Silver Wedding (20 page)

It was ironic that of all the men who had wandered into Maureen’s life the only one that Mother would have considered suitable was the one who came too late, who came along when Maureen knew she didn’t want to change her ways. If she had met Walter, a young earnest barrister in his twenties when she had been struggling to establish the shops, she might well have settled for him. So many of her friends had settled for men who they could not
possibly
have loved in any real sense. These were not great loves, the wedding ceremonies that Maureen had attended all through the 1960s, they were alliances, refuges, compromises, arrangements. Deirdre O’Hagan, who defied everyone and married her first love in that long summer when they had all been in London, that might have been real love. Maureen was never sure. Even though she had been Deirdre’s bridesmaid, and they had slept in the same room the night before the wedding, she had not been certain that Deirdre ached for Desmond Doyle and cried out to be with him. As she herself had cried out to be with Frank Quigley.

It was a strange friendship, hers with Deirdre, their mothers wanted them to be friends so desperately that they gave in at the age of fourteen and agreed to go to the same tennis parties, and later the same hops and rugby-club social evenings on Saturday nights.

By the time they got to UCD they were in fact friends of a sort. And they each knew that their salvation lay with the other. If Maureen said she was going anywhere with Deirdre, then Mother would relax. It was the same in the O’Hagan household, Deirdre could always use Sophie Barry’s daughter Maureen as an excuse.

That was why they had been able to go off to London together that summer. The summer they should have been at home working for their degrees.
The
summer they met Desmond Doyle and Frank Quigley on the boat to Holyhead.

Maureen wondered what Frank Quigley would say if he knew that Mother had died. She didn’t know how he talked these days, whether his accent had changed, if he spoke as a lot of Irishmen living twenty-five years in London spoke, with two distinct strands in their voices and telltale words of both cultures coming in at the wrong place.

She had read about him; who hadn’t read about Frank Quigley? He was profiled always amongst the Irish who had done well in Britain. Sometimes she saw pictures of him with that sullen-looking young Italian he had married to advance himself still further in the hierarchy of Palazzo.

Frank might be so suave of course nowadays that he would write an elegant note of sympathy on a gilt-edged card. He might be so down to earth and still such a rough diamond that he would say she should have died a quarter of a century earlier.

One thing Maureen knew was that Frank Quigley would not have forgotten her mother, any more than he would have forgotten Maureen.

This was not arrogance on her part, believing that her first love would remember her with the same intensity as she remembered him, when she allowed him into her mind at all. She knew it was true. Still it was irrelevant; he might hear about it from Desmond
and
Deirdre, but it was hard to say whether they all remained friends still.

Admittedly Desmond still worked in Palazzo, but despite Mrs O’Hagan’s great reports of her son-in-law’s managerial promotions from time to time, Maureen had the feeling that Desmond had stuck somehow low on a scale, and that all the patronage and friendship from his old friend Frank couldn’t pull him any higher.

The day of sorting through Mother’s things could not be put off for ever. Maureen decided to go on the Sunday following the funeral. It would not take long if she put her mind to it and did not allow herself to become emotionally upset by everything she touched.

Already she had wept over her mother’s glasses in their spectacle case which had been given to her in the hospital. Somehow it seemed sadder than anything else to see the sign of Mother’s frail fading eyesight, handed to her in a useless little case. Maureen, usually so decisive, hadn’t known what to do with them. They were still there zipped into a side compartment of her handbag. Mother would not have been so soft-hearted. She would have been cool and practical as she had been about everything.

They had only fought once, a long time ago, and it had not been about Frank Quigley nor about any man. Mother hadn’t thought that the clothing business looked all right, or sounded respectable enough.

Maureen had blazed her anger, what the hell did it matter how things looked or sounded? It was how they were, what they were about that was important. Mother had smiled a cool infuriating smile. Maureen had stormed out. Up to the North of Ireland first where she got a thorough grounding in retail dress sense from two sisters who ran a smart clothes shop and were pleased and flattered to see the dark handsome young university graduate from Dublin come up to learn all they could teach her. Then she went to London.

