‘May I just ask you one question? Just one? Did you come in here for a conversation session with total strangers or was it possibly, as you claimed, for the shopping? I only ask because I have two traffic wardens up my arse outside, I’ve been round the block twice and we’ve missed ten minutes of Sportsnight already.’
I could see why she wanted a little goodwill in her life: both of them working late, London traffic being like a mediaeval view of hell, crowds, queues, short tempers. I looked at what she had bought as it was being checked out and she packed it neatly into the shopping basket on wheels which was totally unnecessary since she had a husband and car outside the door. She had a lot of cat food, three kinds of cleaning stuff and wire wool and big black plastic bags. She had one lamb chop, two apples and a tube of indigestion tablets. It seemed a poor haul for someone whose mate was missing Sportsnight, and I keep hoping that they do have a cat.
I have a friend who works in a bookshop and who is constantly amazed by the things people buy as Christmas presents. Men buy Cooking for Idiots and expect to get a tinkle of female laughter when the paper is ripped off it on the day. Women buy The Duffer’s Golf Guide … and expect a similarly delighted response.
My friend, who hasn’t the same wish to enter into other people’s lives as I do – and has certainly not the time, sitting at a busy till in a large bookshop – says she arranges gift wrapping or personalised red Christmas bags for books without blinking an eye at the lack of wisdom involved in the choice. Until this week.
A nice young man, blond hair falling into his eyes, eager to a fault, hesitant and cursed with that over-apologetic manner which some people wrongly think is politeness, approached her. He wanted to know about this service called Post-A-Book, which means that you pay the shop for the postage, address the envelope, and they’ll send it off for you.
The book was addressed to a woman, and he signed a card with what was presumably his own name since he paid with a credit card and it was the same name as on the card. ‘Merry Christmas Darling, Love from Harry,’ he wrote, and put it in with the book.
The book was called A Guide to Better Sex and the subheading said that it was a manual for those who found that the fizz had gone out of sex and who noticed that things were not as they used to be in the first heady days of their relationship.
Even the sight of a queue forming up behind the eager young man didn’t stop my friend from making a last-ditch stand.
‘It’s a bit technical, this book, I believe,’ she began.
‘Oh yes, so it says,’ the young man said happily.
‘I wonder, is it a suitable Christmas present? It’s more a thing someone might buy for herself or himself, or sort of after a bit of a chat, you know?’ She was desperate now.
‘No.’ He was firm. ‘No, I think she’d like it, and I’m sending it early because … well, she’ll have plenty of time to read it in advance. Before the Christmas holidays, you see ….’ he said with the open, trusting face of the fool that he was.
The Man Who Set Up Office in the Ladies
13 December 1986
I went into the ladies’ cloakroom of a hotel and a man sat peaceably at a sort of dressing table. The place where you are meant to be a woman and sit combing your hair and adjusting your make-up. The man had his briefcase beside him and he was fairly absorbed in some kind of paperwork.
He certainly wasn’t doing anyone any harm, and I often think that the distinction is fairly arbitrary anyway in cloakrooms. After all, single-sex facilities are available on the Continent and I’ve never been in a private house where they made a distinction, except in one place in Australia where they had ‘Blokes’ and ‘Sheilas’ written on the doors.
It was a perfectly comfortable place to sit: chair, desk and even a mirror to examine himself in if he had any doubts about self-image. He wasn’t taking up too much space, it was easy to sit beside him and adjust your make-up. It was just a small bit unsettling to know what exactly he was doing there.
This was an Irish provincial town, the man must surely have known the ladies who were coming in and out to what was after all their designated area. He had the air of a man who had been there some time. His ashtray had several butts in it. He was a man who had settled in.
There was a box of tissues on the table which he called on occasionally for a nose blow. He seemed quite oblivious of the lavatory flushing and hand washing going on a few yards away from him, admittedly round a corner. This part of the cloakroom was in sort of an alcove. I knew it would be on my mind forever if I didn’t find out. He would join the other unsolved mysteries, like the man who wore a hair roller with an otherwise conservative city gent image; like the Christmas card I get every year signed SLUG; like the man who used to come into The Irish Times every day to buy yesterday’s paper but not today’s. He said it was because he didn’t actually take it, he wasn’t an Irish Times reader but people were always mentioning something in it that he wanted to follow up, which was why he bought the previous day’s.
My head is too full of these confusing things. ‘Damp old day out,’ I said to him.
‘Is it?’ he looked up politely. ‘It was all right when I came in, but of course it’s very changeable this time of year.’
‘Have you been here for a while?’ I asked, heading off a lengthy and generalised weather conversation.
‘Oh yes, a fair bit, I have to meet someone, but there’s no sign of him; still, I suppose it’s the traffic, getting out of Dublin is a nightmare these days.’
He was going to meet another male in the ladies’ cloakroom of the hotel. This could not be usual practice.
‘Why do you decide to meet here?’ I asked, with all the subtlety of my trade.
‘It’s sort of half way between us,’ he said agreeably. ‘Rather than have either of us drive 100 miles, we both drive 50, harder on him of course because he’s got to get out of Dublin, as I said.’
