Maeve's Times (16 page)

The chat went on, and on, and on, and nobody mentioned putting all the chapters together and sort of editing out any discrepancies. And finally I couldn’t bear it any more and said, ‘Well, did we all find the porn-writing difficult?’ And somebody looked at me blankly and said ‘porn-writing?’ That was the damn sportswriter who had all the sports in the world to choose from. I knew his fear of his wife was too great, I knew it and the girl in the insurance company said, ‘It was all a joke, wasn’t it?’ A bit nervously and hopefully I thought. And the man who had worked for a bit in Aer Lingus gave a sigh of pure relief and said, ‘Oh yes, of course it was a joke.’ And the others all ratted, so I ratted too and said naturally I was only joking, and went up to the ladies and tore up ‘Magnolia Checks into Her Hotel’ into little pieces and burned it in an ashtray and gave up my chance of being a millionaire.

D
uring the weekend I made the mistake of reading one of those magazines written by a new brand of unreal woman. These are the dames who are on their third and finally happy marriage, who behave like an angelic drama mum to his children, her children and their children, who earn £9,000 a year in some dynamic career, run a boutique and a charity shop in their spare time, give dinner parties, look magnificent, travel all over the world with pigskin luggage and 21-year-old male admirers, and still find time in their bionic hearts to advise the rest of us how to live our lives.

One of these hard-faced Hannahs suggested that I and the other million fools who would be hanging on her words should try a week of self-improvement. We would be astonished, she pontificated, at how much more alive we would feel. No, we were to make no excuses, everyone had a lunch hour, hadn’t they? We were to forswear lunch and start improving ourselves instead. We would thank her later.

Monday:
Learn a new skill: yoga? calligraphy? a language?

Well determined and all as I was to test this dame’s theory, the lotus position was something that I didn’t see fitting happily into my life. Slow, beautiful handwriting was for monks in the eighth century, not for journalists in the twentieth. Fast, accurate typewriting would be a much more intelligent thing to do. But since I taught myself to type despairingly eight years ago and worked out a great hit and miss system which involves five fingers out of the 10 that I have, and means that its mainly readable, I don’t think I’d learn anything from someone who tried to force me to do hard things like use all the fingers and not look at the keys. It had better be a language. So on Monday, yet again I took up Italian. I love it, of course, the only trouble is that I’m never able to remember a word of it, or create a sentence in it. But there was no excuse.

The Inner London Education Authority has provided classes in a place off Fleet Street which is actually 54 paces from my office. They have lunchtime Italian classes on a Monday. It would be nice and familiar anyway, I thought, all that ‘
Ecco il Maestro
’ and ‘
Come sta
?
Bene grazie, e Lei?
’ In fact I was really looking forward to the familiar business of getting as far as lesson four in yet another instant and painless way to master the language. There were 12 of us in the class. We sized each other up as playmates for the year; I thought they looked very good value. We all told each other eagerly that our ambition was to be able to sit in the middle of a huge Italian group, exchanging jokes and shouting and realising that everyone else wasn’t fighting just because they were shouting.

The teacher came in, she was splendid. She looked about 80, and was full of extravagant gestures, and delighted to meet us all. She was actually so nice and beaming and full of charm that she looked like a stage Italian mama sent over by Central Casting. And we all thundered out ‘
Ecco la classe, ecco il libro, ecco il maestro
’, terribly happily with her, and this time – perhaps this time – I might stick to it. She was so damn nice, and she believed that we were all doing splendidly. I mingled with my classmates afterwards, because the awful article had said I would make friends of my own age and different sexes when learning a new skill. But they were harder working than I, and they kept talking about putting the definite pronoun before words like studenta and porta, and weren’t at all into asking me to marry them or have a brief and brittle affair. But perhaps that will come later, I thought happily and put a few definite pronouns in with the best.

Tuesday:
Brighten yourself up, have a facial
.

