Maeve Binchy (17 page)

Maeve realised what she had to do. Yelling and screaming she raced out of the water suddenly and flung herself belly down on her coat. Neither of them raised an eyebrow. He mumbled something about the March sea being chilly for a swim. She said Maeve really ought to have thought to bring a towel.

Maeve got dressed, walked with them back to the hotel and played poker with them for the rest of the afternoon.

At home with her father, at least life had a stable pattern. They would take the train into Dublin together each morning, he to his work in the Four Courts, she to the newspaper. In the
evening
they’d have supper together at home. Afterwards he’d go to his study and then join her and watch a bit of television – it was a peaceful life.

There had been times when she wanted to get him to go on holiday and felt bad that she hadn’t pressed him to go with her. Maeve, after all, was travelling all over the place in pursuit of her career. She wrote a touching story about this, entitled
‘Victoria’. She wonders what her father would say if she set up a trip for him and the reader soon gets a sense of her frustration. We know that he was far from helpless, a gentle intellectual, unpushy in his job and in his relations with others, but all is so quiet without the force of her mother’s personality, and Maeve can only see him from her point of view.

In the story the father has his study and he manages to look after himself adequately when she is away. He never asks what his daughter is up to when she stays out overnight, but loves to discuss whatever adventures she may have had, if she wants to tell him. But it is life at a rate she cannot relate to, love of a sort that seems lost to this world already.

She suggests that they go together to Paris, which he’s always talking about visiting. He says that it would be a good idea, some time, when he retires and has time to think it through and plan, but he won’t commit. Was he now someone who said things that meant nothing? Is that what growing old is?

Truth seems constantly to be compromised in life. Why does the truth of so many loving things eventually have to slip away?

Then one time Maeve was away interviewing an American millionaire for the
Irish Times
. She spoke to her father on the telephone in the evening, made some joke about there being no one of marriage material for her there. And her father said something about wealth taking the life out of people.

Maeve’s sister Renie was with him that evening. Later she went in to his study and saw him dozing with his book in his hand. The sisters used to joke that William would protest that he hadn’t been dozing, ‘just thinking with my eyes closed’.
Renie smiled and thought he was just thinking with his eyes closed, but then realised that he was not. William was dead. As peacefully as that, Maeve’s father William Francis Binchy passed away.

Maeve had lost both her parents in three years, and now she would also lose the home in which she had been living since she was a child of twelve. The past was swept from under her in one moment and she was completely bereft.

She took a flat in Dublin and often of an evening she found that she’d forget that she had moved and would turn left out of the office, turning towards the station for the train to Dalkey, rather than right for the bus to her apartment.

She decided to work very hard to get it out of her system.

B
y the early 1970s, as well as working for the
Irish Times
, Maeve was broadcasting for RTÉ
54
in Dublin and
working
too for the BBC in London, sometimes down the phone line from Dublin and sometimes actually at the BBC studios, just north of Oxford Circus, in Portland Place.

One day she sent a letter to a theatre critic to attack him for something he’d written in a review. The critic had thought her letter very funny and told her she should get it broadcast. Why didn’t she send it to
Woman’s Hour
?
55

Maeve did what the critic suggested and received a letter from
Woman’s Hour
suggesting that if she was in London why didn’t she come in and record a reading of the letter? So Maeve did just that. The producer of
Woman’s Hour
, who later became a great friend, introduced her to a freelance broadcaster by the name of Gordon Snell. They got on very well and whenever Maeve found herself in London thereafter, they’d meet and have a drink, at first in the BBC Club, where Gordon would
sometimes
meet with his friends after work.

The Club was a short walk from the BBC’s Portland Place studios. Maeve describes it perfectly as it was in the 1970s in ‘Oxford Circus’, another of her stories in the
Central Line
collection
– a big room beyond the porter’s desk, crowds of people, virtually no one to recognise from the telly, more like a constant party, really, than a gentleman’s club with deep leather chairs. The heroine of Maeve’s story doesn’t like it at all and it wasn’t a very womanly place, certainly. But it was a great meeting place for the many freelancers on whom the BBC depended, such as Maeve herself.

Gordon was tall and, although seven years older than Maeve, was boyishly handsome with quite a crop of hair, which he swept back over a high forehead and kept long at the back to the collar.

Measured against Maeve he was anything but the extrovert, but so were most people, and he couldn’t be criticised for being shy. He was, after all, a broadcaster, and used to projecting his personality. The son of a chartered surveyor, Gordon was
intelligent
, congenial, open and sunny. He hailed from Watford in Hertfordshire, just to the north of London. Hertfordshire, though very suburban by then, was originally part of the Binchy heartland, before the family came to Ireland, indeed long before the Norman Conquest even.

Maeve and Gordon gelled immediately, partly because they shared the same kind of humour, but also because of their
differences
. He was really the perfect foil for Maeve. There were rarely silences in any company in which Maeve was involved, but here with Gordon the rapport was at once wholly natural and true.