‘And do you always choose this place?’
He seemed so … helpful. I was sure he’d tell me.
‘No, funnily, we usually go to the other hotel, but someone told us that there was more privacy here, you can have a chat without being disturbed. It’s the divil to get service though, I’ll tell you that. I’ve been here over an hour and nobody’s come to take my order.’
I looked at him fixedly for a few moments. ‘They mightn’t think you were ordering in here, you know, people don’t usually.’
He looked around him mildly. ‘Why not, do you think?’
‘I think that they’d never imagine anyone in the ladies’ cloakroom might want coffee and sandwiches brought in,’ I said.
‘The what?’
I repeated it.
He stood up like a man who had been shot in the back in a film and was about to stagger all over the set before collapsing. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.
I showed him round the corner, where two women were washing their hands, I showed him a line of cubicles and machines on the wall that seemed to prove conclusively where we were. His colour was very bad and I wished, as I always wish, that I had left well alone, and let him sit there all week if necessary rather than bringing on this distress.
‘Mother of God,’ he croaked. ‘Is this where I’ve been all afternoon?’
‘Didn’t you notice?’ I asked.
‘I thought there was a lot of hair combing going on beside me and that women were getting a bit casual about doing up their faces in public. What am I going to do?’ He looked utterly wretched.
I told him that since none of these fiercely combing and titivating women had complained about him to the management, it seemed to prove that there was no harm done, and that women were becoming generally more relaxed about things, which had to be good.
He wanted none of my philosophising. He had bundled all his papers into the briefcase and was looking at me as his saviour. ‘Would you have a look out to see?’ he begged.
‘I wouldn’t know your friend, why don’t you go out yo
urself?’ I said. ‘I’ll come with you if you like.’
I thought he needed somebody to lean on, he sounded so frail. ‘No, I mean look out in case anybody sees me coming out of the … er … the Ladies,’ he said.
I checked that the coast was clear. It seemed fairly academic, since anyone who had been in had already seen him. But perhaps he was more afraid of being seen by his own sex.
He straightened his tie and thanked me again. He assured me that he was not a mirthless man and he would see the humour of this. Not now, at this very moment, but eventually. I don’t know when he saw the humour of it, but not I think when he found his friend, who was sitting impatiently on his third pot of coffee.
‘What in the name of God happened to you?’ the friend said. ‘I’ve been on to your office, on to your home. I nearly had the guards out for you.’
The man recently released from the Ladies lowered his voice.
‘We’ll have a brandy,’ he said.
‘Was it the car? Did you hit anything?
‘No.’
‘Is it your heart, any chest pains, any pins and needles in your arm?’
‘No.’
‘It’s nothing to do with the firm, no redundancies or anything?’
The man who had been waiting all afternoon looked anxious.
‘No, would you get us a drink, I’ve been all afternoon in the ladies’ lavatory.’
‘Were you being sick?’
‘No, I was waiting for you.’
‘I’ll get the brandy fast,’ said the man who had been waiting.
‘I’ll go up to the bar and get it myself.’
A Royal Romance Spelling Danger from the Start
9 November 1987
Things look bad when the popular papers have started to ask solemn questions of Harold Brooks Baker, who is the publisher of Burke’s Peerage. Suppose the royal couple wanted a divorce … he is asked in awed whisper … just suppose. Then would it cause constitutional crises beyond the wildest imaginings? Even more frightening, Harold Brooks Baker says not at all, no worries, or words to that effect. The heir has been provided, not only the heir but the spare. A divorce would be sad but that’s all. Nothing would teeter, nothing would crumble. Diana would be called Diana, Princess of Wales, not The Princess of Wales. The problem would be if Charles wanted a new wife and wished to create her Queen. Brows furrow a little over that knotty problem, but they clear again when everyone realises what a good chap Charles is, and they know he wouldn’t do anything silly to rock the boat, nothing unwise that would remind a nation of his mother’s uncle and all the hoo-ha 50 years ago.
Charles is a luckless fellow in many ways. He will be 40 on Saturday, he has known since childhood what his role would be but never how hard it would turn out to be because he couldn’t have seen how the world would change. When he was 16 his country was full of respect still for royalty, and there were decent attitudes like letting the young royals alone and giving them their privacy and not insulting them too much because they couldn’t answer back. But the world changed all round him and nobody told him how and if he should change. His mother thought there was no way that things should change, his father was never very interested in him since he didn’t like that terrible school where they all run up and down in their vests and knickers and it’s called endurance or character building.
Charles means so well and tries so much that sometimes it would break your heart. He visits deprived inner cities and is taken on tours of areas where the very lucky have some desperate jobs in sweatshops and the rest have no jobs at all. His face forces itself into a look of concern. He says earnestly to the swarm of reporters and photographers that are like a permanent fog around him that one must do something, that one is so admiring of what has been done already but that one must never cease from doing more. His accent separates him, as does his attitude and his whole background, but there is something about him that saves him. Nobody is going to call him a stupid, unfeeling berk, because he genuinely seems to care. Like he cares about getting the Mary Rose up from the bottom of the sea, and like he cares about giving his views on architecture and like he cares about shooting small birds at Balmoral or taking swipes with a sort of upmarket pickaxe at a ball from the back of a polo pony. When he straightens his tie nervously, when he admits that he talks to the plants and flowers in his estates, when he makes leaden attempts at humour, you’d be on his side rather than against him. Who else do you know coming up to a fortieth birthday who had so much and yet was able to do so little with it?