It was then that she realized how she had never been really close to Deirdre, they had met rarely while she was there. Deirdre had been tied up with two babies at that stage, and Maureen had been going to trade fairs and exhibitions, and learning what to look for. Maureen told Deirdre nothing of her coldness with her mother for fear that it would go straight back to the O’Hagan household, and presumably Deirdre had secrets, worries and problems that she didn’t tell Maureen either.

And anyway the coldness didn’t last. It had never been an out-and-out hostility, there were always postcards, and short letters and brief phone calls. So that mother could tell Eileen O’Hagan how well Maureen was doing here, there and everywhere. So that appearances could be kept up. Appearances had been very important to Mother. Maureen determined that she would honour this to the very end, far beyond the grave.

Maureen Barry lived in one of the earlier apartment blocks that had been built in Dublin. She lived ten minutes by foot and two minutes by car from the big house where she was born and where her mother had lived all her life. It had been Mother’s home, and Father had married in. For the short married life that they had. He had died abroad when Maureen was six, forty years ago this year.

It would be his anniversary shortly, in three weeks; how strange to think that she would attend the Mass they always had said for the repose of his soul totally on her own. Normally she and Mother went together, for as long as she could remember. Always at eight o’clock in the morning. Mother had said that it was discourteous to involve others in your own personal mourning and memorials. But Mother had always told people afterwards that they had been to the Mass.

The living arrangements were yet one more way in which the relationship between the two women was widely praised. Many another mother would have clung to her daughter and kept her in the family home as long as possible, not noticing or caring about the normal wish of the young to leave the nest. Many a less dutiful daughter might have wanted to go away to another city. To London perhaps or even Paris. Maureen was successful in the fashion world. To have two shops with her own name on them by the time she was forty was no mean achievement. And
such
smart shops too. She moved from one to another with ease, each had a good manageress who was allowed freedom to run the day-to-day business. It had left Maureen free to buy, to choose, to decide to lunch with the fashionable women whose taste she monitored and even formed. She went to London four times a year and to New York once every spring. She had a standing that her mother would never have believed possible in those bad days, the bad time when they had not seen eye to eye. It hadn’t lasted long, and every relationship was allowed to have some valley periods, Maureen told herself. Anyway, she didn’t want to think about those days now, not so soon after Mother’s death.

It had indeed been so sensible to live apart but near. They saw each other almost every day. Never in all the years since she moved into her apartment did Maureen open her front door and find her mother unannounced on her step. Mother wouldn’t dream of calling to a young woman who might be entertaining someone, and wish to do so privately.

It was different about Maureen going back to her old home. No such strictures applied there. Maureen was welcome to call at any time, but Mother managed to let her know that at the end of a bridge party was a particularly suitable time to drop in for a sherry, because everyone could have the chance to admire both the elegant daughter and the evidence of her consideration and devotion to her mother.

On the Sunday she walked to the house where she would never again see her mother walking lightly down the hall to open the door, viewed through the multi-coloured stained glass of the hall-door panels. It felt strange to go to the empty house, because by now there would be no kind friends and relatives staying around as support. Mother’s great friend Mrs O’Hagan, Deirdre’s mother, had been very pressing and begged Maureen to come and see them, to drop in for supper, to use the O’Hagan house just like she had her old home.

It had been kind, but not the right thing. Maureen wasn’t a little girl, she was a middle-aged woman for heaven’s sake. It was not appropriate for Mrs O’Hagan to invite her up to the house as she had done thirty years ago when she and Mother had decided that Deirdre and Maureen should be friends.

Mother had always set a lot of store on what Eileen O’Hagan thought about this and that. Eileen and Kevin were her greatest friends. They had always invited Mother to join them at the theatre or the races. They had never to Maureen’s recollection tried to find a suitable second husband for her. Or perhaps they had. She would not have known.

