Dear Maeve

by Maeve Binchy

  Now this woman has just become a grandmother and the whole joy of having the beautiful baby to play with has been marred by the new findings which seem to prove that even a grandmother having smoked might weaken the health of the child. She is trailing this guilt and the child is only six weeks old. When the baby was born the parents were congratulating themselves on being non-smokers but with this statistic – and she speaks in heavy italics – their faces have grown glum and disapproving and they are looking at her as if she has contributed leprosy to the genes of her first grandchild.

  She came to tell me about it, and how grossly unfair and hurtful it was, but she lit a cigarette in the car and I literally can’t bear people to smoke in it. So, in order to be kind, I stopped the car and we sat freezing on a beach, looking at the sea while she told me how rotten her daughter and her son-in-law were being and, for God’s sake, everyone smoked until recently. The whole thing was just a media-inspired, holier-than-thou bit of hypochondria, she said, and by the time her granddaughter was old enough to hate and despise her smoking granny, there would be a revisionist school of thought that said tobacco cleared the tubes to your heart or stopped athlete’s foot and everyone would be searching for it.

  And then she said that we would both have hypothermia, so why didn’t we get into the nice warm car. And I told her that I was such a bad driver that if anyone smoked in the car – and I started to cough or anything – I would probably plough headlong into the traffic coming the other way and we’d both go for the chop, and what her granddaughter thought of her would be irrelevant.

  She looked at me thoughtfully and said I was much calmer when I smoked, had less fantasies, a lower level of anxiety and wasn’t it a pity I was so doctrinaire. So I told her the truth. I said the smell of tobacco in a confined space really did make me feel sick and that the thought of emptying a car ashtray would turn my stomach.

  She couldn’t have been more insulted. I was the last person she would have expected to follow the crowd. Where were all the libertarian principles of long ago about living and letting other people live? But I said to her that in wild west films you saw people spitting all the time, getting up a huge throatful of spit and hurling it out of the side of their mouths on the floor. And even in old-fashioned gentlemen’s clubs, they had a horrific thing called a cuspidor which people spat into.

  And I begged her to remember reading about the days when people used to pee into things under the table to save themselves the trouble of getting up and leaving the conversation and the general conviviality of it all. Even among the most enthusiastic diners-out, you don’t hear much of a call to re-introduce that practice.

  And it’s not only because the world had moved on from believing that there is one kind of person who would fill a cuspidor or a thing under the table and another sort of a person who would empty it . . . it’s just because we don’t want to accept unpleasant things if we don’t have to.

  If you add the belief that passive smoking is now considered a fact, then the poor smoker really is beleaguered.

  No longer can we even look at the smokers indulgently and think of them as glamorous if suicidal figures, old-fashioned throwbacks to the black-and-white movie years, rotting their lungs and moving in a haze towards an early grave. Now they are dragging the rest of us to the grave with them and if people even partially believe this then a smoker is going to be as much fun at a gathering as an old man with a long beard and a scythe.

  And also they smell awful.

  In Georgie Best’s gorgeous days, when he did that ad saying, “I’d never kiss a girl who smoked”, it made a lot of girls think for a bit. It was one of the most successful anti-smoking campaigns ever run. If you go to a restaurant where there is a lot of smoking, your own coat smells terrible later. I don’t think smokers should be attacked for the past; my friend should not be blamed for whatever weaknesses her granddaughter might inherit because, hand on heart, none of us knew. We really didn’t.

  But she should realise that it’s disgusting and dangerous and, as such, you can’t expect to make self-deprecating little jokes and say that you’re afraid you’re one of these awful endangered species, the Smoker, and expect people to pat you on the head, hand you an ashtray and allow you to pollute their atmosphere and their lungs.

  I advised her to think in terms of belching and farting and spitting.

  She said we could still be friends but would probably have long phone conversations or maybe one of us could go to prison and we could talk through a screen.

  Weary Words

  “And if I was 25 years older than when last we met, so was she”

  It was a lovely sunny day on Bloomsday and I was sitting in the hallway of the Joyce Centre in Dublin, delighted with myself. Why wouldn’t I be? I was watching all the comings and goings, the people dressed up, the American tourists, the faces I hadn’t seen for years. I was waiting to do an interview and was given a glass of lager to pass the time. Not many people would be having as good a time on a Thursday morning at 11.30 a.m., I said to myself.

  And then a woman came in whom I used to know years ago, when we were young teachers. She was a very positive person then, I remember. She used to take her pupils on great trips to France, which they never forgot. She had amazing projects in her classroom, and she used to go around with a box on the back of her bicycle asking people who had gardens if she could have cuttings, and then she used to get the kids to plant them around the schoolyard.

  She was a leader in everything, the first to give up smoking, the first to organise lunches where people were asked to contribute the price of a meal for the hungry, the first I knew to go to America for the summer and work as a camp counsellor. I had nothing but good memories of her. She seemed glad to see me too, but then her face fell. “You look desperately tired,” she said sympathetically. “Are you all right?”

