Authors: Maeve Binchy
Silver Wedding (35 page)
Helen sat and hugged her knees in the garden where she had sat, misunderstood and thinking herself unloved, all the years of her childhood. She heard footsteps behind her. Anna no doubt asking her to come in and not to make a scene, Mother telling her not to sit on damp stone, Grandmother
O’Hagan
about to ask when was she ever going to be professed. She looked up. It was Frank Quigley.
A terror seized her throat and she felt a momentary light-headedness. It was of course impossible that he was going to touch her, molest her in her parents’ home.
But he looked so menacing in the dark.
‘I heard from your father that you’re thinking of leaving St Martin’s,’ he said.
‘Yes. They want me to go, they threw me out.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
‘Sister Brigid says the others don’t want me.’ She realized as she spoke that she sounded like a child of five years of age with her thumb in her mouth.
‘Sister Brigid is far too fond of you to think that, let alone say it.’
‘How do you know? You only saw her that night, that awful night.’ Helen’s eyes had become as big as dinner plates. The memory of the time she had tried to steal a baby for Frank and Renata Quigley, the night that had turned out so badly, and when the real descent had begun in St Martin’s.
‘No, Helen, I’ve met Sister Brigid many times since then,’ Frank said. ‘We didn’t speak of you much, we had other things to talk about … She was giving me advice. She gave me very good helpful advice, I have you to thank for that.’
‘I meant well that night, I really thought it would have suited everyone.’
‘It might have, you know, but we couldn’t do it that way, always running, always hiding, always pretending. That’s not the way to live.’
‘That’s the way I’ve always lived.’ Helen sounded rebellious and defensive.
‘No, no, it isn’t.’
‘In this house we always pretended, we still are tonight.’
‘Shush,’ he said soothingly.
‘How did you learn to be so upright and not to have to act like the rest of us?’
‘I’m not upright. You of all people should know that.’ Frank spoke seriously. ‘I have done things I am ashamed of, one of them with you. I am very very ashamed of that.’
For the first time since that day in his apartment Helen Doyle looked Frank Quigley in the eyes. For the first time for many years in any encounter she said absolutely nothing.
‘I was always hoping that you would meet somebody nice and somebody young and tender, someone who would put that strange sad day into some kind of perspective for you. Show you that while it was important in one way in many others it was not important at all.’
Still Helen said nothing.
‘So I supposed I was sorry when you went into St Martin’s, because I always thought then that what happened might appear magnified.’
‘I never thought about it again,’ Helen said. She looked at him as she told him the lie, her eyes confident and her head held high.
He knew she was lying but it was important that she didn’t realize.
‘That is so much the right way to be, and it certainly puts me in my place.’
He smiled at her. Ruefully, admiringly. He got it just right. And he could see she was beginning to feel better.
‘So what will you do when you do leave, if you’re going to?’
‘I’ll leave. I don’t know yet. Maybe I need time to think.’
‘Is this the place to do your thinking?’ He looked uncertainly up at Salthill, 26 Rosemary Drive.
‘Maybe not.’
‘Maybe you should go away, right away from London. You’re good with children, Brigid tells me, very good.’
‘Yes, I like them. Certainly. They don’t get as upset as adults.’
‘Could you mind one? For a year or two while you’re thinking?’
‘Do you know one?’
They seemed to talk as equals, her fear of him fell away.
‘I do, his name is Alexander. I don’t know him but I know his mother. However she and I had a fight and
she
doesn’t like me, if I suggested you she would say no. If she were to advertise, and say if you were to apply …’
‘Wouldn’t it be too much of a coincidence?’
‘No, we can do it through Carlo: she asks Carlo about a nanny. Carlo says the daughter of one of his ex-managers, she knew your father.’
‘Is it Miss East?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you fight about?’
‘This and that.’
‘Is Alexander nice?’
‘I don’t know, Helen.’
‘But you’d like to know?’ She seemed to have grown up in minutes.
‘I’d love to know.’
‘Fine,’ said Helen Doyle. ‘I have to do my thinking somewhere, it might as well be with Alexander East.’
The cake was produced and cut. And when everybody had a slice of rich gateau on a plate, Desmond tapped on a glass and said that Frank Quigley who had done the honours so well a quarter of a century ago was going to say a few words.
