Maeve Binchy (28 page)

In these later novels Maeve sometimes uses allegory to introduce a symbolic dimension to the relationships she’s
writing
about. In
Tara Road
the lives of her characters become an analogy for what is happening to Ireland in modern times. It is a small leap from Ria Lynch’s awakening about her
meaningless
marriage, to modern Ireland’s awakening. As for Ria, so for Ireland, all the old certainties have disappeared – and neither had seen it coming. Choosing the break-up of a family to make her point about the break-up of old Ireland was apt because family is at the core of what traditional Ireland was about.

In the later novel
Quentins
, she unites and organises her characters’ stories to a similar end. The book draws on the lives of Brenda and Patrick Brennan’s customers at their restaurant, Quentins, their clients’ stories made available partly by Brenda’s rare ability to lip-read those sitting at the tables. But there are hints early on that Quentins is more than a restaurant
rendezvous
for gossips. Quentin, the owner, has come by it through the generosity of Toby Hayward. His boyfriend, Katar, believes
it has been given to him by God and Hayward’s nickname, ‘Tobe’, raises expectations that Maeve is dealing with matters of existential significance for her characters, who represent Ireland itself.

Through Ella Brady we meet the charismatic Don Richardson. Ella’s betrayal by Don is another example of a common theme in the novels, but it is served up in parallel with a plan to film the stories of the restaurant’s clientele as a documentary of Ireland in change. Those brought up in a religious tradition and then disillusioned – ‘One minute I believed the lot … the next I didn’t believe a word of it’ – realise that a degree of hoodwinking, of confidence trickery has been going on. In
Quentins
Maeve is dealing not only with betrayal of one person by another, but of a nation by its political and religious institutions on a grand scale.

As she brings her heroines to self-belief and -sufficiency without reference to a romantic ideal, so she brings Ireland out of the sentimental into the truth culture which fashioned her own self-belief and -sufficiency, and passes the onus of its future onto individuals’ shoulders, individuals such as those young Irish writers whose work Maeve encouraged at every turn.

When Danielle McLaughlin, a hugely talented young
short-story
writer from Donoughmore in County Cork, received the prize cheque of €1,000 for winning the annual Maeve Binchy Short Story competition at Cumann Merriman, she credited Maeve ‘for her generosity and for her encouragement of
emerging
Irish writers. I am delighted and honoured to be yet another recipient of this legendary generosity and encouragement.’

There is a vibrant literary support structure in Ireland,
publishing
outlets for emerging fine writing like
The Stinging Fly, Boyne Berries, Crannóg
, and
Inktears
. Maeve did everything she could to encourage new writers, knowing how important they were to Ireland’s future. And in 2008 she wrote
The Maeve Binchy Writer’s Club
, inspired by a course that ran for twenty weeks at the National College of Ireland.
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After
Tara Road
came
Scarlet Feather
(2000), an idea she owed to two friends in catering on whom she based the characters of Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather in the novel. Her friends kept telling her amazing stories about the people they catered for. Catering companies enter upon people’s lives at times of high stress – at weddings, funerals, christenings, anniversaries,
birthdays
, retirements – when things of moment are happening and personal and family dramas unfold. So she thought a catering firm would be a good place to set a novel.

In
Quentins
, two years later, the catering idea is again part of the story, the lives of Brenda and Patrick Brennan’s customers brought to the forefront once more.

What Maeve didn’t say was that the two friends – inspiration for the catering theme of three novels,
Scarlet Feather, Quentins
and earlier in
Tara Road
– were none other than her best friend at school, Philippa O’Keefe, and Philippa’s partner, Robert Hampton.

Maeve had supported Philippa’s catering company, now called Lodge Catering after her house in South Hampstead, from its inception in 1985. Before long, she was catering for all the parties given by Century and whenever Maeve hosted functions or book launches from her London house, Philippa provided.

In 1999 awards for Maeve’s achievements began to flow, with the British Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. Professor Kiberd, who brought to Maeve’s reputation a certain literary gravitas, undertook a series of lunches with her and Gordon and remembers one occasion when Maeve dropped an earring on the floor. When she went under the table to retrieve it her arthritis took hold and, realising she was stuck fast and couldn’t move, she looked up at Kiberd with one eye and said, ‘Is there anything else useful I can be doing while I’m down here?’

Humour alternated with seriousness and tenderness, so that in the same year, she published a non-fiction book called
Aches and Pains
, a survival manual, a book of information and sometimes very funny along the way. She had been advised to stick to novels, and this would not be published by her
regular
publisher. But she was determined to write the book after a nurse had come to her in the middle of the night when she was lying awake in hospital clearly nervous about her impending hip operation. The nurse reassured Maeve and made her a cup of tea. Maeve told her how kind she was, and the nurse replied
breezily
, ‘Oh, you’ll forget me when you’re better.’ But Maeve didn’t forget and this was by way of a thank you. Royalties went to the Arthritis Research Campaign.

There would, in time, be further changes made to Gordon and Maeve’s home, to make it easier for her to get upstairs. A glass lift was fitted to the exterior of the building to enable easy access to the first-floor studio, for Maeve continued to work almost to the end.

