Maeve's Times (20 page)

‘Dublin is lovely, especially in May. I always think May is the best month.’

‘Do you?’ he said, ‘I thought it would have been appalling in May.’

‘It’s not,’ I said, thinking that the magic meeting was palling a bit.

‘But I do know you,’ he said. ‘I have a distinct memory of talking to you for hours and hours sometime. Can’t you remember where it was?’

‘I can’t,’ I said, biting back the next boastful thing I was going to say, which was that it could have been anywhere because I go so many places.

‘We talked about tax evasion,’ he said, happiness dawning on his face.

Now that’s something I never talk about, because, honestly, I have nothing at all to say on the subject. Not, of course, that this would necessarily strike it from the topics I discuss, but it’s something that would bore me rigid. People saying, ‘You should claim for the light and heating of the room where you work,’ or ‘You write me a cheque and I’ll write you a cheque.’

It’s too wildly beyond anything I could grasp.

‘Were you for it or against it?’ I asked jovially.

‘I was neither,’ he said, ‘but you were very well up in it all.’

This was taking a bad turn. He couldn’t be some spy sent out from the tax office in Dublin to hound me down in a London street and get me to admit everything? There’s nothing to admit, for God’s sake, except that I pay too much PAYE because I can’t understand the forms.

‘I don’t think I know anything about it at all,’ I said, trembling with guilt, and reddening and prepared to hand myself over.

‘I’m rarely wrong about these things,’ he said. ‘I have a memory of you smoking a cheroot and saying you had a scheme which would mean that you would never pay tax again.’

‘I don’t smoke cheroots,’ I cried desperately.

‘You were about to give them up at the time,’ he said. ‘I suppose you didn’t, though, it seemed to be causing you some pain.’

Cary Grant was never like this. In one of his pick-ups he would have remembered my eyes, or the song that they were playing at the time, we would have gone to a wine bar or a skiing chalet to discuss it. We would have fallen hopelessly in love. Cary would never have droned on about cheroots and tax evasion. I said what I should have said at the outset.

‘I think that you must be mixing me up with someone else.’

A look of desperation came into his eyes. He was obviously for some reason determined to keep me there, which was flattering. He seemed to need to know me so badly, I almost relented. Perhaps he was just gauche and hadn’t seen enough Cary Grant films, perhaps he was a rough diamond. Perhaps as the women’s magazines are always saying, he was the strong, worthy type, few words, those few foolish, but worth a million of your other kind of man.

‘Well, I met someone like you somewhere,’ he said firmly. ‘And I have an hour to kill and I was wondering would you like to come and have a hamburger so that we can think where it was. Oh, come on. You look as if you have nothing to do either.’

‘You could read the evening paper,’ I said, because I am so extremely kind I would never hurt anyone’s feelings. I wouldn’t tell him to get lost, that he was an offensive bore.

‘I’ve read the evening paper,’ he said.

I was silent.

‘Well, make up your mind,’ he said. ‘It’s starting to rain, do we have a hamburger or don’t we? It’s stupid standing here getting wet.’

All right, all right, in years to come you’ll tell me I missed my big chance, that I could have developed an interest in smoking small black cigars and evading taxes even if it meant understanding them first in order to evade them. Perhaps we could have been sitting in his baronial hall with 28 guests and telling them the funny way we met all those years ago.

Perhaps you are right, and I was wrong, but I said, ‘I hate people talking about “killing time”. There’s very little of it left, we shouldn’t kill what there is. I’m afraid I must go on home. Thank you for the offer all the same.’

As I squelched off in the rain, he shouted, ‘You were always too bloody intense, I remember that about you. Go back to your cheroots and your tax forms, I don’t care.’

Oh Trevor Howard and Cary Grant, why did you have to louse up our lives making us think that chance meetings were great?

I
got a pen and paper and did the whole thing very systematically. It was on a train going to Ipswich and the man opposite me was doing it also, writing sneaky figures in the margin. Occasionally we would put our hands around the page like children at school who didn’t want anyone to see how they were getting on. At first it looked pretty good.

