Silver Wedding (6 page)

He had opened them in the right order. He opened Anna's slowly. Perhaps it was going to tell him some bad news, Father had cancer, or Mother was going to have an operation? His face curled into a look of scorn when he saw all the business about the anniversary. Nothing had changed, simply nothing, they had got trapped in a time warp, stuck in a \vorld of tinsel-covered cards, meaningless rituals. He felt even more annoyed about the whole thing because of Sister Helen's pious instruction to take Anna's letter seriously. Talk about passing the buck.

He felt edgy and restless as he always did when drawn into family affairs. He got up and went outside. He would walk up the hills a bit. There was a wall he wanted to look at. It might need a bit more work than just rearranging the stones like they did so often.

He came across Vincent with a sheep that had got stuck in the gate. The animal was frightened and kicking and pulling so that it was almost impossible to release her.

'You came at a good time,' Vincent said, and together they eased the anxious sheep out. She bleated frantically and looked at them with her silly face.

'What's wrong with her at all, is she hurt?' Brendan asked.

'No. Not a scratch on her.'

'Then what's all that caterwauling out of her?'

Vincent looked long at the distressed sheep. 'That's the one that lay on its lamb. Crushed the little thing to death,' he said.

'Stupid thicko sheep," Brendan said. 'Sits on her own perfectly good lamb, then gets stuck in a gate, that's what gives sheep a bad name.'

The ewe looked at him trustingly and gave a great baaa into the air.

'She doesn't know I'm insulting her,' Brendan said.

'Divil a bit she'd care. She's looking for the lamb.'

'Doesn't she know she suffocated it?'

'Not at all. How would she know that?' Vincent said.

Companionably the two men walked back towards the house to make their lunch.

Vincent's eyes fell on the envelopes and cards.

'Well now, it's your birthday,' he said. 'Imagine that.'

'Yes.' Brendan sounded grumpy.

His uncle looked at him for a while.

'It's good of them to remember you, it would be scant remembering you'd get if you had to rely on me.'

'I don't worry about remembering.. . not that sort.' He was still bad-tempered as he washed the potatoes at the sink and put them into the big saucepan of water.

'Will I put them up on the mantelpiece for you?'

Vincent had never said anything like that.

'No, no. I wouldn't like that.'

'All right so.' His uncle collected them neatly and left them in a little pile. He saw Anna's long typed letter but made no comment. During the meal he waited for the boy to speak.

'Anna has this notion I should go over to England and play games for some silver wedding celebrations. Silver,' he scoffed at the word.

'That's how many?' Vincent asked.

'Twenty-five glorious years.'

'Are they that long married? Lord, Lord.'

'You weren't at the wedding yourself?'

'God Brendan, what would take me to a wedding, I ask you?'

'They want me to go over. I'm not going next or near it.'

'Well, we all do what we want to do.'

Brendan thought about that for a long time.

'I suppose we do in the end,' he said.

They lit their cigarettes to smoke while they drank their big mugs of tea.

'And they don't want me there, I'd only be an embarrassment.

Mother would have to be explaining me to people, and why I 't didn't do this or look like that, and Father would be quizzing me, asking me questions.'

'Well, you said you weren't going so what's the worry about it?'

'It's not till October,' Brendan said.

'October, is that a fact?' Vincent looked puzzled.

'I know, isn't it just like them to be setting h all up now?'

They left it for a while but his face was troubled, and his uncle knew he would speak of it again.

'In a way, of course, once in a few years isn't much to go over. In a way of looking at it, it mightn't be much to give them.'

'It's your own decision, lad.'

'You wouldn't point me one way or the other, I suppose?'

'Indeed I would not.'

'It might be too expensive for us to afford the fare.' Brendan looked up at the biscuit tin, maybe this was an out.

'There's always the money for the fare, you know that.'

He did know it. He had just been hoping that they could use it as an excuse. Even to themselves.

'And I would only be one of a crowd, if I were to go it would be better to go on my own some time.'

