Silver Wedding (14 page)

'No, but you know, we say he's away.'

'And where are they sending you?'

'Here and there, roving apparently.'

'Is there any good in it, any good at all?' Her eyes were tender, her big handsome face concerned, and she bit her lip at the unfairness of it all.

He couldn't bear her sympathy.

'Oh, it's all right, Marigold, there's plenty of good in it. I don't see this as anything we should fight them on the beaches for, do you ... ?'

He looked around the office and made a theatrical gesture with his arms.

'But roving?' She seemed upset, he had to reassure her.

'It's more interesting than sitting here and seeing nothing at the end of it. I'll roam up and see you from time to time, you'd brighten my day.'

'Did they say why?'

'Redeployment of resources.'

'Redeployment of balls,' Marigold said.

'Maybe, but what's the point?'

'You didn't do anything, they shouldn't take your job away.'

'That could be it, perhaps I really didn't do anything.'

'No, you know what I mean, you're a manager for God's sake, you've been here years.'

'There's still going to be a manager's title, of whatever sort.. . We don't know yet, we'll know later. . .'

'Later, like when Frank gets back.'

'Shush, shush.'

'I thought you two were meant to be such friends.'

'We were, we are. Now please, Marigold, don't you start.'

She saw, sharp and quick, Marigold, and impulsively she said it.

'You mean you're going to have all this with your wife tonight, is that it?'

'In a way, yes.'

'Well, consider me a bit of a dry run.'

'No. Thank you, I know you mean well.'

She saw the tears in his eyes.

'I mean very well, and I'll tell you this: if your wife doesn't understand that you're one of the best.. .'

'She does, she does.'

'Then I'll have to go round to your house and tell her she's got one beaut guy and I'll knock her head off if she doesn't know it.'

'No, Deirdre will understand, I'll have had time to think about it, explain it properly and put it in perspective.'

'If I were you I wouldn't spend any time rehearsing, ring her up, take her out to lunch, go on, find a nice place with tablecloths and buy a bottle of grog, tell her about it straight, there's no perspective.'

'Everyone does things they want to in the end, Marigold,' he said firmly.

'And some people, Dizzy, do nothing at all,' she said.

He looked stricken.

Impulsively she flung her arms around him. He felt her sobbing in his arms.

Tm such a loudmouth,' she was saying.

'Hush, hush.' Her hair smelled lovely, like apple blossom.

'I was trying to cheer you up, and look at what I ended up saying.'

Her voice was becoming more normal. Gently he released her and held her from him, looking admiringly at the lovely Australian, the same age perhaps as his own Anna or a little older. The daughter of some man out on the other side of the world who had no idea of the kind of jobs this girl was doing and how she entered into them with all her heart. He said nothing, just looked at her until she sniffed herself to some kind of calm.

'Great if the old greaseball had come back and found us in a clinch, would have confirmed everything he suspected.'

'He'd have been jealous,' said Desmond gallantly.

'He would in a pig's eye, Dizzy,' she said.

'I'm going out, I think,' Desmond said.

I’ll tell them you're practising roving if they ask,' she said, almost grinning.

'Don't tell them anything,' he said.

That was what he always said.

He phoned Frank from a call box near one of the entrance gates.

'I'm not sure if Mr Quigley's available, can I say who wants him?'

Long pause. Obviously a consultation.

'No, I'm very sorry Mr Doyle, Mr Quigley's away on business, was this not told to you? I believe Mr Palazzo's secretary was to let you know..."

'Sure, I just wondered was he back.' Desmond was mild.

'No, no.' The voice was firm, as if speaking to a toddler who hadn't quite understood.

'If he calls in tell him that. . . tell him.'

'Yes, Mr Doyle?'

'Tell him nothing. Say Desmond Doyle rang to say nothing, like he's been saying all his life.'

'I don't think I quite .. .'

'You heard me. But I'll say it again.' Desmond said the words again and felt some satisfaction at the sound of them. He wondered was he perhaps going mad.

