Authors: Maeve Binchy
T
wo years ago I went around the world, heading west into the sun all the time, and I loved every bit of it, except the two and a half days in Las Vegas and the memory of an unmerciful row in Los Angeles Airport. Looking back, I don’t know how we did it. If it’s Monday it must be Arizona, if it’s oysters at five pence each, it must be Auckland, if it’s police horses with red tinsel necklaces, it must be Christmas Eve in Sydney. If it’s people playing tinkling music and wearing flowers in their hair, it must be Bali. And this for two people who normally sit with two small cats looking at the television at night, or else in other people’s houses, staring mystified at bridge hands and wondering how many points you need to respond to a call of ‘one diamond’.
So now the urge has come again: the call of the check-in desk, the unpacking in strange hotel rooms, the day tour of a new city, the heat in October, the factor 15 sun lotion in November, the postcards home, meeting friends in far-off lands, the sense of something new going to happen every day, the writing of a weekly travel diary, of working out what possible time it could be at home if I wanted to ring the family or friends. I want to read newspapers again in different countries, obsessed with different issues, utterly unaware of our concerns. I’m looking forward to celebrating other people’s festivals and thanksgivings, lamenting their political systems and weeping over their ludicrous weather forecasts, where Met men and women look into the entrails and forecast, in different accents, sunny periods with some showers or showery periods with some sun and get paid salaries for doing this.
I don’t have four and a half months to examine the world this time, only about half as long, in fact. But I met a marvellous couple last week in County Clare, who told me they were doing the entire cosmos in three weeks and they found it a satisfactory kind of undertaking. The secret is having early nights everywhere, they confided, and drinking a lot of fluids – mainly bottled water – and not going to any country where the people were in any way hostile to your people.
Boastfully I mentioned that I was in the habit of touring the cosmos myself, and they wanted to know my secrets. These were different secrets; they had nothing to do with early nights, bottled water and wondering whether anyone would be hostile to my people. They had a lot to do with only meeting people you wanted to meet, seeing things you thought you would like rather than you should like, late nights and much bottled wine. I told them happily about packing half-a-dozen Ella Fitzgerald and Liam O’Flynn tapes – great for evenings far away – about bringing a small torch, having nothing that needed ironing and always going to airports an hour early to keep the blood pressure down. They looked at me steadily and thanked me for sharing this with them.
Younger friends wondered why would I visit a lot of the same places again when there were so many new places left to see. It’s hard to explain that if a dozen Australian sunrises are good, then two dozen are better, if laughing all night with great friends thousands of miles away was good in 1992, it should be just as good in 1994, and would not be long enough this time either. Last time I missed a general election, which was heart-breaking, but good friends sent faxes with essential information like the results of each count in Dún Laoghaire/Rathdown – good deeds like that will never be forgotten.
I have four weeks before I go, and now that I’m not in the business of dishing out advice any more, I’d love to receive some – if you have any ideas about travelling light or making things easier in some way, it would be great to hear from you. Nothing about travelling irons please, or sheets of tissue paper to make sure the creases fall out. No hints about putting jewellery in hotel safes; this would fall on deaf ears. I had four great dresses made by a friend of mine, who is actually a rather important person in costume design in a theatre. I gave her one dress as a sample, and asked her if she could find an assistant or a student who would make four like it, the only requirements being no discussion about it, no fittings and no ironing. She said she had to make them herself because she spent her working life telling others that you must discuss everything down to the bone, have a fitting twice a day and never use these horrible synthetic fabrics, but have everything natural and crushable. Her entire credibility would have been shot to pieces if it were known that she had a friend with such base requirements.
But out there, somewhere, there are people with marvellous ideas, like the journalist who told me that when you bought books abroad you should send them home by surface mail, which costs hardly anything and then they arrive as a lovely surprise weeks later when you’d forgotten about them. A photographer who told me that if I wanted great holiday snaps, I should look first at the main postcards of wherever I was and go to where they were taken, since these were the guys who had figured out the best angle to take the shot. And since there should be a pool of brilliant travellers’ ideas, I’ll publish some of the ones that appeal to me most.
Last time I went looking at the cosmos I swore I would be better informed when I went to examine it again; I would know intelligent things about the places I was going to visit. But, somehow, two years passed by and I never got informed. I greatly look forward to hearing any advice which might be put into practice during my second crack at the cosmos.
T
he last Thursday of every month, their mother came to Dublin for an outing. There was a day excursion fare and if you got to the station nice and early you got a great seat on the train. Then, at what she still called Kingsbridge, one of her daughters met her. This was Jenny, the daughter who didn’t go out to work. They would meet Nuala, the daughter who did go out to work, at lunchtime.
It was a wonderful routine, never broken over the years, except when one of Jenny’s babies was inconveniently born in the last week of a month and once when their mother had a chest infection. The outing took the same form always. Jenny would drive down the quays, and her mother would cluck at the changes she saw on every visit. It had all been altered, the implication being for the worse, but they knew it wasn’t since last month or last year; their mother was thinking of 30 or 40 years ago, when the world was young.
Jenny would then park and her mother would sigh at the way so many people brought their cars into town for no reason at all. And then they would head for Brown Thomases. It was always said in the plural; if you said it in the singular it meant you didn’t know it. It was like people who said St Stephen’s Green. The tour took two hours, never less. In fact, Jenny thought that had the time been available it might have taken all day. Her mother stood at the front door and sighed with pleasure. Everything that lay ahead was like a wonderland. In a changing world this place remained as it always was, a temple of comfort and luxury.
