Maeve's Times

by Binchy, Maeve

  But there’s another argument which says we only have one crack at life and if you protest so strongly that you want to be in your own place, regardless of falls and knocked-over tables and things not being as clean as they used to be, then that’s where you should be.

  And that is actually what Thatcher’s Britain is trying to do for old people … keep them in their homes.

  It doesn’t, of course, give nearly enough in resources. You get the feeling that the Prime Minister wants a return to old-fashioned values of neighbourliness and concern, because the government doesn’t have to pay for such things. And yet to my intense annoyance I can’t disagree with her. I only wish I had her sense of certainty about everything. It would be great to know which bed my neighbour should sleep in tonight, and know it was the right place for her.

  When Beckett Met Binchy

  14 May 1980

  Beckett looks 54, not 74; he looks like a Frenchman, not an Irishman, and he certainly looks more like a man about to go off and do a day’s hard manual work rather than direct one of his own plays for a cast which looks on him as a messiah come to rehearsal.

  He has spikey hair which looks as if he had just washed it or had made an unsuccessful attempt to do a Brylcreem job on it and given up halfway through. He has long narrow fingers, and the lines around his eyes go out in a fan, from years of smiling rather than years of intense brooding.

  He is in London to direct the San Quentin Workshop production of Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape for Dublin’s Peacock Theatre. It will open in Dublin on May 26th. Beckett has become very involved with this San Quentin group since the early sixties when he heard what was happening in the big American Jail.

  One of the convicts, Rick Cluchey, who was serving what might have been a life sentence for a kidnap and robbery but which turned out to be only 11 years, persuaded the authorities to let the prisoners do Beckett plays and they performed them in a studio theatre in what used to be the prison’s gallows room.

  The plays made such an impact on the prisoners, who immediately saw similarities between the imprisonment felt by Beckett’s characters and themselves, that they were repeated over and over. The word got out and it even got as far as Beckett in Europe.

  Nowadays, Cluchey and Beckett are friends, something that the convict in San Quentin would have thought impossible. Cluchey and his wife, Teresita Garcia-Suro, have called their two young children after Beckett and his wife, Suzanne.

  Rick Cluchey knows nearly every word that Beckett has written but when he is in a position of actor with Beckett as director, he says he tries to forget everything he ever thought himself, tries to strip his mind and memory of actors’ tricks and his own interpretations, and just wait like a blank sheet of paper for Beckett to tell him what to do.

  This is what was happening down at the Riverside Studios in London where they were getting the rather minimal set ready for a rehearsal of Endgame. They needed a chair for Hamm to sit in, a ladder for Clov to run up and down, and a dustbin for Nagg. Nell, the other dustbin inhabitant, hadn’t arrived yet (she is Teresita and was coming over from America the next day), so this day Beckett played Nell.

  He was endlessly finicky and pernickety about the height and shape of the props, he ran up and down Clov’s ladder a dozen times to see was it the right kind of ladder, and if it gave Clov space to turn around and deliver his lines.

  He sat in Hamm’s chair another dozen times raising it and lowering it so that it would be at the right angle when Clov came over to whisper in his ear. I thought I was going to die with irritation and impatience but the American actors, Bud Thorpe, Alan Mandell and Rick Cluchey, hung on every instruction and rushed to carry it out.

  Douglas Kennedy from the Peacock Theatre in Dublin sat with his notebook, taking heed of all the requirements that would be needed in Dublin. Finally, Beckett got down to words.

  The main thing you’d notice is that he thinks the play is a song, or a long rhythmic poem. He can hear the rhythm, he can hear it quite clearly in his head and his work as a director is to get the actors to hear it too. That’s why he goes over and over each line, saying it not all that much differently to the actor (in fact you’d have to strain to hear the difference), but it has a beat the way he says it and, once that beat is caught by the actors, it sounds quite different.

