The Restaurant Read online

  Therese Ruane can’t be on the scene, or anyone else. He wouldn’t be looking to keep in touch with Emily, even just for friendship, if he was in a relationship. She can’t see another woman happy with him contacting his old fiancée on his return to Ireland. No, he must be alone, as she was.

  You’re not in any danger? Heather had asked, and Emily had assured her that she wasn’t. She isn’t.

  ‘You look pleased with yourself,’ Mike says when she walks into the kitchen. Mike doesn’t know where she’s been, who she’s met. Nobody apart from Heather knows.

  ‘I’m not displeased,’ she replies. She feels it went well, considering. He’s going to ring again, and she’s going to have to decide if she wants them to meet for a second time. She washes her hands and puts on her apron as Mike tells her about the copper cookware he saw on sale. ‘You should have a look. I think it might be worth investing in.’

  ‘I’ll check it out.’

  She separates eggs and whisks the yolks for the lemon tarts. She breaks chocolate into squares and sets them in a bowl over simmering water for the mousse.

  Friends. Maybe. One careful step at a time.

  Bill

  Dear John,

  Your email saddened me a lot. I didn’t put it up on the page; I thought you might prefer me to respond privately.

  It’s clear you love your daughter dearly and wish very much to help her, but what the helpline people told you is sadly true: unless and until she is ready to accept help, unless she reaches out and asks you for it, you can’t give it to her. I know that’s horrible to hear, but it’s the accepted reality.

  Let me say this much to you, John. You have nothing, not a thing, to feel guilty about – and I feel certain that your late wife would say the same if she could. You haven’t failed your daughter: on the contrary you did your best for her every step of the way. You hung back when you thought she needed space, and you tried to reason with her when you felt you should. You shared your concerns with your work colleagues, you enlisted your sister’s help, you phoned what numbers you could find. You did everything you could think of, so please don’t beat yourself up now. All you can do for her is what you’re already doing: letting her know that she’s loved, and that you’re there and willing to help, and waiting for the day when she realises she needs you.

  In the meantime, please look after yourself, and be kind to yourself – because if you don’t, you won’t be there when she comes looking for you. You may feel that the support groups aren’t for you, and maybe they’re not, but you might consider giving them a try before ruling them out. Sometimes simply sharing a problem with like-minded people can help.

  Whatever you decide, I hope with all my heart that she finds her way back to the life she had with you, and that you both experience happiness again. I hope, too, that you get some peace while you wait for this – and if you really feel you can’t sit down and talk with strangers, remember that you can write to me again. I’m always happy to listen, and offer what words of comfort I have.

  Your friend,

  Claire

  Nothing new there, nothing to give him fresh hope. Not that he’d expected it – what could a newspaper agony aunt realistically know about addiction? He pictured her as a well-meaning but ultimately ineffectual woman of sixty-plus – weren’t they always that bit older? Never married, too busy trying to make the world a better place from the comfort of her computer.

  She’s wrong about the support groups: they’re not for him. He did attend one in the month following Christine’s permanent departure from the house, not that he’d accepted it as that at the time. Still listening every evening for her key in the front door lock, still searching, every time he went to town, for a glimpse of her, an opportunity to persuade her to mend her ways and come home. Still believing, or trying to convince himself, that it was possible.

  And still trying to find help from wherever he could, so he’d gone along one evening to a group that advertised in the local paper. Addiction support for those affected, the ad said. Join us for a chat in safe and discreet surroundings – but after ten minutes of listening to a woman’s tearful account of living with a gambling husband, and another woman’s tirade against a drug dealer in her area, Bill walked out. What could they do for him, only pull him down further?

  His finger hovers over the delete key. At least she responded. She sounds as if she genuinely cares. And it did feel good to get it all down in an email. He might drop her another, next time he feels at the end of his tether. Nice to feel someone’s listening, even if she can do bugger-all to help. He saves the email and logs out.

  The days pass. May becomes June and life goes on – and in the nursing home, it brings its usual mix of joys and sorrows.

