The Restaurant Read online

  ‘A real treat … [Meaney] wraps her readers in the company and comfort of ordinary strangers’

  Sunday Independent

  ‘Meaney can excavate the core of our human failings and present it to us, mirror-like, on the page … Which makes her utterly credible, utterly authentic, utterly irresistible’

  Irish Independent

  ‘Warm and insightful … Roisin Meaney is a skilful storyteller’

  Sheila O’Flanagan

  ‘Meaney weaves wonderful feel-good tales of a consistently high standard. And that standard rises with each book she writes’

  Irish Examiner

  ‘This book is like chatting with a friend over a cup of tea – full of gossip and speculation, and all the things that make life interesting’

  Irish Mail on Sunday

  ‘An addictive read with engaging, flawed characters and a unique writing flair that pulls you into the plot from the very beginning and keeps you entranced to the very end’

  Books of All Kinds

  ‘A delightful read about relationships and the complexities associated with family life … A cosy read for any time of the year, be it in your beach bag or sitting curled up in front of the fire’

  Swirl and Thread

  ‘It’s easy to see why Roisin Meaney is one of Ireland’s best-loved authors … Should you spot this on a bookshelf, grab a copy’

  Bleach House Library

  Roisin Meaney was born in Listowel, Co Kerry. She has lived in the US, Canada, Africa and Europe but is now based in Limerick, Ireland. This Number One bestselling author is a consistent presence on the Irish bestseller list and she is the author of fifteen novels including three stand-alone novels set in the fictional island off the west coast of Ireland: One Summer, After the Wedding and I’ll Be Home for Christmas. Her other bestsellers include: The Last Week of May, The People Next Door, Half Seven on a Thursday, Love in the Making, The Things We Do For Love, Something in Common, Two Fridays in April, The Reunion and The Anniversary. She has also written books for children. Connect with Roisin Meaney on @roisinmeaney and www.roisinmeaney.com

  ALSO BY ROISIN MEANEY

  The Birthday Party

  The Anniversary

  The Street Where You Live

  The Reunion

  I’ll Be Home for Christmas

  Two Fridays in April

  After the Wedding

  Something in Common

  One Summer

  The Things We Do For Love

  Love in the Making

  Half Seven on a Thursday

  The People Next Door

  The Last Week of May

  Putting Out the Stars

  The Daisy Picker

  Children’s Books

  Don’t Even Think About It

  See If I Care

  Copyright © 2020 Roisin Meaney

  The right of Roisin Meaney to be identified as the author of the work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Ireland in 2020 by

  HACHETTE BOOKS IRELAND

  1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library.

  Ebook ISBN 9781529368246

  Hachette Books Ireland

  8 Castlecourt Centre

  Castleknock

  Dublin 15, Ireland

  A division of Hachette UK Ltd

  Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hachettebooksireland.ie

  Contents

  Praise

  About the Author

  Also by Roisin Meaney

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Emily

  Bill

  Emily

  Astrid

  Emily

  Heather

  Emily

  Bill

  Astrid

  Heather

  Emily

  Bill

  Astrid

  Heather

  Emily

  Bill

  Astrid

  Heather

  Emily

  Bill

  Astrid

  Heather

  Emily

  Bill

  Astrid

  The Party

  Emily

  Acknowlegements

  For Mike O’Grady, sadly missed, never forgotten

  But what can stay hidden?

  Love’s secret is always lifting its head out

  from under the covers,

  ‘Here I am!’

  RUMI

  Emily

  EMILY FEENEY, TWENTY-NINE AND STILL IN PYJAMAS, flings wide her bedroom window on a Thursday and tilts her face to the early-morning sky, the better to inhale the fresh, hopeful scent of April. She loves beginnings of days, particularly at this time of year, with the vigorous bloom of spring not yet spent, and the promise of summer in every burst of birdsong, every drift of cherry blossom, every budding geranium.

  A sound in the street below catches her attention. There is Vinnie Corbett, reliable as the dawn, emerging from his house across the way. She watches as he slips a key into his pocket and pulls the red front door closed behind him. She sees him tap with his fingertips, like he always does, on the adjacent kitchen window before moving off. Saying another goodbye to Angie, who will have filled the yellow lunchbox that’s tucked under his arm.

  ‘Hey, Vinnie,’ Emily calls softly.

  He lifts his head and finds her, and sends her up a smile. ‘Morning to you, Emily,’ he says. ‘Lovely day.’

  ‘Sure is.’

  After he’s vanished around the corner, off to his barber’s shop two blocks away, Emily turns her attention back to the street that’s been her home for the past two years, give or take. A short ramble from the town’s main shopping area, it’s a pleasing undulation of one and two storeys, and a happy juxtaposition of commercial and residential, with little alleys scooting between every two or three buildings, and a line of trees – rowan, maple, willow, cherry – running along the edge of the wider pavement on Emily’s side.

