Dear Maeve

by Maeve Binchy

  It must be a heartbreak for anyone seeing a mother in that position. But I truly believe you must wait until she wants to go.

  Scandalous Liaisons

  “I am sick to death of hearing about affairs. There is nothing as boring as a lover unless you are the lover”

  There’s a friend of mine who is very exercised these days about a rumour that is flying around Dublin suggesting that two people are having an affair with one another. One is well-known and the other is married. I must have heard it five times, accompanied by deep authoritative, confirming nods from people who more or less implied that they have been secreted away at every location where intimacy is Taking Place, as they used to say in old-fashioned divorce cases.

  Now I’m as interested as the next person in unusual information of this sort. But only for about two minutes and then, to be honest, my interest flags. If they are having an affair, so what? They must know all the drama that discovery would cause. Perhaps that is actually part of the heightened excitement of it. They must know that there are people they are hurting and, undoubtedly, they will have taken their own view of that. Either this love is bigger than both of them, or else life can be compartmentalised. There are endless ways of rationalising things, we all know that. Or perhaps it is all out in the open and they have told everyone that matters, so there’s no need for whispering. Soon it will be public knowledge.

  But my friend tells me a new, and as yet unvoiced, opinion. She says this story is just not true. She knows both of them. It is a modern myth, a stone that has gathered so much moss that it is now unrecognisable. What is more, she tells me, the two people involved haven’t a notion of what is being said about them. And she wonders what she should do.

  Nothing, I say, before she finishes her sentence.

  But this can’t be right, she says. What kind of friend would stand by and let the dogs in the street discuss the details of an affair which is not taking place? And she is a good friend of one of the people and a good acquaintance of the other. Shouldn’t she tell them what everyone is saying? For their own sake, she pleads.

  Well I should hope it is for their own sake, not just for hers, in case she is tempted to play God. Who else’s sake would it be for? But I still think she would be out of her skull to mention it at all. Let her look at the options.

  She comes in with her I-think-you-ought-to-know message: the Whole Country is talking about them. Trailing clouds of unpleasantness, it brings with it the discovery of wrongful accusations.

  If they are not having an affair, they are thrown into a welter of maddened outrage at the unfairness of it. They will want chapter and verse, they will demand to know who said what and where and under what circumstances. Writs will get underway, litigation will begin, apologies will be demanded. The helpful friend will be standing out in front of the firing line without a bullet-proof vest. She will get all the accusations redirected at her. She will be asked why it took her so long to tell, why she hadn’t alerted them earlier. There will be tears, recriminations and endless shouting about the world having a sick mind. Whatever happened to the idea of a platonic friendship, they might well ask?

  Suppose they are having an affair.

  She is the messenger bringing the bad news, the news that they are not invisible. They will tell her that she is small-minded to listen to such tittle-tattle, and they will want to know what her response was every time she heard the rumour. If she says that she always denied it (which is true), then they might well laugh and say she is an eejit. Or they might say she should have told them earlier, to mark their cards for them. Whatever she does will be the wrong thing.

  But how cowardly, how weak, she says, to stay out of something because it might make you unpopular. She wouldn’t have thought I would have followed this line. Well, when someone puts it to you like that, you have to ask yourself why you take a view that an honourable person considers cowardly.

  I think it is because I am sick to death of hearing about affairs. There is nothing as boring as a lover unless you are the lover, as if it was all mint new and no one else has ever experienced it before.

  And, as everybody knows, people having an affair positively thrive on the excitement of whether anyone knows or everyone knows or some people do and some people don’t. Even if they don’t admit it.

  I couldn’t have cared less about all these Antonia de Sanchas and Bienvenida Buck-types, except to worry mildly about what they are going to do next. I felt a bit sorry for David Mellor’s wife and for Sir Anthony Buck, since they were both betrayed. I felt no pity for Alan Clark, who is just so boastful and indiscreet, or for the silly judge and his silly family who are greedy and naïve, nor for Alan Clark’s wife with a face carved with lines of forgiveness and understanding.

  None of what we read about them has anything to do with the truth. It is all exaggerated out of recognition and the Chinese whispers of rumours have been made even more grotesque by the paid publicists and the tabloids vying to buy their exclusives. If they were left smartly alone, they’d all go home on the 6.30 and eat their tea like good boys and girls. Of course they would, if no-one was interested in them. The greatest disservice you could do to them is to tell them that nobody cares. Lights would go out all over the place if they ceased to be centre stage.

  And so I think all this has something to do with the rumour that’s going around Dublin and the huge attention it’s getting. I think my friend would be quite wrong and would be in serious danger of becoming a dopey Drama Queen if she were to approach the Main Players and tell them what she felt they ought to know.

  The very best thing to do, if she has their best interests at heart, is to ignore it. She should start a one-woman movement appealing to people not to get over-excited about unlikely pairings along the strange and rocky road through life. Her best service would be to direct less, rather than more, light on what may or may not be happening.

