Authors: Maeve Binchy
There was a St Patrick’s Day when I had to interview a famous person because he couldn’t find any other free time, and I went to his hotel room as arranged. He thought I was part of the hotel staff and said to me wearily, ‘I suppose you’d better send up a bottle of whiskey or something, I have some idiot woman from some paper coming to do an interview and I suppose she drinks like a fish like all of them.’
And two years ago I was in a hotel in Morocco with two girlfriends and we spent our National Feast day having a row with the hotel manager about the price of everything, and the fact that we had veal for breakfast, lunch and dinner. In between bouts of the row we would go out and sit in the boiling sun and say that it was all grand because everyone would be being drowned and bored at home and perhaps we were better here than there.
And last year I was standing amazed in New York at what looked like a million people dancing and skipping down Fifth Avenue, and the whole city went mad for 12 hours, and I wondered were there any words at all to try and describe it, or would people think I was just exaggerating as usual.
So what about last Wednesday?
With a history of abnormal St Patrick’s Days, I waited its dawning with some interest. It began with a flight from Dublin to London. British Airways gave the passengers shamrock, which was nice, and distracted me until the plane was off the ground.
I had also remembered the number of the seat which has room for long legs and that was good. I can’t tell it to you actually, because it’s a bit of special information you pick up from long, harrowing travel and nobody should be allowed to have it too easily.
And when I got to London there was a message for me on the board, which is something I love because it looks so important in front of all the other passengers. Actually it was only from a friend who had passed through the night before and who knows I love getting messages. It said ‘Happy St Patrick’s Day’ but I nodded over it wisely for a bit, hoping that people would think it was about some major management decision that I would have to make in the next hour.
And all had changed utterly in London since I left.
Harold Wilson had gone, Princess Margaret’s marriage had gone. Some lovely mustard seed that I had planted on my window sill had gone mad and only grown in one corner of its cheap little plastic tray, where it looked like as if all the seeds had jumped on top of each other instead of growing in nice normal lines.
But it was a normal working day, with people going about their work and forgetting about St Patrick, which was sad. I went to a businessy sort of lunch where the chairman did say at the end of it, ‘and now not forgetting what day it is I ask you all to stand and drink a toast ….’ so I thought this was great. But the toast was to the company which had been 25 years in business and not to poor St Patrick who has been in business for a hell of a lot longer.
And on the bus I met a man wearing a shamrock, too, and he and I had a great chat about St Patrick and what a shame it was that he wasn’t more highly thought of everywhere.
And then the man went on and said that the real rot set in when some scholar in Ireland had done a bit of investigation and decided that there might be more than one St Patrick, but since the scholar was my uncle I kept quiet on that point.
And in the evening Córas Tráchtála had a little party where they invited mainly foreign people who had done business with Ireland or helped Irish exports or something.
And amid the roar of conversation and goodwill three different people said to me that it must be lonely to be over in London and not having a nice, normal St Patrick’s Day at home.
I
was nearly the co-author of a best-selling pornographic book, and sometimes when I stand in the rain waiting for a non-existent bus and unable to afford the taxis that come by empty and warm and comfortable, I think that it was very feeble of me not to have gone ahead with the project. I don’t even have the moral comfort of knowing that I refused riches for all kinds of pure and upright reasons, it was just sheer cowardice that stopped me in the end – that and the laziness and inertia of all my friends.
A few years ago, struck by yet another blow like an increase in the price of fags or drink or huge telephone bills or something, ten of us sat grumbling in a pub on a Saturday night. The usual remedies to the taxing economic situation were discussed and dismissed. Making gin in the bath. Yes fine, but how did you do it? And it would mean you couldn’t wash, you might be very drunk, but very dirty as a result. And there was a thought that people had gone blind or mad from it during prohibition.
And there was rolling your own cigarettes. Fine, but it took so long, and all the tobacco kept falling out, and it didn’t taste as nice, and somebody had burned all their eyelashes off by forgetting to put any tobacco at all into the paper and just lighting the outside.
