Maeve's Times

by Binchy, Maeve

  ‘Well, why don’t you put on your glasses?’ she asked, reasonably.

  But she wasn’t to know that it was my pride and joy, the ability to read the small print on bye-laws before others could see the noticeboard itself, the slight hint of envy and disbelief around one that one with so dissolute a lifestyle didn’t need to fumble in a handbag or reach for a string around the neck in order to look at snaps or read the fine print of a menu in a dark restaurant. I, who used to read in the twilight when others wouldn’t be able to find the book if they put it down for a minute, now I was going to have to get glasses.

  Naturally, like every major event, I made a drama and a production out of it. I had no intention of going quietly into the dark night of spectacle-wearing. Nor was I going to delay. The very next day, when the plane landed me back in London, I made an appointment to see an ophthalmic surgeon. The receptionist and I consulted our Filofaxes. No, not early in the morning, she said, he would be operating.

  ‘Operating?’ I shouted down the phone in such a fright that strong men and women trying to reclaim their baggage from the carousels stopped short to know what was going on.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said nervously.

  ‘I don’t think I want that kind of an eye doctor,’ I said firmly. ‘I want one that will either say tut tut, it’s just that you’re a bit tired and it will be fine when you’ve had a nice long rest, or else give me something that will bring out the cheekbones in my face and make me see everything again.’

  There was a silence. You could see her wondering whether this appointment should be written into his book, whether this encounter was to be encouraged.

  ‘Who exactly recommended you to us?’ she asked, in one of those tones that frighten me to death and bring on a huge sense of middle-aged respectability.

  ‘Fearfully sorry,’ I said. ‘Where were we? Yes, indeed, eleven-thirty would be fine.’

  They had property magazines only in the waiting room. A woman with a hat and gloves asked me was it my first time.

  ‘You’ll like him,’ she said positively. ‘Great soap and water man, of course, says a lot of the problem is caused by all these creams and scrubs and grains and peeling.’

  I felt a wave of nausea. Nobody had ever told me anything about any of these things in the care of the eye. And I had always thought you should keep soap and water out of your eyes. It turned out, of course, that the waiting room served several specialists. Hers was a dermatologist. There were other doctors in the building that might have been more alarming – she could have told me that he always suggested a bypass or a hysterectomy. I was calm by the time I was called.

  It was like a dentist’s chair without the instruments. You kept looking at things and answering lovely bright-child questions like whether you see more green than red. Then there was the sort of cartoon-style ‘can you read the bottom line?’ bit and a few drops in the eye and a reassuring pat and the news that I was luckier than most people, the average age for it was 44 to 46. I had lasted a few years longer. This made me feel like a champion. I thought of going down to the Savoy Theatre and having a word with Mickey Rooney, who is there in a song-and-dance musical and talking about us old survivors. It was the only doctor’s surgery that I left without the customary instructions to have lost three stone the next time I came in. I told him that, praisingly. I said he shone amongst fellow medics in his attitude. He said diplomatically that he was sure his fellow medics were very right in whatever they advised, but it had no adverse effect on the sight.

  ‘Probably helps it,’ I said cheerfully and went off in search of a place to get the specs. I told the girl I wanted something showy. She found the description too vague.

  ‘If you could tell me what kind of showy, like do the glasses of any personality appeal to you?’

  I thought for a little and decided I wanted them like Edna Everage’s, not exactly like hers, but in that area. The optician was regretful. They didn’t do that kind of range.

  ‘Huge, then, like dinner plates,’ I said. I wasn’t going for half moons or something restrained. We tried on every pair in the shop, and to my annoyance the ones that met with the most approval from everyone, including myself peering at them in a mirror, were extremely discreet ones with mainly colourless frames around the eyes and a bit of blue on the bits that go over the ear. They look very dull on the table, and I can’t really see them properly on my face because they’re not meant for looking at faces in mirrors – they’re meant for books and papers and theatre programmes and telephone directories.

  I can see all kinds of things with them, including a sort of numbering on my typewriter showing you how many spaces you’ve gone. I never knew it was there, and apparently that is the explanation for all those irregular sort of paragraphs over the years.

  There is only one puzzlement. The glasses have a name on them. It’s written in small letters inside one of those bits that goes over your ear. I suppose in posher spectacles it would be a Designer Label. But what it seems to say is ‘Happy Pouff. Paris France’. I’ve asked other people who can read it with their own glasses on to check this out, and indeed this would appear to be the name. Maybe everyone has awful silly names written on the inside of their glasses on the grounds that the poor weak-eyed people wearing them won’t be able to read them. It would be worth finding out.

  Madam Is Paying?

  Published in Maeve’s Diary (Irish Times, 1980s)

  Today I took a man to lunch. It’s something I have done many times before in my life, and hope to do again. It’s not something that makes me feel aggressive, butch or dominant. It doesn’t seem to emasculate and weaken the men who have been taken to lunch either. Never did I feel I should be groping under the table, fumbling to get past his knees, to hand him the fiver or the tenner. Never did I think the table should be booked in his name.

