Dear Maeve

by Maeve Binchy

  We went to a restaurant in London which has so many plants it could be the set of The Jungle Book. You have to lift fronds out of your way in order to see whoever you are having lunch with, everyone else is masked in greenery and hanging foliage. The waiters hack their way through from time to time, but it’s mainly a great place for a chat.

  We were catching up on a lot: the death of a good friend, the unexpected niceness of someone who used to be impossible, the equally unexpected awfulness of a one-time soul mate, life in Dalkey, life in the part of the world she lives in, how I had become a cat bore, how she had become a grandmother.

  One of the disadvantages of this place is that, when you have to go to the bathroom, you need a machete to get past the decor and then you’d be afraid you’d land back at the wrong table. When she came back she was so white I thought she must have been sick.

  She wished it had been so simple. She had seen her son-in-law closeted behind some plants, holding the hand and nuzzling the cheek of a woman who was not his wife. This was the son-in-law spoken of only minutes before as being a workaholic who was at this present moment in New York, but who would be returning next weekend for a big family reunion and the birthday of his three-year-old son. My friend’s grandson.

  He had been spoken of in the warmest terms, sympathetically, with the hope that the world would settle down a bit and he wouldn’t need to work so hard to provide for his family. And now the lying little sod had a fancy woman and wasn’t in America at all. My friend looked as if she was going to faint. A waiter was found by radar through the greenery and a brandy ordered. She got a lot of homespun hopeless chat from me.

  It might be someone who looked like him. No, it was his suit, his hair, his trendy briefcase with his leather jacket on the chair beside him. His wife might know he was back. He might have got in early this morning? No, she had been talking to her daughter just before lunch. The girl had said that the poor lamb was rushing from meeting to meeting and had left a message on the answering machine. He was so looking forward to the weekend.

  I wondered would it have been a surprise? It was a surprise all right, my friend said grimly. Could it be an innocent lunch, I wondered. Lots of lunches are, maybe they had too much wine and grabbed each other’s hands and said isn’t this all wonderful? Our own pasts have been littered with such lunches. Haven’t they?

  “What you are doing,” she said to me in a tone of steel, “is saying I should do nothing. That I should pretend to my daughter I didn’t see him, that I should kiss him on both cheeks next weekend at the child’s birthday and say how well he’s looking.” Glumly, I said that I thought it was better than the alternatives.

  There was a silence. I longed for him to crash through the shrubbery shouting that it was all on Candid Camera and he had really fooled his mother-in-law hadn’t he, and for his wife and the three-year-old to appear by his side. But even my fantasy life didn’t take me far down that road.

  We had been talking earlier about a woman we both knew who had been told that she was getting a promotion. But it was generally known that someone else was being groomed for the job. Her secretary had told her that, and thereby saved her face, her reputation. We had both been praising the secretary. It must have called for very great courage. She could have kept her head down. No one would have blamed her. But she had done a brave and honourable thing. The memory of the conversation hung between us in the air. Why was it different if it was your daughter? Why is it different if it is about love, not work?

  It was all about dignity. No woman should be left in innocence thinking her husband was slaving away in New York while he was feeding his face in a London restaurant. But where was the dignity in telling something as humiliating as that? Was it not, possibly, the absolute denial of dignity? Would the girl ever be able to look at her mother again without remembering that her mother had been the bearer of bad news? And if she threw the guy out, wouldn’t she sometimes, in the dark reaches of a lonely night, wish her mother had never told her?

  Or, if she kept him and never referred to it, wouldn’t she think that her mother despised her, or that her husband was at it again? And if she did bring up the matter of the lovey-dovey lunch with her husband, how edgy would that make family gatherings from now on?

  If we had been talking about someone else’s life or the plot of a novel, we would have found the topic interesting. A set of choices? Definitions even. Was it total hypocrisy to pretend that nothing had been seen, to be an ostrich, to let things take their own way? Or was that the only sensible thing to do? If he had gone to another restaurant. If we had gone to another restaurant. Useless wishes. We hadn’t. He hadn’t.

  She said I had made her question other things in the past. Had I been devious on other occasions? Did I only care for the form and appearance of things? Was true friendship not about to survive confrontation about something as important as betrayal? She said she would not be judgmental, she would deliver the information and leave it for her daughter to act on or ignore as she wished. That was courage and love. What I would offer was papering over cracks and was timid and was probably part of the Casanova’s charter that allowed your men to go out and lech over lunches, sure and safe in the comfortable knowledge that woolly liberals like myself would keep their secrets.

  Was that the solidarity of sisterhood, she wondered? Had the mellowness of maturity meant that I had got soft-centred? Like so many things these days, it remained unresolved.

  And in my heart I know she will tell her daughter. And I am certain that she will be wrong.

  Peace on Hearth

  “In every peace-making gesture you have to recognise the

  rights and wrongs of the other party even though you think

  you have all the rights . . .”

