The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (177 page)

In Pinner if there were grandchildren they would have been the central pivot of the home, as the children had been for nearly a quarter of a century. Anna sighed again as she thought of the celebrations that lay ahead and how she would have to face up to them, as she had to face up to so many things on her own.

It was no use sitting in an empty bookshop with a coffee and a grievance that Joe wasn’t as other men, supportive and willing to share these kinds of things with her. She had known there would be nothing like that from the first evening together.

What she had to do now was work out how the silver wedding could be organized in October in a way that wouldn’t drive everyone mad.

Helen would be no use, that was for certain. She would send an illuminated card signed by all the sisters, she would invite Mother and Father to a special folk Mass with the Community, she would get the day off and come out to Pinner in her drab gray jumper and skirt, her hair dull and lifeless and the big cross on a chain around her neck constantly in her hand. Helen didn’t even look like a nun, she looked like someone a bit dopey and badly dressed retreating behind the big crucifix. And in many ways that’s what she was. Helen would turn up all right if everything was organized, and in her canvas bag she would take back any uneaten food because one nun loved gingerbread and another had a weakness for anything with salmon in it.

With a sense of despair Anna could see into the future months ahead with her young sister Helen, a member of a religious community in South London, picking her way through the food like a scavenger and filling an empty cookie can with foil-wrapped tidbits.

But at least Helen would be there. Would Brendan come at all? That was the real worry, and the one she had been trying to avoid thinking about. If Brendan Doyle did not get the train and boat and then the train again and make it to Pinner for his parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, they might as well call the whole thing off now. The disgrace would never be disguised, the emptiness would never be forgotten.

An incomplete family picture on the wall.

They would probably lie and say that he was in Ireland and couldn’t be spared from the farm, the harvest, or the shearing or whatever people did on farms in October.

But Anna knew with sickening clarity that it would be a paper-thin excuse. The best man and the maid of honor would know there had been a coldness, and the neighbors would know, and the priests would know.

And the shine would be taken off the silver.

How to get him back, that was the problem. Or was it? What to get him back for? Perhaps that was a bigger problem.

Brendan had always been so quiet when he was a schoolboy. Who would have known that he felt this strange longing to go away from the family to such a remote place? Anna had been so shocked the day he told them. Utterly straightforward and with no care about what it would do to the rest of the family.

“I’m not going back to school in September, it’s no use trying to persuade me. I’ll never get any exams, and I don’t need them. I’m going to Vincent. In Ireland. I’ll go as soon as I can leave.”

They had railed and beseeched. With no success. This is what he was going to do.

“But why are you doing this to us?” Mother had cried.

“I’m not doing anything to you.” Brendan had been mild. “I’m doing it for me, it’s not going to cost you any money. It’s the farm where Father grew up, I thought you’d be pleased.”

“Don’t think he’ll turn the farm over to you automatically,” Father had spluttered. “That old recluse could just as well leave it to the missions. You could easily find you’ve put in all that graft for nothing.”

“Father, I’m not thinking of inheritances and wills and people dying, I’m thinking of how I’d like to spend my days. I was happy there, and Vincent could do with another pair of hands.”

“Well, if he does, isn’t it a wonder that he never married and provided himself with a few pairs of hands of his own around the place without asking strangers in to him?”

“Hardly a stranger, Father,” Brendan had said. “I am his own flesh and blood, his brother’s child.”

It had been a nightmare.

And the communication since had been minimal, cards at Christmas and on birthdays. Perhaps anniversaries. Anna couldn’t remember. Anniversaries. How was she going to assemble the cast for this one?

The maid of honor, as they always called her, was Maureen Barry. She was Mother’s best friend. They had been at school together back in Ireland. Maureen had never married; she was the same age as Mother, forty-six, though she looked younger. She had two dress shops in Dublin—she refused to call them boutiques. Perhaps Anna could talk to Maureen and see what would be best. But a warning bell went off loudly in her head. Mother was a great one for not letting things go outside the family.

