Silver Wedding (16 page)

And in a Dublin where anti-clericalism among the younger liberals was becoming rife, this was no mean feat.

He was not a television priest, he had never been seen on the screen debating any issue. He was not the kind of man who would officiate at the marriage of known atheists having a church wedding just for the show, but neither was he the old-fashioned curate who went to Cheltenham in March with a pocket full of fivers, or cheered on the dogs at a coursing match as they followed the hare. Father Hurley was a travelled educated soft-spoken man. People often said that he looked like an academic. This was high praise. And he was amused that it was sometimes regarded as even higher praise when he was described as looking not like a priest but more like a vicar!

James Hurley seemed to have moved quietly from parish to parish without either an upward or a downward movement. There did not seem to be the sense of advancement that such a well-spoken thoughtful man might have been led to expect, but it was rumoured that he never sought any promotion. You couldn’t say he was unworldly, not Father Hurley who liked fine wines and was known to enjoy pheasant and to relish lobster.

But he always seemed totally contented with his
lot
, even when they had sent him to a working-class parish where he was in charge of fourteen youth clubs and eleven football teams instead of the drawing rooms and the visits to private nursing homes of his previous position.

He had been at school at one of the better Catholic schools in England, not that he ever talked about it. His family had been wealthy people and it was rumoured that he was brought up on a big estate in the country. But none of this ever came from the man himself, he would laugh easily and say that nobody in Ireland should try to shake their family trees for fear of what might fall down. He had a sister who lived in the country with her husband, a country solicitor of substance, and their only son. Father Hurley did speak of this boy, his nephew, with great affection. Gregory was the only part of Father Hurley’s private life where he ever volunteered information.

Otherwise he was just a very good and interested listener to other people’s stories. Which is why people thought he was such a good conversationalist. He talked only about them.

In the various presbyteries where Father Hurley’s life had taken him there were pictures of his mother and father, now dead, in old-fashioned oval frames. There was a family picture taken at Gregory’s first Communion, and another one of Gregory’s Conferring. A handsome boy with his hand lightly laid on
his
parchment scroll and his eyes smiling through the camera as if he knew much more than any other graduate who was posing for stiff formal photographs that day but took it all very casually.

For the people who told Father Hurley their own life stories, their worries and their tittle-tattle, Gregory was an ideal conversation piece, they could ask for him, and hear an enthusiastic response, enough to look polite, then they could return to their own tales again. They didn’t notice that after a certain date the stories about Gregory never originated with Father Hurley and that his replies were vaguer and less informed than they had been once. He was far too diplomatic to let that be seen. That was another thing people said, he would have been very good at the Department of Foreign Affairs, or a consul or an ambassador even.

When James Hurley was a boy his mother had died and he had always thought of Laura as being a combination of mother, sister and best friend. Laura was five years older than he was, she had been seventeen when left in charge of a big crumbling house, a small crumbling brother and a remote and withdrawn father who didn’t give any of himself to his children any more than he had given of himself to his wife or the estate he had inherited.

Father James Hurley knew all that now, but then he had lived in a childlike fear of offending his stern cold father still further. Laura could have gone away
to
university, he always thought, if it had not been for her little brother. Instead she stayed at home and took a secretarial course in the nearby town.

She worked in the local grocery which was eventually taken over by a bigger firm, then she worked in the local bakery which merged with three nearby bakeries and her secretarial job there was over. She worked as the doctor’s receptionist and during her time there he was taken off the medical register for professional misconduct. Laura used to tell her little brother Jimbo that she seemed to have a fairly unlucky effect and a dead hand on those she went to work for. Her little brother Jimbo used to suggest she came to work in his school in the hope that she would close it down.

She encouraged him in his Vocation, she took long walks in the country roads with him, and together they sat on mossy banks and on the stile between the fields and talked above the love of God the way others might have talked about sport or the cinema.

Laura Hurley had knelt with tears in her eyes to receive her brother’s first blessing after he had said his First Mass.

Their father had died by this stage, remote and uninvolved to the end. James had become a priest; he might have become a soldier or a jockey, it would have been on the same level of interest for his father.

While away at the seminary James had often
worried
about Laura. She lived in the gate lodge of what had been their home. The Big House was not really big in terms of the landed estates thereabouts but it had been substantial. But Laura felt no sense of having come down in the world, living in the cottage where once people lived rent free if they opened and closed the gates after the Hurley family. Laura had always said cheerfully that it was much easier to keep a small place than a big one, and since their father had gone first to a nursing home and then to his eternal reward she was alone, so it didn’t make sense to run the Big House. When it was sold there were so many debts that had gathered from James being a student, from father being a patient in a private nursing home, that the place had been thoroughly mortgaged. There was little in the bank, there was no dowry for Miss Laura Hurley, faithful sister and dutiful daughter.

Laura never thought like that. She was happy, she walked her two big collie dogs, read her books in the evening by her small fire, and went to work by day for the local solicitors. She said laughingly that she hadn’t managed to close them down like she had done to every other business she worked for but she had managed to change them utterly.

Like changing the confirmed bachelor status of young Mr Black. The Mr Black who had once been the most eligible man in the county. At the age of forty he looked at Laura Hurley aged thirty-four and
a
lot of his iron-hard resolve about staying single, uninvolved and free began to chip away.

Then the letter arrived: ‘Dearest Jimbo, you’ll never believe it but Alan Black and I are going to get married. We would very much like it if you could perform the ceremony for us. Since we’re not in the first flush of youth to put it mildly we won’t make an exhibition of ourselves here with everyone coming to stare. We would like to come to Dublin and be married in your parish if that’s possible. Dearest Jimbo, I never knew I could feel so happy. And so safe and as if things were meant to turn out like this. I don’t deserve it, I really don’t.’