Age group between 31 and 39, which is grand and vague, means that I should live until I was 77.

Place where you live. Greater London nowadays, so that’s another year, 78.

I suppose journalism is laughingly called ‘professional job’. It isn’t ‘skilled’ in my case, and with all the modesty in the world I think it doesn’t fit into their classification for ‘unskilled’ so I add another two years, 80.

How do friends and relations describe you? Fortunately you never hear most of their descriptions. Calm is not an adjective I have ever heard about myself in any of its variations like always, or usually, or even moderately. On the other hand, people are inclined to say things like ‘hopelessly overwrought again’. So to be honest define that as moderately tense, and subtract one year. Back to 79.

Single and under 40 I am, so it’s down another two years. Why? Why? But actuaries must know their job is to know what weakens people. 77.

I knew it was coming – the cigarettes. I think I smoke 40, but I know I have to go into the third packet, so it’s age 67 now.

Drink. What’s an average day? Well if it was the previous Thursday … no forget that. If it were this particular Sunday there would be no drink at all. Come on, be honest, it works out at what they revoltingly call ‘six tots’ a day. I know, I know, but either do the thing honestly or not at all. Subtract five. 62.

Exercise. Run six miles a day? Are these actuaries
insane
?

Let’s see. It’s about three minutes to the bus, and about one minute from the bus to the tube. And about 30 seconds when you get off the tube. The same going home. Come off it. No exercise. Subtract five years, 57.

Weight. By the worst luck ever, hadn’t I weighed myself at Liverpool Street Station while waiting for the train. Otherwise I might have fooled myself a bit. No, the truth was just over two stone overweight. That was half an hour ago, there was no reason to believe that I had got thinner since then. Subtract six years. 51.

Now what’s ‘often ill’, for God’s sake? Does it mean all the time, some of the time? When you take the other alternatives, I suppose it
is
often. All that business about the gall bladder, and the limp I had where they were going to have me shot in the office unless I went to a doctor and had it cleared up. I get a lot of headaches … stop whining and feeling sorry for yourself. Subtract two years you silly hypochondriac and shut up. 49.

False teeth? Now this is embarrassing. I
have
one false tooth. Is it right to take the thing literally? They said teeth (plural), didn’t they? But the principle is that one fang is gone. It didn’t fall out by itself from age or being diseased, it was sort of assisted out in an incident. Still it’s gone. Subtract three years. 46.

So, no plans for how I can spend the seventies, the sixties or even the fifties. It’ll all be over at 46. I read that line about it not being scientific again and again. The man opposite me was doubled with laughter. He’s going to live until he’s 73, why shouldn’t he laugh? He said I had been too harsh with myself about the false tooth as we did it again to check. I said he had been too indulgent with himself about his weight. He said that it was being dramatic to call myself ‘moderately tense’. I said he was being insanely optimistic calling himself ‘always calm’.

We both agreed that it was a very foolish and frightening exercise, that it didn’t take anything into account like family history or ill health, like whether you had children or not, like whether your skilled job was steeplejack or draughtsman. It didn’t bother to investigate whether you had money worries, came from a family of long-livers, or had your home in a war zone. The man said that it was rather unfair that he got extra years for not smoking and drinking. I said that perhaps when he got to 73 he could take up both feverishly on borrowed time. He then worked out his boss’s life expectancy and was disappointed to find that was 85.

Anyway, according to the actuaries, you may not have to read me for much longer.

Though she may be best known and remembered for her features and regular weekly columns, Maeve Binchy was also a skilled news journalist. The following are excerpts from just two major stories she covered from the London office.

In the third week of July 1974 a Greek military junta backed a coup in Cyprus, prompting Turkey to retaliate with an invasion. Maeve Binchy had just returned from a holiday in Cyprus, and was asked to go back to report on the conflict. She has described this as the proudest moment of her career, because despite total isolation and terrible conditions, she got a story into
The Irish Times
every day.

