Silver Wedding (21 page)

Then there was an endless correspondence with a stockbroker. Like everyone of her generation, Mother had believed that wealth was measured in stocks and shares. Only the broker’s letters were to be found: Mother had kept no copies of her own side of the correspondence. It was a sorry tale of confusion and disappointment.

Maureen felt weary and sad as she finished the series of responses to what had obviously been
querulous
demands for information and explanations why shares that everyone knew were excellent seemed to have vanished into nothingness. Briskly Maureen wrote a letter to the broker explaining that her mother had died and asking him to send her details of the nature of the portfolio as it stood now. She wished that she had involved herself more but with Mother there was such a dignity, there was a boundary you didn’t cross.

Maureen kept all the letters she had written in her slim briefcase, she would photocopy them later, back at her own apartment. Mr White who had been Mother’s solicitor had already congratulated her on her efficiency; he wished that many more young women could be as organized but then of course she hadn’t built herself a big business without having a good financial brain and a sense of administration. He had shown her Mother’s will, a simple document leaving everything to her beloved daughter Mary Catherine (Maureen) Barry with gratitude for all her years of devoted love and care. The will had been made in 1962. Just after the reconciliation. After Mother had accepted that Maureen was not going to abandon her idea of how she would live her life. Since the day that Sophie Barry had written down her gratitude for the devoted love and care, twenty-three more years of it had been given. Surely she would never have believed that for over two decades Maureen would remain single and remain her close friend.

It was taking more time than she had thought, and she felt a strange sense of loss, different entirely to the grieving at the funeral. It was as if she had lost her idea of Mother as someone almost perfect. This nest of confusion stuffed into the drawers of a lovely writing desk spoke of a peevish old woman, confused and irritable. Not the calm beautiful Sophie Barry who until two weeks ago had sat like a queen in her throne room in this her morning room with its tasteful furnishings. Maureen didn’t like discovering this side of her mother.

She had made herself a cup of coffee to give her more energy for the task and reached out resolutely for the next big bulky envelope. She remembered the way Mother used to say, ‘Maureen my child, if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.’ That used to apply to anything from cleansing her face twice a day with Mother’s special cream and then splashing it with rosewater, to going back and having six more tennis lessons so that she would look that much better at the summer parties. Well if Mother could see her now, something Maureen doubted, she would certainly agree that the devoted daughter was doing the job properly.

She was totally unprepared for the papers she found in the envelope marked Solicitor. She thought it might be some more fostering dealings about shares or pensions, but these were letters from a completely different solicitor, and they were dated forty years
ago
. There were a series of legal documents, all signed in 1945. And they showed that Maureen’s father Bernard James Barry had not died of a virus when he was in Northern Rhodesia just after the war. Sophie Barry’s husband had deserted her forty years ago. He had left his wife and child and gone to live with another woman in Bulawayo in what was then Southern Rhodesia.

Maureen realized that for all she knew she might have a father still alive, a man of seventy years, living in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. That she might even have stepbrothers and sisters, men and women not much younger than herself. The woman described as his ‘common law wife’ was called Flora Jones and had come from Birmingham in England. Wildly Maureen thought that Mother would have said that Flora was a maid’s name.

She wasn’t in the habit of pouring herself a stiff drink in the middle of a Sunday morning. Maureen Barry, disciplined in this as in everything else, realized the perils of drinking alone. She had seen too many of her friends lapse into it, at the end of a long hard day with no one to relax with. She had learned this from Mother as she had learned everything. Mother said that widows could slip into tippling if they didn’t exercise some control. Widows, what did Mother mean, acting out a lie for forty years? What kind of closeness was it that meant she couldn’t tell her only daughter the biggest event of her life? What manner
of
woman could perpetuate a myth about a man who had to be buried abroad?

With another ripple of shock running through her like the continuous waves after an earthquake, Maureen realized that her mother who had been a sane woman had gone out every May and had a Mass said for the repose of the soul of Bernard James Barry, a man who must have been alive for some if not all of the time that she was doing this.

There was whiskey in a decanter. Maureen smelled it, it reminded her of when she had a toothache years and years ago and Mother would put a whiskey-flavoured piece of cotton wool on the gum to numb the pain. Mother had loved her so much.

Maureen poured out a large measure of neat whiskey, drank it, and burst into tears.

It was a measure of the lonely life she led, she realized, that she had no one to tell. There was no bosom pal to ring up, no house where she could run around and share this staggering news. Like her mother, she had kept aloof from intimacies. There was no man she had let close enough to her thoughts to confide in. Her work colleagues knew nothing of her private life. Her mother’s friends … oh yes … they would be interested. My, my, would she get a hearing at O’Hagans’ if she were to turn up with the news.

Flora. Flora Jones. It was like a name from a musical comedy. And now presenting Miss Flora
Jones
, the Carmen Miranda of our town. There had been letters about divorce, and copies of letters from Mother’s solicitor repeating over and over, that not only was there no divorce in Ireland, and that his client was a staunch Roman Catholic, but that this was not the matter at issue, the question at issue apparently had been money. Maureen leafed still unbelieving through the documents … kept meticulously in order – this was a younger firmer Mother, more in control forty years ago, wounded and enraged and determined she was going to get the last penny from the man who had betrayed her. A sum had been paid over. A sum which in today’s money would have been considered staggering. The solicitor of Bernard James Barry in Bulawayo wrote to the solicitor of Mrs Sophie Barry in Dublin that his client was willing to realize most of his assets in order to provide for his wife and eldest daughter. His client Mr Barry had now, as was already known to Mrs Barry, a second daughter by Miss Flora Jones, a daughter whose birth he was most anxious to legitimize.