  Today was a beauty, however. I had booked a table for two for one o’clock. I arrived on the dot and gave my name.

  ‘Mr Binchy’s table is this way, madam. I don’t think he’s arrived yet.’

  I said nothing. Sometimes, it’s not worth the whole business of explanations, especially when it wasn’t going to change anything. I mean, I was getting to the right table. I ordered a gin and tonic while waiting.

  The waiter looked mildly disapproving. He felt there was an outside chance that the man who had booked the table might hit the waiter across the face for having let a female guest order a drink on her own. He brought it along, grudgingly.

  The man I was taking to lunch rushed in, apologetically. He is an engaging-looking American, who has written a book about Californian way-out lifestyles and meaningful relationships. He is, I think, about 60 or 65. His main emotion was shame at being five minutes late. The waiter hovered about in a worried way.

  ‘I have brought your guest an aperitif, Mr Binchy,’ he said to the American author, fearfully. The American looked back at him fearfully. Was this some terrible plot? Would he have to pay for the meal? Was I passing him off as my husband or my father? He was filled with unease.

  ‘What will you have, I’m paying,’ I said firmly, and he ordered a highball, with a marginal air of relaxing.

  All through the meal it went on. He got the menu with the prices, I didn’t; he was shown the wine list, I was ignored; the tray of cigars was brought to him at the coffee stage, even though we had both made it perfectly clear to this dumb, chauvinist waiter that I was the one who was in charge of the lunch.

  Then came the bill. You must remember that this man and I had been discussing the whole role of female assertiveness in a West Coast marriage. We had agreed that patterns had changed beyond recognition because of the women’s movement nowadays, women no longer saw marriage in its traditional role of giving security or stability.

  Over the cheese we had marvelled at how much had happened in how short a time. And there stood the waiter, discreetly trying to catch the American’s attention so that he could present him with the piece of paper which couldn�
�t possibly be shown to a woman.

  ‘I’m in the lucky position of being invited to lunch,’ the American said engagingly, waving over to me as if to indicate that funds unlimited were available at my side of the table.

  The waiter stood still.

  ‘Madam is paying?’ he asked in a voice full of doom.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said cheerfully, getting out my chequebook.

  ‘By cheque,’ he said defeatedly.

  ‘Oh, they let women have them these days,’ I said with an attempt to cheer him up.

  As an attempt it failed. He took my cheque and cheque card like a butler in a film might pick up a tousled gypsy child to remove it from his lordship’s eyes.

  There was no service charge included so I left a 10 per cent tip, which is, I think, what people do. He looked at the money as if it were the worst humiliation he had ever undergone. I was desperately tempted to snatch it back, since I had got no service, I had only got a patronising sneer throughout. But then, that would have given him further fuel about women if I had taken the money back. So, even though I didn’t feel like it, I grinned at him and thanked him for the nice meal. And though he certainly didn’t feel like it, he grinned back, and said it had been nice to see me and hoped he would see me again.

  As we came out into the cold sunshine, the American author looked back thoughtfully at the restaurant and shook his head.

  ‘It’ll be some while before he’ll let it all hang out with an assertively laid-back female,’ he said, disappointed that the time was changing so slowly after all.

  NINETIES

  Even the Presidents Are Getting Younger

  1 December 1990

  It’s one thing to notice the guards getting younger, to look over people’s shoulders at their passports and realise they were born the year you left teaching but truly it’s a bit hard to become older than the President of Ireland and the Prime Minister of Britain all in one month. Only the comforting lined face of George Bush gives me any hope that there are some elderly folk out there trying to run things. I keep expecting some fresh-faced boy that I taught up to First Communion class to emerge as the Pope.

  It’s not something that will darken my brow for the rest of my natural or anything, it’s just that these things seem to come all at once. A letter in flawless English from a Dutch student who is doing a thesis on Irish women asked me would I talk to her about what I and all my friends felt the day we got the vote. A girl’s school having a sale of work wondered could I donate any mementoes of the old days like a fan or a dance card so that people could get the flavour. A kindly and we hope short-sighted woman told a whole bookshop that she remembered me climbing through the window of the nurses’ home in Vincent’s in 1935.

  A child doing a school essay asked me for advice. They had been asked to imagine that they had been alive the day decimal currency was introduced in Ireland. He wondered what the place had been like then. It was tempting to draw a picture of gas lamps, and cobbled streets and coaches rattling by but since a lot of the teachers probably wouldn’t remember it either, there was no point in being ironical – the child might have got a low mark and been deemed stupid.

  I told him the truth about that day, and that it happened to be a day that a deeply unsatisfactory romance of mine was over, and like everyone in such a situation I was On the Verge.

  One cross word from anyone and the floodgates would open. Determined to begin a new life full of sharp, clear decisions and snappy dialogue, I got on the bus. Everyone else was saying ‘a shilling’, which was the fare. In a voice that could cut through steel, I asked for ‘five pence please’.

