Silver Wedding (25 page)

Her first target was Carlo, struggling offstage into his Santa outfit.

‘Wonderful, Mr Palazzo,’ she said. ‘Wonderful, you go out and knock them dead, tell them what Santa will put in their wage packets if they’re good little girls and boys and work like good little ants.’

Carlo looked puzzled. Frank acted quickly to draw her away.

‘Joy, where are the tubs for the children? Please?’ His voice was urgent.

She came up close to him and he saw her eyes were not focusing properly.

‘Where are the tubs?’ she asked. ‘The tubs are
being
presided over by your wife. The saintly Renata. Santa Renata.’ Her face broke into a big smile. ‘That would be a nice song … Santa Renata …’ She sang it to the tune of ‘Santa Lucia’, and seemed pleased with it so sang it a little louder. Frank moved slightly away. He had to get her out. Soon.

At that very moment Renata appeared to explain that the pink wrapping paper was on the gifts for girls and the blue for boys. One year her father had given the girls horrible monsters and spiders and the boys comb and mirror sets. This time they were taking no chances.

‘That’s right, Renata, take no chances,’ Joy said.

Renata looked at her startled. Never had she seen Joy East looking like this.

‘You look … very smart … very elegant,’ Renata said.

‘Thank you, Renata,
grazie, grazie mille
,’ Joy said, bowing flamboyantly.

‘I have not seen you wear clothes like this and look so full of life before …’ Renata spoke quietly but with a little awe in her voice. She fingered the edge of her expensive but very muted woollen jacket. It had probably cost four times as much as the striking garment that Joy was wearing but Renata looked like a bird of little plumage, dark hair, sallow skin and designer suit in lilac and pink colours with a braid of lilac-coloured suede at the edge of the jacket, nothing to catch the eye. Nothing at all.

Joy looked at Renata steadily.

‘I’ll tell you why I look so different, I have a man. A man in my life. That’s what makes all the difference.’

Joy smiled around her, delighted with the attention from Nico Palazzo who was Carlo’s brother, and from Desmond Doyle and a group of senior management who were all in the circle. Renata smiled too, but uncertainly. She didn’t know quite what response she was meant to make and her eyes raked the group as if to find Frank who would know what to say.

Frank stood with the feeling that the ice in his stomach had broken and he was now awash with icy water. There was nothing he could do. It was the sense of powerlessness that made him feel almost faint.

‘Was I telling you about this man, Frank?’ Joy asked roguishly. ‘You see me only as a career woman … but there’s room for love and passion as well.’

‘I’m sure there is.’

Frank spoke as if he were patting down a mad dog. Even if he had no connection with Joy they would have expected him to be like this. Soothing, distant, and eventually making his escape. They must all see now what condition she was in, they must have noticed. Was it only because he knew her so intimately, had traced every feature of her face and body for three years with his hands that he realized
she
was out of control? Everyone around seemed to be treating it all as normal Christmas high spirits. If he could stop her just now, before she said anything else, then all might not be lost.

Joy was aware she had an audience and was enjoying it. She put on a little-girl voice that he had never heard her use before. She looked very silly, he thought quite dispassionately, in her sober state she would be the first to criticize any other woman with an assumed lisping voice.

‘But it’s forbidden in this company to love anyone except Palazzo. Isn’t that right? We all love Palazzo, we must have no other love.’

They laughed, even Nico laughed, they were taking it as good-natured banter.

‘Oh yes, first love the company, then other loves,’ Nico said.

‘It’s infidelity to love anyone else better,’ Desmond Doyle said, laughing.

Frank flashed him a grateful look, poor Desmond his old pal from those long-ago days in Ireland was helping him inadvertently, he was taking the heat off. Maybe he could be encouraged to say more.

‘Well, you’ve never been unfaithful, Desmond,’ Frank said, loosening his collar. ‘You’re certainly a long and loyal Palazzo man.’ He felt sick in his stomach after he said it, remembering suddenly the time that Desmond had been allowed to go after the rationalization and how he had to fight hard to get
him
reinstated. But Desmond didn’t seem to see the irony. Desmond was about to answer with something cheerful when the voice of Joy East cut in again.

