Silver Wedding (10 page)

She didn’t know how long it was before she made a move to the bathroom and cleaned herself up. She didn’t seem to have been very badly injured, the bleeding had stopped.

She dressed herself carefully and dusted herself with Renata’s talcum powder which wasn’t in a tin like ordinary powder, it was in a big glass bowl with a pink swansdown puff.

When she came out, Frank was dressed. And white-faced.

‘The bed …?’ she began.

‘Forget the bloody bed.’

‘I could …’

‘You’ve done enough,’ he snapped.

Helen’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I’ve done enough? What did I do, I came to talk to you about my father and why he’d been sacked, it was you, you who did all this …’ With her hand she waved in the direction of the bed.

His face was contrite. ‘Your father. You did this to try and get Desmond back his piffling little job. Jesus Christ, you’d whore around to get your father a penny-farthing nothing place in a supermarket.’

‘It is not a nothing job.’ Helen’s face burned with anger. ‘He was a very important person there, and now, now he’s been sacked and Mother says we are not to tell anyone, neighbours, relatives, anyone, and he goes off each morning pretending he’s going to work …’

Frank looked at her in disbelief.

‘Yes he does, and I just wanted to have lunch with you and tell you straight out how bad it was and you’d understand because you were Dad’s friend way back at school in the Brothers when you used to climb over stone walls … he told me … and you’re doing so well there and married to the boss’s daughter and everything … And
that’s
all I wanted, I didn’t whore around, I’ve never slept with anyone in my life and I didn’t mean to sleep with you, I wasn’t to know you’d fall in love with me and all this would
happen
, and now you say it’s all my fault.’ She burst into tears.

He put his arms around her and held her close to him.

‘Christ, you’re only a child, what have I done? Christ Almighty what did I do?’

She sobbed against his jacket for a bit.

He held her away from him and his eyes were full of tears.

‘I’ll never be able to make amends. Literally there’s nothing I can do to tell you how sorry I am. I’d never … never if I hadn’t thought … I was so sure that … but that doesn’t matter now. What matters is you.’

Helen wondered had he always loved her or was it only now. People could fall in love so easily.

‘We’ll have to forget this,’ she said. She knew that a woman had to take the lead in such matters. Men would dither and give in to temptation. Anyway there was no temptation for Helen, if this was what it was like then the rest of the world could have it as far as she was concerned.

‘It happened, it can’t be forgotten. I’ll do anything to make it up to you.’

‘Yes, but we can’t keep on seeing each other, it wouldn’t be fair.’ She looked over at the picture of Renata.

She thought he looked puzzled. ‘No, of course,’ he said.

‘And we won’t tell anyone, either of us.’ She was girlishly eager about this.

‘Lord no, nobody at all,’ he said, looking highly relieved.

‘And my father?’ She spoke without guile, she spoke as Helen always spoke, eager to get over the meaning and burden of what she wanted to say, heedless of timing or other people’s feelings.

She saw a look of pain cross Frank Quigley’s face.

‘Your father will get a job. He told me that he didn’t need one, that he was looking about, that he had plenty of offers.’ Frank’s voice was cold. ‘He will be reinstated in Palazzo. Not overnight, I have to talk to Carlo, these things have to be done tactfully. They can take a little time.’

Helen nodded vigorously.

‘And you, Helen. Will you be all right, will you forgive me?’

‘Of course. It was a misunderstanding.’ Her voice sounded eager, as if she too wanted to be let off a hook.

‘That’s what it was, Helen, and Helen listen to me, please. The only thing I can tell you is that it won’t always be like this … it will be lovely and happy …’ He was straining to try to tell her that this gross happening would not be the pattern for the rest of the lovemaking in her life.

He might as well have been talking to the wall.

‘Are you sure I couldn’t do anything about the sheets, like a launderette or anything?’

‘No.’

‘But what will you say?’

‘Please, Helen, please.’ His face was pained.

‘Will I go now, Frank?’

He looked unable to cope.