Phones? Well you could stop using them, and there was the widely held belief that if you started making suspicious conversations down them they would be tapped, and when your phone is tapped apparently it can’t be cut off even if you never pay your bill at all
But what we were really after was some big quick money, and we hit on the idea of writing a porn book between us. With ten of us, that would only be 3,000 words each, which is nothing. A 30,000-word novel full of sex, it would have to make us a fortune, and it wouldn’t take us a week to write. So carried away with the sheer brilliance of it, we wrote out an outline plan. It was going to be the story of an innocent young American girl who came to Ireland to see the land of her ancestors. She was choosing Ireland because she was fed up with all the immorality in the United States and wanted to be somewhere good and pure. Our boon was going to be the tale of her disillusionment.
We were each ‘to do a chapter on the kind of thing we knew best’. A sudden silence fell on the group at that stage. What did we mean ‘the thing we knew best’? A great unwillingness to admit that we knew ‘anything best’ came over us and there was a lot of shuffling and the outline plan looked as if it were to be abandoned at birth. Then somebody bought a round of drinks and the price of them shocked us into action again. Why didn’t we each describe the kind of ordinary life we knew best, and do a chapter of that, adding all kinds of torrid sexual overtones to it, so that it would be a book of merit as well as hardcore porn? That suited everyone and we divided it up happily.
There was an American in our midst and he was to write chapter one, ‘Magnolia Leaves America’. He was to write about the filth and perversion that was making life unbearable for her there. He asked anxiously how deeply did he have to go into the filth and perversion, because he had lived in a small town, and probably didn’t know in detail the great degrees of all that went on in big cities. Nonsense, we told him, all small towns in America are much, much worse than Peyton Place, use your imagination.
Chapter two, ‘Magnolia Arrives in Ireland’, was to be written by the man who had once worked in a summer job in Aer Lingus. He could do all the steamy scenes aboard the plane. He too started backtracking a bit and said that he had worked on the ground and he wasn’t sure that he would have all the sex scenes aboard the plane absolutely accurate. That didn’t matter at all, we told him firmly, he must draw on his background of working in an airline, otherwise he couldn’t be in on it at all. Hastily and greedily he agreed that there must be something wildly sexual going on on most flights and he’d check it all out.
Because I was writing about tourism in those days I was asked to write chapter three, ‘Magnolia Checks into Her Hotel’. Very easy chapter that, they said, hotels are full of vice and corruption, and I knew a lot of hotel managers, I’d do the thing in an hour. I bleated that most of the hotel managers I met used to talk to me more about getting tourists and getting better grading with Bord Fáilte than about the lust and licentiousness of their staff and clients, but I was assured that I had got an easy number and if I didn’t take it I’d be given something more difficult, so I took it.
‘Magnolia Looks for a Job’ was to be done by a girl who worked in an insurance office, and she was told that she was lucky too because nobody else would have the access she did to what went on behind filing cabinets. She said that in her office the worst thing that ever went on behind a filing cabinet was that she went there alone sometimes to eat a chocolate biscuit so that the other girls wouldn’t tell her she was greedy, and we said she’s got to liven it up a bit.
Chapter five, ‘Magnolia Has a Night Out’, was to be written by a sort of glamorous man who always says I was at this place last night or the other place and the joint was swinging. He looked a little troubled when we said this was to be the most pornographic chapter of all to retain the readers’ corrupt interest. ‘Why do I have to write the most important chapter?’ he whinged. ‘Because you are a very good writer and you know all the joints that swing,’ we said firmly and he was a bit pleased though still troubled and agreed to do it.
Chapter six, ‘Magnolia Goes to the Dáil’, was to be written by a reporter who sometimes does Dáil reporting. He said that you don’t get much training for lusty arousing kind of descriptive pieces when you are just taking down what the TDs are saying but we said nonsense. He didn’t have to make Magnolia go through the whole business of getting elected, just have her as a simple-minded tourist coming in and asking to visit the Irish Parliament the way people do, and then sort of go on with the usual. ‘But I think the usual kind of thing is that they come in and sit in the gallery and then go home,’ he said in a nit-picking way and was advised he’d better make it a hell of a lot racier than that.
