The Restaurant Page 18

  The following day is Friday. She calls a taxi to take her to The Food of Love for lunch. Taxis continue to be her mode of transport since her illness; the thought has occurred to her that she may never again board a bus. Still, she didn’t do too badly to keep going until now.

  The route to the restaurant takes them past the town’s nursing home: as the taxi approaches the building, Astrid sees a man emerge from it, and recognises him. Might as well get it over with.

  ‘Please stop,’ she tells the driver, and he pulls in. Astrid presses the button to slide down her window. ‘Bill,’ she calls, ‘can I give you a lift? I’m on the way to lunch.’

  ‘Astrid.’ He crosses to the car, plants his hands on the window-frame. ‘Actually, I’ve just eaten.’ He nods back towards his place of work.

  ‘Oh …’ Didn’t he say to her, not so long ago, that he loved escaping from there at lunchtime? She decides not to question it. ‘Another time, then.’

  ‘How are you keeping?’ he asks.

  ‘Very well, thank you.’ She must say it. It sits between them; it must be spoken of. ‘Bill, I met Christine. She dropped by two days ago.’

  She doesn’t miss the guarded look he instantly adopts, the small tightening of his features. ‘Did she ring you in advance?’

  ‘No,’ she says lightly. ‘She just turned up. Luckily, I was at home, so it wasn’t a problem.’

  His face drops. ‘Sorry, Astrid. I asked her to phone beforehand. She must have forgotten.’

  ‘You never mentioned she was your daughter,’ she says, careful to keep her tone neutral.

  Immediately she regrets the comment: the poor man looks hunted. ‘I – it must have slipped my mind. Sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter in the least. Maybe you did say it, and I forgot.’ Be kind, when their battle is unknown to her. ‘At any rate, it’s of no consequence. We had a chat, and I showed her the garden, and we agreed that she’d come back the following day, which was yesterday, but …’ How to put it? How to spare the man further distress? ‘… I’m thinking something must have come up, because, well, she didn’t appear, and there was no sign of her today either. If I had a number for her, I’d have called, but she didn’t leave one, and I didn’t think to ask. I just thought you should know, Bill.’

  He receives the news with no change of expression. Clearly, it comes as no surprise to him that she broke a promise. ‘I’m so sorry, Astrid. She’s not the most reliable.’

  ‘Bill, it’s not your—’

  ‘I should never have put her forward,’ he says, as if she hasn’t spoken. ‘I can see it was a mistake. There’s been a – well, after her mother died, things changed. I see her only now and again.’ He shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry.’ he repeats. ‘I thought it might help if she had some … distraction. I was wrong.’

  The absolute defeat in his voice is hard to hear. She places a hand lightly on his. ‘Bill, I doubt there’s a family in the world without some problem or another. Try not to worry too much – I’m sure it will sort itself out in time.’ How trite it sounds – but it’s the best she can do.

  He shakes his head slowly. ‘It’s not …’ He trails off.

  ‘Christine is young,’ she says, ‘with a lot to learn.’

  ‘She’s twenty-five,’ he says quietly. ‘Not that young.’

  While she’s searching for a response he speaks again. ‘Astrid, can I give you my number, just in case you need it?’

  In case she needs it. What does he mean? She opens her mouth to ask, but finds herself unable to frame the question. She takes out her phone and hands it to him. ‘Will you add it to my contacts?’ She can make calls and send texts, but anything more complicated takes her forever. He presses keys and returns the phone to her, and steps back from the car. ‘I’d better let you go,’ he says. ‘Say hello to Emily for me.’

  He looks so utterly forlorn. She regrets opening her mouth. She should have said nothing at all – or lied if he’d asked, told him nobody had been to see her. If ever a lie was called for, it was in this instance – but instead she told the cruel truth, and ruined his day.

  ‘Try not to worry,’ she repeats, once again hearing how useless the words sound. He makes no response, just lifts a hand and waves as the taxi pulls away.

  She’s not the most reliable, he said. I see her only now and again.