During her final years she was in deep pain, with exercise of
any sort out of the question because her back was full of
arthritis
. But she never complained. As Marian Keyes recalled in a tribute to Maeve, she continued to show her ability to laugh and look on the bright side to the end. ‘In her most recent letter to me she admitted to the pain but ended by saying how lucky we were to have jobs we can do in our pyjamas!’

In the year 2000, the pain was the reason she announced her retirement. It meant the end of ‘Maeve’s Week’ in the
Irish Times
. She had been working for the paper for thirty-two years, and readers had become used to receiving ‘Maeve’s Week’ from wherever she happened to be.

It was also the end of the worldwide tours. In the previous year, she had spent 111 days promoting her books. But it was not the end of everything and she continued writing up to the end, though she would concentrate on novellas and on short stories rather than the lengthy novels she had produced in the past.

In the wake of the announcement of her ‘retirement’ everyone suddenly woke up to the fact that Maeve might be as fragile as the rest and what a figure might be lost. There was a flurry of awards – in 2000 a People of the Year Award and in 2001 the W. H. Smith Book Award for Fiction for
Scarlet Feather
, published the year before.

In 2002 there was another health crisis related to her heart disease, an episode that inspired her to write
Heart and Soul
(2008), the story of a doctor with a clinic in an under-served area. In 2004 came
Nights of Rain & Stars
, a tale of people on holiday in Greece linked by a shared tragedy. There was also radio drama –
Surprise
, a four-part play, and the award-winning
Infancy and
Tia Maria
, starring Oscar-winner Kathy Bates. Maeve was also a driving force behind the RTÉ Radio 1
Human Rights
drama seasons, while in 2009 her story ‘The Games Room’ was adapted for RTÉ Radio 1 by Anne-Marie Casey.

In 2005 she was one of a clutch of writers responsible for ‘She Was Wearing’, a series of interconnecting monologues specially commissioned in response to Amnesty International’s Stop Violence Against Women campaign. In the same year a portrait of her by Maeve McCarthy was hung at the National Gallery of Ireland.

Then, in 2006, she began writing novellas for the series of books called
Quick Reads
, an opportunity for readers to snatch a taste of a whole host of different living authors, a scheme chaired by Gail Rebuck, who had been with Maeve at Century in 1982. And so it went on:
Whitehorn Woods
(2006), a film called
How About You
(2007) and a television film,
Anner House
(2007), both based on short stories.

This was not the sort of schedule normally associated with retirement, but the body of work was so rich and varied that it must have been one of her happiest periods, at last to be able to slow down a little and enjoy what she was doing (as much as the pain would allow).

In 2007, she was presented with the Irish PEN Award by Professor Kiberd, and the University College Dublin Foundation Day Medal by her alma mater.
Minding Frankie
came in 2010, a full-length and popular novel about an alcoholic single father who enlists the aid of his neighbours to help raise his infant daughter, Frankie, following the death of her mother.
In the same year she was recognised by the Irish Book Awards for a lifetime’s achievement.

Maeve died on Monday 30 July 2012. She had been in and out of the Blackrock Clinic, a private hospital the other side of Dún Laoghaire, for a while, but there was no thought among her friends that it was time. The writer Roisin McAuley had lunched with Maeve and Gordon at their home only four weeks earlier. Maeve had mentioned that she was to return to the hospital the following week, but there was as much laughter and warmth as there always had been and she had no reason to think they would not see each other again. The expectation on all sides had been that life would go on, and events seemed to confirm that. Dolores Mackenna woke to the announcement of Maeve’s demise on the Tuesday morning and went downstairs to find a letter enclosing a recipe from Maeve for a book she was
compiling
to raise funds for the Irish Motor Neurone Association. It was all so sudden a surprise.

The news spread like wildfire around the world. Her first publisher, Rosie de Courcy, had caught the news on television just before setting off into the wilds of Africa.

When she returned she discovered that although the final blow came from a heart attack, the end had begun four weeks earlier with a severe spinal infection – acute discitis, an infection in the disc space between the vertebrae in her spinal column.

In response to the news, tributes flooded in from dozens of countries, from publishers and politicians (including from President Michael D. Higgins and from Taoiseach Enda Kenny), from friends and colleagues, from people she had helped, from veterans of book signings and émigrés from Ireland, for whom reading her had been like coming home.

Readers worldwide who had never met her responded
without
knowing quite why, but with a sense that the passing of this exhilarating, joyful spirit who made people feel happier for
reading
her was something to be lamented. One, from Birmingham, remembered writing to Maeve three years earlier to ask her for a signed copy of a book for her mother’s eightieth birthday. A few days later she received a phone call from Maeve herself!

Then there was the woman who had lost an earring and seen a photo in a magazine of Maeve wearing a pair just like them. She had written to ask where she’d got hers. Maeve had dropped her a postcard saying that Gordon had bought her the earrings from a gallery in Foxrock and wished her good luck in finding another.

Another wrote simply, ‘There will be a rare old time in Heaven tonight.’

The great feeling of uplift transferred from the stories. ‘That’s her legacy,’ someone concluded. A feeling not engineered through escapism, but by her vision of life as it turns on passion and anxiety, and by galvanising her characters and her readers to take the lead part in their own life-dramas, as she had done in hers. Her books have ‘an emotional reality that most authors can’t capture,’ said another reader. ‘Next to the bible,’ confessed a third, perhaps seeing the novels as parables, ‘the writings that I have learned the most about life from was her wonderful books.’