Maeve Binchy (29 page)

Maeve’s relationship with her readers was an intimate one. ‘We felt like we knew her somehow,’ one person wrote. In the ferment of her stories she laid out so much of herself at a deeper level than the memoirist can. ‘I could “feel” her heart in each book,’ wrote a reader from Ohio.

Tributes poured in to Maeve’s website and publications such as the
Irish Times
, with Jennifer Johnston writing of Maeve as the essential Irishwoman, generous, warm hearted, funny, great to see and drink with. On the Lodge Catering site there were tributes from staff members who remembered ‘Maeve always holding court and talking for Ireland and never to be outdone in a yarn’ at all those legendary parties in her London house with which two Irish girls from the Holy Child Killiney, Philippa and Maeve, had wowed the British media and book trade. Sometime staff member Helder Maia Moco even found time to tweet from Brazil and send Philippa ‘a big hug’, knowing how hopeless she would be feeling.

As the day of the funeral approached, journalists roamed through Dalkey with the thought that here could be one of Maeve’s fictional communities – and in some respects they were not disappointed.

Before Maeve started writing novels, the playwright Hugh Leonard (1926–2009) had put the modern town on the
literary
map, using actual Dalkey characters in his books and plays, people with whom the townspeople were familiar – Maeve herself commented that audiences as far apart as the Abbey Theatre Dublin, London’s West End and Broadway knew Dalkey friends of hers, the Comerfords and Dr Enright, thanks to Leonard.

And she was not averse to doing something similar. Finnegan’s, the Dalkey bar where Gordon and Maeve kept a reserved table in an alcove and came several times a week for lunch, was the venue for a public reading by Maeve a month before she died. She had written a short story for the Dalkey Book Festival which was set in the town and mentioned various local businesses.

Until his death in 2009, Hugh Leonard had been a great supporter of the two local drama societies, the Dalkey Players and St Patrick’s, and had organised author walks and presented the story of the area at the Dalkey Heritage Centre. It all helped to strengthen the sense of community, a spirit which, with Maeve’s funeral imminent, journalists from afar were now
looking
for from the locals.

Matt Malone of the Senso Studios hair salon told the press how Maeve would entertain them all with her stories and a hair
appointment would turn into a signing session with customers racing down to the Book Exchange to buy the latest of her books and get her signature on it before she left. An assistant at the library told a journalist she had nothing appropriate to put in the window, what with all Maeve’s books out on loan since the announcement of her death. And Hilary McCabe at McCabe’s Select Stores café and grocery, who had known Maeve since she was four, confirmed that she’d been the talk of the town all day.

No one quite knew how to handle the funeral. Was it to be a very public occasion with Dalkey reaching out to the world or a more personal one, out of respect for her family’s feelings? Maeve herself had wanted a funeral for friends and family only.

In the event, a Requiem Mass was celebrated on Friday 3 August at the Church of the Assumption in Castle Street, in the old Dalkey lands where half a century earlier Maeve had waited on tenterhooks for her Matriculation results and her adult life had begun.

Inevitably there wasn’t room for everyone who turned up. Hundreds more than the church could hold watched
proceedings
on an RTÉ webcast in the Heritage Centre at Goat’s Castle on the opposite side of the street.

Representatives from the highest political office attended along with high-profile members of the arts, the media and the literary world, as well as representatives of charities that Maeve supported.

The flowers at the funeral were
Rosa
‘Gordon Snell’. Maeve had commissioned the bloom – a yellow floribunda – as a special birthday present to Gordon in 1999, when it was shown for the
first time at the annual Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show in London.

The Mass was celebrated by four priests, including past and present administrators at Dalkey (Fr John McDonagh and Fr Paddy Devitt), visiting priest Fr William Stuart, and Fr Michael Collins of Haddington Road parish in Dublin.

Maeve’s cousin, the actress Kate Binchy, and her brother William gave readings, as did Maeve’s neighbour, the
Father Ted
actor Frank Kelly. Music was provided partly by uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn, whose ‘Brendan Theme’ Maeve had selected as her favourite track on the BBC radio programme
Desert Island Discs
.

After the Mass, Rita Connolly sang ‘The Deer’s Cry (St Patrick’s Breastplate)’ and the coffin was taken from the church to the strains of ‘Mo Ghile Mear’, the time-honoured lament of the female spirit of Ireland, again sung by Rita Connolly. There then followed a private cremation.

