The Restaurant Read online

  And now it’s more complicated, because he’s admitted to Emily that it’s Christine he has in mind. There’s something about Emily that invites you to share, and let your guard down. So she knows – and there’s every danger that she’ll mention it casually to Astrid. Has Bill’s daughter agreed to work in your garden? she might ask – and then they’ll get to talking, and Astrid will wonder, they both will, why he didn’t reveal to Astrid the identity of the person he was proposing. And of course they’ll also wonder why he can’t just lift the phone and talk to Christine. What a God-almighty mess.

  The thing is, he still wants to ask her. He remembers the entire days she could spend in the garden with her mother, weeding or planting or pruning, or moving shrubs from one spot to another. Betty was a great one for shifting things around. They need a new view, she’d say. They’re tired of the old one.

  Bill would be on lunch duty those days. He’d hard-boil a few eggs, cut slices from a loaf, put ham and halved tomatoes out on plates. He’d call them in when the pot of tea was made, and they’d come for just long enough to eat, soil under their fingernails even after they’d scrubbed their hands – neither of them could work with gloves on. Then off they’d go again, leaving him with the washing up, eager to get back out there.

  Of course that was long in the past, long before everything went wrong – but his stubborn brain insists on clinging to the faint hope that being back in a garden, any garden, will work some kind of restorative magic on his daughter. He could say a friend of his was in need of someone to tidy up her garden. A small job, he’d tell her, just take a few days. He needn’t say he’d put her forward already. He wouldn’t put any pressure at all on her.

  There’d be a few quid in it, he could say. Astrid would be generous, he thought, and money might be the thing that would make the difference to Christine. It would really help his friend out a lot, he could say.

  He could suggest that she moved back in with him while the job was going on, just if she wanted. He wouldn’t make a big thing of it, but he could put it out there as an option. It might be another bit of inducement, the idea of a bed with clean sheets for a few nights – and it would also mean that she’d turn up at Astrid’s looking respectable.

  Claire, his agony aunt, urges caution.

  Dear John,

  Thank you for your last email. I’m glad you feel you can talk to me. It’s difficult to know what to advise you on this occasion. I understand your great desire to help your daughter, and the notion of her getting involved in any sort of gainful employment must be so tempting – but please think carefully about this, John. Consider your friendship with the woman in question – have you thought about the repercussions if it all goes wrong, if your daughter fails to do the work, or disappoints in some way? You say there’s nothing to lose – but maybe your relationship with your friend would suffer. Maybe, if it didn’t work out, it would also push your daughter further away from you.

  I’m sorry, John. I know this will be hard for you to hear, but I feel I must play devil’s advocate, and point out the possible pitfalls. Of course you must do as you see fit – and if you go ahead with it, I sincerely hope there’s a happy ending. Please don’t despair if it doesn’t work out – you are to be commended for not losing hope, and you must hang on to this hope despite disappointments.

  Allow me to repeat what I said in my first message to you: when your daughter is ready, I’m sure she will ask you for help. In the meantime, know that I am rooting for you both, and wishing you all the best.

  Your friend,

  Claire

  Not a lot of comfort there. Clearly she feels this would be a wrong move. He should leave Christine to her drugs, and wait till she’s ready to be fixed – but he can’t. He’s sick of standing by and watching her destroy herself. He can’t do nothing, not when there’s something that might help.

  Round and round it goes in his head, any spare minute he has. Going to work each day is a relief: he looks forward to the distraction of the nursing home, and the various continuing ups and downs of life there.

  Eddie Martin, who replaced Rosie Doyle, is in trouble with Mrs Phelan about the card-playing. ‘She said it’s going on too late,’ he tells Bill. ‘She said I have to stop at nine, before the milk and biscuits come around. She treats us like children,’ he says, the frustration plain in his face, and there’s nothing Bill can say to contradict that, and nothing he can do about it. So now the card games finish at nine, and a lot of the spark is gone out of Eddie.