It was the middle of the morning and there was a strange sense of freedom about walking out through the big Palazzo gates.

Lake a child being sent home from school with some kind of sickness.

He remembered at the Brothers years ago how he and Frank had mitched off for the day. Nobody knew that word over here, skived is what they called it. They had told the Head Brother that they had inhaled a bag of chemicals in the schoolyard and that their eyes were red and they were choking. They managed to persuade him that the cure would be fresh air.

Desmond could still recall thirty-five years later that freedom, as they ran and skipped over the hills, liberated in every way from the small classroom.

One of the things they had found lacking then was any way of finding people to play with. Everyone else was sitting resentfully in the classroom. They had felt the lack of a gang and had gone home earlier than they would have thought likely.

It was somehow the same today. There was nobody that Desmond could ask to come and play. Nobody to buy a bottle of grog for as Marigold had suggested. Even if he were to take the train in to Baker Street and go to Anna's bookshop she might not be free. And she would be alarmed, it was so out of character.

His only son who had been lucky enough to recognize some kind of freedom and run for it was far far away. His other daughter away in her convent would not understand the need that he had to talk, the great urgency to define himself somehow.

It was a poor totting up of twenty-six years in this land that he could think of no other person in the whole of London that he could telephone and ask to meet him. Desmond Doyle had never thought of himself as a jet-setter but he had thought of Deirdre and himself as people with friends, people who had a circle. Of course they were. They were going to have a silver wedding anniversary shortly and their problem was not looking for people, it was trying to cut down on numbers.

What did he mean that he had no friends, they had dozens of friends. But that was it. They had friends. He and Deirdre had friends and the problem had nothing to do with redeployment or managerial titles, the trouble was a promise made and a promise broken.

He had sworn to her that night so many years ago that he would rise in the business, he would be a name for the O'Hagan family in Ireland to take seriously. He had said that Deirdre would never go out to work. Her mother had never gone out to work, and none of Deirdre's friends who married back in 1960 would have expected to go and look for a job. Ireland had changed since then, had become more like England. Mrs O'Hagan's nose, which seemed to turn up very easily, would not turn today if a young woman went on for further education or took any kind of work to help build a family home.

But those were black days long ago, and the O'Hagan scorn had been hard to bear. And Desmond knew that his promise was given under no duress. He had held Deirdre's small hand and on the night they were about to tell her parents the news, he had begged her to trust him. He remembered his words.

'I always wanted to be in buying and selling, I know it's not the thing to tell your family but even when the tinkers came to town I loved it, there was an excitement about it, about the way they put out their scarves and bright glittering combs on the ground, I knew what it was about.'

Deirdre had smiled at him confidently, knowing he would never bring up anything as alien as tinkers in the O'Hagan household.

'I want you,' he had said, 'I want it more than anything in the world and when a man has a dream there's nothing he cannot conquer. I'll conquer the retail business in England. They'll be glad they didn't lose you to a doctor or a lawyer. The day will come when they'll be so glad they settled for a merchant prince.'

And Deirdre had looked at him trustingly as she had always looked ever since.

He supposed that she was still his dream, but why had she not come to his mind when Mr Palazzo had asked him?

Desmond found himself walking the well-trodden path towards home. His feet had taken him on automatic pilot to the bus stop. At this time of day there were no crowds, no queues, how pleasant to be able to travel like this instead of incessant rush hours.

Suppose he did ring Deirdre, he knew she was at home, she was working over that infernal silver wedding list again. Surely she would appreciate his honesty and directness?

She loved him in a sort of way, didn't she? Like he loved her.

And he did love her. She had changed of course like everyone changed, but it would be ludicrous to expect her to be the fluffy blonde desirable young Deirdre O'Hagan who had filled his thoughts and his heart so urgently. Why wasn't she the dream?