Diana, Princess of Wales is in many ways a luckless girl too. She was so shy when she faced the first barrage of press at her engagement ceremonies that her throat closed over and she literally couldn’t speak. She was warned that it would be a goldfish bowl, but how could she have known just how many sides and how clear the glass? She did in many ways everything that the country wanted of her and did it so well that she is probably responsible for the whole royal industry all by herself. She was so beautiful for one thing, and none of the rest of the royals ever were, so she was the centre of attention.
She lost weight, she gained confidence, she learned style. The Sloane woolies and wellies went their way and the designer clothes came in, she was always ready to show a bit of bosom and a bit of thigh. The ranks of photographers following her trebled. But how could she have known that it was a dangerous game? When she was in a secret island, very pregnant and thinking she was alone, the papers sent cameramen to hang from trees and pass by in boats with long-distance lenses on their cameras.
She could be excused for thinking she was very important. If she read the newspapers and even believed a tenth of what they said about her then she would have had every reason for thinking that she was very important and powerful indeed.
The people, and not only the British people but the people everywhere, including Ireland, of course, loved a bit of romance and a lovely role model. Even though there were always aspects about the royal romance that spelled danger from the word go. The world believed that it was love at first sight, a strong prince and a beautiful shy girl becoming a fairytale princess, because that is what the world had always wanted to believe in one shape or another. It literally created that belief, and the popular papers and magazines were there to play back to the public exactly what was being demanded. In a secular and permissive society it should have seemed absurd that the strong prince had to marry a virgin but that was literally what had to be. Diana’s uncle in embarrassed tones told a world that should have been equally embarrassed to hear the information that this was indeed the case. Everywhere it seemed like a reward for being a good girl. Look at what happens, you get to marry the prince if you don’t give away that which is more precious than jewels. If anyone had paused to think about a girl 13 years younger than Charles, a girl with no real education let alone the strange sort of education that prepares you for being a royal … then it was obvious that there would be difficulties. If anyone had stopped to think about a decent, well-meaning guy who had no interest in pop music and who knew only women who found backgrounds into which to blend, then it should have been clear that there would be problems.
But nobody wanted to see the problems. And everyone was so relieved, the world had a fairytale wedding, the Queen of England really and truly believes that the succession is very important, as you and I might believe if we had gone through all that anointing and sceptre and Commonwealth routine. Princess Anne, whose own marriage was far from successful, got the spotlight taken off her and turned into a reasonable person with a serious interest in raising money for children in need. Princess Margaret, also relieved that she was out of the firing line for having the odd cigarette in public, was delighted with it too. The Queen Mother, whose smile goes right round her face and who likes happy endings, thought that it had all turned out fine.
But the public appetite is never fully fed. Professor Anthony Clare has said that the people have created a romantic fairytale which, like all fairytales, shou
ld have ended at the point where the prince and princess have arrived at the altar. Perhaps even it might have been allowed to continue until the two blond little boys came on the scene and the family were seen in the sunset in one of their palace homes.
The appetite has been whetted by glimpses inside Charles and Diana’s home, respectful and pseudo-relaxed interviews trying to show that they are just like everyone else, which of course they can’t be because everyone else doesn’t have small armies camped outside their homes wondering when and if they will speak to each other, smile at each other, or hold hands again.
They may hate each other by now, or it may in fact have been the mildest row that caused them to spend some weeks apart. Loves and marriages have survived separations of weeks and months even. But few other people have such huge pressure on them to have a public reconciliation. What other couple had to go through the hurt and upset with the eyes of literally the whole world on them?
The German visit was yet one more charade: Diana re-launches the mini skirt, wears a sultan’s gift of diamonds, Charles straightens his tie and says what a pretty colonel in chief she is, news bulletins report that they are seen talking to each other, the world sighs with relief.
But meanwhile the Queen of England walks with her dogs and knows she cannot yet retire as she’d like to, and the princess’s divorced aunt and separated sister wonder what all the fuss is about. And maybe 10 times an hour newspapers ring Harold Brooks Baker of Burke’s Peerage and he assures them that a divorced Charles could indeed become king. Unthinkable a while ago but not unconstitutional, he insists. And the world becomes a less safe place for a lot of people.
Making a Spectacle of Myself
8 October 1988
It happened at the Abbey Theatre a few weeks ago. The print on the programme had got all small and fuzzed around the bits where it told you what plays the actors and actresses had been in before. I was disappointed for them and felt they deserved better from the management. To my surprise the woman in front of me was reading bits out of it to her husband; I thought she must have got a clearer copy and asked could I have a loan of hers. To my surprise, by the time she had handed it to me, her copy had become small and fuzzed too. Sadly, I gave it back. ‘I think it’s the eyes,’ I said to her in a doom-laden voice.
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