  On the happier side of things, Gloria is coming around a bit after her stroke, with some movement in her affected side. Bill looks in on her whenever he’s passing her room. ‘Music?’ he asks, and she always perks up at that. He’s found her a few more CDs, Maura O’Connell and Louis Armstrong and John McCormack. He holds them all up in turn until she nods, and he slots it in. The music fills her room, and she mouths the words, or as close as she can get to them. And sometimes she cries, but not out of sadness, he thinks.

  He still does the sing-along at five o’clock. They’ll never allow him to stop – not that he wants to. It’s a bright spot in his day, a reminder of the good stuff, and a chance to stop wondering whether he’ll get home to find her waiting outside. Wanting to see her, always wanting that, but dreading it too, because of how the sight of her as she is now stirs him up.

  Today is different. Today there’s someone else on his mind. After work, after the singsong, he returns to his cubbyhole behind Mrs Phelan’s office and lifts the bunch of mixed flowers he bought at lunchtime from the bucket of water he placed them in. He wraps the damp stems in a few pages from an old newspaper, and pours the water down the adjoining toilet, and leaves the nursing home.

  Eight years since he lost her. Eight years to the day since he last held the hand that had wasted to skin and bone in a matter of months. Eight years since he and Christine said goodbye to her, sitting on either side of her bed as she left them, quietly and without a fuss.

  Was it that? he wonders, as he has wondered so many times. Was it the loss of her mother that set Christine on the wrong road, or would it have happened if Betty had lived, if cancer had chosen another victim and passed her by? He recalls his anger in the wake of her death, how he’d raged at God for taking her – because despite his rage, he had to go on believing in God, and heaven, and all that stuff. He has to believe that Betty is in a happier place now, or he may as well lie down and die too.

  The day is dry and gentle; he slings his jacket over a shoulder. It takes twenty minutes to walk to the cemetery. Betty’s grave, in the plot Bill bought a decade before, is located along the outer edge, next to Timothy Moran, fifty-six, and his infant grandson Thomas. A copper beech by the wall spreads its generous canopy overhead, sheltering both graves from the crueller elements.

  He stands before Betty’s black marble headstone, chosen by Christine. He’d have gone for a granite one if it was left up to him, but he figured it was a small price to pay if it gave comfort to Christine. By the time it was erected, almost a year after Betty’s death, Christine had changed utterly from the tearful girl who’d selected it.

  He closes his eyes and breathes in the soft calming sounds of the place, the gentle rustle of leaves, the calls of the birds that flit among them, the rumble of the traffic beyond the stone walls that surround the graveyard.

  At length, he begins to speak. ‘The Halpins next door moved out yesterday,’ he says. ‘End of an era. Gone to a bungalow, Caroline can’t manage the stairs any more.

  ‘John and Tina Foley are away to the Canaries again. This’ll be their third time since Christmas.

  ‘One of the little twins across the road – you wouldn’t know them, they’re after your time – he fell off a trampoline at a birthday party and broke his leg.

  ‘There was a charity swim in the river on Sunday. Good turnout, I walked down to see it. I met Lucy Garvey, Dearbhla’s mother. You remember Dearbhla? She used to be pally with Christine. Lucy’s had to g
ive up the taxi, her back is at her. She had Dearbhla’s little baby with her, born just after Christmas. Conor, I think she said his name was, or Cormac.’

  Dearbhla had been in Christine’s class at school. The two had been friendly, in the days before Christine drove all her friends away. Lucy was the mother who’d called to Bill’s door, more than a year after Betty’s death, when he was already out of his mind with worry about Christine. She offered Dearbhla drugs, Lucy said. She wasn’t angry with Bill, she didn’t blame him. I just wanted you to know, she said. You need to know.

  And after Christine left home, a long time after, he met Lucy in the supermarket, and she squeezed his hand and told him she’d seen Christine on the street, and how sorry she was, and you could tell she wasn’t taking any satisfaction from it, the way others might.

  He could be a grandfather now. He could be showing off a grandchild, like Lucy was.

