Maeve Binchy (19 page)

Then, from the mid-twentieth century, she could expect to find an Irish Centre in the great émigré cities, London, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow – a place of succour, but also somewhere to be Irish with your countrymen, a home from home. The years 1965 to 1990 were the golden age of the Irish community in Liverpool, thanks to the Irish Centre there. The feeling among the leaders there was that if an émigré didn’t retain his own dancing, music, language, then he would have nothing to give to the community in which he lived, and the Irish as a body would sink without trace.

Now, the very same route – Irish Centre, Catholic priest – brought Maeve her first really successful story in England. At the Irish Centre in Camden Town Maeve met with a priest who told her a story of an Irish émigré, a builder’s labourer in his parish, whose wife was preparing for Christmas when the news came from the hospital that her husband had died of pneumonia. She couldn’t believe it, she kept thinking that it’s a huge hospital and there must be some mistake. But there was no mistake and the family was suddenly without an earner. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the man’s brothers had turned up from Ireland to collect the body. The priest intervened and objected that he’d lived half his life in London. ‘Won’t he want to be buried where his wife and children can visit his grave?’ ‘No,’ said
the older brother. ‘He’d want to be buried in the parish church at home, where his wife and seven children can visit the grave.’

The man had one wife and family in Ireland and another in London, neither one knowing about the other until the man died. The story first appeared in the
Irish Times
under the headline ‘Death in Kilburn’, and as a direct result became the basis of Maeve’s most successful play,
Deeply Regretted By
, the classic Irish émigré tale that she wrote in 1976.

She felt that the most important thing about the bigamy story was that it was true, for bigamy among Irishmen in London, she discovered, was far from unusual. That it is a crime under Section 57 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and carries a sentence of up to seven years in prison was not the point. She wanted our understanding. These men had been forced to emigrate to find work and fallen foul of the law because there was no work available at home. Her message to the Irish at home was, ‘Don’t forget us, just because you think there’s plenty of jobs and money and we’ll be fine; listen to that fleeting sense you have that we Irish in Britain do feel different and a little bit lost.’

But this was far from the only string to her bow. In the summer of 1974 she took a holiday in Cyprus and barely had she touched base in London on her return but she was ordered back on the plane to report on an Athens-backed coup on the island which had ignited a major international incident, the British offering sanctuary to the deposed President, Archbishop Makarios, and America sending seven ships to stand off Cyprus ‘in readiness’.

Maeve always regarded Cyprus as the best thing that
journalism
ever landed her, as it meant that she got a story in the paper every day. Soon she was at the front, reporting from the Cypriot capital, Nicosia, describing the burnt-out remnants of Makarios’s palace, the scene of strongest resistance, and being abandoned by her driver, who said he would rather ‘vomit’ than have anything to do with the rebels.

When serious bombing of the capital began, she, along with a hundred other reporters, retreated to the British base in Dhekelia in the south of the island, relating tales of horror about the mass evacuation from the north.

Desperate that her articles got through to Renagh Holohan, who was by now London Editor of the
Irish Times
, Maeve would sleep in the queue of journalists for the phone, the only means by which to relay her stories home, rather than risk losing her slot if she left.

Travelling abroad on her own in her twenties had nurtured useful skills for survival. Food and cigarettes were scarce and she bribed people to get supplies from the thousands of refugees. In the end she was among the last of the evacuees in an operation that transported over 6,000 people to Britain.

Characteristically, when she was categorised as a ‘friendly national, Class 4A’ she objected that ‘4A’ didn’t sound very friendly. They told her to ‘shut up’ and get on. Some British journalists flying out on the same plane had been classified 1A and didn’t let her forget it all the way home.

Back home in England she launched her ‘Inside London’ column. In common with Joyce and Dickens, the two writers
who influenced her most and whose work she loved, Maeve was becoming increasingly sympathetic to the everyday lives of ordinary people, to the minutiae of their day. This column was the first outlet for the particular skills she developed to pursue her interest, skills that would later be employed in her fiction. This is how it had worked for Dickens.
Sketches by Boz
carries in its very subtitle the writer’s fascination for ‘Every-day Life and Every-day People’,
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and the sketches led directly to his being commissioned to write fiction.