  He stands there in front of them, mouthing the lines they say word perfect in his own play, up to the pauses and the half pauses, quite confident that this conversation between wretched imprisoned people is almost the obvious definition of the human condition. He doesn’t ever apologise for his own work, excuse it or say, ‘What I’m trying to say here is this ….’

  In fact, it seems to stand there beside him, this play, as if it was an important statement, and he is just helping the actors to unveil it.

  Beckett is courteous, he never raises his voice. ‘Bud, may I suggest something here?’ he says to a young American actor, Bud Thorpe, who thinks that, when he has grandchildren, they’ll never believe this, not in a million years.

  ‘Alan, Alan, take the rhythm. You have to knock on the bin, the rhythm comes in the knocks, it sets the speed for the conversation. Come, no, I’ll get into my bin.’

  And Beckett sits down beside Alan Mandell to play the loving scene between the two dustbin-imprisoned folk who can only remember, wish and regret. Mandell says he’ll never forget it to his dying day.

  He has ludicrous energy, Beckett. When the actors, all decades younger than him, were tiring, needing a break, a coffee, he was still as fresh as when he started, the tones, the rhythms were running through him; his spare body, in its almost traditional uniform of two thin polo-necked sweaters, moved from side to side of the stage, bending, crouching, stretching. Even I, sitting silently on my chair, began to feel weary and wish he’d stop for a few minutes.

  He did. He lit another of the small cheroots he smoked and came over to me. I looked behind me nervously, assuming he was going to talk to someone else.

  It had been a very firm arrangement. I could watch but not talk. Write but not interview. I assumed he was going to ask me to leave.

  He introduced himself to me as formally as if I might have had no idea who he was and assumed he was someone who came in off the street to direct the play. He asked how The Irish Times was getting on and I gave him the usual loyal craven tale about it being the best newspaper in the world. He only saw it from time to time, he said, but he seemed to go along with my opinion of its excellence.

  ‘I remember it more in the days of Bertie Smyllie,’ he said. ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘No, but I believe he was a bit of a personality,’ I said, helpfully wishing that, when Beckett had decided to talk to me, I could find something entertaining to say to him.

  ‘My memory of him was that he ran his newspaper from the pubs and that there were circles around him, listening to what he wanted to do and running away to do it. He used to drink in the Palace. Is the Pearl still there?’

  ‘No, it’s been bought by the bank,’ I said.

  ‘The bank,’ said Beckett thoughtfully. ‘The bank. How extraordinary.’

  It seemed to upset him deeply. I wondered should I tell him about all the alternative drinking places we had found, but I decided that he was more brought down by the notion of the bank owning the Pearl than the actual deprivation of the drink in it.

  ‘And I believe the Ballast Office clock has gone,’ he said gloomily. I agreed and hoped that he might hit on something that was still there in Dublin. ‘How do people know what time it is?’ he asked.

  ‘I think they sort of strain and look down the river at the Custom House,’ I said.

  ‘It’s the wrong angle,’ he said.

  He was silent then, and I wondered was he really concerned about the people not knowing what time it was, or had he gone off on a different train of thought.

  ‘Will you come to Dublin yourself to see this?’ I asked.

  ‘Not this time, no, I shan’t be coming this ti
me,’ he said.

  His accent is sibilant French with a lot of Dublin in it. Not as lispy as Seán MacBride but not unlike it, either. I was afraid I had given him a bum steer by letting him dwell on the Ballast Office and the Pearl.

  ‘There’s a lot of it left, you know,’ I said.

  He smiled. ‘I’m sure there is, but I must get back to France and Germany … that’s where my work is ….’

  ‘What are you working on next?’ I asked him.

  ‘A television play, it will be done for German television in Stuttgart. I like Stuttgart, not the town itself, it’s down in a hole, a deep hole, but I like when you go up on the hills outside Stuttgart. And I like the people there that I work with … I am looking forward to it.’

  ‘Does it have a name?’ I wondered.

