Maeve's Times (44 page)

‘It’s twenty past nine in the morning,’ Gordon said.

He was right. It was water.

I ate the olive resentfully. Each time during the three takes. Then the camera moves inexplicably from us to the stars. But we are there. You wouldn’t want to blink or look down to choose a sweet or anything, or you would miss us, but we are part of it.

In the last cut I saw of the film we are still there, sipping delicately, mouthing our thanks and, in my case, wondering why on earth I wore lilac, which is the most enlarging colour in the spectrum.

It’s a terrific, moving and touching film. We have all had losses in our lives, we have all loved foolishly and been lonely. The film tells very clearly, as the book tried to do, that the solution is in our own hands, that we have to make ourselves better. There is no cavalry waiting on a cliff to rescue us. We have to do it for ourselves.

Marilyn and Ria do that on the screen as much as they did in the book, played by two wonderful actors who, with the rest of my cast, told this story as well as I could have hoped and better. I was lonely when the film crew packed up and went away, as they do. But at least we have the book, and the movie is out there to be seen as well.

W
hen the National Gallery of Ireland first suggested it, I had the very real fear that it might be some terrible practical joke. That it could be a
Candid Camera
style television programme watching people making fools of themselves by accepting huge honours like that and then having to bluster their way out of it.

But they seemed serious. So I was utterly delighted and waited for the artist to arrive.

She was Maeve McCarthy and had been at the same school as I had, though admittedly a quarter of a century later. We talked animatedly about loved figures and less-than-loved figures in the place, and had a great bond.

I had looked her up and seen how successful she was, as well as all the competitions she had won. She had painted a self-portrait which everyone had said was very good, but in real life she was good-looking, and the self-portrait had made her look a lot less attractive than she was. If she’s so tough on herself, I thought, what is she going to do to a subject? And I sort of hinted that.

But she explained that there were various conventions about a self-portrait, which I thought was all very well in theory but going to be a bit tough on me if she was into too much gritty realism. Still, we were into it now.

She told me the bad news was that she couldn’t paint from photographs, but the good news was that I didn’t have to sit still. I could move about and talk and drink mugs of tea and everything.

So I was busy then trying to look for nice bits of our house to be painted in – near the one good piece of furniture maybe, with some tasteful glass arranged on it?

She said she would like to prowl about the place looking for a setting and could I just get on with my life so that she could observe me?

So I chose a day when Gordon would be out and I got on with life, trying to ignore her. For a whole morning I yacked away on the phone, typed with my four-finger typing, looked things up in the dictionary, stroked the cat who had settled in the ‘Action This Day’ basket, and had a script conference about a project with Jean Pasley where McCarthy was most helpful and came up with some good ideas.

After a day of prowling she had chosen the location. It was to be upstairs in our study where you can see Dalkey Castle in the background over the roof. And she wanted Gordon to sit in on the roof terrace – sort of out of sight but with his legs in the picture. His legs? Yes, just his presence around the place apparently, and he would be reading
The Irish Times
. What? Product placement? No, you would only get a hint that it was
The Irish Times
. Right. Right.

So we had the first sitting; there was some discussion about the colour I would wear, and eventually I settled on blue. Maeve McCarthy set up her easel and I sat down nervously and waited for it to begin.

We talked about everything under the sun – life, death, hopes, disappointments, friends, family, travel. And then the sitting was over.

I had heard you must not look at your own portrait until it is finished. But she shrugged. Of course I could look at it, she said.

Interestingly, there was no face.

Lots of Dalkey Castle, and the roof, and the desk I was sitting at, and big, blue shoulders, but no face.

I managed to say nothing. After the fourth sitting, when there was still no face – only pixelation like they put in a newspaper to hide the face of the Accused or the Suspect – I thought I would mention it.

‘Oh I won’t do your face,’ she said, at which I felt dizzy and wondered had I entirely misunderstood the whole thing.

