by Maeve Binchy
‘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 cor
rected 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.
Helen sat and hugged her knees in the garden where she had sat, misunderstood and thinking herself unloved, all the years of her childhood. She heard footsteps behind her. Anna no doubt asking her to come in and not to make a scene, Mother telling her not to sit on damp stone, Grandmother O’Hagan about to ask when was she ever going to be professed. She looked up. It was Frank Quigley.
A terror seized her throat and she felt a momentary light-headedness. It was of course impossible that he was going to touch her, molest her in her parents’ home.
But he looked so menacing in the dark.
‘I heard from your father that you’re thinking of leaving St Martin’s,’ he said.
‘Yes. They want me to go, they threw me out.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true.’
‘Sister Brigid says the others don’t want me.’ She realized as she spoke that she sounded like a child of five years of age with her thumb in her mouth.
‘Sister Brigid is far too fond of you to think that, let alone say it.’
‘How do you know? You only saw her that night, that awful night.’ Helen’s eyes had become as big as dinner plates. The memory of the time she had tried to steal a baby for Frank and Renata Quigley, the night that had turned out so badly, and when the real descent had begun in St Martin’s.
‘No, Helen, I’ve met Sister Brigid many times since then,’ Frank said. ‘We didn’t speak of you much, we had other things to talk about … She was giving me advice. She gave me very good helpful advice, I have you to thank for that.’
‘I meant well that night, I really thought it would have suited everyone.’
‘It might have, you know, but we couldn’t do it that way, always running, always hiding, always pretending. That’s not the way to live.’
‘That’s the way I’ve always lived.’ Helen sounded rebellious and defensive.
‘No, no, it isn’t.’
‘In this house we always pretended, we still are tonight.’
‘Shush,’ he said soothingly.
‘How did you learn to be so upright and not to have to act like the rest of us?’
‘I’m not upright. You of all people should know that.’ Frank spoke seriously. ‘I have done things I am ashamed of, one of them with you. I am very very ashamed of that.’
For the first time since that day in his apartment Helen Doyle looked Frank Quigley in the eyes. For the first time for many years in any encounter she said absolutely nothing.
‘I was always hoping that you would meet somebody nice and somebody young and tender, someone who would put that strange sad day into some kind of perspective for you. Show you that while it was important in one way in many others it was not important at all.’
Still Helen said nothing.
‘So I supposed I was sorry when you went into St Martin’s, because I always thought then that what happened might appear magnified.’
‘I never thought about it again,’ Helen said. She looked at him as she told him the lie, her eyes confident and her head held high.
He knew she was lying but it was important that she didn’t realize.
‘That is so much the right way to be, and it certainly puts me in my place.’
He smiled at her. Ruefully, admiringly. He got it just right. And he could see she was beginning to feel better.
‘So what will you do when you do leave, if you’re going to?’
‘I’ll leave. I don’t know yet. Maybe I need time to think.’
‘Is this the place to do your thinking?’ He looked uncertainly up at Salthill, 26 Rosemary Drive.
‘Maybe not.’
‘Maybe you should go away, right away from London. You’re good with children, Brigid tells me, very good.’
‘Yes, I like them. Certainly. They don’t get as upset as adults.’
‘Could you mind one? For a year or two while you’re thinking?’
‘Do you know one?’
They seemed to talk as equals, her fear of him fell away.
‘I do, his name is Alexander. I don’t know him but I know his mother. However she and I had a fight and she doesn’t like me, if I suggested you she would say no. If she were to advertise, and say if you were to apply …’
‘Wouldn’t it be too much of a coincidence?’
‘No, we can do it through Carlo: she asks Carlo about a nanny. Carlo says the daughter of one of his ex-managers, she knew your father.’
‘Is it Miss East?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you fight about?’
‘This and that.’
‘Is Alexander nice?’
‘I don’t know, Helen.’
‘But you’d like to know?’ She seemed to have grown up in minutes.
‘I’d love to know.’
‘Fine,’ said Helen Doyle. ‘I have to do my thinking somewhere, it might a
s well be with Alexander East.’
The cake was produced and cut. And when everybody had a slice of rich gateau on a plate, Desmond tapped on a glass and said that Frank Quigley who had done the honours so well a quarter of a century ago was going to say a few words.
Frank stood forward, he said that it was a great happiness and a great honour to be asked to speak. He made it seem both. Those who listened felt for a moment that he was lucky to have been invited.
He said that he remembered the day when Deirdre, looking roughly the same as she did tonight, had made this commitment; she was young and beautiful, she had her life ahead of her, there were many decisions to make, many paths to choose. She had chosen Desmond Doyle. Smoothly he brought them from the marriage through the early days of Palazzo, to the joys of children, to their luck in each and all of these children, a daughter rising high in the book trade – Palazzo had tried to poach her, but with no success. Another daughter giving her entire life to looking after people, and a son with a love of the land. These were three rich rewards for Deirdre and Desmond to look at and see their hopes realized.
He himself had not been so fortunate in the early days, he hadn’t met anyone he loved until later on in life. His gaze passed gently over Maureen standing cool and admiring in her lemon silk dress. But then he too had known the happiness of married life, though unfortunately unlike Desmond he had not been given the joy of fathering three fine children. But his heart was happy tonight and in no sense tinged with the envy that it might have held over the years. At the weekend he and Renata were going to Brazil, where a legal adoption had been arranged, and where they were going to take home with them and give a home to a girl called Paulette. She was eight months old. Nuns had arranged the papers. She would be very much younger than his friend Desmond’s children but he hoped that the friendship would be there always, as his had been. A lifelong friendship, he said. Some things never change.
It had been masterly, there were a few tears brushed away, and the champagne glasses were raised.
Everyone was touched by Frank. Every person in the room.
Even Maureen Barry.
‘My God, you are one performer,’ she said to him admiringly.
‘Thank you, Maureen.’ He was gallant and suave.