Silver Wedding (11 page)

Before everything had changed.

The garden was finished and more or less ran itself. Sister Joan loved being in the clothing centre, and she was quick with a needle, so that she could do an alteration on the spot, move the buttons on a jacket for an old man, praise him, admire him, say that the fit made all the difference in the world. Let him think it was custom tailored.

There was no real work for Helen, no real place.

Once more she asked Brigid about taking her vows.

‘It’s very harsh to keep me on the outside, seriously I have been here for so long, you
can’t
say it’s a passing fancy any more now, can you?’ She begged and implored.

‘You’re running, Helen,’ Brigid said. ‘I told you that from the word go. This is not like a convent in the films, a place in a forest where people went to find peace, it’s a working house. You have to have found peace already to bring it here.’

‘But I’ve found it now,’ Helen implored.

‘No, you’re afraid of engaging with real people, that’s why you’re with us.’

‘You’re all more real than anyone else. Honestly I’ve never met any group I like so much.’

‘That’s not the whole story. We shelter you from something. We can’t go on doing that, it’s not our role. If it’s men, if it’s sex, if it’s the cut and thrust of the business world … we all have had to face it and cope with it. You’re still hiding from something.’

‘I suppose it is sex a bit.’

‘Well, you don’t have to keep indulging in it,’ Brigid laughed. ‘Go back out into the world, Helen, I beg you, for a couple of years. Stay in touch with us and then if you still feel this is your home, come back and we’ll look at it all again. I really do think you should go. For your own good.’

‘Are you asking me to leave. Truly?’

‘I’m suggesting it, but do you see what I mean about this not being like the real world? If this was a real place, I’d be telling you to go or promoting you. It’s too protective here for you, I feel it in my bones.’

‘Let me stay for a little while. Please.’

‘Stay until after your parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary,’ Brigid said unexpectedly. ‘That seems to be preying on your mind for some reason. And then after that we’ll see.’

Helen went away from Sister Brigid’s little workroom, more wretched than she had been for a long time.

She looked so sad that Sister Nessa asked did she want to come and help with the young mothers. This was the first time the invitation had ever been made.

Helen went along, for once silent and without prattle.

‘Don’t be disapproving or anything, will you Helen?’ Nessa asked nervously. ‘We’re not meant to be passing judgement, just helping them cope.’

‘Sure,’ Helen said.

She sat listless as any of the girls who were on low-dosage anti-depressants or who lived in fear of a pimp who had wanted them to have an abortion. Nessa looked at her from time to time with concern. But Helen was quiet and obedient. She did everything she was asked to do. She was useful too in a
way
. She went out to the flats of those who had not turned up. Nessa had always been nervous since the incident of the little Simon who had crawled out of his flat almost into the mainstream of rush-hour traffic.

In the late afternoon Nessa asked Helen to go and find Yvonne, who was eight months pregnant with her second child. Her eldest, a beautiful girl with Jamaican eyes like her father long gone, and a Scottish accent like her mother who gave birth to her at sixteen, was waiting at the door.

‘Mummy’s gaen do wee wee,’ she said helpfully.

‘That’s great,’ Helen said, and brought the toddler back into the house.

From the bathroom came the groans and the cries of Yvonne.

Suddenly Helen found courage.

‘You’re better in your bedroom,’ she said suddenly to the chubby child and moved a chest of drawers to make sure the child couldn’t get out.

Then she went to cope with what she thought was a miscarriage in the lavatory.

But in the middle of the blood, the screams and the definite smell of rum all around the place, Helen heard a small cry.

The baby was alive.

Yvonne remembered nothing of it all. She had been so drunk that the day passed in a terrible blur.

They told her she had lost the child, that she had flushed it down the lavatory.

The ambulance men had been tender and gentle as they lifted her on to the stretcher, they had looked around the place and even down the lavatory bowl in confusion.

‘They told us she was near to her time, she couldn’t have got rid of a full-term foetus, surely.’

But Helen, the cool-eyed girl who said she was a voluntary welfare worker at the mother and child centre, and that she lived with the Sisters in St Martin’s, assured them that she had not been able to get in to the flat and had heard continuous flushing of the chain and then found the place covered in blood.

