Maeve Binchy (6 page)

But one of her short stories cuts deeper and suggests that there was more to the weight issue. ‘Warren Street’, from Maeve’s
Victoria Line
collection (1980), is a sensitive and imaginative story inspired by Maeve’s dressmaker, Miss Creegan. Nan has a dress shop. Shirley is a large woman with a sunny personality and has for years come to Nan for her clothes. Shirley is one of Nan’s best customers and Nan tends to dress her in bright colours (as Maeve often chose to be dressed), and it is tacitly understood that there is a close bond of sisterly love between the two women.

The story kicks off with Colin, Nan’s boyfriend,
catching
sight of Shirley for the first time and likening her to a beach ball bouncing out of the door. Nan informs Colin that that was Shirley, whom she’s talked about before. Colin says
that she never mentioned that Shirley looked like a ‘
technicoloured
Moby Dick’. Nan is furious with him.

Later Shirley spots an envelope on which Colin has
scribbled
‘Green eye-shadow for burly Shirley’, and is so hurt that, in Maeve’s words, ‘she was almost bleeding’.

Nan gets herself in a terrible twist trying to make things right with Shirley, but her attempts only deepen Shirley’s wound, exposing the fact that their friendship is built on Nan’s pity for her for being fat.

For Shirley, Nan’s hypocrisy is a betrayal of their friendship, and it hurts badly. Things are imagined and said so hurtfully that their friendship is destroyed. What Maeve is asking is, where is truth in a relationship between soulmates when one is not wholly honest with the other?

Whether love or even true friendship should involve always telling the truth preoccupied Maeve throughout her life and elsewhere in her books, notably in the novel
Tara Road
(1998).

What did it say of her relationships with her close friends that they couldn’t tell her the truth? One of her school friends refused to engage with the subject even today. ‘There is too much written about Maeve’s weight and her psychological well-being. Maeve was a fun loving, normal, happy girl.’ Yet on Maeve’s own admission she was not. Another said, ‘Actually, if Maeve hadn’t had such a loving, wonderful, supporting family who told her all the time that she was wonderful, she could well have had problems.’ A third friend, who knew her only from her forties but became just as close, took the issue further:

Was it really her size that led to her unrest, or was it born of a growing awareness of the difference between how she felt about herself at home and at school? Was there a glimpse of the discrepancy between what Maureen was always telling her – that she was the most beautiful and the best – and the reality, which was that she was not the best academically, nor quite the most beautiful, she was tall and big boned and, yes, a little plump?

Fortunately Maeve had Mother St Dominic, who diverted her interest into what she found to admire in the girl, which was plenty, such as her warmth and humanity and the fact that she was good company, one of those unusual girls who never had anything bad to say about anybody else. Remembers Patricia Hamilton, ‘You felt good when you were with Maeve because she was not a knocker of people. You felt “built up” perhaps, because Maeve built you up by her attitude towards you.’

Like mother, like daughter.

Under Mother St Dominic’s guidance Maeve became ‘more of a chum and a friend of everybody’ rather than straining to become the popular, beautiful girl her mother promised she was. As a result the friends she made at school remained, she said, the
closest
she had as an adult too. And she also made at least one special relationship. Her best friend was Philippa O’Keefe, a boarder one year older than her. The O’Keefes lived on a farm in Drinagh, County Wexford. At school Philippa was a quiet, attractive girl, prudent and discreet, and a member of the local pony club.

The demands Maeve made on herself and her close friends to be honest and true were colossal, if not sometimes unreal. But her relationship with Philippa comes down to us as the ideal. Their friendship endured through school, university and right up until Maeve’s death, so that even sixty years after they met Maeve had a file of letters marked ‘Dear Philippa’ in her study. By then, Philippa had long since left Ireland for London. But like Aisling and Elizabeth, and like Benny and Eve in
Circle of Friends
, their bond was never broken.

Maeve’s love for Philippa is why she made the blood-tie of friendship the heart and soul of her first novel. The intimacy of the relationship between Aisling and Elizabeth – innocent, touching and truer than anything that passes between boy and girl or man and woman in her books – is what swept sales of the book to the top of bestseller lists around the world. We watch it forming and being ritualised in baptism by Aisling, and later being challenged by all that fate can throw at it. Elizabeth comes to the friendship timid, unsure of herself, a complete novice to love, while Aisling’s family embody the emotion and it comes as
second nature to Aisling. They seal their love in Ireland because love says something about Ireland; they mesh blood from their arms, ‘like Red Indians’.

Later, Elizabeth’s English boyfriend, Johnny, recoils from the intensity of it. Friendships between women so close as truly to merit the epithet ‘love’ abound in the novels, and are the subject too of a number of Maeve’s short stories, but none is as deep as this, most movingly so when they say goodbye at the barrier in Euston station in London after Aisling has come over from Ireland to help Elizabeth through an abortion. While Elizabeth fights the feeling that she’ll never see Aisling again and fears that Aisling will look back on the visit and be repulsed by all that has happened, Aisling vows that she can never cut Elizabeth out of her life, that she is an inextricable part of it, and ‘if it weren’t so soppy I’d say I love you’.

‘Well I love you too,’ says Elizabeth and there is nothing more to be said, as Aisling is swallowed up in the crowds for the train.

Maeve’s ‘religious maniac’ phase at the Holy Child was followed (but wasn’t replaced) by the ‘utter hysteria about sex’ phase. She had learned the facts of life from her mother at quite a young age. Trailing home from Mass with her family on St Patrick’s Day, all wearing shamrocks of course, Maeve was thrilled to learn that this is the one day in the Lent calendar when the order of abstinence is lifted – she would be allowed to eat all the sweets she liked. Buoyed by the news, she decided to settle something that had been bothering her and asked her mother where children come from. Unflustered, Maureen told her. Maeve was so astonished that she refused to believe her, confiding in her father that her mother had got things very
confused; her father said that he thought Maureen could in fact be quite right.

