Authors: Maeve Binchy
She lost weight, she gained confidence, she learned style. The Sloane woolies and wellies went their way and the designer clothes came in, she was always ready to show a bit of bosom and a bit of thigh. The ranks of photographers following her trebled. But how could she have known that it was a dangerous game? When she was in a secret island, very pregnant and thinking she was alone, the papers sent cameramen to hang from trees and pass by in boats with long-distance lenses on their cameras.
She could be excused for thinking she was very important. If she read the newspapers and even believed a tenth of what they said about her then she would have had every reason for thinking that she was very important and powerful indeed.
The people, and not only the British people but the people everywhere, including Ireland, of course, loved a bit of romance and a lovely role model. Even though there were always aspects about the royal romance that spelled danger from the word go. The world believed that it was love at first sight, a strong prince and a beautiful shy girl becoming a fairytale princess, because that is what the world had always wanted to believe in one shape or another. It literally created that belief, and the popular papers and magazines were there to play back to the public exactly what was being demanded. In a secular and permissive society it should have seemed absurd that the strong prince had to marry a virgin but that was literally what had to be. Diana’s uncle in embarrassed tones told a world that should have been equally embarrassed to hear the information that this was indeed the case. Everywhere it seemed like a reward for being a good girl. Look at what happens, you get to marry the prince if you don’t give away that which is more precious than jewels. If anyone had paused to think about a girl 13 years younger than Charles, a girl with no real education let alone the strange sort of education that prepares you for being a royal … then it was obvious that there would be difficulties. If anyone had stopped to think about a decent, well-meaning guy who had no interest in pop music and who knew only women who found backgrounds into which to blend, then it should have been clear that there would be problems.
But nobody wanted to see the problems. And everyone was so relieved, the world had a fairytale wedding, the Queen of England really and truly believes that the succession is very important, as you and I might believe if we had gone through all that anointing and sceptre and Commonwealth routine. Princess Anne, whose own marriage was far from successful, got the spotlight taken off her and turned into a reasonable person with a serious interest in raising money for children in need. Princess Margaret, also relieved that she was out of the firing line for having the odd cigarette in public, was delighted with it too. The Queen Mother, whose smile goes right round her face and who likes happy endings, thought that it had all turned out fine.
But the public appetite is never fully fed. Professor Anthony Clare has said that the people have created a romantic fairytale which, like all fairytales, should have ended at the point where the prince and princess have arrived at the altar. Perhaps even it might have been allowed to continue until the two blond little boys came on the scene and the family were seen in the sunset in one of their palace homes.
The appetite has been whetted by glimpses inside Charles and Diana’s home, respectful and pseudo-relaxed interviews trying to show that they are just like everyone else, which of course they can’t be because everyone else doesn’t have small armies camped outside their homes wondering when and if they will speak to each other, smile at each other, or hold hands again.
They may hate each other by now, or it may in fact have been the mildest row that caused them to spend some weeks apart. Loves and marriages have survived separations of weeks and months even. But few other people have such huge pressure on them to have a public reconciliation. What other couple had to go through the hurt and upset with the eyes of literally the whole world on them?
The German visit was yet one more charade: Diana re-launches the mini skirt, wears a sultan’s gift of diamonds, Charles straightens his tie and says what a pretty colonel in chief she is, news bulletins report that they are seen talking to each other, the world sighs with relief.
But meanwhile the Queen of England walks with her dogs and knows she cannot yet retire as she’d like to, and the princess’s divorced aunt and separated sister wonder what all the fuss is about. And maybe 10 times an hour newspapers ring Harold Brooks Baker of Burke’s Peerage and he assures them that a divorced Charles could indeed become king. Unthinkable a while ago but not unconstitutional, he insists. And the world becomes a less safe place for a lot of people.
I
t happened at the Abbey Theatre a few weeks ago. The print on the programme had got all small and fuzzed around the bits where it told you what plays the actors and actresses had been in before. I was disappointed for them and felt they deserved better from the management. To my surprise the woman in front of me was reading bits out of it to her husband; I thought she must have got a clearer copy and asked could I have a loan of hers. To my surprise, by the time she had handed it to me, her copy had become small and fuzzed too. Sadly, I gave it back. ‘I think it’s the eyes,’ I said to her in a doom-laden voice.
‘Well, why don’t you put on your glasses?’ she asked, reasonably.
But she wasn’t to know that it was my pride and joy, the ability to read the small print on bye-laws before others could see the noticeboard itself, the slight hint of envy and disbelief around one that one with so dissolute a lifestyle didn’t need to fumble in a handbag or reach for a string around the neck in order to look at snaps or read the fine print of a menu in a dark restaurant. I, who used to read in the twilight when others wouldn’t be able to find the book if they put it down for a minute, now I was going to have to get glasses.
Naturally, like every major event, I made a drama and a production out of it. I had no intention of going quietly into the dark night of spectacle-wearing. Nor was I going to delay. The very next day, when the plane landed me back in London, I made an appointment to see an ophthalmic surgeon. The receptionist and I consulted our Filofaxes. No, not early in the morning, she said, he would be operating.
‘Operating?’ I shouted down the phone in such a fright that strong men and women trying to reclaim their baggage from the carousels stopped short to know what was going on.
‘Well, yes,’ she said nervously.
‘I don’t think I want that kind of an eye doctor,’ I said firmly. ‘I want one that will either say tut tut, it’s just that you’re a bit tired and it will be fine when you’ve had a nice long rest, or else give me something that will bring out the cheekbones in my face and make me see everything again.’
There was a silence. You could see her wondering whether this appointment should be written into his book, whether this encounter was to be encouraged.
‘Who exactly recommended you to us?’ she asked, in one of those tones that frighten me to death and bring on a huge sense of middle-aged respectability.
