Silver Wedding (11 page)

It ended badly. As everything Helen Doyle had ever touched seemed to end.

She had refused to go into the flat, crying too now, louder than Renata, but neither of the women cried as much as the bewildered hungry baby that had been born in a lavatory that morning.

Sister Brigid was summoned eventually to make some sense out of the whole scene. She came with Nessa, white-faced but calm.

Nessa saw to the baby and Brigid listened to the hysterical explanations.

The Italian woman was saying that she had intended only to inquire if any mother wanted to give her baby privately for adoption, she hadn't asked anyone to take one for her.

The tall Irish businessman was pleading for Helen, saying that she had done it for the best as she had always done everything for the best, but the world was never able to perceive it that way. He sounded tender towards her and yet terrified of her as well.

He knew her parents, he explained. Desmond Doyle had been one of his oldest friends.

'She is the daughter of those Doyles?' Shock was being piled on shock for Renata.

'Yes, she can't have known it was us.'

There was something in the way the man spoke. There was something that sounded a warning. Brigid looked from one stricken face to another to try and read the signals.

Helen was opening her mouth. 'But I did know, I did know, it's only because it was Frank that I'd do this, I'd never have taken a baby, and told all those lies. If it hadn't been Frank I'd not have risked the baby's life. I felt I owed it to him, after all, after everything. , .'

Brigid had worked with people for all her adult life. Mainly people who were in some kind of distress. She didn't know what was going to be said now but she felt it was crucial that whatever it was, Helen should not say it. Helen was in mid-flight, through the tears and the gulps the story was coming out.

'I never meant it to be like this, but they could have given

it such a good life, so much money, and Frank's too old to adopt a child, and she said he had been having heart attacks . . .'

'You told her that?' Frank snapped at his wife.

'I thought she was a nun miles away, how did I know she was bloody Doyle's daughter?'

Helen was oblivious. 'I wanted to make amends, to make up for everything. To try and put things right. After all, my life worked out all right and I got everything I wanted, but Frank didn't, he had no children and he had heart attacks, he was punished ... I wanted to try and even it out.'

Renata was looking from one to another now in confusion. Out in the other room Sister Nessa had quietened the baby and Helen was gathering breath again.

'You work with Mr Doyle still?' Brigid asked quickly.

'Yes, and he helped my father when he was sacked, he asked Mr Palazzo to give him back his job . ..'

Brigid saw an avenue of escape. She stood up as she spoke.

'So Helen with her usual impetuous nature decided to thank you for this by getting you a child when it was not going to be easy through the proper channels. Isn't that right?'

Frank Quigley looked into the grey eyes of Sister Brigid, competent, unemotional, strong. Irish perhaps a generation ago, but now with a London accent. She reminded him of bright men he met in business.

'That's it. Exactly, Sister.'

Helen hadn't stopped crying. Brigid felt she might not have stopped speaking either. With what seemed like a deliberate effort she put her arm around the girl's shoulder.

'Let's take you home, Helen, back to St Martin's. That's the best thing now.'

'Will I drive you?' Frank asked.

'No, but if you could get us a mini-cab or a taxi, Mr Quigley.'

At this moment Nessa came in; the baby was asleep. They would take him to the hospital, the one they knew, and where they were known. He would be looked after.

'It seems a pity in a way, Sister.' Frank looked at Sister Brigid, and she looked back. The glance was a long one.

It was a pity in many ways. They could give the boy everything, including more love than he would ever know from Yvonne.

'Yes, but if we do this, everything breaks down. Every' single thing.'

He felt she was tempted.

'Not everything, just one little bit of form-filling. The mother thinks he is dead.'

'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.

'Goodbve, 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.

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.