  He brings his mind back to his surroundings. Beloved wife and mother, he reads on Betty’s headstone. She was beloved, by both of them. He’d loved her since he was fourteen and she was two years older, newly moved to the town and befriended by his sister Grace. Whenever she came to the house he would adopt an air of indifference, terrified that any attempt to interact with her would show him up for the gormless idiot he was.

  I thought you didn’t like her, Grace said four years later, after he’d finally found the courage to ask Betty if she’d care to go to the cinema with him, after she’d made his day by saying yes she would.

  ‘I was thinking,’ he says, ‘of asking Christine if she’d like a few days’ work, clearing a friend’s garden. It’s probably a long shot, the way she is now, but I thought it might be worth a try. I wonder would you think it’s a good idea.’

  What would she say, if she could still talk to him? Would she discourage it? Would she urge caution, like Claire has? He wishes there was someone else he could ask, but Grace, living in Cornwall now with her English husband, has washed her hands of Christine. I tried, she said, and she had: she’d made repeated attempts to talk to her when Christine was still living at home, when they still thought they could win her back. He can’t involve Grace now. He’s asked enough of her.

  He could ring the helplines again: God knows he did it often enough. He began to recognise the different voices of the volunteers, he was on to them that often. But what if they give him the wrong answer to this particular question? Or maybe it’s the right answer, but not one he wants to hear.

  ‘Bill?’

  He turns – and there is Emily, wearing a pale blue and white spotted dress. ‘I thought it was you,’ she says, holding a small bunch of pink flowers, her curls loose and glorious. She looks at the headstone. ‘Is this …?’

  ‘My wife,’ he finishes. ‘Eight years gone today.’ The odd confluence, he thinks, of encountering the woman you love by the grave of the woman you loved. The sight of Emily is welcome, as it always is, but also strange on this occasion.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ she says, reading.

  ‘She was Betty. I don’t know why I put Elizabeth. Everyone knew her as Betty.’

  ‘You do though, don’t you?’ She indicates the pink flowers. ‘These are for my gran – she’s buried further on. Everyone called her Bridie, but my father put Bridget on her headstone. I think people feel they have to do it properly.’

  ‘When did she die?’ he asks.

  ‘Coming up on four years. She had a hat shop, where the restaurant is now.’

  ‘I remember it,’ he says. ‘Betty got a couple of hats there, for weddings.’

  ‘Did she?’ Emily smiles. ‘I could have met her. I used to go there a good bit after school.’

  They might have met, Betty and the schoolgirl Emily. The thought is unsettling: he shifts it sideways. ‘You were close, you and your gran.’

  ‘…Yes.’

  He could ask her, he thinks suddenly. He’s already mentioned Christine to her in connection with Astrid’s garden – he could fill in the blanks, ask what she thinks. Of all people Emily would be kind, wouldn’t judge. Maybe they were meant to meet here.

  But he doesn’t get the chance. ‘Bill,’ she says, ‘could I … would you mind if I asked you something?’

  He’s pulled up short. His brain slides onto a new track. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t mind.’

  There’s a pause. He sees her search for the right words, hears the careful way she eventually speaks. ‘Would you think – a person deserves a second chance? Even if they really hurt you, should you trust them again if they tell you they’re sorry, and if they promise not to … let you down again?’

  The question, so unexpected, throws him further off balance. He decides not to consider its possible implications, and take it at face value. He casts about for the right response.

  ‘I shouldn’t ask,’ she says quickly, seeing his hesitation. ‘I shouldn’t involve you. Forget I spoke, it’s not important.’

  ‘No, it’s— I just …’ He thinks of Christine, all the second chances he would give her without a thought. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, definitely. Everyone makes mistakes, everyone deserves a chance to come good.’

  She smiles again, the sight warming him as it always does. ‘Thanks, Bill.’ Another pause. ‘I should explain,’ she says. ‘Someone has come back into my life,’ the colour blooming in her cheeks, and too late, he thinks, No, I don’t want to hear this, but he has to hear it, ‘and I – well, he wants us to try again, and … I’ve agreed.’

  She stops. She’s looking at him. Waiting.

