The Restaurant Read online

  I’m assuming you have the same number. I’ll ring you when I get back, but I’ll understand if you don’t answer, and I promise I’ll take the hint and leave you alone after that.

  I’m so sorry. I just want to clear the air and make it up to you. Please allow me that chance.

  Ferg x

  She reads it through a second time, more slowly, and then she sets it aside.

  He’s coming back to live in Ireland. He wants to see her. He gives no indication as to whether he’s alone, or if he’s spent the last few years with Therese Ruane, or with anyone.

  He knows about the restaurant, so he must have asked Sarah about her. She doesn’t imagine that her name would have come up casually in their conversations.

  He’s coming home at the end of May. It’s the third week of May now, twenty days after the date at the top of his letter. Her phone will ring some time soon and his number will show up on the screen. Not his name – that was deleted from her list of contacts ages ago, but she’ll recognise the number, assuming he held on to his Irish SIM card, and she’ll know it’s him.

  And what then?

  She knows what Gran would tell her. Have nothing whatsoever to do with him; don’t give him the time of day. Daniel and her parents would say the same, and so would her friends, every one of them outraged on her behalf after his desertion. Nobody would think it a good idea for her to pick up her phone and press the answer key and say hello.

  She looks at Barney, curled on the couch beside her. What would it be like, meeting Fergal again after all this time, or even having a phone conversation with him? She can’t imagine it, with so many unknowns and uncertainties. There would be nothing to fear from an encounter though, she’s sure of it. She’s over him: she’s made a new and happier life for herself, and she’s stronger and more independent because of what happened.

  Granted, the arrival of his letter threw her, but only because it was so totally unexpected – and wouldn’t it be good in a way to show him how well she’s doing now, how completely she’s recovered from his jilting of her?

  Or would it be looking for trouble, having any kind of contact at all with him? Would she run the risk of unravelling the last four years? Would he still have the power to hurt her, to upend all her carefully packed-away emotions?

  ‘Emily?’ Mike’s voice, calling up the stairs. ‘Five to seven.’

  ‘Coming.’

  She won’t talk to him. She won’t see him. It’s not worth the risk of making her vulnerable again. She’ll cut off the call when it arrives, and that will be the end of it. If they meet by chance in the street sometime, as may well happen with him back in Ireland, she’ll greet him civilly and walk on, like Sarah does to her. He’s in her past and she’ll keep him there.

  She opens the restaurant on the dot of seven. At ten past, Heather walks in, wearing her usual jeans and shirt.

  ‘I like your dress,’ she says to Emily. ‘Very pretty. Very cute.’

  ‘Thank you. Why have I never seen you in a dress?’

  Heather gives her dark chuckle. ‘Me? That’ll be the day. Dresses are for ladies like you.’

  ‘Oh stop that – you’d be lovely.’

  She would be. She’s got the full feminine figure that the right style of dress – fitted on top, flared skirt – would celebrate. Emily sees her in sky blue to match her eyes, whose thick dark lashes need no mascara. And if she pulled that black hair out of its tight ponytail and let it tumble loose, she’d be magnificent.

  The table begins to fill. People arrive in ones and twos and take their seats. Introductions are made, and the usual tentative conversations ensue. Some gather momentum, others stutter along heroically. Heather’s laugh erupts every now and again: impossible to miss it. At half past seven, as Emily brings lasagne to a pair of Spanish au pairs who appear once a month or so, a man enters whose face she recalls from a few lunchtimes ago, mainly because of the eyebrow piercing.

  ‘I’m glad to see you back,’ she says. ‘I didn’t get your name the last time,’ and he tells her Shane.

  ‘Come and sit with Heather,’ she says, spotting a free chair next to the American. ‘She’ll make you feel right at home.’

  Heather

  OH, FOR GOD ALMIGHTY’S SAKE. FOR CRYING OUT loud. She ducks her head, willing Emily to bring him someplace else, anyplace else – but over they come to ruin her evening.

