Quentins (28 page)

“Oh, no, they don't make movies like that. They make them where the son goes home and everyone loves him and drinks themselves senseless and dances jigs. Then the guy goes to his father's birthplace and weeps and begs his dead father to forgive him for not talking to him more. That's what would sell.”

“I wish you were coming back to Dublin tomorrow with me, in many ways. Not for you but for me,” Ella said suddenly.

“You do? Why do you say that?” He was gentle as he always was, interested but not invasive.

“It's funny. I've only known you for just over a week, and yet I feel very safe talking to you. When I step off the plane in Ireland, I'm back in a land where anything could happen, anything
did
happen. I have to go to a city where I know Don Richardson will never walk or breathe again. That's hard. All these decisions you identified, I have to make them but I may do it all wrong. It would be much easier if you were there. That's all I'm saying, I suppose.”

“Very well,” he said.

“What?”

“I'll come with you,” Derry King said simply.

“You can't, not just like that?”

“But you just asked me to.” He seemed surprised.

“Yes, but why?”

“If you have to face all that and get through it, then surely I can face a few old memories,” he said.

And he took away the plate that had held her figs and cream before it fell on the floor.

I
t had never occurred to Ella that Derry King's office would have booked him first class to Dublin and neither of them discovered this until they were at Kennedy Airport in New York. “Silly of them not to check,” he said, and went to change.

“No, please, you
must
have your comfortable seat,” Ella begged him. It was quite bad enough that he was coming to Ireland on a whim without him turning up with backache and stiff legs from traveling at the back of the bus.

But he wouldn't hear of it. “It's only a few short hours. It would be highly antisocial and alas, first class is full, or we'd upgrade you,” he said.

Ella began to panic. What would she talk to him about for six hours, knowing all the time that he could have stretched his legs out in comfort and watched a movie of his choice?

They heard the overhearty laughter of a group on the other side of the departure lounge. They were rather red-faced and might have had a couple of cocktails to speed them on their trip. Ella listened to them carefully and then identified American rather than Irish accents.

“Yours, I think,” she said to Derry.

“What do you mean?”

“You have me so sensitive and quivering now about the
Irish being loud and drunk that I'm very relieved to say that those people over there aren't my lot, they're actually yours.”

“Oh, dear, that's a pity. I thought that we might keep score and tick them off.” He mocked her.

He was easy company on the plane as he had been everywhere else. Talking some of the time, reading a magazine or even sleeping a little. When the cart passed through the aisle selling duty-free goods, the stewardess asked, “Do you want to wake your husband in case he wants to make any purchases?”

Ella didn't correct her about the relationship. “No, he doesn't want any, nor do I, thank you.”

She would have bought Deirdre a bottle of duty-free gin under normal circumstances. But these were far from normal times.

Why
had she said she would like him to come to Dublin? Now she had to look after him, make sure he liked the place. Confirm that he had done the right thing in lending the foundation's name and support to this venture. She had to draw him into her life, introduce him to her friends and family. Yes, it would certainly take her mind off Dublin now being a city without Don, but she wanted some time on her own to think about that too. Time to mourn him without having to plunge into all this. And to decide what to do.

But to be fair, he hadn't asked her to make any arrangements for him. His office had booked his hotel, and a limousine would meet them at the airport. He said that he realized she would have to get back to work. He knew she would not be free to dine with him every night because she would possibly be working in the very restaurants where he might want to go and eat. In Quentins itself, and in Colm's restaurant up on Tara Road. It would be very different from the life of a lady that she had been leading in New York.

She looked at him as he slept. This was a man who had worked all his life. He would understand she had a living to earn.

She fell asleep herself. And dreamed a troubled dream, where Don Richardson was waiting for her at the airport, saying that he had come back from the next world for twenty-four hours to give her a message, but he had now forgotten what it was. In her dream, Ella had clutched the computer harder and harder.