‘I’ll drive you …’ His voice trailed away. His face showed that he didn’t know where he was to drive her.

‘No, it’s all right, I can get the bus. I know where I am, I’ll just get the bus home and say … say I don’t feel well.’ Helen gave a little giggle. ‘It’s true in a way. But listen, Frank, I don’t have the bus fare, could I ask you …’

She couldn’t understand why Frank Quigley had tears pouring down his face when he handed her the coins and closed her hand over them.

‘Will you be all right?’ He was begging to be reassured. He was not ready for what she told him.

‘Frank.’ Helen gave a little laugh. ‘I’m not a child, for heaven’s sake, I was sixteen last week. I’m a grown-up. I’ll find my way home on the bus.’

She left then because she couldn’t bear the look on his face.

Of course he had to stay away from the house in case he wasn’t able to control himself when he saw her. That’s what she told herself.

She never remembered him coming to Rosemary Drive again after that. There had always been some excuse, he was on a conference, he was abroad, he and Renata were going to see some of her relations in Italy. He was terribly sorry, it was such bad timing. Mother said he was getting above himself, still wasn’t it great that they never had to go to him cap in hand to ask him to reinstate his old friend in Palazzo’s? At least that idea had come straight from Mr Palazzo himself, who had realized that this was no way to treat valued managerial staff.

Helen never knew whether her father realized that it was Frank. It was hard to talk to her father, he had built a little shell around himself almost for fear of being hurt, like Mother’s shell for fear of letting themselves down somehow.

She had found those last school terms endless, the world had changed since that strange afternoon. She was always frightened of being misunderstood. She had started to scream one day when the singing master at school asked her to come into the storeroom and help him carry down the sheet music to the school hall. The man hadn’t touched her but she had this sudden claustrophobic fear that he would think she was encouraging him somehow, and that he would begin this hurtful business and then blame her. As things turned out he
did
blame her very much indeed and had said that she was a neurotic hysterical fool, a troublemaker, and if she were the
last
female on earth he wouldn’t touch her with a barge-pole.

The Principal of the school seemed to agree with him and asked Helen sharply why she had begun to scream if she agreed that there had been no question of an attack or even an advance.

Helen had said glumly that she didn’t know. She had felt that she was in some kind of situation she couldn’t handle and that unless she
did
scream something else would happen and it would all be too late and too complicated.

‘Has anything of this sort happened to you before?’ The Principal was not entirely sympathetic. Helen Doyle had always been a difficult pupil, gushy, anxious to please, always creating waves of trouble around her.

Helen had said no, unconvincingly.

The Principal had sighed. ‘Well, you can be certain that it will keep happening to you, Helen. It’s your personality. This sort of thing will turn up in your life over and over again, situations that you can’t handle. That is unless you pull yourself together and take control of your own actions.’

She sounded so final it was as if she were passing a life sentence.

Helen had been dazed at the unfairness of it all.

It was then that she decided to be a nun.

And now, years later, she was almost a nun. Well, she would be a nun if Sister Brigid had not been so
adamant
about telling her that she was only using the convent as a crutch, that she was using it as a place to hide and that those days were over in religious life.

Helen felt safe in St Martin’s. And even as she made a mug of coffee and sat down to join the beautiful Renata Palazzo Quigley whose face had looked at her from a silver frame on that frightening day … she felt safe. Safe from the memories and the fear of that time.

‘Tell me what you want and I’ll see if there’s anything we can do,’ she said with the big smile that made everyone love Helen. When they met her first.

‘It’s very simple,’ Renata said. ‘We want a baby.’

It was very simple. And very sad. Helen hugged her mug of coffee to her and listened. Frank was too old at forty-six. Too old. How ridiculous, but adoption societies wouldn’t consider him. Also he had a poor medical history, some heart trouble, nothing very serious, due to stress at work, and all businessmen had this in today’s world. Natural mothers and fathers were allowed to bring a child into the world into any kind of appalling conditions, tenements, places of vice, nobody stopped them and said that they couldn’t have any children. But for adoption everything had to be over-perfect.

