Silver Wedding

by Maeve Binchy

  Already she had wept over her mother’s glasses in their spectacle case which had been given to her in the hospital. Somehow it seemed sadder than anything else to see the sign of Mother’s frail fading eyesight, handed to her in a useless little case. Maureen, usually so decisive, hadn’t known what to do with them. They were still there zipped into a side compartment of her handbag. Mother would not have been so soft-hearted. She would have been cool and practical as she had been about everything.

  They had only fought once, a long time ago, and it had not been about Frank Quigley nor about any man. Mother hadn’t thought that the clothing business looked all right, or sounded respectable enough.

  Maureen had blazed her anger, what the hell did it matter how things looked or sounded? It was how they were, what they were about that was important. Mother had smiled a cool infuriating smile. Maureen had stormed out. Up to the North of Ireland first where she got a thorough grounding in retail dress sense from two sisters who ran a smart clothes shop and were pleased and flattered to see the dark handsome young university graduate from Dublin come up to learn all they could teach her. Then she went to London.

  It was then that she realized how she had never been really close to Deirdre, they had met rarely while she was there. Deirdre had been tied up with two babies at that stage, and Maureen had been going to trade fairs and exhibitions, and learning what to look for. Maureen told Deirdre nothing of her coldness with her mother for fear that it would go straight back to the O’Hagan household, and presumably Deirdre had secrets, worries and problems that she didn’t tell Maureen either.

  And anyway the coldness didn’t last. It had never been an out-and-out hostility, there were always postcards, and short letters and brief phone calls. So that mother could tell Eileen O’Hagan how well Maureen was doing here, there and everywhere. So that appearances could be kept up. Appearances had been very important to Mother. Maureen determined that she would honour this to the very end, far beyond the grave.

  Maureen Barry lived in one of the earlier apartment blocks that had been built in Dublin. She lived ten minutes by foot and two minutes by car from the big house where she was born and where her mother had lived all her life. It had been Mother’s home, and Father had married in. For the short married life that they had. He had died abroad when Maureen was six, forty years ago this year.

  It would be his anniversary shortly, in three weeks; how strange to think that she would attend the Mass they always had said for the repose of his soul totally on her own. Normally she and Mother went together, for as long as she could remember. Always at eight o’clock in the morning. Mother had said that it was discourteous to involve others in your own personal mourning and memorials. But Mother had always told people afterwards that they had been to the Mass.

  The living arrangements were yet one more way in which the relationship between the two women was widely praised. Many another mother would have clung to her daughter and kept her in the family home as long as possible, not noticing or caring about the normal wish of the young to leave the nest. Many a less dutiful daughter might have wanted to go away to another city. To London perhaps or even Paris. Maureen was successful in the fashion world. To have two shops with her own name on them by the time she was forty was no mean achievement. And such smart shops too. She moved from one to another with ease, each had a good manageress who was allowed freedom to run the day-to-day business. It had left Maureen free to buy, to choose, to decide to lunch with the fashionable women whose taste she monitored and even formed. She went to London four times a year and to New York once every spring. She had a standing that her mother would never have believed possible in those bad days, the bad time when they had not seen eye to eye. It hadn’t lasted long, and every relationship was allowed to have some valley periods, Maureen told herself. Anyway, she didn’t want to think about those days now, not so soon after Mother’s death.

  It had indeed been so sensible to live apart but near. They saw each other almost every day. Never in all the years since she moved into her apartment did Maureen open her front door and find her mother unannounced on her step. Mother wouldn’t dream of calling to a young woman who might be entertaining someone, and wish to do so privately.

  It was different about Maureen going back to her old home. No such strictures applied there. Maureen was welcome to call at any time, but Mother managed to let her know that at the end of a bridge party was a particularly suitable time to drop in for a sherry, because everyone could have the chance to admire both the elegant daughter and the evidence of her consideration and devotion to her mother.

  On the Sunday she walked to the house where she would never again see her mother walking lightly down the hall to open the door, viewed through the multi-coloured stained glass of the hall-door panels. It felt strange to go to the empty house, because by now there would be no kind friends and relatives staying around as support. Mother’s great friend Mrs O’Hagan, Deirdre’s mother, had been very pressing and begged Maureen to come and see them, to drop in for supper, to use the O’Hagan house just like she had her old home.

  It had been kind, but not the right thing. Maureen wasn’t a little girl, she was a middle-aged woman for heaven’s sake. It was not appropriate for Mrs O’Hagan to invite her up to the house as she had done thirty years ago when she and Mother had decided that Deirdre and Maureen should be friends.

  Mother had always set a lot of store on what Eileen O’Hagan thought about this and that. Eileen and Kevin were her greatest friends. They had always invited Mother to join them at the theatre or the races. They had never to Maureen’s recollection tried to find a suitable second husband for her. Or perhaps they had. She would not have known.

  As she walked through the sunny streets towards her old home Maureen wondered what life would have been like if Mother had married again. Would a stepfather have encouraged her or fought her when she wanted to take up her career in what she had called the fashion industry and her mother had said was common drapery and glorified salesgirl work?

