Silver Wedding by Maeve Binchy Read Free Book Online Page A

had said without taking his eyes away from the few rows of potatoes.
    And indeed Brendan
had
known when the day arrived.
    Things changed when they went back home to London after that visit. For one thing Father got his job back, and they didn’t have to pretend any more that he had a job when he hadn’t. And there had been all kinds of terrible rows with Helen. She kept saying that she didn’t want to be left in the house alone. She would interrogate them all each day about what time they were going out and coming back, and even if there seemed to be five minutes of unaccounted-for time, she would arrange to go and meet Brendan when school finished.
    He had tried to ask her what it was all about, but she had shrugged and said she just hated being by herself.
    Not that there was ever much fear of that in Rosemary Drive. Brendan would have loved some time on his own instead of all the chit-chat at mealtimes, and getting the table ready and discussing what they ate and what they would eat at the next meal. He couldn’t understand why Helen didn’t welcome any chance of peace with open arms.
    Perhaps that was why she had gone to be a nun in the end. For peace. Or was it because she still felt the need to be with people, and she thought the numbers were dropping at Rosemary Drive, with Anna moving out to her flat and Brendan a permanent resident in Ireland?
    It was strange to have lived for so long with this family, and lived so closely during weeks, months, years of endless conversation and still to know them so little.
    Brendan had decided to go back to that stone cottage on the day that his school ran a careers exhibition. There were stands and stalls giving information about careers in computing, in retailing, in the telephone service, in London Transport, in banking, in the armed forces. He wandered disconsolately from one to another.
    Grandpa Doyle had died since that family visit when he welcomed them to the soil they came from. They had not gone home for the funeral. It wasn’t really
home
, Mother had said, and Grandpa would have been the first to have agreed. Uncle Vincent wouldn’t expect it, and there were no neighbours who would think it peculiar and talk poorly of them for not going. There had been a special Mass said for the repose of his soul in their parish church and everyone they knew from the parish sympathized.
    The headmaster said that a decision about how to spend the years of one’s life was a very major decision; it wasn’t like choosing what cinema to go to or what football team to support. And suddenly like a vision Brendan realized that he had to get away from this, he had to escape the constant discussions and whether this was the right decision or the wrong one, and how he must tell people he was a management trainee rather than a shopworker or whatever new set of pretences would appear. He knew with the greatest clarity that he had ever possessed that he would go back to Vincent’s place and work there.
    Salthill, 26 Rosemary Drive, was not a house that you walked out of without explanations. But Brendan realized that these would be the very last explanations he would ever have to give. He would regard it as an ordeal by fire and water, he would grit his teeth and go through it.
    It had been worse than he could ever have imagined. Anna and Helen had wept, and pleaded and begged him not to go away. His mother had wept too and asked what she had done to deserve this; his father had wanted to know whether Vincent had put him up to this.
    ‘Vincent doesn’t even know,’ Brendan had said.
    Nothing would dissuade him. Brendan hadn’t known that he possessed such strength. For four days the battle went on.
    His mother would come and sit on his bed with cups of drinking chocolate. ‘All boys go through a period like this, a time of wanting to be on their own, to be away from the family apron strings. I’ve suggested to your father that you go on a little holiday over to Vincent, maybe that