The Italian class had been such a success that I ploughed ahead with all the rest of the advice. Indeed brightening myself up would be a fine thought, I decided, having examined myself in a magnifying mirror for the first time since I was a teenager, and it wasn’t a joyous experience.

‘Do you want the full facial, the mini facial, the city skin breather, or just a cleanse and make-up?’ asked the voice from the big store.

‘How much is the full?’ I asked humbly.

‘Well it would depend, Madam, it could be as little as £4 depending on what you want done.’

But I wanted them to tell me what I wanted done; I dithered for a while.

‘Of course if you wanted eyelashes tinted, facial hair removed, unsightly blemishes covered up, skin peeling, and vapour masks, it would all add up,’ the voice said.

This made my crumbling brain come to a decision. ‘I’ll have the mini facial,’ I said firmly and went along at lunchtime to have it.

It was horror from the word go. I longed for the self-improvement of ‘ecco il maestro’. Instead I had ‘Good heavens, we do need a little work here, don’t we? Did you say you only booked for the mini facial? Ah, well, we’ll see what we can do.’

I spent an hour and £2.80 fighting off offers to tear off my eyebrows, refusing to pay another 60p to have my face hoovered with some electric vacuum cleaner that had come in that week from America, and denying utterly that I wanted my ears pierced, even though there had been some mistake and a piercing girl came into the cubicle with what she called sleepers saying that cubicle eight had ordered them.

The beautician was nice but single-minded, she saw a course of treatments for my face, she saw them every week, the full not the mini variety. She saw herself selling me creams to plump out tissues and to beat back lines, she saw a rich heavy night cream, and a light nongreasy day cream. She saw much more than just Brightening Myself Up, which was what I saw. I regard it as the major achievement of the week that I was grown up enough not to see any of these things with her, and be able to leave with the lying promise that I would think about what she said. I didn’t look any brighter at all, and I will
never
think about what she said. It’s too dispiriting.

Wednesday:
Help other people, it will make you feel good inside
.

It seemed an odd if not selfish reason to help other people, but maybe these hard, brittle women phrase things oddly. Perhaps it was just a ploy to get us out there doing something instead of just talking about it. I rang an old people’s home and asked could I help them serve lunch, they said they’d be delighted and off I went.

I was in the room where they served the wheelchair lunch, which meant gathering everyone together and assembling them around the table. You had to tie bibs around people, long plastic ones which practically covered the whole chair. I thought this was very undignified and said that I was sorry to the old man that I was tying into his bib first.

‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I’d much prefer a pinny, the old hands aren’t what they used to be, and all this convenience food, you know, it slips off the fork. Much prefer to be well covered up.’

They were having soup, and then bacon casserole and mash, and then stewed apricots and custard.

‘Why aren’t you wearing a uniform?’ asked one old lady to me as I was passing her food.

‘They didn’t have one to fit me,’ I said.

‘People are getting much fatter nowadays,’ she said thoughtfully and not in any way insultingly. ‘I suppose it’s the lack of exercise, and so much food available and everything since the last war.’

She told me about her son who was married to a very fat selfish woman, which was odd since fat people are meant to be jolly, but her daughter-in-law was sour and selfish, and she had three sour fat grandchildren. It was a sad thing to end up having been responsible for three sour grandchildren.

‘Perhaps they’ll get thinner,’ I said hopefully.

‘But will they get less sour?’ she wondered, and there was no answer to that.

I was helping to clean up, and an old man told me not to, that only people who couldn’t speak English cleaned up. I thought this was a wrong theory, but he said it was very sensible, people who could speak English talked to the guests, the others who would like to talk to them but couldn’t cleaned up.

So I went to talk to him and he told me he was 91 and very happy. He had been so lucky to get into this home, because there were three television sets, and three sitting rooms, so you could watch whatever channel you liked, and that this was the kind of thing that really made a home successful, and he got £2 of his pension into his hand every week, and was saving it up to buy a nice West Indian nurse a Christmas present, because she had been great to him, and she kept promising to take him back to Trinidad with her, even though they both knew it was a joke.