Frank stood forward, he said that it was a great happiness and a great honour to be asked to speak. He made it seem both. Those who listened felt for a moment that he was lucky to have been invited.
He said that he remembered the day when Deirdre, looking roughly the same as she did
tonight
, had made this commitment; she was young and beautiful, she had her life ahead of her, there were many decisions to make, many paths to choose. She had chosen Desmond Doyle. Smoothly he brought them from the marriage through the early days of Palazzo, to the joys of children, to their luck in each and all of these children, a daughter rising high in the book trade – Palazzo had tried to poach her, but with no success. Another daughter giving her entire life to looking after people, and a son with a love of the land. These were three rich rewards for Deirdre and Desmond to look at and see their hopes realized.
He himself had not been so fortunate in the early days, he hadn’t met anyone he loved until later on in life. His gaze passed gently over Maureen standing cool and admiring in her lemon silk dress. But then he too had known the happiness of married life, though unfortunately unlike Desmond he had not been given the joy of fathering three fine children. But his heart was happy tonight and in no sense tinged with the envy that it might have held over the years. At the weekend he and Renata were going to Brazil, where a legal adoption had been arranged, and where they were going to take home with them and give a home to a girl called Paulette. She was eight months old. Nuns had arranged the papers. She would be very much younger than his friend Desmond’s children but he hoped that the friendship would be there always,
as
his had been. A lifelong friendship, he said. Some things never change.
It had been masterly, there were a few tears brushed away, and the champagne glasses were raised.
Everyone was touched by Frank. Every person in the room.
Even Maureen Barry.
‘My God, you are one performer,’ she said to him admiringly.
‘Thank you, Maureen.’ He was gallant and suave.
‘No, I mean it. You always were. You didn’t have to try so hard, just to prove my mother wrong, to prove me wrong.’
‘But your mother loved me, she said I was a very nice young man.’ He put on her mother’s voice. It was a good imitation.
‘I’m glad about the child,’ she said.
‘Yes, so are we.’
‘And will I see you all when I open my shop in England?’
‘It will be a time before Paulette will be old enough for your clothes.’
‘Oddly enough I’m having a children’s boutique too.’
‘Well then.’ His smile was warm. But not warm enough.
Maureen thought she would discuss it with her father. The old rascal was full of advice. She wasn’t going to let drop a prize like this again.
Father Hurley said he wanted to use the phone, but there appeared to be a queue. Anna was speaking to someone.
‘Sure, come round,’ she was saying. ‘Listen to me, Ken Green, this is 1985, we are all free to make our own choices. My choice is that if you choose to be here that would be great.’ There was a pause.
‘And I love you too,’ she said, hanging up, surprised with herself.
Deidre’s mother was on the phone next.
‘Yes Tony, perfectly satisfactory, no opportunity. No, no, not reneging on anything, but you know the whole art of life is knowing the right time to say things. Yes, yes. Nothing changed. Absolutely. Me too. Lots.’
Father Hurley picked up the telephone to tell Father Hayes that he was getting a mini-cab back, he would be sharing it with several others, a large car had been ordered.
Yes, he said, it had been delightful, he just felt he mustn’t take up the phone, other people might be telephoning people to say they loved them.
No, he said testily to Father Hayes. He wasn’t even remotely drunk, he had just been sitting listening to a woman and her granddaughter talking on the telephone. That was all.
The move to go was general now. But there was a sense of something not quite completed.
Deirdre found the camera. She had a new film in it
all
ready for the occasion, she ran into the kitchen where Philippa’s team were busy putting polythene on the leftovers and storing them in the fridge. There would even be things for the freezer.
Deirdre explained how the camera worked and Philippa listened patiently. It was a characteristic of this kind of woman that they thought their cameras were complicated.
They gathered around the couple in a semicircle. They smiled. The camera flashed and flashed again.
Amongst the pictures in the roll of twenty-four there would be one which was bound to look good when enlarged, would look just right. There would be the picture of The Silver Wedding on the wall, for everyone to see. Everyone who came to Rosemary Drive from now on.
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409049128
Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2006
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Copyright © Maeve Binchy, 1988
Maeve Binchy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in the United Kingdom in 1988 by Century
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