  They are old enough to play with the big boys and girls in the real world. If they are just good pals and not having the steamy affair that the whole place is talking about then they must be deaf and blind. I advise my friend to let them get on with it or not to get on with it, as the case may be. She can do nothing but harm by opening her mouth.

  If she is still really concerned she could rely on the old, anonymous letter trick, or send them this column postmarked from the GPO. Cowardly.

  Moi?

  Phone Phobia

  “There are enough things to be afraid of in life without setting up the poor old telephone as a source of possible terror”

  My friend has a very bright eight-year-old daughter. She has taught her to answer the phone with the word “Hello”. She says it’s very dangerous to give your number when you answer the phone.

  Dangerous to give your own phone number when someone has rung it? I wondered whether we were all in danger of living out Operation Fort Knox fantasies. But no, she insists, that’s what Telecom Eireann advises you to do. Read the leaflet, she says, aggrieved. And it’s true, it does say that on the leaflet, and it urges you to advise children specifically to follow that procedure.

  And if someone asks you “What number is this?” you mustn’t tell them, you must ask them what number they are looking for and then say triumphantly that they’ve got the wrong one.

  I suppose Telecom feels it’s protecting people from what they call the Irish Burglars Association, and trying to cut down on the Heavy Breathers, who might accidentally fumble on a female answering a phone, and keep the number forever as a place to ring and torture with grunts and obscenities.

  And in theory this is good. Good that they should care enough about subscribers to want them not to be hassled. But isn’t it also dangerous to manoeuvre us all into the position that the sound of a ringing telephone becomes like a scene in a Hitchcock drama? Something that will widen the eyes, constrict the throat and set the nerves a-jangle.

  There are enough things to be afraid of in life without setting up the poor old telephone as a so
urce of possible terror.

  My friend’s daughter has been warned to give no information whatsoever. This seems to me to be a retrograde step.

  When I was eight the great emphasis was to state the number clearly and make sure you found out who was speaking and told them when your parents were going to be home. There was no greater crime in the book than to report “Someone rang”. All right, so the world has moved on, and you don’t want encourage children to babble that they are Home Alone. But is it good for them to be told that they must “never answer any questions on the phone, no matter how innocent they seem, unless you know the caller”?

  This is in heavy type in Telecom’s leaflet, and my friend is busy warning and warning her child about it. She thinks that this is the way safety lies, that this way she will prevent the girl from ever coming across something unpleasant and unsettling.

  I advise her to give up this set of instructions. You can’t protect anyone from hearing unpleasant things, and if you give a child too many rules and regulations, some are bound to fall out of the system. I’d prefer an eight-year-old to be told morning noon, and night about the traffic, and not to be wandering into it, rather than waste two minutes on the dangers that might lurk on the other end of the phone.

  All very well for you, my friend says, you are a big confident woman. No one ever rang you and said things that frightened you.

  Of course they did. And of course I didn’t like it. But I am sure that it was much better to have been given the background information that people who had to do that were (a) in the minority and (b) not the full shilling. No one ever told me to fear the phone. I was certainly told that if anyone started on a spiel of the objectionable sort, you said nothing, you gasped not at all, and you hung up as soon as possible.

  Some people said to nuisance callers: “Hold on a minute, I’m just getting the tape recorder.” Others said: “This call is being traced and there’s a fine and a jail sentence so you’d better make the most of it.” And if someone rang persistently and never spoke you could always have the number changed. It costs £18.56 (including VAT) to get a new number, but if there was a weirdo constantly ringing you it might be worth it.

  The friend does not agree. I am speaking from a position of so-called maturity, she thinks. A child must be taught to shield herself; much more sinister people are about nowadays – prevention is better than having to cope.

  But how can it be good for a child’s psyche, just as she is about to come to the serious telephoning decade of her life – to be told that out there is a bunch of nutters and potential robbers and violators and she must give no information when she answers the phone?

  Her friends will be ringing, for heaven’s sake, and her parents’ friends, and people giving information, wanting information, visitors passing through calling to say Hi from the airport. There will be bosom pals who have had rows with their mothers, needing consolation, older pals who have lost their Love and needing even deeper consolation. There may be news that she has won a raffle, got her Leaving, had a positive or negative pregnancy test . . . and for the rest of her life she will have been trained to answer a phone cautiously, giving no information in case abusers lurk out there.

  I am all for giving and getting information. I love people who answer their phones with their name or their number. The world is much more of a jungle if we make it one, and it is definitely a regression if you fear to say who you are and what number is written on your telephone.

  Telecom is trying to be helpful, but I genuinely think it is just creating further alarm. They tell you truthfully in the leaflet that they can’t trace nuisance calls without being asked to do so by the Gardaí. The Gardaí say that, if there’s a series of abusive or threatening calls, people usually know or suspect what quarter they’re coming from and so action can be taken at that end. And in the case of unexplained calls, the number change is always advised.

