by Maeve Binchy
And then Andy’s key turned in the lock and everything changed. It seemed to be a series of questions and Oh my Gods, and whys and telephone calls to the police, and the police arriving in a car with a woman who had a scarlet face from crying, and her husband who was shouting, and a doctor, and an injection, and a bit of sleep. And there were days of people saying no action would be taken, and people asking her had she had infertility tests, and had she considered adoption, and did Andy refuse to let her have a child.
And all the time she was very calm because there was very little to say. She left her job, even though they told her she was always welcome back and her boss said that she was a woman born to be a mother and one day she would have a little one of her own. And the doctor told her that there was nothing wrong with either herself or Andy and, of course, they would probably have a baby in time. And they told her she was very lucky that the Law was so kind that no action was being taken, and she went to see a kind, wise man twice a week and told him about her childhood, and he gave her tablets which took some of the pain and the feeling of having a heavy meal off her chest.
Vanity of Vanity, All Is Vanity
23 February 1976
No it is not my first Communion picture, it was taken on a cold Tuesday morning last November. I got it taken because I’m such an honest poor old thing that I didn’t want to be using a picture that was four years old.
Normally, I’d just look at the photographer with a desperate intensity and hope it would all be over quickly and I could get on with my life, but this time I’d been reading a surfeit of these articles about women who decline and go to pieces in their mid-thirties, so I decided I would go to a hairdresser and have a lovely memento of myself looking at my best. I also had a sneaking, ageing hope that someone I don’t know at all might fancy me from afar and cut out the picture and put it over his lonely fireplace.
The hairdresser was very excited when I told her that I wanted to look nice for a photograph. ‘Is it for a pen friend?’ she asked interestedly. ‘We get a lot of requests for pen-friend photography.’
When I told her it was for a newspaper she brought the whole salon around to discuss it. Kiss curls, wigs, streaks, colouring, perms and plaits were discussed and eventually she did it like a mad magician all coming up to a conical point, and they all said it was very slimming, and I went home in horror and washed it all out with a hungry detergent.
I had also read that if you wore something soft and flattering around the neck it did marvels for you. I contemplated soft flattering things like an angora scarf. But somehow it looked like one of those halters people wear when they have been in a car accident. And I tried a necklace and it looked like one of these before and after things, where so and so used to wear cheap shoddy trinkets until we taught her how to dress, so I just put on a blouse backwards because the back of it looked soft and flattering and I pinned it all together at the back where no one would see.
Then I went off to a photographer.
Liam White is a professional photographer who earns his living taking pictures of things and people. Over 10 cups of coffee in his house I told him that I would like something soft and gentle that would let readers know what a lovely mind and heart I had, and that if it wouldn’t cost a fortune I’d like the lines under my eyes touched up a bit.
Liam White said that touching pictures up did cost a fortune and, if I was being as honest at showing myself at my real age, wouldn’t it be a bit hypocritical having the eyes touched up? I said that if it was expensive we’d better leave it. And I sat and smiled at him soppily for about 15 minutes and never felt so foolish in my whole life.
Then he sent me the pictures and I was delighted with them, and I thought I would buy lots of big heavy silver frames and put the pictures in them and give them to people for their pianos with my name scrawled across the bottom left. And for a mad moment I thought that maybe a restaurant might like one, with a kind of a message like ‘Thanks for all the lovely portions of No. 67 and the bottles of number 154.’
And then it appeared in the paper and people keep writing in and telling me that I am a disappointment to them, and why produce this old photograph taken during my teens, and since when have I become so vain that I have taken to having pictures retouched. A man who said he had always mildly fancied me from afar was now totally turned off and would fancy Nell McCafferty instead.
Well, to hell with the begrudgers. I don’t see any of you lot who write in showing me your own photographs. That’s the way I look when I’m nice and clean and tidy and that’s the picture I’m going to use. And the only reason I’m making any fuss about it all is that if readers only knew how the men in this paper react when having their photographs taken there would be less fuss about my poor effort. I’ve been up in the photographers’ department while fellow journalists have been recorded on celluloid or whatever it is. I’ve seen all the worried looking in mirrors, the careful tousling of the hair so that it will look natural, the wondering whether we look better with glasses or without them. Is the finger better on the left side of the chin or the right side? Do we look more urgent if we are on a telephone or not? Men have been known to tear up old pictures they don’t like in case it might ever be used by accident, even in an obituary.
And then I knew a man who had all his teeth cleaned and filed and polished for a television appearance and who was most dissatisfied with his smile when he saw it on the screen. He actually wrote in to the head of engineering and wanted to know if they could improve their lighting techniques so that his teeth would look more brilliant during the next appearance.
And I once interviewed a man about a nice healthy manly outdoor sport and asked a photographer to take his picture. The healthy outdoor manly man behaved like Maria Callas over the whole thing and refused to let a line be printed until he had seen proofs of the picture, and even then he wanted it done all over again to the point where I told him that I had forgotten what I had interviewed him about now, and he wrote six distressed letters about me to people of importance and made my life miserable.
