Silver Wedding (8 page)

As it was he was alive, the sores from his stinking nappies being treated. Anti-tetanus injections were being given against the germs he must have encountered, and his bruised eye was pronounced mercifully intact.

His mother hadn’t beaten him, of this Nessa was sure, but she was too feeble-minded to look after him. He would be in care when he came out of hospital. A lifetime of care lay ahead of him. But care with a capital C.

Nessa was not in the mood for Helen’s tears and explanations. She cut her very short.

‘So you forgot the vegetables again. So what, Helen? Let’s have a little peace. That’s what would be really nice.’

Helen broke off mid-sentence. ‘I was only taking it all on myself, I didn’t want you to blame Sister Joan.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, Helen, who in their right mind would blame Sister Joan or any Sister? Cut it out, will you?’

It was the sharpest remark that had ever been made in St Martin’s House, a place of peace and consideration.

Sister Joan and Sister Maureen looked shocked at Nessa with her white tired face going up the stairs.

Helen looked at all three of them and burst into tears again.

Sister Brigid never seemed to be aware of any little atmosphere. It was one of her characteristics. Sometimes Helen thought it was a weakness, a rare insensitivity in an otherwise remarkable character. Other times she wondered whether it might in fact be a blessing and something that Sister Brigid cultivated purposely.

There was no mention made of Helen’s red eyes and blotchy face as they sat, heads bent, waiting for Sister Brigid to say the simple blessing over their food. Nobody acknowledged that Nessa looked white and drawn, though they were solicitous about passing her things and smiling at her a little more often than they smiled at the rest of the table. Eleven women including Brigid, the quiet Mother Superior who never used that title. She had been very stern with Helen for calling her Reverend Mother.

‘But isn’t that what you are?’ Helen had been startled.

‘We are sisters here, it’s a community, this is our home, it’s not an institution with ranks and rules and pecking orders.’

It had been hard to grasp at first, but after three years Helen felt that she had surely earned her place. Biting her lip she looked at the ten women chattering around the simple meal. Made more simple still by the fact of her forgetting the vegetables.

They talked easily about the work they had done during the day, the practicalities, the funny things, the optimisms, the chance of more help here, of fighting the cuts there. Brigid had said that they must not bring their problems to the supper table or even home to the house, otherwise St Martin’s would be weighed down by the collective grief and anxiety of these workers in the sad end of society. They would become so depressed if they were to dwell every night on the amount of misery and pain they had seen in their different worlds that it would be counter productive. People needed escape, time out, retreat. They didn’t have the luxury of going
on
retreat like the nuns of a previous generation, but neither did they have the demands and responsibilities that many trained social workers who were married women or men had. There were no children needing time, love and attention, there were no social demands nor the intensity of one-to-one
relationships
. Brigid told them often that small communities of nuns like theirs were ideally situated to serve the many and apparently increasing needs around them in London. The only thing they had to fear was too great an introspection or a depth of worry which might render their help less effective because it was becoming self-important.

Helen looked around at their faces: apart from Nessa who was still looking frail the others were like women who had few cares. You would not know from listening to them that some of them had spent the day in magistrates’ courts, in police stations, in welfare centres or in squats and rundown council estates, or like herself in a clothing centre.

She was pleased that they laughed when she told them about the bag lady who had come in to get a coat that morning. Helen’s job was to arrange the sorting, the dry-cleaning and mending of clothes that came in to the bureau. A generous dry-cleaning firm let them use the big machine free at off-peak hours if they ensured that paying customers didn’t realize they were sharing with hand-me-downs for tramps.

The woman had been very insistent. ‘Nothing in green, I’ve always found green an unlucky colour, Sister. No, red’s a bit flashy, in my day only a certain kind of woman wore red. A nice mauve, a lilac shade. No? Well, safer to settle for a brown then. Not what you’d call cheerful for spring. But still.’ A heavy sigh.
Helen
Doyle was a good mimic, she caught the woman perfectly, all the others could see her as clearly as if they had been there.

‘You should be on the stage, Helen,’ said Joan admiringly.

