The Same Name Twice

Gregory Thomas Lahey and Philippa Rose Lahey were married on a Saturday afternoon at St Matthew's Church in New Norfolk. He was twenty-four and two years into his position with the Tasmania Department of Public Works. She was three weeks short of her twenty-second birthday and nearly two years into child protection work with the Department of Community Welfare. They had met on the early bus from New Norfolk into Hobart nearly five years before, and the bride did not change her name.

The shared surname had dogged the couple since the engagement. They were third cousins once removed, descended from separate branches of a Lahey family that had spread through the Derwent Valley since the 1850s, and there was no legal or church impediment to the marriage. Some of the older relatives on Greg's side were less comfortable than the law. Two of his father's cousins had questioned the match at the engagement gathering, and one great-aunt declined her invitation without giving a reason. Thomas and Margaret Lahey, who had raised eight children and seen most of their concerns come to nothing, attended without objection.

Greg's youngest sister, Linda, eighteen and his closest sibling, was among the bridesmaids. Pip's family filled the other side of the church. Her parents, Patrick and Jane, had come down the road from 19 Hobart Road. Her eldest brother Nicholas was there, as was her sister Fiona. Her brother Solomon flew in from Melbourne the night before and left again the following morning. Patrick's younger sister, Patricia Atwell, travelled from Adelaide with her husband Laurence. They came without their seventeen-year-old daughter, Heather, who they said was unwell and had stayed at home.

The reception was held at the New Norfolk Town Hall. The guests reflected the couple's working lives as much as their families. Engineers from Public Works sat at the same tables as social workers from Community Welfare, and the two groups spent much of the evening in conversation with each other. A small number of Pip's former clients, families whose cases she had seen through to a safe close, had been invited at her insistence and came.

Patrick Lahey gave the father-of-the-bride speech. He kept it short and closed by observing that his daughter at least would never need to replace her monogrammed linen. The joke went down well with the Hobart Road side of the room and less well with the great-aunt's allies on the other side. Jane Lahey spent most of the evening at her daughter's elbow. She told several relatives that she had never seen Pip so certain of anything.

Jane also spent part of the evening with her sister-in-law. Patricia had brought the year's news of Heather with her, as she did each year in a letter, and she gave it in person over the wedding cake. It was brief and guarded, and none of it was good. Patrick, standing near them, did not ask what they had been discussing. No one else at the reception knew there was anything to discuss.

The couple left the hall a little before eleven to drive to a borrowed holiday shack on the east coast for a week. They returned to begin married life in a rented cottage in Glenorchy, close to both their workplaces and half an hour from the house where Pip had grown up.