  So why frighten the eight-year-old? Why sit down and tell her that there are Bad Men ringing up, watching the house, wanting to know Daddy and Mummy’s business?

  There has to be some humour as well as sympathy for those who use the phone to gain a thrill. A friend who smokes a great deal too many cigarettes and has a deep voice answered her phone the other day, and the desperate caller took her for a man. Disappointed that he couldn’t unfurl his invective, he did the next best thing.

  “Your wife’s a slag,” he said excitedly, “she does it with anyone.” If he wasn’t cured of his little problem by the laughter he got, he never will be.

  He certainly didn’t call again that evening.

  Split Ends

  “The best friends are the ones who let you tell the story, over and over, until you have decided what you must do”

  You could hear the sigh of relief for three counties. She has thrown him out. It is not another feminist cry of triumph that yet another dirty, stinking rat has been given his marching orders. This was a very unhappy scene. The woman loved far too deeply and put up with so much from the man that he could be excused for thinking that he really was something special, and someone from whom no one expected the normal courtesies of life.

  Over a period of years those who knew them have watched astounded, wondering how much more she would take. Even if anyone wanted to, there would have been no point in telling her about any of his countless infidelities, in some misplaced belief that you thought she ought to know.

  She knew. She knew them all.

  They did not have children; she wasn’t staying with him to keep the home together. These are the Nineties; she didn’t stay because to leave would have meant being cast adrift with no one to support her. It isn’t a society that looks oddly at the separated. In fact, her situation was much more odd the way it was. But she stayed – until Christmas. And on Christmas Eve, suddenly, in the middle of Grafton Street with everyone filled with Christmas cheer and happiness – linking up with their loved ones and going in to have a drink with people they met – she caught sight of her face in a shop window . . . and saw that she looked like an illustration for some article called Unhappiness.

  It was as if she had been given a chance to look at herself from the outside. She came home and she told him that their marriage was over. He said that her timing was spectacular. He didn’t say that he loved her, or wanted her to stay; he didn’t promise to change his ways, limit his extracurricular activity, refrain from humiliating her in public. He concentrated on the very inappropriate way she had approached the subject, and how it was rather typical of her to balls up the season of goodwill.

  He went off and imposed on friends for Christmas, she stayed in their home and cried her eyes out.

  She moved into her sister’s house and sat stunned, waiting for and getting all the solidarity she knew would be forthcoming from her friends.

  I advised them to tread warily, very warily indeed. They think she wants huge bolstering support, the firming up of her resolution by the recitation of more and more of his dirty tricks. They are not going to confirm her in the rightness of her decision by defining still further his villainy. This is only going to make her feel foolish, vulnerable, and let her believe that for years she had been an object of great pity, if not actual scorn.

  I advise her closest friend not to start talking about getting a tough lawyer and taking the guy for everything he’s got. This is not the language of survival; it’s the dialogue of revenge. Of course she needs to be told that she must value herself, and not underestimate her part in the company that she and her husband once had, but companies can be dissolved without blood on the floor.

  Her best friend doesn’t agree. She says I am shilly-shallying over it all, that I have no courage because I fear they will get back together and I don’t want to be seen as someone who sat in judgement. I don’t want to be the worst in the world. Up to a point.

  They might get back together. That woman put up with so much, for so long, that she must love him in a way we don’t understand. Or sort of love him
. It couldn’t have been just fear or inertia on her part that kept the thing going.

  But that’s not the real point. The real point is that not only is it too soon to dance on the grave of a love that is finished, it’s a dangerous thing to do anyway.

  Are her friends going to be there all the time? At night, when she returns to an empty house? She will not live with her sister forever, she doesn’t have another relationship in mind and it’s hard to see her treading the path towards finding one.

  Will they be there not just at the beginning to see her over the first bit, but in a few months’ time which may be the worst bit? The time when they think she should have pulled herself together and got on with things.

  Will they include her in everything they are doing, going to the pictures, the theatre, having supper, and will they be able to do it without patting her on the head?

  That is what real friendship is about, much, much more than telling her she is well out of it and advising her to retain the high ground and fight him to the Court of Human Rights if necessary. Her relationship and her marriage had some good elements in it. There were times when they were happy. Both of them. It was not all a matter of dependency and doormat behaviour. She must be allowed to recall those good elements without the pack of supporters starting to panic and seeing signs of the old order returning.

  Anyone making such a huge decision must not be pushed to it by the well-meaning efforts of friends who, after all, are either safe within relationships that do work, or are already single or separated. She might well think that she was being patronised by the former, or over-encouraged by the latter.

  The best friends are the ones who let you tell the story over and over again until you have decided what you must do. There is nobody who finds that advice harder to act on than myself, but I know that it is true.