Silver Wedding

by Maeve Binchy

  But those were black days long ago, and the O’Hagan scorn had been hard to bear. And Desmond knew that his promise was given under no duress. He had held Deirdre’s small hand and on the night they were about to tell her parents the news, he had begged her to trust him. He remembered his words.

  ‘I always wanted to be in buying and selling, I know it’s not the thing to tell your family but even when the tinkers came to town I loved it, there was an excitement about it, about the way they put out their scarves and bright glittering combs on the ground, I knew what it was about.’

  Deirdre had smiled at him confidently, knowing he would never bring up anything as alien as tinkers in the O’Hagan household.

  ‘I want you,’ he had said, ‘I want it more than anything in the world and when a man has a dream there’s nothing he cannot conquer. I’ll conquer the retail business in England. They’ll be glad they didn’t lose you to a doctor or a lawyer. The day will come when they’ll be so glad they settled for a merchant prince.’

  And Deirdre had looked at him trustingly as she had always looked ever since.

  He supposed that she was still his dream, but why had she not come to his mind when Mr Palazzo had asked him?

  Desmond found himself walking the well-trodden path towards home. His feet had taken him on automatic pilot to the bus stop. At this time of day there were no crowds, no queues, how pleasant to be able to travel like this instead of incessant rush hours.

  Suppose he did ring Deirdre, he knew she was at home, she was working over that infernal silver wedding list again. Surely she would appreciate his honesty and directness?

  She loved him in a sort of way, didn’t she? Like he loved her. And he did love her. She had changed of course like everyone changed, but it would be ludicrous to expect her to be the fluffy blonde desirable young Deirdre O’Hagan who had filled his thoughts and his heart so urgently. Why wasn’t she the dream? She was connected with the dream in a way. The dream was to make good his promise. But he couldn’t have told that to Carlo Palazzo in a million years, not even if he had been able to articulate it, which he hadn’t. Not until this moment when the bus was approaching.

  Desmond hesitated. Should he let the bus go, find a telephone and invite his own wife out to lunch and tell her his own real thoughts? In the hope that they could somehow share them the way they had shared every little heartbeat during that time when they stood strong against the might of the O’Hagans about their marriage.

  ‘Are you getting on or are you not?’ the conductor asked him, not unreasonably. Desmond had been standing holding the rail. He remembered Marigold saying to him, ‘Some people, Dizzy, do nothing at all.’ But he was nearly on the bus.

  ‘I’m getting on,’ he said. And his face was so mild and inoffensive that the tired young bus conductor who also wanted a different and a better life abused him no further.

  He sorted it out for Deirdre as he walked towards Rosemary Drive, little phrases, little reasoning steps. There would be more scope in a roving managerial position, he would get to know the workings of the company at first hand rather than being tucked away in his own little eyrie. He would explain that Frank had been called away, he would mention that the exact wording was not firmed up but the magic word Manager would be included. He would not mention the Palazzo invitation to supper because he knew it would not materialize.

  He felt no bitterness towards Frank for avoiding the confrontation. Nor indeed for initiating the move. Frank was probably right, the functions of Special Projects had indeed been taken over.

  Frank at far remove might even be giving him a chance to find a better niche. He wished he could summon up more enthusiasm for this niche, whatever it might be.

  It would confuse Deirdre to see him arriving home unexpectedly for lunch. She would fuss and say over and over that he should have warned her. The importance of his news would be lost in a welter of worries about there being nothing at hand.

  Desmond decided that he would go into the corner shop, and tell Mr Patel that yet again he had provided a service. They sold pizzas there, not very good ones, wrapped in rather too much plastic and with the wrong ratio of base and topping. Still that might do. Or he might get a tin of soup and some crusty French bread. He didn’t remember whether Mr Patel sold chicken pieces, that might be nice.

  There were no customers in the shop, but more unusually there was nobody sitting at the till. On the few occasions when Suresh Patel did not sit there himself as if at a throne, still able to advise and direct his tiny empire, there was always another occupant. His silent wife, wordless in English but able to ring up the prices she read on the little labels. Sometimes it was the young owlish son or the pert little daughter. Mr Patel’s brother didn’t seem capable of manning the family business.

  Desmond moved past the central aisle and saw with that lurching feeling of recognition that a raid was in progress.

  There was that slow-motion sense of things not being real. Desmond felt as he looked at the two boys in their leather jackets beating the fat brother of Suresh Patel that this was like an action replay when watching a football match.

  Desmond felt the old bile, but this time it was a sharper feeling. He thought he was going to choke.

  He took two steps backward. He would run out and raise the alarm, he would run around the corner to the street where there would be more people passing by. And, if he was honest, where there would be less chance of the two muggers catching him calling for help.

  But before he could go any further he heard the voice of Suresh Patel calling to the boys with the bars.

  ‘I beg of you, I beg of you, he is simple in the head, he does not know anything about any safe. There is no safe. There is money in the night deposit. Please do not hit my brother again.’

  Desmond saw with another shock that he could feel physically in his own stomach that Mr Patel’s arm hung at an odd angle. As if it had already been beaten. And already broken.

  Even if Marigold had not said to him sadly that there were some people who never did anything at all, he would have done what he did. Desmond Doyle, the man so mild that he had to be moved from an office lest he take root, so meek that he made a young Australian beauty cry over his future, knew suddenly what he had to do.

  He lifted the stack of trays which had held the bread delivered that morning and he brought it suddenly down on the neck of the first leather jacket. The boy, who could hardly have been as old as his own son Brendan, fell with a thud to the floor. The other one looked at him wild-eyed. Desmond pushed him, jabbing him with the trays, and manoeuvred him towards the back rooms, the living quarters of the whole family.

  ‘Is your wife in there?’ he shouted.

  ‘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.

  ‘Perhap
s 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 is, 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.’

  5

  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 bishoplike 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 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 Communion, 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 above 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.