Mother’s letter of reply to that had been extraordinary, it was written exactly as Mother spoke. Maureen could hear her voice as she read the words. She could literally hear Mother’s voice, slow, measured, articulate, a younger stronger voice than of late.

‘… while you will understand that there can never be any question of a divorce since it is against
the
rules of the Church to which we both belong, I cannot legislate for you and your actions in a foreign land. I am writing this letter without the approval of the solicitors but I think you will understand its general drift. I have accepted your settlement for Maureen and myself, I shall pursue you in no court, nor under any jurisdiction. You shall be totally free from me if and only if you never return to Ireland. I shall announce your death. Today is April 15th. If you return this letter to me with your promise that you will never come back to Ireland again, then I will say that you died abroad of a virus on May 15th.

‘If this promise is ever broken or if you try to get in touch with Maureen in any way even after she is legally an adult, I can assure you that you will be made to regret it to the end of your days …’

It was the way Mother spoke to a tradesman who had offended her in some way, or to a handyman who had not done a job to her satisfaction.

He had accepted her terms, the man in Bulawayo, the man Maureen had thought was dead for forty years. He had returned the letter, as ordered to do. Attached to it by a small pearl-topped pin was a postcard. A brown sepia picture of mountains and savannah.

The words on the postcard said, ‘I died of a virus on May 15th 1945.’

Maureen put her head down on her mother’s desk
and
cried as if her heart would break into little pieces.

She didn’t feel the time passing. And when she looked at the clock, the way the hands were placed seemed meaningless. It said a quarter past two or ten past three. It was bright so it must be daytime.

She had come to the house at ten o’clock, she must have been in this semi-trance for over two hours.

She walked around feeling the blood beginning to flow again in her veins. If anyone had looked in the window of the morning room they would have seen a tall dark young woman, looking considerably less than her forty-six years, apparently hugging herself around the waist of her smart navy and pink wool dress.

In fact Maureen was holding in each hand the elbow of the opposite arm, in a physical attempt to hold herself together after this shock.

She felt a rage against her mother, not just because this man had been ordered summarily out of her life, and threatened not to contact his own flesh and blood. But she felt a burning anger that if her mother had kept this secret so successfully for so long, why on earth had she not destroyed the evidence?

If Maureen had never found these papers, she would never have known. She would have been happier, more safe and sure in the world she had built for herself.

Why had her mother been so casual and cruel? She
must
have known that Maureen would find the evidence some day.

But of course Mother knew that Maureen would not betray her. Maureen would keep up appearances to the end.

Like hell she would. Like bloody hell.

It came to her suddenly that she could do anything she liked about this whole farcical bargain. She had entered into no melodramatic promises about mythical deaths. She had entered into no promise not to contact him for fear of some awful punishment.

By God, she was going to find him, or Flora, or her half-sister.

Please, please may they be alive. Please may she find her father from this welter of documents. The latest being in 1950, confirming a final transfer of assets.

Please God may he still be alive. Seventy wasn’t that old.

She began to work with the kind of controlled furious energy that she had not known since the night before her first big high-fashion sale when they were up almost all night in the stockrooms marking clothes down, and recataloguing and estimating the takings of the following day.

This time she approached her mother’s belongings with different categories in mind. She found two boxes which she filled with early photographs and memorabilia of herself when a child.

If she did find this man, if he was a man with any heart he would want to know what she looked like at her first Communion, in her hockey outfit, dressed for her first dance.

Items which would have been carefully cut up and destroyed were now filed in boxes and labelled ‘keepsakes’.

She sorted and arranged and tidied until she was ready to drop. Then she tied up the bags which were real rubbish, folded the clothes and other items which were to go to the Vincent de Paul, and ordered a taxi to take back the boxes of keepsakes to her own flat.

There wasn’t a drawer now that hadn’t been emptied and dusted out. Much of the ordinary kitchen equipment would go to Mrs O’Neill who had come to clean for Mother over the years. Jimmy Hayes who did the garden could have the lawnmower and any of the gardening tools he wanted. Maureen also wrote him a letter asking him to take for his own use any plants that he particularly liked, and to have them removed quickly. She had decided now that the house would go on the market as soon as possible.

She laid her hand on the small writing desk. The one she had been going to take for the entrance hall of her own apartment. She patted it and said, ‘No’. She didn’t want it now. She wanted nothing from here.

The taxi man helped her in with the boxes. Because he was curious she told him that she had been clearing away her mother’s effects. He was very sympathetic.

‘Isn’t it a pity now that you didn’t have anyone to help you do a job like that?’ he said.

That’s what people often said to her in different forms, like wasn’t it a wonder that a fine girl like herself had never married and settled down.

‘Oh my father would have done everything but he was away, far away,’ she said.

She had mentioned her father. She didn’t care about the surprised look that the taxi driver gave her, or how odd it was to have a father far away when a mother had died.

She felt that by mentioning him she was making him be alive.

She had a long, long bath and felt better but ravenously hungry. She telephoned Walter.

‘I’m being very selfish, and literally using you, so feel free to say no, but are there any nice restaurants open on a Sunday night? I’d love to go out for a meal.’

Walter said nothing could suit him better, he had been doing a particularly tedious kind of Opinion where there seemed to be no solution or a thousand solutions, and one was as hard as the other. He would love to escape from it.

Together they sat and ordered good food and wine by candlelight.

‘You look a little feverish,’ Walter said with concern.

‘I’ve a lot on my mind.’

‘I know, it must have been very distressing today,’ he said.

Her eyes seemed to dance at him across the table. She had never looked more beautiful, he thought.

‘I know it’s not the time, but then there never is any really good time, but perhaps you might think of …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, should we go on a holiday together, somewhere we would both like, Austria you once said you would like to visit?’