Silver Wedding (2 page)

They had sat together in the warm spring night and he had told her about his acting and she had told him about her family. How she lived in a flat because she had thought she was becoming too dependent on her family, too drawn into everything they did. She went home of course on Sundays, and one other evening in the week. Joe had looked at her enthralled. He had never known a life where adults kept going back to the nest.

In days she was visiting his flat, days later he was visiting hers because it was more comfortable. He told Anna briefly and matter-of-factly about Janet and the two little boys. Anna told Joe about the college lecturer she had loved rather unwisely during her final years, resulting in a third-class degree and in a great sense of loss.

Joe was surprised that she had told him about the college lecturer. There was no hassle about shared property, shared children. He had only told her about Janet because he was still married to her. Anna had wanted to tell everything, Joe hadn’t really wanted to hear.

It was only logical that he should come to live with her. He didn’t suggest it, and for a while she wondered what she would say if she were invited to take up residence in his flat. It would be so hard to tell Mother and Father. But after one long lovely weekend, she decided to ask Joe would he not move in properly to her small ground-floor flat in Shepherd’s Bush?

‘Well I will, if that’s what you’d like,’ Joe had said, pleased but not surprised, willing but not over-grateful. He had gone back to his own place, done a deal about the rent and with two grip bags and a leather jacket over his arm he had come to live with Anna Doyle.

Anna Doyle, who had to keep his arrival very secret indeed from her mother and father who lived in
Pinner
and in a world where daughters did not let married men come to spend an evening let alone a lifetime.

He had been with her since that April Monday a year ago. And now it was May 1985 and by a series of complicated manoeuvres Anna had managed to keep the worlds of Pinner and Shepherd’s Bush satisfactorily apart while flitting from one to another with an ever-increasing sense of guilt.

Joe’s mother was fifty-six but looked years younger. She worked at the food counter of a bar where lots of actors gathered, and they saw her maybe two or three times a week. She was vague and friendly, giving them a wave as if they were just good customers. She hadn’t known for about six months that they lived together. Joe simply hadn’t bothered to tell her. When she heard she said, ‘That’s nice, dear,’ to Anna in exactly the same tone as she would have spoken to a total stranger who had asked for a slice of the veal and ham pie.

Anna had wanted her to come around to the flat.

‘What for?’ Joe had asked in honest surprise.

Next time she was in the pub Anna went to the counter and asked Joe’s mother herself.

‘Would you like to come round and see us in the flat?’

‘What for?’ she had asked with interest.

Anna was determined. ‘I don’t know, a drink maybe.’

‘Lord, dear, I never drink, seen enough of it in this place to turn you right against it, I tell you.’

‘Well, just to see your son,’ Anna went on.

‘I see him in here, don’t I? He’s a grown-up now, love, he doesn’t want to be looking at his old mum, day in day out.’

Anna had watched them since with a fascination that was half horror and half envy. They were just two people who lived in the same city, and who made easy casual conversation when they met.

They never talked of other members of the family. Nothing about Joe’s sister who had been in a rehabilitation centre on account of drugs, nor the eldest brother who was a mercenary soldier of some sort in Africa, nor the youngest brother who worked in television as a cameraman.

She never asked about her grandchildren. Joe had told Anna that Janet did take them to see her sometimes, and occasionally he had taken the boys to a park nearby where his mother lived and she had come along for a little while. He never took them to her home.

‘I think she has a bloke there, a young fellow, she doesn’t want a lot of grandchildren trailing in to her.’ To Joe it was simple and clear.

To Anna it was like something from another planet.

In Pinner if there were grandchildren they would have been the central pivot of the home, as the
children
had been for nearly a quarter of a century. Anna sighed again as she thought of the celebrations that lay ahead and how she would have to face up to them, as she had to face up to so many things on her own.

It was no use sitting in an empty bookshop with a coffee and a grievance that Joe wasn’t as other men, supportive and willing to share these kinds of things with her. She had known there would be nothing like that from the first evening together.