  Rosie Doyle slips away from them in her sleep one night, exactly the way she’d always said she wanted to go. She’s buried in the town cemetery, with the son who rarely visited standing by her open grave in a good suit.

  Eddie Martin moves into the home two days later to take possession of Rosie’s room, and within hours of his arrival has found enough like-minded souls to organise a nightly poker game, much to Mrs Phelan’s alarm, but so far they’re only playing for matches.

  Rory Dillon of the blocked sink wins fifty euro on a scratchcard his grandson gave him for his eighty-fourth birthday. He instructs his daughter to buy a tin of Quality Street for the day room, one a week until the money is used up, and everyone obeys the unwritten rule of leaving the green triangles for Rory.

  Gloria McCarthy, their lead singer at the afternoon piano sessions, suffers a stroke that leaves her right side useless, and robs her of speech, and of song. Bill wants to call a halt to the sessions after it happens – it doesn’t seem right to carry on without Gloria – but Kate Greene and Jenny Burke ask him not to stop. ‘People would miss it,’ they say, ‘and Gloria might like to listen,’ so they prop open her door, which is just up the corridor from the day room, and Bill hears her voice singing in his head as he plays.

  The old minibus finally surrenders, leaving a group of residents stranded one Sunday at the community centre across town that offers afternoon dancing. Mrs Phelan puts the word out among her business associates, and within days they have a new bus, donated by the largest of the town’s hotels. Well, not new, one from the hotel’s existing fleet with a fair few miles on the clock, but in altogether better shape than its predecessor. More complicated under the bonnet too, but Bill does the best he can with that. He sprays over the hotel signage on the side of the vehicle, and lives in fear that Mrs Phelan will ask him to paint on the nursing home name in its stead, but so far it hasn’t happened. He’s never attempted it, but he strongly suspects that signwriting is not his forte.

  Outside the home, life continues much as normal too. ‘Changeable weather,’ Mrs Twomey remarks, appearing on the other side of the hedge one evening as Bill is taking in the clothes he hung out that morning. ‘You’ll have to put those sheets through the spin again.’

  ‘I will.’ He won’t chance the line a second time, more showers on the way by the look of that sky. He’ll drape the sheets over the clothes horse, fill the utility room with the smell of pretend passion flower and ylang ylang.

  ‘A week of June gone already.’ Mrs Twomey, still there. ‘Can you credit it?’

  ‘I know.’

  The year rushing by, like they all seem to do now. Betty’s ninth anniversary approaching, Bill’s forty-ninth birthday at the end of September. His and Astrid’s birthdays occur close together: she’s forty-four years and four days older than him. They’ve joked about having a joint party, but he’s not much of a one for parties. Never was really, although Betty always insisted on making a bit of a fuss.

  A cake from the Dutch bakery in town – the coffee one was his favourite – with candles stuck in that he used to let Christine blow out when she was still young enough to relish it. Make a wish, he’d tell her, and she’d wish aloud for a puppy, or a doll’s house, or whatever she was hanker
ing for at the time.

  It was her birthday six days ago. She turned twenty-five. All that day Bill found her drifting around in his head, like she does on every one of her birthdays. He was reminded of his excitement when Betty announced she was pregnant, and the subsequent miracle of their daughter’s arrival. He remembered the heart-stopping realisation – as he held her in his arms for the first time, as he marvelled at the tiny nose and ears and fingers, the tiny everything – that he and Betty had created a new life, and were now wholly responsible for another human being.

  On her twenty-fifth he went into town after work, again as he did on every birthday. He walked the streets, went to the places where he’d spotted her before, kept going until his stomach growled with hunger. No plan in his mind, nothing but his urge to see her, to wish her a happy birthday and slip her some money, but he could find no sign of her. Did she even remember the significance of the day?

  ‘Harry will be gone seven years tomorrow,’ Mrs Twomey says, and Bill is brought back to the garden, and his sodden laundry, and his neighbour on the other side of the hedge with kitchen scissors in her hand. ‘I’m picking a few dahlias to put on his grave.’

