Silver Wedding (7 page)

‘She’d have been a hopeless mother to it even if it had lived,’ Brendan said.

‘She doesn’t know that, she’s just living by some kind of instinct. She’d like to see it for a bit. To know that it’s all right, sort of.’

It was one of the longest speeches his uncle had ever made. He looked at his uncle and reached out to
touch
him. He put his arm gently around the older man’s shoulder, feeling moved to the heart by the kindness and generosity of spirit.

‘I’ll go off into the town now, Vincent,’ he said, taking his arm away. ‘I’ll write a couple of letters maybe and maybe work pulling a few pints tonight.’

‘There’s enough in the biscuit tin,’ Vincent said gently.

‘There is, I know. I know.’

He went out into the yard and passed the lonely ewe still calling for her lost lamb and started up the old car to drive to the town. He would go back for their silver anniversary. It was only a little time out of this life. The life he wanted. He could give a little time to show them he was all right and that he was part of the family.

3
HELEN

THE OLD MAN
looked at Helen hopefully. He saw a girl in her twenties with a grey jumper and skirt. Her hair was tied back in a black ribbon but it looked as if any moment it might all escape and fall wild and curly around her shoulders. She had dark blue restless eyes and freckles on her nose. She carried a black plastic shopping bag which she was swinging backwards and forwards.

‘Miss,’ said the old drunk, ‘can you do me a favour?’

Helen stopped at once, as he had known she would. There were passers-by who went on passing by and those who stopped. Years of observation had taught him to tell one sort from the other.

‘Of course, what can I do?’ she asked him.

He almost stepped back. Her smile was too ready, too willing. Usually people muttered that they didn’t have change or that they were in a hurry. Even if they did seem about to help a wino they didn’t show such eagerness.

‘I don’t want any money,’ he said.

‘Of course not,’ Helen said as if it was the last thing that a man with a coat tied with string and an empty ginger-wine bottle in his hand would want.

‘I just want you to go in there and get me another bottle. The bastards say they won’t serve me. They say I’m not to come into the shop. Now if I were to give you two pounds into your hand, then you could go in and get it for me.’

From his grizzled face with its wild hair above and its stubble below his small sharp eyes shone with the brilliance of the plan.

Helen bit her lower lip and looked at him hard. He was from Ireland of course, they all were, or else Scotland. The Welsh drunks seemed to stay in their valleys, and the English didn’t get drunk in such numbers or so publicly. It was a mystery.

‘I think you’ve had enough.’

‘How would you know whether I’ve had enough or not? That’s not what we were debating. That, as it happens, was not the point at issue.’

Helen was moved, he spoke so well, he had such phrases … the point at issue. How could a man who spoke like that have let himself go so far and turn into an outcast?

Immediately she felt guilty about the thought. That was the way Grandmother O’Hagan would talk. And Helen would immediately disagree with her. Here she was at twenty-one thinking almost the same thing.

‘It’s not good for you,’ she said, and added spiritedly, ‘I said I’d do you a favour, it’s not a favour giving you more alcohol, it’s a downright disservice.’

The drunk liked such niceties and definitions, he was ready to parry with her.

‘But there is no question of your
giving
me alcohol, my dear lady,’ he said triumphantly. ‘That was never part of our agreement. You are to act as my agent in purchasing the alcohol.’ He beamed at his victory.

‘No, it’s only going to kill you.’

‘I can easily get it elsewhere. I have two pounds and I will get it elsewhere. What we are now discussing is your word given and then broken. You said you would do me a favour, now you say you will not.’

Helen stormed into the small grocery-cum-off-licence.

‘A bottle of cider,’ she asked, eyes flashing.

‘What kind?’

‘I don’t know. Any kind. That one.’ She pointed to a fancy bottle. Outside, the drunk knocked on the window and shook his head of shaggy hair, trying to point to a different brand.

‘You’re not buying it for that wino?’ asked the young man.

‘No, it’s for myself,’ Helen said guiltily and obviously falsely. The drunk man was pointing feverishly at some brand.

‘Listen, don’t give it to him, lady … I beg you.’

