Maeve's Times (40 page)

And I asked Maire on her own would she have liked Valentines at all over the years, and she said she would of course – like any human. But Sean wasn’t made that way and it would be like asking for people to do something completely against their nature. He was a good man to her. He’d give her money to buy one for herself if he thought she was fussing over it.

But oddly, for the first time he was looking around him out there where waitresses and shopkeepers and barbers and deck-chair attendants were all talking about the feast day. He had actually said to her that maybe sending a card was a cultural thing – like wearing shamrock on St Patrick’s Day. So she wouldn’t be surprised if the man she fell in love with in 1958 when Mick Delahunty’s band was playing might well buy her a card this year. It wouldn’t continue at home, but it was different in the southern hemisphere.

And love is in the air all over the place, not only for the Feast Day. This week Nelson Mandela’s handsome face smiles out of every paper as he clasps the hand of Graça Machel, widow of the Mozambican President. He has now spoken publicly of his love for her, how they talk every day on the telephone and how she has changed his life. Commentators on all sides seem to be full of indulgence and delight about it all, even though weddings have not actually been mentioned. Even Archbishop Desmond Tutu harrumphs only mildly about it and though he has to point out to the President about being a role model for young people, there has not as yet been any serious thundering from pulpits.

And then there’s the other marvellous love story that’s all over the papers. The tale of David and Caroline Dickie. He is 80, she is 70. They only met recently at a party in England and confided to each other that their children were plotting to put them into old people’s homes against their wills. So they came out on a holiday to South Africa and got married.

According to the way it’s told here, their children
still
don’t know. David is English and used to work in Kenya. Caroline is originally Irish, a teacher, and used to work in Zambia. They both look radiant, barefoot on a sandy beach under a caption saying ‘Saved By The Wedding Bells’.

They are going back to England to face the music today, and if I had the energy and the time I’d find them and go with them myself just to see the St Valentine’s Day surprise a lot of people are going to get when they find out.

W
hen we were young teachers a wise woman told us that we should never ask the children to tell the class what they did for Easter or Christmas or Confirmation or St Patrick’s Day.

Don’t ask, she said, because it will turn out that some of them did nothing at all or – worse still – had a really awful time. Nothing points up the inequality of people’s lives more starkly than asking innocent children to tell you how they spent what was meant to be a festival.

But once I forgot this and asked them what they did for the National Day.

There was the usual chorus of visiting granny and going to watch the parade and having lunch in a hotel from the lucky ones.

And then there was a child who said they spent the whole day looking for a vet’s that might be open because their dog had got hurted.

And I asked what had happened to hurt the dog.

Later you get a sense of what not to ask, but you don’t have it when you’re 22 and eager to be nice to the children and encourage them to tell stories.

It was a tale of a brother who had been away at sea coming home unexpectedly and his not liking the fact that Mammy’s friend was living in the house and breaking a chair, and the dog got frightened and ran under the table whining.

And there had been a fight between the girl’s brother and her Mammy’s friend, and the dog hadn’t understood so he jumped at the brother not realising who he was and to save himself her brother had picked up a bread knife and the dog was badly hurted.

And we all sat in that classroom as the horror of someone else’s St Patrick’s Day came through to us.

And I remember her voice going on about it not being too bad in the end because eventually she and her sister brought the dog to a hospital – a hospital for people – and someone there knew a vet nearby, so they carried the dog to his house and he stitched the cut in the shoulder and the dog would limp always on his front left paw and he had a bit of a cough but he was not going to die which they thought he might when they saw all the blood.

I wonder do any of the other pupils remember her telling that story? She is dead now, so I can tell it without hurting her.

She left school without any real education or exams, nothing much at home to encourage her, and she married when she was 19 – to a very nice fellow apparently, and they had a grand marriage until she died at the age of 38, some complications after a routine operation.

I’m sure that during the years of her happy marriage she didn’t keep thinking back to that terrible St Patrick’s Day in 1962 when she and her little sister carried a big dog covered in blood all around Dublin and eventually going to a hospital for people.

Maybe even the sadness and fright of the Domestic Incident had long died down in her mind.

Not in mine.

I think of it every St Patrick’s Day when I see the Special Menus advertised in hotels, when I hear the oompah-oompah of a band. Not because I want to superimpose on everyone else’s happiness the image of those two frightened little girls whose dog always coughed and walked with a limp as a result of the day’s events.

I suppose it’s just to remind us not to assume.

It certainly cemented the lesson that the wise old teacher had taught us, and now that I’m not in the classroom any more it hasn’t lost its relevance. I strongly believe that you don’t do thoughtless, cheerful vox pops to people about feast days.

In spite of the greeting cards, the streamers, the cheerleaders and the festivities, a startling number of people may have remarkably little to celebrate.

And all this came to mind because I met a glowing young girl with a tape recorder who was doing a series of ad-lib recordings in a shopping mall for a radio programme.

She thrust her microphone at passers-by and with a huge infectious grin she asked every one of them, ‘What will
YOU
be doing on St Patrick’s Day?’ Her tone expected a reaction of riotous excitement, fun, happy families and carnival time.

In my earshot she met a man who would be going to see his wife up in the hospital as usual.

She met a woman who said she was going to stay in bed all day with the sheet up to her chin because she was demented with all the demands her children were making.

She met an elderly woman who said she wouldn’t be doing much because she had been broken into and robbed.

In one way I wished the gorgeous girl with the microphone might realise that not everybody on this windy day was gearing up to a party-party spirit. That she was unearthing more despair than hope.

But then as a co-worker I was sort of sorry for her. I know what it’s like when people won’t say what you want them to, when they refuse to behave like a crowd sent down by Central Casting who are mouthing exactly what you want to hear.