  Well, the sun went out of the day and the fun went out of the Joyce Centre and the taste went out of the glass of lager and the sense of being as free as a bird went out the window. Tired is not a good thing to be told you look. Tired is terrible. And the really infuriating thing is that I was not tired, I had been in bed nice and early the night before. And I was tidy. Tired can often mean that you look like a tramp, but no, I had dressed up, complete with white collar, for the interview. And I wasn’t sweating or collapsing up flights of stairs. I was sitting calm as anything in the hall. And if I was 25 years older than when we last met, so was she. So, stupid as this may seem, I looked upset. I must have bitten my lip or may have looked as if I was going to burst into tears, because she said at once that she was sorry, and wanted to know what she had said.

  ‘'I’m not tired,” I said, like a big baby.

  She tried to explain that tired was okay. We were entitled to be tired. By God, we had earned the right to it. We worked hard, we had done so much. It would be an insult if we weren’t tired.

  She was back-tracking, trying to dig herself out of it, I said.

  No way, she insisted, and wasn’t I the touchy one trying to read other words into a perfectly acceptable observation, and more meanings than were implied in an expression of concern?

  But what was she going to do about my tiredness? Suppose I had admitted it? Just suppose I had agreed that I was flattened by fatigue and had been waiting for someone to come in that door to identify it. What was her cure? Had she ginseng or Mother’s Little Helpers in her handbag? Did she have a personal fitness trainer, a protein diet, a Seventh Son or shares in a health farm?

  We argued it away good-naturedly, as we had always argued in years gone by. She was always a woman of strong views, a characteristic I admire. I have even remembered many of her maxims, such as “Avoid restaurants that have strolling musicians”, “Never play cards with a man named Doc” and “Don’t resign before lunch”.

  But what’s the point of telling someone that they look tired, even if you don’t mean it as a euphemism for old, ugly, unkempt or rapidly going downhill? Was it a kind of
sympathetic come-on . . . expecting an answer along the lines of Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen?

  She was spirited about it. And she nearly won the argument. Would I prefer, she wondered, if we were all to turn into those dinkleberries who greet each other with an effusion of insincere compliments: “Oooh, you look marvellous” and “Oooh, you’ve lost loads of weight and honestly, I never saw you looking better, what have you been doing?” – the greetings and the compliments becoming like a ritual dance where the vain and the self-centred rake through a form of words, wondering if there is a “marvellous” too few or an expression of astonishment not heightened enough. Surely we haven’t reached this stage?

  But then, when she said “tired”, did she mean that as some sort of shorthand, to be a jovial punch on the shoulders between old mates, a kind of bonding between the worn out?

  She thought about it.

  She thinks she meant that she liked me from the old days, and it was good to see me again, and when she came upon me I had a serious expression on my face as if I had been talking to a woman about her late husband and maybe she remembered me roaring about, not sitting down. And in a sense, she didn’t want to be one of those people who always said twitter-twitter things and assumed other people had lives that were free of care. And on reflection, she said, now that we had argued the thing down to the bone, she would never as long as she lived tell another human being that they looked tired again.

  Linguistically Challenged

  “It is much more lofty to correct someone’s spelling if

  you have not been invited or paid to do so”

  It was probably right of that nice mild man who has been married to Margaret Thatcher for years to correct her when she got the name of the country she was in wrong. She was praising warmly the people, parliament and customs of one Far Eastern country when in fact she was in another, one which hadn’t had entirely cordial relations with the other for some centuries. Dennis cleared his throat and put her right.

  I imagine that, when she took off her shoes and calmed down her hair and looked back on yet another bone-achingly tiring night, she might have been grateful. Suppose she had gone on mixing up Indonesia and the Philippines all night, the hatchets and the tumbrels might have come out for her even sooner than they eventually did. Also, he did it nicely. As if he weren’t entirely sure himself, but was taking the risk.

  I thought of him last week in Manchester when a nervous young woman was trying to chat with her new in-laws. They were all in a big, somewhat anxious-making hotel lobby. It was the kind of place where you might expect a heavenly choir to come out of the woodwork. And I had already travelled down in the lift with Barry Manilow.

  Anyway, the girl was trying too hard, her dress was too short, too shiny, her heels too high, too uncertain, her tone too screechy for the dowdy and slightly supercilious clan into which she had married.

  Her young husband obviously loved her to bits. He had his arm protectively under her elbow to guide her through the minefields of slippy floors and dangerous conversations.

  She was telling the in-laws their holiday plans. “Jim’s booked us two weeks in a commodium,” she said excitedly. Her husband would have liked the marble floors and the brass rails to part and deliver them inside the earth’s crust. “I think you mean condominium, love,” he said.

  Her face was scarlet.

  “Isn’t that what I said?” she managed.

  “Well, sort of.” He didn’t really mean to but he did sort of smile a bit apologetically towards his mother and father and sister. I wanted to cry.