  ‘No name, and no dialogue, no words.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ I said.

  After a morning of listening to his words, I could have done with more. Anyway, I’m rigid enough to think that a play should have words, for God’s sake.

  He saw this on my face, and he smiled a bit. ‘It will be very satisfactory,’ he assured me. ‘It’s all movement, activity, percussion, cohesion ….’

  ‘Why do you like working with the people in Germany on this sort of thing?’ I asked, the tinge of jealousy evident in my tone.

  ‘Oh, they understand, we understand the rhythm of it …’ he said.

  He picked up the issue of The Irish Times that was on my lap, and looked at it for a while, not really reading, more remembering.

  He had liked Alec Newman, he said, a very gentle man. He had admired Myles na Gopaleen and laughed so much at everything he had written but had been a bit disappointed when he met him because he had expected too much. There were a lot of things he thought of about Dublin from time to time. Niall Montgomery. Had I known him? He was a good man.

  He decided that those young actors had had enough rest. He went back to them. They took up at a part of the play where Hamm has to say, ‘This is not much fun.’ Rick Cluchey as Hamm said his line, giving it all the weight it deserved. ‘I think,’ said Beckett, ‘I think that it would be dangerous to have any pause at all after that line. We don’t want to give people time to agree with you. You must move and reply to him before the audience start to agree with him.’

  And Beckett laughed and lit another cheroot and settled in for hours’ more work.

  Fit for a Queen

  23 May 1980

  I met this woman at a party and she was quite drunk and had tears of vodka pouring down her face as she decided she was going to confide her biggest secret to me.

  She had her bras and corsets made for her specially at a place in the West End, which also made bras for the Queen.

  She told me that I’d love it, that it would become quite an addiction, that I’d never be able to buy an ordinary bra again without wincing and feeling third rate. She said I should go the next day and see them myself.

  With difficulty she was restrained from taking off her dress there and then to show me their handiwork and I assured her I would check them out. She wrote the name on my cheque book, in my diary and, to my annoyance, all over some letters that I was going to post to other people. Then, happy that she had done her duty, she passed out.

  I needed a new bra. It’s never what I would call heady excitement going to buy clothes of any kind if you aren’t a Stock Size, so I thought I might investigate the royal corsetières.

  I hoped they wouldn’t be snooty and put me down. It’s bad enough to be put down when you’re dressed. Naked, it’s intolerable. They live in South Molton Street, and you have to make an appointment. The place was faded genteel, lots of elegant-looking wraps and robes about the place and Christmas cards from the royal family; and discretion hung heavily over the whole place like ectoplasm.

  The lady was crisp and welcoming.

  She seemed quite confident that the outcome was going to be a spectacular success. She looked like the kind of person that would never discuss money in a million years.

  There are a few advantages about being more or less grown up. When I was younger I would have sat there tortured wondering how much the damn thing cost; nowadays life is too short.

  ‘How much will it cost?’ I asked, brazen as hell.

  ‘About £30. It depends on how much fitting we have to do,’ she said.

  It sounded a great deal of money, but then foul ones on which nobody has lavished any attention at all are about £18 in sickly pink and even more if they’re any colour you might wear. I decided to live dangerously and have one built for me.

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll call Madame,’ she said.

  Madame was tiny and from somewhere in Europe that gave her an accent which sounded as if she had come out the door of Central Casting. She was petite and charming, and she said ooh la la, twice. She had a tape measure around her neck, she had pins in her mouth. Together we marched in to the fitting room.

  First she would make a model, she said, and when we got the model right she would make the bra. It would be like a kind of masterplan, she would work from it. It would be as good as having me there.

  I got a feeling of rising panic. Surely she wasn’t going to cover me in putty or plaster of Paris so that she’d remember my shape. I stood there unhappily, with my arms crossed modestly over my bosom.

  ‘Oh, maybe you should just make it … sort of largish,’ I said vaguely, looking around fearfully for whatever they were going to pour over me.