'Whatever you say yourself.'

Outside they heard a bleating. The sheep with the foolish face, the one that had suffocated her lamb was still looking for it. She had come towards the house hoping that it might have strayed in there. Vincent and Brendan looked out the kitchen window. The sheep Still called out.

'She'd have been a hopeless mother to it even if it had lived,' Brendan said.

'She doesn't know that, she's just living by some kind of instinct. She'd like to see it for a bit. To know that it's all right, sort of.'

It was one of the longest speeches his uncle had ever made. He looked at his uncle and reached out to touch him. He put his arm gently around the older man's shoulder, feeling moved to the heart by the kindness and generosity of spirit.

Til go off into the town now, Vincent,' he said, taking his arm away. Til write a couple of letters maybe and maybe work pulling a few pints tonight.'

'There's enough in the biscuit tin,' Vincent said gently.

There is, I know. I know.'

He went out into the yard and passed the lonely ewe still calling for her lost lamb and started up the old car to drive to the town. He would go back for their silver anniversary. It was only a little time out of this life. The life he wanted. He could give a little time to show them he was all right and that he was part of the family.

Helen

The old man looked at Helen hopefully. He saw a girl in her twenties with a grey jumper and skirt. Her hair was tied back in a black ribbon but it looked as if any moment it might all escape and fall wild and curly around her shoulders. She had dark blue restless eyes and freckles on her nose. She carried a black plastic shopping bag which she was swinging backwards and forwards.

'Miss,' said the old drunk, 'can you do me a favour?'

Helen stopped at once, as he had known she would. There were passers-by who went on passing by and those who stopped. Years of observation had taught him to tell one sort from the other.

'Of course, what can I do?' she asked him.

He almost stepped back. Her smile was too ready, too willing. Usually people muttered that they didn't have change or that they were in a hurry. Even if they did seem about to help a wino they didn't show such eagerness.

'I don't want any money,' he said.

'Of course not,' Helen said as if it was the last thing that a man with a coat tied with string and an empty ginger-wine bottle in his hand would want.

'I just want you to go in there and get me another bottle.

The bastards say they won't serve me. They say I'm not to come into the shop. Now if I were to give you two pounds into your hand, then you could go in and get it for me.'

From his grizzled face with its wild hair above and its stubble below his small sharp eyes shone with the brilliance of the plan.

Helen bit her lower lip and looked at him hard.

He was from Ireland of course, they all were, or else Scodand. The Welsh drunks seemed to stay in their valleys, and the English didn't get drunk in such numbers or so publicly. It was a mystery.

'I think you've had enough.'

'How would you know whether I've had enough or not?

That's not what we were debating. That, as it happens, was not the point at issue.'

Helen was moved, he spoke so well, he had such phrases . . . the point at issue. How could a man who spoke like that have let himself go so far and turn into an outcast?'

Immediately she felt guilty about the thought. That was the way Grandmother O'Hagan would talk. And Helen would immediately disagree with her. Here she was at twenty-one thinking almost the same thing.

'It's not good for you,' she said, and added spiritedly, 'I said I'd do you a favour, it's not a favour giving you more alcohol, it's a downright disservice.'

The drunk liked such niceties and definitions, he was ready to parry with her.

'But there is no question of your giving me alcohol, my dear lady,' he said triumphantly. 'That was never part of our agreement. You are to act as my agent in purchasing the alcohol.' He beamed at his victory.

'No, it's only going to kill you.'

'I can easily get it elsewhere. I have two pounds and I will get it elsewhere. What we are now discussing is your word given and then broken. You said you would do me a favour, now you say you will not.'

Helen stormed into the small grocery-cumoff-licence.

'A bottle of cider,' she asked, eyes flashing.

'What kind?'

'I don't know. Any kind. That one.' She pointed to a fancy bottle . Outside, the drunk knocked on the window and shook his head of shaggy hair, trying to point to a different brand.

'You're not buying it for that wino?' asked the young man.

'No, it's for myself,' Helen said guiltily and obviously falsely.