So it would be for Maeve. If reflection on Maureen’s habit of talking to whoever she met on the bus or in the open-air market in Dublin’s Moore Street planted the idea of ‘the elements of the marvellous latent in ordinary living’
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in Maeve’s mind, Dickens and Joyce almost certainly gave her the idea of pursuing it in a literary vein.

Maeve’s new column would be described as ‘a veritable psychopathology of everyday life’.
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It could have been conducted simply as a series of interviews. Instead, she took any opportunity she could find for eavesdropping on her subjects. She began listening in to people’s conversations in restaurants, on buses, wherever she found herself. She even admitted to getting off a bus and pursuing two people down the street because their conversation hadn’t finished.

The No. 73 bus was a favourite vehicle: from Victoria through Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Tottenham Court Road, Euston, King’s Cross and Islington, ‘you hear everything eventually,’ she once said. She even developed a vacant, ‘not the full shilling’ look, as if she wasn’t quite there, so that people wouldn’t think
she had any particular interest in them. Gordon found it particularly dispiriting when suddenly she’d tune in to a conversation in a restaurant when he was mid-flow talking to her over a meal.

To give herself an edge, she decided to learn to lip-read. The idea came to her after catching a particularly bad cold, which made her a bit deaf, and when a programme came on television about lip-reading, she gave it a go, She would record the
television
news and play it back repeatedly with the volume turned down until she could read exactly what was said in the facial movements of the newscaster alone. She even attended classes in Kensington to hone her new skill, which on one occasion far in the future would give her unexpected and highly satisfying supremacy over a critical pair of her fans.

She was giving a talk to a large group of her readers. The format of the event included a lunch, followed by Maeve’s talk and then a signing session afterwards. Maeve always got a bit tense before giving these talks and was so nervous before this one that she barely touched her lunch. Afterwards, feeling
peckish
, she asked the publicity PA to prepare her a plate of cheese and biscuits, which she was eating while the line of her readers was forming, each with a copy of her latest novel ready for her signature. Some way in the distance she noticed two women, one of whom was saying to the other, ‘Would you look at her, eating a plate of cheese and biscuits after that huge meal, is it any wonder that she is the size she is?’ Maeve had ‘seen’ them say this as clearly as if they had whispered it into her ear. And she was furious. She put the cheese aside and began the
signing
session, chatting to each of her readers in turn and writing
a message in their books. Eventually, it was the turn of these two women. Maeve treated them as she had done every other. ‘“Lovely to see you and you look so well… And you mustn’t worry about the cheese; I had it instead of the dinner, not as well.” And their faces were scarlet and I loved it!’
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By the winter of 1975, delivering an eavesdropped conversation had become a Binchy format, an anticipated ingredient not only of her ‘Inside London’ column but of other articles too.

The very intrusiveness of her new private-lives technique was even sometimes used as the subject. In ‘On a Pier Day’ Maeve is back in Dublin. She has missed the train in Dún Laoghaire and is whiling away the time by walking the magnificent pier, a place no less imaginatively potent than the Cobb at Lyme Regis in Dorset, and equally popular for a stroll. It is a freezing day and Maeve notices a woman well wrapped up with a little dog which is looking less than happy with its situation, shivering uncomfortably in the cold. Maeve engages the woman in conversation, apparently concerned for the dog. The woman takes umbrage, protesting that her dog loves the bracing air and what’s more it does him good, it shakes the surplus fat off him. Maeve retreats and embarks on a brisk walk herself, before espying a man looking out to sea, ‘as if he were remembering a long life on the ocean or planning to end his life there’. She becomes convinced that he intends the latter and takes up a position close to him, intending quietly to divert him from his act of self-harm by talking about the cold weather and spring being around the corner, and when that fails, about the economy looking up. When he remains unmoved, she suggests that if
he is planning to walk back to Dún Laoghaire she might walk back with him, and congratulates herself that so selfless an act of friendship would be bound to do the trick.

