Quentins (12 page)

“They would not. Come in and see me one day.”

But Quentin knew that Brother Rooney would not make the journey from the garden where he lived and would probably die without ever visiting him. He wondered, was the old Brother right about Quentin being like him? A eunuch interested in neither men nor women? It could very possibly be true. Anyway, there was no time to think about it today. The restaurant was full.

The legendary afternoon teas were a huge success, tiny warmed scones with a serving of cream and raspberry jam were disappearing rapidly from trolleys. There was hardly room for all the customers.

“Move that old tramp on, Quentin, will you,” Harold Hayward, the manager, said with a wave at a shabby man in the corner.

“He's not a tramp. He's just a bit untidy,” Quentin protested. Perhaps Brother Rooney had been right and this was not the place for a man with grimy hands.

“Move him on anyway. He's only had a pot of tea in the last hour and there's a line forming at the door.”

Quentin went to the table. The man looked up at him from a sheaf of papers. A near empty teapot sat on the table. Harold the manager had been right. This was not a customer from whom they would make much money this afternoon. But it didn't seem a reason to move him on.

Quentin smiled apologetically at the man, who was in his eighties. “I'm sorry to inconvenience you, sir, but as you can see, people are standing in a long queue, waiting for tables.”

“Are you asking me to get out?” He had bushy eyebrows, a red weather-beaten face and a slightly Australian accent.

“Certainly not! I just wondered, would you mind if I helped you move your papers so that we could let other people share your table?”

“He asked you to move me on, didn't he.” The old man jerked his head at where Harold Hayward stood watching.

“Now we have room for those two ladies who both have walking sticks. They
will
appreciate it. May I bring them over?” Quentin was charm itself. He replaced the teapot with a fresh one at no extra charge.

The old man outstayed three sets of people who were
brought to his table. At the end of the day he asked Quentin if he was part of the Hayward family himself.

“Alas, no.” He smiled apologetically. “Just a laborer in the field, as they say.”

“Why do you say ‘alas,' they can't be any great shakes as a family, judging by the face of the guy who looks as if he swallowed four lemons.”

Harold Hayward did indeed look a bit sour.

“Oh, I suppose I meant it would have made life much easier for me if I could have joined the family firm. My father is an accountant and he had my name on a door in his place, but I couldn't face it. At least Harold's family are pleased with him.”

The old man came in regularly and he always sat at one of Quentin's tables. His name was Toby, shortened to Tobe. He had traveled the world, he said, and seen wonderful things. “Have you traveled?” he asked Quentin.

“No. My problem was that since I decided not to go in with my father, I was so determined to make a living, I never gave myself time to go anywhere. I'd love to see the colors in Provence or in Tuscany, and I'd love to go to North Africa. One day, maybe.” He smiled sadly.

“Don't leave it too late, Quentin.”

“Eventually should be now,” Quentin said, thinking of old Brother Rooney.

“There was never a truer word said.” Tobe nodded his head vigorously.

There was no doubt that he looked a lot shabbier than the rest of the clientele. Sometimes Quentin would tell him there was this miracle stain remover he had discovered, and when Harold Hayward was not looking, he would attack a particularly noticeable stain on Tobe's chest. Once he handed him a comb and another time he gave him elastic bands to hold back his frayed cuffs. He didn't know why he did this, partly because he wanted
to prove Harold Hayward wrong in his attitude. Also, he knew he wasn't offending Tobe, who was totally unaware that he looked rather eccentric and was perfectly agreeable to be brought courteously more into the mainstream.

And work was becoming Quentin's life. He still had few friends apart from the pleasant and casual relationships with those he worked with and served.

His kindness did not go unnoticed by everyone. Even his fellow staff were aware of how well he got on with the customers.

“You're very warm to people,” Brenda Brennan said to him one day.

She was one of their part-time staff, but a superior girl, cool and elegant, calm in a crisis and always perfectly capable of dealing with whatever the day might pitch at them.

He wished she would take a permanent job there, but she told him that she and her husband had dreams of owning their own place.