F
our months later came
A Week in Winter
, the last book Maeve had written and her final opportunity to reach her millions of readers. It was not a wasted one. In it she describes Freda, who ‘sees true’, as if Maeve wrote the story knowing she was leaving, standing on the threshold of Freda’s ‘other world’.

Carole Baron had to edit the novel with no Maeve to consult. She worked with a copy editor and they’d say things like, ‘That doesn’t sound like the kind of word Maeve would use’ or ‘This sounds like a Maeve word’ to each other. Carole said she felt Maeve at her shoulder the whole time.
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In the dying of the light Maeve sought resolution in
symmetry
, echoing the opening page of her first novel in the final words of her last.
Light a Penny Candle
opens with Elizabeth White’s mother Violet reading a library book, an escapist romance starring a masterful man and a bird-brain heroine who does nothing for herself – the type of book, Maeve was announcing back in 1982, that she was not about to write. Now,
A Week in Winter
ends with Freda, who understands how a library can be
the seat and lifeblood of a community, and what books can do other than to provide mere escapist entertainment.

Gordon had closed his literary output with similar symmetry the previous year, a second adventure of the King of Quizzical Island, the character of his first book, published at the same time as Maeve’s first fiction in 1978.
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One of Maeve’s school friends, who hadn’t been able to attend her funeral, wondered that it had been a Catholic ceremony, given that she was agnostic. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘coming to face death, maybe there was a turnaround.’ The thought was bound to cross the minds of people aware of Maeve’s loss of faith in 1963.

The ‘turnaround’ scenario doesn’t sound like her. In Father William Stuart’s homily he said: ‘Maeve came from the
tradition
of the Magi. She was a searcher, a seeker of the divine, but it eluded her.’ Perhaps what she understood to be divine did not elude her. Sometimes one must lose a life to find a new one. She discarded Catholicism certainly, but a new inner life had begun to form in 1968, with her visit to Cumann Merriman in County Clare.

And therein lies the real message of
A Week in Winter
.
Forty-four
years after first dipping her finger in the cauldron of inspiration of Cumann Merriman, celebrated in the short story ‘A Week in Summer’, she rounded off her literary career, and her life, knowing that she was dying, with a book entitled
A Week in Winter
. The novel is set in Merriman’s birthplace at Ennistymon, less than eight miles south of Lisdoonvarna.

The ‘West of Ireland paradise’ of Ennistymon is the fictional
Stoneybridge of the novel. It is named Stoneybridge after Ennistymon’s seven-arch stone bridge, which stands astride the Cullenagh.

Stone House in the novel, ‘a picture of a house’, is converted into a hotel by its fictional proprietor Chicky Starr, who has come home with her burden of secrets and regrets, and it is here that Maeve throws together an ill-assorted group of strangers. Stone House is in fact the house in Ennistymon which the poet Francis McNamara (1884–1946) converted into the Falls Hotel in the 1930s, and where, for three successive years from 2002, Cumann Merriman held its summer school.
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Merriman was born illegitimately at Ennistymon in 1749. Shortly after his birth his mother married a local stonemason who was working on the walls of the local Deerpark estate. Stone is what Ennistymon is all about. ‘Built by the best stonemasons in Ireland, there is a congruence of shape and form about this place which comes from a long tradition of knowing how to express vernacular art in stone,’ writes Margaret MacCurtain in the best short account of the town.
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The symmetry of returning to Cumann Merriman in
A Week in Winter
to complete the circle that had begun there in 1968 was no mere tidy tying up of ends, it said something about her inner life.

When she returned to Dalkey in the 1980s, Maeve did so not sentimentally to rediscover the town of her youth, nor
prosperously
to connect with modern celebrity Dalkey, but spiritually to reconnect with the collective unconscious of her people, which was her inspiration.

Connections with Ireland’s ancient past were to be found, like so much else, on her doorstep. Dalkey came into existence as Killbegnet, which means ‘Begnet’s Church’, which takes us back to the ruins of the seventh-century church in Castle Street. But at the eastern end of Sorrento Road, beyond Sorrento Point (the far promontory of the modern town), there lies a bewitching 25-acre island in a huddle with three smaller fragments,
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and a sense of Ireland far, far back in the mists of time.