‘No one should be married except to the company. When you join Palazzo you must marry the place, marry Palazzo. Very hard to do. Very hard. Except for you, Frank. You managed it all right, didn’t you? You really
did
marry a Palazzo!’

Even Nico who was very slow must have realized by now that something was wrong. Frank had to move quickly. But he must not appear to be rattled. He must take it indulgently as anyone would take the public idiocy of a normally exemplary colleague.

‘Yes, you’re right, and I’m glad you reminded me because my father-in-law will be down on us all like a ton of bricks if we don’t get the presents going soon. Renata, should we get the children to line up now … or does somebody make an announcement. Or what?’

In other years Joy East had arranged everything like clockwork. Renata had a look of relief all over her face. She had thought that there had been an insult, a jibe, but obviously since Frank didn’t see one, she had been wrong.

‘I think we should tell Papa that the time has come,’ she said and moved away towards her father.

‘I think we should all tell Papa that the time has come,’ Joy said to nobody in particular.

Desmond Doyle and Nico Palazzo exchanged puzzled looks.

‘Joy, you must be tired after all that busy time at the packaging conference,’ Frank Quigley said loudly. ‘If you like I can run you home now before it all gets too exhausting here.’

He saw the relief on a few faces around him, Mr Quigley was always the one to cope with the situation, any situation.

His smile was hard and distant as he looked at Joy. It said in very definite terms that this was her one chance to get out of what she had walked them into. There wouldn’t be any other chances. His smile said that he was not afraid.

Joy looked at him for a few seconds.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘let’s say I’m tired after the packaging conference, tired and very very emotional, and that I need to be taken home.’

‘Let’s say that then,’ Frank said easily. ‘Tell Renata to save me a nice boy present from Santa Claus,’ he called out. ‘I’ll be right back to collect it.’

They looked at him in admiration as he led Miss East who was behaving most oddly out of the big hall and towards the car park.

There was complete silence in the car, not one word spoken between them. At her door she handed him her small handbag and he took out the key. On the low glass table was a bottle of vodka with one third of it gone and some orange juice. A heap of unopened Christmas cards, and a small smart suitcase as if she was going on or had come back from a
journey
. With a shock he realized that she must not have unpacked her case after her trip to that conference.

‘Coffee?’ he asked. It was the first word spoken.

‘No thanks.’

‘Mineral water?’

‘If you insist.’

‘I don’t insist, I couldn’t care less what you drink, but I wouldn’t give a dog any more alcohol than you’ve had already.’

His voice was icy cold.

Joy looked up at him from the chair where she had sat down immediately.

‘You hate drink because your father was such a drunk,’ she said.

‘You’re telling me what I told you. Have you any further insights or shall I go back to the party?’

‘You’d like to hit me but you can’t, because you saw your father beating your mother,’ she said, a crooked smile on her face.

‘Very good, Joy, well done.’ His hand was clenched, and he would like to have struck something, a chair, a wall even to get rid of the tension he felt.

‘I said nothing that wasn’t true. Nothing at all.’

‘No indeed, and you said it beautifully. I’m going now.’

‘You are not going, Frank, you are going to sit down and listen to me.’

‘Now that’s where you’re wrong. Since I did have a drunk for a father I am only too used to listening to drunks, it’s a useless exercise. They don’t remember anything next day. Try telephoning the speaking clock, tell it all to them, they love a good sob story from people with enough drink in them to float a navy.’

‘You have to listen, Frank, you have to know.’

‘Another time, a time when you can pronounce my name without stumbling over it.’

‘About the conference. I wasn’t there.’

‘So you said, you told me. A Scotsman, well well. Don’t tell me it’s preying on your mind?’

‘I wasn’t anywhere near it, I didn’t leave London.’

Her voice was odd, she seemed to have sobered up a bit.

‘So?’ He was still poised to go.

‘I went to a nursing home.’ She paused. ‘To have an abortion.’

He put his car keys in his pocket, and came back into the room.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Very sorry.’