What she had to do now was work out how the silver wedding could be organized in October in a way that wouldn’t drive everyone mad.

Helen would be no use, that was for certain. She would send an illuminated card signed by all the sisters, she would invite Mother and Father to a special folk Mass with the Community, she would get the day off and come out to Pinner in her drab grey jumper and skirt, her hair dull and lifeless and the big cross on a chain around her neck constantly in her hand. Helen didn’t even look like a nun, she looked like someone a bit dopey and badly dressed retreating behind the big crucifix. And in many ways that’s what she was. Helen would turn up all right if everything was organized, and in her canvas bag she would take back any uneaten food because one nun loved gingerbread and another had a weakness for anything with salmon in it.

With a sense of despair Anna could see into the
future
months ahead with her younger sister Helen, a member of a religious community in South London, picking her way through the food like a scavenger and filling a biscuit tin with foil-wrapped titbits.

But at least Helen would be there. Would Brendan come at all? That was the real worry, and the one she had been trying to avoid thinking about. If Brendan Doyle did not get the train and boat and then the train again and make it to Pinner for his parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary they might as well call the whole thing off now. The disgrace would never be disguised, the emptiness would never be forgotten.

An incomplete family picture on the wall.

They would probably lie and say that he was in Ireland and couldn’t be spared from the farm, the harvest or the shearing or whatever people did on farms in October.

But Anna knew with sickening clarity that it would be a paper-thin excuse. The Best Man and the Bridesmaid would know there had been a coldness, and the neighbours would know, and the priests would know.

And the shine would be taken off the silver.

How to get him back, that was the problem. Or was it? What to get him back for? Perhaps that was a bigger problem.

Brendan had always been so quiet when he was a
schoolboy
. Who would have known that he felt this strange longing to go away from the family to such a remote place? Anna had been so shocked the day he told them. Utterly straightforward and with no care about what it would do to the rest of the family.

‘I’m not going back to school in September, it’s no use trying to persuade me. I’ll never get any exams, and I don’t need them. I’m going to Vincent. In Ireland. I’ll go as soon as I can leave.’

They had railed and beseeched. With no success. This is what he was going to do.

‘But why are you doing this to us?’ Mother had cried.

‘I’m not doing anything to you.’ Brendan had been mild. ‘I’m doing it for me, it’s not going to cost you any money. It’s the farm where Father grew up, I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘Don’t think he’ll make the farm over to you automatically,’ Father had spluttered. ‘That old recluse could just as well leave it to the missions. You could easily find you’ve put in all that graft for nothing.’

‘Father, I’m not thinking of inheritances and wills and people dying, I’m thinking of how I’d like to spend my days. I was happy there and Vincent could do with another pair of hands.’

‘Well if he does isn’t it a wonder that he never married and provided himself with a few pairs of hands of his own around the place without asking strangers in to him?’

‘Hardly a stranger, Father,’ Brendan had said, ‘I am his own flesh and blood, his brother’s child.’

It had been a nightmare.

And the communication since had been minimal, cards at Christmas and on birthdays. Perhaps anniversaries. Anna couldn’t remember. Anniversaries. How was she going to assemble the cast for this one?

The Bridesmaid, as they always called her, was Maureen Barry. She was Mother’s best friend. They had been at school together back in Ireland. Maureen had never married, she was the same age as Mother, forty-six, though she looked younger. She had two dress shops in Dublin – she refused to call them boutiques. Perhaps Anna could talk to Maureen and see what would be best. But a warning bell went off loudly in her head. Mother was a great one for not letting things go outside the family.

There had always been secrets from Maureen.

Like the time that Father had lost his job. It couldn’t be told.