‘Not until much later,’ she added to my relief, and the blood returned slowly to my veins.

After the sixth sitting, still no face as such. She asked me if I liked the picture. We were such friends now, I had to be honest. ‘I spend over €20 each time you come getting my hair done and it doesn’t really show. I wonder does the hair look a bit flattened in the portrait?’ I said nervously.

‘You’re very lucky you didn’t have Gwen John painting you – she made subjects put Vaseline all over their heads so that she could see the shape of the skull,’ Maeve McCarthy said unsympathetically.

And then the pixelation went and I saw my face, and the lovely picture of our cats, and a picture of our friends on the wall, and a mug of tea with Nighthawks on it. And best of all the reassuring presence of Gordon outside the window, reading a paper, which could be
The Irish Times
. And then it was all over.

Maeve McCarthy packed up her easel and her brushes and her little jars of whatever it was and left.

And I missed her like mad.

She made it all very painless, she was great company and I am as pleased as anything that it was done.

It is a huge honour to be chosen by the national gallery of your own land to hang in its halls, and to be lent a talented portrait painter for a summer of friendship and insights.

I will of course be hovering a lot about the gallery for some time pretending I have come to see something else, or that I am taking some overseas visitors for a tour. But really I will be there to make sure they don’t take it down.

1. ‘Cheer up, nobody ever died of arthritis.’ This statement is, oddly, not cheering at all. We have dark, broody feelings that if people did die of arthritis there might have been huge, well-funded research projects over the last few decades, which could have come up with a cure.
   
2. ‘It’s just a sign of old age, it will come to us all.’ No, it’s not a sign of old age. Even toddlers can get arthritis, and some old people never get a twinge of it. The very worst phrase you can use is ‘Haven’t you had a good innings?’
   
3. Remember that marvellous radio series about disabilities called
   Does He Take Sugar?
   The message of that title means you should never ask, in the hearing of someone with arthritis, ‘Do you think she’ll be able to manage the stairs?’ Arthritis can make us many things, but it certainly doesn’t make us deaf.
   
4. Avoid mentioning magic cures, as anyone with arthritis will already have heard of vinegars, honey, mussels, berry teas, and so on. We will probably have tried them too. It is dispiriting to be told of someone else who was once bent double but now climbs mountains before breakfast.
   
5. Don’t ever say, ‘That walking stick is very ageing – I wouldn’t use it if I were you.’ Did you think we thought of the stick as a fashion accessory? Of course we know it’s hardly rejuvenating to be seen bent over a stick, but when the alternative is a knee or a hip that could let us down, or pitch us into the traffic, then the stick is a great help. It is sad when people give us the impression that it makes us look 100 years old. At least we are getting out there, and that should be praised and encouraged.
   
6. Never let the phrase ‘a touch of arthritis’ pass your lips. You don’t say someone has a touch of diabetes or a touch of asthma. It is denying sympathy and concern for people who have a painful and ever-present condition to minimise it to just ‘a touch’.
   
7. Don’t suggest a healthy walk to blow away the cobwebs. People whose joints are unreliable don’t want to get further proof of this when they are halfway down the pier. Unless you are a physiotherapist, don’t impose exercise on others.
   
8. Don’t tell arthritis sufferers to go and live in a hot, dry climate like Arizona. We know it might be easier on the joints, but some of us are very happy here with family and friends, and we don’t want to be packed off like remittance men.
   
9. One time you shouldn’t stay silent is when your favourite restaurants, theatres or galleries are difficult to access for a friend with arthritis. Before you turn your back on them, be sure to tell the owners or proprietors exactly why you will not be making a booking. You can be very polite and praising (‘I hear such good things about your place’), but just confirm that there isn’t a lift and that the cloakrooms are up or down a flight of stairs?’). If enough people were to do this, it would not take long to improve facilities. If we don’t tell the offenders, how will they know there’s a problem?
   