  No chain stores are to be found here. There’s the carpet shop owned by Karl, whose name is different in his native Syria, and who’s lived in Ireland long enough to curse as fluently as any local. There’s the launderette run by cousins Sheila and Denise, source of glorious wafts of fragrant cottony air each time its door is opened. There’s Pauline’s crèche, and Joan and Frank’s secondhand bookshop, and Imelda’s minimart, and Barbara’s chemist, and Tony and Charlie’s hardware store. All the businesses of the street scattered about – and nestling between them are the homes. She knows everyone. At various stages she’s fed everyone.

  She watches by the window as the place comes slowly to life. Vans arrive and slot into alleys, shop shutters are rattled up, workers and schoolgoers emerge from houses, car engines sputter on.

  At twenty to nine, James appears. He props his bicycle against the painted wooden bench outside Emily’s front window and takes a bundle of mail from the canvas bag that sits in his large wire basket. A second or two later she hears the rattle of her letterbox. ‘Thanks, James,’ she calls.

  He looks up and grins. ‘Hello, you. Not a bad morning.’

  ‘Not bad at all.’

&
nbsp; At length she leaves her position to shower and brush her teeth and get dressed. The swirly pink skirt she’s in the mood for today, a crisp white shirt above. She wriggles her feet into slippers and dabs colour from the same small pot onto her lips and cheeks. She runs a wide-toothed wooden comb through her curls and goes downstairs, fingertips skimming the ridges of the wallpaper in an ashes-of-roses shade that has hung there for decades, and that she sees no need at all to change.

  A cream envelope lies face down on the hall floor. She knows before she turns it over that it will have a Portuguese stamp on it, and her mother’s slanted handwriting. She takes it unopened into the restaurant kitchen, where she sees Barney sitting on the sill outside, waiting to be let in. At the sight of her he gets to his feet and presses his way along the glass, tail high, mouth moving in silent, hungry mews. She leaves the kitchen and opens the back door to let him into the corridor. Strictly no animals in a commercial kitchen, she was told by the health inspector before she was given the go-ahead to open the restaurant, and she obeys.

  Down he bounds, graceful as a ballerina. ‘Good morning, best boy,’ she says, crouching to scratch between his ears. He butts his head against her hand; she feels the vibration of his purring. ‘Come on,’ she tells him, ‘your breakfast is waiting.’ They travel together up the stairs. He pads eagerly towards his filled bowl and begins to eat.

  Back in the kitchen she washes her hands before weighing ingredients – flour, salt, yeast – into a large bowl. She scoops out a crater and dribbles in oil and tepid water and coaxes it all together. She tips the soft, warm dough onto a floured worktop and kneads, the comfort of the familiar movements allowing her mind to wander away, to touch on half-remembered snatches of conversation, to hum a song about a wandering minstrel that has snagged lately on a corner of her mind, to think ahead to the evening’s dessert ingredients. Lemons and eggs for the tarts, bitter chocolate for the mousse.

  When she’s worked the dough into a shiny elastic ball she sets it by the window to rise and starts another loaf, and after that another, and another. She halves olives. She chops marjoram and thyme and rosemary. She spoons seeds – pumpkin, caraway, sunflower, sesame – into a small bowl. Minestrone and cream of tomato the soups on today’s lunch menu, accompanied by slices of crusty bread, herby olive or seeded.

  She returns upstairs to find Barney washing himself. She crouches to gather up the usual small scatter of his food pellets on the tiles, and return them to his bowl. So small he was when she found him, not a fortnight after moving here. Abandoned in the alley between the launderette and the bookshop, his tiny high cries caught her attention as she walked by on an evening stroll, her head full of the new direction her life was taking. She halted and peered up the alley, straining in the muddy twilight gloom to find the source of the sound – and there he was, clambering unsteadily over what she first took to be a little heap of rags, but which turned out to be the limp bodies of two others, presumably his siblings, lying half in and half out of the plastic bag they must have been transported in.

  She stooped and gathered him up without thinking. She tucked him inside her coat – how he trembled! – and returned home with him, where she warmed milk and poured it into a saucer. He spluttered and choked, drenching his face and paws, too small to manage. She tried feeding him from a teaspoon. Here he fared slightly better, but still the process was messy, with more milk ending up on his face than in his tiny stomach.

  She lined a pudding bowl with one of her scarves and deposited him there, and returned for the other two casualties. She wrapped them in an old tea towel and dug a hole for them in the shrubbery at the end of her narrow garden – but what was she to do with the survivor? With many splatters and splashes she coaxed a few more mouthfuls of milk into him, wondering if it was the right food for this helpless little creature, or if she was doing him more harm than good.

  She returned him to his bowl and placed it next to her pillow, and spent the night straining to hear the small sounds of him. She listened to the fierce little rapid breaths and imagined his tiny lungs working frantically to keep him alive. She heard his snuffles and scratches and mews as he clambered his unsteady way around the bowl, her heart in her mouth in case all his noises stopped.