And I took a nice holiday snap of about six of us once sharing a joke and looking happy. One of the men looked a bit fat because of the way he was sitting. (In fact, without being too sensitive about it, he had a great beer belly for all to see.) When the snap was being handed around to recall happy, sunny days his face clouded over in rage. Could he have a look at the negative, he asked all in an icy calm voice.
Unsuspectingly, I handed it to him and he tore it up with the print so that nobody could ever again think of him with a paunch.
At a wedding recently there was more fuss getting combs for the bridegroom and best man in case they might look dishevelled than there was arranging the bride for the loveliest day of her life. It looked like a scene from some American comedy where everybody was in some kind of drag. And a man who is normally very well balanced and normal showed me 36 contact proofs of pictures to choose the best one. What was it wanted for? An old boys’ school annual actually. The fact that the people who knew him knew what he looked like and the others didn’t matter was something he couldn’t grasp.
So I’m not going to become upset when people ring up with abuse, and write me these patronising letters. I know that I am young and simple and pleasant looking and that the day I got that picture taken I was all of these things plus very clean and tidy and wearing a blouse backwards.
A Nice, Traditional, Normal Sort of Patrick’s Day
22 March 1976
I’ve spent years with people asking me what a normal St Patrick’s Day is like in Ireland, but I’ve no way of knowing. I’ve never had a normal St Patrick’s Day in my life. When I was about eight I remember a St Patrick’s Day with us all wearing shamrock coming from Mass, and two great discoveries that I made. One that St Patrick’s Day didn’t count as Lent and I could eat sweets, which was an unexpected ecstasy. I also remember asking my mother as we walked back from the church how were children born, and she told me casually. I
felt enormously sorry for her having such delusions about it all and confided to my father that she seemed to have got things very confused. He said that he didn’t know but there was probably some truth in what she had said. I abandoned the whole idea of it being in any way accurate for about a year.
Then there was a St Patrick’s Day at school when I was in my religious maniac stage and I insisted on coming in and helping the boarders to sing the Mass in case I was needed there more than in the parish church. And a nice nun allowed me to check that all the statues of the national saints were properly garlanded with flowers and I went home happy that up there Patrick was having a good day and didn’t feel foolish in front of Peter or Francis or any of the other lads.
And there was a time at college when we had a St Patrick’s night barbecue on the beach and we all had to bring a pound of sausages and a bottle of wine, and I didn’t drink in those times and brought a bottle of orange for myself as well, which fell and broke as we were going down the cliffs and people said thank God it hadn’t been the wine. I remember sitting there parched and singing ‘Lazy River’ which was having one of its ninetieth revivals at the time, and there was an awful incident where somebody went off with my best friend’s boyfriend and she cried and cried, and we decided to punish this other girl, and somebody actually cut off her ponytail, which was an appalling thing to do when you think back on it.
There was a time when I was teaching that I actually forgot about St Patrick’s Day and went into the school as usual. The town seemed unusually quiet and the bus unusually late, but since I was marking children’s exercise books at the last minute as usual, this didn’t occur to me as anything odd. In the school I felt that punctuality had reached a new low and was prepared to speak to the headmistress about it. It was only when I couldn’t find her that I realised what day it was, and as I went gloomily to the dog show, I thought back on life and younger days of giving up sweets and decorating statues and I realised that growing up meant less deep feelings.
But the following year there were plenty of deep feelings. Some distant and pleasant American cousins announced they were coming to Ireland. Letter followed letter about all the fun they were going to have, all the great scenes they were going to join, the fantastic welcome they were going to get. Mystified, we reread the letters again and again. Could they be talking about the place we all knew?
They were coming so far and making such an effort we would have to do something. My mother refused to dye the potatoes green. Utterly. But, we kept wailing, they write about looking forward to the green potatoes, it wouldn’t hurt us to make them green just once. My father refused to call himself O’Binchy for the occasion, and hang a harp outside the gate. I was beginning to think of dressing up in some kind of uniform to go out on the tarmac at Dublin Airport piping a melancholy tune. It was all solved for us by their plane being delayed. They didn’t get here until the next day.
They had a great time at New York Airport, they said, lots of green beer and songs and entertainment. But they were of course heart-broken that they had missed what they kept calling The Real Thing.
And I spent a St Patrick’s Day once in a hotel by the sea where I had gone to think about things and have a rest. And it was such a beautiful day I decided to go and walk along the beach to a deserted place and contemplate a swim. The sun was beating down, there wasn’t a soul about, so I went into the sea alone and naked and swam about thinking about things and delighted with myself. From nowhere came an elderly couple who parked themselves beside my clothes. Suspicious that they might be about to steal everything I owned, I scrutinised them from the water. Not at all, they were people I knew slightly from Dublin who had heard from the hotelier that I was there. Kindly, they thought they would come along and have a chat with me in case I was lonely and all by myself. I contemplated the problem out in the sea. I was too sophisticated to say, ‘You must turn your backs now because I have nothing on.’ I wasn’t sophisticated enough to walk out stark naked.
