Silver Wedding (34 page)

‘Well yes.’ Deirdre had been pleased by the compliment if somewhat startled by the way it was expressed.

At that moment Maureen Barry arrived.

She must have left her taxi at the corner of Rosemary Drive, she walked easily through the gate and up the little path to the door. The guests were both in and outside the house, it was one of those warm autumn evenings that made it not totally ridiculous to be in the open air.

Maureen seemed to expect all eyes to be on her, yet there was nothing vain or coquettish about the way she came in.

She wore a lemon-coloured silk suit, with a lemon and black scarf. She was slim and tall and her black hair shone as if it were an advertisement for shampoo. Her smile was bright and confident, as she turned with excitement from one to another.

She said all the right things and few of the things that were in mind. Yes, that was Brendan she had seen this morning struggling with a big green Marks and Spencer’s bag. Obviously the outfit he was wearing now. Perfectly adequate, but think what a big handsome boy could look like if he had been dressed by a tailor.

Yes, amazingly it
had
been Deirdre’s mother that she had seen that morning at breakfast with the rather over-obvious-looking man. Was it possible that the great and esteemed Eileen O’Hagan was having a relationship? How her father would enjoy hearing of that, when she went to Ascot to see him tomorrow.

She kissed her friend Deirdre and exclaimed with
pleasure
over the wonderful dress. In her heart she wondered how Deirdre could have fallen for the obvious-looking lilac, the matronly garment with the self-colour embroidery at the shoulder. It was a pastel Mother of the Bride outfit. Deirdre deserved better, she could have looked so well.
And
the dress had probably cost a fortune as well.

The Doyle girls didn’t look smart either. Helen seemed to be wearing a blouse and skirt, perhaps that was the nearest that the Order could come to letting her wear home clothes. Anna, who was quite striking if she had just left herself alone, was wearing a very tarty-looking navy and white outfit: everywhere there could be a white frill there was one, at the neck, on the hem, at the wrists. It was like a child’s party frock.

And Frank.

‘How well you look, Frank, it must be years and years,’ she said.

‘But it’s impossible that for you time has stood still,’ he said, mocking her tones by imitating her, very slightly.

Her eyes hardened.

‘Renata, this is Maureen Barry, she and I played bridesmaid and best man at the great occasion twenty-five years ago. Maureen, this is Renata, my wife.’

‘I’m delighted to meet you.’

The two women took in each other’s clothes at a glance.

Maureen saw a girl with a nondescript face and well-cut designer garments, carefully made up and wearing discreet jewellery. If that gold chain was what she thought it was Renata Quigley was wearing the price of several houses in Rosemary Drive around her neck.

‘Frank tells me you are a very successful businesswoman, and you have high fashion shops.’ Renata spoke as if she had learned a little speech. Her accent was attractive.

‘He’s building me up a bit too much, Renata, two small outlets, but I am thinking of opening up over here. Not in London, more out Berkshire way.’

‘I was sorry to hear that your mother died,’ Frank said. He lowered his voice suitably.

‘Yes, it was sad, she was very lively and opinionated always, she could have had many more years. Like Mrs O’Hagan over there.’ Maureen nodded in the direction of Deirdre’s mother who was holding forth in a corner.

Renata had moved slightly away to talk to Desmond and Father Hurley.

‘Of course she hated me,’ Frank said, not letting his eyes leave Maureen’s.

‘Who? I beg your pardon?’

‘Your mother. She hated me. You know that, Maureen.’ His eyes were hard now. Like hers had been.

‘No, I think you’re quite wrong, she never hated
you
. She spoke very well of you always, she said you were very nice, that one time she met you. I remember her standing in the morning room at home and saying, “He’s a very nice boy, Maureen.”’ As Maureen spoke she re-created her mother’s little laugh, the unkind dismissal, the sense of amused wonder.

It was the most cruel thing she could have done.

But he was asking for it, arrogant, handsome and powerful, playing with people’s lives, and planning what they would buy and where they would buy it.

‘You didn’t marry?’ he asked. ‘There wasn’t anyone you could marry?’

‘Not anyone I did marry, no.’