  It’s a meaningless word. It’s a word anyone would pause over, wondering if by any chance you had said condom instead. It’s a made-up word coming from American culture, not ours. It has some technical meaning in the US, meaning you own it more than people in apartments own theirs, or on a different kind of lease.

  Why should any of us have to know that kind of a word just because it has become travel-agent speak? I remember Terry Wogan saying he had a friend who owned a condominium who always referred to it as a pandemonium, because he thought that’s what it was actually called.

  I longed to tell this girl this, but they take you away firmly from hotel foyers if you butt into other people’s lives with stories like that.

  What should that nice boy, who didn’t intend to make little of his young wife, have done?

  He could have talked about the advantages of condominiums or whatever, showing that he knew the word and maybe she would pick it up. Or he needn’t even have done that. They weren’t out to catch her, he only embarrassed everyone by the correction.

  Would he have corrected a colleague, a friend, a stranger even? The women I had dinner with, booksellers, did not agree with me. They said, if they had said the wrong word, they would prefer to be corrected, then they would not make the same mistake again. Surely I as a teacher would go down that route?

  If they pronounced the name of an author or a book title wrongly, they would prefer to be told, they said. That way they wouldn’t allow a conspiracy of pity to grow up around them, pigeon-holing them as people less than they were. All of which could be avoided by a simple correction.

  But in public? Yes, they shrugged, they were young, they were on the way up a career ladder, they didn’t want to be held back by not being able to pronounce Anouilh on the rare occasions that anyone might want one of his works.

  They told embarrassed stories of how colleagues thought that Carson McCullers was a man, or that My Secret Garden, a sexual fantasy book, was in fact a work of horticulture. How much better to have been told. The public embarrassment took 10 seconds and was then over.

  I admired their courageous attitude but think that they might be over-optimistic about the thickness of their skins. And, of course, once you start going along some line of thought, there are dozens of examples to illustrate it.

  The young trainee in the next hotel showed me the bathroom, and pointed out bath, shower, lavatory and duvet. Was I going to tell him it was a bidet? No, I damn well wasn’t. I don’t care if he takes longer to make general manager of the chain; he was a kid. I was not going to tell him one nouveau, poncey word from another.

  I have had many letters from youngsters wanting to “persue” a career in journalism and I’ve let them “persue” it on the grounds that there is a spell check on most word processors and by the time they get there they might have learned how to spell it. Is this a lofty patrician attitude, a patronising tolerance of the lower orders? I don’t think so, truly I believe it is much more lofty to correct someone’s spelling if you have not been invited or paid to do so.

  I have never corrected the numerous English people who pronounce my home town of Dalkey as if the L were not silent, because I surely have pronounced their home towns incorrectly too, and it doesn’t really matter. What would matter is to be called up short in front of someone and given a more acceptable pronunciation for a word that had just left your mouth innocently, when you thought it was fine.

  Like the people in our road in London who know exactly what a woman means when she says that two nice people from the Johanna Hovises called. Very polite and asking you about being saved. Everyone knows she means Jehovah’s Witnesses; what a pedantic down-putting world it would be if anyone were ever to correct her.

  House Private

  “For some reason, they got locked into the phrase. They

  thought, in their grief, that it had some dignity instead of

  working out what it meant”

  Some months ago I saw a death notice in the paper. It was the father of a woman I know. He was a man in his seventies, popular, respected, he liked his work. After his retirement he was known in his neighbourhood and much visited by friends.

  Then I noticed the words House Private at the end of the announcement. It struck me as an odd thing to say in the circumstances. It wasn’t as if there was anyone else in the house who was sick or frail, someone to whom visitors or callers would be a nigh
tmare.

  His death had been a peaceful happening after some weeks’ illness, so there was no question of it being a suicide, a tragic motor accident or some drama that might have attracted the appalling gawpers.

  He was not a well-known celebrity whose house might have been invaded by paparazzi or sightseers, coming in the guise of mourners – if such a thing ever happens, which in this land is not really likely.

  They are a loving, warm family; they didn’t want to refuse access to their house on the day of a funeral because they would all be at each other’s throats and wanted to have their blood-letting in private. These are generous people who would be delighted to dispense drink and sandwiches; they were not trying to avoid putting their hands in their pockets to buy a beverage for those who came to sympathise over their father.

  They are articulate and outgoing: it’s not as if they would be struck dumb by any emotional scene or the show of warmth by neighbours, colleagues, extended family and friends.

  They must have been to enough funerals in their lives to know how consoled and pleased a family always seems when others come to mark the occasion and show that they cared about the person who died and those who survived him.

  The more I saw the words, the more I wondered whether they meant that the removal to the church and the actual Requiem Mass were also private. Would it be an intrusion to go to those? But no, the paper had given the times, so they must be expecting people to turn up on these public occasions. So I went.

  And a small, sparse group of people stood in a Dublin city church on an autumn evening waiting for the funeral party to arrive. It was a very small group, when you considered what kind of man was going to be buried the next day.