  The conductor may have been having a crisis of his own. He looked at me without much pleasure. ‘If there’s one thing I hate it’s a smart alec,’ he said. I looked at him in disbelief and then I began to cry; the bus was racked with sobs, and heaving and whooping. Every single passenger took my side, they had no idea what it was about, but he had grossly offended me, a paying passenger, trying to coordinate with all these instructions about trying to Think Decimal. Scant thanks you got for thinking decimal, only dog’s abuse from public officials. They were going to take his number and report him for upsetting the poor woman who was only struggling like the rest of the population to cope with what we all knew would be our ruination and our downfall. I was now terribly sorry for the conductor and trying to get people not to report him, which only made me look nicer and him look even more foul.

  New passengers getting on were told of the horror of it. By now he was meant to have called me a smart arse, he had shouted at me, he had frightened me, he wouldn’t hear the end of this. Oh no.

  No fare was taken from me in either the old or new money, and I staggered off the bus eventually red eyed and thanking my loyal supporters. They all waved at me out the window as the bus pulled away, some of them made fists of solidarity, and the unfortunate conductor ashen with fright was trying to cover his badge number.

  The child said it was interesting but probably not what the teacher had in mind. Sadly I agreed, these kind of tales are never what the teacher had in mind.

  I would like to thank the seven readers who wrote in saying that they agreed with me about working at home and the nightmarish difficulty of actually starting the damn thing when everything else on earth seems more interesting.

  One woman listening to the radio when she should have been working heard an item about bees, and went out and bought two hives. She has a lot of stings, very little honey, a fascination with bees and no income from her real work, she tells me. I would also like to thank the 23 readers who wrote to correct me about the previous Governor General of Canada being a woman, not a man. I was going to say it was just a little test, or I’m glad you’re all awake, but it might have looked as if I were flailing on the ropes so I didn’t say it.

  And if you are reading this in Canada tomorrow night as you might well be, it’s because a couple called Kevin and Meta Hannafin of the Irish Newspaper and Book Distributors bring in national, provincial and Sunday papers. At eight o’clock on a Sunday night you can get them, and they have to wait until Wednesday in Chicago, the Hannafins say with some pride.

  I would particularly like to thank the reader who said that there was a message on her telephone answering machine asking how to get rid of fleas from a cat or dog’s cushion. The person hadn’t said who they were but it sounded like my voice and the kind of thing I would ask. Since I hadn’t left a number, she wrote to me at the paper and the answer was to stuff the cushion with dried ferns. Ferns are said to frighten off fleas. She gave no address to save me the bother of getting in touch again.

  Again? If she thinks I rang her and left this request on her machine then surely I should know her address. I have a friend who always says, ‘Let it pass, let it pass.’ How can you let something as mystifying as that pass? But then there could be something about some people which actually goes out and attracts the confusing, the incomprehensible and the downright barking. It has nothing to do with being loud and extrovert and claiming to enjoy unexpected experiences.

  One of the quietest and most demure authors I know got a postcard the other day from a boy, man maybe … saying, ‘My grandmother says you know everything; how is CWRW, the Welsh word for beer, pronounced? Trusting you can oblige.’

  The flattery was very pleasing; someone’s grandmother thought she knew everything … Of course she did no work that morning looking through dictionaries and Books of Unusual Facts. She eventually had to ring a newspaper in Wales and found that the answer was Koo Roo. The whole thing took forever but she felt it was somehow more satisfying than finishing the chapter that was already a week late.

  And I agree, it’s so much better being thought a person who leaves messages about fleas on the answering machines of strangers or someone who knows how to pronounce beer in Welsh than to be thought capable of nothing.

  I heard two students talking glumly about their mothers. One apparently obsessed, day and night, abo
ut the house. The other was in a worse state. ‘She just sits and looks in front of her as if all her brain cells were dead,’ the daughter said sadly. ‘Of course she will be 50 at Christmas; what’s left for her when you come to think of it?’

  My Theodora Story

  6 April 1991

  Last week, when I was writing about sauces in a restaurant, I felt the familiar sense of fear that Theodora might read it and tell me that even now at this late stage I had still learned nothing about cookery terms.

  But last Saturday the pages were full of appreciation and memories of Theodora FitzGibbon, and I remembered my own Theodora story and how she had said I must always tell it after she was dead, since it reflected huge credit on her and George and none at all on me.

  I think I was the one who hired Theodora on a regular basis for The Irish Times. The more famous she became, the more often I say that it was I who found her. Anyway, when I became women’s editor in 1968, knowing nothing about fashion and cookery, it was great to have that side of things handled by experts. In the beginning she used to discuss recipes with me, but the feeling of talking to a brick wall must have overcome her, because she eventually gave up. One inkling of my limitations may have come when she typed out a recipe that included one to one and a half pounds of split peas. The way it was written, a 1 and then another 1 and a ½, made me think it must have been eleven and a half pounds that she meant, and I amended her copy accordingly.

  It was around that time that she decided to take control of her own column, and sometimes her husband, George Morrison, would send us a picture to go with the piece that Theodora wrote. I loved it when he did, but it was always just a little bonus.