There had always been secrets from Maureen.

Like the time that Father had lost his job. It couldn’t be told.

Like the time that Helen ran away when she was fourteen. That was never breathed to Maureen. Mother had said that nothing mattered in the end, everthing could be sorted out just so long as family matters weren’t aired abroad, and neighbors and friends weren’t told all of the Doyle business. It seemed to be a very effective and soothing cure when things went wrong, so the family had always stuck to it.

You would think that Anna should phone Maureen Barry now and ask her as Mother’s oldest friend what was best to do about Brendan and about the anniversary in general.

But Mother would curl up and die if she thought there was the remotest possibility of any member of the family revealing a secret outside it. And the coldness with Brendan was a big secret.

There were no family members who could be asked to act as intermediaries.

So what kind of party? The day was a Saturday, it could be lunch, there were a lot of hotels around Pinner, Harrow, Northwood, and restaurants and places used to doing functions like this. Perhaps a hotel would be best.

It would be formal, for one thing. The banqueting manager would advise about toasts and cakes and photographs.

There wouldn’t have to be weeks of intensive cleaning of the family home and manicuring the front garden.

But a lifetime as the eldest of the Doyles had taught Anna that a hotel would not be right. There were all those dismissive remarks about hotels in the past, destructive and critical remarks about this family, which couldn’t be bothered having the thing in their own home, or the other family, which would be quite glad to invite you to a common hotel, an impersonal place, but wouldn’t let you over their own doorstep, thank you very much.

It would have to be home, the invitation would have to say in silver lettering that the guest was being invited to Salthill, 26 Rosemary Drive, Pinner. Salthill had been a seaside resort over in the West of Ireland where Mother and Maureen Barry used to go when they were young, it had been lovely, they said. Father had never been there, he said there was little time for long family holdiays when he was a boy making his way in Ireland.

Wearily Anna made the list; it would be this size if there wasn’t an Irish contingent, and that size if there were. It could be this size if there was to be a sit-down meal, that size if it were a buffet. This size if it were just drinks and snacks, that size if it were a proper meal.

And who would pay for it?

Very often the children did, she knew that.

But Helen had taken a vow of poverty and had nothing. Brendan, even if he did come, which wasn’t likely, was working for an agricultural worker’s wages. Anna had very little money to spend on such a party.

She had very little money indeed. By dint of hard saving, no lunches, and a few wise buys at Oxfam, she had saved £132. It was in the building society hoping to become £200, and then, when Joe had £200, they were going to Greece together. Joe had £11 at the moment, so he had a longer way to go. But he was sure to get a part soon. His agent had said there were a lot of things coming up. He’d be working any day now.

Anna hoped that he would, she really and truly did.

If he got something good, something where they recognized him properly, something steady, then everything else could fall into place. Not just the Greek holiday but everything. He could arrange a settlement for his sons, give Janet something that would make her feel independent, begin the divorce proceedings. Then Anna could risk leaving Books for People and go to a bigger shop; she would easily get promotion in a large bookshop, a graduate experienced in the trade already. They would love her.

The time had gone by in thought, and soon the keys were turning in the door and the others arriving. Soon the door was open to the public. Planning was over yet again.

At lunchtime Anna made up her mind that she would go out to Pinner that evening and ask her parents straight out how they would like to celebrate the day. It seemed less celebratory than telling them that it was all in hand. But to try to do that was nonsense, really, and she could still get it wrong. She would ask them straight out.

She phoned them to say she would be coming over. Her mother was pleased.

“That’s good, Anna, we haven’t seen you for ages and ages. I was just saying to Daddy I hope Anna’s all right and there’s nothing wrong.”

Anna gritted her teeth.

“Why would there be anything wrong?”

“Well, it’s just been so long, and we don’t know what you do.”

“Mother, it’s been eight days. I was with you last weekend.”

