Quentins (31 page)

“It's an image, a concept—the whole idea of sticking fast. We've used it in our literature just to attract this
client's account. You're not telling me you're going to go back on the agreed menu . . .”

“I'm not telling you anything. What are you advertising?”

“It's no business of yours . . .”

“What is meant to be sticking to what? What's the concept about? Can't you tell me? We're doing the bloody presentation for you,” Patrick roared.

“All you were asked to do was to provide a shellfish buffet.”

“It's in your interest to tell me.” Patrick lowered his voice impressively.

The PR eventually gave in and told him it was a new insurance company that stuck with you through thick and thin.

“In that case you don't need shellfish, you eejit. You need mollusks.”

“I need what?”

“Prawns and lobsters don't stick to things, you clown. They walk all over the ocean floor. Your clients would drop you as soon as look at you. What you want is mollusks. Why didn't you tell me before?”

He hung up and called the restaurant. “I need Blouse urgently,” Patrick begged. He was told he would have to wait in line. “We have to find him quickly, Cathy. Tomorrow we're doing mollusks.”

“Doing what?”

“Didn't they teach you anything at that catering college? Mollusks. Single shell, double shell. There's thousands of them out there, stuck to rocks. All we have to do is get them to the table.”

“Do you mean things like mussels or whelks or cockles?” Cathy felt dizzy.

“Yes, and everything else . . . clams, razor shells, limpets . . . Blouse will know where to find them. Where is he, anyway?”

“I'll get him to call you in the hospital, Patrick,” Cathy sighed. The restaurant must be in a poor position if Blouse Brennan was going to be sent off to scrape limpets off rocks.

Tom rang again. “The party's over but the children won't go home. They wouldn't even come up for the group picture with the graduate. Blouse has them hypnotized, he's like the Pied Piper. I wouldn't be surprised if they followed him back to Quentins.”

“Yeah, well, ask him to break off just long enough to call his brother in the hospital. Patrick wants him to do the Pied Piper thing along the shore tomorrow to collect limpets.”

“Isn't this a totally crazy life?” Tom said with the tone of a man who would never live any other kind of life.

Cathy felt the same. But with one proviso. She wished mightily that tomorrow night was over. She couldn't see one redeeming feature that would save them. But she had reckoned without Blouse and his newly found self-confidence.

And the next night, they all watched, astounded, as the boy they had all considered slow pointed out, with an elegant cane, the variety of shellfish displayed on what he called the Mollusk Medley. The limpet, the cockle, the whelk and the winkle . . . all of them praised for their qualities of constancy. The oyster, the scallop, the mussel likewise. These were loyal invertebrates, Blouse told the group earnestly. Like the insurance company they were there to honor, these magnificent mollusks were noted for their sticking power in a world where, alas, not everything could be relied upon.

The PR man was as delighted as the graduate's demon mother. He would be booking further spectaculars, but only if Blouse could be part of the package. Patrick Brennan sighed a very great, long sigh. His early release from the hospital had been justified.

“He doesn't come cheap, of course,” Patrick heard himself saying. His voice sounded weak. It had taken hours to persuade Blouse not to stress the lonely, futile and pathetic lifestyle of the mollusk. He hadn't been sure if Blouse had grasped it until the very last moment. But there were lots of things he wasn't sure of anymore. Like how Blouse had found all those children to help him get buckets of those terrible things to the restaurant. They kept coming in all afternoon and all they needed for payment was an ice cream.

Best not to question good news, Patrick always believed, like the look of love and huge relief in Brenda's eyes as she reached out her hand and stroked his through the most extraordinary—and successful—evening that Quentins had known so far.

W
hen Brenda's great friend Nora had lived all those years in Italy, she had written long, long letters. Always she began with the word “Carissima” . . . It sounded a bit fancy, Brenda thought, a little over the top, but Nora had insisted. She spoke Italian, she dreamed Italian now. To say Dear Brenda would sound flat and dull.

Carissima . . . dearest, was a better way to begin.

And Brenda wrote back faithfully. She charted a changing Ireland for her friend, for Nora, who lived in the timeless Sicilian village of Anninziata . . . Brenda wrote how the waves of emigration were halted, how affluence came gradually to the cities, how the power of the Church seemed to slip away and change into something entirely different.

Brenda wrote that young people from different lands came to find work in Ireland now, girls who found themselves pregnant kept their babies instead of giving them up for adoption, young couples lived together for six months or a year before their marriages.

Things that were unheard of when Brenda and Nora were young.

Nora wrote about her friends in this village. The young couple who rented the pottery shop, Signora Leone. And of course Mario.

Mario, who ran the hotel.

Nora never wrote of Mario's wife, Gabriella, or their children. But that was all right. Some things were too huge to write about.

