Authors: Maeve Binchy
The older people are more interested.
‘That will be a relief to Her Majesty,’ says the woman with a basket full of lentils for herself and choice cuts for her cat. ‘Her poor Majesty was exhausted trying to turn the other way; now it will all be above board.’
‘A lot of bloody nonsense,’ says the man in the cloth cap with the north of England accent, who buys tins of pilchards and oven chips and nothing else. ‘Pair of them were perfectly all right living over the brush like half the country; he’s only marrying her because they’re asking questions about how much of our money he spends on her anyway.’
And the large, comfortable woman who sits like a wise old bird at the checkout is very pleased.
‘It’s one up for the cardigans,’ she says. ‘I knew the day would come when a woman as shabby as myself would marry a prince.’
I lived here in these London streets in 1981 when Charles was getting married for the first time, and the atmosphere was electric. The playboy prince was going to settle down, and he had found a nice virgin girl to marry. Yet, at his engagement press conference, when asked was he in love, he had said rather ominously, ‘Yes, whatever that means.’
But the country had gone mad with an innocent pleasure. It was July 1981, and there was a huge fireworks display in Hyde Park the night before the wedding. There were street parties, and I was almost afraid to tell people I was talking to on the tube to St Paul’s that I had an invitation to the do in my handbag. They might have killed for it. And I say ‘the people that I talked to’ because for a day or two London forgot its introversion and everyone spoke to everyone else. It was like the day the Pope had come to Dublin two years previously.
It was something that was of its time and will never happen in the same way again. There’s no excitement about Charles and Camilla in the streets of west London this time around. No spontaneous flags and bunting, no lump in the throat empathising with the happy event.
The past 24 years have seen too much murky water flow under too many bridges. The little virgin bride shed all her shyness and puppy fat and became one of the world’s most beautiful women, and Charles, who had never loved her remotely, behaved as badly as any pantomime villain. The disastrous royal marriage was lived out in public, with other parties briefing the media about the rights and wrongs of the situation. The couple’s two little boys struggled on, surrounded by butlers, nannies and nonspeaking relatives.
Princess Diana, who at one stage held all the cards because she was
nice
to people and full of charm, lost out in the end in every possible way. Charles, who became more arrogant and mutinous with every passing year, made little attempt to hide his relationship and now seems, oddly, to have won. It looks now as if he is being rewarded: he is getting the marriage he should have had 35 years ago when Camilla was certainly up for it but when he dithered and couldn’t make a decision.
It’s not a love story that immediately sets the bells ringing or promises to get to the heart of the nation. But never underestimate the power of the media. About 20 minutes after the usual messed-up announcement from Clarence House, a statement that left so many questions unanswered and showed a complete lack of planning and preparation, all the television channels had wheeled in the ageing royal-watchers. They were brought out of mothballs and dusted down and wound up to go. I know what I’m talking about; I was one of them.
Queen Elizabeth II has four children. I was at three of their weddings and I didn’t bring any of them much luck. Only Prince Edward’s first marriage has survived, and Princess Anne’s second marriage.
I am sure Charles and Camilla, who have had each other out on approval for some time, will make a go of it. And truly, most people of goodwill will wish them happiness, as you would to anyone who has had a troubled journey in romance.
But it’s such a different scene this time around. I wonder whether Charles, in his very narrow world, knows this. It’s hard for any of us to know what other people think and how they live and what their values are. But it must be harder for the Prince of Wales, surrounded as he is by sycophants and by people who grew up in the same strange enclosed world as himself, where journalists are called ‘reptiles’ and where there are the People Who Matter and then the rest of the world, which doesn’t matter a bit. He must think he is a scream, because I have seen the awful, fawning, servile press, really worse than reptiles, laughing hysterically if he makes a stupid joke. Why would he
not
think that his forthcoming wedding should be on the same scale as the last one? He has no loving family to lean on.
His parents never went to visit him when he was at that terrible school, Gordonstoun. Do you know anyone who was
never
visited at boarding school by their parents? He was completely out of touch with the life his first bride wanted to live, and there was nobody to advise him, except in the ways of protocol, history and tradition, which could be summed up as ‘wives must learn’. He was singularly unlucky in that his wife never did.
His polo-playing friends told him that Diana was a loony tune and that his best bet was to invite Camilla to their house parties. Then, somewhere along the line, somebody taped his intimate conversation with Camilla years ago and broadcast it to the world. That was the only day I felt really sorry for Charles. I could have wept for his sheer embarrassment as I saw him on television straightening his cuffs and going to see his mother, who was after all the queen of the country that was rocking to his bizarre sexual fantasies. Strange as they were, they
were
his and Camilla’s own business.
So the man who will presumably one day be king may not have a clue how his future subjects think of him and his wedding.
For a start, most of the broadcasts and breaking news and interviews focused on the issue of what poor Camilla would be called. She would not
dare
to call herself Princess of Wales, would she? She couldn’t ever be queen, could she? And eventually, two hours later, Charles’s expensive spin doctors and PR people issued a statement defining what the woman would or would not be called.
Then there were hours of debate about whether a civil ceremony would be a proper marriage for a head of the Church, or whether a church wedding would be worse. Then they debated whether Charles was only marrying Camilla now because the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee might uncover something too damaging about what he had spent on the lady. Or because the results of the second inquest into Princess Diana’s death were to be published, possibly throwing up even more bad publicity about the royal family. Or because the Archbishop of Canterbury said that they should regularise their situation.
And as if all this wasn’t bad enough for a couple planning their wedding, it was said that the Labour party was incandescent with rage because Charles and Camilla’s plans were messing up the timing of the next election.
