The Restaurant Read online

  We’ve resigned, her mother replied. We thought this was a good opportunity: if we left it much longer we’d be too old for anyone to want us.

  So arrangements had been made, without any consultation with their children. Hard not to feel abandoned, even if you were twenty-two and earning a fair enough salary, even if you were still going to have a roof over your head – the house is yours and Daniel’s, they were told, for as long as you need it. Hard all the same not to feel that they were making their escape.

  And you’ll have Gran with you, Dol said. Gran, Patrick’s mother, lived in town, in the flat above the hat shop she’d opened after handing over the family home to her son and his new wife, twenty-five years earlier.

  She’s finally ready to retire, Dol went on. We’ve asked if she’d like to move back here, to live with you two.

  Another decision taken without Emily and Daniel being consulted – but this was one Emily was all in favour of. Gran felt like family, real family. All through her teens Emily had so often dropped into the hat shop after school, to sit behind the counter and watch Gran with her customers, or to climb the stairs on days the shop was closed, to drink tea and eat Garibaldi biscuits.

  She’d never known her builder grandfather: he’d fallen to his death from scaffolding when Emily’s father was still a toddler. I worked from home while Patrick was growing up, Gran told her. I was always handy with a needle so I did alterations, and made hats to order. When Patrick announced he was getting married it gave me the push I needed – I’d been dreaming about opening a hat shop for years. I was thrilled when I found this little place with accommodation upstairs. It was perfect.

  The shop was an Aladdin’s cave to young Emily. There was a large room to the rear where Gran made her hats, with a big trestle table covered with rolls of fabric and bundles of lace and stacks of felt, and two giant glass-fronted cabinets whose presses and drawers held her various trimmings and threads and tools, and a large family of pin-cushions that put Emily in mind of hedgehogs.

  In the main shop the hats were displayed on tiered shelving, with their curving magnificent feathers, their tulle veils and delicate lace edging, their ribbons and buttons and sequins and flowers. It was a place riotous with colour, and glorious with shape and texture. There was a small dressing table with a mirrored triptych, in front of which frowning customers would tilt their heads this way and that while Gran kept up a running commentary, and sometimes reached out to tip the hat further to the front, or an inch to the side. There! she would exclaim, beaming, clasping her hands. That’s made all the difference!

  I’m leaving it to you, she told Emily once, during one of their conversations. This place. It’ll be yours after I’m gone – and Emily, shy and sixteen, couldn’t imagine having the confidence to run a hat shop, or any shop, could only protest at the unconscionable thought of Gran not being around any more. She’d pushed the remark to the back of her mind and it hadn’t been mentioned again – and thirteen years later here she is, three and a half years after the unthinkable happened, and Gran left them. Here she is, living in the apartment that was Gran’s home, proprietor for the past two years of the restaurant that used to be a hat shop.

  Here she is, after the future she’d planned fell apart, forcing her to create a new one.

  She folds the letter and slips it into the left dresser drawer with all the others. Her father doesn’t write: he phones every Monday evening, and they spend ten minutes in the kind of amicable but empty conversation people make when they aren’t close enough for anything deeper.

  She must remember to ask him about the injury to his foot; that’ll use up a minute or two. She can tell him about the young couple who’ve moved into Frances Cooney’s house, along with their small baby and several cats – Daniel thinks five, but it could be more.

  Frances, childless and unmarried, lived next door to them all through Emily’s growing-up years, behind net-curtained windows that were never opened. Her rear garden, for as long as Emily could remember, was home to her various discards: a rusting fridge, an assortment of woebegone kitchen chairs, the tangled skeletal remains of several umbrellas, numerous bicycle wheels and frames, a lopsided wardrobe missing its door. Frances, tatty and friendly, collapsed and died without a murmur on her way into the supermarket on the morning of her seventieth birthday.

  Emily spends the next few hours at her computer, stopping only to return to the restaurant kitchen and attend to the intermittent demands of her bread. At length, the warm, wonderful scent of the baking loaves begins to drift up the stairs as it does every working morning, causing Barney to purr happily in his sleep. Emily drinks vanilla chai and types on.

