Silver Wedding (12 page)

‘Please,’ Renata said. ‘Please, Sister.’

‘I’m not God, I’m not even Solomon,’ said Brigid.

They knew it was hard for her, and they drew together, the handsome couple. Helen watched them with a look of pain in her face.

The porter had been asked to hail a taxi, and the unlikely foursome walked to the lift, Helen tearful and supported by Sister Brigid, red-haired Sister Nessa carrying the tiny baby wrapped in its blue rug.

Renata stretched out her hand to touch Helen’s arm.

‘Thank you, Sister Helen, I know you meant kindly for me,’ she said.

‘Sister Helen has a great big heart,’ Brigid said.

‘Thank you,’ Frank said at the door. He did not look at Helen, he looked instead admiringly into the grey eyes of Brigid.

‘There are countries where it is all legal. If you like, some day you can ask me and I will tell you what I know,’ she said.

‘Goodbye, Frank,’ Helen said.

‘Thank you, Helen. Sister Brigid is right, you have a great big heart.’ He touched her cheek.

In the taxi they were silent, until Helen said, ‘You called me Sister Helen, does this mean I can stay?’

‘It means we won’t ask you to go yet. But maybe now that you have faced some things you haven’t faced before, it mightn’t be as necessary to hide as it once was. Perhaps you will be able to make your life somewhere else. Travel the world, even.’

This time Helen didn’t think that Sister Brigid was asking her to leave. She felt better than she had felt for a long time.

She looked at Sister Nessa holding the tiny boy close to her breast.

‘Isn’t it sad that you can’t keep the baby, Nessa,’ Helen said with a rush of generous spirit. ‘To make
up
for the one you had that died. It could be a kind of substitute, couldn’t it? A consolation.’

She didn’t even notice the two women glance at each other and then look out the windows on each side of the taxi.

4
DESMOND

OF COURSE THE
corner shop was more expensive than the supermarket but then it
was
on the corner, that’s what you were paying for. And the fact that it stayed open so late at night.

Desmond liked calling in there. There was a mad magical feel about the place and the way Suresh Patel was able to pack in so many goods on his shelves … and in such a way that they didn’t all come tumbling down. Desmond often said that Mr Patel must have a secret. Over in the big supermarket chain Palazzo Foods where Desmond worked, the principle was totally different. You had to give maximum space so that the customer could walk around and choose and best of all be persuaded by something that had not been on the original shopping list. Mr Patel’s business was the other end of the market. They came in because they had run out of sugar or they hadn’t bought anything for the supper and the shop they intended to go to
had
been closed. They came for the evening paper and a tin of beans sometimes. Mr Patel said that you’d be surprised how many people must be going home to a lonely evening. He often felt better off standing in his shop talking to whoever came and went.

Desmond’s wife Deirdre said she had nothing against Mr Patel personally, he was extremely polite and respectful always, but everything was that little bit dearer there. The place was a mixem gatherem, a bit like those hucksters’ shops you didn’t go into years ago at home in case things mightn’t be quite … well, fresh.

And she never knew why Desmond would stop and buy an earlier edition of the paper in the corner shop when he could have got one nearer work and had the pleasure of reading it on the way home.

Desmond found it hard to explain. There was something solid about the little place. It didn’t depend on the fluctuations of far-away suppliers and huge multinationals. If Mr Patel noticed a customer asking for something he gave it a lot of thought. Like the time Desmond had asked for red-currant jelly.

‘Is it a jam or a condiment?’ Mr Patel had asked with interest.

‘I think it can be either.’ Desmond had been equally interested in the definition. Between them they decided that once it had been bought, it would be
placed
on a shelf with the mustards, the chutneys and the little green jars of mint sauce.

‘Soon I will know exactly the tastes and temperaments of a fine British suburb, I will know enough to write a book, Mr Doyle.’

‘I think you know that already, Mr Patel.’

‘I am only starting, Mr Doyle, but it is all so interesting. You know the saying they have in your country about all human life is here … that’s what I feel.’

‘All human life is in my job too but I don’t welcome it as much as you do.’ Desmond smiled ruefully.