She woke just before they were making their approach to Dublin in the pink Irish dawn. She heard the stewardess asking Derry King to make sure his wife's seat belt was fastened, and he had not bothered to correct the relationship either.

She realized that there would be no Don at the airport or anywhere ever again. She bit her lip to hide what she feared might be a look of upset on her face. If he noticed, Derry said nothing. He just looked out the window at all the green. It was hard to read his expression.

Then the plane landed, and there was no time to discuss anything.

She had never come into the city any way except the bus. It was curious to see the road from the back of a big black Mercedes. The chauffeur asked Derry which route he should take. Ella began to protest that she should be dropped at Derry's hotel in Stephens Green, and that then she would find her own way home from there.

Derry took no notice. “Tara Road first, please,” he said simply, and there had been no argument.

Neither of them commented on the city that they were both looking at with new eyes. Ella was glad to see that the weather was good. It was a crisp, late autumn day. The early-morning rush hour had not yet begun. The streets looked as if they had been cleaned by a recent shower of rain.

He could not find this place repulsive at first glance. He had to see it as a gracious city.

Derry was pleased to see some color return to her face. She had looked very pale as they had landed. It was a series of hard things for a girl to have had to face over a period of four months. The loss of the man she considered her true love, the financial ruin of her family. And then the second loss of the suicide. Not easy for her to come back, but at least she had friends in this place. She would survive.

They made arrangements for her to pick him up at his hotel that night for an early dinner.

“This is a beautiful street,” he said when they came to Tara Road.

“Yes, but I'm round at the tradesman's entrance these days,” she said with a bright little smile.

“Not forever, Ella,” he consoled her.

“Well.” She shrugged.

“Shall I take the car up the lane, Madam?” the chauffeur inquired.

“No, it would get stuck, I'm afraid. Just leave me at the corner if you don't mind.”

The chauffeur was about to carry her case but she wouldn't hear of it.

“See you tonight at six, Derry.” She ran off before anyone could say more, down the narrow lane behind the big houses of Tara Road to where her parents would be waiting, up already for hours, and peering out the windows of what used to be the garden shed.

Ella couldn't sleep. She tried, but it didn't work. Her mother had gone to work, her father sat at the kitchen table moving papers around him. The huge paper sunflowers looked cheerful in the window as she had known they would. She looked across at the house where her parents had lived since their marriage until
this summer. She remembered Derry King saying that this situation would not be forever. Maybe a man thought differently in that he would work and scheme and slave to get it all back. While Ella would lose it all and more on top of it if she only thought she could see Don just once more. She wished she could sleep because she felt a great weariness and sense that life was going to be so empty from now on, it didn't really matter what happened.

In his hotel room, Derry King paced up and down. He had a stiff neck from the plane journey. His eyes felt heavy. In theory, he should be able to sleep. In the past, when he had crisscrossed the United States to go to conventions, meetings, sales conferences, he had been legendary about his ability to snatch sleep. He would wake refreshed and ready for everything.

But it was different here. These were the streets that Jim Kennedy had walked when he was young. This was the land that had not given him a living or an understanding, the city he had fled to find a better and brighter life. Jim Kennedy would not have been welcome in a hotel of this caliber. He would not have been allowed past the door. But those small bars they had passed in the journey from the airport, places with family names over the door, that would have been his territory. And in the telephone directory there were people who could tell him about it all.

But he didn't want to ask and learn. He didn't know what he wanted to do. For years he had steeled himself against useless regrets and time-wasting, wishing himself elsewhere. There had been too many maudlin “if onlys” in his father's conversations. Derry King would be no part of it. He would spend no time wondering why he had decided to come to this place. Nor wishing that he had stayed where he was and taken Fennel for a
three-hour walk every day in Central Park. He was here now and he would make the best of it. And if sleep would not come, then he must go out and walk in that park across from his hotel.

Brenda Brennan's friend Nora was working in the kitchen. She knew that the American was in town. The one who would provide the money to make the film about Quentins.

