by Maeve Binchy
She told the Sisters amazing things each evening about the sexuality of growing things.
‘They never told us a word about this at school,’ she said indignantly. ‘It’s the kind of thing you should know, about everything being male and female even in the garden, for heaven’s sake, and going mad to propagate.’
‘Let’s hope it all does propagate after your hard work,’ Brigid said. ‘You really are great, Helen, I don’t know where you find the energy.’
Helen flushed with pleasure. And she was able to remember those words of praise too a little later when the problem of the bedding plants came up. The nice woman who said she really admired the Sisters even though she wasn’t a Roman Catholic herself and disagreed with the Pope about everything, brought them some lovely plants as a gift. Red-faced with exertion from planting them, Helen assured the others that evening they were very very lucky. It would have cost a fortune if they had to buy all these, nobody knew how expensive things were in garden centres.
She had barely finished talking when the news came that the plants had all been dug up from a park and a nearby hotel. The repercussions were endless. The explanations from every side seemed unsatisfactory. Helen said she had to protect her sources and wouldn’t give them the name of the benefactor. But in mid conversation she mentioned to the young policewoman that Mrs Harris couldn’t possibly have taken them deliberately, she wasn’t that kind of person, and that was enough for the two constables to identify exactly who she was talking about. Mrs Harris had been in trouble before. A latter-day Robin Hood was how she was known down at the station, taking clothes from one washing-line, ironing them and presenting them as gifts to another home.
Only Helen could have got herself involved with Mrs Harris, the other nuns sighed. Only Helen could have got them all involved, was Brigid’s view, but she didn’t say anything at the time.
Helen realized that the garden couldn’t be considered her full-time work. And even when she had reassured the Community that she was taking on no further assistance from gargantuan eaters of meals or compulsive plant thiefs she felt she should take on more than just a horticultural role. She was determined to play her part as fully as possible. She said she would do half the skivvy work, leaving Sister Joan or Sister Maureen free for a half day to do something else.
It worked. Or it sort of worked.
They all got used to the fact that Helen might not have scrubbed the table or taken in their washing when it started to rain. They knew that she would never know when they were running out of soap or cornflakes. That she wouldn’t really rinse out and hang the dishcloths up to dry. But she was there, eager and willing to help.
And she did answer the phone and more or less coped when people came to call.
Which is why she was there when Renata Quigley came to see the Sister in charge.
Renata. Tall and dark, somewhere in her mid-thirties. Married for fifteen years to Frank Quigley.
What on earth could she want, and how had she tracked Helen down to St Martin’s? Helen felt her heart race and she could almost hear it thumping in her ears. At the same time there was a sense of ice-cold water in the base of her stomach.
She hadn’t seen Renata since the wedding, but she had seen pictures of her of course, in magazines and in the trade papers Daddy had brought home. Mrs Frank Quigley, the former Miss Renata Palazzo, exchanging a joke or enjoying herself at the races or presenting a prize to the apprentice of the year or walking among the high and mighty at some charity function.
She was very much more beautiful than Helen had thought, she had skin that Mother would have called sallow but looked olive-like and beautiful with her huge dark eyes and her dark shiny hair with its expensive cut. She wore her scarf very artistically caught in a brooch and draped as if it were part of her green and gold dress. She carried a small leather handbag in green and gold squares.
Her face was troubled and her long thin hands with their dark red nails were twisting round the little patchwork bag.
‘Can I please speak to the Sister in charge?’ she asked Helen.
Helen looked at her, open-mouthed. Renata Quigley didn’t recognize her. Suddenly the memory of an old movie came back to her, and some beautiful actress looking straight at the camera and saying, ‘Nobody looks at the face of a nun.’ It was the kind of thing that would drive Sister Brigid mad. Helen had never forgotten it. Until this moment she had never realized how true it was. There was Renata Quigley on her doorstep looking straight into her eyes and she didn’t recognize Helen, the daughter of Deirdre and Desmond Doyle, her husband’s friends.
Helen who had caused so much trouble that time.
But perhaps she had never known. With another shock Helen realized that Renata might have been told nothing at the time.
While all this was going through her mind, Helen stood at the door, a girl in a grey jumper and skirt, with a cross around her neck, her hair tied back with a black ribbon, her face perhaps covered in grime from the garden where she had been when she heard the doorbell.
Perhaps she didn’t even look like a nun.
It was obvious that Renata didn’t connect her with the child she had known in Rosemary Drive, Pinner, when she had come to call.
‘I’m sorry, there’s nobody here but me,’ Helen said, recovering slightly.
‘Are you one of the Community?’ Renata looked doubtful.
‘Yes, well yes. I’m here in St Martin’s, part of the house, one of the Sisters.’ It was straining the truth but Helen was not going to let Renata Quigley go until she knew why she had come here in the first place.
‘It’s a little complicated, Sister,’ Renata said nervously.
Helen’s smile nearly split her face in half.
‘Well, come on in and sit down and tell me, that’s what we’re here for,’ she said.
And she stood back and held the door open while Frank Quigley’s wife walked into St Martin’s. Into Helen’s home.