‘Are you going to sell me this bottle of cider or are you not?’ Helen could be authoritative in short bursts.

‘Two pounds eighty,’ the man said. Helen slapped the money,
her
money, down on the counter, and in an equally bad temper the bottle was shoved into a plastic bag for her.

‘Now,’ Helen said. ‘Did I or did I not do what you asked me?’

‘You did not, that’s only rat’s piss, that stuff, fancy bottles for the carriage trade. I’m not drinking that.’

‘Well don’t then.’ There were tears starting in her eyes.

‘And what’s more I’m not spending my good money on it.’

‘Have it as a present.’ She was weary.

‘Oh high and mighty, Lady Muck,’ he said. He had a good quarter of it drunk from the neck by this stage. He was holding it still by its plastic carrier bag.

Helen didn’t like the look of his face, the man was working himself up into some kind of temper, or even fit. She looked at him alarmed, and saw a huge amount of the despised cider vanishing down his throat.

‘The urine of rodents,’ he shouted. ‘Bottled by these creeps of shopkeepers and dignified with the name of alcohol.’

He banged on the window again loudly. ‘Come out, you cheat and rogue, come out here and justify this garbage.’

There were vegetable boxes piled neatly with apples and oranges, with potatoes loose and mushrooms in baskets. The man with the near-empty cider bottle began to turn them over on to the street systematically.

The staff ran from the shop; two of them held him, another went for the law.

‘Thank you very much,’ said the boy who had served Helen. ‘That was a very nice day’s work.’

‘You wouldn’t bloody listen to me,’ shouted the man, who had foam flecks at the side of his mouth by now.

‘Her sort don’t listen to anyone, mate,’ said the irate shopkeeper who was trying to immobilize him.

Helen moved from the scene awkwardly. She walked away almost sideways as if she were trying not to turn her back on the chaos and distress she had created. But then this happened so often.

It was always happening, Helen found, everywhere she went.

Back in the convent she wouldn’t say anything to Sister Brigid about it. It would be so easily misunderstood. The sisters wouldn’t grasp that it would all have happened anyway. The man might have got even more violent and upset if nobody had
bought
him the drink. He might have broken the window or hurt someone. But Helen wouldn’t tell the upsetting tale. Brigid would be bound to look at her sadly and wonder why trouble seemed to follow Helen Doyle wherever she went.

It might even put further away the day when they would allow Helen to take her vows and become a member of the Community rather than just a hanger-on. How much did she have to prove? Why did Sister Brigid keep putting off the time when Helen should be considered seriously as one of their Community? She worked as hard as any of them, she had been with them for three years and still there was this feeling that it was somehow a passing whim.

Even the most minor and accidental events made them see Helen as unstable in some way. It was terribly unfair and she wouldn’t add to the long list by telling them about the confusion she was walking away from. Somehow it would be seen as her fault.

Instead she would think about the silver wedding celebrations and what she could do best to help.

Well obviously she hadn’t any money or anything so there could be nothing expected from her on that score. And as well as the vow of poverty that she had taken – or to be more honest was trying to take – she was a bit unworldly these days, she had left the mainstream of everyday life. And even if she did go out to work each day, as all the Sisters did, she
didn’t
see the side of life that Mother and Anna would be concentrating on, the more material end of things. And she wouldn’t be any good rounding up neighbours and friends. Perhaps she could see whether they might have a special Mass or Liturgy … But Helen was doubtful whether the old priest in the parish church where the Doyles went was going to be well up on the modern liturgy of renewal.

Better leave it to Anna who had plenty of time for all that sort of thing. Anna got so tetchy often when Helen did things to help, it was often better to do nothing, to say in a calm voice, Yes Anna, No Anna, Three Bags Full Anna. This is what Brigid would suggest. Brigid was very big on the calm voice. Or on Helen’s developing it. It often sounded like blandness, and even hypocrisy to Helen, but Brigid said that it was what the world in general seemed to want. And there were times when Helen thought gloomily that she might be right.