‘But you were tempted, perhaps a little here and there …’ His eyes still held hers. They hadn’t faltered under her sarcasm, her reproducing her mother’s deadly voice.

‘Oh Frank, of course I’ve been tempted here and there, like all business people are. That has nothing to do with being married. I’m quite sure you have found the same in your life. I’d be
very
surprised if you didn’t. But to marry and settle down, there has to be a reason for that.’

‘Love maybe, or attraction even?’

‘Not enough, I think. Something more prosaic like …’ She looked round and her glance fell on Deirdre. ‘Like being pregnant maybe, or else …’ She looked round the room again and stopped when she was looking at Renata.

But she wasn’t quick enough, Frank said it first.

‘Like money?’ he said blandly.

‘Exactly,’ she said.

‘Not very good reasons, either of them.’

‘Well, certainly not the pregnancy one. Even more specially when it turns out not to have been a real one.’

‘Did you ever find out what happened?’ Frank asked.

Maureen shrugged. ‘Lord, I wasn’t even told that there was any question of it in the first place, so I wouldn’t be told that the danger had passed or whatever.’

‘I think she had a miscarriage,’ Frank said.

‘Did Desmond tell you that?’ She was surprised.

‘Not a bit of it, but it was their first Christmas in London, and I was in a bit of a bad way, a bit let down and feeling very lost. I asked could I spend Christmas with them, the excuse was Deirdre wasn’t well. She looked badly too. I think that’s what it was.’

He sounded much more human, her eyes had softened and she felt his had too.

‘What bad luck to tie themselves into all this, for nothing, over a false alarm,’ she said.

‘They may like it, the children could be some consolation,’ Frank argued.

They were talking like friends now, old friends who hadn’t seen each other for a while.

Philippa was relieved when the party began to
decamp
towards the church. She had no idea and didn’t even want to imagine what went on there, but she knew it was some kind of important landmark for them. Not just to serve food and drink but go back to the same kind of a church where the whole thing had begun. She shrugged cheerfully as she organized the collection of glasses, the airing of the room. At least this bizarre kind of two-tier arrangement gave them a chance to clear up the hors d’oeuvres part of things and let them lay out the salads without interruption.

The church was at a nice easy walking distance, that was why it had been thought a feasible plan. If they had all to get lifts and taxis and sort out who went with whom it would have taken for ever.

They all knelt in a little group, the thirty people who formed the silver wedding party.

It was a perfectly normal Mass, many of them congratulated themselves that they didn’t need to go tomorrow since a Saturday-evening attendance was sufficient in these liberated days.

Some like Anna who didn’t go anyway did not see the great incidental advantage.

Brendan always found Mass a social event back home with Vincent. He didn’t think his uncle believed in any kind of God, but he went to Mass on a Sunday as regularly as he would go to get petrol, or to the marts to buy sheep. It was part of the life they lived.

Helen prayed hard at the Mass so that God would tell her what was right. If Sister Brigid said that she
was
running away, what was it from and which was the right direction if the convent was the wrong one? If she could have some kind of sign. It wasn’t much to ask.

Father Hurley asked himself why did he feel that this was all some kind of charade, almost a television version of renewal of vows? Any moment now someone would say ‘Cut. Can we take that again from the top?’ He didn’t feel this about any other aspect of his ministry. There was just something he didn’t like about a public reiteration of something that was said and meant a long time ago. Yet the faithful were always being asked to renew their baptismal vows, so why did he feel uneasy in this instance?

Frank looked at Maureen in the church and thought what a fine-looking woman she was, full of spirit, so like Joy East in many ways. He thought briefly of Joy and of his son who was called Alexander. The son he would never get to know.

It had been thought inappropriate to take pictures at the church. It wasn’t as if it were a real wedding, they would look a little ancient to be photographed, Deirdre tittered, hoping that someone would disagree with her.

Maureen did, strongly.

‘Come on now, Deirdre, I still have to take the plunge and when I do I’ll want banks of photographers outside,’ she said.

‘And after all people get married at
any
age, any age at all,’ Deirdre’s mother said, which caused Deirdre’s heart to lurch a little.

