Silver Wedding (13 page)

He let his eyes wander to the picture with its unlikely blue skies and its soft grassy slopes. Mayo had never been like that.

There had been very big white skies and stony walls and small brown fields. The picture was chocolate-box stuff.

Carlo Palazzo was coming to the point.

The point was definitely upcoming, Desmond thought to himself, he felt the familiar acid taste coming from his stomach to his mouth. Please let there be some kind of office. Something which need never have to be explained. Some part of the building where there would be a person, a person like Marigold who would answer the telephone to Deirdre. Someone who would say 'Hold on and I'll put you through' when his wife rang and asked as she always did to speak to Mr Doyle Special Projects Manager, please.

With an upward inflection on the please.

Please let there be some word 'manager' somewhere along the line, and let Deirdre not have to spend the rest of her life phoning a business who would not know who he was, let alone where he was.

'So we thought it best if your work was to be in a roving capacity,' Carlo Palazzo said.

'Not roving, Mr Palazzo,' said Desmond Doyle. 'Please, not roving.'

The Italian looked at him with concern.

'I assure you, Desmond, that the work will be just as important, more important in many ways, and as you know there is no question of changing the salary structure, that will remain with the usual emoluments ..."

'Any kind of base. Anything at all.' Desmond felt the sweat on his forehead. God Almighty, he was beginning to beg. Why could he not have talked it straight through with Frank Quigley?

He and Frank, who had played on the stony hills of Mayo together, who had never seen a West of Ireland sky like the one in the picture, they knew the same language. Why had the barriers of years meant that he couldn't say to Frank straight out that he must have an office even if it was a doorway leading nowhere?

It wasn't much after all these years to give Deirdre, the belief that her husband was of managerial stuff in a large and important retailing organization.

There was a time when he and Frank had been able to talk about anything, anything at all. Like how Frank's father drank away a fortune of compensation in three weeks buying large measures for the whole town. Lake how much Desmond wanted to escape from the farm and the silent brothers and sisters who seemed happy to stalk the barren land after the scrawny difficult sheep.

They had told each other of their first conquests with girls when they had come here, two ignorant young paddies in the fifties, they had shared everything from the day they had gone to work for Prince Stores. But then a hunger had taken Frank over, and it must have been about that time that the close friendship died.

And Frank had gone for ever up, for ever and ever, he ran ' everything now. But the Palazzos had bought out Prince Stores and made it their own. It was known that Carlo Palazzo had never made a decision larger than what sauce he would have on his pasta without consulting Frank Quigley. So it was Frank who was dooming his old pal Desmond to be on a roving basis.

Did Frank not remember Deirdre, did he not know how hard ithis was going to be for him?

Frank came so rarely to Rosemary Drive these days. But still, [ every time they met each other it was as if the old days were still | the same. They banged each other on the shoulders and laughed, and since Desmond never made anything of being on such a low f rung of a ladder they had joined so long ago, Frank equally never made any reference to his own high position. Only at the marriage to Renata Palazzo had the real gulf between them become apparent.

Nobody else from Desmond's level was at the wedding, everyone was many degrees above.

Deirdre had hated that wedding. She had been looking forward to it for months and even believed that she and Renata Palazzo would somehow become great friends. It had always been so unlikely that Desmond had never taken her seriously. Renata was years younger than they were, she was from a different world.

Deirdre persisted in thinking of her as an Italian immigrant of her own age who would be shy and needing some kind of sisterly advice.

Desmond would never forget how Deirdre's smile had faded at the wedding when the bright yellow dress and coat made in matching man-made fibre came up against the pure silks and the furs of the other women. She who had left the house so cheerily that morning had been sinking into the background even during the church service when an Italian opera singer was getting through 'Panis Angelicus' for the newlyweds. By the time they had arrived at the marquee and joined the line of guests waiting to be received she was tugging at her dress and his arm.

It had been a black day for her and her hurt had darkened the day for Desmond too.

But none of it had been Frank Quigley's fault. Frank's smile never lessened, not ever in the years since then.