“That was a nice gesture,” she said to him when she had seen him give the odd refill to Tobe without charging.

“Lord, Brenda, it's only hot water and a teabag,” Quentin said. “He's happy here, watching people come and go. I like his company. You should hear him talk about those orange and purple sunrises they have out in Australia.”

“I wonder what sent him out there all those years ago,” Brenda said.

“Probably his family.” Quentin was thoughtful. “He never talks about them and it's our families who usually upset us most.”

His own father and mother barely spoke to each other now. On the few occasions when he went there to try to cook a lunch, the atmosphere was intolerable. Tobe may have gone through something like that years
ago. Quentin wondered where he ate when he did eat. He obviously couldn't afford the prices in Hayward's.

One night by accident he found out. There was such a bad mood in his family home, with his mother retiring to bed and his father sighing and saying he would go to his club, that Quentin had left quietly.

He didn't think that either of them was really aware that he had left. He went to a café called Mick's on a corner where he often bought chips on his way home from the cinema but had never sat down to have a meal.

Beans on toast, fried eggs and chips, two sausages and a spoon of mashed potatoes and peas. That was the choice at Mick's. The place smelled of cooking fat, nobody wiped down the tables, the linoleum on the floor was torn and yet something about the place itself was enchanting. It was very handy to get at on a corner of a busy street but a little oasis when you went into its cobbled courtyard and closed the door. It was as if the world slowed down there.

Quentin saw Brenda the waitress and her husband, Patrick, a serious guy, deep in conversation over their beans and toast. Then he saw Tobe with his plate of sausages, egg and chips.

Tobe waved him over. “If you're not meeting anyone . . . ?”

“No, indeed, I'd be happy to have your company.” Quentin sat down with the older man and they talked about this and that. Neither asking the other what they were doing there. “See you tomorrow at Hayward's,” Tobe said.

He paused for ten seconds to greet Brenda and her husband, enough to show them he had noticed them but not enough to intrude on what looked like a very private conversation.

So the weeks went by, and every now and then they met in Mick's for eggs and beans and Quentin said what
he would do with this place if it was his and he had a backer and Tobe said that his visit was nearing its end, he was going back to Australia.

Quentin told him how his parents would be so much better in two small, separate establishments, but that neither of them would budge. Tobe told Quentin that for forty years in Australia he had wondered about his Irish family, now that he had discovered them he would waste no more time, not one second, wondering about them, they simply weren't worth it.

“You can't have spent much time with them, Tobe. Weren't you in Hayward's all day and at Mick's café all night?”

“I saw them all right, and I didn't like what I saw. Have you made your plans to travel, Quentin?”

“Yes, I have got as far as inquiring the price of off-peak travel, it's still very dear. But, Tobe, are you changing the subject away from your family? I'll probably never see you again after next week when you go back. I'll go mad wondering what you said to your family and they to you. Can't you tell me?”

“Not yet. I have something to think through. But I'll tell you next week, in Mick's. Would Thursday be all right, do you think?”

At Mick's on Thursday, Tobe looked different, more together somehow. “Come on, Quentin, my treat. We'll lash out and have beans
and
egg
and
sausages.”

It was hard to put a finger on it, but it was as if Tobe had suddenly taken charge. “It's been a great pleasure meeting you. It made my visit to Dublin worthwhile and helped to clear my thoughts. Will you come and see me in Australia in a few years' time?”

“Look, Tobe. I'm having difficulty getting the money to go to Italy or Marrakesh, for heaven's sake. How could I get to Australia? Even if I do want to see the purple and orange sunrises.”

“You'll be able to afford it,” Tobe said quite calmly, as if he knew it would happen.

“Oh, I wish,” Quentin said, pushing his hair back from his face.

And then Tobe told him the story.

Beginning with his name, which was Toby Hayward.

He was the cousin who didn't fit in, the remittance man who got an allowance as long as he stayed out of the country and far away. He had come back to see the Haywards, but since they didn't know him, he thought he would observe them a bit first. He had seen nothing in their store that he liked, nothing except Quentin. Tobe had done extremely well in Australia, better than any of the Haywards had ever known. It wasn't their business, so he hadn't told them.

