Maeve Binchy (22 page)

Interestingly, the 1957 edition of
Thom’s Street Directory of Ireland
states that the cottage, at that time owned by one John Fahey, was actually named Polly
ville
, which, so long as that is not a printer’s error, means that somebody did rename it Pollyvilla within the era of Polyfilla. Perhaps Maeve would have returned it to the French original had she known!

The cottage consisted of a sitting room, dining room, kitchen and bathroom downstairs, and one bedroom upstairs. As a bolt-hole in Dublin, it was perfect. It would be a little while yet before she and Gordon moved there altogether.

By this time Anna Cooper, Maeve’s agent, had left the John Johnson Agency to join Mother Teresa to become a nun and left behind her a list of editors who had expressed interest should Maeve ever look like writing a novel. When, subsequently, agency boss Andrew Hewson invited Christine Green, who was working for the literary publisher Faber & Faber, to take Anna’s
place, she met Maeve and discovered that while she was
enjoying
writing short stories, a novel was indeed very much on the cards, and Green rang the first name on that list.

Rosemary (Rosie) de Courcy worked for a company called Macdonald, which was engaged in publishing highly
commercial
hardbacks and paperbacks through its Futura imprint, all part of BPCC, the publishing and printing group run by the rogue entrepreneur Robert Maxwell, who would commit suicide in 1991 after plundering the
Daily Mirror
newspaper’s pension fund.

Rosie had in 1977 published
The Thorn Birds
, one of the most successful novels of any era and the first by the Australian writer Colleen McCullough (who would become a friend of Maeve). Rosie recalls:

That Maeve should suggest such a scenario may be thought a clue as to what had contributed to her own feelings of betrayal. But perhaps it is a common experience among girls, for it married with Rosie’s own experience.

She and Maeve clicked instantly and became close friends.

The two women had in common an attractive combination of success and vulnerability but they discussed this no more than they did Rosie’s Irish side of the family. It seemed important to Maeve that Rosie was completely English. Perhaps no surprise; Maeve was thinking and writing about the Irish girl
Aisling’s relationship with the English girl Elizabeth White when she and Rosie first became close. On the strength of Maeve’s first synopsis Rosie agreed with Chris Green a £5,000 advance against royalties for UK hardcover and paperback rights for the novel, to be called
Light a Penny Candle
. The deal was not a particularly generous one at the time, but everything had fallen neatly into place and a contract was drawn.

Eventually, the part of the £5,000 advance due on signature of the contract, probably one third of it, arrived at Green’s office. Green banked it and sent Maeve the amount less her
commission
. The sum of money that Maeve received at this point will have been in the region of £1,500. Not a lot, but she and Gordon had fallen a little behind with the mortgage payments on Pollyvilla and it was most welcome. Not only that, it was the first money earned by Maeve for her first novel.

When the cheque arrived, she and Gordon put it in pride of place on the mantelpiece at home in Hofland Street, danced round it, photographed it, kissed it, and celebrated the life out of it. The next day they came downstairs to discover the cheque was missing. They had lost the cheque for
Light a Penny Candle
on the day they received it!

They tore the house apart in search of it and eventually it was found. But the loss of it – temporary or permanent – wouldn’t have mattered a jot: shortly afterwards they were asked to return it.

Anthony Cheetham, an old Etonian with an editorial
background
in mass-market paperbacks and entrepreneurial flair, was the force behind Macdonald and had founded the paperback
imprint Futura for them, but had come to the conclusion that working for Maxwell was intolerable and made a move to set up his own publishing company with one or two other colleagues.

The new company was to be named Century. Rosie, who had risen from secretary to editor under Anthony’s personal
patronage
and, indeed, become his wife, was naturally to be a part of this and they wanted Maeve to come with them.

‘Anthony suggested that I should ask Maxwell if I could take two authors with me, but not to go for the obvious bestsellers,’ said Rosie.

In the light of this new state of affairs, Maeve was advised to cancel the contract with Macdonald, repay the advance and follow Anthony and Rosie to Century.
Light a Penny Candle
would lead the new list, which alone would be enough to get everyone jumping up and down about Rosie’s great new signing. Most important, it would mean that Rosie would remain her editor. Maeve remained characteristically loyal to Anthony and Rosie throughout, moving with the duo after they ceded control of the company to the mighty US publisher Random House and started up again as Orion Publishing. She was always loyal
and generous to those who helped her, staying with her new agent Chris Green after she left the John Johnson Agency and set up on her own, too, and moving twice with her American publisher and editor, Carole Baron.

So indispensable did Rosie become that ‘Maeve and Chris decided that ever after the
Light a Penny Candle
contract, they would insist on having an “editor clause” in her contracts,’ Rosie revealed. ‘This stated that if I left the company, Maeve would have the right to cancel the contract and follow me.’

So began a relationship between Maeve, Rosie and Anthony that would continue for years, during which Century Publishing became the publishing sensation of Margaret Thatcher’s making-it-happen Britain.

Green, meanwhile, turned her attention to her author, for whom she had very high hopes. She realised that Maeve needed a system of working that would enable her to write the novel and at the same time continue as a journalist for the
Irish Times
, which Maeve both needed and wanted to do.