  ‘Is it really seven years?’

  He remembers Harry Twomey, decent man. Manager at the office-supplies shop in town, walked with a limp from a long-ago car accident, right heel not quite touching down when it approached the ground. Very dapper always, Harry. Pinstripes he favoured, the marks of the comb in his oiled hair. What was it he always said, some phrase he always used when he met you? ‘Not a bad oul day’, that was it. That was Harry’s greeting, whatever the weather.

  Poor Harry, came to a nasty end. Stumbled from a railway platform into the path of an oncoming train somewhere in Scotland – Glasgow, was it? Over visiting their son and his wife for a week or so. A new baby due, their first, the birth and Harry’s funeral almost coinciding. One out, one in.

  The rain returns just then, and Bill makes his escape. While the clothes are spinning he sticks a fork into potatoes that are boiling on the hob. He puts three fish fingers under the grill and opens a tin of garden peas. The kitchen still smells of the takeaway curry he had last evening. He eats his dinner listening to the rain hammering on the skylight, and he prays his daughter has a roof over her head.

  And two evenings later, she shows up.

  She has a cold. Her voice is thick with it. She refuses his offer of a hot lemon drink, and scratches at her scalp as she picks nubs of sweetcorn from the half pizza he placed before her. Head lice, he thinks, and tries not to imagine the places she spends her nights, or from whose head the lice might have migrated.

  ‘Happy belated birthday,’ he says, and the blank look with which she receives the remark tells him that she forgot it.

  ‘… Thanks.’ Beneath the table she rests her feet on Sherlock’s flank. The dog continues to welcome her, and worship her.

  ‘I looked for you in town, but I didn’t find you.’

  ‘Oh …’ She sneezes twice, and swipes beneath her nose with the back of a hand, and gives a phlegmy sniff. Bill takes the box of tissues from the worktop behind him and places it next to her.

  You’re breaking my heart. You’re breaking it. Of course he doesn’t say it aloud. What’s the point? She’s past caring.

  He lifts another slice from his half of the pizza and chews it doggedly. Pizza never did much for him, with all that melted cheese. He takes in the thin hunched shoulders of his darling child, his lost soul. Every impulse in him yearns to gather her into his arms, to love her back to health, if that were only possible.

  ‘Will you let me get help for you?’ he pleads, as he always eventually does during their encounters. As he will continue to do until he has no breath left to do it. ‘Will you please let me try, Christine?’

  In response she moves aside her pizza. She’s eaten precisely half of her three slices, and picked the sweetcorn from the rest of them. She plants her elbows on the table and sinks her head into her hands. Her hair is damp from the shower. She wears the clothes he washed after her last visit; the ones she arrived in are swishing about in the machine. The same sad routine as always.

  ‘Will you please?’ he begs again. He’s not above begging. ‘Christine, will you just help me out here?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No,’ she whispers behind her hands. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You can, if you want to.’

  ‘No.’

  So once again he gives up. Instead he urges more pizza on her, and she takes another bite – purely, he knows, to shut him up. When she’s eaten all she will, he insists that she dry her hair fully before she leaves, and gives her the usual things to take with her. He accompanies her to the front door and watches her walk away, his hand on Sherlock’s collar to stop the dog going after her. He stands there long after she’s vanished from view, and wonders how long it will be until he opens the door and finds two guards standing there with sombre faces and bad news, because this sort of story never ends well.

  And it isn’t until he’s brushing his teeth later that he remembers Astrid asking if he knew anyone who might help restore her garden, and him telling her that he might. Is it daft to think Christine might be able to do something as normal as gardening? Is he crazy even to suggest it? He’s missed his chance anyway now. He’ll have to wait till she turns up again, and by then Astrid will probably have found someone else.