She claimed not to have fancied him straight away, but liked being with him, thought him ‘just great’ and found him ‘
interesting
’, by which she meant she detected something singular in the way he related to people, which made her trust him. Trust was a key emotion in Maeve’s repertoire.

And trust was not something she associated with men. She observed that Gordon had lots of long-term friends, many from when he was at school. He wasn’t the kind of person who transferred from one circle to another according to what he was doing in his work.

Gordon was genuine. He was interested in people and cared about what they did. But it was his openness to Maeve herself that really swung it. She observed that his face lit up whenever he saw someone he knew and liked, and it lit up for her
especially
, which she found ‘immensely cheering’.

After all the disappointment in her relations with men, he was exactly what Maeve needed. They were good friends for a year or two, then romance slowly blossomed. Ever
spontaneous
, Maeve once suggested hopping on the hovercraft to Boulogne for the day. In those days the 27-mile journey time from Dover to Boulogne was only thirty-five minutes, with six trips a day at peak times. Why not, said Gordon, so they did. Once there they walked up the hill in the town to the little square and spent the whole of the rest of the day in a restaurant, eating, drinking and talking and talking, until it was time for the hovercraft to return. By common consent it was that day in Boulogne which transformed their relationship into more than friendship.

Maeve confessed that she was ‘beginning to fancy him
dreadfully
’, but wanted at all costs not to put herself at risk in a relationship again. The good news was that Gordon wasn’t married – she had promised herself never to fall for a married man again. But was it perhaps good between them, Maeve wondered, because they saw one another more or less only at weekends?

Maeve’s main argument was always with herself. She spoke to herself like a teacher, just as she spoke to other people when they were at an uncertain point in their emotional lives. She told herself that the geographical distance between Ireland and England surely made it impossible for the relationship to become more serious. But then she and Gordon decided they would go on a holiday together to Sicily, and they had such a wonderful time that it seemed to Maeve ridiculous to be always saying goodbye to Gordon at airports. It was time to introduce him to her family.

Later she would write a very well-observed story for her
Victoria Line
collection called ‘Highbury & Islington’, in which Adam worries about what others might think of his partner when they first give her the once-over. Their two worlds are so different that for as long as he can he puts off the date when his fiancée, Heather, will meet his family, and even when the time arrives he finds a ridiculous excuse at the last minute to avoid the meeting. The reader realises that he will lose Heather’s respect in the end, indeed he has already lost that of the readers. It was time Adam grew up.

After Gordon met Maeve’s family for the first time he asked her at the airport what they’d thought of him. Maeve said they
were absolutely delighted with him. ‘Yes, but what did they say?’ he asked. Maeve replied, as Aidan says to Orla in
A Week in Winter
, ‘They said you’d be no trouble.’

‘God, isn’t that a recommendation,’ Orla replies.

Gordon felt much the same. But Maeve reassured him it was the highest praise from her brother and sisters.

Of course, to begin with, the Irish–English issue was at the fulcrum of Maeve-and-Gordon relations and, as far as Maeve could see, the reason why they handled themselves so
differently
on social occasions. When Gordon first came to Ireland, if they found themselves at dinner with her friends, Maeve would criticise him for not saying more, not being more demonstrative. Gordon would protest that he liked to listen to what people said. She insisted that in Ireland that is simply not good enough, that the Irish are not listeners but talkers. Gordon objected that as far as he was concerned listening was good. But Maeve wouldn’t hear of it. ‘The etiquette books say you should have four good listeners and four good talkers at a dinner party,’ she said once in interview with CBS News, ‘but that would never work in Ireland, because where would you find the good listeners? And if you knew them, you wouldn’t invite them to your house. You wouldn’t let them in the door. What would they be so quiet about, what would they be listening for?’
56

Maeve’s criticism was hardly justified, for she herself was a great listener – she had to be. She made her name as a journalist by listening to, indeed eavesdropping on, other people, and later whole novels came out of chance words overheard. In any case, her dictum that Gordon should become a talker rather than a
listener at parties is in contravention of her first principle: be who you are.

Maeve would not have been persuaded by any such argument. But Gordon soon began to fight his own corner a bit and when, a few years later, at a Christmas dinner in London’s Fleet Street, Maeve, as always holding court until late, insisted that Gordon sing a song with her, joining the fray was no longer a problem for him, and according to their friend Patsey Murphy, Editor of the
Irish Times Magazine
, one of Maeve’s favourite songs was ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man of Mine’, which naturally she would sing on her own.

Later, Gordon could give as well as take and was not averse to a bit of badinage with the woman he came to love, though in the end it was hard to pip Maeve. Perhaps with tongue firmly in cheek, he once admitted that he never knew about the TV soap opera
Coronation Street
until he met Maeve. She replied, ‘Life was limited in every way when you come to think about it. But you were keeping yourself in readiness.’
57

It became a great double act. ‘What struck me was the
incredible
relaxation of Maeve and Gordon in each other’s company,’ said Declan Kiberd. ‘It radiated out and brought everyone into that zone of comfort and ease.’
58

Maeve was aware of the differences between them, while at the same time knowing that he was the first man in her life who was true. Her friends realised she was in love with him long before she did, and the romance went on and on, with Maeve and Gordon travelling back and forth between England and
Ireland, Maeve increasingly concerned that it would never move onto a more certain footing.

