you think you might well get new hips some day if you were to get thinner. Weight, sadly, is no help, it would appear, in any aspect of life except Sumo wrestling.

  Most people with arthritis would prefer not to be greeted with cries of amazement as they limp in. They would prefer not to be asked: “What happened?” in tones of surprise and sympathy because the answer – which is about the bones gradually eroding with wear and tear – is a downer for everyone: you feel they’d much prefer to hear that it was a skiing accident, or that you had fallen out of bed with someone entirely unsuitable.

  So most of us who have it try to pretend, for as long as possible, that we don’t. I got quite good at that. It was a matter of identifying litter bins that I could sit on if the walk down a street was too long. Or railings to lean against, pretending you were rooting in your handbag for something, and there are lovely little jutting out ledges on shop windows that you could sink onto – but sadly not enough of them.

  Then, when you are indoors, you learn to find a high stool, like a bar stool. In my case, this is not difficult since I’m often in a bar anyway. But, if I were going to a reception in a hotel, I would ring in advance and ask could I have a bar stool set aside for me. Sometimes you hear a note of apprehension in their voices, as if you had been working your way north from Mizen Head, always having to order bar stools, but mainly they are co-operative.

  If you are invited to someone’s house for a stand-up gathering, you could ask them to lend you their kitchen stool. This can be a problem if the rest of the house is posh and the kitchen stool looks deeply shabby. I sometimes bring a shower cap to put on the stool which a hostess may be unwilling to produce – at least this way they look deliberately ludicrous rather than just tacky.

  There are lots of ways to pretend that your two legs are working fine. Like being in places before other people, and then they only see you sitting down and think you are as right as rain. When leaving a dinner table, you must always remember to stand for a moment, deep in conversation with the other guests, before you head off, otherwise one of your legs could fail you and you’re flat on the floor.

  There are a hundred ways of making life better and a great many people who read this will have their ruses. It has nothing to do with foolish vanity, or wanting to look younger or stronger, it has a lot to do with well-meaning, non-arthritic people constantly, relentlessly, saying the wrong thing.

  You can be sure that almost everyone who is able to read has heard of, and tried, capsules of concentrated mussel, particular vinegars, vitamin supplements, and seaweed baths. They have or haven’t helped as the case may be, but we do not want every social gathering ruined with people holding forth on them. Maybe, if someone feels very strongly in favour of some cure, they could send a note rather than turning someone’s house into an episode from Casualty.

  Arthritis doesn’t make you deaf. If you wonder whether someone can make the stairs, then ask that someone – don’t ask his or her friends. Our hearing is still as good as ever, and our sensitivities are a little more sharp and prickly. If people talk as if we weren’t there, we think that our touch of arthritis must be too terrible and hideous to acknowledge directly, but we are too far gone to notice if they speak of it in front of us.

  Since my Touch became a Blast, I have got myself a beautiful beech folding stool. It’s a lovely piece of furniture for a start, but the top folds down and you can carry it with you without looking as if you had come in with a van to move the contents of a building. I got mine made by Smyth Studios Cabinet Makers, 1a Stoneview Place, Dun Laoghaire, and it’s extremely solid because Mr Smyth and I thought about the possibilities and dangers of an insubstantial folding stool, and they were too horrible to contemplate.

  I love this stool: it fits in the boot of the car, in a taxi, it has been on the bus and a DART. I was showing it to someone proudly, and she said: “What a tragedy that you have to do that, but still, you’re being b
rave.” I wanted to pick up my beautiful stool and beat her senseless with it.

  It is not tragic. It’s very practical. I will have something to sit on. It’s self-centred. I want to be the same height as everyone else when they are standing and I’m sitting so that I can take part in, and even dominate, the conversation.

  People with a Touch or a Blast of arthritis love those who don’t talk about it, but do heed it. Those who don’t say that you’re walking better this week than last week, as if they were tracing a toddler’s steps, but who do manage to park near where you’re going and always walk at your speed.

  We don’t want to hear of a marvellous man here or a great woman there, a diet of frogs’ legs and sun-dried tomatoes, a prayer to someone with special intercession for inflamed joints – or that we should pull ourselves together and walk straighter. We’re trying to do that. All the time, as it happens.

  Most people who have arthritis know quite a lot about it, but it’s only sensible to know as much as can be known, that’s why we should all have a subscription to Arthritis News. It comes out four times a year, is full of sensible information, and you could always write to it yourself to make your own views felt.

  You won’t find anyone patronising you in this particular publication and it’s well worth a fiver a year. Send to the Arthritis Foundation of Ireland, 1 Clanwilliam Square, Grand Canal Quay, Dublin 2.

  Infidel In-Law

  “Was it total hypocrisy to pretend that nothing had been seen . . . or was that the only sensible thing to do?”