But then I couldn’t stay in the sea forever. A hopeless kind of shouting match took place. ‘I don’t seem to have any bathing togs on,’ I shouted idiotically.
‘What?’ they shouted.
‘I didn’t know I was going to meet anyone, I haven’t any clothes on,’ I screamed.
‘What? Do you want your clothes? We’ll mind your clothes,’ they shouted.
‘Perhaps if you went along the beach I’ll join you later,’ I yelled.
‘Not at all, we’ll wait here, glad to have a rest,’ they called.
I had to do it. Yelling and screeching to alert them of what would be emerging from the water, I raced out of the sea and dived on my coat. Neither of them raised an eyebrow.
‘It must have been cold,’ said the 80-year-old husband.
‘You should have brought a towel anyway,’ said the 75-year-old wife, disapproving at my lack of care about my health. Stunned, I walked back to the hotel with them and played poker with them all afternoon.
There was a St Patrick’s Day when I had to interview a famous person because he couldn’t find any other free time, and I went to his hotel room as arranged. He thought I was part of the hotel staff and said to me wearily, ‘I suppose you’d better send up a bottle of whiskey or something, I have some idiot woman from some paper coming to do an interview and I suppose she drinks like a fish like all of them.’
And two years ago I was in a hotel in Morocco with two girlfriends and we spent our National Feast day having a row with the hotel manager about the price of everything, and the fact that we had veal for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In between bouts of the row we would go out and sit in the boiling sun and say that it was all grand because everyone would be being drowned and bored at home and perhaps we were better here than there.
And last year I was standing amazed in New York at what looked like a million people dancing and skipping down Fifth Avenue, and the whole city went mad for 12 hours, and I wondered were there any words at all to try and describe it, or would people think I was just exaggerating as usual.
So what about last Wednesday?
With a history of abnormal St Patrick’s Days, I waited its dawning with some interest. It began with a flight from Dublin to London. British Airways gave the passengers shamrock, which was nice, and distracted me until the plane was off the ground.
I had also remembered the number of the seat which has room for long legs and that was good. I can’t tell it to you actually, because it’s a bit of special information you pick up from long, harrowing travel and nobody should be allowed to have it too easily.
And when I got to London there was a message for me on the board, which is something I love because it looks so important in front of all the other passengers. Actually it was only from a friend who had passed through the night before and who knows I love getting messages. It said ‘Happy St Patrick’s Day’ but I nodded over it wisely for a bit, hoping that people would think it was about some major management decision that I would have to make in the next hour.
And all had changed utterly in London since I left.
Harold Wilson had gone, Princess Margaret’s marriage had gone. Some lovely mustard seed that I had planted on my window sill had gone mad and only grown in one corner of its cheap little plastic tray, where it looked like as if all the seeds had jumped on top of each other instead of growing in nice normal lines.
But it was a normal working day, with people going about their work and forgetting about St Patrick, which was sad. I went to a businessy sort of lunch where the chairman did say at the end of it, ‘and now not forgetting what day it is I ask you all to stand and drink a toast ….’ so I thought this was great. But the toast was to the company which had been 25 years in business and not to poor St Patrick who has been in business for a hell of a lot longer.
And on the bus I met a man wearing a shamrock, too, and he and I had a great chat about St Patrick and what a shame it was that he wasn’t more highly thought of everywhere.
And in the evening Córas Tráchtála had a little party where they invited mainly foreign people who had done business with Ireland or helped Irish exports or something.
And amid the roar of conversation and goodwill three different people said to me that it must be lonely to be over in London and not having a nice, normal St Patrick’s Day at home.
The Day We Nearly Wrote a Sex Book
4 October 1976
I was nearly the co-author of a best-selling pornographic book, and sometimes when I stand in the rain waiting for a non-existent bus and unable to afford the taxis that come by empty and warm and comfortable, I think that it was very feeble of me not to have gone ahead with the project. I don’t even have the moral comfort of knowing that I refused riches for all kinds of pure and upright reasons, it was just sheer cowardice that stopped me in the end – that and the laziness and inertia of all my friends.
A few years ago, struck by yet another blow like an increase in the price of fags or drink or huge telephone bills or something, ten of us sat grumbling in a pub on a Saturday night. The usual remedies to the taxing economic situation were discussed and dismissed. Making gin in the bath. Yes fine, but how did you do it? And it would mean you couldn’t wash, you might be very drunk, but very dirty as a result. And there was a thought that people had gone blind or mad from it during prohibition.
And there was rolling your own cigarettes. Fine, but it took so long, and all the tobacco kept falling out, and it didn’t taste as nice, and somebody had burned all their eyelashes off by forgetting to put any tobacco at all into the paper and just lighting the outside.