It is no surprise to learn that Dalkey Island was inhabited at least as early as 4000 BC, long before St Patrick was brought to Dún Laoghaire from his home in England as a sixteen-year-old slave, long before Laoghaire himself was crowned High King of Ireland on the Hill of Tara – to a time even before Tara itself was a symbol of national kingship in Ireland.
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When Dalkey Island came into its own in the fourth
millennium
before the birth of Christ, Tara was a ceremonial site of a different kind. Its vast passage tomb, known as Duma na nGiall, takes us back to the era of the megalithic tombs of Thomond, which the festival-goers of Cumann Merriman know so well.

This was a time when Ireland, one of the oldest nations in Europe, was known as ‘Ierne’, after early colonisation by Greek and other eastern European peoples had left a certain
matriarchal
impress upon the Irish mind.

The Celtic Mother Goddess, Danu (descended from the goddess Danae of Argos), was brought to Ireland’s shores in neolithic times (4000–2400 BC) and still finds reference in two hills in County Kerry – Da Chich Anann (‘the Breast of Anu’) to this day.

Danae, or Danu, is the matriarchal goddess celebrated in Brian Merriman’s poem as the Aoibhea, Queen of the Fairies, the matriarchal figure Maeve found to identify with, a
formidable
, mysterious feminine principle recognised by the poet’s intuitive side (Merriman’s ‘Aisling’ dream-girl) as the voice of the collective unconscious of the Irish people.
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The more one discovers about Maeve, the more this
powerful
matriarchal impress fits. Queen Maeve, the matriarch whose acolytes, friends and family paraded alongside her throne on the St Patrick Day parade; Maeve the counsellor and advisor, who at the end could still think, as she did when she was twenty, that she could run everybody else’s life; intuitive Maeve, whose
unassailable
authority could strike to the very core of one’s being; and Maeve the
seanchaí
, whose values arose from somewhere deep in her country’s past and were enshrined in modern parables, her purpose to offer resolution to divisions everywhere.

She herself recognised the moment when this unconscious ‘goddess’ personality suddenly and unexpectedly put in an appearance. She called it ‘an unbalanced kind of time’, often at 5.30 in the morning when she was up before the world writing a book. At that time, ‘You have absolutely no judgement about your own work.’ There is no objectivity, no analysis, you just cut off and the work flows.

A thing of no idle interest is that in a lifetime process of
realising
her true matriarchal self, it seems that Maeve was fulfilling a destiny pre-ordained at the very moment of naming her.

This goddess found expression in various personae, none more famously than as Medb, the Queen of Connacht in the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology. The matriarchal people of County Sligo built a massive passage tomb for her known in Gaelic as Meascán Méabha, the tomb of Medb, a large cairn about 180 feet wide and 30 feet high of some 40,000 tons of stone, making it the largest in Ireland outside the Brú na Bóinne. And on the hillside below Tara, just north of Dublin, there is a protected national monument, a large ceremonial enclosure or ‘henge’ 800 feet in diameter dedicated to Medb. But the sign to it reads, ‘Rath Maeve’. For ‘Medb’, in English, translates as ‘Queen Maeve’.

So, when Maureen named her beloved child Maeve she was, as an out-and-out Irishwoman steeped in these things, putting her baby plumb central in the great matriarchal mythology that lies at the heart of what being Irish means.

There is more. Very often when a great sea change in the beliefs of a people occurs, as it did when St Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland, custom, ritual and characters of the old religion are grafted onto the new, facilitating the leap of faith and making the transition less dramatic. The memory of the goddess worshipped as Danu was preserved for Christians in fifth-century Ireland in the figure of St Anne, who in the
Christian story is the mother (i.e. the forerunner) of the Virgin Mary.
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It is so apt, then, that Maureen christened her daughter both Anne and Maeve, the two names that point to an
identification
with the matriarchal tradition in Ireland as far back as we can tell.

It is also appropriate that
our
Maeve lived in Knocknacree Road on Dalkey Hill thousands of years after Medb. For the large hill on which Queen Maeve lies buried in Sligo is called Knocknarea, and like Maeve’s hill overlooks a beautiful bay.

Finally, both Maeve’s brother and her literary agent quite independently described her as a swan gliding apparently effortlessly across a pool, while underneath everything is going like the clappers. And Queen Maeve was commonly identified with the swan, even sometimes taking a swan’s form in myth.

Over the millennia the Sligo people have remained highly protective of the tomb of Medb, resisting its excavation. It is just about the oldest thing of Irish Tradition we have.