10. Don’t ever say, sadly, how tragic it is that nothing has been done for poor arthritis sufferers. Plenty is being done. Just contact Arthritis Ireland, or phone its new helpline. Then you will have an idea of how much is happening and you can be a true and informed friend rather than a false and frightening one.
    

W
ell, I did say from the very start that there was a problem. There was no extreme poverty in the tale, no family discord, no feuds, no emigration. Nothing to hang a good story on. But they said they knew all that and they still wanted to go ahead.

So Gordon and I had a working party on it and listed the arguments for and against. Against doing the whole thing were the fact that the story was too tame to hold people’s interest and the fact that I love talking so much that once I get started I can’t be stopped. And in favour of it was that it would be good to have something that would confound my enemies, but we couldn’t think of any enemies we wanted to confound, so that one didn’t really work. But also in favour of it was that we know Noel Pearson, whose company would be making it, and we knew it wouldn’t be a dull and glum sort of thing.

I checked with my sister and brother to see whether they would be horrified by it all, and they said nonsense and I should go ahead. So I said yes, because I’m as easily flattered as the next person, and I thought it would be great to be made much of and for people to arrange flattering lighting and tell me they were ready for my close-up. And of course this was all at the end of the summer, when autumn seemed miles away.

But, the way things do, the day arrived. I met the director, Sinéad O’Brien; I actually knew her mother and her father and her grandmother. I wondered mildly was she old enough to be directing documentaries, but she assured me she was, so we got that out of the way early on.

And then, bit by bit, I met everyone else, the cameramen and the sound recordists, all of them cheerful, charming and hugely apologetic about the amount of gear they had to bring into the house. We were apologising equally for the smallness of the house, as we would reverse into the bathroom, climb over what seemed like gigantic metal trunks, and negotiate floors covered with thick cables.

The lights were so bright you could see everybody’s nose hair and any other imperfection in the skin; but there was Make-Up to deal with that. There were never fewer than 12 people around, each one knowing exactly their role. Archives would be taking out my papers, borrowed on a daily basis from UCD library, and getting out old scrapbooks that I had totally forgotten. Continuity was making sure I was wearing the same dress to continue a conversation as I had been wearing to begin it the day before – people with clipboards who knew far more about me than I knew about myself. When I would say vaguely that something happened back in the 1960s or 1970s, they would actually know the date.

A gloom-ridden acquaintance told me I would be demented from making them all tea. I want to put on record that no cup of tea was ever brewed in this house for the crew.

Magically, trays of sandwiches or little cakes appeared from Dalkey’s cafés and food shops; cartons of good coffee were always available.

If they had been doing a documentary with a more able-bodied person there could have been great shots of me striding along the beach at White Rock or climbing Killiney Hill. I could have been down at Dalkey Island, talking to the porpoises and the seals.

But this wasn’t on.

I find moving about very hard these days, so it all had to be done at home. I caught sight of myself on a monitor one day and almost forgot to talk, because I was in a kind of torpor, wondering why I hadn’t gone on that diet I thought I was going to try, a diet that apparently puts hollows in your cheeks and makes your neck long and thin. I had even cut it out of a newspaper and filed it away carefully in a yellow file called ‘Action This Day’ last August and forgotten about it totally.

But otherwise I just talked and talked until I felt there wasn’t one more word to say.

Any question I was asked I answered at immense length. I exhausted myself and them.

They reassured me and said that once the editor had got at it these monologues would look much more acceptable.

I dearly hope this is so.

Then I would hear tales of the days they interviewed other people: family, friends and colleagues. It wasn’t that I was worried would these people tell any Awful Secrets, because, honestly, there aren’t any Awful Secrets, but I hated them having to say nice things on order.

I wasn’t allowed anywhere near all this filming, quite rightly, and I even had to leave the house when Gordon, my husband, was being interviewed, because they didn’t want me staring at him beadily, willing him to say how wonderful I was and am.