  The following day he drops into The Food of Love at lunchtime, needing the sight of Emily, the comfort of her face. ‘Bill, there you are,’ she says, and as ever his heart melts at the sound of his name on her tongue, at the sight of her bright smile. He loves how delighted she always looks to see him, and he chooses to ignore the fact that everyone else gets the same warm welcome. A yellow dress she wears today, a pair of yellow and blue striped slides pushed into her hair. He loves her little fripperies, the pure delight of her.

  ‘What’ll it be?’ she asks, and he chooses butternut squash and red pepper soup, and wishes he could tell her about Christine. He would love to pour it all out to her, to show her the sorrow that lives inside him, every minute of every day. It will never happen, of course. He wouldn’t dream of inflicting it on her, or on anyone he knows. If he needs to vent he’ll stick to his agony aunt, his anonymous listening ear.

  His soup arrives. ‘Bill,’ Emily says, ‘I need you again, I’m afraid. There’s a loose floor tile in the corridor. It’s in near the wall, but I’m still a bit nervous of someone slipping on the way to the toilet. Any chance you could have a look on Saturday?’

  ‘Course I will – on one condition.’

  She makes a face. ‘You won’t let me pay.’

  ‘Not for such a small job. It’ll take two minutes.’

  ‘In that case, today’s lunch is on the house.’

  He demurs, she insists. ‘I’ll bar you unless you agree.’

  ‘What’s he done now?’

  They turn to see Heather taking a seat across the table.

  ‘We’re doing a deal,’ Bill tells her. ‘She’s bluffing about the barring.’

  Emily laughs. ‘He’s impossible.’

  ‘But we love him,’ Heather replies, winking at Bill. ‘You keeping well, William?’

  ‘Can’t complain.’

  ‘What’ll you have?’ Emily asks her.

  Heather orders mulligatawny; Emily vanishes.

  ‘How’re things with you?’ Bill asks.

  ‘Oh, you know. Same old, same old.’ She reaches for a slice of bread. She takes pleasure in her food, makes no secret of it. ‘It’s Lottie’s sports day at school tomorrow,’ she goes on, spreading butter as generously as Bill himself does. ‘She’s planning to win the three-legged race. She and her buddy Amy have been practising hard in the park – have to say they’re pretty impressive.’

  Listening to how eagerly she speaks, hearing the pride that spills from her words, Bill feels a stab of jealousy, and is ashamed of it. He should be glad that her daughter is still hers, still in
nocent and unharmed, still the source of joy that Christine was for him. Mind her, he wants to say. Wrap her up. Lock her up if needs be. Do whatever you have to do to keep her safe, to keep the demons from getting her.

  ‘She’ll be eight in a few weeks. We’ve always gone off on a day trip for her birthday, just the two of us, but this year she’s looking for a party in the house.’

  ‘Good for her.’

  They always gave Christine a party. A dozen or so of her friends, sausage rolls, chicken nuggets, an ice-cream cake – and when she was older, when her teens were approaching and she was casting off her childish preferences, the guests dwindled to three or four, and Bill was despatched with a takeaway pizza order. On his return, he and Betty would move into the sitting room, where they sat with the telly turned down low so they could hear the shrieks and giggles from the kitchen.

  No more parties after Betty got sick. For Christine’s sixteenth, just weeks before her mother’s death, she asked Bill for money to have lunch in town with two friends. Her seventeenth was a very different affair, with the house filled with tension, and his daughter already embarked, if he’d only known it, on her dreadful journey. No birthday celebration that year, or since. He’d given her fifty euro on the day, wanting to mark it in some way: she’d pocketed it with mumbled thanks. Lined a drug dealer’s pockets later, no doubt.

  ‘How are they in the nursing home?’ Heather asks – and glad of the change of topic, he tells her of Rosie’s death, and Rory’s scratchcard win, and Gloria’s stroke.

  ‘She loved to sing,’ he says. ‘I play the piano after work every day, we have a little sing-along before their tea, and Gloria was our singer. She loved all the old songs, knew all the words – well, most of them – but that’s gone now.’