That face, that dark lean face with the high cheekbones. Helen Doyle knew it so well. She remembered well her mother saying with some satisfaction that it would run to fat all the same in the end, mark her words, all the middle-aged Italian women you saw with several chins, they too had been lean girls with long, perfectly formed faces. It was in their diets, in their lifestyles, in the amount of olive oil they managed to put away.
When she was a child Helen had been irritated with her mother for all this kind of niggling. What did it matter? Why was Mother so anxious to criticize, to find fault?
But later, later Helen was to look at pictures of the face and wish that her own were like it, that she had hollows and soft golden skin instead of round cheeks and freckles. She would have killed to get that dark heavy hair she saw in the photographs, and wear those loop earrings, which made Helen look like a tinker running away from an encampment, but made Renata Palazzo Quigley look glamorous as an exotic princess from a far land.
‘I came here because I heard that there is a Sister Brigid … I thought perhaps …’ She faltered.
‘I suppose you could say I’m Sister Brigid’s deputy,’ Helen said. In ways it could be true. She was in charge of the house when they were all out, that could be considered being a deputy. ‘I’ll be glad to do what I can.’
Helen fought back the other thoughts in her mind. She simply closed a door on Renata’s picture in a silver frame on a small table with a long white cloth reaching to the floor. She closed another door on Frank Quigley, her father’s friend, with tears in his eyes. She tried to think only of this moment. A woman had come to St Martin’s for help in some way, and Sister Brigid was out. Helen was in charge.
‘It’s just that you’re very young …’ Renata was doubtful.
Helen was reassuring. She had her hand on the kettle and paused to look at Renata.
‘No, no, I’m much more experienced than you think.’
She felt a little light-headed. Could she really be saying these words to Frank Quigley’s wife?
/> It had been impossible in Rosemary Drive that time when Father had lost his job. Helen thought back on it and it flashed in front of her as if she were watching a video on that machine that she had got for St Martin’s once because the company had assured her it was free for a month and there would be no obligation. It had all been very difficult, the business about the video, like everything.
But nothing was as frightening as the time her father had left Palazzo. There was a council of war every night and Mother had warned them that they must tell nobody.
‘But why?’ Helen had begged. She couldn’t bear her sister and brother to accept that this was the way things should be from now on. ‘Why does it have to be a secret? It’s not Daddy’s fault that they changed the place. He can get another job. Daddy can get any job.’
She remembered still how Mother had snapped at her.
‘Your father doesn’t want any job, he wants his job at Palazzo back. And he will have it back soon, so in the meantime nothing is to be said. Do you hear me, Helen? Outside this house not one word is to be said. Everyone is to think that your father is going to work as usual in Palazzo.’
‘But how will he earn money?’ Helen had asked.
It was a reasonable question. To this day she didn’t regret it, like she sometimes regretted the things she had said, the offers she had made, the questions she had asked.
Anna had said nothing, for an easy life she had explained.
Brendan had said nothing because nothing was what Brendan always said.
But Helen couldn’t say nothing.
She was sixteen years old, grown up, in her last year at school. She would not stay on and do A levels like Anna. Even though she felt she was twice as bright as Anna in many ways. No, Helen was going to see the world, try her hand at this and that, get on-the-job experience.
She was so full of life, at sixteen some people thought she was years younger, a big schoolgirl. Other people thought she was years older, a lively student going on twenty.
Frank Quigley had no idea how old she was the afternoon she went to see him in his office.
The dragon woman Miss Clarke had protected him as she always had. Helen wondered could she possibly be there still? It was years ago. Surely she had given up hoping that Mr Quigley was going to look into her eyes and say that she was beautiful without her glasses?
Helen had left her school blazer downstairs with the doorman, and had opened the top buttons of her school shirt in order to look more grown up. The dragon woman had eventually let her in. There were very few who could withstand Helen when she was in full flow. Explanation came hard upon explanation, and all the time she was moving towards his office. Before the dragon realized it, Helen was in.
She was flushed and excited.
Frank Quigley had looked up, surprised.
‘Well, well, Helen Doyle. You’re not meant to be here, I’m sure.’
‘I know.’ She laughed easily.
‘You should be at school, not bursting into people’s offices.’
‘I do a lot of things I shouldn’t do.’
She had sat on the corner of his desk swinging her legs, shoulders hunched up. He looked at her with interest. Helen knew she had been right to come here, the silence of Rosemary Drive was no way to handle things. There had to be confrontation.
‘What can I do for you?’ He had a mock gallantry. He was quite handsome in a way, dark with curly hair. Old of course, as old as her father, even. But different.
‘I suppose you could take me to lunch,’ she said. It was the kind of thing people said in films and in plays on telly. It worked for them, perhaps it would for her too. She gave him a smile much braver and more confident than she felt inside.
‘Lunch?’ He laughed in a short bark. ‘Lord, Helen, I don’t know what kind of lifestyles you think we live down here …’ He broke off, looking at her disappointed face.
‘Aw hell, I’ve not had lunch out for years.’
‘I never had,’ Helen said simply.
That did it.