Things had been coming to a head even before the contract for the first novel. Since
Central Line
’s publication in 1978, Maeve had had increasingly heavy duties both to promote the book and write new stories for
Victoria Line
, which was published in 1980. So divided were her priorities between the book world and journalism that in the run-up to Margaret Thatcher’s election in May 1979, when she should have been turning in fascinating feature material about the possibility of the first female Prime Minister of Great Britain, she was instead sneaking off to do book tours and fobbing off the editor of the
Irish Times
with
reassurances that Thatcher’s would be a long campaign with plenty of time to cover it.

Maeve was adamant that she didn’t want to stop writing for the
Times
and in any case £5,000 was not enough to secure her services full time on the novel. The plan was to carry on with her job and write the novel in short bursts. She would sit down every Friday afternoon when everyone else was in the pub and work on the manuscript until late afternoon on Sunday, or until 5,000 words were written.

Through the week she would get up at 5.12 a.m., having worked out that it took her eighteen minutes to get washed, dressed and make a cup of coffee, so she’d be at the typewriter at 5.30, work on the novel for three hours and then head off to the
Irish Times
office in Fleet Street.

Sacrosanct was the Monday morning deadline when she would put the 5,000 words in a taxi and send it to her agent. Gordon read each instalment and if Maeve descended into despair at any point he pulled her round.

Light a Penny Candle
took a year to write but what
immediately
made it all worthwhile was the publishers’ response. They were bowled over by it, which is not to say that it didn’t cause some surprise. ‘On the basis of the synopsis, I had been
expecting
a short, rather gloomy novel about best friends destroying each other,’ Rosie told me. ‘What I got was a great big heart-warming saga about best friends who stick up for each other through thick and thin – even suspected murder. That was when I knew I had something truly special on my hands.’

As soon as the contract was dry, Maeve said later, the synopsis
which had earned her the contract had been torn up and she wrote the novel we all read.
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Perhaps it wasn’t in her nature to write so negative and destructive a story as had first been mooted. If it had had a real precedent then this may well have been the case. She told Donal O’Donoghue in 2010 that she had once tried to write a novel about revenge and found she couldn’t. It was the only book she was never able to finish. This, after all, is the girl who at school never had anything bad to say about anybody. ‘I couldn’t get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance,’ she said.

Maeve had much more important things to consider. Yes, like the short stories, her first novel would be about females, and yes, it would be about feelings and emotions, and it would tackle the social issues she’d been writing about in her
journalism
, many of which concerned Ireland as it changed from a God-fearing society into a secular one. But more than this, she wanted to see whether she could deliver the essence of who she had become, the stuff she’d been working on since that day on the bench on St Stephen’s Green. It was no coincidence that the central character was called ‘Aisling’ (the name of the Merriman convention), Maeve’s wild, free, all-seeing, intuitive self, fiercely passionate, capable of cutting through the rational restraints of everyday thinking, yet with a highly sensible attitude, clever, but not intellectual, a spirit whose speciality is feeling and emotion – laughing, really – and who is Irish to the core. This is Aisling O’Connor with the wild red hair in the novel, whose spirit we also detect in Aisling’s mother Eileen and in Maeve’s real mother Maureen, and in the side of Maeve which
engaged freely with the otherworldly feminine mystique of Ireland itself.

Rosie predicted correctly that publication would make Maeve a millionaire. Everyone, including, most importantly, Century’s marketing executive, Susan Lamb, was completely hooked on the story, although Maeve told her great friend Mary Kenny that there had been some misgivings that it was completely devoid of explicit sex.

Sex was an especially important ingredient in paperback fiction at this time. Anthony Cheetham’s Futura had come to prominence partly on the back of a category of historical fiction pioneered by Avon, an American paperback publisher, where an editor called Nancy Coffey had been releasing passionate historical novels with explicit sex scenes. Known in the trade on both sides of the Atlantic as ‘bodice-rippers’, these were huge door-stopping books with a clear-cut editorial formula, which purportedly included a bedroom scene every nineteen pages. It led to writers such as Kathleen Woodiwiss (
The Flame & the Flower
, 1972) and Rosemary Rogers (
Sweet Savage Love
, 1974) among many others, becoming millionaires overnight.

These authors had a huge impact on the marketing of women’s paperback fiction and, at Futura, Rosie had made her name as a white-hot mass-market editor after selling a series of
home-grown
bodice-rippers back across the Atlantic for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Then along came Maeve with a novel with no explicit sex scenes at all! After publication she must have become sick of having to explain why. ‘There’s a huge interest in sex and writing
about it very graphically,’ Maeve told the
Daily Mail
. ‘But I am not going to do it – not because I’m a Holy Joe, far from it. Not because I’m very moral, far from that. But because I’m afraid I’ll get it wrong.’ Nothing could have been more disarming. ‘I’ve never been to an orgy,’ she said, ‘and I wouldn’t know where legs should be and arms should be.’

Her personal sex life, much to her chagrin, she said, had not been as colourful as she would have liked.
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But there is no doubt that Maeve was a hot-blooded, passionate woman who liked to use what she claimed was her lack of experience in
lovemaking
to amuse her friends. One time she and her drinking pals on Dublin’s Fleet Street came up with the idea of writing a sex manual to make them some quick money, with each of them writing a chapter. Maeve was the only one to research hers; the others treated it as a boozy joke. But Maeve had the last laugh. She turned the situation into a brilliantly funny, sad and telling short story called ‘Tottenham Court Road’, which appeared in the
Central Line
collection.