Silver Wedding (4 page)

Anna stood there paralysed. In the flat in Shepherds Bush, the phone was indeed on the floor. To answer it you had to lean out of bed.

She didn't want the girl to struggle any more, she knew the number.

'Is Joe there?' she asked. 'Joe Ashe?'

'No, sorry, he went out for cigarettes, he'll be back in a few minutes.'

Why hadn't he put the answering machine on, Anna asked herself, why had he not automatically turned the switch, like he did always when leaving the flat? In case his agent rang. In case the call that would mean recognition came. Now the call that meant discovery had come instead.

She leaned against the wall of the house where she had grown up. She needed something to give her support.

The girl didn't like silences. 'Are you still there? Do you want to ring him back or is he to ring you or what?'

'Um .. . I'm not sure.' Anna fought for time.

If she got off the phone now, he would never know that she had found out. Things would be the same as they were, nothing would have changed. Suppose she said wrong number, or it doesn't matter, or I'll call again, the girl would shrug, hang up and maybe might not even mention to Joe that someone had called and rung off. Anna would never ask, she wouldn't disturb what they had.

But what had they? They had a man who would bring a girl to her bed, to her bed as soon as she was out of the house. Why try to preserve that? Because she loved him and if she didn't preserve it there would be a big screaming emptiness and she would miss him so much she would die.

Suppose she said she'd hold on, and then confront him? Would he be contrite? Would he explain that it was a fellow actress and they were just learning their lines?

Or would he say it was over? And then the emptiness and ache would begin.

The girl was anxious not to lose the call in case it might be a job for Joe.

'Hang on, I'll write down your name if you like, won't be a jiff, just let me get up, should be up anyway.. . Let's see, there's some kind of a desk over here by the window, no it's a dressing table ... but there's an eyebrow pencil or something. Right, what's the name?'

Anna felt the bile bitter in her throat. In her bed, lying under the beautiful expensive bedspread she had bought last Christmas was a naked girl who was now going to carry the phone across to the simple table where Anna's makeup stood.

'Does the phone stretch all right?' Anna heard herself asking. The girl laughed. 'Yes it does, actually.'

'Good. Well, put it down for a moment on the chair, the pink chair, and reach up on to the mantelpiece, good, and you'll find a spiral-backed pad with a pencil attached by a string.'

'Hey?' The girl was surprised but not uneasy.

Anna continued, 'Good, put back the eye pencil, it's kohl anyway, it wouldn't write well. Now just put down for Joe: "Anna rang. Anna Doyle. No message."'

'Sure he can't ring you back?' A hint of anxiety had crept into the voice of yet another woman who was going to spend weeks, months, even years of her life trying to please Joe Ashe, say the right thing, not risk losing him.

'No, no, I'm with my parents at the moment. In fact I'll be staying here the night. Could you tell him that?'

'Does he know where to find you?'

'Yes, but there's no need to ring me, I'll catch up on him another time.'

When she had hung up she stood holding on to the table for support. She remembered telling them that the hall was the very worst place to have a telephone. It was cold, it was too public, it was uncomfortable. Now she blessed them for having taken no notice of her.

She stood for a few moments but her thoughts would not be gathered, they ran and scurried like mice around her head. Finally when she thought she had at least recovered the power of speech she went back into the room where her mother and father sat.

They who had never known the kind of love she knew nor kind of hurt. She said that if it wouldn't put them out she'd to stay the night, then they'd have all the time in the work discuss the plans.

'You don't have to ask can you stay the night in your home,' her mother said, pleased and fussing. Til put a hot-wa I bottle in the bed just in case, the rooms are all there for you, I that any of you ever come and stay in them.'

'Well, I'd love to tonight.' Anna's smile was nailed firmly I her face.

They had got to the actual numbers that should be invited when Joe rang. She went to the phone calmly.

'She's gone,' he said.

'Has she?' Her voice was detached.

'Yes. It wasn't important.'