They went to an Italian restaurant which was almost dark like night and there were candles on the table.
Every time Helen tried to bring up the subject of her father he skirted around it. She knew that in those television series about big business they always came to the point at the coffee stage.
There was no coffee. There was a Zambucca. A liquorice-tasting liqueur. With a little coffee bean in it and the waiter set it alight. Helen had never seen anything so marvellous.
‘It’s like a grown-up’s birthday cake,’ she said delightedly.
‘You’re fairly grown up for seventeen,’ Frank said. ‘Or is it older?’
This was to her advantage, if he thought she was older than sixteen he would listen better. Take her more seriously.
‘Almost eighteen,’ she lied.
‘You’ve been around, despite the schoolgirl get-up,’ he said.
‘I’ve been around,’ Helen said.
The more travelled he thought she was, the more he would listen when the time came to talk.
The time didn’t come to talk.
He had been affectionate and admiring and had patted her cheek and even held her face up to the candlelight to see if there was any telltale ring of red wine around her mouth before she went back to school.
‘I’m not going back to school,’ Helen said very definitely. She looked Frank Quigley straight in the eye. ‘You know that, and I know that.’
‘I certainly hoped it,’ he said, and his voice sounded a bit throaty. Something about the way he stroked her cheek and lifted her hair made it difficult to talk about her father’s job, Helen had felt it would somehow be wrong to bring the subject up when he was being so attentive. She was relieved when he suggested they go back to his place so that they could talk properly.
‘Do you mean the office?’ She was doubtful. The dragon would keep interrupting.
‘I don’t mean the office,’ he said very steadily, looking at her. ‘You know that and I know that.’
‘I certainly hoped it,’ she said, echoing his words.
The apartment block was very luxurious. Mother had always said she could not understand why Frank Quigley hadn’t bought himself a proper house now that he was a married man. But then he probably had expectations of the big white house with the wrought-iron gates and the large well-kept gardens. The house of the Palazzos.
But Mother couldn’t have known how splendid the flat was. Flat wasn’t the word for it, really. It was on two floors, there was a lovely staircase leading up to a floor which had a big balcony with chairs and a table outside, the balcony ran along the whole length of the place, past the sitting room and the bedroom.
They went out the sitting room door to look at the view from the balcony. And Helen’s heart lurched with a sudden realization as they left the balcony to return indoors through the bedroom.
Her hand went to her throat in an automatic gesture of fright. ‘Your wife …?’ she said.
Long long afterwards when she played it back in her mind, she thought of all the things she could have said, should have said, might have said. How had it been that the only thing which did come to her to say was something that could obviously be taken to mean that she was willing and enthusiastic, but just afraid of discovery?
‘Renata isn’t here, Helen,’ Frank Quigley said softly. ‘You know that and I know that, just as we both knew you weren’t going back to school.’
She had heard that it wasn’t healthy to try to blot something out of your memory, to try to pretend that it had never happened. Helen didn’t care whether it was healthy or not, for a long time she tried to forget that afternoon.
The moment of no return, the look of bewilderment and anger when she had shied away from him first.
The urgency, and the pain, the sheer hurt and stabbing and fear that he was so out of control that he might do literally anything and kill her. The way he rolled away and groaned, not like that first groan but with shame
and then with fury.
‘You told me, you said you’d been around,’ he said with his head in his hands as he sat on one side of the bed, white, naked and ridiculous-looking.
She lay on the other beside the silver-framed photograph of the lean olive-faced Renata. Silent and disapproving-looking beside her marriage bed. As if she had always known what might happen there one day.
Helen had lain there and looked at the picture of Our Lady, it was the one you saw everywhere called Madonna of the Wayside. At least Our Lady hadn’t had to go through all this to get our Lord. It had been done miraculously. Helen looked at the picture because that meant she didn’t have to look at her father’s friend Frank Quigley who was crying into his hands. And it meant she didn’t have to look at the white sheets which were stained with blood and she didn’t have to think about how badly he had injured her and if she would have to go to a doctor. Or if she might be pregnant.
She didn’t know how long it was before she made a move to the bathroom and cleaned herself up. She didn’t seem to have been very badly injured, the bleeding had stopped.
She dressed herself carefully and dusted herself with Renata’s talcum powder which wasn’t in a tin like ordinary powder, it was in a big glass bowl with a pink swansdown puff.
When she came out, Frank was dressed. And white-faced.
‘The bed …?’ she began.
‘Forget the bloody bed.’
‘I could …’
‘You’ve done enough,’ he snapped.
Helen’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I’ve done enough? What did I do, I came to talk to you about my father and why he’d been sacked, it was you, you who did all this …’ With her hand she waved in the direction of the bed.
His face was contrite. ‘Your father. You did this to try and get Desmond back his piffling little job. Jesus Christ, you’d whore around to get your father a penny-farthing nothing place in a supermarket.’
‘It is not a nothing job.’ Helen’s face burned with anger. ‘He was a very important person there, and now, now he’s been sacked and Mother says we are not to tell anyone, neighbours, relatives, anyone, and he goes off each morning pretending he’s going to work …’