And now that he had seen haughty Harold in the restaurant, and arrogant George Hayward in the furniture department, sour and prissy Lucy Hayward in the silver department, he realized they were not people he wanted to be involved with.

Quentin, on the other hand, a boy with a dream who wanted to run a restaurant. Now, that was something different. That was what he could pay back to Ireland, the land where he had been born. Quentin would come to a solicitor tomorrow morning with him and then be in a position to buy Mick's café that afternoon.

“This doesn't happen in real life,” Quentin said.

“But you believe me, don't you? You believe I have the money and I'm giving it to you. I'm not out of the funny farm or anything.”

“Yes, of course I believe you want to do this, and I know I would do the same myself if it were me, so I understand. But it won't work, Tobe.”

“Why not?”

“Your family?”

“Don't know I'm home. I'm just the shabby old person they move from section to section of their store.”

“They might feel they have a prior claim . . . family money.”

“No, I made this money. I worked and invested and I worked day and night and invested more.”

“Maybe you should give it to a charity.”

“I've given plenty to charity. I'm just giving you enough to buy this place.”

“Maybe Mick won't sell.” Quentin was afraid to let himself believe it would happen.

“How much do you think would be a fair price, Quentin?”

Quentin told him.

“Give him half as much again, he'll sell, he'll run out of the place.”

“And then?”

“And then you'll call in sick to Hayward's tomorrow and we get the money organized.”

“This doesn't happen,” Quentin said for the second time.

“Mick, could you come over here for a minute, mate?” Tobe called.

And Mick, who was tired and wanted nothing more than to be able to take his wife and handicapped daughter down to the country to live, was summoned to the table to hear the news that would change his life.

B
renda and her friend Nora had been inseparable during catering college. They made plans for life, which varied a bit depending on what was happening. Sometimes they thought they would go to Paris together and learn from a French chef. Then they might set up a thirty-bedroom hotel in the countryside, which would have a waiting list of six months for people trying to come and stay.

In reality, of course, it was slightly different. Shifts here and there and a lot of waitressing. Too many people after the same jobs, plenty of young men and women with experience. Nora and Brenda found it hard going at the start.

So they went to London, where two things of great significance happened. Nora met an Italian man called Mario who said he loved her more than he loved life itself. And Nora certainly loved him as much, if not more.

Brenda at the time caught a heavy cold, which turned into pneumonia, and as a result lost her hearing for a time. She regarded this deafness as a terrible blow. She, who could almost hear the grass grow before her illness.

“I was never sympathetic enough to deaf people,” she wept to the busy doctor who gave her leaflets on lip-reading classes and told her to stop this self-pity, her hearing would return in time.

So Brenda went to the classes, mainly much older people, men and women struggling with hearing aids.

She learned how to practice on a VCR machine. You watched the news with the volume turned down over and over until you could guess what they were saying, and then you turned it up very high to check if you were right.

Miss Hill, the teacher, loved Brenda, as she was so eager to learn. Brenda learned to study people's faces as they spoke, trying to make sense of what she couldn't hear. Brenda understood that the hard letters to hear were the ones in the middle of a word. Most people could read the word “pay” or “pan,” for example, but it was much harder to see a hidden consonant like an L or an R in the middle of a word. “Pray” or “plan” were much more difficult to work out. You had to do that from the meaning of the sentence.

Brenda had taken to it all so much, she hardly realized when her normal hearing returned. By this stage she could read conversations across a room.

Nora and Mario were very impressed. “If all else fails, we can put you in a circus,” Nora cried, delighted.

“And I will sell tickets outside,” Mario promised.

But they all knew this wouldn't happen. Mario was going back shortly to Sicily to marry his fiancée, the girl Gabriella, who lived next door to him back there.

Nora knew this too, but she just would not accept it. She was not going to stay in London without Mario, or go back to Ireland to cry over him there. She would follow him to Sicily and all it would bring.