'No. No.'

'No need for you to stay over and make a big scene anc meaning of life confrontation.'

'Oh no, none of that.'

He was nonplussed.

'So what are you going to do?' he asked.

'Stay here, as I told your friend.'

'But not for ever?'

'Of course not, just tonight.'

'Then tomorrow night after work. . . you'll be home?'

'Yes indeed, and you'll be packed.'

'Anna,> don't be so dramatic.'

'Absolutely not, calmness itself. Stay there tonight of course, no, for heaven's sake there's no need to go immediately. Just tomorrow evening. Right?'

'Stop this, Anna, I love you, you love me, I'm not lying to you.'

'And neither am I to you, Joe, about tomorrow night. Truly.'

She hung up.

When he called back ten minutes later, she answered the phone herself.

'Please don't be tiresome, Joe. That's a great word of yours . . tiresome. You hate when people press you on things and ask you about things that concern them, tiresome you call it. Maybe I'm learning from you.'

'We have to talk

'Tomorrow after work. After my work that is, you don't have any work, do you? We can talk then for a bit like about where I'm to send your mail, and there won't be any answering machine messages so you'd better set something else up.'

'But. . .'

'I won't come to the phone again, you'll have to talk to my father, and you always said he was a nice bloke with nothing to say...'

She went back to the discussion. She saw that her mother and father were wondering about the phone calls.

'Sorry for the interruptions, I've been having a row with Joe Ashe, my boyfriend. It's very antisocial to bring it into this house, if he rings again I won't talk to him.'

'Is it serious the row?' her mother asked hopefully.

'Yes, Mother, you'll be glad to know it's fairly serious as rows go. Possibly final. Now let's see what people should have to eat.'

And as she told them about a very nice woman called Philippa who ran a catering business, Anna Doyle's mind was far away. Her mind was back in the days when things had been new and exciting and when her life was filled to every corner by the presence of Joe.

It would be hard to fill up all those parts again.

She said that they could ask for sample menus and decide what they wanted. They would write to everyone in very good time, individual letters, personal letters with the invitation, that would mean it was special.

'It is special, isn't it? Twenty-five years married?' She looked from one to the other hoping for reassurance. The cosy claustrophobic sense of family that the Doyles had managed to create around them. To her surprise and regret it didn't seem to be there tonight. Mother and Father looked uncertain about whether a quarter of a century of marriage had been a good thing. This was the one time in her life that Anna needed some sense that things were permanent, that even if her own world was shifting the rest of civilization was on fairly solid ground.

But maybe she was only reading her own situation into it all, like those poets who believed in the pathetic fallacy, who thought that nature changed to suit their moods, and that skies were grey when they were grey.

'We'll make it a marvellous occasion,' she told her father and mother. 'It's going to be even better than your wedding day, because we're all here to help celebrate it.'

She was rewarded with two smiles and she realized it would at least be a project for the great yawning frighteningly empty summer that lay ahead of her.

Brendan

Brendan Doyle went to the calendar to look up the date that Christy Moore was coming to sing in the town twenty miles away. It was some time next week, and he thought he'd go in to hear him.

He had written it down on the big kitchen calendar the day he had heard it billed on the radio. To his surprise, he realized that today was his birthday. It came as a shock to think it was already eleven o'clock in the morning and he hadn't realized that it was his birthday. In the olden days he would have known it was his birthday weeks in advance.

'Only three weeks to Brendan's birthday,' his mother would chirrup to anyone who might listen.

He had hated it when he was very young, all the fuss about birthdays. The celebrations. The girls had loved it of course, wearing smart frocks. There were never any outsiders there; Brendan couldn't remember having a real party, one with other children and crackers and games, just the family all dressed up and crackers and jelly with whipped cream and hundreds and thousands on it. There would be presents from all the others, wrapped properly, with little tags, and birthday cards as well which would all be arranged on the mantelpiece. Then there would be a photograph of The Birthday Boy all on his own, maybe wearing a paper hat. And then one with the rest of the family. These would be kept in the album, and brought out triumphantly when any guests arrived. The first of the birthdays, Brendan, wasn't he getting so big? And then this was Helen's birthday, and then Anna's. Look. And people looked and praised Mother. She was marvellous they said, marvellous to do all that for them, go to so much trouble.

