Maeve's Times

by Binchy, Maeve

  So there was this day when it came to getting the cookery page ready and it was one of the days that George hadn’t sent an illustration. The recipes were for various ways of cooking veal. Of course, because I wasn’t well organised there was no time to ask the Irish Times photography department to set up a nice, relevant picture, so I looked through what I always called my Emergency Cookery Pictures File. These were things that had come from various sources, you know, pots of marmalade beside oranges, and picnic hampers. Nothing seemed very suitable until I saw a nice, vague-looking picture of a casserole with a lot of spoons and servers and forks sticking out of it. It wasn’t the best but it would do, I told myself. A swift caption was typed by me: ‘Tasty veal casserole, excellent for a winter evening.’ And with the totally undeserved feeling of a job well done, I took the train out to Dalkey at the end of the day.

  My father and I were looking at the nine o’clock news on television when I saw something that made me deeply uneasy. I saw Dr Christiaan Barnard, the heart transplant surgeon, getting off a plane somewhere after yet another successful operation, and I knew suddenly where I had seen that picture before. It was in fact a picture of open-heart surgery. What I had taken to be forks and servers were in fact clamps and forceps.

  I telephoned the paper and asked them to hold the cookery page. As a request at ten past nine at night, it was poorly received. I was asked why, and the explanation was met with disbelief.

  ‘I think you had better get in here as quickly as possible,’ said the editor in a voice that I knew was holding on by only a thread.

  We had no car, so I started to run the nine miles from Dalkey to Dublin purple-faced, panic-stricken. An unknown man with a car gave me a lift, and when he heard my errand he abandoned his car in the traffic in D’Olier Street and came in with me, a total stranger, saying he had to see; he loved to know how other people coped in a crisis.

  Grimly, I discovered, very grimly. They stood around my desk searching hopelessly for any alternative picture; not having unearthed the Emergency Cookery Pictures File, they found only a cache of Kit Kat wrappers and a bundle of magazines of much lower brow than I would have liked it known I read.

  The replacement picture had to be of the same size. There was now no time to enlarge or reduce anything that emerged from the file. Eventually I found one, an egg in an egg cup … I think it was a picture from an advertising agency trying to show the charms of some china.

  Underneath the picture, and under the grim glance of Top People, I typed out, ‘Why be content with a boiled egg on a winter’s evening when you could have all these tasty veal recipes?’

  Theodora was on the phone bright and early.

  ‘You didn’t exactly kill yourself getting an illustration,’ she said to me frostily.

  But she was delighted with the explanation of the terrible happenings the night before. She said she had lived a colourful life and it would have been entertaining to have added a prosecution for cannibalism to her other achievements. She seemed to regret my last-minute discovery and heroic dash to save us all from turning out a cookery page that would have been a collector’s item.

  She said almost wistfully that it would have been something that would make people remember her … as if there were a chance that any of us will ever forget Theodora.

  Heading for the Hustings

  4 April 1992

  Even though a heavy cloud of greyness is hanging over the British election, there’s still a whiff of intrigue about it all. I’m excited already at the thought of going to the press conferences and looking them all straight in their weary eyes and seeing how they’re bearing up.

  And it also reminds me of the great happiness of going back to school knowing that a hated teacher has gone, you can hardly dare to believe it. She won’t be there in the hound’s-tooth suit baying at the back of the hall, turning with reptilian cunning to the cowering ministers on either side saying those dreaded words, ‘I think that’s one for you, Home Secretary, or Chancellor,’ addressing any number of men whose nervous systems and political futures she unsettled over the years.

  I have no nostalgia for those Thatcher days when the sun always shone and we were sure of a good row story every outing.

  I think the place is far better without her, and for once she may have done the wisest thing by leaving town. Because she sure as hell did everything else wrong a year and a half ago when she was leaving. She waited to be booted out, she patted the head of the little grey boy who was to be her successor and she even chose the wrong little grey boy to be her puppet because he cleared his throat and found his own voice and lived perfectly well without her.

  She should have gone six months earlier and sat watching them running around like headless rabbits tearing each other to bits.

  That’s what I would have done. I would have sat there with a false smile playing around my chops saying that I was absolutely certain that they’d all manage much better without me.

  And then I would have laughed all the way to the Thatcher Institute listening toa chorus of world opinion trilling that everything would have been perfectly fine if only I’d stayed.

  But then she’s not the only politician who stayed too long in these islands. It seems to go with the territory.

  What is beyond comprehension is how a woman who loved free enterprise and what she called the cut and thrust of the marketplace could have made such a monumental cock-up of writing and selling her memoirs. She was months dillying and dallying and allowing everything that could possibly be said in her book be said elsewhere. She was said to be taking the advice of her son, someone whom she had rarely consulted on anything during his whole existence.

  A forthright, if inelegant, American publisher said she should have done the deal when she was red hot or not at all. She should have held an auction, promised to name names, say that she was going to right wrongs, avenge grievances, and possibly describe some of the frostiness of Her Majesty the Queen during their weekly conferences.

  If she had done this, her asking price in dollars and sterling could have gone through the roof, the publisher lamented sadly.