The small round three-year-old seemed to back her up, saying that her mother had been long time wee wee and that Helen had been long time at the door.

Nessa, ashen-faced and trying not to let herself believe that this would never have happened if she had sent anyone else but Helen, agreed that Helen had been gone ages and ages and could get no reply. Helen had made a call to Nessa saying that there were problems but that she knew she would get in if she could persuade the child to open the door. She had called from a nearby shop where she had stopped to buy a bottle of milk for herself because she felt faint thinking of what might be inside.

That night, with Yvonne in her hospital bed, with Yvonne’s three-year-old lodged temporarily in a local orphanage until the care order could be signed, Helen told Brigid she felt restless and she would like to go out for a walk.

‘You
are
restless tonight,’ Brigid said absently. ‘You’ve been out to the garden a half a dozen times.’

‘I wanted to make sure it was all right,’ Helen said.

Carefully she picked up the little bundle, the boy who would inherit the Palazzo millions, and took him in her arms. She had him wrapped carefully in a towel and in one of her own nighties. She had a soft blue rug, which used to lie folded on the back of her chair, wrapped well around him.

She slipped out the back gate of St Martin’s and walked until her legs were tired. Then in a shop where nobody would recognize her and mention to one of the sisters that they had seen one of the Community carrying a baby, she found a phone and telephoned Renata.

‘I have it,’ she said triumphantly down the phone.

‘Who is this, you have what?’

‘Renata, it’s Sister Helen from St Martin’s, I have your baby.’

‘No, no, it’s not possible.’

‘Yes, but I must give him to you now, tonight, now this minute.’

‘It’s a little boy, you got us a little boy?’

‘Yes. He’s very very young, he’s only one day old.’

Renata’s voice was a screech. ‘But no, one day, he will die, I cannot know what to do for a child of one day …’

‘I don’t know either, but I bought him a bottle of milk, he seems to be taking it off my finger,’ Helen said simply.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m in London of course, about two miles from the convent. Renata, have you any money?’

‘What kind of money?’ She sounded worried.

‘Enough to pay for a taxi.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘So will I come to your flat. And give him to you. No one must know.’

‘Yes, I don’t know, perhaps I should wait till … I don’t know what to do.’

‘I went to great trouble to get him for you.’ Helen sounded tired.

‘Oh I know, Sister, I’m so foolish, it’s just that it’s so quick and he is so very little.’

‘I’m sure you’ll learn, you can always ring someone and ask them. Will I get a taxi now, it might cost pounds?’

‘Yes, come now.’

‘And Frank’s not there is he?’

‘Frank, how did you know my husband is Frank?’

‘You told me,’ Helen said, biting her lip.

‘I suppose I must have. I don’t know what to say.’

The taxi man said that this wasn’t where he wanted
to
go. He was on his way home. South London is what he wanted. Not miles out to Wembley.

He saw the tears beginning to form.

‘Get in before I change my mind,’ he said. ‘Anyway, at least you’ve had it, let’s look on the bright side, I could have ended up delivering it.’

‘That’s true,’ Helen said, and the taxi driver looked at her anxiously, wondering would he get his fare when he got to Wembley.

She recited the address of the apartment block as if by rote and asked the driver to wait. The lady of the house would be down in a moment and would pay him.

He told the other cab drivers afterwards that he had spotted her as trouble the very moment he saw her. The moment that her eyes had filled with tears when he said perfectly normally of an evening that he wanted to go south of the river rather than up to this neck of the woods in Wembley. Anyway, he said, it all seemed to have happened at once, the lady came down and was carrying a purse with money. Classy she was and foreign, she took one look at the baby and she started to scream.

‘He’s got blood on him, he’s not properly formed, no, no, I didn’t want this! This is a baby that still is not ready to be a baby. No, no.’

She backed away from the girl in the grey skirt and jumper with her hand up to her mouth and at that moment a fellow in a Rover came along and leaped
out
, he took one look at what was happening and he shook the foreign woman till her head near as anything fell off, then he took the child and seemed to recognize the girl in the grey. He kept saying ‘Oh my God’ too, as if she were something from outer space.

Then there was a bundle of notes stuffed in the taxi man’s window, four times the fare out to bloody Wembley. So he had to go and he never knew what it was all about and how it ended.

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.’