‘Maybe she will one day,’ said Maureen innocently.

Helen’s face clouded. ‘But how can I? I’ll be here. Why don’t any of you believe I’m going to stay? I’ve joined as much as you’ll let me.’ The lip was trembling. Dangerously.

Sister Brigid intervened. ‘What did she look like in the brown coat, Helen?’ she asked firmly. The warning was plain.

With an effort Helen pulled herself back to the story. The woman had asked for a scarf too, something toning she said, as if she had been in the accessories department of a fashion store.

‘I found her a hat in the end, a yellow hat with a brown feather in it, and I gave her a yellow brooch I was wearing myself. I said it sort of brought the whole colour scheme together. She nodded like the Queen Mother and was very gracious about it, then she picked up her four bags of rubbish and went back to the Embankment.’

‘Good, Helen.’ Sister Brigid was approving. ‘If you can make it seem like a fashion store with a bit of choice then you’re doing it exactly right, that woman would never have taken what she thought was charity. Well done.’

The others all smiled too, and Nessa’s smile was particularly broad.

‘There’s no one like Helen for these old misfits,’ Nessa said, as if to make up for her earlier outburst. ‘You always get on to the wave length so well.’

‘It’s probably that I’m there already,’ Helen said. ‘You know, about taking one to know one and all that.’

‘You’d never be a bag lady, Helen,’ Brigid said affectionately. ‘You’d lose the bags.’ The laughter around the supper table in St Martin’s was warm and good-natured.

Helen felt very much at peace and very much at home.

She thought she heard Nessa get up in the middle of the night and go downstairs. It was an old house full of creaks and sounds. They could each recognize the others’ steps and coughs. Like a family.

Helen was about to get up and follow her down to the kitchen for cocoa and a chat. But she hesitated. Brigid had often said that when people were upset the last thing they needed was someone to arrive in on top of them offering tea and sympathy. Helen had listened without agreeing. It was what she always wanted. There hadn’t been any of it at home. Daddy too tired, Mother too anxious, Anna too busy, Brendan too withdrawn. It was why she had found this other family. They always had time to
sympathize
. It was what their work was all about. Listening.

Surely she should go down now and listen to Nessa, and maybe tell her all about the drunk today and how upsetting it had been. But maybe not. As Helen was deciding she heard Sister Brigid’s light step go down the stairs.

She crept to the landing to hear what they were talking about.

Strangely it was all about the garden, and what they should plant. Shrubs would be nice to sit and look out on, Brigid said.

‘When do you ever sit down?’ Nessa spoke in a tone that was both scolding and admiring.

‘I do sit down, lots of times. It’s like that thing we got to charge the batteries for the radio, it puts new energy into me, into all of us.’

‘You never seem tired, Brigid.’

‘I feel it, I tell you. I’m getting old anyway, I’ll be forty soon.’

Nessa laughed aloud. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you’re only thirty-four.’

‘Well, forty is the next milestone; I don’t mind, it’s just that I don’t have as much energy as I used to. Who’ll do the garden, Nessa? I’m too full of aches and pains. You can’t be spared from the children.’

‘After today I think I could be spared only too easily. I don’t have any judgement …’

‘Shush, shush … Who will we ask to do it? It’s hard work, you know, trying to make that little patch look like something restful and peaceful.’

‘Helen maybe?’ Nessa sounded doubtful.

Helen on the landing felt a dull red come up her neck and to her face.

‘Oh, she’d do it certainly, and she’d be full of imagination …’ Sister Brigid sounded doubtful too. ‘The only thing is …’

Nessa came in immediately. ‘The only thing is she’d lose interest halfway through after we’d bought all the plants, and they’d die. Is that what you mean?’

Helen felt a wave of fury come over her.

‘No, it’s just that I don’t like her to think that we’re shunting her to do something that isn’t really … our work, you know.’

‘But it’s
all
our work, isn’t it?’ Nessa sounded surprised.

