Silver Wedding (6 page)

Brendan’s heart skipped.

‘Coming back … for more than a holiday do you mean?’

‘Wasn’t that what it was all about?’

‘Was it?’

He had seen his uncle’s eyes looking at him kindly.

‘Yerra, don’t worry yourself, Brendan boy, just live your life the best you can, and then one day you can go off and be where people won’t be getting at you.’

‘When would that day be?’

‘You’ll know when it arrives,’ Vincent had said without taking his eyes away from the few rows of potatoes.

And indeed Brendan
had
known when the day arrived.

Things changed when they went back home to London after that visit. For one thing Father got his job back, and they didn’t have to pretend any more that he had a job when he hadn’t. And there had been all kinds of terrible rows with Helen. She kept saying that she didn’t want to be left in the house alone. She would interrogate them all each day about what time they were going out and coming back, and even if there seemed to be five minutes of unaccounted-for time, she would arrange to go and meet Brendan when school finished.

He had tried to ask her what it was all about, but she had shrugged and said she just hated being by herself.

Not that there was ever much fear of that in Rosemary Drive. Brendan would have loved some time on his own instead of all the chit-chat at mealtimes, and getting the table ready and discussing what they ate and what they would eat at the next meal. He couldn’t understand why Helen didn’t welcome any chance of peace with open arms.

Perhaps that was why she had gone to be a nun in the end. For peace. Or was it because she still felt the need to be with people, and she thought the numbers
were
dropping at Rosemary Drive, with Anna moving out to her flat and Brendan a permanent resident in Ireland?

It was strange to have lived for so long with this family, and lived so closely during weeks, months, years of endless conversation and still to know them so little.

Brendan had decided to go back to that stone cottage on the day that his school ran a careers exhibition. There were stands and stalls giving information about careers in computing, in retailing, in the telephone service, in London Transport, in banking, in the armed forces. He wandered disconsolately from one to another.

Grandpa Doyle had died since that family visit when he welcomed them to the soil they came from. They had not gone home for the funeral. It wasn’t really
home
, Mother had said, and Grandpa would have been the first to have agreed. Uncle Vincent wouldn’t expect it, and there were no neighbours who would think it peculiar and talk poorly of them for not going. There had been a special Mass said for the repose of his soul in their parish church and everyone they knew from the parish sympathized.

The headmaster said that a decision about how to spend the years of one’s life was a very major decision; it wasn’t like choosing what cinema to go to or what football team to support. And suddenly like
a
vision Brendan realized that he had to get away from this, he had to escape the constant discussions and whether this was the right decision or the wrong one, and how he must tell people he was a management trainee rather than a shopworker or whatever new set of pretences would appear. He knew with the greatest clarity that he had ever possessed that he would go back to Vincent’s place and work there.

Salthill, 26 Rosemary Drive, was not a house that you walked out of without explanations. But Brendan realized that these would be the very last explanations he would ever have to give. He would regard it as an ordeal by fire and water, he would grit his teeth and go through it.

It had been worse than he could ever have imagined. Anna and Helen had wept, and pleaded and begged him not to go away. His mother had wept too and asked what she had done to deserve this; his father had wanted to know whether Vincent had put him up to this.

‘Vincent doesn’t even know,’ Brendan had said.

Nothing would dissuade him. Brendan hadn’t known that he possessed such strength. For four days the battle went on.

His mother would come and sit on his bed with cups of drinking chocolate. ‘All boys go through a period like this, a time of wanting to be on their own, to be away from the family apron strings. I’ve
suggested
to your father that you go on a little holiday over to Vincent, maybe that will get it all out of your system.’

Brendan had refused. It would have been dishonest. Because once he went he would not come back.

His father made overtures too. ‘Listen, boy, perhaps I was a bit harsh the other night saying you were only going to try and inherit that heap of old stones, I didn’t mean that to sound so blunt. But you know the way it will look. You can see how people will look at it.’

Brendan couldn’t, not then, not now.

But he would never forget the look on Vincent’s face when he arrived up the road.