“Will he sneak in to have a look at the place, do you think?” Signora asked as she expertly cleaned and diced vegetables that Blouse Brennan produced triumphantly in ever more earth-covered trays.

“No, I think he's too smart for that,” Brenda said thoughtfully. “He'll have to meet us sooner or later, so he doesn't want to be unmasked as someone having a private peek.”

“That's true, but I bet he has a private peek through the window sometime today, don't you?” Signora said.

“Oh, definitely,” Brenda laughed.

Patrick Brennan looked at them. Women's friendships were amazing. Brenda and Nora O'Donoghue had been so close since they had all met at catering college. Even those long years Nora had spent in Sicily didn't seem to have broken it, they wrote each other long letters all that time. It didn't matter that one of them ran the restaurant and the other was scraping vegetables in it. They were still equals. Still like girls, giggling over whether a rich American would come and peek in the window. Patrick wished that men had friendships like that, where there were no secrets, where nothing was hidden.

“Would he be the kind of fellow that would fall for me, do you think?” Deirdre asked in the café at lunchtime.

Ella had begged her to have a quick lunch and they were having a sandwich near Deirdre's work.

“No, I don't think he would. He's too interested in work, more work and art and brooding and more work and homeless dogs to have any time for you,” Ella said.

“Hey, I could be interested in all those things too if I wanted to,” Deirdre protested.

“Well, your powers are extraordinary, Dee. We all know that . . . and what do I know? When you meet him, you might start to sing arias at each other.”

“And will I meet him?”

“Of course you will. I'm just trying to work out where. It can't be Quentins. That has to be formal and work and everything . . . we haven't room to swing a cat at our home these days, otherwise I'd have a Sunday lunch for him to meet my friends . . .”

“I could have a Sunday lunch in
my
place if you like,” Deirdre offered.

“Would you, Dee? And we could ask Nick and Sandy.” Ella was pleased.

“Your parents could come, and Tom and Cathy,” Deirdre said.

“Oh, Dee, what would I do without you?”

“Nuala is still in town, but I think not, don't you?” Deirdre said.

“I think very much not.” Ella was reflective.

“Sorry for bringing her up,” Deirdre said. “But you might just run into her or Frank of the one-track mind.”

“Now that Don's dead, do you think he'll shut up about it all and let him rest in peace?”

“Are you asking me for an honest answer?”

“Of course I am.”

“Then I don't think that people like Frank and his brothers would let
anyone
rest in peace while they think that someone owes them a sum of money.”

“Oh, well, welcome back to the real world, Ella,” Ella told herself ruefully.

“You never left the real world, Ella! You're terrific to cope with all that's being fired at you. Truly you are.”

“No, it's okay, I'll survive.”

“I'm only babbling on because I honestly don't have the words to tell you face-to-face how sorry I am about what Don did. It's a nightmare for you, and I just want you to understand that I
know
this.” Deirdre's eyes were full of tears.

“Let's think of what we'll eat on Sunday,” Ella said. She could cope with anything but sympathy just now.

Tom and Cathy were delighted with the invitation to lunch. Something they didn't have to cook and serve themselves. It was heaven. But there was a problem that they had to work around.

“Deirdre, we'd just love to come to lunch,
and
we'll bring you a really luscious dessert from the freezer,” Tom offered.

“You don't need to do that. I'd love it, but you don't need to . . .”

“We do.”

“Why?” Deirdre was suspicious.

“Because we're going to ask you if we can bring the twins. We're meant to be looking after them that day. Muttie and Lizzie are going on an outing. We said we'd take the kids. They're so mad and awful really we thought if we gave you a roulade
and
a pavlova it might sort of make up.”

“How mad and awful?” Deirdre asked.

“Just desperately curious and inquisitive, really. They ask all kinds of intimate questions without realizing it. They might offer to dance, but we can close them down on that.”

“No, we might need it if it's all a bit sticky. Ella says
they're great value. Of course they can come and I get two puddings as well.” Deirdre sounded well pleased.