And then they were all having a little doze, and they would have afternoon tea at four when other helpers would come in and serve it to them at their chairs. I don’t think it really made me feel good inside but it made me a lot less afraid of being old.

Thursday:
Brighten up your office, we work better in bright surroundings
.

This was actually taken out of my hands because the office was full to the gills of workmen brightening it up for me. The London Editor had cunningly arranged that the Conservative Party Conference should be taking place in Brighton, as far away as possible from 85 Fleet Street while this chaos was going on, so I had to deal with it alone.

Well, deal with it? It was a matter of getting down on all fours and crawling under my own desk to be able to sit at it. Then I was trapped in a corner, while Alf and Bert walked backwards and forwards across it foot in typewriter and bottom on telephone, both cheerfully apologising and saying they hoped they weren’t disturbing me. Every time the phone rang they both took out pneumatic drills, and made exaggerated dentist noises about a foot from my ear, and anyone who telephoned me on Thursday may well be justified in thinking that I had gone mad.

I managed a few calls by putting my head and the phone in a drawer. But when I got it out again, Alf had piled four chairs on my desk, and Bert had moved the filing cabinet over to block the door. They had both left in search of some electricians and so I missed the coffee trolley when it passed the door and I missed going out to a nice wine and cheese reception, but at least there were no drills going and nobody pacing backwards and forwards on my desk so I got a bit of work done.

And then they came back and they told me that this job was going to take a bit longer than I thought and than they thought and they started drilling again. And I picked up the potted plant that was going to brighten up my office for me and I left silently with it under my arm and went to a library not far away and read three books that I had to review.

I felt a bit guilty because it was a Christian Science Reading Room and I apologised for not reading anything about Christian Science but the woman said it didn’t matter, I could read whatever I liked, so I hid the titles from her and read away until it got dark.

Friday:
Shake yourself out of your old routine. Do something you would never normally do
.

The trouble here is that I don’t have an old routine. Nearly every day I do something that I wouldn’t normally do, there’s no normal. But I’m still not glittering and action-packed like these new women that upset me so much.

I must try to think of something really unusual to do at lunchtime.

I’ve seen all the lunchtime plays that I want to, and then that couldn’t be called unusual. I’ve never been up to the top of the post office tower, but it’s a dull day and would I see anything? There is a lunchtime cookery class I believe somewhere, but then that’s too like Monday and learning a new skill. Eventually I thought of something. I’d take a walk. I would go and explore parts of the city I had never seen. This would be helpful about opening my mind and broadening my horizons, not to mention flattening my feet.

I set off happily and marched down towards the City, to the stockbrokers and the banks and the money houses, looking fearfully upwards in case I’d be hit by falling bodies of speculators. But nothing like that happened. I just got a bit weary plodding on through these caverns of streets, when suddenly a door opened, and two men, locked in what looked like a very un-Londonish embrace, hurtled out. Still groping each other, they fell on to the ground and rolled lovingly towards the traffic. Taxis and buses were now practically standing up on their hind legs to avoid them, and there was an enormous amount of excitement. So near me were they that they actually knocked my handbag out of my hand, so I had to join them more or less in order to get it back.

I was extremely embarrassed by the whole thing, kneeling beside them on the edge of the footpath saying, ‘Excuse me … I’m sorry … you seem to have ….’

Then I made the appalling discovery that they were not murmuring endearments to each other at all, they actually were trying to kill each other.

‘I’ll get you,’ one was panting.

‘Lying bastard,’ the other was huffing.

I grabbed my bag and explained to all the onlookers that it was really mine, one of those long, boring explanations that make you seem guilty when you are really innocent. ‘You see I don’t know either of them,’ I explained to a stunned crowd. ‘You see, I was just passing by and they kind of knocked my handbag … it is mine, you see, it has all my things in it ….’