You could always go to Frank. You didn't have to say things in so many words. You could use code.

Where in the name of God was Frank today, this new black day when Carlo Palazzo was telling Desmond Doyle that he would have no office, no door, no telephone on a desk possibly?

Should he ask whether he could shortcut the whole thing for them by putting on one of the beige coats that the men who swept the shops put on, and getting down to work immediately with his bucket and pail and cleaning cloth, wiping the vegetable racks just after the doors closed? Would it perhaps be easier than waiting for half a dozen further slides? But then anger filled him too, he wasn't a stupid man, he wasn't a fool who could be passed over like this. He could feel his face working in a way that was beyond his control. To his horror he saw something like pity in the older man's face.

'Desmond, my friend, please,' Carlo began uncertainly.

'I'm all right.' Desmond stood up behind his small desk. He would have strode across to the window so that the telltale tears in his eyes could subside. But his office wasn't one for striding, he would have had to squeeze past the filing cabinet and possibly knock over the small table or ask Mr Palazzo to move his chair.

It was too confined a place for grand gestures. Of course, come next week there would be no place for any gestures at all. 'I know that you are all right. I just don't want you to understand me wrongly. Sometimes even after all these years in this country I can't make myself clear .. . you know.'

'No, you make yourself very clear, Mr Palazzo, clearer than I do, and English is meant to be my native tongue.'

'But perhaps I have offended you in something I said. Can I try to say it again? You are so valued here, you have been here so long and your experience is so necessary... it is just that circumstances change and there is an ebb and flow . . . everything is being . .. what word will I use ... ?'

'Redeployed,' said Desmond flatly.

'Redeployed.' Carlo Palazzo seized it and ran with it, not "knowing he had already used it twice. His smile was broad. As if this word somehow rescued things.

He saw from Desmond's face that it didn't.

'Tell me, Desmond, what would you like best? No, it's not an insulting remark, not a trick question ... I ask you what would you like best in work, what way would be the best way for things to work out for you today? Suppose it were possible for you to stay here, would that be your dream, your wish?'

The man was asking seriously, it wasn't a game of going forwards and back. Carlo wanted to know.

'I don't suppose it would be my dream, no. Not to stay in this room as Special Projects Manager.'

'So.' Carlo looked for some silver lining desperately. 'So why then is it so bad to leave it? What other place would have been I your dream?'

Desmond leaned on the corner of the filing cabinet. Marigold had decorated the place a little with a few borrowed plants which she must have grabbed from the carpeted offices. Desmond hoped she hadn't actually taken any of Carlo's own greenery. He smiled a little to himself at the thought, and his boss smiled back, looking up eagerly from the chair in front of the desk.

Carlo had a big kind face. He didn't look shifty, he was the kind of Italian who always played the kind uncle or indeed the loving grandfather in a film.

It was Carlo's dream to be a grandfather many times over, to have a lot of little grandsons with half-Irish and half-Italian names running in and out of that huge white house. Children to leave his share of Palazzo to. Did Desmond dream of grandchildren too? He didn't know. What a dull man he must be not to know his own dream when he was asked it by this big straightforward man.

'It's so long since I allowed myself to have a dream I suppose I've forgotten what it was,' he said truthfully.

'I never forgot mine, I wanted to go to Milano to work with the fashion,' said Carlo. 'I want to have the finest craftsmen and stitchers and designers all together and to have my own factory with the name Carlo Palazzo.'

'You have your own name over your work,' Desmond said.

'Yes, but it is not what I wanted, not what I had hoped, I only have a little time in what I would have loved. My father he told me I must go into the food business, with my brothers, with my uncles, not playing with clothes like a ladies' dressmaker, he said.'

'Fathers don't understand,' Desmond said simply.

'Your father . . . did he not understand perhaps?'

'No, my father neither understood nor didn't understand, if you know what I mean. He was always an old man. When I was ten, he was old, and it wasn't just that I thought it, he looks it in every picture. He only understood sheep and hillsides and silence.

