Silver Wedding (32 page)

Helen was in very poor form at the moment, there had been some problem yet again in the convent. Apparently the rest of the Community didn’t want Helen to take her vows and be a permanent member of the house. This was what Anna was reading between the lines, Helen of course was reading nothing of the sort, seeing only a series of petty irritations, confusions and obstacles.

Anna sighed. If she was in a religious community, which was possibly the last place on earth she would want to end up, then the very very last person on earth she would like with her was Helen, there was something very unsettling about Helen’s very presence. On the few occasions she had come to see Anna in the bookshop it had been a matter of trying to hold on to big piles of books in displays – no other customer knocked them over but Helen would. Like she had actually swept the credit-card machine off the cash desk, breaking the glass on a display cabinet. Like her coat always caught somebody’s cup of coffee. Not a restful presence anywhere. She hoped that Helen wouldn’t say the wrong thing too often this evening.

What could she say that would be terrible? Well, something about Brendan, along the lines of wasn’t it great we forced him to come back … Which wasn’t the case, but Father would think it was. Or about Father having left Palazzo and working with a terribly nice Paki. Helen was the only person Anna knew who actually used words like Paki and Eyetie. Yes, she could refer to Renata Quigley as an Eyetie.

Anna padded off in bare feet to make herself a cup of instant coffee. Another pleasure and advantage of not living any more with Joe Ashe. It had to be real, the coffee, it had to be freshly ground in a machine that would split your head apart. She would not like to live for ever on her own, but she was daily finding more and more positive things about not living with Joe Ashe.

He had left as good-naturedly and easily as he had arrived. He had kissed her on the cheek and said that she was being very heavy over nothing. He had said he’d miss her, and he had taken quite a few of her records, and a very expensive rug she had bought for their bed. She had watched him fold it, and had said nothing.

‘You did give me this as a present, I think?’ He had smiled lightly.

‘Sure, Joe,’ she had said. She would not be heavy over a bedspread. Only about another woman in her bed.

Judy had been very good over the break-up.

‘I’m always here, ring me if you feel a bit bleak. I’ll listen. Don’t ring him out of loneliness, only ring him if you could take him back.’

Friends were great, Anna thought, real pure gold. Friends understood when you got infatuated with people, and didn’t mind you going mad for a while, they were still there when the infatuation was over. As it nearly was. Very very nearly.

And she wasn’t going to embark on anything again for a long while. Ken Green understood that, he had said that he wanted the smell of Joe Ashe’s rather sickly aftershave well gone from the place before he came round in earnest. Ken was very droll. He got on very well with her father too, which was odd, and persuaded Dad and Mr Patel to take a small selection of his paperbacks to display with the magazines, just in case there was a market, he had said … and of course there had been. Father and Mr Patel were going to expand. There was an opening for a bookshop in the area. Ken had even suggested that Anna might think of opening one herself, in conjunction with them.

‘Too near home,’ she had said.

‘Maybe you’re right.’ Ken was agreeable but not in the way Joe Ashe agreed with people. Joe agreed for an easy life, Ken because he had thought it out. She half wished she had asked him to the silver wedding do, but it was far too public a commitment, Mother’s friends would whisper, and Grandmother O’Hagan
would
be bound to want to know everything even though there was nothing to know.

Brendan had arrived in London early, off the boat train in Euston. It coincided with the morning rush hour. He stood watching for a quarter of an hour while the commuter population of that part of London buzzed and scuttled and darted up ramps and down stairs, down to taxi queues, in to grab a quick breakfast standing at a counter, leaping on to escalators. They looked so self-important, he thought, as if whatever petty job they were racing to was important, as if they were people of substance. And this is what his father and mother would like him to be doing, racing down from Rosemary Drive to catch a train to Baker Street, and another tube to somewhere like here. It was a preposterous way to live, and all to be able to
say
to someone that this was success.

Brendan knew he must not spoil his gesture in coming to the celebration by voicing these thoughts.

And he also remembered that Vincent had warned him to buy some proper clothes to wear for the occasion.

‘You’ll always be able to use a good suit, lad,’ his uncle had said.

‘Aw no, Vincent, not a suit, I’d never wear a suit for God’s sake.’

‘Well that’s what we wore in my day. But then a jacket and trousers.’

‘An anorak maybe?’ Brendan had brightened.

‘Not an anorak, you gobdaw, not for a big party in their house, a smart dark jacket, navy maybe and light blue trousers. Sure you’ll have them hanging out of you at the next dance you go to here.’

His uncle had given him folding money. It was a sacred trust to buy something smart to wear. He had written to Anna, telling her how much he had to spend. He had hoped she wouldn’t make fun of him, but he had wronged her even to suspect she might do such a thing.

Her letter was enthusiastic and grateful, she told him that Marks or C and A or any High Street store would have a bewildering selection, and that she was touched and pleased that he was going to so much trouble. She wrote that she herself was going to wear a dress and jacket in navy and white with awful bits of lace trimming on both, because she thought it would please Mother, it looked what Mother called dressy and Anna called yucky but it was Mother’s day. Anna wrote how she had told Helen that since Vatican Two nobody expected nuns to arrive in places dressed in sackcloth and ashes, but of course Helen would suit herself, as always.

Maureen Barry came out of Selfridge’s and thought she saw Desmond’s and Deirdre’s son Brendan walking down Oxford Street with a huge Marks and Spencer’s bag as if he had bought half the shop.

But she decided that this was ridiculous. There were twelve million people in London, why should she see a member of the family she was thinking about?

And for all she knew the boy might still be in the West of Ireland, there had been some kind of coldness. Her mother had told her that not long before she died. She said that Eileen O’Hagan had said that there had been some great cover-up but the facts were that the son of Deirdre and Desmond had run away, and run of all places back to the very townland his father managed to escape from. The same place that Frank had run from. Maureen told herself to be reasonable. Even if the boy was in London, he would surely be out in Pinner helping to set up tables for the function. She must stop being fanciful and thinking she had this town down to size as she did Dublin. Only that morning at the hotel she had thought she saw Deirdre’s mother, in the distance across the dining room, in fact it had been so like her she was nearly going across to say hallo but the woman had been joined by a flashy-looking man wearing a blazer with a big crest of some sort. Perhaps it was the sign that she needed glasses. She smiled, remembering how they had all told each other years ago when coming to work in London that they should get false teeth and spectacles on the National Health, it had seemed a scream to need either.

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 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.

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 – rightly, 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 Miss 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.