His mother never knew how he hated it. How he had hated the singing, and seeing her clapping her hands and running for the camera during the Tor He's a Jolly Good Fellow'.

He wished they could just sit down and get on with it instead of all these antics and actions. As if they were all on stage.

And all the secrecy too. Don't tell Auntie Maureen about the new sofa. Why? We don't want her to think that it's new. Why don't we want her to think that? We just don't want them saying we put a lot of store by it, that's all. But it's gorgeous, isn't it? Yes, but we don't want them to say that we think it's something special, when Auntie Maureen asks about it just say "Oh the sofa, it's all right", as if you weren't impressed. You know.'

Brendan didn't know, he had never known. They always seemed to be hiding something from somebody. From the neighbours, from people at school, from people in the parish, from Maureen Barry, Mother's great friend, from Frank Quigley who worked with Father, who was meant to be the greatest friend of the family. And specially from everyone back in Ireland. Don't tell this to Grannie O'Hagan, and never let a word of that be said in front of Grandpa Doyle.

It was quite simple to live by Mother's and Father's rules if you understood that nothing was to be said outside the family.

Brendan thought that there was very little of importance said within the family either.

He remembered his birthday the year that Father had lost his job. There had been huge secrecy at that stage of their lives. Father used to leave the house in the mornings at the usual time and come back again as if things were normal. What was it all for, Brendan had wondered then and wondered still.

And here in Vincent's farm, the smallholding on the side of a hill where his father had grown up, he felt even more remote from the man than he had done when he lived in Rosemary Drive pretending that he was bright at school, pretending that he was going to get A levels and go to university. When all the time he knew he was going to come back here to this stony place where nothing was expected and nothing claimed to be what it was not.

He had never been Uncle Vincent, even though he was the oldest of Father's brothers, he was Vincent from the start. A tall stooped man, much lined and weatherbeaten. He never spoke until he had something to speak about. There was no small talk in the small house on the side of the hill, the house where Father had grown up one of six children. They must have been very poor then. Father didn't speak of it or those times. Vincent didn't speak of any times. Although a television aerial waved from almost every small farm in the countryside hereabouts, Vincent Doyle saw no need of one. And the radio he had was small and crackly.

He listened to the half-past six news every evening, and the farm report that went before it. He sometimes came across some kind of documentary on the Irish in Australia, or some account of the armies of Napoleon coming to the West of Ireland. Brendan never knew how he tracked these features down. He didn't buy a daily newspaper nor any guide to look up what was on. And he wasn't a regular enough listener to know what was being broadcast when.

He wasn't a hermit, a recluse or an eccentric. Vincent always wore suits. He had never come to terms with a world of jackets and trousers. He bought a new suit every three years, and the current one was moved down a grade, so that one day it would have been the good suit for going to Mass and the day after a new purchase it would have been relegated to a different league. It could be worn when he went to tend the sheep, and even when lifting them in and out of his trailer.

Brendan Doyle had loved this place that strange summer when they had come for the visit. Everyone had been very tense all the way over on the boat and train, and there were so many things to remember. Remember not to talk about sitting up all night on the way to Holyhead. Remember not to talk about the crowds sitting on their luggage or people would know they had gone steerage. Remember not to say that they had waited for ages on a cold platform. There were to be no complaints, it was all to have been fun. That was the message that Mother kept repeating over and over during the endless journey. Father had said almost the opposite, he had told them not to go blowing and boasting to their Uncle Vincent about all the comforts they had in London. Brendan remembered asking a direct question; he had felt slightly sick before he asked it, as if he knew it wasn't the thing to say.