  At eleven she hears the sound of Mike’s key in the door. She saves her file and flips the laptop closed, and goes downstairs to greet him, and to begin the lunchtime preparations in earnest.

  ‘Toothache,’ he says, when she enquires if all is well. ‘Kept me awake half the night. My own fault, been nagging me for a while. Should have done something about it.’ Hanging his jacket in the narrow press behind the door, reaching for a clean apron, securing it about his waist.

  ‘Oh, poor thing – you should have phoned. I could have got Daniel to give me a hand.’ Her brother has stepped in on a few occasions before. Daniel doesn’t have Mike’s flair, but he’s not a bad cook. Between them, he and Emily manage when they have to.

  Mike rolls up his sleeves and washes his hands at the small corner sink. ‘I’m grand, the painkillers have kicked in. I’ve got the dentist booked for a quarter past two – only time he could take me, so I’ll have to leave you with the tidy up, I’m afraid.’

  ‘No worries.’

  ‘I’ll pay it back.’

  ‘You know you don’t have to.’

  ‘I know.’

  But he will, of course. First person she’s ever employed, and she doubts she could have found a more dependable one. For the next half hour they chop and fry and season and stir as the kitchen grows warmer and more fragrant. While the soups bubble and the breads cool, Mike cuts lemon and orange slices for water jugs and Emily goes to the garden for primroses, a reawakened Barney padding after her. The sun is weak and pale but it’s there, the sky a patchwork of washed-out blue and pillowy white. She sniffs the air, damp and fresh from last night’s rain.

  Beads of water cling to the velvety flower petals: she tries not to dislodge them as she snips stems. She arranges them in four little rinsed-out spice jars and takes them through to the restaurant. She checks place settings and straightens a fork and pulls out a tweak in the tablecloth. Ten to midday.

  Upstairs she dabs fresh colour on lips and cheeks, and scent behind her ears. She pulls her hair into a ribbon that will definitely come undone before lunch is over, but elastic of any kind, once secured in her hair, becomes a prisoner of her curls. She checks her reflection in the bathroom mirror and reminds herself, as she does every day, how lucky she is. Healthy and solvent – just about – with a business she loves, and a sideline that helps pay the bills, and friends and family who care about her. Not much to complain about.

  Back on the ground floor she pokes her head into the kitchen. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Ready.’

  She walks through the silent restaurant as church bells three streets away chime for the Angelus. She unlocks the front door and throws it open. As she glances out to check on the street, a man rises from the bench outside the window, shaking out the jacket that was resting on his lap as he runs a hand through straw-coloured hair that’s every bit as unruly as her own.

  She smiles at him. ‘You’re early.’

  ‘The boss is away,’ he says. ‘I snuck out. Don’t tell.’

  Bill

  HE CHOOSES MINESTRONE, BECAUSE LAST THURSDAY he picked cream of tomato, and variety is the spice of life. He wonders if he’ll meet any of the other regulars today. Sometimes their paths intersect, sometimes he’s surrounded by strangers. He doesn’t mind either way: people come here to chat, to mix, so conversa
tions strike up easily. Today he’s the first to arrive.

  After taking his order, Emily lingers. ‘Bill, I know you always tell me you don’t mind when I ask you to do something, but if you ever feel like I’m becoming a pest—’

  ‘Never. What do you need?’

  ‘One of the kitchen taps is dripping. There’s no rush, it’s not major.’

  ‘I’ll come Saturday afternoon, if that suits.’ He’d go to the moon on a bicycle if she asked.

  ‘Would you? Thanks a million, you’re a star.’

  When she’s gone he selects a slice of olive bread from the basket she set before him, and spreads it with too much butter. A minute on the lips, an inch on the hips, Rosie Doyle would say if she saw it, arthritic finger prodding at the softness around his middle – but he’s fairly sure an extra inch or two on him would go largely unobserved. Long time since anyone looked at him with enough interest to notice stuff like that. He’s no George Clooney, with his tangle of hair and pointy nose, and mouth too big for its surroundings. Still got all his own teeth though, and the hair is as plentiful as it was in his twenties. Small mercies: he’s thankful.