Certainly Mother always wanted things underplayed and understated, and in most cases not mentioned at all. Mother would like not so much calm as silence. Perhaps Mother might be pleased if Helen had been born deaf and dumb.

By this stage she had arrived at St Martin’s, the house where the Sisters lived. Brigid never called it the Convent, even though that is what it was. Brigid called it just St Martin’s, or home. She didn’t
criticize
Helen Doyle for using a more formal and official word to describe the redbrick house where eleven women lived and went about their daily business as social workers in various London agencies.

Nessa was working with young mothers, most of them under sixteen, and trying to teach them some kind of mothering skills. Nessa had a child herself a long time ago, she had brought the baby up on her own but the child had died when it was three. Helen couldn’t remember whether it was a boy or a girl. The other Sisters didn’t talk about it much. But it did give Nessa the edge when it came to looking after children. Brigid usually worked in the day centre for vagrants. Serving them lunches, trying to organize baths and delousing. Sister Maureen worked with the group that were rehabilitating ex-prisoners. The days were gone when these kinds of nuns just polished the big tables in the parlour in the hopes of a visit from a bishop. They went out to do God’s work and found plenty of opportunity to do it in the streets of London.

Helen had moved from one area to another since she had come to join St Martin’s. She would like to have worked with Sister Brigid running the day centre. What she would really have liked is if Brigid would let her run it on her own, and just call in from time to time to see how things were getting along. This way Helen felt she would be really useful and
special
, and that once seen in a position of calm control over the wellbeing of so many people, she would have no difficulty in proving her readiness to be a full member of the Community.

She realized that Obedience was very much part of it, and like Poverty and Chastity this was no problem to her, Helen believed. She didn’t want to be laying down the law and making rules, she would obey any rule. She didn’t want money for jewels or yachts, she laughed at the very notion of such things. And Chastity. Yes she was very sure she wanted that in a highly positive way. Her one experience of the reverse side of that coin was quite enough to reassure her on this particular score.

She had worked in the kitchen, done her turn as a skivvy. She was never sure why Brigid hadn’t liked her using that term. Skivvy. She had not been able to understand that people used that word quite respectably nowadays, as a sort of a joke. Debs said they were skivvying for a while before going skiing, it meant minding someone’s house. Australians over here for a year often got jobs in bars, in restaurants, or as skivvies. It wasn’t an insulting term.

Helen sighed, thinking of all the gulfs in understanding there were everywhere. She let herself in the door of St Martin’s. It was Sister Joan’s month for running the house, as Brigid liked it called. Joan called out from the kitchen as she heard her come in.

‘Just in time, Helen, I’ll take the stuff from you now. You couldn’t have timed it better, as it happened.’

With a lurch Helen remembered the reason she had taken the large black plastic carrier bag that had been swinging emptily beside her on her journey home. She had meant to come by the market and buy cheaply what the sellers hadn’t got rid of during the day. She had forgotten it once, and that was why she had been heading towards the grocery and off-licence where she had assisted her compatriot to destroy his liver even faster than he was already doing. She had been given three pounds to buy the vegetables. She had spent it on cider for an alcoholic.

‘Sit down, Helen. It’s not the end of the world,’ said Joan, who didn’t know the details of the story but recognized the substance and knew there would be no vegetables for the casserole.

‘Sit down, Helen, stop crying. I’ll put on a cup of tea for you just as soon as I’ve scrubbed some of those potatoes. We’ll have jacket potatoes with a little bit of cheese. It will be just as nice.’

Nessa was tired; it had been a particularly bad day.

An eighteen-year-old mother had sat whimpering in a corner while her fate was being discussed by social workers and a woman police officer. Her baby would live, thanks to Nessa, but what kind of life?

The mother had not turned up at the centre for two days running and Nessa became worried. The door to the block of flats always swung open and as Nessa went in she almost fell over Simon crawling along the filthy corridor. Beer cans and bottles were strewn everywhere, the place smelled of urine, there were dangers every few feet, broken bicycles, crates with sharp corners. Simon was crawling earnestly towards the open door. In a minute he would have been on the street where no car or motor bicycle would have expected a child to crawl. He would have been dead.