  If it can be attempted in Northern Ireland, in Israel and in Sarajevo, it can be tried in the home. It is heart-breaking to read the statistics about stress and rows in a season of too much expectation. Visitors from Mars would be very confused to hear of such hype and hope followed by heart attacks, family feuds and intensive consultation of marriage counsellors.

  The number of people needing marital mediation or advice soars by 50 per cent in January as a direct result of the festive season, and whole budgets fall to pieces.

  And, if we are to believe the doom brigade, all kinds of relationships fall apart at this time of year. Those who have been bereaved, divorced or separated find it a hell on earth, and even those who go into it quite good-naturedly find themselves snarling at siblings and at loggerheads with in-laws.

  Who are these people? I have never known anyone fight with each other at Christmas. Fall asleep stuffed with food and drink, yes certainly, but fight?

  Last week I met a woman who had a fight with her sister last Christmas. It poisoned the year and it has made her dread tomorrow, when they will all be gathering again in her mother’s house where the row took place.

  What was it about? Well, of all things, it was about Christmas crackers. It then moved on to the stuffing for the turkey.

  Could she be serious?

  Never more so, apparently.

  She had brought crackers to the party. She had just rushed into a shop and bought them at the last moment. They had awful plastic toys in them, stupid riddles and hats that fell apart after ten seconds. Her sister had been scornful, very publicly. “That was all you had to do, get crackers, and look at what you turned up with,” she said.

  The woman was outraged. It was not all she had to do. She had a hell of a lot to do, like keep secret the fact that her husband was out of work; like drive everyone here and there in a falling-to-bits car; like go to a cemetery to put flowers on a grave; like be responsible for setting a table with a whole lot of different people’s china and cutlery and get it all back to the right people; like keeping the fires going because nobody else ever noticed until they went out; like exercising the dog because otherwise he’d howl the house down; like keeping all the bones and putting them in a sauce
pan for her mother to make soup later – the rest of the family threw them out in reckless abandon.

  And her sister said that the bloody crackers were all she had to do, the sister who put packet stuffing in the turkey. Yes, cheap packet stuffing mixed with water. Dry as dust, you might as well have eaten the contents of the Hoover. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have the money. The new car stood gleaming outside the door. It wasn’t as if she had all that much to do.

  So the stuffing had been mentioned then? Criticised? It had. It wouldn’t have been mentioned had the crackers not been mentioned . . .

  But a whole year? Sisters who had been friends couldn’t have fallen out for a year over this.

  They had preserved the outward civilities. Smiles and waves at the First Communion, waves and smiles at Mother’s birthday lunch, but they deliberately sat at different ends of the table.

  Did their husbands know? Oh yes, but you know what men are like, they didn’t think it was important. This year her sister is doing the crackers; probably got them from Harrods, she sniffs. And is she doing the stuffing? No, that would be petty, someone else is. She’s doing the plum pudding.

  There was a time when these sisters laughed over things together, and went out to the kitchen for a cigarette and confided things, and wondered was their sister-in-law pregnant again and whether their mother would like a proper worktop in the kitchen or if she actually loved all these different heights and surfaces. There was a time when they used to giggle over Christmases long ago, when their father was alive and when he drank the brandy that was meant to pour over the pudding. When they held on to each other sentimentally as they watched their toddlers under the tree and said life was wonderful. And now they are miles apart because of some insane Christmas tension that built up last year.

  I advised her to write a note to her sister. I nearly wrote it for her. Something like “I was such a stupid fool last year, all that fuss over crackers and stuffing, when all I wanted to do, like everyone else on earth, was have a happy Christmas. I hope it will be happy this year and I’m sorry for my part in whatever nonsense went on before. All my love.”

  She thinks not. She thinks that she didn’t begin it. If she had started it, then, maybe.

  But what about their children, their mother? They must be aware of the coldness; it will contribute a frost to the celebration.

  Oh go on, I said to her, of course, the letter’s a bit hypocritical. In every peace-making gesture you have to recognise the rights and wrongs of the other party, even though you think you have all the rights and they are permanently in the wrong.

  Her sister will weep out gratitude and embrace her. Or she’ll grudgingly and brusquely say, yes, the hatchet should be buried. Or she will behave like a sewer-house rat and say she herself was in no way to blame for what happened, in which case this woman will have virtue and goodness on her side for the rest of her days and need never feel guilty again. But she has to take the step. Otherwise she is adding to the statistics that say this is a time when families fall out.

  Home Truths

  “Remember how many youngsters there are living in squalor in bed-sits . . . why should we not accept that at the other

  end of the age curve similar feelings exist?”

  Of course she would be much better off in a home. Everyone knows that. There would be no danger of electrocuting herself, gassing herself, falling over the small stool, scalding her wrist with the boiling water.

  She would be less anxious in a home; she would not worry about shadows across the windows being intruders. She would have no fears about knocks on the door late at night. Sounds of suspicious cars or creaking boards. She would have company in a home.

  She spends long hours of the day and evening alone at the moment. She would be in a place where there were other people to talk to. She could pick and choose those she liked and those she didn’t. No longer would she be dependent on the accident of who lived on either side of her.

