Free Maeve Binchy by Piers Dudgeon Page B

died in early middle age.
    Life may have been simpler back in the ’50s, but for Maeve occasionally it was so hurtful that even her sense of humour was not enough to protect her sensitive soul.
    In 1956, the year of her Leaving Certificate, she turned seventeen . She was approaching the end of her time at the convent and was nervously awaiting the results on which her passage into university depended when she was invited to a dance at theRoyal Marine Hotel. It was to be a big ‘do’, a dance given by the parents of two of her school friends.
    The Royal Marine has been an elegant fixture in Dún Laoghaire since 1865, with its bandstand out front and stories abounding of guests as various as Queen Victoria, Frank Sinatra and Michael Collins, the Irish freedom fighter who took Room 210 with Kitty Kiernan in November 1920.
    Maeve borrowed a dress from a cousin and had a big velvet band let into the front. Diamante earrings were found to complete the outfit, but with frequent practice earlier in the day they had bitten into her ears, so that by the time of the dance she’d had to put patches of plaster on her lobes. Maeve painted the plaster blue to match her dress, though wasn’t quite certain she had done the right thing.
    But then, as she was leaving the house, Maureen yet again came to the rescue. She looked at her daughter proudly and said, ‘You look so beautiful you’ll take the sight out of their eyes.’
    Alas, it was a cataclysmic failure of a night, one that would inspire what her editor years later described as ‘one of the most powerful scenes she ever wrote – the party scene in
Circle of Friends
’. Nobody – not one single person – danced with her, and this was a private party. She was there with her friends and she couldn’t hide her utter failure. Her parents waited up for her until she came home, wanting to know not only that she was safe, but about every heartbeat of every dance. Maeve told them that she had been danced off her feet all night long.
    Long afterwards she admitted this was a very black time. If earlier she had not dared admit a discrepancy between whatMaureen was always telling her about her beauty and the reality, she surely did now and what did it say of her mother’s love that she had duped her all her young life? For days Maeve persecuted herself by imagining people were gossiping behind her back in the tight little Dalkey community. The memory of it still stung on the day her Leaving Certificate results came through. But it was only one of many feelings that were running through her core that day.
    Today she would hear whether she had passed – and she was worried sick. The nuns had given their opinion that she was not, after all, of a scholarly frame of mind. If she tried, she could be top at anything, but she had continued to dream and when all was said and done she liked laughing better than working.
    She no longer had a particular ambition. She was down to read Law at university, but had no desire to be a lawyer. She didn’t at this point want to be a writer nor was she thinking about becoming a teacher. She wanted to enjoy life and with the results hanging over her she had been uncharacteristically moody and difficult at home, flaring up on any subject. Maureen realised that she was worried about her results and wondered if, like herself, Maeve would be more successful in work where no great further study was required.
    At the same time, Maeve had not forgotten what had been sacrificed to get her this far. She was aware of her father’s expectations of all the children to pass their exams, and remembered his warning that money might not always be there. As the eldest child she felt a duty to prove that they, the children of ‘these great people’, as she referred to her parents, were indeed swans and not ducks.
    Dalkey was such a small town and however familiar and friendly on the surface, it was, like every other small town, full of small-town gossips. Everyone knew