Maeve's Times (30 page)

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.

I
t’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, about 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?’

L
ast 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.

So there was this day when it came to getting the cookery page ready and it was one of the days that George hadn’t sent an illustration. The recipes were for various ways of cooking veal. Of course, because I wasn’t well organised there was no time to ask the
Irish Times
photography department to set up a nice, relevant picture, so I looked through what I always called my Emergency Cookery Pictures File. These were things that had come from various sources, you know, pots of marmalade beside oranges, and picnic hampers. Nothing seemed very suitable until I saw a nice, vague-looking picture of a casserole with a lot of spoons and servers and forks sticking out of it. It wasn’t the
best
but it would do, I told myself. A swift caption was typed by me: ‘Tasty veal casserole, excellent for a winter evening.’ And with the totally undeserved feeling of a job well done, I took the train out to Dalkey at the end of the day.

My father and I were looking at the nine o’clock news on television when I saw something that made me deeply uneasy. I saw Dr Christiaan Barnard, the heart transplant surgeon, getting off a plane somewhere after yet another successful operation, and I knew suddenly where I had seen that picture before. It was in fact a picture of open-heart surgery. What I had taken to be forks and servers were in fact clamps and forceps.

I telephoned the paper and asked them to hold the cookery page. As a request at ten past nine at night, it was poorly received. I was asked why, and the explanation was met with disbelief.

‘I think you had better get in here as quickly as possible,’ said the editor in a voice that I knew was holding on by only a thread.

We had no car, so I started to run the nine miles from Dalkey to Dublin purple-faced, panic-stricken. An unknown man with a car gave me a lift, and when he heard my errand he abandoned his car in the traffic in D’Olier Street and came in with me, a total stranger, saying he had to see; he loved to know how other people coped in a crisis.

Grimly, I discovered, very grimly. They stood around my desk searching hopelessly for any alternative picture; not having unearthed the Emergency Cookery Pictures File, they found only a cache of Kit Kat wrappers and a bundle of magazines of much lower brow than I would have liked it known I read.

The replacement picture had to be of the same size. There was now no time to enlarge or reduce anything that emerged from the file. Eventually I found one, an egg in an egg cup … I think it was a picture from an advertising agency trying to show the charms of some china.

Underneath the picture, and under the grim glance of Top People, I typed out, ‘Why be content with a boiled egg on a winter’s evening when you could have all these tasty veal recipes?’

Theodora was on the phone bright and early.

‘You didn’t exactly kill yourself getting an illustration,’ she said to me frostily.

But she was delighted with the explanation of the terrible happenings the night before. She said she had lived a colourful life and it would have been entertaining to have added a prosecution for cannibalism to her other achievements. She seemed to regret my last-minute discovery and heroic dash to save us all from turning out a cookery page that would have been a collector’s item.

She said almost wistfully that it would have been something that would make people remember her … as if there were a chance that any of us will ever forget Theodora.

E
ven though a heavy cloud of greyness is hanging over the British election, there’s still a whiff of intrigue about it all. I’m excited already at the thought of going to the press conferences and looking them all straight in their weary eyes and seeing how they’re bearing up.

And it also reminds me of the great happiness of going back to school knowing that a hated teacher has gone, you can hardly dare to believe it. She won’t be there in the hound’s-tooth suit baying at the back of the hall, turning with reptilian cunning to the cowering ministers on either side saying those dreaded words, ‘I think that’s one for you, Home Secretary, or Chancellor,’ addressing any number of men whose nervous systems and political futures she unsettled over the years.

I have no nostalgia for those Thatcher days when the sun always shone and we were sure of a good row story every outing.

I think the place is far better without her, and for once she may have done the wisest thing by leaving town. Because she sure as hell did everything else wrong a year and a half ago when she was leaving. She waited to be booted out, she patted the head of the little grey boy who was to be her successor and she even chose the wrong little grey boy to be her puppet because he cleared his throat and found his own voice and lived perfectly well without her.

She should have gone six months earlier and sat watching them running around like headless rabbits tearing each other to bits.