They would start at the cosmetics counters. Mother knew a lot of the elegant women who demonstrated and sold the various fragrances and creams. Well, she didn’t really know them but she remembered them from visit to visit. ‘When I was here last month you were telling me about this new firming cream for the throat,’ she might say to one. They were invariably helpful and interested and often gave her a spray of something new and very sophisticated that had just come in. Years ago there had been a very nice woman called Caroline Mahon who mother had got to know. She had wept and sent a letter to the store when she read of Caroline’s death in the paper. But all these girls were very helpful and took all the time in the world. Which, as Jenny said grimly, was more than duty required since her mother’s face, with its dusting of face powder and merest touch of lipstick, was not going to be an arena on which the great cosmetic wars of the world could be fought and won.
Then they went to look at scarves and ribbons and particularly at the kind of ribbon comb attachments that someone going to a glittering evening do might wear in her hair. Mother had short grey hair, hidden on the day of the outing by a hat. She never wore these hair ornaments but she fingered them, lovingly clucking over the prices, but saying that of course if you had the right dress then these ribbons could set it off and make the whole thing into a coordinated outfit that would be very striking. And then they might go to the cookery shop where they would examine whole ranges of coloured cookware and mother would discuss 12-place settings and easy-care napkins.
They would try on jackets, a nice jacket. A nice jacket paid for itself a hundred times over, she would tell the salespeople. And as they would nod and agree, she would see the price and cluck that it was steep but then you were paying for the cut. ‘And the material,’ the assistant might say. ‘Pure wool.’ ‘And the name,’ mother would say and put the jacket back on its hanger.
The tour almost always ended in the bed linen department downstairs. Real down was debated, the kind of goose that had delivered up the feathers for the duvet was identified, queen size and king size beds were clucked over; in the old days there had been just a double bed. Mother nearly always bought a pillowcase, it was wrapped carefully in the distinctive bag of the store and she would leave reluctantly for lunch with Nuala.
Since mother did not walk far, lunch was in Dawson Street or Wicklow Street. It was a nightmare for Nuala, who worked on the southside. She gave up trying to find lunchtime parking and took a taxi instead, arranging for another taxi to pick her up an hour and a half later. This meant nearly two and a half hours away from the office, unheard of in the place where she worked, but Nuala said that not to have it for her mother’s outing was unthinkable. She worked longer hours to compensate and always felt slightly guilty about it.
At lunch mother would talk about the tragedy of growing old on your own without knowing love and a family. Nuala would clench her teeth and smile ever more brightly as she said in a tinny voice that one never knew what was around the corner. And, at the age of 43, with the same relationship, of which her mother knew nothing, she found it harder and harder to play this role. Then it would be Jenny’s turn, what a pity the children had done such odd things, gone to Australia with no job and no plans, didn’t write letters to their gran, were never there when she came to the house. Jenny smiled and shrugged and said that was the way it was, and what could you do?
The sisters’ eyes met across the table. Twelve times a year they felt united by this huge resentment of the mother they both loved. Then Nuala’s taxi would come and she would go, and it was always too soon and nothing had been said and she worked too hard and perhaps that’s why she hadn’t settled down like a normal person. And then Jenny would get the car and take mother home for afternoon tea, never sure whether she wanted one of her children to be there and possibly bring up an argument about the Church, or whether it was better to face into an empty house. And she would put mother on the train. All the way to the station and as they boarded the train, Jenny’s mother talked about the great visit to Brown Thomases. It was a tragedy that it was going to change into that Marks and Spencers.
Last month at lunch she told Jenny and Nuala that she might cease these outings to Dublin. After all, with no lovely visit to Brown Thomases what was the point? Her two daughters looked at her blankly. Nuala began a useless attack, saying that the place had always been a bastion for the rich and privileged and that it was absurd to say it was for ordinary people. Jenny, trying to be a peacemaker, said that BT’s would be across the street and that everything would be just the same. But their mother would not be consoled, without any idea that she was writing off over 20 years of being welcomed warmly to Dublin by her two girls. As far as she was concerned it had been maybe 250 visits to an escapist paradise.
She was 71, too old to have the shining, glittery toy snatched away from her. Too innocent to hide from her children that the disappointment was so great it had clouded her judgment and her love for her family.
I
t was usually with a group of friends in those days and they would all make sure to buy a different Sunday newspaper so they could go and have a drink afterwards and read four papers instead of one. It was very companionable then but of course nobody had time to do anything like that now; they were all in marriages or relationships varying from uxorious to deeply unsatisfactory and they would corpse themselves laughing if she were to suggest anything as ludicrous as walking down the pier on a cold Sunday and going to have a few jars.
Nowadays they asked each other to dinner parties, at infrequent intervals, to drinks mornings or to charity dos; the days of sharing newspapers and glasses of lager were long gone. So, if she were to go down the pier, she would go alone. But it might look odd if she met someone she knew, which was part of the purpose of the trip, so she borrowed a dog from a neighbour. She could always say it was a keep-fit exercise. The dog was less fit than herself and seemed to have had enough after a few steps. But she dragged him along behind her. She noticed that everyone else seemed to be following behind bounding hounds who were straining at leashes – she had obviously taken the wrong breed. This was a sleep-by-the-fire-and-wait-for-bits-of-roast-beef-after-lunch kind of dog.
She had dressed quite carefully: a smart jacket with a white shirt coming out over it; dark pants and boots; no handbag or anything prissy like that; hair wind-blown but not messy. If she met anyone from the past she would look fine. She would also have her explanation – her husband was at the golf club for a special competition so she was released from making Sunday lunch and she thought she would blow away the cobwebs. It was mainly true. It was a bit true. And anyway, one of the great things about growing older is that you know people don’t care about your circumstances all that much.