  Would Mother have been coquettish with men years ago? After all Maureen herself did not feel old and past sexual encounters at the age of forty-six, so why should she assume that her mother had? But it was something that never came into their lives.

  They talked a lot about Maureen’s young men, and how they had all somehow failed to measure up. But they had never talked about any man for Mother.

  She let herself into the house and shivered slightly because there was no little fire lit in what Mother had always called the morning room. Maureen plugged in the electric fire and looked around.

  Two weeks ago on a Sunday she had come here to find Mother looking white and anxious. She had this pain, possibly indigestion but … Maureen had acted quickly, she helped her mother gently to the car and drove calmly to the hospital. No point in disturbing the doctor, calling him away from his Sunday breakfast she had said to Mother, let’s go to the outpatients’ department, to Casualty. They were there the whole time in a hospital, they would set her mind at rest.

  Mother, looking more and more anxious, agreed with her, and even at this stage Maureen had noticed with sinking heart that her mother’s careful speech sounded slurred, the words were running together.

  They were seen at once, and within an hour Maureen was waiting outside the intensive care to be told the news that her mother was having a massive stroke. One that she might very well not recover from.

  Mother recovered, but not her faculties of speech; her eyes, bright and burning, seemed to beg for an end to this indignity.

  She could press once for yes and twice for no on Maureen’s arm. Maureen had spoken to her alone.

  ‘Are you afraid, Mother?’

  No.

  ‘You do believe that you’ll get better, don’t you?’

  No.

  ‘I want you to believe that, you must. No, sorry: of course you can’t answer that. I mean, don’t you want to get better?’

  No.

&
nbsp; ‘But surely for me, Mother, for all your friends, we want you to get better. God, how do I say something that you can answer? Do you know that I love you? Very very much?’

  Yes, and a lessening of the strain in the eyes.

  ‘And do you know that you are the best mother that anyone could have?’

  Yes.

  Then she had been tired and not long after that she had slipped into unconsciousness.

  They had been right, the friends who had stood in this room, Mother’s morning room that got the early light, when they had nodded and said Sophie Barry could not have lived the dependent life of an invalid. It was better that she had been taken quickly away from pain and indignity.

  Could it really only have been two weeks since that Sunday morning? It felt like ten years in so many ways.

  Maureen unfolded the black plastic sacks. She knew that a great deal of Mother’s things could indeed be thrown away, there was no one to gasp and wonder over old mementos of cavalry balls years ago, or programmes of long-forgotten concerts signed with some illegible squiggle. No grandchildren to ooh and aah over worlds gone by. And Maureen in her own busy life would not look at them, a lot of things would go.

  She sat at the small writing desk: an antique. She might take it for the hallway of her own flat. It was such an impractical thing dating from a time when ladies only penned little notes or invitation cards. It had nothing to do with today’s world. Mrs O’Hagan had been surprised that Maureen was going to remain in her flat. She was sure that Sophie would have wanted her own home to continue in the family. But Maureen was adamant. She lived a life too full to involve cleaning a house with as many nooks and crannies as this. Her own space was custom-made for her, wall-long closets for her clothes, a study with proper filing cabinets as a mini-office, a big room where she could entertain, its kitchen in full view of the dining table so that she could talk to her guests as she served them their dinner.

  No, it would be a backwards move to come home to this house. Mother knew that too.

  First she went through the finances. She was surprised how fiddly and disorganized Mother had become lately. It was sad to see little notes Mother had written to herself: a reminder here, a query there. It would have been so easy for Maureen to have set up an uncomplicated system like her own, five minutes would have done it, a letter to the bank asking them to pay so much each month to electricity, gas, insurance fund … It would have cut out all these final demands and letters of bewilderment. Mother must have appeared much more in control than she was.

  Then there was an endless correspondence with a stockbroker. Like everyone of her generation, Mother had believed that wealth was measured in stocks and shares. Only the broker’s letters were to be found: Mother had kept no copies of her own side of the correspondence. It was a sorry tale of confusion and disappointment.

  Maureen felt weary and sad as she finished the series of responses to what had obviously been querulous demands for information and explanations why shares that everyone knew were excellent seemed to have vanished into nothingness. Briskly Maureen wrote a letter to the broker explaining that her mother had died and asking him to send her details of the nature of the portfolio as it stood now. She wished that she had involved herself more but with Mother there was such a dignity, there was a boundary you didn’t cross.

  Maureen kept all the letters she had written in her slim briefcase, she would photocopy them later, back at her own apartment. Mr White who had been Mother’s solicitor had already congratulated her on her efficiency; he wished that many more young women could be as organized but then of course she hadn’t built herself a big business without having a good financial brain and a sense of administration. He had shown her Mother’s will, a simple document leaving everything to her beloved daughter Mary Catherine (Maureen) Barry with gratitude for all her years of devoted love and care. The will had been made in 1962. Just after the reconciliation. After Mother had accepted that Maureen was not going to abandon her idea of how she would live her life. Since the day that Sophie Barry had written down her gratitude for the devoted love and care, twenty-three more years of it had been given. Surely she would never have believed that for over two decades Maureen would remain single and remain her close friend.