Like the time that Helen ran away when she was fourteen. That was never breathed to Maureen. Mother had said that nothing mattered in the end, everything could be sorted out just so long as family matters weren’t aired abroad, and neighbours and friends weren’t told all of the Doyle business. It seemed to be a very effective and soothing cure when things went wrong, so the family had always stuck to it.

You would think that Anna should ring Maureen Barry now and ask her as Mother’s oldest friend what was best to do about Brendan and about the anniversary in general.

But Mother would curl up and die if she thought there was the remotest possibility of any member of the family revealing a secret outside it. And the coldness with Brendan was a big secret.

There were no family members who could be asked to act as intermediaries.

So what kind of party? The day was a Saturday, it could be a lunch. There were a lot of hotels around Pinner, Harrow, Northwood, and restaurants and places used to doing functions like this. Perhaps a hotel would be best.

It would be formal for one thing, the banqueting manager would advise about toasts and cakes and photographs.

There wouldn’t have to be weeks of intensive cleaning of the family home and manicuring the front garden.

But a lifetime as the eldest of the Doyles had taught Anna that a hotel would not be right. There were all those dismissive remarks about hotels in the past, destructive and critical remarks about this family who couldn’t be bothered to have the thing in their own home, or the other family who would be quite glad to invite you to a common hotel, an impersonal place, but wouldn’t let you over their own doorstep, thank you very much.

It would have to be home, the invitation would have to say in silver lettering that the guest was being invited to Salthill, 26 Rosemary Drive, Pinner. Salthill had been a seaside resort over in the West of Ireland where Mother and Maureen Barry used to go when they were young, it had been lovely, they said. Father had never been there, he said there was little time for long family holidays when he was a boy making his way in Ireland.

Wearily Anna made the list; it would be this size if there wasn’t an Irish contingent, and that size if there were. It could be this size if there was to be a sit-down meal, that size if it were a buffet. This size if it were just drinks and snacks, that size if it were a proper meal.

And who would pay for it?

Very often the children did, she knew that.

But Helen had taken a vow of poverty and had nothing. Brendan, even if he did come which wasn’t likely, was working for an agricultural worker’s wages. Anna had very little money to spend on such a party.

She had very little money indeed. By dint of hard saving, no lunches and a few wise buys at Oxfam she had saved £132. It was in the building society hoping to become £200 and then when Joe had £200 they were going to Greece together. Joe had £11 at the moment so he had a longer way to go as regards saving. But he was sure to get a part soon. His agent
had
said there were a lot of things coming up. He’d be working any day now.

Anna hoped that he would, she really and truly did.

If he got something good, something where they recognized him properly, something steady, then everything else could fall into place. Not just the Greek holiday but everything. He could arrange a settlement for his sons, give Janet something that would make her feel independent, he could begin the divorce proceedings. Then Anna could risk leaving Books for People and go to a bigger shop, she would easily get promotion in a large bookshop, a graduate, experienced in the trade already. They would love her.

The time had gone by in thought, and soon the keys were turning in the door and the others arriving. Soon the door was open to the public. Planning was over, yet again.

At lunch time Anna made up her mind, she would go out to Pinner that evening and ask her parents straight out how they would like to celebrate the day. It seemed less celebratory than telling them that it was all in hand. But to try and do that was nonsense really, and she could still get it wrong. She would ask them straight out.

She rang them to say she would be coming over. Her mother was pleased.

‘That’s good, Anna, we haven’t seen you for ages and ages, I was just saying to Daddy I hope Anna’s all right, and there’s nothing wrong.’

Anna gritted her teeth.

‘Why would there be anything wrong?’

‘Well it’s just been so long, and we don’t know what you do.’

‘Mother, it’s been eight days. I was with you last weekend.’

‘Yes, but we don’t know how you are getting on …’

‘I ring you almost every day, you
know
how I’m getting on and what I do, get up in Shepherd’s Bush and get the tube in here, and then I go home again. That is what I do, Mother, like a great many million people in London do.’ Her voice rose in rage at her mother’s attitude.