‘Fearfully sorry,’ I said. ‘Where were we? Yes, indeed, eleven-thirty would be fine.’
They had property magazines only in the waiting room. A woman with a hat and gloves asked me was it my first time.
‘You’ll like him,’ she said positively. ‘Great soap and water man, of course, says a lot of the problem is caused by all these creams and scrubs and grains and peeling.’
I felt a wave of nausea. Nobody had ever told me anything about any of these things in the care of the eye. And I had always thought you should keep soap and water out of your eyes. It turned out, of course, that the waiting room served several specialists. Hers was a dermatologist. There were other doctors in the building that might have been more alarming – she could have told me that he always suggested a bypass or a hysterectomy. I was calm by the time I was called.
It was like a dentist’s chair without the instruments. You kept looking at things and answering lovely bright-child questions like whether you see more green than red. Then there was the sort of cartoon-style ‘can you read the bottom line?’ bit and a few drops in the eye and a reassuring pat and the news that I was luckier than most people, the average age for it was 44 to 46. I had lasted a few years longer. This made me feel like a champion. I thought of going down to the Savoy Theatre and having a word with Mickey Rooney, who is there in a song-and-dance musical and talking about us old survivors. It was the only doctor’s surgery that I left without the customary instructions to have lost three stone the next time I came in. I told him that, praisingly. I said he shone amongst fellow medics in his attitude. He said diplomatically that he was sure his fellow medics were very right in whatever they advised, but it had no adverse effect on the sight.
‘Probably helps it,’ I said cheerfully and went off in search of a place to get the specs. I told the girl I wanted something showy. She found the description too vague.
‘If you could tell me what kind of showy, like do the glasses of any personality appeal to you?’
I thought for a little and decided I wanted them like Edna Everage’s, not exactly like hers, but in that area. The optician was regretful. They didn’t do that kind of range.
‘Huge, then, like dinner plates,’ I said. I wasn’t going for half moons or something restrained. We tried on every pair in the shop, and to my annoyance the ones that met with the most approval from everyone, including myself peering at them in a mirror, were extremely discreet ones with mainly colourless frames around the eyes and a bit of blue on the bits that go over the ear. They look very dull on the table, and I can’t really see them properly on my face because they’re not meant for looking at faces in mirrors – they’re meant for books and papers and theatre programmes and telephone directories.
I can see all kinds of things with them, including a sort of numbering on my typewriter showing you how many spaces you’ve gone. I never knew it was there, and apparently that is the explanation for all those irregular sort of paragraphs over the years.
There is only one puzzlement. The glasses have a name on them. It’s written in small letters inside one of those bits that goes over your ear. I suppose in posher spectacles it would be a Designer Label. But what it seems to say is ‘Happy Pouff. Paris France’. I’ve asked other people who can read it with their own glasses on to check this out, and indeed this would appear to be the name. Maybe everyone has awful silly names written on the inside of their glasses on the grounds that the poor weak-eyed people wearing them won’t be able to read them. It would be worth finding out.
T
oday I took a man to lunch. It’s something I have done many times before in my life, and hope to do again. It’s not something that makes me feel aggressive, butch or dominant. It doesn’t seem to emasculate and weaken the men who have been taken to lunch either. Never did I feel I should be groping under the table, fumbling to get past his knees, to hand him the fiver or the tenner. Never did I think the table should be booked in his name.
Today was a beauty, however. I had booked a table for two for one o’clock. I arrived on the dot and gave my name.
‘Mr Binchy’s table is this way, madam. I don’t think he’s arrived yet.’
I said nothing. Sometimes, it’s not worth the whole business of explanations, especially when it wasn’t going to change anything. I mean, I was getting to the right table. I ordered a gin and tonic while waiting.
The waiter looked mildly disapproving. He felt there was an outside chance that the man who had booked the table might hit the waiter across the face for having let a female guest order a drink on her own. He brought it along, grudgingly.
The man I was taking to lunch rushed in, apologetically. He is an engaging-looking American, who has written a book about Californian way-out lifestyles and meaningful relationships. He is, I think, about 60 or 65. His main emotion was shame at being five minutes late. The waiter hovered about in a worried way.
‘I have brought your guest an aperitif, Mr Binchy,’ he said to the American author, fearfully. The American looked back at him fearfully. Was this some terrible plot? Would he have to pay for the meal? Was I passing him off as my husband or my father? He was filled with unease.
‘What will you have, I’m paying,’ I said firmly, and he ordered a highball, with a marginal air of relaxing.
All through the meal it went on. He got the menu with the prices, I didn’t; he was shown the wine list, I was ignored; the tray of cigars was brought to him at the coffee stage, even though we had both made it perfectly clear to this dumb, chauvinist waiter that I was the one who was in charge of the lunch.
Then came the bill. You must remember that this man and I had been discussing the whole role of female assertiveness in a West Coast marriage. We had agreed that patterns had changed beyond recognition because of the women’s movement nowadays, women no longer saw marriage in its traditional role of giving security or stability.
Over the cheese we had marvelled at how much had happened in how short a time. And there stood the waiter, discreetly trying to catch the American’s attention so that he could present him with the piece of paper which couldn’t possibly be shown to a woman.
‘I’m in the lucky position of being invited to lunch,’ the American said engagingly, waving over to me as if to indicate that funds unlimited were available at my side of the table.
The waiter stood still.
‘Madam is paying?’ he asked in a voice full of doom.
‘That’s right,’ I said cheerfully, getting out my chequebook.
‘By cheque,’ he said defeatedly.
‘Oh, they let women have them these days,’ I said with an attempt to cheer him up.
As an attempt it failed. He took my cheque and cheque card like a butler in a film might pick up a tousled gypsy child to remove it from his lordship’s eyes.