Brenda wrote about a lot of things, how she had met this guy they used to call Pillowcase, but was most definitely called Patrick Brennan these days, how they had fallen in love and worked in many restaurants. She told how the good fortune of running Quentins had fallen into their lap and they were rapidly making a great name for themselves. She wrote about the people who came and went, staff, and those like Patrick's brother, Blouse, who had stayed and flourished there.

But Brenda only once told the deepest secrets of her soul, their great wish to have children, the long, often humiliating and eventually disappointing road of fertility guidance. That was too hard to write about.

But Brenda was very helpful in that she acted as a spy for Nora O'Donoghue by going to see Nora's family. Hard, unforgiving people who regarded Nora as a sinner and a fool, someone who had disgraced them by running off after a married man.

They were so uncaring about Nora's life that Brenda urged her friend to forget them. “They have forgotten you unless it suits them,” she had written to Sicily. “I beg you don't listen to any pleas they may have when they are older that you should return and be their nurse.”

“Carissima,” Nora had written, “I will never leave this place while there is a chance that I can see my Mario. I wish they could share my happiness. But perhaps one day they will be able to.”

Nora's Mario died, killed in an accident on the mountain roads that he drove across so fast. The village implied that the Signora Irlandese should now leave and go home.

Brenda would never forget the day Nora had
appeared at Quentins, long dress, wild hair, her face mad with grief for the only man she had ever loved. She still called Brenda Carissima. They were still best friends. The long years apart, well over two decades, had changed nothing between them.

And when Nora found a new love, Aidan the teacher up in Mountainview School, she and Brenda clutched each other like teenagers. “I'll dance at your wedding,” Brenda promised.

“Hardly, there is the little problem of his first wife,” Nora had giggled.

“Come on, Nora, drag yourself to the present day . . . there
is
divorce since 1995.”

“I managed for well over twenty years without marriage first time round. I can do it again.” Nora wasn't asking for the moon and stars.

“You do what you like, but I'm not giving up on it,” Brenda threatened.

Patrick said that it was amazing they found so much to talk about. He was never jealous of their friendship, but often said that men just didn't have conversations like that about every single aspect of life.

“You are the losers,” Brenda said.

“I agree, that's what I'm saying,” Patrick said unexpectedly.

Nora went every week to the hospital where her elderly father lived in the geriatric ward. Rain or shine she wheeled him in the grounds. Sometimes he smiled at her and seemed pleased, other times he just stared ahead. She told him about any happy things that she remembered about her childhood. Often these were difficult to dredge up. She didn't tell him about Sicily because already it was fading in her mind like a brightly colored photograph left in sunlight. So she told him about Aidan Dunne and Mountainview School and the Italian
classes. And she talked pleasantly about her sisters Rita and Helen, even though she hardly saw them at all.

The news that she had moved into a bed-sitting room with a married Latin teacher had horrified them all over again. Really, Nora seemed to be a scourge sent to lash their backs.

Nora visited her mother every week. Age had not improved her mother's temper or attitude. But Nora was determined to remain calm. Years of practice had given her a skill at being passive. And it was easy to call in for an hour and listen to her mother's list of complaints if she could go back on the bus to good, kind Aidan, who was so different and saw nothing bad in the world.

The day of her father's funeral was bleak and wet. Brenda and Patrick came but they decided against letting Aidan take part. He might be like red rag to a bull.

Some of her students from the Italian class came to the church, an odd little group that certainly helped to boost the numbers.

“I'd ask you back, but I don't honestly think that my mother would be able to . . .”

No, no, they insisted, they had just wanted to pay their respects. That was all.

Nora's mother found fault with everything. The priest had been too young, too swift, too impersonal. People hadn't worn dark clothes. The hotel they had gone to for coffee, just the family, had been entirely unsuitable.

She brooked no conversation at all about Father. Did not care to hear that he had been a kind man and that it was good that he was at peace. Instead, there was a litany of his mistakes, which were apparently legion, and the main one was his never having taken out a proper insurance policy.

“And now of course you'll all go off to your own homes and leave me alone for the rest of my days,” she said.

Nora waited for the others to speak. One by one they did. They told her that she was in fine health, that a woman in her seventies was not old these days. They reminded her that her flat was very convenient for bus stops, shops and the church. They said that they would all come to see her regularly and now that there was no longer a matter of visiting Father, they would take her on different outings.

Their mother sighed as if this were not nearly enough. “You come only once a month,” their mother said.

This was news to Nora. It had always been implied that the visits from her sisters and sisters-in-law were much more frequent. It meant then that she, with her weekly visit, was indeed the best of them all.

She noted it without allowing her face to change.

Rita and Helen were quick to explain. They were so
busy
and honestly others must remember how hard it was with
families
and running
proper homes
.