He had walked all the way from the town. Vincent was standing with the old dog, Shep, at the kitchen door. He shaded his eyes from the evening light as Brendan got nearer, and he could make out the shape in the sunset.

‘Well now,’ he said.

Brendan had said nothing. He had carried a small grip bag with him, all his possessions for a new life.

‘It’s yourself,’ Vincent had said. ‘Come on in.’

At no time that evening did he ask why Brendan had come or how long he was staying. He never inquired whether they knew his whereabouts back in London, or if the visit had official approval.

Vincent’s view was that all this would emerge as
time
went by, and slowly over the weeks and months it did.

Days came and went. There was never a harsh word between the two Doyles, uncle and nephew. In fact there were very few words at all. When Brendan thought he might go to a dance nearby, Vincent said he thought that would be a great thing altogether. He had never been great shakes at the dancing himself but he heard that it was great exercise. He went to the tin on the dresser where the money was and handed Brendan forty pounds to kit himself out.

From time to time Brendan helped himself from the tin. He had asked in the beginning, but Vincent had put a stop to that, saying the money was there for the both of them, and to take what he needed.

Things had been getting expensive, and from time to time Brendan went and did an evening’s work in a bar for an extra few pounds to add to the till. If Vincent knew about it he never acknowledged it, either to protest or to praise.

Brendan grinned to himself, thinking how differently things would have been run back in Rosemary Drive.

He didn’t miss them; he wondered could he ever have loved them, even a little bit? And if he hadn’t loved them did that make him unnatural? Everything he read had love in it, and all the films were about love, and anything you heard of in the papers seemed to be done for love or because someone loved and
that
love wasn’t returned. Maybe he was an odd man out, not loving.

Vincent must have been like that too, that’s why he never wrote letters or talked to people intensely. That’s why he liked this life here in the hills and among the stony roads and peaceful skies.

It was a bit unnatural, Brendan told himself, to become twenty-two all by yourself, without acknowledging it to another soul. If he told Vincent, his uncle would look at him thoughtfully and say ‘Is that a fact?’ He would offer no congratulations nor suggest a celebratory pint.

Vincent was out walking the land. He would be back in by lunch. They would have that bacon cold, and plenty of tomatoes. They would eat hot potatoes with it because a dinner in the middle of the day without a few big floury potatoes would be no use to anyone. They never ate mutton or lamb. It wasn’t out of a sense of delicacy to the sheep that were their living, it was that they had no big freezer like some of their neighbours who would kill a sheep each season. And they couldn’t bear to pay the prices in the butcher’s shop for animals that they had sold for a greatly smaller sum than would warrant such a cost by the time they got to the butcher’s cold store.

Johnny Riordan the postman drove up in his little van.

‘There’s a rake of letters for you, Brendan, it must be your birthday,’ he said cheerfully.

‘Yes it is.’ Brendan had grown as taciturn as his uncle.

‘Good man, will you buy us a pint later?’

‘I might do that.’

The card from his father was one with a funny cat on it. Quite unsuitable from an estranged father. The word ‘Father’ was written neatly. No love, no best wishes. Well, that was all right. He sent an automatic card to Father with just ‘Brendan’ on it each year too.

Mother’s was more flowery, and said she could hardly believe she had such a grown-up son, and wondered whether he had any girlfriends and would they ever see him married.

Helen’s card was full of peace and blessings. She wrote a note about the Sisters and the hostel they were going to open and the funds that were needed and how two of the Sisters were going to play the guitar busking at Piccadilly station and how the community was very divided about this and whether it was the right way to go. Helen always wrote with a cast of thousands assuming he knew all these people and remembered their names and cared about their doings. At the end she wrote, ‘Please take Anna’s letter seriously.’

He had opened them in the right order. He opened Anna’s slowly. Perhaps it was going to tell him some bad news, Father had cancer, or Mother was going to have an operation? His face curled into a look of
scorn
when he saw all the business about the anniversary. Nothing had changed, simply nothing, they had got trapped in a time warp, stuck in a world of tinsel-covered cards, meaningless rituals. He felt even more annoyed about the whole thing because of Sister Helen’s pious instruction to take Anna’s letter seriously. Talk about passing the buck.

