Free Silver Wedding by Maeve Binchy Page A

know when they were running out of soap or cornflakes. That she wouldn't really rinse out and hang the dishcloths up to dry. But she was there, eager and willing to help.
    And she did answer the phone and more or less coped when people came to call.
    Which is why she was there when Renata Quigley came to see the Sister in charge.
    Renata. Tall and dark, somewhere in her mid-thirties. Married for fifteen years to Frank Quigley.
    What on earth could she want, and how had she tracked Helen down to St Martin's? Helen felt her heart race and she could almost hear it thumping in her ears. At the same time there was a sense of ice-cold water in the base of her stomach.
    She hadn't seen Renata since the wedding, but she had seen pictures of her of course, in magazines and in the trade papers Daddy had brought home. Mrs Frank Quigley, the former Miss Renata Palazzo, exchanging a joke or enjoying herself at the races or presenting a prize to the apprentice of the year or walking among the high and mighty at some charity function.
    She was very much more beautiful than Helen had thought, she had skin that Mother would have called sallow but looked olive-like and beautiful with her huge dark eyes and her dark shiny hair with its expensive cut. She wore her scarf very artistically caught in a brooch and draped as if it were part of her green and gold dress. She carried a small leather handbag in green and gold squares.
    Her face was troubled and her long thin hands with their dark red nails were twisting round the little patchwork bag.
    'Can I please speak to the Sister in charge?' she asked Helen.
    Helen looked at her, open-mouthed. Renata Quigley didn't recognize her. Suddenly the memory of an old movie came back to her, and some beautiful actress looking straight at the camera and saying, 'Nobody looks at the face of a nun.' It was the kind of thing that would drive Sister Brigid mad. Helen had never forgotten it. Until this moment she had never realized how true it was. There was Renata Quigley on her doorstep looking straight into her eyes and she didn't recognize Helen, the daughter of Deirdre and Desmond Doyle, her husband's friends.
    Helen who had caused so much trouble that time.
    But perhaps she had never known. With another shock Helen realized that Renata might have been told nothing at the time.
    While all this was going through her mind, Helen stood at the door, a girl in a grey jumper and skirt, with a cross around her neck, her hair tied back with a black ribbon, her face perhaps covered in grime from the garden where she had been when she heard the doorbell.
    Perhaps she didn't even look like a nun.
    It was obvious that Renata didn't connect her with the child she had known in Rosemary Drive, Pinner, when she had come to call.
    |k 'I'm sorry, there's nobody here but me,' Helen said, recovering slightly.
    'Are you one of the Community?' Renata looked doubtful.
    'Yes, well yes. I'm here in St Martin's, part of the house, one of the Sisters.' It was straining the truth but Helen was not going to let Renata Quigley go until she knew why she had come here in the first place.
    'It's a little complicated, Sister,' Renata said nervously.
    Helen's smile nearly split her face in half.
    'Well, come on in and sit down and tell me, that's what we're here for,' she said.
    And she stood back and held the door open while Frank Quigley's wife walked into St Martin's. Into Helen's home.
    That face, that dark lean face with the high cheekbones. Helen Doyle knew it so well. She remembered well her mother saying with some satisfaction that it would run to fat all the same in the end, mark her words, all the middle-aged Italian women you saw with several chins, they too had been lean girls with long, perfectly formed faces. It was in their diets, in their lifestyles, in the amount of olive oil they managed to put away.
    When she was a child Helen had been irritated with her mother for all this kind of niggling. What did it matter? Why was