But finally she met another gorgeous young girl like herself.

‘I’m a
SINBAD
, I’ll be cruising Temple Bar,’ said the interviewee, which seemed to satisfy the girl with the microphone perfectly.

But not me.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, coming out of hiding from my lurking position. ‘What’s a
SINBAD
?’

Apparently it’s a Single Income No Boyfriend, Absolutely Desperate.

But then everyone knew that, didn’t they?

I
t had been a good day and when I saw a little ant run across my desk I thought to myself, in a rare fit of Buddhist kindness, that the poor little fellow hadn’t much of a life, really. The desk must have seemed endless to him and he didn’t know what awful dangers, such as myself, were lurking nearby. So I picked him up on a postcard and carried him out to the garden and put him in a big pot that contains a fuchsia. There, now he would have grand things to eat – old fuchsia leaves, earth grubs, much nicer than a dull old desk.

Feeling very proud of myself and full of virtue, I went back to work and discovered 12 more ants crawling up the screen of the word processor.

Suddenly we had a distinct change of policy.

No more mercy dashes to the potted fuchsia.

The ants were too many and too insistent and in the wrong place. I went for the Parozone and a J-cloth, and having nearly asphyxiated myself I looked at the surface to see had I dealt with them as quickly and efficiently as I believed.

The ants loved the Parozone. They reeled a bit at first – as we all might with a first, strong gin and tonic – but they obviously took to it greatly, and sent out a message for their friends to come and join them. The other ants heard somehow that the good times were rolling on my desk and they arrived eager to share the delicious taste of bleach.

The day looked a lot less good somehow and I withdrew a bit to consider my position. Now, I don’t like them. We’re not meant to like things with six legs and antennae. Nobody enjoys seeing things much smaller than us scuttling around the place, particularly around our place.

And it was actually a question of numbers. One ant was all right but this amount was not. And I had the feeling the ant which had been carried outside had long said farewell to the fuchsia leaves and had come back to join the bleach sniffers. And of course there’s the huge guilt feeling: this must mean I have a filthy house. Why else were crawling insects marching towards it? Quite obviously it’s a place that any infestation would love to settle in.

This was doubly distressing because I was expecting a colleague to arrive from London and we were going to be spending some six hours at this desk going through a manuscript page by page.

The thought of having to beat the ants off with a ruler before we could even read the thing was not something I wanted to contemplate. Nor did I fancy what might be reported about the standards of hygiene in modern Dalkey.

Sitting well back from the desk full of reeling, happy ants, I reached cautiously for the telephone to ring Éanna Ní Lamhna, of RTÉ’s nature-programme fame, who would be the right person. She would know what was politically correct about ants without being foolishly sentimental and asking me to give them muesli for their breakfast or anything. But there was only her answering machine. In times of stress nowadays I have a big mug of tea and turn on the radio. So, having examined the mug very carefully for fear of drinking a dozen ants accidentally, I turned on RTÉ.

A huge ant discussion was taking place. I looked at the radio beadily for a bit. People are always imagining they hear voices on the radio talking to them: it’s a fairly common paranoia apparently. But I listened very carefully and they really were talking about ants.

And wonderful, healing words came out of the little radio: ‘It doesn’t mean your house is dirty.’ The man said it twice. I could have leaped into the radio and hugged him. Apparently it’s just that people have patios near their houses more nowadays, and grouting between tiles. Yes, yes, I was saying, looking out at the roof garden with its tiles, all this is true. The ants are just looking for food, that’s why they come indoors, the calming voice said. Yes, well. That’s as may be. But you’d wonder why can’t they eat the grouting and the things outside where nature intended them to be? This point was not properly dealt with, I felt.

Anyway, they moved on to a pest person, and the pest person said that there were indeed far more inquiries about ants at the moment, a lot of people had been inquiring. Anxious even.

Well, that makes you feel better. Up to a point. At least the house isn’t dirty. It has been said on the radio, so it must be true. And there’s somehow comfort in knowing that they’ve got into other people’s places.

But not huge comfort.

Remember the Hitchcock film
The Birds
? It wasn’t that much help to know that they were in everyone else’s house pecking their eyes out, too.

There’s always a really good, kind person on these programmes and he came on and said that ants were fantastic little creatures and hugely helpful in the ecosystem. They ate dead insects and they aerated the soil.

Yes, well. I looked at them marching up and down the screen of the laptop and forced myself to think well of them. Even if I could carry them all out, would I be able to motivate them to eat dead insects and aerate the soil?

The kind man was saying that possibly the best thing to do was to make sure they didn’t get in in the first place and more or less ignore them if they did.

But then I thought of the six hours of work at this desk that lay ahead, and I took a magnifying glass and looked at an ant carefully and whipped myself up with hatred for their species. And I went out and bought ant-killer. The ant-killer was full of warnings. First it said, ‘Use only as an insecticide,’ which was a staggering instruction. What did they expect people to use it as? A deodorant? To ice a cake?

Then it said that you should wear rubber gloves and keep it miles from any electrical equipment and never let any of it get into the air, only on to skirting boards and window frames.

They’d obviously never come across an infested desk because there were further warnings about not putting it near furniture or matt surfaces. And that it would be detrimental to pond life and must be kept far, far from anywhere animals might feed.

And just at that point the two cats came in, knowing that all was not well, and that
The Little Book of Calm
was badly needed. And the moment I thought of them licking this murderously poisonous stuff and lying dead beside the ants, all eight paws rigid in the air, my decision was made. I carried the ant-killer to the garden shed and all the pages that had to be gone through downstairs to the dining-room table. At the moment, an ant-free zone.