Chapter seven, ‘Magnolia Takes Up Sport’, was to be written by a journalist who works on the sports pages of a newspaper. ‘What sport?’ he asked. Any sport, we said. Anything at all from watching greyhound racing to playing squash. His brief was so nice and vague that we all felt he was getting off too lightly, but he kept saying that we didn’t understand how difficult his wife would prove if ever any of this was made public and we all said nonsense that we’d all get into appalling trouble with someone if it did, we would have a great pseudonym, and just divide the half million quid or whatever we earned into ten parts. We’d use a post office box number for all the correspondence about it, and all the dealings about the film rights and everything.
‘Magnolia on Stage’ would be chapter eight and an actress was going to write that. She was the most cheerful about it and said she’d have all kinds of terrible things happening to Magnolia in her dressing room, and in the wings, but particularly at the party on the first night of the play. So that was very trouble-free and we all thought deep silent thoughts about the private life of the actress which we had assumed to be blameless and even rather dull up to this.
Chapter nine, ‘Magnolia in High Finance’, was the lot of a man who had always claimed that he had made a bit of money on stocks and shares in his time. He was appalled at his task. ‘Have you ever seen the stock exchange?’ he begged. ‘You couldn’t write anything vaguely pornographic about it, it’s ridiculous.’
We advised him to think of the money he’d be losing by opting out and he said he’d rack his brains.
The final chapter, ‘Magnolia Leaves Again’, was to be written by a teacher because she had absolutely refused to write anything whatsoever concerning the school she taught in. We told her that the nuns were unlikely to be buying cellophane-wrapped porn and would never read it, and the book would be banned in Ireland anyway. But she said no, the nuns found out everything you did, and she wasn’t going to be sacked and pronounced unhireable for the rest of her life, no matter how many millions she earned from the film rights of the book. Grudgingly she said she’d do the bit where Magnolia was sitting alone in her flat with the door barred against rapists and perverts and would write the big crisis part about Magnolia saying that wicked though the United States were they were like cloisters compared to Ireland. The book would end with her getting on a boat to America, not wanting to risk the horrors of chapter one and whatever had happened to her on the plane. And everyone went home happy with their instructions and promising to meet with the completed chapter next Saturday.
The only pornographic book I had at home was
Fanny Hill
and I read it again and again but there was nothing about hotels in it, so I rang a friend in London and asked her to send me something particularly foul from some seedy bookshop, and she kept asking me had I gone mad and said she wouldn’t dream of doing it for me until she knew why. I said it was a secret and I was sworn not to tell anyone and she said that everyone seemed to be going off their heads in Dublin. By a great stroke of good luck I was sent to London for two days myself and I went into a terrible shop where I was the only woman and a small evil man kept asking me not to finger the books unless I was going to buy them. I humbly told him that I wanted something about sex in hotels and he became more benign and said he’d see what he could do. I stood for what seemed like a fortnight in the shop until he came back with a book called
Hot Honeymoon Hotel
which cost £2. I was too embarrassed to check it with him so I paid him and ran. It was an amazing book certainly, but it was mainly photographs, that kind with so many limbs in them it’s like a puzzle in a child’s book and you’d have to colour them in to see which arm or leg belonged to whom. It made me very uneasy, and I kept thinking how awful it would be if I dropped dead on the street while I had it in my handbag and people would think that this was my normal reading matter.
Anyway I copied down a few useful phrases out of it in a sort of code for myself and I left the book in a litter bin at Heathrow Airport where someone must have got a nice surprise later on, and came home to write the chapter. It took me about 14 hours to write and I kept wondering who would want to read it, but then the memory of
Hot Honeymoon Hotel
and its price tag of £2 came back and I persevered. Ten nice neat pages of typing with 300 words each on them. I put it in an envelope on the Saturday and wondered had the other nine found it as difficult as I had or were they all deep down much more experienced and sophisticated. Almost everybody was there, and I was waiting for someone to call the meeting to order. Nobody had envelopes or typescripts on the table or anything. I supposed like myself they were keeping them out of sight.