  She would not be human if she did not feel some small satisfaction at the way the boys in the nursery are messing it all up now that Nanny has been sacked. She would not be normal if she did not take a small frisson of pleasure from the polls. But had she only gone in time, she could have been regarded forever as the Monarchy in Exile, and she could have had her ego massaged until she lived to be a hundred.

  But she’s gone, and though her shadow hangs over the country she ruled for so long with such certainty and so little self-doubt, she will not be a consideration this time round.

  It can hardly be a presidential-style election since the candidates trail so little glory. Just from my brief four hours a day spent watching the campaign on television, they all seem to me to be in pretty poor shape. John Major has almost blended into the background, they’re afraid to photograph him against anything except primary colours. Neil Kinnock is as white as a sheet and as hoarse as a crow, Paddy Ashdown’s famous lopsided smile seems to be held on with putty, and they are all moving into the most important week of their lives.

  It will be very exciting to get back to it all. To see them again, lining up each morning striving for the newsbites, the one phrase of burning sincerity that will catch every news bulletin, the one lashing out against the other side in a phrase that 20 script-writers worked on all night. I will sit with the press corps, the lay analysts who try to spot victory or defeat in the red-eyed faces on the platform. And I’ll walk through the streets of Hammersmith, one of the safer Labour seats in London but with pockets of bright blue resistance in the most unlikely places.

  There are a few times in life when Irish journalists are greatly in demand among the British media, usually to explain the Third Secret of Fatima, or the artists’ tax-free exemption scheme. But at general elections, people always want us to explain proportional representation in case it might ever
become a real issue.

  And this time, for the first time, it just might.

  Please Don’t Forget to Write

  2 January 1993

  There’s a great advantage in being grown up. You don’t have to swim if it’s pouring rain. You can sit and look at the others being dragged in – to get value, or because they’ve come all this distance, or just because it’s Christmas morning.

  I’m a great believer in not doing things just for some ritualistic principle; or that’s what I said as hot tropical rain lashed down on Bondi Beach.

  The people in the next car were not so lucky. They didn’t have the Inner Zen that would enable them to sit there and drink the ice-cold champagne anyway. They also had three screaming sons with bodyboards who wanted to be in that surf at once. ‘They’ll be trampled on – the place is full of Poms,’ said the mother anxiously.

  ‘Piss off, Poms,’ screamed the children in excitement, quoting a graffito seen on every Qantas advertisement: a polite way of registering disapproval of British Airways buying a stake in the national airline.

  People were setting up little camps on the beach in the rain which everyone knew would pass soon. They were planting Canadian, Greek and Italian flags in the sand.

  ‘Where’s ours?’ asked one little boy.

  ‘It’s all ours,’ said his father, shivering in his bathing trunks. That pleased the elder two. The youngest one was interested in a well-developed lady shaking the drops off her bosom as she came out of the tide.

  ‘That lady lost her bra,’ he said, looking at her with deep interest and some sympathy.

  ‘Not all she lost, I’d say,’ his father said.

  ‘She’s still got the bottom bit.’ The boy was a stickler for accuracy.

  ‘For the moment.’ The man looked knowledgeable about such things.

  ‘Perhaps, Brian, you might take your son out to the sea, which is the reason we came here, rather than embark on any further instruction, sensitive as it may be, on the Facts of Life.’

  It would have been interesting to know how their Christmas Day went on, but then wouldn’t you want to follow almost everyone home? Like the two men in their braces and hats on the back of their heads, sitting on the Promenade in Bondi, saying to each other sagely, ‘Better to stay out of the house. Women don’t like people in a house when they’re cooking.’

  Or the girl all dressed up to meet the boy’s family who asked, ‘Is there anything I shouldn’t talk about?’

  ‘Communism,’ said the boy.

  ‘Right.’ She took it on board with a puzzled expression. I felt she should have enquired further but the young probably know what they’re at.

  Our own Christmas was fine thank you and, apart from chickening out on the swim, went as forecast. There was a moment though when the soft, warm night air came in the open windows and the lights of Sydney Harbour twinkled beyond the gently moving curtains when one of our number asked, ‘Do you think that with four people out of five fast asleep during the video we could say that a democratic decision might be to turn it off?’ And we all woke up angrily, denied having dozed at all and fought to keep awake to the end.

  And then came the Sales. The biggest one is in Grace Brothers, where they had the usual attractions of televisions at $50 and washing machines at $70 to get the crowds in. These special bargains were called ‘Doorbusters’, a name they’ll probably drop now, since the crowds actually did break the doors down in eagerness to get at them, and glass was everywhere, wounding a lot of the shoppers. But still the buses and cars and even the ferry boats are weighed down with huge parcels, brightly coloured sheets and duvet covers, huge terracotta pots for the garden, deck chairs, garden lights – all the luxuries for summer living.

  At a party I met a woman who asked me could I tell her absolutely honestly whether I thought she had a mad face. With total honesty I told her that I did not, and wondered why. She said that for the second year in succession she had been photographed for the newspapers as a sort of face in the crowd to illustrate Sales Frenzy. Once had been bad enough but twice was something that would make you think.