I am basically a big custard heart. I don’t know these people at all. I’ve watched them for three decades, notebook in hand, but I don’t know them or know anybody who knows them. But I am interested in their love story. I think Charles is arrogant and selfish, but the roots of that lie in his upbringing. I think Camilla is basically a decent and horsey cardigan who loves Charles and is prepared to go through all this (like she has gone through so much already) from the sheer accident of falling in love with him. And really, I don’t think she cares
what
she is called. She isn’t even trying to be ‘queen of hearts’, and it must be painful and hurtful when she is compared to her beautiful, warm, but deeply unhappy predecessor.
The young have no interest in the affairs and doings of such elderly people. The Diana activists may feel that somehow Camilla triumphed in the end, and perhaps they will dislike her for that. I can’t be the only person in the world who doesn’t think hereditary monarchy is a good idea but who still does genuinely wish these two confused middle-aged people a great wedding day and a good time together.
T
hey say that handing over your story to film-makers is like sending your first child to school. The book, like the child, still belongs to you in a sort of a way, but it’s not the same way. Now there’s a different life, with a lot of other people involved. But a child can’t stay at home forever, and a book is better when it gets a further life, so I am always delighted when someone thinks that one of my stories is good enough to make into a movie.
I know, of course, that not everything will fit in.
Tara Road
is a long story, with many characters, so some have to go if we are to make sense of it in an hour and a half of cinema. I don’t write the scripts myself; I have tried, but I’m not good at it. I prefer to tell a story in big, swooping terms, pausing to tell you what someone’s thinking about, worrying over, hoping for. You can’t do that in a screenplay. It’s very brief, with lots of short sentences and plenty of white space on the page. That’s not my scene at all.
You have to suggest things in a screenplay, so the director and actors can take it up and make sense of it. I find it much easier to tell things. So I have great respect for those who can write a script and then for the others who can turn a short screenplay, of about 100 pages, into a whole film.
The author has no say in casting, finding locations or choosing music. So you wait with an eager face to see what they will do. It’s as much a surprise for the writer as it is for the audience.
Sometimes people have very unhappy times watching their beloved book transfer to the movies, but I enjoyed it all so much and had such good times on the set that I thought I would share it with you.
I have been lucky before. I enjoyed so much the filming of
Circle of Friends
, with Minnie Driver and Chris O’Donnell, the television version of
Echoes
, with Geraldine James, and the TV movie of
The Lilac Bus
. But
Tara Road
has long been one of my favourite stories. It’s about two women who exchange homes and, in doing so, find more than a place to spend two months and lick their wounds: they discover redemption.
Many years ago we exchanged our London property for a house in Sydney, and it was a great experience.
Tara Road
is not our story, because nothing would be duller than reading about two happily married, settled couples, which is what we and they were. Still, it was fascinating living in their home, knowing their secrets and realising that they knew ours. They had no corkscrew; we had no cereal bowls. By the time I left their house, with its wonderful bottlebrush trees and exotic birds on the garden fence, I felt I knew them more than I knew neighbours of 20 years at home. And so I wrote the story.
I can’t remember what I thought my characters Ria and Marilyn looked like, because all I can see are the beautiful, strong, sensitive faces of Olivia Williams and Andie MacDowell registering hope and grief and triumph when it is called for. I don’t think I ever saw in my mind’s eye all the other characters, either. I just had a feeling for them, and now they are brought to life for me: the strong-willed Mona, played by Brenda Fricker; the elegant and faithless Rosemary, played by Maria Doyle Kennedy; the sexy, feckless Danny, played by Iain Glen; the handsome Stephen Rea, playing Colm, the restaurant owner; and the children, who behave just like Ria’s children would have behaved. I will never see any of them in any other way.
As for the house, I had a road in mind in Dublin for which I made up the name Tara Road. The film company asked where I was thinking of, and I told them. It wouldn’t work, they said, as it was much too narrow. They would hold up traffic with their huge generators and all the crew. So the location people went out and found another house to film it in, which is perfect. It’s almost as if it had been built for it, exactly the kind of road I had in mind, with those big, high-ceilinged rooms where Ria had been once so happy, then so lonely; where Marilyn tried to look for peace and found half of Dublin passing through to interrupt her.
So I approached the filming with great optimism. I have always known that film-makers hate the author around the place. They always fear that he or she is going to say that it wasn’t at all like that. We are looked at with fear and mistrust. Yet it isn’t human to expect us to stay away, especially when it’s being filmed down the road. So I asked politely if my husband, Gordon, and I could come along and watch. Quietly. I stressed the word.
And that’s what we did. We peeped in at the huge Tara Road house, the apartment where Bernadette lived; we watched astounded while our marvellous local fishmonger’s was changed into a US delicatessen over a bank holiday weekend. We were very polite to Gillies MacKinnon, the director, and to his camera and sound people; we admired all the actors and told them they were just the part.
Eventually they realised we were just ageing groupies, loving everything and therefore no trouble. And they sensed that Gordon and I were dying for little walk-on parts. So it was arranged that we were going to play Martini drinkers in Colm’s restaurant.
I wish I could tell you how excited we were. We went to bed early the night before, because the limo came for us at seven a.m. Then we went to make-up. We didn’t have to go to costume, because they asked us to wear anything of our own that was not black or navy. For some reason now forgotten, I wore lilac. Then it was time for our scene. We would be sitting on high chairs at the bar in Colm’s restaurant. Stephen Rea was to serve us with two triangular Martini glasses, each with an olive in it. We were to say nothing aloud but to mouth thank-you words at him.
Just before they said ‘Lights, camera, action’ I said to Gordon that I could murder this Martini. I felt we had been up for hours. He said he wouldn’t hold his breath about its being a real Martini, but I am an eternal optimist. I said we should look at the way there was condensation on the glass; they wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to chill a glass of water.