As she walked through the sunny streets towards her old home Maureen wondered what life would have been like if Mother had married again. Would a stepfather have encouraged her or fought her
when
she wanted to take up her career in what she had called the fashion industry and her mother had said was common drapery and glorified salesgirl work?

Would Mother have been coquettish with men years ago? After all Maureen herself did not feel old and past sexual encounters at the age of forty-six, so why should she assume that her mother had? But it was something that never came into their lives.

They talked a lot about Maureen’s young men, and how they had all somehow failed to measure up. But they had never talked about any man for Mother.

She let herself into the house and shivered slightly because there was no little fire lit in what Mother had always called the morning room. Maureen plugged in the electric fire and looked around.

Two weeks ago on a Sunday she had come here to find Mother looking white and anxious. She had this pain, possibly indigestion but … Maureen had acted quickly, she helped her mother gently to the car and drove calmly to the hospital. No point in disturbing the doctor, calling him away from his Sunday breakfast she had said to Mother, let’s go to the outpatients’ department, to Casualty. They were there the whole time in a hospital, they would set her mind at rest.

Mother, looking more and more anxious, agreed with her, and even at this stage Maureen had noticed with sinking heart that her mother’s careful
speech
sounded slurred, the words were running together.

They were seen at once, and within an hour Maureen was waiting outside the intensive care to be told the news that her mother was having a massive stroke. One that she might very well not recover from.

Mother recovered, but not her faculties of speech; her eyes, bright and burning, seemed to beg for an end to this indignity.

She could press once for yes and twice for no on Maureen’s arm. Maureen had spoken to her alone.

‘Are you afraid, Mother?’

No.

‘You do believe that you’ll get better, don’t you?’

No.

‘I want you to believe that, you must. No, sorry: of course you can’t answer that. I mean, don’t you want to get better?’

No.

‘But surely for me, Mother, for all your friends,
we
want you to get better. God, how do I say something that you can answer? Do you know that I love you? Very very much?’

Yes, and a lessening of the strain in the eyes.

‘And do you know that you are the best mother that anyone could have?’

Yes.

Then she had been tired and not long after that she had slipped into unconsciousness.

They had been right, the friends who had stood in this room, Mother’s morning room that got the early light, when they had nodded and said Sophie Barry could not have lived the dependent life of an invalid. It was better that she had been taken quickly away from pain and indignity.

Could it really only have been two weeks since that Sunday morning? It felt like ten years in so many ways.

Maureen unfolded the black plastic sacks. She knew that a great deal of Mother’s things could indeed be thrown away, there was no one to gasp and wonder over old mementos of cavalry balls years ago, or programmes of long-forgotten concerts signed with some illegible squiggle. No grandchildren to ooh and aah over worlds gone by. And Maureen in her own busy life would not look at them, a lot of things would go.

She sat at the small writing desk: an antique. She might take it for the hallway of her own flat. It was such an impractical thing dating from a time when ladies only penned little notes or invitation cards. It had nothing to do with today’s world. Mrs O’Hagan had been surprised that Maureen was going to remain in her flat. She was sure that Sophie would have wanted her own home to continue in the family. But Maureen was adamant. She lived a life too full to involve cleaning a house with as many nooks and crannies as this. Her own space was
custom-made
for her, wall-long closets for her clothes, a study with proper filing cabinets as a mini-office, a big room where she could entertain, its kitchen in full view of the dining table so that she could talk to her guests as she served them their dinner.

No, it would be a backwards
move
to come home to this house. Mother knew that too.

First she went through the finances. She was surprised how fiddly and disorganized Mother had become lately. It was sad to see little notes Mother had written to herself: a reminder here, a query there. It would have been so easy for Maureen to have set up an uncomplicated system like her own, five minutes would have done it, a letter to the bank asking them to pay so much each month to electricity, gas, insurance fund … It would have cut out all these final demands and letters of bewilderment. Mother must have appeared much more in control than she was.