Silver Wedding (15 page)

'No, Mr Doyle.' Suresh Patel looked up from the floor like people look up in films when rescuers arrive.

The brother who didn't know where the safe was smiled as if his heart was going to burst.

On and on Desmond pushed and prodded, his strength flooding to him. Behind him he heard voices come into the shop. Real customers.

'Get the police immediately, and an ambulance,' called Desmond Doyle. 'There's been a raid. Go quickly, any private house will let you phone.'

They ran, the two young men delighted to be on the safe end of a heroics job, and Desmond pushed a cabinet up against the door to the room where he had cornered the bewildered boy in the leather jacket.

'Can he get out that way?' he asked.

'No. We have had bars on the window and everything, you know in case something like this...'

'Are you all right?' Desmond knelt on the floor.

'Yes. Yes. Did you kill him?' He nodded towards the boy on the floor who was regaining consciousness and starting to groan.

Desmond had taken his iron bar away from him, and stood prepared to deal another blow, but the boy was not able to move.

'No, he's not dead. But he'll go to gaol, by God he'll go to gaol,' said Desmond.

'Perhaps not, but it doesn't matter.' The shopkeeper tried to get himself to his feet. He looked weak and frightened.

'What matters then?' Desmond wanted to know.

'Well, I have to know who will run this shop for me – you see my brother, how he i$, you know how my wife cannot speak, I must not ask the children to desist from school, they will miss their places and their examinations . . .'

Far away Desmond heard a siren, the two heroes were bursting back in saying the Law was on the way.

'Don't worry about that,' Desmond said gently to the man on the floor. 'That will all be organized.'

'But how, how?'

'Have you any relations, cousins, in businesses like this?' 'Yes, but they cannot leave their own places. Each place, it has to make its own way.'

'Yes I know, but when we get you to hospital, will you be able to give me their names? I can get in touch with them.'

'It is no use, Mr Doyle, they will not have the time . . . they must work each in their own.'

His face was troubled and his big dark eyes filled with tears. 'We are finished now. It's very simple to see,' he said.

'No, Mr Patel. I will run the shop for you. You must just tell them that you trust me and that it's not any kind of trick.'

'You cannot do that, Mr Doyle, you have a big position in Palazzo Foods, you only say this to make me feel good.'

'No, it is the truth. I will look after your shop until you come back from hospital. We will have to close it today of course, put up a notice, but by tomorrow lunch time I will have it working again.'

'I cannot thank you .. .' Desmond's eyes also filled with tears.

He saw that the man trusted him utterly, Suresh Patel saw Desmond Doyle as a great manager who could do what he willed.

The ambulance men were gentle. They said he had very likely broken a rib as well as an arm.

'It might be some time, Mr Doyle,' said Suresh Patel from the stretcher.

'There's all the time in the world.'

'Let me tell you where the safe is.'

'Not now, later, I'll come to see you in the hospital.'

'But your wife, your family, they will not let you do this.'

'They will understand.'

'And afterwards?'

'Afterwards will be different. Don't think about it.'

The policemen were getting younger, they looked younger than the villains. One of them was definitely younger than Desmond's son Brendan.

'Who is in charge here?' the young policeman asked with a voice that had not yet gained the confidence it would have in a few short years.

'I am,' said Desmond. 'I'm Desmond Doyle of 26 Rosemary Drive and I'm going to look after these premises until Mr Patel comes back from hospital.'

Father Hurley

Nobody except his sister called Father James Hurley Jimbo, it would have been unthinkable. A man in his sixties with silver hair and a handsome head. He had the bearing of a bishop, and a lot of people thought he looked much more bishop like than many of those who held the office. Tall and straight, he would have worn the robes well, and even better the cardinal's red. But Rome didn't go on appearances, and Father Hurley's name had never been brought to any corridors of power.

It was impossible to find anyone who would speak a word against him. His parishioners in several County Dublin districts had loved him. He was able it seemed to move just fast enough with the changes that came to the Church after the Vatican Council, but not too fast. He could murmur calming things that soothed the most conservative and yet he seemed to go far along the road that allowed the laity to have a say. He wasn't exactly all things to all of his flock but he certainly avoided irritating them.

And in a Dublin where anti-clericalism among the younger liberals was becoming rife, this was no mean feat.

He was not a television priest, he had never been seen on the screen debating any issue. He was not the kind of man who would officiate at the marriage of known atheists having a church wedding just for the show, but neither was he the old-fashioned curate who went to Cheltenham in March with a pocket full of fivers, or cheered on the dogs at a coursing match as they followed the hare. Father Hurley was a travelled educated soft-spoken man. People often said that he looked like an academic. This was high praise. And he was amused that it was sometimes regarded as even higher praise when he was described as looking not like a priest but more like a vicar!

James Hurley seemed to have moved quietly from parish to parish without either an upward or a downward movement. There did not seem to be the sense of advancement that such a well-spoken thoughtful man might have been led to expect, but I it was rumoured that he never sought any promotion. You couldn't say he was unworldly, not Father Hurley who liked fine wines and was known to enjoy pheasant and to relish lobster.

But he always seemed totally contented with his lot, even when they had sent him to a working-class parish where he was in charge of fourteen youth clubs and eleven football teams instead of the drawing rooms and the visits to private nursing homes of his previous position.

He had been at school at one of the better Catholic schools in England, not that he ever talked about it. His family had been wealthy people and it was rumoured that he was brought up on a big estate in the country. But none of this ever came from the man himself, he would laugh easily and say that nobody in Ireland should try to shake their family trees for fear of what might fall down. He had a sister who lived in the country with her husband, a country solicitor of substance, and their only son. Father Hurley did speak of this boy, his nephew, with great affection. Gregory was the only part of Father Hurley's private life where he ever volunteered information.