  ‘I’d like you to meet Heather, my very first customer,’ Emily is saying as they approach. ‘Heather, this is Shane.’

  Cornered, Heather looks up. ‘We’ve met,’ she tells Emily flatly. ‘Our kids are in the same class at school.’ Deliberately avoiding his gaze. Not even trying to pretend that his appearance holds any pleasure for her.

  A beat passes. Emily’s smile falters. ‘Oh – that’s nice.’ There’s a second or two of silent awkwardness before he pulls out the chair beside Heather and sits.

  ‘So … do I get a menu?’

  He’s going to brazen it out. Of course he is. Never a hint of embarrassment when they encounter one another at the school gates, or elsewhere. On the contrary, he always makes a point of smiling at her, while she’s busy making a point of pretending not to see him.

  Emily tells him the two dinner choices as Heather resumes eating: she’ll be damned if he’s going to ruin her dinner. He chooses the ratatouille and Emily scuttles off – delighted, no doubt, to escape from whatever’s going on.

  He flips his napkin open. ‘This place is different, isn’t it?’

  Heather gives a curt nod. Can’t talk with food in her mouth: one of the few things all her nannies agreed on.

  ‘How’s the lasagne?’

  For Heaven’s sake. She makes him wait, takes her time chewing and swallowing. ‘Good.’ She forks up the next load before he can get another question in. Bet he talks with his mouth full, bet it doesn’t cost him a thought. If she gets a move on, she’ll be finished before his arrives. She can get Emily to pack up her dessert, enjoy it in peace at home.

  ‘I think I made the wrong choice,’ he says.

  She ignores him.

  ‘For dinner. I think I should have gone for the lasagne.’

  Not a question, no response necessary. She continues eating.

  ‘So how long’s this place been open?’

  OK. Enough is enough. She swallows, takes a drink of water. ‘Listen, I don’t want to sound rude’ – she doesn’t give a damn how rude she sounds – ‘but I sure would appreciate less of the small-talk while my food’s hot.’

  He lifts his hands in mute surrender. She resumes eating.

  And then he sort of leans in her direction. ‘Look,’ he murmurs, ‘I’d like to say something, just for the record. All you have to do is listen.’

  For the love of Moses.

  ‘It’s clear you’re angry—’

  And that’s all it takes. ‘Is it? Is it really?’ she hisses. ‘And I suppose you don’t have the smallest idea as to why I might be angry!’ Calm down, she tells herself. You’re at Emily’s, you’re in public – but she may as well try to yank the tablecloth off without disturbing the plates. She stabs again at her lasagne and chews furiously, but all the pleasure has gone out of it.

  ‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.’

  She feels a fresh wave of rage. She drops her fork with a clatter, causing a couple of heads to turn. ‘Oh – you’re sorry? Really? You’re sorry about what – kicking me and my baby out on the street? Making it impossible for me to claim what was left to me in your father’s will? What exactly are you sorry for?’

  ‘I’m sorry about all of it, about everything that happened. None of it was my doing.’

  She throws him a look of disbelief. ‘Really? It wasn’t your idea to give me a week to find someplace else to live? You didn’t hide behind your wife’s skirts and let her drop the bomb instead? Gee, I wonder how I could have got that so wrong!’

  ‘Look, I can understand—’

  ‘You understand nothing – and by the way
, you’re welcome, because I’m sure you meant to thank me for returning your father’s house after he left it to me!’

  ‘You didn’t have to return it—’

  ‘Like hell I didn’t, with you planning to contest the will – you think I had the energy for that, with a tiny baby to look after?’

  He gives an impatient sigh: it’s more than enough to crank her fury up a notch. ‘Well, pardon me if I’m annoying you – pardon me if I’m giving you some inconvenient truths, Mister!’

  ‘Listen,’ he throws back, anger flashing in his eyes now, ‘just listen for a second, would you? I’m trying to explain that none of it was my doing, I didn’t want any of that—’

  ‘So you’re telling me you’re such a weakling that you were powerless to stop your big bully wife from throwing us out of your father’s house? Is that really the best you can do?’

