Silver Wedding by Maeve Binchy Read Free Book Online Page B

will get it all out of your system.’
    Brendan had refused. It would have been dishonest. Because once he went he would not come back.
    His father made overtures too. ‘Listen, boy, perhaps I was a bit harsh the other night saying you were only going to try and inherit that heap of old stones, I didn’t mean that to sound so blunt. But you know the way it will look. You can see how people will look at it.’
    Brendan couldn’t, not then, not now.
    But he would never forget the look on Vincent’s face when he arrived up the road.
    He had walked all the way from the town. Vincent was standing with the old dog, Shep, at the kitchen door. He shaded his eyes from the evening light as Brendan got nearer, and he could make out the shape in the sunset.
    ‘Well now,’ he said.
    Brendan had said nothing. He had carried a small grip bag with him, all his possessions for a new life.
    ‘It’s yourself,’ Vincent had said. ‘Come on in.’
    At no time that evening did he ask why Brendan had come or how long he was staying. He never inquired whether they knew his whereabouts back in London, or if the visit had official approval.
    Vincent’s view was that all this would emerge as time went by, and slowly over the weeks and months it did.
    Days came and went. There was never a harsh word between the two Doyles, uncle and nephew. In fact there were very few words at all. When Brendan thought he might go to a dance nearby, Vincent said he thought that would be a great thing altogether. He had never been great shakes at the dancing himself but he heard that it was great exercise. He went to the tin on the dresser where the money was and handed Brendan forty pounds to kit himself out.
    From time to time Brendan helped himself from the tin. He had asked in the beginning, but Vincent had put a stop to that, saying the money was there for the both of them, and to take what he needed.
    Things had been getting expensive, and from time to time Brendan went and did an evening’s work in a bar for an extra few pounds to add to the till. If Vincent knew about it he never acknowledged it, either to protest or to praise.
    Brendan grinned to himself, thinking how differently things would have been run back in Rosemary Drive.
    He didn’t miss them; he wondered could he ever have loved them, even a little bit? And if he hadn’t loved them did that make him unnatural? Everything he read had love in it, and all the films were about love, and anything you heard of in the papers seemed to be done for love or because someone loved and that love wasn’t returned. Maybe he was an odd man out, not loving.
    Vincent must have been like that too, that’s why he never wrote letters or talked to people intensely. That’s why he liked this life here in the hills and among the stony roads and peaceful skies.
    It was a bit unnatural, Brendan told himself, to become twenty-two all by yourself, without acknowledging it to another soul. If he told Vincent, his uncle would look at him thoughtfully and say ‘Is that a fact?’ He would offer no congratulations nor suggest a celebratory pint.
    Vincent was out walking the land. He would be back in by lunch. They would have that bacon cold, and plenty of tomatoes. They would eat hot potatoes with it because a dinner in the middle of the day without a few big floury potatoes would be no use to anyone. They never ate mutton or lamb. It wasn’t out of a sense of delicacy to the sheep that were their living, it was that they had no big freezer like some of their neighbours who would kill a sheep each season. And they couldn’t bear to pay the prices in the butcher’s shop for animals that they had sold for a greatly smaller sum than would warrant such a cost by the time they got to the butcher’s cold store.
    Johnny Riordan the postman drove up in his little van.
    ‘There’s a rake of letters for you, Brendan, it must be your birthday,’ he said cheerfully.
    ‘Yes it is.’ Brendan had grown as taciturn as his