  So sad, whatever the cause of their trouble. She’ll give the girl a few more days to return. For Bill’s sake, she’ll give her a bit of leeway. If she doesn’t reappear Astrid will put an advert in the local paper. She’ll ask for a retired person to work in her garden – is she allowed to specify the age group, or is that regarded as discrimination? So difficult these days to avoid causing offence to someone or other. At any rate, she’ll take out an ad – or perhaps she could ask at the local garden centre: they might be able to suggest someone reliable. Yes, that might be safer than taking on a complete stranger.

  She puts it from her mind as they draw closer to the restaurant, but the exchange with Bill has unsettled her, and she realises that she’s no longer in the mood for socialising. ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she says to the driver. ‘I think I’d like to go home.’

  ‘No problem,’ he replies, swinging into a side street. A banana sandwich she’ll have, then the comfort of her bed, a few hours of dreaming and drifting. I’m old, she thinks, looking out at rushing shoppers and playing children and trotting dogs. I’m old and I’m tired and my energy is nothing like it was, but my mind is intact, and my hearing and sight are holding up. I’m not ready for the scrapheap yet.

  ‘Going to stay fine all next week,’ the driver remarks. ‘We’re getting a good run of it.’

  ‘Indeed we are.’

  ‘You going on any holiday yourself?’ he asks, meeting her eye briefly in the rearview mirror.

  ‘Oh no,’ she tells him. ‘I’m going nowhere.’

  She’s staying right here, for another while at least.

  Heather

  HER PHONE RINGS WHEN SHE’S AT GEORGE’S HOUSE, up a ladder with a sponge in her hand. The phone sits where she left it, on the windowsill a floor below. Two rings, three. Two more and her voicemail will click in. She’ll leave it.

  But it might be Madge, who’s looking after Lottie this morning.

  She drops the sponge and scoots down. She swipes her palms on her jeans and grabs the phone and presses the answer key, not stopping to check the caller ID. ‘Hi,’ she says.

  A buzz, a click. Silence, followed by another click. It’s one of those scammers from Outer Mongolia, ringing to tell her she’s won a fortune on their lottery, and can they please have her bank details so they can lodge it. She’ll hang on, give them one of her whistles.

  ‘Heather?’

  ‘… Mom?’ She never calls at this hour. Isn’t it the crack of dawn on the west coast? ‘What’s up?’

  And then, abruptly, she remembers the letter. Jeez, how could she have forgotten it? She turns and leans her butt cheeks against the sill, waiting for whatever is to come.

  ‘You have a daughter.’ Her mother’s voice sounds muffled. Maybe she’s got a cold.

  ‘Um … yeah.’ She shifts her weight while the silence lengthens. ‘Mom? Hello?’ Have they been cut off?

  ‘You have a daughter.’

  She’s crying.

  Her mother is crying, which could mean any number of things. ‘Mom, listen. Are you OK with it, you and Dad? I need to know.’

  ‘Heather,’ her mother says – and then nothing again, and after that there’s a fumbling, and a new voice. ‘Heather, it’s me.’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘We got your mail. We’re – well,’ he says, and stops.

  What is it with all this silence? ‘Dad, can you please tell me? How do you both feel about it?’

  ‘Well,’ he repeats, and there’s another pause, while Heather watches a bee buzzing around George’s rhododendrons, or whatever they are. For crying out loud.

  ‘Heather,’ her mom again, �
�we want you to come here, and bring your – bring Charlotte.’

  ‘Lottie,’ she says automatically. ‘You want to meet her? For sure?’

  ‘Well, of course we do!’

  Wow. ‘I’m glad to hear it, Mom. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how you’d take the news.’

  ‘Heather, we have a grandchild we’ve never met, a grandchild we didn’t know existed. How could you keep this from us? How could you do that?’

  ‘Mom, I was seventeen. I wasn’t married. I didn’t even have a boyfriend when she was born. I was afraid you’d cut me off, or at the very least bawl me out.’

  ‘But to say nothing for eight whole years? Really?’