  The following day she brought him to the vet, who told her that he was a he, and roughly a month old. ‘You’ll need to bottle-feed him for a couple of weeks,’ he said, and gave her a bottle hardly bigger than her thumb, a funnel and a carton of kitten milk. She filled the bottle and wriggled its teat into the small mouth; her charge sucked at it greedily, like a baby, and grew round and tubby within a fortnight. After each feed she brought him out to the garden and set him on a patch of earth. Tiny as he was, he burrowed out a little hole and squatted over it.

  Two years later, look at him. ‘My big boy,’ she says, and he runs a licked paw over his ear again and again and ignores her. He is her first pet, the first animal she has ever owned – if anyone can truly own a cat. By night he prowls the rear gardens and yards of the street, returning at dawn to his windowsill; during the day he sleeps a lot, curled in a corner of the sofa on one of Gran’s old cushions that Emily hadn’t had the heart to throw out.

  Most of the time, apart from his morning welcome, he exhibits little evidence of fondness for her. He’ll shy away from an attempted caress, making her feel that he looks on her purely as a source of food and shelter – but every now and again, when she’s tapping on her computer or engrossed in a book, he’ll leave his cushion and butt against her leg, demanding to be lifted and stroked and scratched before settling in her lap to purr and doze. She cherishes these unexpected episodes, this evidence that he holds her after all in some affection.

  Grooming over, he leans unhurriedly into a stretch with the same fluid grace that accompanies all his movements. It ripples along the length of his body, elongating his limbs, pulling everything taut as a piano string. Watching him, she feels her own muscle groups flexing in response. He bounds onto the couch and gives a few exploratory prods of his cushion; the prelude, she knows, to his first snooze of the day.

  She cuts a slice from a lemon and drops it into a cup and covers it with hot water. She spoons thick Greek yogurt into a bowl and eats it drizzled with pale yellow honey from the market and scattered with a teaspoon of toasted flaked almonds. She watches a pair of thrushes flitting about in the little back garden below, checking out the rowan hedge for a possible home. Be careful, she tells them silently. Watch out for Barney if you settle there. Keep your wits about you. Keep your babies safe.

  As she dries her bowl she remembers her mother’s letter, abandoned on the worktop in the restaurant kitchen. She retrieves it and slits open the envelope. She pulls out the single page and leans against the sink to read it.

  Hello there!

  Hope all’s well with you. Patrick cut his foot on a rock a few days ago and had to have two stitches and a tetanus jab. He’s fine but he loves a fuss, so I’m pretending it was far more serious. One of our students won quite a big swimming competition at the weekend, great excitement! We had local press at the school, so we were all in our Sunday best. What else? A neighbour fell off a ladder and crushed a vertebra, or slipped a disc, something painful anyway. I felt obliged to visit him in hospital, although he’s a cranky so-and-so. He was asleep, which was a relief, but he looked about a decade older in the bed, and not half as fierce in his pyjamas. I left a bag of oranges and sneaked away. I might look in again in a few days, if only to make sure he knows who left the oranges!

  Must go – we’ve been invited to drinks, it’s my yoga teacher’s silver wedding anniversary. Patrick did his best to wriggle out but I wasn’t having it. He sends his love, by the way,

  Dol xx

  Dol for Dolores. Never Mum, or Mam, or any of that. Dol and Patrick they were called, by their children as well as by everyone else. Was that why, Emily wonders, they always seemed more like amiable guardians, people who’d been entrusted with two children and instructed
to see them safely into adulthood, rather than the parents who’d conceived them?

  Not that Emily and Daniel were neglected, nothing like that. Never slapped or shouted at either. On the contrary, they grew up in a state of comfort, well dressed and well fed. They were brought on holidays like everyone else, and encouraged to do well at their very respectable schools, and driven to or collected from friends’ houses when they requested it. But from the time she was old enough to notice it, before she had learnt enough to put it into words, Emily was aware of some disconnect, some short circuit in the emotional current that flowed between them.

  Their infrequent embraces struck her as distracted, as if they were following convention rather than demonstrating affection. Their greetings and goodbyes were breezy; their words of comfort when mishaps occurred sounded formulaic rather than heartfelt. Even their censure lacked conviction, as if whatever offence had prompted it – a negative comment on a report card, a complaint from a neighbour about loud music, a breaking of curfew at the weekend – didn’t really bother them all that much.

  The harsh truth of it, Emily finally concluded, was that her parents were more interested in each other than in their children. Individually they were happy to spend time with Emily and Daniel, but the instant they came together, their focus changed. They gloried in the other’s company. They were enough for one another, with Emily and Daniel being the afterthoughts, the by-products of their union. The tolerated baggage.

  Hard not to draw that conclusion, when they had packed their actual bags at the earliest opportunity. Their duty done, it felt like. Their preferred unencumbered lives ready to resume.

  We’re moving to Portugal in September, they said, the summer that Daniel, younger than Emily by three years, had got his first job. We’ve been offered positions in an international school. You’ll both be welcome to visit anytime you want, as soon as we’re sorted with accommodation.

  But you have work here, Emily said. They taught in separate secondary schools; Dol’s subjects were English and French, Patrick’s science and maths.