Brenda was lonely in London when her friend had gone. She was bewildered by a love so great that it could withstand such humiliation. In her letters, Nora wrote of how she lived in a bed-sitting room in the village that looked down on Mario's hotel. How she saw his wedding and the children's christenings and was slowly becoming part of the life of the place.

Brenda could never have loved like that. Sometimes she wondered if she would ever love at all. She came back to Dublin, but it was the same there. Nobody filled her days and nights with passion like Mario had been able to do for Nora O'Donoghue. Everyone said that Brenda was cool and calm in a crisis, a great reliable person to have around if someone spilled the gravy or dropped a tray. Brenda wondered was she going to be like that all her life, look calm and unflappable. Never in love like the couples she served at table, never upset and aching like the colleagues she consoled in kitchens when their love affairs were shaky. Never to marry even as two of her younger sisters had married, with huge drama and great expenditure of nerves. Brenda had been there, cups of tea, aspirins and calm advice at the ready.

She didn't know why she went to the dance that night. Possibly to have something to write to Nora about. It was for past pupils of their catering college. Maybe she hoped she might hear of some job opportunities.

She wore the new dress she had bought for her sister's wedding. It was very dressy, cream lace with a rose-pink jacket. It looked good with her dark hair. She thought that she got many admiring looks, but perhaps she was only imagining it.

Across the room she suddenly saw Pillowcase. Now, she couldn't remember why she and Nora had called him that, an overserious fellow, head in his books, barely any time to socialize. She heard he had gone to some high-flying place in Scotland, that he had been with a pastry cook in France. What was he doing back here? And even more important, what was his name, Paddy, Pat?

She looked over at him. As clearly as if the words were written like subtitles, she read his lips and heard him say to the man he was with, “Will you look at that?
It's Brenda O'Hara from our year in college. Isn't she a very fine-looking girl. I haven't seen her in years. Very classy altogether.” He seemed full of admiration.

The man he was with, a loudmouth whom Brenda knew around town, said, “Oh, you'll get nowhere there. Real ice maiden, let me tell you.”

“Well, I'll go over and say hallo. She can't take offense at that.” He walked toward her.

Sometimes she felt a little guilty at having advance knowledge because of her extra hearing due to the lip reading. Why hadn't the other eejit said his name, so that at least she'd know that much.

Pillowcase approached her with a broad smile. He had smartened himself up. He looked taller, or else he didn't crouch over so much.

“Patrick Brennan,” he said as he shook her hand.

“Brenda O'Hara, delighted to see you again.” She must beat the silly nickname out of her mind.

“Don't I remember you and Nora O'Donoghue very well, and is she here tonight as well?”

“Sometime when you have an hour, remind me to tell you what happened to Nora,” Brenda laughed.

“I have an hour and more now, Brenda,” he said.

Would she have seen the admiration in his face anyhow, or was it because she had lip-read his praise of her that Brenda turned her charm on Patrick Brennan?

Whatever it was, she saw him most evenings for the next two weeks. He seemed pleased that she still lived with her family. “I'd have thought a glamour girl like you would have gone off with a rich man long ago,” he teased.

“No, no, I'm an ice maiden, didn't they tell you that?” she teased him back.

“I think I heard it said.” He shuffled awkwardly.

She wrote about him to Nora. “He's still very serious about work. He'd rather do nothing than work for a
place that he doesn't think is worth it. He says I'm wasting myself doing waitress shifts here, there and anywhere. He'll do construction work or deliver cases of wine rather than work in a kitchen, which would give him a bad name. But I don't agree. It's all work. You're learning all the time and anyway, he's a man who doesn't even have a flat of his own. He sleeps on people's sofas or floors. He doesn't notice.”

He told her about the small farm in the country where he grew up, how his younger brother, who wasn't exactly simpleminded but not far off it, lived there still. She told him about the corner shop where her father had worked so hard to make a living. They went to the cinema and sometimes she paid if Patrick had no money. They went to Mick's café for old time's sake.

One lunchtime as she unpacked their sandwiches to eat by the Grand Canal, she said to him firmly that she had her own plans as to how they would spend the evening.

“I live at home, Patrick. For over a month now I've been going out every single night with you.”