‘Ah, that’s because your job is so much more important than mine.’

Deirdre Doyle would have agreed with him, Mr Patel was right to look with respect at a man like Desmond who though well under fifty was Special Projects Manager at Palazzo. Palazzo was a name like Sainsbury’s or Waitrose. Well not quite like them, but in certain areas it was just as well thought of and back home in Ireland where nobody knew any of the others anyway, a Palazzo sounded much grander.

The Patels didn’t live in Rosemary Drive, naturally they lived somewhere else, somewhere more suitable for Indian and Pakistani people, Deirdre said, when anyone brought the subject up.

Desmond knew that in fact Suresh Patel, his wife, his two children and his brother lived in the tiny
storerooms
behind the small shop. Mrs Patel could speak no English and the brother was fat and looked as if he had some illness. He used to sit there and smile perfectly pleasantly but he spoke little and did not seem to be any help in the running of the corner shop.

For some reason that he never totally understood Desmond never mentioned that the Patel family lived there. That their two children, immaculate in school uniform and wearing blazers and spectacles, came out each morning from this tiny place. Desmond felt that somehow it demeaned the Patels to be thought to live in such a small place, and somewhere in his subconscious he felt that Deirdre might think it demeaned the neighbourhood to have Pakistanis actually living there rather than just trading.

The shop was busy in the early morning, people buying papers, bars of chocolate, orange drinks and plastic-wrapped sandwiches. The stuff that kept the commuters more or less alive on their journeys to work. The oil that ran the machinery of British industry.

Not that Desmond felt too cheery about his own part in British industry. He was on his way to work at the big headquarters of Palazzo Foods, the supermarket chain which was now ninth largest in Britain. Desmond had begun to work for it back in 1959 when it was simply called Prince. That was the year
he
and Frank Quigley had left Mayo and come to London by train, boat and train to make their fortune. They arrived during the heatwave that went on month after month, they thought they had come to paradise.

As Desmond took his regular morning journey down Rosemary Drive into Wood Road and on to the bus stop at the corner he often looked back on those days when things were simpler and when he and Frank worked behind the counters in the two Prince Stores. One day they might be slicing bacon, another day dressing windows. Every day they met the customers and they knew everyone who worked in the shop.

It was Frank who had seen that this was a company where they could rise and rise, it was no stopgap job. Prince Foods were breaking new ground, they were getting bigger, soon they would expand and Frank would be a manager in one branch and Desmond in another if they played their cards right. Frank played his cards magnificently. Desmond had always been slower to see the opportunities. But he saw how everything was changing and saw sadly that the higher he rose, dragged, pulled and cajoled by his friend Frank, the further he got from the people, which was what he had liked about it all in the first place.

Desmond Doyle had been a thin wiry young man then with a thick shock of fair brown hair. His
children
had often teased him about the old photograph, saying that he looked a proper teddy boy, but their mother wouldn’t allow that at all. That was the way all young men of style looked then, she would say firmly. He looked different now, combing his hair in a way where it might look as if it was covering his head, and wearing shirts that had a neck size far wider than he wore that first summer when he had only been able to buy two shirts as his entire wardrobe and there was always one hanging on the back of a chair drying.

He supposed that many people looked back on the old days as good days even though they had been practically penniless days. He certainly did.

He could never understand why people liked the Palazzo Building so much. It was a perfect example of Art Deco, they said, a thirties masterpiece. Desmond always thought it looked like one of those big brutalist buildings you saw in documentaries about Eastern Europe. It was a square menacing-looking place, he thought, it was strange that there was a preservation order on it and articles in magazines talking about its perfect proportions.

Frank had been instrumental in getting that building for Palazzo, it was then the disused headquarters of a motor group that had gone bankrupt. Nobody else had seen its potential, but Frank Quigley who knew everything said that they had to have storage space for stock, they had to have a depot and
maintenance
centre for their vans and they had to have some kind of central offices. Why not combine them all behind this splendid facade?