At last the man turns towards her, examines her thoughtfully for the first time, and replies to each of her points in turn, making it plain in measured tones that he disagrees with her prognosis in every case, that the weather is showing
no
signs of turning, the economy is getting
worse
, and no he does
not
intend to walk back to Dún Laoghaire. He wants simply to be left alone. It transpires he is engaged in working out the plot of a novel.

Moving on, Maeve comes upon two schoolgirls so scantily clad that surely they are close to developing hypothermia, if not in serious danger of being raped… She thinks for a moment of getting involved, but decides this time she’ll let whatever will be happen.

Back in London she meets a woman at a party who has her bras and corsets made for her at a place in London’s West End which also services the Queen. Maeve decides to go see for herself and maybe buy a bra, an item of no small import for a woman her size. She hopes they won’t be snooty and put her down. ‘It’s bad enough to be put down when you’re dressed. Naked, it’s intolerable.’ When she arrives the lady-in-waiting is a model of politeness and discretion, but what is required is a mould of Maeve’s breasts – which is where the fun begins, as they scoop bits of her into a contraption ‘like two huge steel horseshoes covered in fur’. What they create turns out to be ‘the most cheering garment I ever bought … firm to the point of
being like reinforced steel. It will look fantastic if I’m knocked down by a bus.’

Gradually her articles became longer and more searching of the person being scrutinised; Maeve was not only on the hunt for a good story, but also for
character
. Indeed, from this point her stories tend to steer an uncertain course between journalistic fact and an imaginative work of fiction. ‘She witnesses real life dramas in airports, overhears suicide plans in quick food queues. Is it all true or does she make it up?’ wonders her friend the journalist Marianne Heron.
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Many of Maeve’s articles were now really short stories in disguise, like the one about Elise, a French woman who attaches herself to her on holiday in Morocco.

Elise’s genial, good-looking husband is paralysed from the waist down, but he is up for anything and is great fun, while Elise is precious, fastidious and snobbish. Everybody else seems to be enjoying themselves, but Maeve is stuck with Elise, who proceeds to grill Maeve about her wealth and social status, as if Elise were a cross between a tax inspector and a duchess looking for a maid companion. She then asks Maeve whether she thinks her husband is handsome. Maeve, thankful that the
interrogation
is at an end and keen to embrace this more positive turn in their conversation, agrees that he is fine looking indeed. Elise approves wholeheartedly. She values Maeve’s judgement because it is always nice to hear what others think about one’s choices in life. She then adds that of course she couldn’t possibly tell Maeve about the sexual side of their marriage… And so it goes on. There is no escaping the woman. It is like Maeve is caught
in a vice, and so shamelessly patronising is Elise about Maeve’s social status that Maeve is eventually unable even to respond.

Time and again it is Maeve breaking the ice with strangers that gets a story off the ground. ‘Oh, Why Can’t the English?’ made the most of her satirical émigré eye on the host nation. The episode occurs on a trip on the railway from London to Leeds, in the days when trains still had traditional six-seater compartments leading through their own door into a side
corridor
eventually into the next carriage. As the train gathers pace out of Euston, the door of the compartment is thrown open and the guard, a man in red braid, shouts in self-important
railway-speak
, ‘Lusk Hall Varieties!’ Maeve and the five businessmen, thrown together by chance into her compartment, look up wide eyed with non-comprehension, and with Maeve as
catalyst
, the unwritten rule of silence attached to train travel across England is broken. There develops a bizarre conversation as to what on earth ‘Lusk Hall Varieties’ might be, interest whipped up further by the sight of people hurrying along the corridor after the guard.

One by one, the members of the compartment – the
nimble-minded
crossword enthusiast, the management man, the fat budget man – each has his say, until finally, one of the group – ‘the geologist’ – cannot hold out any longer and goes to investigate, returning wiping tears of laughter from his eyes, to put the rest out of their misery. It was the way Red Braid had said it. ‘Lusk Hall Varieties!’ was in fact, ‘Last call for High Teas.’