Silver Wedding (31 page)

It was good to be back in London again, Maureen thought, she had a spring in her step and three credit cards in her wallet.

She was merely going on a reccy as the film people called it, a little prowl examining the style in other people's boutiques and in the big fashion stores. And if she wanted to she could stop and buy herself any treat she wanted. She walked in a cloud of the expensive perfume she had just bought in Selfridge's, she had bought her father a jaunty cravat there too. He would look well in that, and he would like the fact that she had thought him a f cravat man.

Helen Doyle sat in the kitchen of St Martin's with both her hands round the mug of coffee as if to get some warmth from it. It was not a cold morning but not even the bright shafts of sunlight coming in the window seemed to warm her. Across the table sat Sister Brigid, the others had gone. They must have known that the confrontation was coming, they had either gone back to their rooms or gone about their business.

A yellow cat with a broken paw looked trustingly up at Helen She had found it and made a sort of splint which helped it to walk. The others said she should take it to the cats' home, but this would be curtains for the yellow cat, Helen said. It wouldn't eat much, they could mind it surely.

J It was just one more sign of Helen around the house, and another chore. It would be impossible to expect Helen to feed or clean after the cat all the time. The cat began a very loud purring and arched its back to be stroked. Tenderly Sister Brigid lifted it up and carried it out to the garden. She came back and sat''beside Helen. She looked straight into the troubled eyes and spoke!

'You have so much love and goodness to give,' she began.

'But this is not the place.'

She saw the lip, the lower lip that Helen had been biting nervously, begin to tremble. And the big eyes fill with tears.

'You're sending me away,' Helen began.

'We could sit here all morning, Helen, you could call it one thing, I could call it another. I could say that you must find yourself and what you are looking for in some other surroundings, you will say that I am throwing you out, turning you away from St Martin's.'

'What did I do this time?' Helen looked piteous. 'Was it the cat?'

'Of course it wasn't the cat, Helen, there's no one thing, one incident. Please know that.. . could you try to understand that it's not a punishment, not an exam where you pass or fail? It's a choice and this house is our life, we chose it and we have to choose how it will be shared.'

'You don't want me, you've all decided at a meeting, is that it?'

'No it's not it, there was no court passing sentence on you. When you came here in the first place it was on the understanding that. ..'

Helen interrupted hotly. 'In the old days nuns couldn't pick and choose who they had with them, if you didn't like another member of the community that was hard luck, you had to offer it up, it was part of the sacrifice ...'

'Nobody dislikes you ...' Sister Brigid began.

'But even if they did, in the old days it wouldn't have been a matter of a popularity contest like it is now.'

'If there were a popularity contest there are many ways you'd come out on top. And anyway looking back on the old days they were bad old days, in the very old days girls could be thrown into convents literally if they were wild or disappointed in love or something. That was a fine way to build a community.' Brigid was firm.

'That didn't happen to me, nobody forced me, in fact they tried to keep me back with them.'

'That's why I'm speaking to you today.' Brigid was gentle.

'Today no false optimism about when you will take your vows.

Because you won't, Helen, not here with us. It would be unfair for me as head of this house to let you go to a family celebration in the belief that you were well on the way towards being a nun in our Order. One day you will thank me from the bottom of your heart. Today I wanted you to look at your family with different eyes, look at the other options .. .'

'You mean I'm out today. I can't come back here tonight!'

Helen was stricken.

'Don't be so dramatic .. .'

'But when? If you're giving me notice, when do you want my room?' Helen was hurt and bitter.

'I thought that if you could think for a while, don't do any more work, just think, take stock of yourself, and what you might want to do . ..'

'When?' Helen repeated.

'Christmas seems a good time.' Brigid was firm. 'Say two or three months. You should know by Christmas.'

Frank and Renata Quigley planned the day ahead.

'Will I dress up or down?' Renata asked.

'Up as high as you can go,' he smiled.

'But that wouldn't be considered ... I don't know .. . showing off a bit?' Renata was doubtful.