D
on’t talk to any Cypriot about Geneva. Geneva is not on fire. What will Mr Callaghan and Dr Waldheim do about the sons and brothers who are dead? Will this high-power conference bring love and peace and co-existence with the men who are shooting at you to kill tonight, they ask. Are we all expected to live like dear friends after this week?

And not every country has known a military coup and a foreign invasion in one week. Tonight I talked to the Turkish Cypriot refugees, who sat spooning meat from tins and crying in the dark field where they wait to hear more news of their fellow Turks.

And the news they hear is not good. They know that whole villages have been wiped out. There are too few Turks here for comfort, they say. Where are the women, and the children from that little village and that little sector of the town?

An old man whose wife had been killed in a mountainous Turkish village near Platea told me that he had been saved by God, not Allah.

He was a Maronite. His poor wife was in heaven now. It was too terrible to tell, he said, but he told it with tears streaming down his old, brown face. They had a small shop, some Greeks in the next village, young and drunken, had come there late one night, ages ago, like three weeks previously, and demanded food. The old man said they were not open. The young thugs had put stones through the windows, and said they would be dead. Back they came on Saturday. Shouting and screaming that it was now war, they had worn uniforms; they came into his shop, to this one only, and shot his wife.

Another Turkish man confirmed his story. He said that they had been able to get lorries and get to the base quickly. They buried the old man’s wife in the garden and said prayers and then drove past before any other villagers could be massacred.

They know nothing, nothing about what is happening outside, only that Ankara Radio tells them first it has come to help the Turkish Cypriots establish their rights, and now that these rights have been established. It must be strange, harsh news to hear when you sit spooning out tinned meat, and thinking of your wife buried in the garden.

But there is not general despondency among the Turks, not even those whose villages have been attacked. At last Turkey has really come, and the intense pride that this gives them will be some solace when it is all over and the problems of normal life begin again. Turkey promised to come before and didn’t. Now it actually arrived and it will show the Greek Cypriots that the island is not all theirs, that a decent democratic way of life for all Turkish people will be maintained henceforward.

And in a strange way they have some reason for this wild belief, because their status, however personally disturbing, must be collectively improved when the bargains are being made, when the law-makers are yet again drawing up the rules.

I asked them did they not regret that the Turks had only landed in two areas of the Island, thus exposing the scattered villagers to risk. ‘President Ecevit is sad tonight in Ankara,’ said one young woman, who was a teacher in her town. ‘He did not want so many Turkish Cypriots to be attacked but what could he do? He had to land somewhere. He could hardly drop a hundred men into each village. These are the sacrifices we must make.’

She went on to describe the sacrifices they had made. They had been a minority with titular representation.

Oh yes, it looked good at the beginning, they had been given Vice-Presidentship and positions for a small Turkish National Guard. They were second citizens in every way, except one, she said proudly. ‘We are half of Cyprus. Even though our population is not half nor even a quarter, they must consider us one half of the population, and the Greeks the other when any decisions are made. That is what they never understood, but now that Turkey has shown real support and not forgotten us, things will be different.’

It all seemed so clear and so right that the Turks should be the victims in this mad war that I found myself agreeing with her from the heart. And the heart can change in a short walk through the section where the Greek Cypriot refugees are spooning meat out of tins.

There was an old Greek woman who thinks that her three sons are dead. Someone explained to me that she had not stopped wailing since Saturday morning when she was taken by friends to Dhekelia. They were in Kyrenia. They must be dead. Everyone is dead in Kyrenia. She was being looked after by a woman of about 40, her daughter-in-law, who refused to believe anyone was dead. The Turks had been pushed back into the sea. She had heard it all day on the radio.

An old Greek man thought that Cyprus would have to be partitioned sooner or later. Why not give the Turks Kyrenia since they had captured it anyway? Move the rest of the Turks in there, and let them feel happy with their harbour looking over at Turkey if that was what they wanted.