  It was taking more time than she had thought, and she felt a strange sense of loss, different entirely to the grieving at the funeral. It was as if she had lost her idea of Mother as someone almost perfect. This nest of confusion stuffed into the drawers of a lovely writing desk spoke of a peevish old woman, confused and irritable. Not the calm beautiful Sophie Barry who until two weeks ago had sat like a queen in her throne room in this her morning room with its tasteful furnishings. Maureen didn’t like discovering this side of her mother.

  She had made herself a cup of coffee to give her more energy for the task and reached out resolutely for the next big bulky envelope. She remembered the way Mother used to say, ‘Maureen my child, if a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing properly.’ That used to apply to anything from cleansing her face twice a day with Mother’s special cream and then splashing it with rosewater, to going back and having six more tennis lessons so that she would look that much better at the summer parties. Well if Mother could see her now, something Maureen doubted, she would certainly agree that the devoted daughter was doing the job properly.

  She was totally unprepared for the papers she found in the envelope marked Solicitor. She thought it might be some more fostering dealings about shares or pensions, but these were letters from a completely different solicitor, and they were dated forty years ago. There were a series of legal documents, all signed in 1945. And they showed that Maureen’s father Bernard James Barry had not died of a virus when he was in Northern Rhodesia just after the war. Sophie Barry’s husband had deserted her forty years ago. He had left his wife and child and gone to live with another woman in Bulawayo in what was then Southern Rhodesia.

  Maureen realized that for all she knew she might have a father still alive, a man of seventy years, living in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. That she might even have stepbrothers and sisters, men and women not much younger than herself. The woman described as his ‘common law wife’ was called Flora Jones and had come from Birmingham in England. Wildly Maureen thought that Mother would have said that Flora was a maid’s name.

  She wasn’t in the habit of pouring herself a stiff drink in the middle of a Sunday morning. Maureen Barry, disciplined in this as in everything else, realized the perils of drinking alone. She had seen too many of her friends lapse into it, at the end of a long hard day with no one to relax with. She had learned this from Mother as she had learned everything. Mother said that widows could slip into tippling if they didn’t exercise some control. Widows, what did Mother mean, acting out a lie for forty years? What kind of closeness was it that meant she couldn’t tell her only daughter the biggest event of her life? What manner of woman could perpetuate a myth about a man who had to be buried abroad?

  With another ripple of shock running through her like the continuous waves after an earthquake, Maureen realized that her mother who had been a sane woman had gone out every May and had a Mass said for the repose of the soul of Bernard James Barry, a man who must have been alive for some if not all of the time that she was doing this.

  There was whiskey in a decanter. Maureen smelled it, it reminded her of when she had a toothache years and years ago and Mother would put a whiskey-flavoured piece of cotton wool on the gum to numb the pain. Mother had loved her so much.

  Maureen poured out a large measure of neat whiskey, drank it, and burst into tears.

  It was a measure of the lonely life she led, she realized, that she had no one to tell. There was no bosom pal to ring up, no house where she could run around and share this staggering news. Like her mother, she had kept aloof from intimacies. There was no man she had let close enough to her thoughts to confide in. Her work colleagues knew nothing of her private life. Her mother’s friends … oh yes … they would be i
nterested. My, my, would she get a hearing at O’Hagans’ if she were to turn up with the news.

  Flora. Flora Jones. It was like a name from a musical comedy. And now presenting Miss Flora Jones, the Carmen Miranda of our town. There had been letters about divorce, and copies of letters from Mother’s solicitor repeating over and over, that not only was there no divorce in Ireland, and that his client was a staunch Roman Catholic, but that this was not the matter at issue, the question at issue apparently had been money. Maureen leafed still unbelieving through the documents … kept meticulously in order – this was a younger firmer Mother, more in control forty years ago, wounded and enraged and determined she was going to get the last penny from the man who had betrayed her. A sum had been paid over. A sum which in today’s money would have been considered staggering. The solicitor of Bernard James Barry in Bulawayo wrote to the solicitor of Mrs Sophie Barry in Dublin that his client was willing to realize most of his assets in order to provide for his wife and eldest daughter. His client Mr Barry had now, as was already known to Mrs Barry, a second daughter by Miss Flora Jones, a daughter whose birth he was most anxious to legitimize.

  Mother’s letter of reply to that had been extraordinary, it was written exactly as Mother spoke. Maureen could hear her voice as she read the words. She could literally hear Mother’s voice, slow, measured, articulate, a younger stronger voice than of late.

  ‘… while you will understand that there can never be any question of a divorce since it is against the rules of the Church to which we both belong, I cannot legislate for you and your actions in a foreign land. I am writing this letter without the approval of the solicitors but I think you will understand its general drift. I have accepted your settlement for Maureen and myself, I shall pursue you in no court, nor under any jurisdiction. You shall be totally free from me if and only if you never return to Ireland. I shall announce your death. Today is April 15th. If you return this letter to me with your promise that you will never come back to Ireland again, then I will say that you died abroad of a virus on May 15th.