'Oh, you couldn't please Desmond's wife, if you're too casual you didn't make the effort, if you do make the effort you're overdressed . . .'

'So?'

'So let her have something she'll be glad to have in the photographs. The woman's a monster for snapping this and that. Every time someone farts it's recorded in that place.'

'Frank, really!'

'No, you don't know what they're like. Seriously though, their place is coming down with framed photographs. I remember a wall full of them at least.'

'That's nice in a way.'

'Yes, it would be if there was anything to remember. Anything to celebrate.'

'But you were friends, why do you talk like this?'

'I was friends with Desmond, never with Deirdre, anyway she resented me being free, she was afraid - righdy, I think – that poor old Desmond would feel tied down by comparison. Still we'll dress ourselves up to the nines and dazzle their eyes out.'

She smiled back at him. Frank was so cheerful these days, since they had come to so many decisions. There was the expansion of the business. It was going ahead up North, and it did not mean as Renata had feared that Frank would be away a lot. No he hardly ever travelled there, her father and uncle did, and of course Mrs East had been very much part of it. Even with the baby boy, she seemed to thrive on work. Some women were able to do everything, Renata thought sadly.

Still, things were good nowadays, and this morning she was going to get injections and vaccinations, shots needed for the journey. Frank would go to work as he did almost every Saturday, he said it was so quiet in the big Palazzo building that he could dictate peacefully and get more done in an hour than he normally did in a week of ordinary days. She reminded him to get a haircut. He was looking a bit shaggy around the neck.

Frank didn't need to be reminded, he would go to Larry and have hot towels as well as a trim. He would wear his best suit, and the new shirt. If Maureen Barry was going to look at him she would admire what she saw. That was why he had asked his wife to dress up too. When Renata had the full works she looked very well. Maureen Barry would not be able to say that the man she rejected had to marry a colourless mouse with money.

Father Hurley had a great place to stay when he came to London, he always described it as a cross between a luxury hotel and a gentlemen's club. It was in fact a religious house, a simple place now where they rented most of their high-ceilinged rooms as office space. Once these had been parlours with polished tables holding copies of Missionary Annals. It was an oasis to come back to after a day in such a big noisy city. Father Hurley found the morning a little overtiring, it was good to know that he could come back to this house and have a rest.

His friend Daniel Hayes was Principal, a soft-spoken man who seemed to understand a great deal without having to have things explained in words. He had known last night when he asked after Father Hurley's nephew that this was not an avenue to travel any further. Diplomatically and with the polished ease of years Father Hayes slipped to another topic. Father Hayes also seemed to know that his old friend James Hurley was somehow uneasy about the silver wedding he was going to attend.

'I can tell you, Daniel, you don't know them from a hole in

the ground, a nice young pair, she a real product of Dublin Four .. . though we didn't know the phrase then. He was a bit of a rough diamond from the West of Ireland without a penny to bless himself. Anyway the usual story, and she was well and truly pregnant, and I knew the family, her family that is, and could I marry them in a flash.'

'And you did?' Father Hayes prompted.

'Well I did of course, what else did we do in those days?

Cover the shame, hide the sin, get the thing regularized as soon as possible . ..'

'And did it not work out. . . they are still together?'

'I know, Daniel, it's just that there's something odd there.

Firstly they didn't have a child.'

'What?'

'Oh, they did later, three of them. But not at the time. They sort of played at being married, pretended it... as if they were taking parts in a play ... Right, Desmond will play the Husband and Deirdre will play the Wife.'

'I expect a lot of people do that.'

'Yes, I expect they do, and there's ways in which we're playing at being priests. But do you know what I mean? As if the whole thing didn't ring true. Like Deirdre sending me a picture of them all on a picnic or somewhere, blinking into the light, as if she had to prove it to people.'

'Prove what?'

'Lord, I don't know, that they were a normal family or something.'