He felt edgy and restless as he always did when drawn into family affairs. He got up and went outside. He would walk up the hills a bit. There was a wall he wanted to look at. It might need a bit more work than just rearranging the stones like they did so often.

He came across Vincent with a sheep that had got stuck in the gate. The animal was frightened and kicking and pulling so that it was almost impossible to release her.

‘You came at a good time,’ Vincent said, and together they eased the anxious sheep out. She bleated frantically and looked at them with her silly face.

‘What’s wrong with her at all, is she hurt?’ Brendan asked.

‘No. Not a scratch on her.’

‘Then what’s all that caterwauling out of her?’

Vincent looked long at the distressed sheep. ‘That’s the one that lay on its lamb. Crushed the little thing to death,’ he said.

‘Stupid thicko sheep,’ Brendan said. ‘Sits on her own perfectly good lamb, then gets stuck in a gate, that’s what gives sheep a bad name.’

The ewe looked at him trustingly and gave a great baaa into the air.

‘She doesn’t know I’m insulting her,’ Brendan said.

‘Divil a bit she’d care. She’s looking for the lamb.’

‘Doesn’t she know she suffocated it?’

‘Not at all. How would she know that?’ Vincent said.

Companionably the two men walked back towards the house to make their lunch.

Vincent’s eyes fell on the envelopes and cards.

‘Well now, it’s your birthday,’ he said. ‘Imagine that.’

‘Yes.’ Brendan sounded grumpy.

His uncle looked at him for a while.

‘It’s good of them to remember you, it would be scant remembering you’d get if you had to rely on me.’

‘I don’t worry about remembering … not that sort.’ He was still bad-tempered as he washed the potatoes at the sink and put them into the big saucepan of water.

‘Will I put them up on the mantelpiece for you?’

Vincent had never said anything like that.

‘No, no. I wouldn’t like that.’

‘All right so.’ His uncle collected them neatly and left them in a little pile. He saw Anna’s long typed letter but made no comment. During the meal he waited for the boy to speak.

‘Anna has this notion I should go over to England
and
play games for some silver wedding celebrations.
Silver
,’ he scoffed at the word.

‘That’s how many?’ Vincent asked.

‘Twenty-five glorious years.’

‘Are they that long married? Lord Lord.’

‘You weren’t at the wedding yourself?’

‘God Brendan, what would take me to a wedding, I ask you?’

‘They want me to go over. I’m not going next or near it.’

‘Well, we all do what we want to do.’

Brendan thought about that for a long time.

‘I suppose we do in the end,’ he said.

They lit their cigarettes to smoke while they drank their big mugs of tea.

‘And they don’t want me there, I’d only be an embarrassment. Mother would have to be explaining me to people, and why I didn’t do this or look like that, and Father would be quizzing me, asking me questions.’

‘Well, you said you weren’t going so what’s the worry about it?’

‘It’s not till October,’ Brendan said.

‘October, is that a fact?’ Vincent looked puzzled.

‘I know, isn’t it just like them to be setting it all up now?’

They left it for a while but his face was troubled, and his uncle knew he would speak of it again.

‘In a way, of course, once in a few years isn’t much
to
go over. In a way of looking at it, it mightn’t be much to give them.’

‘It’s your own decision, lad.’

‘You wouldn’t point me one way or the other, I suppose?’

‘Indeed I would not.’

‘It might be too expensive for us to afford the fare.’ Brendan looked up at the biscuit tin, maybe this was an out.

‘There’s always the money for the fare, you know that.’

He did know it. He had just been hoping that they could use it as an excuse. Even to themselves.

‘And I would only be one of a crowd, if I were to go it would be better to go on my own some time.’

‘Whatever you say yourself.’

Outside they heard a bleating. The sheep with the foolish face, the one that had suffocated her lamb was still looking for it. She had come towards the house hoping that it might have strayed in there. Vincent and Brendan looked out the kitchen window. The sheep still called out.