‘Yes, you know that, I know that, Helen doesn’t. Anyway we’ll see. Come on, Nessa, if us old ones are to be any use to this Community we’d better get a few hours of sleep a night.’ She was laughing, Sister Brigid had a lovely warm laugh that included you and wrapped you up.

‘Thank you, Brigid.’

‘I did nothing, said nothing.’

‘It’s the way you do it, say it.’ Nessa was obviously feeling better now.

Helen slipped back into her room and stood for a long time with her back to the door.

So they thought she wouldn’t finish things? She’d show them, by heavens would she show them.

She’d dig that garden single-handed, she’d build a magic garden where they could all sit and think and be at peace and they would realize that Sister Helen more than any of them knew that anything done for the Community was as important as any other thing. Then they would have to let her take her vows. And she would be completely part of their world. And safe. Safe from everything else.

Like everything Helen had touched, the building of the garden had its highs and lows. Helen found three boys who said they were anxious to help the Sisters in their great work building a refuge and they’d be happy to join in with a bit of the heavy work. They brought spades and shovels and Sister Joan said it was beyond the mind’s understanding how much tea they wanted, how they couldn’t have this butter on their bread, or marge, it had to be a particular spread. And they wondered was there a little something going at lunch time. Sister Joan said nervously that the nuns all had their meal in the evening, but fearing that the volunteer workforce would abandon everything, she ran out and bought provisions.

After three days Sister Brigid thanked them and
said
that there could be no further imposition on their kindness.

The lads had begun to enjoy the good food and overpowering gratitude of the nuns and didn’t really want to leave at all.

They left the place in a possibly greater mess; earth had been turned over certainly, but no pattern or plan had emerged.

But Helen soldiered on, she dug until she had blisters, she spent her scant off-time in bookshops reading the sections of gardening books that concentrated on ‘Starting Out’.

She learned the differences between one kind of soil and another.

She told the Sisters amazing things each evening about the sexuality of growing things.

‘They never told us a word about this at school,’ she said indignantly. ‘It’s the kind of thing you should know, about everything being male and female even in the garden, for heaven’s sake, and going mad to propagate.’

‘Let’s hope it all does propagate after your hard work,’ Brigid said. ‘You really are great, Helen, I don’t know where you find the energy.’

Helen flushed with pleasure. And she was able to remember those words of praise too a little later when the problem of the bedding plants came up. The nice woman who said she really admired the Sisters even though she wasn’t a Roman Catholic herself and
disagreed
with the Pope about everything, brought them some lovely plants as a gift. Red-faced with exertion from planting them, Helen assured the others that evening they were very very lucky. It would have cost a fortune if they had to buy all these, nobody knew how expensive things were in garden centres.

She had barely finished talking when the news came that the plants had all been dug up from a park and a nearby hotel. The repercussions were endless. The explanations from every side seemed unsatisfactory. Helen said she had to protect her sources and wouldn’t give them the name of the benefactor. But in mid conversation she mentioned to the young policewoman that Mrs Harris couldn’t possibly have taken them deliberately, she wasn’t that kind of person, and that was enough for the two constables to identify exactly who she was talking about. Mrs Harris had been in trouble before. A latter-day Robin Hood was how she was known down at the station, taking clothes from one washing-line, ironing them and presenting them as gifts to another home.

Only Helen could have got herself involved with Mrs Harris, the other nuns sighed. Only Helen could have got them all involved, was Brigid’s view, but she didn’t say anything at the time.

Helen realized that the garden couldn’t be considered her full-time work. And even when she
had
reassured the Community that she was taking on no further assistance from gargantuan eaters of meals or compulsive plant thiefs she felt she should take on more than just a horticultural role. She was determined to play her part as fully as possible. She said she would do half the skivvy work, leaving Sister Joan or Sister Maureen free for a half day to do something else.

It worked. Or it sort of worked.

They all got used to the fact that Helen might not have scrubbed the table or taken in their washing when it started to rain. They knew that she would never know when they were running out of soap or cornflakes. That she wouldn’t really rinse out and hang the dishcloths up to dry. But she was there, eager and willing to help.