  Her daughter and son-in-law think the time they would spend visiting her in a home would be good time. It wouldn’t be a series of bolstering up a tottering system – trying to exclude draughts, re-position chairs, clean grime from surfaces, change her out of food-stained garments and persuade her that she would be far better off in care.

  If she were being looked after, then the time they would have with her would be – to use that terrible expression – Quality Time. They wouldn’t have to waste so many hours on inessentials, and circular arguments that are beginning to destroy all the love that has been there up to now.

  They are a loving family. The daughter would, and does, do anything for her mother, a woman who made a lot of sacrifices in her own youth so that the daughter should have a good start. Her mother has committed no crime except to turn 88 and become a bit feeble. That, and express a wish to hold on to her own home.

  The son-in-law loves her too. She championed his cause 35 years ago when he was considered an unsuitable match and his future father-in-law had dismissed him as a degenerate Teddy Boy. Her son-in-law doesn’t want to tidy this woman away just for convenience. He genuinely thinks it would make her a much happier and more contented person to be in a place where a cup of tea was handed to her and didn’t involve a hazardous series of movements.

  He thinks it’s just a matter of their deciding on the move and then waiting for the dust to settle. She can’t be really and truly attached to a house that is causing her nothing but hassle. She knows they’ll never abandon her, that she’ll see the grandchildren regularly. Her only other child, a son who lives abroad, would be even more eager to come home with his family if he thought that Mother was nice and clean and warm and safe in a place where she didn’t worry about everything from gurgles in the tank to whether the television licence has been paid.

  This son-in-law is a kind man with a fistful of brochures, a man who has done his sums and wants his mother-in-law to be settled and his wife to come out of what he calls the screaming heebie jeebies. He says that 80 per cent of their conversation now is spent talking about The Situation.

  Every phone call causes them to jump in case it is news of some disaster that they feel they could have prevented. The daughter, who is in her late 50s, tells me that her mother would never knowingly upset the family and that this is an additional dilemma. If everything were different, she can almost hear her mother’s voice advising consideration and practicality. But of course everything is not different and she has to play the parent now. A role she cannot act because always her mother’s own goodness intervenes and she feels nothing but guilt. Then she gets angry and she gets more guilty still.

  And she says to me that I don’t understand and she’s right. Our parents died so young that they remain for ever in the mind as the young, healthy, strong people they were. I don’t know how I would cope with the problem that so many of my friends are facing.

  So you might not understand from the inside but you can sympathise. You can imagine yourself in each situation. I imagine myself as the daughter and, because I’m of a bossy nature, I can see myself making huge efforts at persuasion. I would hate it but I would be so sure that it was for the best in the end that I would grit myself to all the pain and dismantling of a mother’s life for her own good. Then, for a moment, I imagine myself as the mother. We know what it’s like to be young and foolish and vulnerable and awkward . . . because we’ve been through that. We haven’t been old yet. We don’t know what it’s like.

  It might have an awful lot to do with feeling safe in the familiar. And being prepared to put up with any amount of inconvenience, and even downright discomfort, to hang on in. Remember how many youngsters there are living in squalor in bed-sits, with hopeless heating, disgusting plumbing and having to hike up and down four flights of stairs with peeling wallpaper. We can all accept that as a rite of passage, a need for independence, even though a much more comfortable alternative exists in the parents’ house. Why should we not accept that, at the other end of the age curve, simi
lar feelings exist?

  I advise the couple to stand back a bit. Although things are not perfect, they are so much better than they used to be. The mother could have a home help morning and afternoon. A nurse can come to wash her on certain days of the week, meals on wheels can be delivered.

  Her daughter and son-in-law should not be there every single day, maybe every second day. Good humour should be maintained, even in the face of negative thinking. We were all fairly negative when we were young and being looked after. Our parents never complained that, for the first years of life, we were not rational about things like our nutrition and lifestyle. We must owe them a similar tolerance at the other end, even if they aren’t all gurgling and sweet and adorable, like babies and toddlers are.

  I know, I know. I have friends whose elderly parents distort what they say, who imagine grudges and grievances where none exists. I have friends with a mother who suspects their motives and thinks they are just waiting to sell the house over her head, or move into it. Nothing could be further from the truth, or indeed from her mind, were she more rational and less frail. It must be almost impossible to see the woman who was strong and independent, who helped you to mould your life, become frail, difficult, querulous and ultimately manage to turn your love for her into exasperation.

  But I think we have to ask honestly, who we are doing it for when we insist that the excellent nursing home is the answer?

  When my elderly neighbour in London was in a hospital ward for the elderly, I loved it. I loved it to bits. She was clean and pink and well fed and cared for. I didn’t have to come home and know that she was there next door, terrified of intruders, unkempt and unable to do anything in a house she could hardly see. But she didn’t love it. She was aching to be home. As soon as her hip mended, back she went to the entirely unsuitable house.

  Then came the day, too late by many people’s standards, when she was ready to go in. And she went.