Maeve Binchy (20 page)

Now there can be no slinking back like tortoises into their all-too-English shells. The six continue to talk the whole way to
Leeds, making Maeve’s tacit point, to be developed years later in such tales as
Nights of Rain and Stars
(2004),
68
that ‘strangers are just friends you haven’t met yet’.
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When Red Braid reappears at the end and says, ‘Trying survival please’, they are all able to predict that the train was indeed
arriving at Leeds
.

Characterisation, social satire, comedy – it wasn’t long before Gordon insisted that Maeve try her hand at fiction. He’d known she’d be good at it since she took to filling in what he called ‘the word picture’ of people she encountered. On one occasion, again on the harbourside at Dún Laoghaire, she’d seen three people, two men and a woman, walking towards her, dressed for sailing but looking very grim. At once she imagined that they were a married couple walking with a best friend, and that the woman (the wife) was unhappy because she secretly wished she’d married the best friend rather than her husband. The best friend was looking grim because he was wondering why he didn’t marry the wife when he had the chance, instead of throwing his life away on his current girlfriend, a Barbie-doll blonde who always made herself scarce as soon as sailing was mentioned (which was why she wasn’t there). The husband was looking grim only because he was absorbed with what
problem
the wind was going to cause them sailing that day. He knew that his wife would bite his head off if he started to explain the problem. She no longer provided him with sex in the bedroom. She lived for the moments when the three of them met at the yacht club, when she of course dressed up to look as good as she could in the presence of the Barbie doll…

Maeve did actually write the story for the Dún Laoghaire
Yacht Club, calling it ‘An Enthusiastic Yacht Watcher’, and it had come to her just like that.

The eavesdropping might give her an idea for a story. But once she had the story she couldn’t help but imagine who the person was
in their entirety
. She couldn’t help creating the whole character, the environment in which that person lived and her emotional life – her psychology and what she felt.

In fact, Gordon first mentioned writing fiction as something they could both do. He wanted to write children’s books. For some time he’d had to put up with people saying, ‘I saw/heard you on such-and-such a programme last night. Can’t remember what it was about, but it was very good.’ And Maeve said that that was exactly how she felt about journalism – you wrote your piece, expending great creative energy in the process, and it was history – unknown to anyone the very next day. ‘Today’s paper is tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper,’ she said.

They both wanted something more lasting, something that could be accessed and be useful and entertaining long after it was written. Gordon had an idea for a fantasy story about a king who had great curiosity and a healthy scepticism for what he saw around him. In fact, he had a whole host of ideas of interest to young children.

Already Maeve had a useful contact in publishing called William Miller, an editor with a fine reputation who had, with three others, set up the trail-blazing Quartet Books in 1972. William, a former journalist and novelist himself, and a warm personality who liked to introduce himself as ‘a Scot, a homosexual and a socialist’, held court in bars or restaurants in
whichever capital city he happened to be. It was a fair bet that eventually he and Maeve would meet, and when they did that they would get on. William invited Maeve to write a book of short stories and together they came up with the unique London Underground theme of
Central Line
. Soon Maeve also had an agent, very possibly suggested by William – Anna Cooper of the John Johnson Agency.

Women’s feelings were always going to be the subject of the stories, because that is what Maeve knew about. But this ‘metro’ idea was brilliant because she found a story much easier to write once she had a setting with which she was familiar.

She started to travel the Central line, coming up occasionally at this station or that like a mole sniffing the air, then setting her imagination free to conjure up the atmosphere of the place and what people she might find living there.

Each story would have a point to make, putting into practice what she called ‘one of the great lessons of feature journalism – the Power of the Parable’ – to highlight something, some truth that had impressed itself on her in the course of her own
challenging
life over the past decade or so.

Less than a decade since her life had begun to fall into place, she was doing what she really wanted to do, writing fiction, and being with ‘dear generous Gordon, who makes life great every single day’. Gordon believed that she could do anything she set her mind to, as her mother had believed. He helped make Maureen’s confidence in her finally come true. For Maeve it was wonderful to have somebody by her side again who believed in her and who cheered her up when the going got tough, which it
surely would. Through his love for her, Gordon, it seemed, had set her free.

Writing fiction changed her feelings even about living in London, for she saw now that it would never have been possible in Dublin. The social scene, the lunches in the Pearl Bar with her journalist friends, the fun, the harum-scarum things she got up to, were a distraction. In Dublin they’d sit in bars talking about their plans to write, but very few did it. In England it was
different
. Once she announced that she was writing a book, people were forever asking how it was going, which was good for her. In London she was in the right place to get the writing done.

Suddenly it no longer mattered that she didn’t know anybody and didn’t have things to do in the evening. Now, instead of feeling guilty about turning up at Gordon’s workplace and being a hanger-on to his friends after she’d finished at the
Times
, she wrote short stories in the office between 6 and 8 p.m., after everyone else had gone home.

Combining writing fiction with daily journalism took some organisation. Roisin McAuley claimed that Maeve was the most organised person she had ever met, while Patsey Murphy described her levels of concentration in the office: ‘No
preciousness
, no delay.’

In due course Gordon also got a contract, with A. & C. Black in Soho Square, a publisher of some distinction in children’s books at the time.
The King of Quizzical Island
, as his book was called, would be illustrated by David McKee and published at the same time as Maeve’s
Central Line
.