  ‘I know. But—’ She stops. She can’t very well say, ‘You were crap at being a mom, so how could I trust you as a grandma?’ Who would it help? Not Lottie, that’s for sure.

  ‘Please come home, Heather. Please come soon, even just for a bit. Is she – is Lottie at school now, or on summer break?’

  ‘School’s out till the end of August.’

  ‘Is she there with you? Can we talk with her?’

  ‘No, she’s with a neighbour. I’m working right now.’

  It feels unreal. It feels a little weird. They want to be grandparents; they’re excited to meet Lottie. Maybe they’ll be better at it than parenting. Maybe they just needed to skip a generation. Maybe, after all, they don’t know that they stank at being parents. Maybe they thought that was how it was done.

  ‘So you’ll come?’

  They could go for a week, ten days maybe. She could take Lottie to meet Josephine’s son Terry, and his wife and kids. The older brother whose name she’s forgotten, the two little girls who aren’t little any more. She wonders how they’re all doing. She wanted to keep in touch after Josephine’s death, but she was too sad to figure out how to make it happen.

  She hopes they live in the same house. If not, she’ll find them. She’ll search the phone book, she’ll call all the Terry Moloneys in California if she has to.

  ‘We’ll come visit,’ she says. ‘Soon as I can organise it.’

  ‘When? When will you come?’

  In the nine years she’s been living here they’ve never been so keen to have her come home. They asked before, sure they did, but they never insisted like they’re doing now.

  She lets it go. ‘Maybe a week or so? I’m not sure how often—’

  ‘And can we call you later, so we can say hi to Lottie?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll be picking her up in a bit. Give us an hour.’

  After she hangs up she finishes the windows, her thoughts darting about.

  Wait till Lottie sees the big fancy house her mom came from. Wait till they hear their grandchild’s Irish accent.

  They’re not mad. They want to meet her. They’re excited to meet her.

  She needs to book flights. Lottie’s never flown before; it’ll be such an adventure for her.

  Lottie could do with new summer clothes, and with getting her hair cut.

  ‘You look like you won the Lotto,’ George says, paying her.

  ‘Just happy,’ she tells him. ‘How about you, George?’

  ‘Can’t complain.’

  He could complain. He has plenty to complain about. His wife Susie died last year, his only surviving brother two months before that. His children, every last one of them, live in New Zealand, and don’t come home often enough. George has a dicky heart, and uncertain blood pressure, and pain in both his knees when it rains. But he soldiers on and never complains, and Heather brings a lemon drizzle cake each time she comes to do his windows, because he mentioned once that Susie used to bake them. Heather’s aren’t home baked, obviously, and probably not a patch on Susie’s, but he seems happy to get them.

  On the walk back to her street, just a few blocks away, she takes out her phone and scrolls through flight schedules from Ireland to San Francisco, remembering her sixteen-year-old self flying in the opposite direction, no thought in her head but to get to Ireland, to be in the country Josephine had loved.

  ‘Oof!’

  The collision, as she rounds a bend, knocks her phone from her hand, sends it skidding down the path.

  ‘Sorry—’ The man who crashed into her rushes to retrieve it: she doesn’t recognise him until he’s on his way back to her. ‘Think it’s OK,’ he says, handing it over.

  Stony-faced. Not surprising, given their last encounter.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, beginning to move off – and then she halts. ‘Hang on,’ she says, but already he’s vanished around the corner. Desperate to get away from her. She hurries after him. ‘Wait!’ she calls. He stops dead and turns. He watches warily as she approaches.

  ‘Listen,’ she says, ‘I might have been a bit hard on you, that time we met.’

  He shoves his hands into his pockets and makes no reply.

  ‘What I mean is, I don’t know the circumstances – I mean the situation. I shouldn’t assume, is what I’m saying.’

  Still no response. He could help her out.

  ‘I’m trying to say sorry,’ she says.

  ‘Say it then.’

  She stares at him. ‘What?’

  ‘Say sorry. If you really mean it.’