  The bread still holds the last of its warmth. He chews slowly, relishing the generous chunks of olive he encounters. He was twenty-two before he tasted an olive; he remembers biting into its crinkled black flesh, not knowing what to expect. The surprise of his teeth hitting the stone: he’d been thinking little pips, like a grape.

  Greece they’d gone to, he and Betty, less than a year into their marriage, and just a few months after her mother died. A little holiday, he’d said, trying to pull his wife’s mind away from her grief, trying to distract her with sunshine and bougainvillea and chunks of tender lamb on wooden sticks, and houses so dazzlingly white he’d had to squint at them.

  Fragments of crust scatter with each bite onto the tablecloth. He swipes them into his hand and drops them back on his side plate. He reaches for the little glass jar closest to him and dips his head to sniff the primroses. He runs a finger lightly along a petal to marvel at its softness. He was never one to coax flowers from the earth – Betty was the gardener, and Christine had an interest too – but the sight of them never fails to gladden him.

  The door opens to admit two women. He guesses mother and daughter. Right ages, same chins. Mother shorter, daughter thinner. They nod at him and take seats at the far end of the table. Came for the food maybe, happy keeping to themselves. He doesn’t remember seeing them here before, but this can’t be their first visit. New people always do a double-take when they walk in.

  Emily reappears with his soup. She presses his shoulder briefly as she leans in to deposit the bowl before him. ‘Bon appétit,’ she says, like she always does. She turns her attention to the other two, leaving him with the echo of her touch, the soft, powdery trail of her perfume. He likes her in pink; she suits pale colours. Then again, he can’t remember seeing her in a colour that didn’t flatter her.

  He tells himself to cop on, and lifts his spoon.

  Over the following few minutes the table fills rapidly, as it generally does. People enter in ones and twos, seats are chosen, names exchanged with neighbours, handshakes across the table, conversations ensuing. Bill soon finds himself chatting with a holidaying Norwegian, who tells him that a barman recommended the restaurant to him the night before. ‘It is different here,’ he says.

  ‘You travelled to Ireland on your own?’ Bill enquires.

  ‘Yes. I like it, more interesting’ – but Bill can’t imagine heading off anywhere without a companion. Not for him, never for him. Took him long enough to work up the nerve to walk into this place by himself. For weeks he’d dithered, getting as far as the door and then walking on by, cursing his cowardice.

  It’s your first time, Emily said, when he finally made it across the threshold. The situation plain, with him hovering on the sidelines like a red-faced fool, having missed, in his botheration, the sign that told him he could sit wherever he chose. I’m Emily, she went on, putting out her hand to clasp his. You’re very welcome. He told her he was Bill, and she seated him next to a tiny old woman with a head of sparse snow-white hair, whom she introduced as Astrid. One of my regulars, she told him, doing her best to put him at ease.

  Over the course of the forty minutes or so that he spent in her company, he learnt that Astrid had been born in Austria, but had lived in Ireland for most of her life.

  We got out just as the war was starting, she said, her accent barely discernible, the ‘r’s softened, the ‘t’s sharp. We were lucky: my father had contacts in high places. We came to Ireland because it was neutral, and he thought we would be safe here, and so we were. I married an Irish man but I’m a widow now, and we were not blessed with children.

  Bill told her he’d been widowed too. He mentioned a daughter but didn’t dwell on her. She has her own life now, he said, and left it at that, and thankfully Astrid didn’t probe. He has since come to recognise and appreciate the sensitivity that allows her to understand what isn’t always articulated.

  Emily comes and goes today, greeting known faces cheerily, keeping an eye on lone diners who look a bit lost. Bringing steaming bowls to new arrivals, keeping bread baskets filled, asking if anyone wants second helpings.

  As he gets up to leave, Bill spots the two women he noticed earlier, in conversation with a pale, freckly man whose wire-rimmed spectacles perch on the bald dome of his head. As he talks, the man tears a slice of bread into pieces and floats them in his soup. He glances in Bill’s direction and catches his eye briefly before Bill lets his gaze slide away, afraid that a smile might come across as mocking the bread islands.