'They might be just very unhappy,' Daniel Hayes said. 'A lot of people are, seriously. They go into these marriages with such ridiculous expectations. I never thought that all the celibacy bit seemed too much of a hardship to me ..."

The neither,' Father Hurley agreed. His face was sad.

'Of course when it does work, it must be the greatest thing in the world, a friendship so real and true you'd trust the other with your life ... We never had that, James/

'No indeed.' Father Hurley still seemed down.

'But your sister had it, didn't she? J remember your telling me that you thought she had a totally good relationship, that they seemed to know each what the other was about to say, and then smiled when they said it.'

'True, but their life hasn't been easy. . .'

Father Hayes interrupted him. 'Of course not, but it's only that kind of relationship we're talking about... It would surely buoy them up when things were bleak. You don't see anything like that in this wedding you're going to in Pinner.'

Father Hurley had been successfully diverted. 'No, it's going to be a lot of empty phrases, like it was a quarter of a century ago.'

'Ah, that's what we're here for, James,' laughed his friend. 'If the priests can't put a bit of conviction into meaningless comforting phrases . .. then I ask you . .. who can?'

The caterers arrived at three o'clock. It had all been arranged weeks ago. But Philippa of Philippa's Catering knew a fusser when she saw one, and Mrs Doyle had all the characteristics of someone who could raise a Class-A fuss. There were to be canapés and drinks for an hour or so then the party would proceed to a Roman Catholic church where there would be a Mass, and the Doyles would say aloud that they renewed their marriage vows.

Then pink and triumphant they would return to Rosemary Drive, it would now be heading on for seven, there would be more drinks and the guests would be asked to help themselves to a cold buffet - salmon, and cold chicken in a curry mayonnaise. There would be warm herb bread with it. Philippa, having seen the size of the house and the smallness of the oven, had advised against hot food, she had convinced Mrs Doyle that people would most certainly think it was a real meal even if it was cold and there were no potatoes.

As Philippa unloaded crates from her van and set up her centre of operations in the Doyles' small kitchen she hoped that someone might have been detailed to distract this woman with the freshly done hair and the obviously new manicure who held her hands awkwardly as if the varnish would chip.

Mercifully a daughter arrived, a sensible-looking girl, dark and intelligent. She was carrying her own outfit on a hanger. Through the kitchen window Philippa had seen her thanking a man who had driven her. The girl had leaned back into the car and kissed him. Philippa liked to see something like that, it made a change in the highly tense homes she often found herself working in.

Still if it weren't for the weddings, the bar-mitzvahs, the silver weddings, the retirement parties, where would her business be?

She thought that Mrs Doyle and her husband must both be barking mad to go back into a church and say publicly that they were still married. As if it weren't obvious. As if anyone else would have either of them! However, question it not, just keep unpacking, get the table decoration started, and maybe send in a tray of tea to the bedroom so that the mother and daughter could be kept up there.

'You look absolutely beautiful, Mother,' Anna said. 'You haven't a line on your face, did you know that? You're like a young girl.'

Deirdre was pleased. 'Oh stop it now, you're going too far.'

'I mean it. And isn't your hair great! Very elegant in all those swoops.'

Deirdre looked at her daughter's short dark shiny head of hair.

'Of course if you went to the hairdresser a bit... just now and then for a nice set... you'd look very much better. I know it's smart nowadays to wash your hair every day in the shower. . .'

Deirdre was trying to be helpful.

I know, Mother. .. Oh look, isn't this marvellous, a pot of tea.. . brought to us on a tray! This is the life, isn't it?'

Deirdre frowned. 'I wish your father was back, he's going to be running late. I don't know what he had to go down to Patel's for. . .'

'It's not Patel's, it's the Rosemary Central Stores, Mother, and Dad is the joint owner, and Saturday is very busy, so obviously he's going to help Suresh and he'll be back in plenty of time. You know Dad.'

'What time's Brendan coming?'

'He should be here anytime. He was looking round a bit, he said he didn't want to come too early and be in the way.'

'Lord, wouldn't you think he'd come . . .'