But he never stopped me, he said I was right to go.'

'Then how do you mean fathers never understand?'

'I didn't understand. I did all this for my son. I wanted him to have as good an education as possible, I didn't understand when he left.'

'Where did he go?'

It had never been admitted outside Rosemary Drive. Never beyond the walls.

'He ran away, he ran back to the sheep and the stones and the silence.'

'Well, you let him go.' Carlo didn't seem shocked that Desmond's son had run off uneducated to the back of beyond.

'But not with a good grace,' Desmond sighed.

Carlo was still puzzled. 'So did you want a life of high education?'

For some reason the small eager face of Suresh Patel flashed into Desmond's mind, his dark eyes feverish with the wish to heap degrees and diplomas on his family.

'No, not a high education. Just a place, I suppose, a place that was mine.'

Carlo looked around the featureless office, which he probably remembered as being even more featureless over the previous months without its injection of borrowed plants.

'This place? It feels so important?'

Desmond had somehow come to the end of the road.

'To be honest, Mr Palazzo, I don't know. I'm not a man of very strong opinions. I never was. I have ideas, that's why I suppose Frank and you thought I'd be good here. But they are personal ideas, not corporate ones, and I'm inclined to get a bit lost whenever there's redeployment and the like. But I'll manage.

I'll manage. I've always managed before.'

He didn't sound frightened now or self-pitying. Just resigned and practical. Carlo Palazzo was relieved that the mood, whatever it had been, had passed.

'It's not going to happen overnight, it will be in two to three weeks, and in many ways it will give you more freedom, more time to think about what you really want.'

'Maybe it will.'

'And there will be a title of manager, it hasn't been quite worked out yet but when Frank gets back I'm sure ...'

'Oh, I'm sure he will,' Desmond agreed readily.

'So. . .' Once more Carlo spread his hands out.

This time he was rewarded with a half smile and Desmond stretched his own hand out as if to shake on something that had been agreed between two men of like mind.

Carlo paused as if something had struck him.

'Your wife? She is well?'

'Oh yes, Deirdre's fine, thank you Mr Palazzo, blooming.'

'Perhaps she might care to come some evening to have ... to have a meal in our house with us, the family, you know, Frank and Renata and everything.. . You were all such friends in the old days .. . before any of this .. . that's true, yes.'

'That is very kind of you Mr Palazzo.' Desmond Doyle spoke in the voice of a man who knew that no such invitation would be issued.

'That will be good, we will enjoy that.' Carlo Palazzo spoke in exactly the same voice.

Marigold held the door open for the great chief Mr Palazzo.

He looked at her with a vague and pleasant smile.

'Thank you, thank you ... um.'

'I'm Marigold,' she said, trying to iron out her Australian accent. 'I'm lucky enough to work for Mr Doyle. There have been several important calls, Mr Doyle, I told them that you were in conference.'

Desmond nodded gravely, and waited until the footsteps were gone for Marigold to hiss at him, 'Well, what happened?'

'Oh Marigold,' he said wearily.

'Don't "Oh Marigold" me, didn't I make you look good? Didn't you hear me? Bet he thinks a lot more of you now. Saying I was lucky to be working for you.'

'I expect he thinks you're sleeping with me,' Desmond said.

'I wouldn't half mind.'

'You're possibly the nicest girl in the world.'

'What about your wife?' Marigold asked.

'Oh, I don't think she'd like you to sleep with me, not at all.'

'I mean isn't she the nicest girl in the world, or wasn't she once or what?'

'She's very nice, very nice indeed.' He spoke objectively.

'So no chance for me then.' Marigold was trying to jolly him along.

Talazzo's not the worst. That's a great Irish expression for you, to say a man is not the worst, it's grudging praise.'

'He didn't give you the bum's rush then?' Marigold's face lit up.

'No, he gave me the bum's rush all right.'

'Aw, shit. When? Where?'

'Soon, a week or two when Frank gets back.'

'Frank's not away,' Marigold said furiously.