  In response he gets abruptly to his feet, scraping his chair loudly across the floor and narrowly avoiding a collision with Emily, who steps hastily out of his way. He mutters something – an oath? an apology? – and keeps going, and only after he vanishes through the doorway does Heather become aware of the dead silence in the room, and every pair of eyes fixed on her.

  ‘What on earth is going on?’ Emily asks quietly, dropping into his vacated chair, still holding his bowl of ratatouille.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Heather replies, her anger dissipating as quickly as it rose. ‘We had a bit of a row. I didn’t mean for it to go public.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Look, I’ll call you tomorrow and explain, when you have time to listen.’

  Emily knows nothing, or very little. Heather’s told her only the bones of her story, left out most of the flesh. Time for full disclosure now, after this.

  Par for the course, his stalking out tonight. No wife to hide behind, so he takes off. What was he doing anyway, out on his own? Maybe he and Yvonne had a bust-up – maybe she told him to get someone else to make his damn dinner.

  She considers all the acrobatics she’s had to perform since Lottie and Jack ended up in the same class – worse, since they decided to become buddies, despite Heather’s best efforts to steer her child in other directions. All the lies she’s had to spin to prevent after-school encounters, determined never to have anything more to do with that family. All the day trips she organised on each of Lottie’s birthdays, purely to avoid a party to which Jack would inevitably be invited. All the times she cajoled another parent to bring Lottie to Jack’s parties, to spare Heather having to encounter either Shane or Yvonne – and now, when she puts it up to him, when she finally challenges him on how they treated her, he ducks all responsibility. ‘None of it was my doing’: what a load of horse manure.

  She finishes her meal as conversations resume around the table. The place is filling up early tonight – not yet half past seven, and just three empty chairs. Heather loves the place, loves the fact that they all share a common space. There’s something cool about the changing faces, the never knowing who she’ll end up meeting here.

  And even though it’s not that kind of a place, it’s not about picking someone up, or being picked up – who knows? Maybe one day someone will take the chair beside her, and they’ll fall into conversation, and discover how much in common they have. And they might, they just might want to take it further. She’d be open to that possibility, is all.

  One thing’s for certain: if she ever finds herself in that situation again, it won’t start on a phone screen. Oh sure, clicking on someone’s profile and setting up a date in the comfort of her living room seemed like a nice easy way to meet a man, once she’d recovered from Lottie’s father doing a runner as soon as she broke the happy news to him that he was to be a dad. Took long enough for that itch to need scratching again, almost three years before she felt ready to give love another go.

  But once she did, she went for it. She sorted a babysitter for Lottie – plenty of volunteers in the neighbourhood – and she fooled around on dating apps until she had a date sorted with George, who was thirty, and single, and looking for fun.

  Sadly, George turned out to be a lot closer to forty, and not that single either, with a divorce still pending – and not really taken anyway with Heather. She figured, judging by the glances he kept throwing at other females in the vicinity, that he was more into having fun with women who had less flesh on their bones. After George came Denis, who lost interest the minute she mentioned Lottie, and after Denis she arranged to meet Frank, but he must have lost his way because he didn’t put in an appearance, and didn’t contact her again.

  She persevered, kept agreeing to dates with new contacts, kept showing up – and now and again things seemed to be rolling along nicely, and she had a bit of fun along the way, but ultimately all the promising starts petered out. If it wasn’t Lottie, it was something else that eventually put them off Heather: her accent, her appearance, her independence, her whatever – or sometimes she was the one put off, by their lack of deodorant, or their fondness for drink, or their poor dental hygiene, or the wives they forgot to mention until something gave them away.

  In the end, she got tired of trying. I don’t need a man, she told Madge, her chief babysitter. I can manage without one.

  Of course you can – but everyone needs a night out. Everyone your age, anyway.