  At the same party I asked someone who the man was that had just walked in.

  ‘Someone whose face I had hoped never to have looked upon in what remains of my life,’ said my informant, who told me the newcomer’s enormities and how he had wrecked the particular part of the media he worked in. I heard of his sleazy way with women, his betrayals of trust, his sailing close to the wind financially and that he owned a Rottweiler. By the time I was introduced to him there was nothing he could say to redeem himself.

  ‘I’m not surprised you like Sydney,’ he said. ‘On a gossip level it’s just like Dublin.’

  And of course he is absolutely right. I just hadn’t realised it before.

  I feel as if I have always lived here. The neighbourhood is so familiar now. There’s not a day that you’d leave the house without meeting someone you know. On the road where I live I meet Siobhan McHugh and her marvellous baby Declan; in the Dry Dock pub they know our table; in Manjits Indian restaurant they bring the poppadums and chutney before we sit down. In the hairdresser opposite the police station – which calls itself ‘The Crop Shop Opposite the Cop Shop’ – they’d remember you after one visit and make you feel like a friend. In Ralph’s delicatessen, they keep hoping I’m going to emigrate there; they like the reckless abandon with which I buy food. There are three gorgeous cats where we live and sometimes I go into Heavy Petting to consider gifts for them, and they are full of advice.

  Fireworks over the harbour for New Year, everyone out in the warm night air, windows open and the old or the children waving at the festivities.

  And before going to bed we all light those green coils that smell slightly like incense and burn through the night, killing, we hope, any mozzies that come in the open doors. And the cats sleep peacefully out of doors on the warm wood shavings that are ground cover, and there’s a wonderful yellow plant called Kangaroo Paw that is all lit up in the dawn at about six o’clock when it’s bright enough to read in bed but there’s no anxiety-related pressure to get up just because you’re awake.

  And tonight it’s off to the Sydney Opera House for the gala opening of Lughnasa.

  It’s over four months since we left Ireland but thanks to the friends, colleagues and family who have been so great about keeping in touch it doesn’t seem anything like that.

  It truly has been so good to get letters from home that I have resolved for 1993 to write to the Irish abroad. We may seem over-confident, as if we almost preferred where we are to where we were. But the truth is that we are all desperate to hear from home.

  Casually Elegant Meets the Mob

  9 January 1993

  You never know exactly what they mean about dressing up in Australia. We spent a couple of nights in a resort called Terrigal, in a smart kind of hotel where they left a note in each room saying that guests would probably appreciate some advice about Dress Codes. Fearfully we read that the Executive Lounge was Casually Elegant in the evenings, and Smartly Casual in the mornings. They defined Smartly Casual as meaning no bathrobes or swimwear, which left the field fairly open.

  But it was confusing because Casually Elegant in the Key Largo Lounge meant No Runners. What could they want in La Mer, the gourmet dining room? The instructions were Elegant Resort Wear. I put on all my jewellery and a lot of eyeshadow and hoped that would compensate for the ordinary summer dress. Gordon bought a tie.

  Everyone assumed we were the cabaret. Elegant Resort is taken to mean open-necked shirts, shorts – and one woman was definitely barefoot, but she had cunningly draped tinsel around her legs so that it looked like exotic twinkling Roman sandals.

  So back in Sydney at the opening night of Dancing at Lughnasa you wouldn’t know what they were going to wear for a glitzy night out, and there was the usual rainbow of clothes: little black dresses and pearls; great Hawaiian-type shirts over psychedelic shorts; marvellous beaded and brocade-typ
e Asian jackets. They came in from the warm night air around the harbour to the cool air-conditioned Opera House.

  In the row just in front of us a line of people came in, all the men dressed in smart dark suits. I speculated about them happily – they might be coming from a funeral, or possibly serious negotiations within the Mob. Then one of them, who was Martin Burke, the Irish Ambassador, introduced me to another of them, who was Paul Keating, the Prime Minister of Australia, and that sorted out who they were.

  There’s huge rivalry between Melbourne and Sydney, so Martin Burke, had to go to the play’s opening in both cities, which he said was no hardship at all. I explained the Cork–Dublin thing to Paul Keating in case it was something he would ever need to know and he listened gravely, adding that if you lived in Australia and didn’t live in Sydney you were merely camping out.

  The night was a huge success and there was one unexpected laugh in the script: when Gerry the Welsh Romeo describes his kind of dancing as ‘Strictly Ballroom’ there was a cheer. Australians are as proud of the success of this film as they have been of anything for years, and love to know that it’s showing in cities all over the world.

  There was a reception afterwards where I realised from the photographers that the gorgeous woman sitting beside us who was about one inch wide was in fact Judy Davis the film star, and I was having a great, happy conversation with a man called Michael Bailey who worked in television. We were getting along fine until someone whispered to me that he read the weather forecast and my brow darkened.

  ‘I don’t make it up, I’m not a Met Man. I only read it,’ he pleaded.

  But the magic was gone. The Australian weather forecast is as helpful as our own; it says things like sunshine mixed with showers or showers mixed with sunshine and everyone thinks that this is useful.