Silver Wedding Read Online Free PDF Page B

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