The implication being that Nora had all the time in the world and no responsibilities so should play nursemaid and be glad to do so. Nora, who worked harder than any of them, Nora the only one of them without a car who did the awkward shopping, and visited four times as often as the others did, always bearing something she had cooked for her mother.

It was grossly unfair of them to make
her
of all people feel guilty. And she had promised Brenda Brennan that she would never weaken. But Nora had also promised herself that she would be polite and courteous to the family, she would not return their hostile, bad-mannered attitude.

So she blinked at them all pleasantly as if she hadn't understood the direction of their conversation. She could see it driving them all insane. Still, what the hell, she was not going to lose her dignity on the day of her father's funeral.

And after all, she had Aidan to go home to. Aidan, who would make her strong tea, play some lovely arias in the background as they talked, and want to know every heartbeat of the day.

Then tomorrow she would meet Carissima Brenda and tell her the story again.

She looked at her sisters, brothers and their spouses. Not one of them had a fraction of the happiness she had.

This gave Nora great confidence and strength and made it easy to put up with their taunts and very obvious suggestions that she abandon everything and go look after her mother full-time.

“I'll come round to see you tomorrow,” Nora promised as she left. She kissed the cold parchment of her mother's cheek.

Did this woman miss the man they had buried today? Did she look back at times when there was passion and love? Maybe there had never
been
any passion and love.

She shuddered at the thought. She who had found it twice in one lifetime.

She saw Helen and Rita looking at her oddly. She knew that her sisters often talked about her with their sisters-in-law. It didn't matter very much.

“Will you be round at Mother's tomorrow also?” she asked them pleasantly.

Helen shrugged. “If you're going, Nora, there's not much point in us all crowding in,” she said.

“And anyway I'll be there next week,” Rita snapped.

But she could still hear them reassuring their mother, “Nora'll be in tomorrow.”

“Aren't you going to be fine tomorrow, Nora will do any jobs for you.”

“Nora has nothing to do, Mam, she'll do all the shopping for you when she comes to see you.”

It would be like this always. But it didn't matter. None of the rest of them had known happiness like Nora had. It was only fair that she should give something back.

“Did you end up paying for their coffee and sandwiches yesterday?” Brenda asked her friend Nora.

“Brenda, mia Carissima Brenda, don't you always have the hard word?” Nora laughed.

“That means you did,” Brenda cried triumphantly. “Those four kept their hands in their pockets and you, who have no money at all, paid.”

“Don't I have plenty of money, thanks to good people like you?”

She went on washing and chopping vegetables in Quentins, where she was paid the hourly rate.

“Nora, will you stop and listen to what you're saying. We pay you a pittance here because you insist it will all mount up to take Aidan and yourself to Italy, and then those selfish pigs make you spend your few pounds on
their
bloody sandwiches. It makes my blood boil.”

“Brenda Carissima . . . you of all people must not boil. You know they call you the ice maiden, you know you must be cool and calm. To boil would be a great, great mistake.”

Brenda laughed. “What am I to do with you? I can't make it up for you which
might
stop me boiling. You won't take what you call charity.”

“Certainly not.”

“Well, swear one thing. Now. Swear here and now that you won't listen when they tell you that she needs a full-time caregiver and that you are it.”

“They won't!”

“Swear it, Nora.”

“I can't. I don't know the future.”

“I know the future,” said Brenda grimly. “And I'm very sad that you're not going to swear.”

It happened sooner than even Brenda could have believed. Only weeks after her father's funeral, Nora found herself being told that her mother had failed terribly.

They didn't get in touch with her at home because the little flat she shared with Aidan Dunne was still out-of-bounds territory for her brothers and sisters. Some of the letters were sent to Mountainview School, some in care of her mother. Helen directed hers through Quentins restaurant, which was why Brenda became suspicious.

“Tell me, I demand to know what are they asking you to do now,” she begged.

“You are really a very difficult friend, Carissima,” Nora laughed as she polished the silver, another little restaurant job she had managed to wangle to help top up the Italy fund.

“No, I'm so helpful and so good for you. Just tell me what they want.”

“Mother is walking around in the night.
It
came on her suddenly. She can't bear being on her own, apparently.”

“Your father was in hospital for over three years, she had some time to get used to it.”

“She's old and frail, Carissima.”

“She's seventy-five and as fit as a flea.”

They looked at each other angrily.

“Are we having a fight?” Nora asked.

“No, we couldn't have a fight, you and I. You know all my secrets, where all the bodies are buried,” Brenda said ruefully. “But believe me, I tried to persuade you not to run after Mario, and as it turned out I was wrong. You had the life you wanted. However, I'm not wrong this time and that kind of pressure was nothing to what I'm going to put on you now. Before I have to shake it out of you, what have they asked?”