She was connected with the dream in a way. The dream was to make good his promise. But he couldn't have told that to Carlo Palazzo in a million years, not even if he had been able to articulate it, which he hadn't. Not until this moment when the bus was approaching.

Desmond hesitated. Should he let the bus go, find a telephone and invite his own wife out to lunch and tell her his own real thoughts? In the hope that they could somehow share them the way they had shared every little heartbeat during that time when they stood strong against the might of the O'Hagans about their marriage.

'Are you getting on or are you not?' the conductor asked him, not unreasonably. Desmond had been standing holding the rail.

He remembered Marigold saying to him, 'Some people, Dizzy, do nothing at all.' But he was nearly on the bus.

'I'm getting on,' he said. And his face was so mild and inoffensive that the tired young bus conductor who also wanted a different and a better life abused him no further.

He sorted it out for Deirdre as he walked towards Rosemary Drive, little phrases, little reasoning steps. There would be more scope in a roving managerial position, he would get to know the workings of the company at first hand rather than being tucked away in his own little eyrie. He would explain that Frank had been called away, he would mention that the exact wording was not firmed up -but the magic word Manager would be included.

He would not mention the Palazzo invitation to supper because he knew it would not materialize.

He felt no bitterness towards Frank for avoiding the confrontation. Nor indeed for initiating the move. Frank was probably right, the functions of Special Projects had indeed been taken over.

Frank at far remove might even be giving him a chance to find a better niche. He wished he could summon up more enthusiasm for this niche, whatever it might be.

It would confuse Deirdre to see him arriving home unexpectedly for lunch. She would fuss and say over and over that he should have warned her. The importance of his news would be lost in a welter of worries about there being nothing at hand.

Desmond decided that he would go into the corner shop, and tell Mr Patel that yet again he had provided a service. They sold pizzas there, not very good ones, wrapped in rather too much plastic and with the wrong ratio of base and topping. Still that might do. Or he might get a tin of soup and some crusty French bread. He didn't remember whether Mr Patel sold chicken pieces, that might be nice.

There were no customers in the shop, but more unusually there was nobody sitting at the till. On the few occasions when Suresh Patel did not sit there himself as if at a throne, still able to advise and direct his tiny empire, there was always another occupant. His silent wife, wordless in English but able to ring up the prices she read on the little labels. Sometimes it was the young owlish son or the pert little daughter. Mr Patel's brother didn't seem capable of manning the family business.

Desmond moved past the central aisle and saw with that lurching feeling of recognition that a raid was in progress.

There was that slow-motion sense of things not being real. Desmond felt as he looked at the two boys in their leather jackets beating the fat brother of Suresh Patel that this was like an action replay when watching a football match.

Desmond felt the old bile, but this time it was a sharper feeling. He thought he was going to choke.

He took two steps backward. He would run out and raise the alarm, he would run around the corner to the street where there would be more people passing by. And, if he was honest, where there would be less chance of the two muggers catching him calling for help.

But before he could go any further he heard the voice of Suresh Patel calling to the boys with the bars.

'I beg of you, I beg of you, he is simple in the head, he does not know anything about any safe. There is no safe. There is money in the night deposit. Please do not hit my brother again.'

Desmond saw with another shock that he could feel physically in his own stomach that Mr Patel's arm hung at an odd angle. As if it had already been beaten. And already broken.

Even if Marigold had not said to him sadly that there were some people who never did anything at all, he would have done what he did. Desmond Doyle, the man so mild that he had to be moved from an office lest he take root, so meek that he made a young Australian beauty cry over his future, knew suddenly what he had to do.

He lifted the stack of trays which had held the bread delivered that morning and he brought it suddenly down on the neck of the first leather jacket. The boy, who could hardly have been as old as his own son Brendan, fell with a thud to the floor. The other one looked at him wild-eyed. Desmond pushed him, jabbing him with the trays, and manoeuvred him towards the back rooms, the living quarters of the whole family.

'Is your wife in there?' he shouted.