  Annoyance rises. She takes a breath. ‘Look, you could be a bit more – gracious about it.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he says, ‘are you sorry or aren’t you?’

  She glares at him – and then, to her astonishment, he grins. ‘You’re so easy to wind up.’

  He’s winding her up? He can sing for his apology. She wheels and stalks off – but it’s his turn to chase after. ‘Heather, hang on, listen to me. Hang on, please—’

  ‘I’ve got to pick up Lottie,’ she says, not breaking her stride, but he catches up and walks beside her, giving her little choice but to hear what he has to say.

  ‘Seriously,’ he says, ‘thank you. I did feel under attack the other night, but I can see where you were coming from. And in a way, you did have justification.’

  She stops. He stops.

  ‘Look,’ he says, unsmiling now, ‘like I told you that night, it wasn’t my idea to chuck out you and Lottie, honestly it wasn’t. It was the last thing I wanted, and I should have done more to prevent it.’

  She has no quick response to this. Maybe he could have prevented it – but at what cost to himself, or his children? She can’t blame him for wanting to protect them.

  ‘Yvonne and I have split up,’ he says then. ‘You may have heard.’

  ‘I heard something.’ Things get around, particularly when children share classes. No need to say Nora had told her: it could as easily have been Lottie, or another parent in the class.

  ‘I know it might sound like I’m blaming her now, when she’s not here to defend herself—’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Actually, it makes sense. She never took to me.’

  ‘You made her feel guilty,’ he says. ‘You were doing what she should have done.’

  ‘You mean looking after Gerry?’

  ‘Yeah. I wanted Dad to come and live with us after his stroke, but she wouldn’t hear of it. It suited her perfectly when you stepped in and took over, but it didn’t stop her resenting you. You showed her up. Every time we went to see him you reminded her that she’d refused to take him in.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have been happy,’ Heather says, ‘having to quit his home.’ Not to mention having to live with Yvonne, the daughter-in-law who just about tolerated him when they called to see him, who never had a genuinely kind word to say to him. ‘It was best to leave him where he was.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that in hindsight … Anyway, I’m the one who’s sorry. I should have stopped her pushing you out – and I should have insisted you got the house in the will too, but I didn’t.’

  They’re about the same height. He’s – what? Fifty, maybe sixty pounds lighter than Heather. Slight frame for a man, not muscular. Yvonne isn’t big: she’s wiry, but she must be strong. Strong enough to push him around, s
trong enough to give him a thump whenever he didn’t toe the line, whenever he attempted to stand up to her.

  ‘Let’s call it quits,’ he says. ‘On the sorry front, I mean.’

  She tries not to smile at that, but a little one breaks through. ‘Can I ask you something?’ she says. ‘Just out of curiosity.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘What did you think when you found out I’d bought Gerry’s house?’

  ‘I was glad,’ he says, without hesitation. ‘I thought it was right that you got to live in it. Surprised too, though – I’d assumed you had no money, but you paid over the odds for it.’

  ‘My folks pitched in,’ she says. True, in a manner of speaking. ‘I don’t imagine Yvonne was too happy when she heard who was buying.’

  A wry grin. ‘No. Not too happy.’

  ‘But the money softened the blow.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  There’s a pause.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’m glad we cleared things up. I’d better let you get off.’

  ‘I was sixteen,’ she says.

  In the act of turning away, he stops. Looks quizzical.

  ‘When I started looking after Gerry. Not eighteen, like I said.’ As long as they’re telling the truth, she may as well go the whole hog. Not much he can do about it now.

  He frowns. ‘Sixteen? You’re joking, aren’t you? This is a wind up.’

  ‘Nope. My folks put me on a plane for England. I was supposed to spend two years in a kind of swanky finishing school, but I … changed my mind and came here instead. They weren’t exactly thrilled when they found out.’

  ‘Jesus.’ He shakes his head slowly. ‘We employed a sixteen-year-old to look after my father. We probably broke the law.’

  ‘I was mature,’ she insists. ‘I think I did a pretty good job.’

  ‘So mature you got pregnant.’