  By this stage she had taken out a grand harmless-looking thing which was like two huge steel horseshoes covered in fur and kind of white cotton. She fixed it onto me and we scooped bits of me into it and I was delighted.

  ‘Oh, it’s great,’ I said happily. ‘I’ll take it.’

  With enormous patience she explained that this wasn’t it. This was just what she was going to work from, the real thing wouldn’t be dull old cotton, it would be satin and lace.

  I felt very foolish but Madame didn’t mind at all. She buzzed around me like a butterfly, nipping here and folding there and raising and lowering. I felt like the prow of a ship. I was delighted with myself.

  Then she said she was satisfied and I got out of it with very bad grace and put on what I had come in with which was very humble by comparison, and we made another appointment.

  I offered to pay a deposit and Daphne said that was super, but you got the feeling that if I hadn’t they’d still have gone ahead and made it. On the stairs I met a woman who stood back to let me pass and I noticed she had a bosom like the nose cone of a plane. She had obviously been there already and was coming back for another fix.

  A week later I went back full of confidence. This time Madame produced a confection of satin and little roses and lace. It would make your heart soar to look at it. I quite understood why the vodka-soaked woman felt the urge to take off her dress and display hers.

  A frown on Madame’s face, a few more little pulls and pushes, she buzzed and Daphne came in and purred and I moved in a stately way around the fitting room, and begged to be allowed take it just as it was, but they said nonsense, the whole notion of having a bra made was so that it could be fitted. They said it would be ready on Thursday.

  And it was. A final fitting … an enormous amount of mutual congratulation. No pressure whatsoever to buy anything else. I wrote a cheque for the remainder and they waved away the banker’s card. In the privacy and peace of a corsetières, they assume a lady is a lady and not a bounder.

  It is possibly the most cheering garment I ever bought. It is firm to the point of being like reinforced steel. It’s so comfortable that it’s like wearing a cushion around the bosom. It will look fantastic if I’m knocked down by a bus.

  I don’t know if it actually does anything for men in the sense of an infrastructure, which is what bras are meant to be about … but I know that if there’s another revolution and I’m told to burn it, I’ll abandon the sisters before I
’d let it go.

  Contraceptive Conversation

  16 February 1981

  Today I had an argument with a stranger, a real live argument with a woman I’d never met before as we waited at a bus stop for what seemed a considerable length of time.

  ‘Very depressing kind of day,’ she said.

  ‘Grey,’ I agreed. ‘But it might cheer up later.’

  ‘Nothing much to be cheerful about, though, is there? Look at the papers,’ she said.

  Obligingly I looked at the front page of The Irish Times. Compared to some days, I thought the news was fairly neutral. ‘Do you mean Mike Gibson not playing rugby for Ireland any more?’ I asked, not quite seeing anything that would cause gloom.

  ‘Never heard of him,’ she said.

  It couldn’t be the heady excitement of will we, won’t we about the EMS; she was hardly brought down by the fact that the RUC may have been kidnapping Father Hugh Murphy, since he was safe and well; the talks were continuing in an RTÉ dispute, but that wasn’t enough to lay anyone low. No, it had to be Haughey and the Contraceptive Bill.

  ‘Do you mean about having to have a doctor’s prescription?’ I asked.

  ‘Indeed I do,’ she said.

  ‘Well I suppose it does make us look very foolish trying to legislate for everyone else’s morality and pass the buck to the doctors,’ I said cheerfully. ‘But then I’m a fairly optimistic person, and I’d prefer to regard it as a step in the right direction.’

  There was a stony silence. I wondered had she heard me. After all, she was the one who started the conversation. ‘So, even though it’s a bit of a joke, it’s not all that bad,’ I said, keeping things going as I thought.

  ‘Is that your view?’ she said.

  ‘Well it’s not a very thought-out view,’ I backtracked. ‘But it’s a kind of instant reaction, if you know what I mean.’