Otherwise he was just a very good and interested listener to other people's stories. Which is why people thought he was such a good conversationalist. He talked only about them.

In the various presbyteries where Father Hurley's life had taken him there were pictures of his mother and father, now dead, in old-fashioned oval frames. There was a family picture taken at Gregory's first Gommunion, and another one of Gregory's Conferring. A handsome boy with his hand lightly laid on his parchment scroll and his eyes smiling through the camera as if he knew much more than any other graduate who was posing for stiff formal photographs that day but took it all very casually.

For the people who told Father Hurley their own life stories, their worries and their tittle-tattle, Gregory was an ideal conversation piece, they could ask for him, and hear an enthusiastic response, enough to look polite, then they could return to their own tales again. They didn't notice that after a certain date the stories about Gregory never originated with Father Hurley and that his replies were vaguer and less informed than they had been once. He was far too diplomatic to let that be seen. That was another thing people said, he would have been very good at the Department of Foreign Affairs, or a consul or an ambassador even.

When James Hurley was a boy his mother had died and he had always thought of Laura as being a combination of mother, sister and best friend. Laura was five years older than he was, she had been seventeen when left in charge of a big crumbling house, a small crumbling brother and a remote and withdrawn father who didn't give any of himself to his children any more than he had given of himself to his wife or the estate he had inherited.

Father James Hurley knew all that now, but then he had lived in a childlike fear of offending his stern cold father still further. Laura could have gone away to university, he always thought, if it had not been for her little brother. Instead she stayed at home and took a secretarial course in the nearby town.

She worked in the local grocery which was eventually taken over by a bigger firm, then she worked in the local bakery which merged with three nearby bakeries and her secretarial job there was over. She worked as the doctor's receptionist and during her time there he was taken off" the medical register for professional misconduct. Laura used to tell her little brother Jimbo that she seemed to have a fairly unlucky effect and a dead hand on those she went to work for. Her little brother Jimbo used to suggest she came to work in his school in the hope that she would close it down.

She encouraged him in his Vocation, she took long walks in the country roads with him, and together they sat on mossy banks and on the stile between the fields and talked about the love of God the way others might have talked about sport or the cinema.

Laura Hurley had knelt with tears in her eyes to receive her brother's first blessing after he had said his First Mass.

Their father had died by this stage, remote and uninvolved to the end. James had become a priest; he might have become a soldier or a jockey, it would have been on the same level of interest for his father.

While away at the seminary James had often worried about Laura. She lived in the gate lodge of what had been their home.

The Big House was not really big in terms of the landed estates thereabouts but it had been substantial. But Laura felt no sense of having come down in the world, living in the cottage where once people lived rent free if they opened and closed the gates after the Hurley family. Laura had always said cheerfully that it was much easier to keep a small place than a big one, and since their father had gone first to a nursing home and then to his eternal reward she was alone, so it didn't make sense to run the Big House. When it was sold there were so many debts that had gathered from James being a student, from father being a patient in a private nursing home, that the place had been thoroughly mortgaged. There was little in the bank, there was no dowry for Miss Laura Hurley, faithful sister and dutiful daughter.

Laura never thought like that. She was happy, she walked her two big collie dogs, read her books in the evening by her small fire, and went to work by day for the local solicitors. She said laughingly that she hadn't managed to close them down like she had done to every other business she worked for but she had managed to change them utterly.

Like changing the confirmed bachelor status of young Mr Black. The Mr Black who had once been the most eligible man in the county. At the age of forty he looked at Laura Hurley aged thirty-four and a lot of his iron-hard resolve about staying single, uninvolved and free began to chip away.

Then the letter arrived: 'Dearest Jimbo, you'll never believe it but Alan Black and I are going to get married. We would very much like it if you could perform the ceremony for us. Since we're not in the first flush of youth to put it mildly we won't make an exhibition, of ourselves here with everyone coming to stare. We would like to come to Dublin and be married in your parish if that's possible. Dearest Jimbo, I never knew I could feel so happy. And so safe and as if things were meant to turn out like this. I don't deserve it, I really don't.'

Father Hurley always remembered that letter from his sister, he could see it, the words almost tumbling over each other on the small cream writing paper. He remembered the way his eyes had watered with a feeling of pleasure that things really did seem to have some point if this kind woman had found someone generous and good to share her life with her. He couldn't remember Alan Black except that he had been very handsome and rather dashing-looking in the past.

Father James Hurley felt that at twenty-nine he was a man of the world. And in a strange way he felt protective of his older sister as he joined her hand with Alan Black's at the wedding ceremony. He hoped this man with the dark eyes and dark hair just greying at the temples would be good to Laura and understand her generosity and how she had never sought anything for herself.

Several times he found himself looking at them and with a hope that was more than a wish, it was a silent prayer, he willed his sister to have a good relationship with this tall handsome man.

Laura's face was open and honest, but even on this her wedding day nobody could call her beautiful, her hair was pulled back and tied with a large cream-coloured ribbon which matched the colour of her suit. The ribbon was large enough to be considered a hat or head covering for church. She had a dusting of face powder and a smile that warmed the small congregation to the heart. But she was not a beautiful woman. Young Father Hurley hoped that the attentions of the handsome solicitor would not wander.

Years later he marvelled at his own callow approach and wondered how he could ever have thought himself any use in advising men and women in their lives on their road to God. In a changing world there never was and never had been anything more strong and constant than the love Alan Black had shown to his bride. From the day that they had come to see him, back suntanned and laughing from their honeymoon in Spain, he should have realized that his own judgements based on appearances and vanity were superficial. Why should Alan Black, a bright intelligent man, not be able to see the great worth, goodness and love in Laura Hurley? After all James Hurley had always seen it himself, why should he think it would pass Mr Black the solicitor by?