  So she still went out, one or two nights a week, with a rotating schedule of sitters. Every Tuesday, and some Saturdays, Heather would feed Lottie chicken nuggets and garden peas before Madge or Carol or Paula or whoever arrived to take over.

  Heather would change one shirt for another and spritz some Calvin Klein behind her ears and set out, always with the slightly delicious feeling that she was somehow engaging in illicit activity, like a kid playing truant from school, or a hoodlum on her way to rob a liquor store.

  Going out alone didn’t bother her in the least: from an early age she’d learnt to be content with her own company. It wasn’t for want of friends now: she had piles of them, Madge and Joseph and Carol and Paddy and Ernie and Paula, and all the others in the neighbourhood who employed her to do whatever needed doing – cleaning, painting, collecting kids from school, walking dogs, you name it. She always made friends with everyone she worked for: that was just how it went. Be a friend, and you’ll never run short of them, Josephine used to tell her – and like everything Josephine had said to her, it was true.

  Trouble was, all her employers were either married and settled, or too old, like Madge, to fancy a night out. Not that Heather was ever planning to stay out till the small hours – she liked her sleep too much for that ever to have appealed, even in the days before Lottie. No, her plans usually involved finding food she didn’t have to cook, served on dishes she didn’t have to wash up. That, or maybe catching a movie – or occasionally, if she was feeling in the mood, she’d take a chance on a play.

  For food she steered clear of McDonald’s, which was Lottie’s eatery of choice on any special occasion. McDonald’s was fine for a kid’s treat, but Heather’s idea of a good meal wasn’t a burger parcelled up in paper, or a cardboard box of pale skinny fries. When she paid someone to cook her a meal she wanted real food, on real plates.

  She checked out the town’s restaurants and found a few she liked. An Italian, a Thai, a pancake house. Dining alone wasn’t an issue – let the couples and groups of friends gawp all they wanted – but she did find herself wishing, as she twined tagliatelle around her fork or cut into a pancake to release its chilli filling, for someone, anyone, sitting across from her. No big romantic commitment necessary, just someone to chat with as she ate.

  And then Madge told her about The Food of Love, one morning as Heather was packing up her stuff after cleaning the windows. There was a bit in the paper, Madge said. A new restaurant opening on Holland Street, something about bringing people together. Might be worth checking out.

  Bringing people together sounded suspiciously like some brand of blind dating, and Heather ha
d no intention of revisiting that particular scenario. But her usual favourites had begun to pall a little: she might just check out the new one, see what made it tick.

  Where’s Holland Street?

  Not far from here – go by the canal and turn up after the fishermen’s cottages, and then it’s first or second right. There’s a little minimart on the corner.

  And on her very next night out, Heather found it.

  It was tucked between a carpet shop and a narrow house built of red bricks, behind whose single upstairs window a little brown and white dog yapped soundlessly at her. It was small, with a wooden bench painted tangerine outside the single window, and a wicker basket full of trailing flowers suspended from a large hook by the door.

  She wasn’t immediately won over. She stood on the pavement and regarded it dubiously. The Food of Love did sound like the venue for some sort of matchmaking – or at the very least, a kind of romantic hideaway, some type of refuge for furtive lovers. There was every danger she’d find nothing but couples inside.

  No menu was posted on the wall. She knelt on the bench and peered through the window, but the evening had reached that crepuscular, softened-edge stage where shadows and shapes became interchangeable, and eyes could no longer be fully trusted. A tumble of fairy lights on the inner windowsill was all she could be sure of: beyond that there were only vague yellow glows of candles or lamps, and humps of indeterminate furniture.

  The door was open. She left the bench and stepped closer. She inhaled. Oh my: was that the golden-brown nutty scent of baking pastry? Was there a pie in there? She imagined its buttery crumbliness, the way the crust would yield to the smallest pressure of her teeth, surrendering the savoury contents within. She sniffed again – Lord, now she was getting spices, hot and dark and tantalising. Tender marinated beef, or maybe lamb. She could almost taste the fiery tease of it in her mouth.