Maeve Binchy (16 page)

The Binchys had no car and she had no idea when there’d be a train. She waved down a passing car, told her story to the man driving it and asked if he was going anywhere near D’Olier Street. ‘I am now,’ he replied.

The man even came up with her in the lift to the newspaper offices, where she found a crowd of serious-looking men
standing
around her desk. And all she could hear was, ‘That bloody woman, that bloody woman.’

Maeve stood inside the door and announced her arrival. The printing of the paper had been held. People were rummaging around her desk and drawers for picture alternatives, finding things she’d rather they hadn’t, like miniature bottles of gin.

Gageby was not happy and he gave her five minutes to find an alternative picture. The only one she could find, close to the dimensions of the other, was an advertisement sent in by Wedgwood. It was a picture of an egg cup with an egg in it. She sat down and wrote the caption – ‘Why settle for an egg?’

Even before the veal casserole incident Maeve liked to pretend to be terrified of the boss, Douglas Gageby. It was all part of office theatre. She had every reason to be fearful at first, so naïve was she about the workings of a newspaper office. A year into the job and the paper received the first letter attacking Maeve for something she had written. It knocked her sideways. Not since she’d been arraigned before the school for smuggling out the boarders’ love letters and was stripped of her Child of Mary medal had she been publicly shamed.

She thought it was the end of the world. For of course the paper would be publishing the letter from the disgruntled
reader, and the very fact that the decision was taken to publish seemed to Maeve tantamount to her dismissal by the Editor. She decided the only thing to do was to offer her resignation. She tidied her desk and with her heart bursting with unhappiness went in to see Gageby.

It was a bad moment. Gageby was busy and didn’t even break off from what he was doing while Maeve said her piece. He then paused only long enough to look up and say that the paper had a letter column for readers to write in with their views. If a reader thought Maeve was no good it was his right to say so. Maeve ventured, ‘But do
you
think I am no good?’ Gageby’s ‘No’ was not as convincing as she would have liked. But it was enough to get her to go back to her desk and untidy it again.

She was in fact a favourite of both Gageby and Foley, her immediate boss, whose belief that a reporter could do a job
irrespective
of gender went down especially well. He didn’t assign a woman to a woman’s issue or a man to a man’s issue on account of gender, but according to who, in his opinion, would do the job best.

The late 1960s was a period when all Maeve’s friends were getting married or were occupied chasing their future husbands, and some of her closest friends, like Philippa, were leaving Ireland altogether.

Behind the craic and the laughs, Maeve admitted that she was a lonely young woman, envious of her friends getting married
because marriage brought them a home of their own, while she was still living with her father, and they could have as much sex as they liked without anyone disapproving or panicking in case they got pregnant.

She longed for a mate, but nobody came Maeve’s way with full-time commitment in mind. She said she consoled herself with her late mother’s words that love was a matter of luck. You couldn’t force the issue. It would happen when it happened, as it had for Maureen and William after they met by chance in Ballybunion. But Maeve knew in her heart that she was now too much of a handful for the sort of man that Maureen had had in mind for her when she said that.

Her loneliness found its way into a short story called ‘I’m Not Really Mad, Doctor, Am I?’, which introduces the reader to Valerie, who remembers one day coming home from work on the bus thinking that nobody had said ‘I love you’ to her like people had done to her friends. She dismisses it as only words until someone at a wedding tells her she should hurry up and get married, she’s no spring chicken. Valerie starts stealing clothes to smarten up and eventually, realising something is wrong with her, makes an appointment to consult a psychiatrist.

It was Maeve’s opinion that no psychiatrist ever knows which words precisely tip the cure, but the psychiatrist in this case does cure Valerie and he thinks that it could have been when he told her that she was a unique and special individual, that no one on earth had her history, her mind, her personality… This had been Maureen’s line to Maeve when making her feel better about herself as a child. But now there was a danger of Maeve slipping
back, with no one in Maureen’s place to reassure her, not even her closest friends.

In ‘Green Park’ (in the
Victoria Line
collection), Maeve discusses how the sisterhood relationship – the type of blood bond with her closest girlfriends which had sustained Maeve since she was a girl – atrophies in adulthood. ‘Blood brothers, you know, for life’ – close friends who can say anything to each other and it won’t be misconstrued; no one will tell, it’ll remain a secret for life. The suggestion is that her old friends have grown out of it. She had not.

The story focuses on four women. Helen refuses to accept that the special bond isn’t there any more. At school, Helen, not unlike Maeve with the boarders’ love letters at Killiney, had fraternised with the senior girls, seeking their friendship by revealing secrets to them and trying to prove that she was mature as they were. In some ways Helen is still the innocent schoolgirl. She insists that the blood-kinship remains as strong as ever and says that she can still tell Margaret personal things about her life, her man and her money worries, and that Susie has just returned from Kuwait and told her how she has discovered that she is a lesbian. Susie hadn’t been able to tell anyone else but Helen.

But when it comes to the test with Jane, who asks Helen and Margaret to join in a little deception with her, Helen is herself ultimately found wanting.

Maeve was aware how readily people could misconstrue her girl-friendships. Come the 1980s, in the novel
Tara Road
, Rosemary’s sister Eileen goes to live with a woman from work called Stephanie and they become lovers. But that is not Maeve.
Her friendships with women are friendships – caring, trusting, almost frighteningly loyal, intimate certainly – but sex doesn’t come into them at all.

Maeve wrote about women, she said, because she knew about them. She talked to women more than men ‘and I know what they talk about more’, she said. Women talk to one another about their feelings and emotions and relationships, and on that plane men were nowhere to be found.