The drunk man was pointing feverishly at some brand.

'Listen, don't give it to him, lady... I beg you.'

'Are you going to sell me this bottle of cider or are you not?'

Helen could be authoritative in short bursts.

Two pounds eighty,' the man said. Helen slapped the money, her money, down on the counter, and in an equally bad temper the bottle was shoved into a plastic bag for her.

' Helen said. 'Did I or did I not do what you asked me?'

'You did not, that's only rat's piss, that stuff, fancy bottles for the carriage trade. I'm not drinking that.'

'Well don't then.' There were tears starting in her eyes.

'And what's more I'm not spending my good money on it.'

'Have it as a present.' She was weary.

'Oh high and mighty, Lady Muck,' he said. He had a good quarter of it drunk from the neck by this stage. He was holding it still by its plastic carrier bag.

Helen didn't like the look of his face, the man was working himself up into some kind of temper, or even fit. She looked at him alarmed, and saw a huge amount of the despised cider vanishing down his throat.

'The urine of rodents,' he shouted. 'Bottled by these creeps of shopkeepers and dignified with the name of alcohol.'

He banged on the window again loudly. 'Come out, you cheat and rogue, come out here and justify this garbage.'

There were vegetable boxes piled neatly with apples and oranges, with potatoes loose and mushrooms in baskets. The man with the near-empty cider bottle began to turn them over on to the street systematically.

The staff ran from the shop; two of them held him, another went for the law.

'Thank you very much,' said the boy who had served Helen.

'That was a very nice day's work.'

'You wouldn't bloody listen to me,' shouted the man, who had foam flecks at the side of his mouth by now.

'Her sort don't listen to anyone, mate,' said the irate shopkeeper who was trying to immobilize him.

Helen moved from the scene awkwardly. She walked away almost sideways as if she were trying not to turn her back on the chaos and distress she had created. But then this happened so often.

It was always happening, Helen found, everywhere she went.

Back in the convent she wouldn't say anything to Sister Brigid about it. It would be so easily misunderstood. The sisters wouldn't grasp that it would all have happened anyway. The man might have got even more violent and upset if nobody had bought him the drink. He might have broken the window or hurt someone.

But Helen wouldn't tell the upsetting tale. Brigid would be bound to look at her sadly and wonder why trouble seemed to follow Helen Doyle wherever she went.

It might even put further away the day when they would allow Helen to take her vows and become a member of the Community rather than just a hanger-on. How much did she have to prove?

Why did Sister Brigid keep putting off the time when Helen should be considered seriously as one of their Community? She worked as hard as any of them, she had been with them for three years and still there was this feeling that it was somehow a passing whim.

Even the most minor and accidental events made them see Helen as unstable in some way. It was terribly unfair and she wouldn't add to the long list by telling them about the confusion she was walking away from. Somehow it would be seen as her fault.

Instead she would think about the silver wedding celebrations and what she could do best to help.

Well obviously she hadn't any money or anything so there could be nothing expected from her on that score. And as well as the vow of poverty that she had taken - or to be more honest was trying to take - she was a bit unworldly these days, she had left the mainstream of everyday life. And even if she did go out to work each day, as all the Sisters did, she didn't see the side of life that Mother and Anna would be concentrating on, the more material end of things. And she wouldn't be any good rounding up neighbours and friends. Perhaps she could see whether they might have a special Mass or Liturgy. . . But Helen was doubtful whether the old priest in the parish church where the Doyles went was going to be well up on the modern liturgy of renewal.

Better leave it to Anna who had plenty of time for all that sort of thing. Anna got so tetchy often when Helen did things to help, it was often better to do nothing, to say in a calm voice, Yes Anna, No Anna, Three Bags Full Anna. This is what Brigid would suggest. Brigid was very big on the calm voice. Or on Helen's developing it. It often sounded like blandness, and even hypocrisy to Helen, but Brigid said that it was what the world in general seemed to want. And there were times when Helen thought gloomily that she might be right.