Renata had heard that sometimes, if she were only to meet the right person, there must be occasions where a child could be given to a good loving home,
to
a father and mother who would love the little boy or girl as their own. There surely were cases when this happened.

There was a look of longing in her eyes.

Helen patted the hand of the woman who had once looked at her from the silver frame.

She had told Renata that they would meet again in a week when she would have made some inquiries. She thought it wiser not to consult Sister Brigid for the moment. Sister Brigid being an authority figure had to keep so well within the limits of the law … Better just let Helen inquire a little. All right? All right.

She told nobody. They said she looked feverish and excited, and Helen entertained the Community with tales of how she made her garden grow.

‘Anyone call?’ Brigid asked.

‘No. Not anyone really, you know, usual callers.’ Helen avoided her eye. It was the first time she had told a direct lie in St Martin’s. It didn’t feel good but it was for the best in the end.

If she could do this one thing, if she could do what she hoped she might be able to do, then even at the age of twenty-one her whole life would have been worth living.

It was Nessa’s turn to do the kitchen for half a day. Nessa was the one woman at St Martin’s who found Helen almost impossible to get on with. Normally when they worked together Helen stayed out of
Nessa’s
way. But this time she positively hung around her neck.

‘What happens when the children are born to really hopeless mothers, Nessa? Don’t you wish you could give them to proper homes from the start?’

‘What I wish isn’t important, I don’t rule the world.’ Nessa was short, she was scrubbing the kitchen floor and Helen kept standing in her way.

‘But wouldn’t a child be much better off?’

‘Mind, Helen, please. I’ve just washed there.’

‘And you always have to register the births, no matter what kind of mother?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean do you have to go to the town hall or the registry office or whatever and sort of say who the child is?’

‘No, I don’t always.’

‘Oh, why not?’

‘Because I’m usually not the one who does it, it depends. It depends. Helen, do you think that if you’re not going to do any work you could move out of the kitchen so that I could clean it?’

‘And no babies end up without being registered?’

‘How could they?’

‘I don’t know.’ Helen was disappointed. She had thought there might be long twilight times when nobody knew who or what the baby was. She hadn’t understood how the Welfare State at least checked its citizens in and out of the world.

‘And foundlings, babies in phone boxes, in churches, where do they end up?’

Nessa looked up in alarm. ‘God, Helen, don’t tell me you found one?’

‘No, worse luck,’ Helen said. ‘But if I did would I have to register it?’

‘No, Helen, of course not, if
you
found a baby you could keep the baby and dress him or her up when you remembered, and feed the child when it occurred to you, or when there was nothing else marginally more interesting to do.’

‘Why are you so horrible to me, Nessa?’ Helen asked.

‘Because I am basically pretty horrible.’

‘You can’t be, you’re a nun. And you’re not horrible to the others.’

‘Ah, that’s true. The real thing about being horrible is that it’s selective.’

‘And why did you select me?’ Helen didn’t seem put out or hurt, she was interested. Actually interested.

Nessa was full of guilt.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m just short-tempered, I hate doing this bloody floor, and you’re so young and carefree and get everything you want. I’m sorry, Helen, forgive me, I’m always asking you to forgive me. Really I am.’

‘I know.’ Helen was thoughtful. ‘People often are, I seem to bring out the worst in them somehow.’

Sister Nessa looked after her uneasily as Helen wandered back into the garden. There was something more than usual on her scattered brain and it was weighing very heavily.

Helen rang Renata Quigley. Same address, same apartment, same bed presumably. She said that she was still inquiring but that it wasn’t as easy as people thought.

‘I never thought it was easy,’ sighed Renata. ‘But somehow it does make all the going out to functions and to this celebration and that celebration a little easier if I think that somebody as kind as you, Sister, is looking out for me.’

With a thrill of shock that went right through her body Helen Doyle realized that she would meet Frank and Renata Quigley at her parents’ silver wedding party.

Frank Quigley had been the best man back in those days when he and Father were about equal.