‘And with the way the church is going, maybe even the clergy will get married, Mother, and Father Hurley will be coming down the aisle in a morning suit,’ Helen said.

They laughed at that, particularly Father Hurley, who was rueful and said that even if he was forty years younger he wouldn’t be able to take on such an undertaking.

And soon they were back in Salthill, 26 Rosemary Drive. The neighbours who had not been invited waved and called out greetings, the lights were on and soon the supper was under way.

‘There’s a lot of conversation, like at a real party,’ Deirdre said to Desmond almost in disbelief.

Her face was flushed and anxious, her hair had fallen from its hard laquered layers and seemed softer somehow. There were beads of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip.

He felt strangely touched by her anxiety.

‘Well it
is
a real party,’ he said, and he touched her face gently with his hand.

It was an unfamiliar gesture but she didn’t draw back, she smiled at him.

‘I suppose it is,’ she agreed.

‘And your mother is getting on well with everyone,’ he said encouragingly.

‘Yes, yes she is.’

‘Brendan’s looking in fine shape, isn’t he? He said he’d be very interested in coming down to the Rosemary Central Stores tomorrow morning to see how it operates.’

She was surprised. ‘He’s going to come the whole way across from Shepherd’s Bush early in the morning when he could have stayed here in his own room?’ She was still peeved that he wouldn’t stay.

‘It’s not his own room, Deirdre, it’s the office.’

‘There’d have been room for him,’ she said.

‘Yes, and he will stay some time. But as a visitor.’

‘As part of the family,’ she corrected him.

‘As a visiting part of the family,’ he corrected her back.

It was gentle. But the Desmond Doyle of a few months back would not have done it. He would have been too anxious, too willing to play the parlour game of lies, backing up whatever story Deirdre told her mother and Maureen Barry about his mythical prowess at Palazzo, trying all the while to engineer these conversations out of the hearing of Frank or Renata who would know them to be untrue.

How restful it was at last for Desmond Doyle to have his own position, his own place. To be for the first time his own person, not Palazzo’s person. It gave him by a grim irony the kind of confidence that his wife had always wanted to see in him, but which would have for ever escaped him in Palazzo land.

‘Mother is actually talking normally to Dad,’ Brendan whispered to Anna at the other side of the room. ‘Does this happen often?’

‘Never saw it happen before,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to take away from your sense of wellbeing, but I do think that you have captured a very rare sighting, make the most of it.’

And indeed as they looked the little tableau broke up. One of the caterers was speaking to Mother, there was a slight problem in the kitchen.

‘It’s bound to be Helen,’ Anna said sadly. And it was.

Helen was all for putting candles on the gateau, she had bought twenty-five of them and had rooted through the bottom of the dresser to find old cake tins holding the plastic candle holders. She could only find fourteen. She could not think why.

‘Probably because that would be the age at which normal people wouldn’t really want any more,’ Anna said crisply. ‘All right, Mother, go back to the guests. I’ll cope with it.’

‘It’s not a question of coping with it.’ Helen was hurt and angry now. ‘I was just making a little gesture so that we could be festive.’

Philippa of Philippa’s Caterers said that the written agreement had been a gateau with toasted almonds to be applied at the last moment to the cream topping, the toasted almonds to read: Desmond and Deirdre October 1960.

‘I think it
is
better like that, Helen, don’t you?’ Anna spoke as she might have spoken to a dog that was foaming at the mouth or a four-year old who was severely retarded. Ken Green said he spent a lot of his life speaking to people like this, it got you a reputation for being very patient, slightly thick, and a person who could be relied on in any crisis. Anna remembered that Ken always said that the more enraged he was the more slowly he spoke.

‘Don’t you think we should leave the caterers to it, Helen?’ Anna said, enunciating every word very clearly and slowly.

‘Oh piss off, Anna, you’re a pain in the arse,’ Helen said.

Anna decided that they were definitely coming to the end of Helen’s term of life in a religious order.

Helen had flounced out into the garden.

‘Shall I go after her?’ asked Philippa the caterer.

‘No, she’s probably safer out there, there’s no one she can insult beyond reprieve, and not too much she can break.’ Anna thought that Ken would be proud of her and wondered why she was thinking of him so much anyway.