A facade is what it was. Wonderful stairways and reception rooms on the ground floor. But upstairs a warren of prefabricated and jerry-built offices and partitions. Accounts had been modernized and gone on line in computers, so that was housed in a modern extension at the back. But there was a strange limbo land on the third floor, a place where there were names on doors and people often bursting in saying, ‘Oh, sorry’. There were vague storage areas where panelling that hadn’t worked or plastic display units that hadn’t fitted were left pending decisions.

There in the heart of this hidden chaos, the unacceptable face of Palazzo, lay Desmond Doyle’s workplace. The Special Projects Department. Officially it was the nerve centre of new ideas, plans, concepts and illuminations that would wipe the competition off the map. In reality it was the place where Desmond worked and drew his month’s salary and kept his managerial title because he was the boyhood friend of Frank Quigley. Because they went back a long way and because they had set out on the same day over a quarter of a century ago.

Frank Quigley the quiet but powerful Managing Director, the man who had seen the way to jump and jumped with the Italians when it came to takeover
time
. The man who had married the boss’s daughter. It was thanks to Frank that Desmond walked up to the third floor of Palazzo and opened the door of his office with heavy heart.

The Special Projects Department was coming under scrutiny. There had been definite rumours that a big investigation was upcoming. Desmond Doyle felt the familiar knot of sour bile in his stomach and the panic beginning to grip his chest. What did it mean this time? An accusation that the section wasn’t pulling its weight, a demand for exact quantifying of how much the last in-store presentations had realized, and the projected figures likely from the children’s promotional exercises.

The antacid tablets seemed to do no good any more, he was eating them like sweets. He was weary of the confrontations and the need to seem bright. Once that business of looking bright and being on top of things had been the be-all and end-all of his day. Not any more. At an age which the rest of the world persisted in thinking of as young, Desmond Doyle felt an old, old man. Forty-six going on ninety. That’s what he would have answered truthfully if anyone had asked him caringly about his age.

His office, blessedly free from the photographs that covered the walls in his home, had a pale print of a Connemara countryside. It looked somehow more mauve, blue and elegant than he remembered it, but Deirdre said it was the very spirit of the West of
Ireland
and he should hang it there so that it could be a conversation piece. He could talk about it to visitors, tell them this was the place he came from. Those were his roots.

Poor Deirdre, thinking that was the kind of conversation that took place in his box-like cubicle of an office. He was lucky to have walls that were not that rough glass or Perspex, he was lucky to have a desk, a telephone and two filing cabinets. The luxury of chats about roots based on over-pastelized views of County Mayo was not anything he had known. Or would ever know.

He no longer felt that the words stuck with cardboard lettering on his door were important … there had been no Special Projects in the old days, it was only a made-up word. There had been real jobs like Stores Development Manager, or Operations Manager. Merchandising Manager. These were what the business was about. Special Projects meant nothing to Desmond Doyle because he knew that in his case it was nothing. In other countries it was a real job, he knew that from reading the retail magazines. In Palazzo Foods it meant only a pat on the back.

Desmond remembered way back reading an advertisement which said ‘A title on the door means a Bigelow on the floor’. A Bigelow was some kind of a carpet. It was a lovely innocent advertisement trying to drive young executives mad for status. He had told
Deirdre
about it once but she had missed the point. Why shouldn’t he have a carpet too, she had asked. Perhaps they could get some off-cut of carpet themselves and fit it over the weekend, then it would look important and nobody would have to go to war over it and risk a confrontation they might lose. Wearily at that time he had settled for a small rug, which he kept under his desk so that nobody could see it but assured Deirdre that it gave the place class and superiority.

Desmond wouldn’t lose his job in Palazzo even if the whole Special Projects Department was deemed to be useless, a criminal waste of time. It was hardly a department anyway, he had that young pup who was meant to be a trainee and the very occasional services of Marigold, a big Australian girl with a mouthful of teeth and a mane of hair who was on what she called OE, Overseas Experience, and had worked in a funeral parlour, as a dentist’s receptionist and in the office of an amusement park, all to get an idea of what the world was like before she went home and married a millionaire from Perth, which was her goal.