  ‘Always good to see you, Bill,’ Emily says, taking his money, and his name on her tongue sends warmth through him.

  ‘I’ll be back on Saturday,’ he replies, but if it wasn’t Saturday it would be Sunday, or soon anyway. He can’t stay away, is the truth of it. He feels compelled to return, like Astrid. This place is like home for me, she told him that first day. I come here two, sometimes three days a week – and now it feels like home for him too, and he’s become one of the regulars that Emily entrusts with the shy newcomers. He drops in nearly every other day for lunch, and on Sundays he sometimes treats himself to evening dinner here.

  But it’s not just the food that pulls him back, or the company of his fellow diners. The pathetic, laughable truth is that his foolish smitten heart insists on his returning, again and again. Another encounter, it commands. Another chance to look at her, to listen to her. Another chance to do your level best to make her laugh.

  A light mist begins to fall as he strolls back to the nursing home, the blue all but chased from the sky now, his hair frosted with tiny wet beads when he runs a hand over it. Still, they got the morning dry. Focus on the positive, Betty would say, and let the rest go – and it helps a bit, it does, when he can manage to do it. The bread and soup have left a pleasant fullness in his belly: he’ll only want something small this evening. An egg, maybe; fry it up with a tomato.

  ‘Bill,’ Mrs Phelan says, ‘the sink in Rory Dillon’s room is blocked up.’

  Always he hears a small edge of impatience in her voice, leaving him with the faint suggestion that he’s somehow a disappointment to her. Una Phelan she said, the first time they met, him done up in his only suit for the job interview, not that he’s ever had the courage to call her Una. Even in his head she’s Mrs Phelan.

  But the residents are well looked after – you can’t fault her there. Three decent meals a day, cups of tea in between if they want it, milk and a biscuit before bed. Bill could eat there too – it was mentioned at the interview. Lunch included, they’d said, but he prefers to get out. Feels more like a break if he leaves the premises.

  He climbs the stairs to the first floor, and makes his way along the corridor to Rory Dillon’s room. ‘I don’t know why it happened,’ Rory says, peering anxiously over Bill’s shoulder at the little puddle of cloudy water that sits unmoving in the sink. �
�I only ever wash my face, that’s all I ever do, and rinse out my teeth at night.’

  ‘Could happen to a bishop, Rory. Don’t worry, I’ll sort it.’

  The job is easy for him. He’s always been handy around the house. Plumbing was what he was trained for, worked at it since he was eighteen in Hennessy’s Builders. Never saw the end coming: Declan Hennessy gave them no warning. The doors locked when they arrived for work one Wednesday, coming up on four years ago. No sign of Declan, nobody at all around but a young lad in a grey suit and a crew-cut, telling them the place had gone into liquidation. Don’t shoot the messenger, he said. Nothing to do with me, I’m only passing on the news.

  Bill wasn’t as badly off as some of the others, with his mortgage paid and his child gone to the dogs and his wife buried, but still it was a blow. Gainfully employed one day, surplus to requirements the next – and who’d want to hire a man in his forties if a younger fellow was willing to do the same work for less money? Who’d want to hire a plumber of any age, with the building trade still only picking itself up after the bust?

  So he tipped away at odd jobs wherever he could find them, and then he heard that the nursing home was looking for a caretaker. He decided to chance his arm, and they took him on. The work is mostly undemanding, and it pays the bills, and he’s grown fond of the residents – who look on him, he suspects, as a kind of adopted son. He buys them cards for their birthdays and takes their letters to post, and gets a tin of butter cookies and a new board game for the day room at Christmas. For some, for quite a few of them, the nursing-home community is the only family they have left; he’s only doing what anyone with a heart would do.

  From time to time he spots Declan Hennessy, still driving around town in his fancy car, pretending every time not to see Bill, who refuses to let it bother him. What’s the point in harbouring a grudge? What’s the good of letting something fester away inside him? No good at all, so he wishes his old boss no evil.