Like Nessa and Maura Brennan in
The Copper Beech
(1992), Maeve couldn’t believe her parents had ‘done it’. For a year she put her father’s response down to his wonderful loyalty to Maureen, but by the time she arrived at the Holy Child she was prepared to admit that Maureen’s explanation probably did hold some water.

Then the nuns added a vital new dimension to the whole thing – passion and desire. Hitherto there’d been no mention of these, which, according to Maeve, were discussed by the nuns in terms of the level of lust that the girls would meet in the big wide world and the need to bridle it within ‘a good Catholic marriage’. They were told how difficult it was for boys to restrain themselves. Girls had to take control of them and insist that they only have sex within matrimony. That was society. Sixty years later, the same girls still remember the dictum: ‘Any impure thoughts, get out your rosaries! Go to confession!’ Said Patricia:

Maeve listened to the nuns’ counsel and to the missioners. The sermons on purity she took very seriously indeed, although she could never quite remember whether sex was meant to be
the highest expression of love, or love the highest expression of sex. The girls had nearly choked trying to keep a straight face, and it was all confused further by the crucial matter of ‘respect’, the idea that if you gave yourself to a boy too readily he would lose respect for you.

Interest in the ‘utter hysteria about sex’ phase was greatly facilitated by what Patricia referred to as the ‘age of chilblains’, brought about by the Spartan conditions at the convent. ‘What you did in your spare time was go to a radiator and talk to your pal … It was cold so you’d put your feet on the radiator. And you’d put your hands and feet and lift your skirt up to get warm!’

Thus positioned, Maeve and her friends would have endless conversations. It was where female solidarity, the one certainty throughout Maeve’s life, was first implemented. Most of the girls said they had boyfriends. Maeve didn’t have one, which must have seemed odd to one who had been brought to believe that she was the most beautiful, so she became immersed in other girls’ affairs – so much so that she could tell you the names of their boyfriends even half a century later. It was here, often in an advisory capacity, that she discovered her natural
métier
, a sure talent for discussing other people’s problems, and soon realised that it made her very popular indeed. There was no aspect of her peers’ relationships that went undiscussed. ‘We were given to planning the first night as meticulously as the planning of the Normandy landing,’ she once said.

She became a go-between, stuffing letters from the boarders to their boyfriends in town down the front of her gymslip and smuggling them out to the post.

Inevitably, one day a nun stopped her on the way out with a hoard of letters. As Maeve squirmed with guilt, the nun asked her whether she felt all right, because she looked as if she was about to have a heart attack. Maeve, feeling like a hooked fish on the nun’s line, assured her that she was fine. But then one of the letters fell to the floor and others followed soon after, each tellingly addressed to Master so-and-so. Maeve felt the depths of Hell yawn beneath her.

She had flouted the trust the nuns had placed in her, the trust at the very root of convent discipline. This time there was to be no wide smile of forgiveness or a ‘do it again’, only the
humiliating
prospect of the finger of shame pointing at her the following morning at Assembly, when she would have to give her
treasured
Child of Mary medal back.

It was terribly upsetting. Maeve likened the ritual
humiliation
in front of the whole school to a court martial, lightened only a little by the credit she received from the girls for
refusing
to disclose who had enlisted her to post the letters. Maeve was intensely loyal, especially to the sisterhood. She would not have ratted on any of the girls at the Holy Child had the nuns got out the spiked chains in true Jesuit style. But nothing could compensate for the loss of the Child of Mary medal for the would-be saint.

And her humiliation was made doubly worse by it being evident that she, alone among all the girls involved, had no boyfriend. The nuns might see no boyfriend as a good thing, but Maeve was more than a little bit disappointed that, given the emphasis on the amount of lust she would meet in the outside
world, there was so little around for her to repel. ‘At fifteen the latent stirrings were there all right, although they were stirring a bit in vain for me.’
17

Passion and anxiety characterised Maeve’s life from the start, but it would be some time before she exercised the former in a relationship with a boy.

She once put her lack of success with boys down to an absence of opportunity. She didn’t have an older brother who might bring home a boy of suitable age. William, her brother, was eight years her junior.

The first opportunity came her way at fourteen or fifteen. The local answer to Italy’s
passeggiata
was a Saturday afternoon stroll in Dún Laoghaire’s local ‘piazza’, a square-cum-thoroughfare off Lower George Street, outside the local cinema. Kids would hang out there before going in to catch the latest film. The cinema was a regular Saturday treat for Maeve and her younger sisters, and she would look enviously at those girls who had boyfriends and who could engage in this parade properly.

Finally, a boy did ask her out, to see a film called
Roman Holiday
, a romantic comedy starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn released in 1953. Maeve was thrilled. She could talk about nothing else. At last she had joined ‘the gang’. But the boy rang the night before to confirm the date and spoiled it all. He said he’d meet her
inside
the cinema. She said he might as well have slapped her face.

At sixteen an alternative solution to her lack of boyfriend arose in the form of Marlon Brando. She fell in love with him. Yes,
love
was what it was, not some adolescent crush, you
understand. She really meant it, though later she admitted it was ‘pure sex’!

Brando first appeared in
The Wild One
, dressed in leather astride a motorbike in 1953, and swept aside ‘old smoothie Hollywood’, welcoming in mean, ‘brooding, smouldering Hollywood’, with James Dean upping the tempo mid-decade with
East of Eden
and
Rebel Without a Cause
. Brando’s
On the Waterfront
followed
The Wild One
in 1954, the heart of waterfront culture being not Dún Laoghaire but Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York, somewhere deep within a little docksider.