How could it? The
Irish Times
was everything to her and she had built an enviable reputation through her features and the women’s page. How could she just give that up and take the risk of a far less certain future with Gordon in London?

Leap in the Dark
, with a nice touch of irony, was the name of a BBC TV series for which Gordon was anchor in 1973. Linda Blandford was his female counterpart. It was a kind of
Tomorrow’s World
of the paranormal – the 1970s were full of mystics and magic, with people like Uri Geller bending spoons by looking at them and Erich von Däniken riding high in the bestseller charts with his extra-terrestrial-themed
Chariots of the Gods?. Leap in the Dark
went on to be a success and continued for four series (1973, 1975, 1977 and 1980). Gordon had performed very well in the initial stages with a less than ground-breaking script, trussed up in an olive-green safari jacket to give just the right air of ‘gentleman adventurer with stories to make your hair curl’, as one reviewer put it. But after they changed the format from documentary to docu-drama he wisely made a graceful retreat.

Maeve made her leap in the dark one day when she saw Douglas Gageby posting a job notice on the board at the
Irish Times
for ‘a man on the ground in London’ to write features for the paper. Maeve ‘humphed’ when she read the advertisement over his shoulder. Gageby looked at her over his glasses mildly disapprovingly and asked whether she was interested in the job – ‘You’ve got a fella in England, haven’t you?’ Maeve replied that
the discriminatory tone of the advertisement was her point. But Gageby could see that it wasn’t: ‘Well, do you want the job, or not?’ Maeve did. It was the perfect solution.

She liked to say that that was how she came to pursue Gordon and ‘nail his feet to the floor’. But at the time she still wasn’t 100 per cent sure it would work out, and later said that it took a bit of courage. In the event, she got the job sewn up and telephoned Gordon, nonchalantly telling him that she’d ‘got this job in London…’ Asked later how he’d reacted, Gordon said, ‘I was startled … but pleased!’

‘Love Gordon; hate London’ would have been Maeve’s
telegram
home a few months later, for working in London wasn’t at all as she’d imagined it would be.

She had thought that it would be like Dublin, a world of
journalism
in which everybody knew everyone else. She expected that people would be shouting, ‘Hello Maeve, are you coming for a drink in El Vino’s?’ every time she set foot on Fleet Street.

But with London more than twice the size of the whole of Ireland in population, it wasn’t like that, and the London office for the
Irish Times
was but an outpost, shared with the
Cork Examiner
. When the writer Roisin McAuley became the
Examiner
’s London correspondent, there was only a
partition
between her desk and those of Maeve and the then London Editor, Conor O’Clery.

Maeve confessed she was ‘a bit startled’ at the relative scale of the whole thing. Suddenly, she didn’t know anyone; even when she went on a press junket and was in among forty or fifty journalists it was likely that she wouldn’t see a soul that
she knew. Just occasionally she might bump into Mary Kenny or Mary Holland at some glittery celebrity party and run off to have a meal and some non-glittery conversation, which was ‘like the nectar of the gods’. But it didn’t happen often. It was all so utterly different to the daily round at home in Dublin.

London itself in the early 1970s was not a particularly great place in which to live. Striking miners had brought Britain almost to a standstill, with a three-day week operating from January 1974 until the following March, Prime Minister Ted Heath’s makeshift idea to conserve electricity. Hospitals, supermarkets and other essential services (including newspaper printers) were exempt, but the whole place slowed down to a crawl.

At the same time the IRA had moved into the capital, and the next three decades were played out against their horrific activities, which made being Irish no easier.

On 8 March 1973, just as she arrived, the Provisional IRA conducted its first operation in England, planting four car bombs in London, killing one person and injuring 180. Ten members of the IRA unit were arrested at Heathrow airport trying to leave the country. On Christmas Eve, two packages exploded almost simultaneously in pubs in Swiss Cottage. On 17 June 1974, a bomb exploded at the Houses of Parliament. On 17 July bombs exploded in the Tower of London and at government buildings in Balham. On 7 November a bomb was thrown through the window of the Kings Arms pub in Woolwich. On 21 December bombs were defused in Harrods department store in Knightsbridge and outside London at the King’s Arms pub in Warminster, Wiltshire. On 28 August 1975
a bomb exploded in Oxford Street. On 5 September another exploded in the lobby of the Hilton hotel. On 3 November a car bomb exploded in Connaught Square. From 6th to 12th December the IRA held two people hostage in the Balcombe Street Siege. And on 27 March 1976 a bomb exploded in a litter bin at the top of an escalator in a crowded exhibition hall at Earl’s Court: 20,000 people were attending the
Daily Mail
Ideal Home Exhibition at the time; seventy were injured, four people lost limbs.