Once they were both contracted, the writing regime changed.
Roisin and Renagh Holohan remember that Maeve would work from about nine o’clock in the morning until two at the office, when she would break for lunch. She went to lunch ‘always with company and lunch often continued late into the afternoon’.
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She would then go home. Gordon might be out working for the BBC or he’d be writing at home. If the latter, they would write in the same room – twin typewriters next to one another. ‘They worked together side by side, true mates,’ said Patsey Murphy, ‘their partnership in itself hugely inspiring.’
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They had a rule about showing each other their work. They had to tell the absolute truth. But then there would be what they called ‘sulking time’, ten minutes to decide whether the criticism would be taken on board or the original justified and kept.

Generally, they would break around seven. They’d be firm about this too, close up shop, have a shower, take a break, otherwise there’d be no end to the tinkering with what they had done. Maeve would put a cover on her typewriter to emphasise that that was all the attention the machine would be getting from her until the following day.

In the evening she and Gordon liked to entertain friends, many from the BBC or Fleet Street, and whenever anyone came over from Ireland they’d give a supper party in the house, just as Mary Holland had done. According to Roisin, Maeve was a demon card player and she recalled ‘many wonderful evenings of wine, cards (mostly solo whist, I think) and an endless stream of visiting friends’.

If no one came round and they didn’t go out to friends or the theatre (a favourite pastime), they’d have a quiet night with a
meal and a bottle of wine in front of the television and watch one of the many films they recorded in the afternoons – old black-and-white ones, mostly shot at a time when the English accent sounded like the South African accent today, as Maeve put it, an amusing observation, and true.

Or they might talk about their next trip to Ireland or the colour of the garden – gardening being a skill, like chess, more satisfying talked about than expertly practised. Maeve claimed that anyone watching her and Gordon play chess wouldn’t recognise it as the game they knew, but years later she so enjoyed it that she had a long-running postal series with her neighbour, whose moves would be despatched by hand through the cat flap onto the floor.

Then, no doubt influenced by her interest in old movies, Maeve decided she wanted to learn to tap dance and enrolled in a class in Covent Garden (as Orla does in
A Week in Winter
). She had a vision of herself dancing up a staircase like Ginger Rogers in
Swing Time
.

Maeve had always been a good dancer and she and Gordon attended the class twice a week with a group of friends. It was a serious commitment, involving practice at home to a record and the purchase of proper shoes. Not everyone kept it up, but Maeve and Gordon did.

No doubt one of the reasons it was felt that publishers would be attracted to Maeve as a good long-term prospect was that her
writing was already attracting interest from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

On 13 June 1975, Joe Dowling, Director of the Peacock Theatre, the small studio theatre below the foyer of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, wrote on behalf of the National Theatre Society that he was looking for plays. ‘I feel sure that with your splendid writing style and your consummate ear for dialogue, you could have a great contribution to make to the theatre.’ He’d read her
Irish Times
pieces and was a great admirer of her work ‘both as a reporter and as a witty and compassionate columnist’.

By the end of the month Maeve had replied to say that she was interested and suggested a play set in a classroom in an Irish convent school, with the action centred on three teachers whose lives are exposed by a devious schoolgirl. Dowling liked the idea, particularly as ‘it would give a few parts for our young actresses, which would be a welcome change’.

Maeve delivered the script of
End of Term
at some point in the first half of November and heard nothing from Dowling until midway through the following January, 1976, when he wrote: ‘I’m sure you are wondering what has happened to your play which you sent me in November.’

The script reviews had not been good. The problem seems to have been one of trying to pack too much into so short a play, too many characters and too much action. Of the three main plot elements – a blackmail attempt on a teacher by the devious schoolgirl, the reaction of the teacher and a love angle between them – it was felt that the first two alone would suffice. The reader’s report described it as ‘a rough and hurried first draft’.

In 1976 Maeve was only just beginning to progress from real-people journalism to fictional characterisation.
End of Term
was a huge learning curve. Particularly helpful was the
award-winning
playwright Hugh Leonard,
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who lived in Dalkey.

Leonard was acting as Editor at the Abbey at this time and advised Maeve about writing dialogue for a modern play,
pointing
out the need for realism. Instead of having her characters make long speeches (as had been the way in Shakespeare’s day), he suggested she look around at what actually happens. They were having lunch together at the time in a Dublin restaurant. Maeve looked around the room and saw at once that people don’t wait respectfully to hear another person out, they interrupt and engage with them and there are a lot of unfinished sentences.

On 10 August 1976, Martin Fahey, Secretary of the Abbey Theatre, wrote to her with a contract. On signature of it she would receive £40.

Meanwhile producer Louis Lentin had read Maeve’s story ‘Death in Kilburn’ in the
Irish Times
about the Irish bigamist, and commissioned a screenplay based on it, which she would call
Deeply Regretted By
.

Finally, on 12 December,
End of Term
– her first play – was produced for the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre.

Maeve was terrified before the opening night. A letter from Gordon shows just how much she needed reassurance. He advises her to regret nothing. Not being used to the gestation process of theatre or book publication, only to the instant turnaround of newspaper publishing, Maeve had hated the
whole process – eighteen months from initial contact to the play opening to the public. There had been what seemed to her huge hassle. Was it worthwhile? Gordon urges her to wait and see how she feels afterwards, to be cool and not to make an instant decision to stick in future to her plans, which clearly now include novels as well as short stories. He advises her on the other hand not to appear too over-grateful that the Abbey has done the play at all. They are professionals in the business of putting on good theatre.