“Yes, but we don’t know how you are getting on.…”

“I phone you almost every day, you
know
how I’m getting on and what I do, get up in Shepherd’s Bush and get the tube in here, and then I go home again. That is what I do, Mother, like a great many million people in London do.” Her voice rose in rage at her mother’s attitude.

The reply was surprisingly mild. “Why are you shouting at me, Anna, my dear child? I only said I was delighted you were coming over this evening, you father will be overjoyed. Will we have a little steak and mushrooms? That’s what we’ll have as a celebration to welcome you back. Yes, I’ll run down to the butcher’s this afternoon, and get it.… That’s simply great you’re going to come back. I can’t wait to tell your father, I’ll give him a call at work now and tell him.”

“Don’t … Mother, just … well, I mean …”

“Of course I’ll tell him, give him pleasure, something to look forward to.”

When she hung up, Anna stood motionless, hand on the receiver, and thought about the one time she had brought Joe to lunch at Salthill, 26 Rosemary Drive. She had invited him as a “friend” and had spent the entire journey making him promise not to reveal that he was (a) living with her and (b) married to someone else.

“Which is the more dangerous one to let slip?” Joe had asked, grinning.

“They’re both equally dangerous,” she had said with such seriousness that he had leaned over and kissed her on the nose in the train in front of everyone.

It had been all right as a visit, Anna had thought. Mother and Father had inquired politely about Joe’s acting career and whether he knew famous actors and actresses.

In the kitchen Mother had asked if he was Anna’s boyfriend.

“Just a friend,” Anna had insisted.

On the way home she asked Joe what he had made of them.

“Very nice but very tense people,” he had said.

Tense? Mother and Father. She had never thought of them as tense. But in a way it was true.

And Joe didn’t know what they were like when there was no outsider there, Mother wondering why Helen hadn’t been there on two occasions during the week when they had telephoned her convent. Father striding around the garden snapping the heads off flowers and saying that boy was so restless and idle that he could only end up with the job of village idiot sucking straws on a small farm, it was hard to know why he had to go back to the one village in Ireland where they were known, and live with the one man in Ireland who could be guaranteed to give the worst impression of the Doyles and all their activities, his own brother, Brendan’s Uncle Vincent. Just to inherit that miserable farm.

Joe had seen none of this side of things and yet he still thought her parents tense.

She had pursued it. Why? How did it show itself?

But Joe didn’t want to be drawn.

“It’s like this,” he had said to her, smiling to take any hurt out of his words. “Some people just live that kind of life where this can be said and that can’t. It’s a way of going on where everthing is a pretense, an act.… Now that doesn’t bother me if people want to live like that. It’s not my way, but people make up a lot of rules and live by them.…”

“We’re not like that!” She was stung.

“I’m not criticizing you, my love. I’m just telling you what I see.… I see Hare Krishnas shaving their heads and dancing and waving bells. I see you and your family acting things out just like they do. I don’t let the Hare Krishnas get up my nose, I won’t let your old man and old lady either. Right?” He had grinned at her winningly.

She had grinned back with a hollow empty feeling inside her and resolved not to go on about home anymore.

The day came to an end. One of the nicer publishing reps was there as the shop closed. He asked her to come and have a drink.

“I’m going to darkest Pinner,” Anna said. “I’d better set out now.”

“I’m driving that way, why don’t we have a drink en route?” he said.

“Nobody’s driving to Pinner.” She laughed.

“Oh, how do you know I don’t have a mistress out that way, or am hoping to acquire one?” he teased.

“We wouldn’t discuss such things in Rosemary Drive,” Anna said, mock primly.

“Come on, get in, the car’s on a double yellow line.” He laughed.

He was Ken Green, she had talked to him a lot at the bookshop. They had both started work the same day, it had been a common bond.

He was going to leave his company and join a bigger one, so was she; neither of them had done it.

“Do you think we’re just cowards?” she asked him as he negotiated the rush-hour traffic.

“No, there are always reasons. What’s holding you back, these moral folk in Rosemary Drive?”