  ‘Right. Good luck,’ he says, because of course it’s what she wants to hear. ‘I hope it goes well,’ he says, as his heart folds and crumples. Not that he ever had a hope in hell with her, he knows that, he’s well aware of that, but all the same the blow almost suffocates him. He makes a show of checking the time, but the numbers on his watch face may as well be hieroglyphics. ‘I’m late,’ he says. ‘I’d better be off. Take care now.’ Lifting a hand, moving away.

  ‘Bye, Bill. See you soon.’

  Her words drift after him. She’ll wonder about his abrupt departure – or maybe she won’t. Maybe it didn’t register, because she’s got better things to think about.

  He wants us to try again, she said, and I’ve agreed. She’s trying again with someone who hurt her badly. She’s giving him a second chance, and he, Bill, told her to go right ahead.

  At least he didn’t bring up the subject of Christine – because he doesn’t really want advice, does he? Not from Emily, not from anyone. His mind is made up. He’s going to put it to her, next time he sees her. She can say no, she’ll probably say no, but at least he’ll have tried. He’ll have done that, and his dithering will be over.

  It’s after seven by the time he turns onto his road. In the driveway of number three, Keith Flaherty is washing his car with his usual gusto, sending rivulets of sudsy water cascading onto the street. ‘Hey Bill,’ he calls, and Bill throws him a salute. Further on, the mother of the child with the broken leg pulls up in her Mini Cooper across the road. Bill waits while she gets out, and enquires after the patient, and is told he’ll be coming home in the morning. He’ll pick up a few of those easy-peeler oranges in the supermarket on his way home from work tomorrow, and drop them over.

  And as he opens his gate there she is, waiting for him. Grey woolly hat pulled low, despite the mild weather.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I was at the cemetery, saying hello to Mum.’ He makes no mention of the anniversary. He lets her in, and they go through their usual routine. He scrambles eggs as water rushes through the pipes overhead. He opens a can of beans and heats them till small bubbles pop softly in the sauce. He fills the washing up basin with hot water and slides two plates in to warm. He scratches Sherlock’s head and looks at the wall without seeing it as he waits for her.

  ‘How are you?’ he asks, when she’s seated at the table, and she says fine. She always says fine, and never enquires how he is. He loads food onto a plate and places it before
her: she accepts it with murmured thanks. He takes a can of Coke from the fridge and sets it down.

  ‘There’s bread,’ he says, slicing it. ‘Butter,’ he says, adding the dish to the table. The running commentary he feels compelled to provide as the backdrop to their meals, tipping words into the chasm of all that is left unsaid between them. ‘Your cold better?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s gone.’ Popping the tab on the Coke and drinking. Forking up some egg, bringing it to her mouth. Trying.

  The radio is playing – he has it tuned to Lyric. A choir sings a song he doesn’t recognise. He’s not that gone on choral music, but it’s better than the offerings of other stations, the over-bright prattle of presenters, the pious spin of politicians, the irritating jangle of pop music. He’s a fogey when it comes to the radio.

  He butters bread. He ladles egg onto it and rolls it up. He always does this with scrambled egg. He remembers Betty and Christine teasing him about it. ‘Look,’ he says, holding it up to show her. ‘Eggroll,’ he says, and she gives a thin smile.

  He takes a bite; some egg escapes and plops back onto his plate. He drinks from his glass of milk. Now. Say it now.

  ‘There’s something I wanted to run by you,’ he says. Diving in before he can think about it. ‘Something I thought you might be interested in.’

  She scratches at her damp head before lifting her Coke and drinking again.

  ‘I have a friend. I met her in a place I go to for lunch sometimes. She’s old – she’ll be ninety-three in September. Astrid, her name is. She’s from Austria. Her family left it before the war, the Second World War, and came to live in Ireland. I’m assuming she’s Jewish.’

  He stops. He’s babbling, shying away from the point. Christine takes up another minuscule piece of egg. The beans remain undisturbed. Too late, he thinks he should have put them on toast: she used to love that.