Father Hurley always remembered that letter from his sister, he could see it, the words almost tumbling over each other on the small cream writing paper. He remembered the way his eyes had watered with a feeling of pleasure that things really did seem to have some point if this kind woman had found someone generous and good to share her life with her. He couldn’t remember Alan Black except that he had been very handsome and rather dashing-looking in the past.

Father James Hurley felt that at twenty-nine he was a man of the world. And in a strange way he felt protective of his older sister as he joined her hand with Alan Black’s at the wedding ceremony. He hoped this man with the dark eyes and dark hair just greying at the temples would be good to Laura and
understand
her generosity and how she had never sought anything for herself.

Several times he found himself looking at them and with a hope that was more than a wish, it was a silent prayer, he willed his sister to have a good relationship with this tall handsome man. Laura’s face was open and honest, but even on this her wedding day nobody could call her beautiful, her hair was pulled back and tied with a large cream-coloured ribbon which matched the colour of her suit. The ribbon was large enough to be considered a hat or head covering for church. She had a dusting of face powder and a smile that warmed the small congregation to the heart. But she was not a beautiful woman. Young Father Hurley hoped that the attentions of the handsome solicitor would not wander.

Years later he marvelled at his own callow approach and wondered how he could ever have thought himself any use in advising men and women in their lives on their road to God. In a changing world there never was and never had been anything more strong and constant than the love Alan Black had shown to his bride. From the day that they had come to see him, back suntanned and laughing from their honeymoon in Spain, he should have realized that his own judgements based on appearances and vanity were superficial. Why should Alan Black, a bright intelligent man, not be able to see the great worth, goodness and love in
Laura
Hurley? After all James Hurley had always seen it himself, why should he think it would pass Mr Black the solicitor by?

And as the years went on he used to go to stay with them. They had done up the little gate lodge and built on extra rooms. There was a new study out at one side of the house filled with books from ceiling to floor, they lit a fire there in the evenings and often the three of them sat in big chairs reading. It was the most peaceful happy place he had ever been.

Sometimes Laura would look up from the chair where she lay curled up and smile at him.

‘Isn’t this the life, Jimbo?’ she’d say.

Other days when he visited she might walk with him through the fields and over the stiles and hedges and ditches they had once owned.

‘Did we ever think it would turn out so well, Jimbo?’ she said often, ruffling the hair of her young brother who would never be the great Father Hurley to her.

And then they told him they were building a similar long low room at the other side of the house. It was going to be a nursery playroom. They would never call it the nursery, they said, they would call it the child’s room whatever his or her name was. Nursery was only a baby name. The name was Gregory, Father James held the baby in his arm for the Baptism. A beautiful child with the long dark eyelashes of his father. Gregory Black.

He was their only child; Laura said they would like to have had a brother or sister for him but it was not to be. They made sure he had plenty of other children to play with. He turned out to be the dream child that every doting uncle hopes for.

He would run from the window seat of his own big low room when he saw the car approaching.

‘It’s Uncle Jim,’ he would shout and the old collie dogs would bark and leap and Laura would rush from the kitchen.

When Alan got back from work the smile was broad and the delight obvious. They loved to see him come for a couple of days mid week. They loved the way he got on so well with their son.

Gregory wanted to be a priest of course, when he was around ten. It was a far better life than working in his father’s office, he told them all seriously. As a priest you had to do nothing at all, and people paid you money for saying Masses that you’d be saying anyway, and you could get up on a pulpit and tell them all what to do or else they’d go to hell. Sensing a delighted if half-shocked audience, Gregory went on eagerly. It was the best job in the world. And you could refuse to forgive anyone in Confession if you didn’t like them and then they’d go to hell, it would be great.

They came to Dublin to see him too and James Hurley never tired of talking about this warm bright boy. Gregory wanted to know everything, to meet
everyone
. He could charm crabbed old parish priests and difficult women parishioners who were always quick to fancy slights.

‘I think you would be good as a priest actually,’ his uncle said to him laughingly one day when Gregory was fifteen. ‘An awful lot of it is public relations and getting along with people, you’re very good at that.’

‘It makes sense,’ Gregory said.

Father Hurley looked at him sharply. Yes of course it made sense to present an amiable face towards people rather than a pompous one, of course it was the wise thing to do to take the path that would not bring the wrath of authority around your ears. But fancy knowing that at fifteen. They were growing up a lot faster these days.

When Gregory got his place in UCD he was studying Law, that made sense too, he said. He had to study something and Law was as good a training as anything else, meanwhile it kept his father, grandfather and uncle happy to think another Black was going to come into the business.

‘And is that what you are going to do?’ Father Hurley was surprised. Gregory seemed to him to be too bright, too lively to settle in the small town. There wouldn’t be enough to hold his sharp eyes that moved restlessly from face to face, from scene to scene.

‘I haven’t really thought it out, Uncle Jim. It’s what
my
mother and father would like certainly, and since I don’t know yet it makes sense to let them assume that it’s what I’ll do.’

Again there was a slight chill in the words. The boy had not said he was lying to his family, he had said that since nothing in this world was definite why cross your bridges before you came to them? Father James Hurley told himself that once or twice when he was saying his Evening Office and when the memory of Gregory’s words troubled him. He began to think that he was becoming a foolish fusspot. It was ridiculous to read danger into the practical plans of a modern young man.

Gregory graduated well and was photographed on his own and with his father, mother and uncle.