Chewing over the spectrum of womanly love Maeve produced one of her best short stories of all – ‘Holland Park’ in
Central Line
(1978).

‘Holland Park’ is told in the first person by the author, and we immediately cast Maeve in the ‘I’ role. She and her friend Alice go to dinner with Malcolm and Melissa, a couple they met abroad on holiday who live in a beautiful house in Holland Park in west London. Alice is married; she isn’t. There are all sorts of hidden messages in the description of the run-up to the party, particularly in her preparations. It is the first time that she and Alice have met Malcolm and Melissa on home territory.

What transpires is a wonderfully observed ‘coming out’, the sudden realisation that Malcolm and Melissa have all the time assumed that she and Alice are lesbians, which they are not – well, heavens, they wouldn’t know what to do, would they?

But then she begins to examine her behaviour with Alice at the party objectively, and sees just why it could lead one to think that they were lesbians. And of course she does feel strongly about Alice. Woman to woman, there wasn’t anything to touch the sort of relationship she had with Alice, totally trusting,
intimate in all ways but not … She didn’t want Alice in that way. They’d laugh themselves silly! ‘
Kiss Alice?
’

As the evening progresses, the story begins to take on the hue of an Alan Ayckbourn play, but only a woman could write this. Alice becomes too drunk to drive home. Will Malcolm and Melissa offer them the double bed in the spare room? What will that mean, now that the friendship with Alice has been put in a different light? Her perception of their friendship has changed forever, but it hasn’t for poor Alice, who is now paralytic and knows nothing of what she has been thinking.

Can anything ever be the same again? How will she respond to Alice in bed, thinking these things? Will her love for her, which has been bottled up for all these years, suddenly be released?

Friendships between girls were so utterly real and true to Maeve, and because they meant so much to her she was
frighteningly
vulnerable to them.

A fan once wrote about Maeve: ‘It bothers me a little that in her books love almost always turns into betrayal.’ Maeve said unequivocally, ‘I know about love and disappointment – even betrayal – from my own life … It’s just so hard to believe that somebody with whom you’ve shared a great deal of intimacy would betray you.’
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Betrayal is everywhere in her fiction, and its opposites – truth, loyalty – are paramount. In
Circle of Friends
Nan carefully and coldly plans the betrayal of her friend Benny with her boyfriend Jack Foley. In
Quentins
, Don Richardson not only breaks Ella Brady’s heart, he rips off her parents and others besides. Here
is betrayal on a grand scale. Betrayal eats at this author, but it hurts most when it is the betrayal of a woman by a woman in the blood-tie friendship. This was the ultimate sin. The betrayal of Ria by Rosemary in
Tara Road
is the most painful of all. This is another novel full of betrayal: Danny betrays his wife Ria with Orla and Bernadette, but this – a man’s betrayal of a woman – is insignificant next to the betrayal of Ria by her best friend Rosemary, who has a secret affair with Danny throughout the novel.

Nor does the betrayal stop there, for the question arises, if a girlfriend knows that your husband is cheating on you (as happens in the novel), should she tell you, and if she doesn’t tell you, is she also guilty of betraying you? Maeve was still chewing on these questions in
A Week in Winter
shortly before she died.

What in Maeve’s own life made her feel betrayal with this intensity? Did something happen in that period post-1963 when, liberated, she threw off the shackles, started drinking and smoking and had a series of doomed affairs? Was it the break-up of some close bond with one of her friends, which she treasured with the innocence of a child even when they became mature people, as the short story ‘Green Park’ suggests? Or was there perhaps a
Tara Road
Rosemary situation in those
free-love
years of the 1960s, where someone she knew cheated with her lover?

There was such innocent belief in Maeve, an idealism that had been sown in her by her loving family and the religious community. Mary Kenny once said of her, ‘To the good, all things are good, and I used to say to Maeve that she didn’t
need formal religion – she was a saint already.’
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Molly Parkin warmed to Maeve when they met in the early 1960s, but noted how badly she’d been hurt by what Maeve saw as the cruelty of Jack MacGowran. Molly was alarmed by the force of Maeve’s response to what was, after all, a rejection after a spontaneous amorous episode well fuelled by alcohol, a common enough occurrence by the 1960s.

In spite of her new confident exterior Maeve was immensely vulnerable. Perhaps betrayal was always bound to crack her heart in two at some point.

As her close friends disappeared and her love life led nowhere, spinsterhood and caring for her father was the full reality, and there were down times for Maeve, real loneliness, though she claimed she didn’t realise how lonely she was until later, when she could measure it against her happiness with her soulmate, the man who, as her friend the journalist Anne McHardy put it,
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drove ‘a series of bad-hat lovers out of her life, for ever’.

One St Patrick’s Day Maeve found herself at a particular low point and booked into a hotel by the sea to be alone and sort things out. In the morning sunshine she walked along the sand and, finding a secluded spot, decided spontaneously to take a swim, throwing off her clothes and running naked into the sea. Minutes later a man and a woman appeared and sat down, right by her clothes. Appalled at first that they might be intending to rifle through her things, she then recognised them as an elderly couple she knew vaguely from Dublin and pondered what she should do.

Should she shout that she was stark naked and ask would they
please avert their eyes as she alighted from the sea? Or should she walk out unabashed and be damned?

Concluding that her level of confidence did not meet the requirements of the latter option, she began yelling that she hadn’t a bathing costume, that she had not expected to meet anyone, would they mind walking along the beach and she’d catch them up later?

The old couple stayed stoically where they were. Either out of ignorance, because they couldn’t hear what Maeve said above the surf, or on account of their Irish sense of humour, they dug in.