‘You needn’t be.’ She didn’t look at him.

‘But why, how …?’

‘The pill didn’t suit me. I changed the type several times … but still …’

‘You should have told me …’ He was gentle now. Forgiving.

‘No, it was my decision.’

‘I know, I know. But still …’

‘And so I went to this place … very nice place actually, it’s a real nursing home for other things too, not just terminations as they call them …’ Her voice shook a little.

He laid his hand over hers, the coldness was forgotten. ‘And was it very bad, was it awful?’ His eyes were full of concern.

‘No.’ Her face was bright and she smiled at him, a smile only a little lopsided. ‘No it wasn’t awful at all. Because when I went in there and went to my room, I sat and thought for a while, and I thought … Why am I doing this? Why am I getting rid of a human being? I would
like
another human being around me. I would like a son or a daughter. So I changed my mind. I told them I had decided not to go through with the termination. And I went to a hotel instead, for a couple of days, then I came back here.’

He looked at her, stricken.

‘This can’t be true.’

‘Oh yes, it’s true. So now you see why you couldn’t just toddle off back to the party. You had to know. It was only fair that you should know. And know everything.’

If he lived to be an old man, something that his doctor said was highly unlikely, Frank Quigley would never forget that moment. The day he learned he was going to be a father, but not the father of Renata’s
child
, not the father who would be congratulated and embraced by the Palazzo tribe. A father who would be ostracized and cut off from the life he had built for himself for a quarter of a century. He would never forget her face as she told him, knowing that for the first time in their very equal relationship she held all the cards. Knowing that drunken and upset and having broken all their rules she was still the one in charge. Because of biology which said that the women bore the children she was winning, and that was the only reason. Frank Quigley would not have been beaten by anything except the human reproductive system.

He had played it just right, of course, at the time. He had telephoned back to base and said that Joy needed a bit of attention. He had sat down and talked to her, but his mind was in overdrive. His words were soothing and supportive, his real thoughts were taking a journey into the future.

He allowed his real reactions only a moment’s indulgence while he relished the thought that he had fathered a child. If Carlo knew there would be a lot less of the chat about eating more red meat. If Carlo knew. Carlo must never know. And Renata would be hurt beyond repair. Not only at the infidelity, the knowledge that an affair had been going on under her very nose for years, but at the fact that this woman had produced a child, the one thing that Renata had failed to do.

As he stroked Joy’s fevered forehead and assured her of loyalty and his great pleasure at the news and the way that things had turned out, Frank was working out logically and coldly what he must do next, what avenues were open to him.

As he urged cups of weak tea and thinly sliced bread and butter on the weeping Joy, he listed the possibilities that lay ahead and the disadvantages of each one. When he found the one that had the least dangerous minefield attached to it that was where he would head.

Joy could have the child and he would acknowledge that it was his. He would say that he did not intend to leave his marriage, but felt in fairness that the son or daughter should grow up knowing the care of a father. He considered this for seconds, only to dismiss it.

In a more liberated society this would work. But not with the Palazzos. Not for one minute.

Suppose Joy were to say that she was having the child and that the identity of the father was to remain unknown, undiscussed? Again not something beyond the imaginings in the 1980s for a liberated woman. But again this was the world of Palazzo. It would be frowned upon, it would be speculated about, and worst of all if Joy were ever to hit the bottle again it would all be revealed.

Suppose he were to deny paternity? Literally say that Joy was lying? He wondered why he had even
considered
this route. Joy was a woman he had intended to spend a great amount of time with, he didn’t only love her for the good sex they had, he loved her mind and her reactions to things. Frank asked himself why had this possibility crossed his mind. He had never thought of stabbing Carlo in the back and taking over the company. He had not decided to woo and win Renata only for her money and position. He was not that kind of bastard. So why even entertain the idea of turning his back on the woman who had been his lover for three years, the woman who was going to bear his child? He looked at her, slack-jawed and awkward in the chair. He realized with a shudder how much he feared drink and the effects of it. He knew that whatever happened now, he would never be able to trust Joy, or trust himself to her again.