THE woman who was dealing angrily with her face in the ladies' room had a determined sort of look. Whatever unappealing thing she seemed to find in the environs of her nose would be dealt with, and stay dealt with.
There was serious grouting and infilling being done there. I looked at her handbag with interest to discover how many tools she had brought with her for this purpose. This kind of massive over haul job was usually done, I thought, back at base.
And there, inside the rim of her handbag was a long piece of beige linen and embroidered on it in red were the words "Don't Kill The Messenger".
It's what urban myths are made of. Next I would see an axe and discover she went round dabbing at her nose and backing people to death all over the city.
I looked at the exit and worked out that my chances of making it were not great. My only hope was to outwit her and pretend I hadn't seen the message. I scrubbed at my hands furiously with the soap and tried to saunter to the door.
"You probably wonder what that means," she said.
No, not at all," I said in a squeak, realising too late that I should have seen nothing at all to wonder about. I'd have been no good in intelligence.
"My children gave it to me on my birthday. It was meant to be a joke - a joke that should be taken seriously.
"Well now," I said.
"I have a habit of sounding off when something happens, you see," she confessed.
"Well, don't we all?" I tried not to let my fevered imagination wonder how violently she had sounded off and what had to happen to make her do so. It couldn't be too bad if her children had made a joke of it and embroidered a sampler for her.
She said it had been a great shock, they had given her flowers, of course, and other things, but her three children decided that this would be the most practical and helpful thing they could give her a little reminder for mother's handbag. Because whenever she had been about to kill the messenger it appeared that her handbag would be open or she would be on the point of opening it.
And what kinds of messengers had she killed?
She would like to know that too, she told me, she would very much like to know, and then she had asked for incidents that could have led to such an accusation. They had been very sparse and would not have stood up in a court of law.
Anything at all specific?
Oh, the time she had spoken her mind to the man in the DART office about the poor timetable. Her daughters had taken a bad view about that. They said that he wasn't personally responsible, and that Mother should have written to the authorities or organised a letter of protest from the neighbourhood, or written to a newspaper or a radio programme about it.
She hadn't really meant to attack him of course, but he was there, and he did represent the people who ran the DART so he might have expected a little ill will to be vented now and then when shortcomings were noticed, and surely he would pass this to the proper people? Her daughters didn't think so.
And her son was put out because she spoke sharply to a man on a garage forecourt about some negative aspects of the Shell Corporation in Nigeria.
He said that the whole thing had been exaggerated beyond all imaginings. And it was quite irresponsible to compare her to those all powerful army generals in the past who killed the messenger when he brought bad news of an army defeat.
That's what the allusion was, she said cuttingly, she was being cast in the role of someone who just lashed out at the first and usually least responsible member of the team that committed the outrage.
"It's very easy to do," murmured Maeve the peacemaker.
I told her that I used to attack the air hostesses about unexplained noises in the soft underbellies of jumbo jets and blame them because the pilots used to begin every announcement with a great strangled growl of "aaaarrgh". It's only a mannerism, a sort of preparatory throat clearing, but to those with a slightly nervous disposition it sounds as if they being held firmly at the neck by a hijacker with a smoking grenade. Only when an air hostess told me kindly that she really could not go into the flight deck and correct the captain's diction did I realise I was attacking the nearest target.
I thought this nice, humble and honest admission would help the ruffled mother and make her feel that she was not alone, that if I had three children they might have embroidered the same thing for me.
But she was accepting no consolation. She had been in a supermarket recently where they had changed everything around; she found herself looking at stir fry sauces where once they had all the teas and coffees. Who else should she attack other than the girl stacking the shelves?
The family had been very annoyed when she reported that incident. And the one involving the taxi man who was late because the firm had not contacted him in time and he had to come miles from a taxi rank, and the waiter in the restaurant where the smoking tables were too far away from the buzzy part.
Her view was that there simply wasn't time to write to the heads of supermarkets, owners of restaurants, managers of taxi firms, and certainly not enough time to wait to get on to the Gay Byrne Show or Marian Finnucane's Live Line, and suppose you did get on those shows, you might run the risk of being considered a crank.
WE had both said how we didn't like those hot air things for drying your hands. She believed they gave you warts, I believe they are deafening and don't really dry your hands - paper towels are much better.
At that moment a woman came in to clean the cloakroom. I could see the ruffled mother's mouth open. She was just about to blame the cleaner.
I tapped her handbag in a warning manner. Together we wrote a post card to the hotel manager courteously expressing our dissatisfaction with the hand drying operation. I have received a reply already and I'm sure she has too. Not entirely convincing, it says that they're high on being anti germ, incapable of giving you warts and not at all deafening for the majority of customers.
Like, they did a survey since maybe?
But still, it's a start.
I saved the girl who cleaned the taps from an ear bashing, and maybe after the polite letter about the drying machine that breaks through the threshold of pain in terms of noise the manager might pay a courtesy visit to the ladies and listen to it. And I have learned that crisis intervention in terms of embroidering any little maxims of life is not a great idea.
Whatever the temptation, and no one on earth is more perpetually tempted than myself to tell people how to run their lives, we must remember this hurt people to the quick, it also doesn't work.