“Yes?” He looked anxious.

“So I'd like to let them
see
you, know the kind of person I'm meeting.”

“Sure.”

“No, you don't understand. It's not for them to inspect you. It's not a gun to your head. It's common courtesy.”

“No, I agree entirely. I thought you were going to say you were tired of going out with me. When we have a daughter, won't we feel the very same way about her, want to know her friends.”

“What?” said Brenda.

“When we have a daughter. It's not the same with sons.”

“But what are you saying, exactly?”

He looked at her, bewildered. “When we're married. We
will
have children, won't we?” He was genuinely concerned.

“Patrick, excuse me. Did I miss something here? Did you ask me to marry you? Did I say yes? It's quite a big thing. I should have remembered it, I know I should.”

He held her hand. “You will, won't you?” he begged.

“I don't know, Patrick. I really don't know yet.”

“What else would you do?” he said, alarmed.

“Well, a number of things. I might marry no one. Or I might marry someone else, as yet unmet. Or I might marry you in the fullness of time when we knew that we loved each other.”

“But don't we know now?”

“No, we don't. We haven't talked about it at all.”

“We haven't stopped talking about what we'll do,” he said.

“But that's work, Patrick, what jobs we'll get.”

“No, it's about what kind of life we'll live. I thought it was about our life together.”

“This is nonsense, Patrick.” She stood up, upset. “You can't take us for granted like that. We're not even lovers.” She was very indignant.

“It's not for want of trying,” he protested.

“Not on the sofa of some ghastly flat with half of Dublin about to walk through the door with cans of Guinness any minute.”

“So what do you want, Brenda? A night in a B and B and for me to go down on one knee? Is that it?”

“No.” She was hurt and angry. “Not that at all. It sounds ludicrous. I
do
like you, Patrick, you fool. Why else was I inviting you home? But I want love and passion and desire and all those things too. Not a casual munching on a sandwich and talking about our daughter as if it were all planned.”

“I'm sorry I did it wrong,” he said.

“If I thought you loved me and would take any kind of job like I do while saving for a home, and if you talked more rather than having glum silences about your future. And if you asked me properly and . . . well, if you desired me . . . I can't think of a better word, then I would strongly think of marrying you, and sooner rather than later. But it's useless now, because if you do all those things it's only my having written the script and my having fed you the lines.”

“So I can't come to supper? Is this what you're saying?” he asked.

“No, you clown, come to supper,” she said, and went away fast before he could see the tears in her eyes.

That night she reassured her mother that there was nothing in it. “He's just a friend, Mam, a quiet friend without much to say for himself. Can anyone of your sex-mad older generation realize that people in their twenties can be friends these days?”

At supper, Patrick Brennan brought flowers to her mother and sat down to have chicken and ham pie. And from the moment he came in the door, he never stopped talking. He praised the lightness of the pastry and flavor of the sauce. He admired the cushion covers which Mrs. O'Hara had embroidered. He begged to see the wedding albums. He asked Mr. O'Hara where he got fresh vegetables and told him of a cheaper place. And when they were all worn out trying to get a word in edgeways, he told them all, her two younger sisters included, that he loved Brenda but up to now had no prospects and no hope of being able to make a home for her. But suddenly on the canal bank he had gotten enlightenment and he realized it was a matter of any old job in catering until they had a home and he could go and build their dream.

The O'Haras were astonished at him. Brenda was dumbfounded. When he left, they said he was a very nice
fellow indeed, gabby though, very overtalkative, hyper almost. Hadn't Brenda said he was quiet?

“I got it wrong,” Brenda said humbly.

In weeks he had found them a job together, Patrick as chef and Brenda as front-of-house manager.

“You despise this kind of place,” she said.

“What does it matter, Brenda? A month's salary, and we'll have our bed-sitter,” he said.

“We can have it now from
my
savings,” she said.

They found one that day, and they practiced passion and desire that night and found it fine.

They were married very shortly after that, a simple wedding with just cake and wine. It was a beautiful cake made and iced by Patrick and much photographed.

There was a series of jobs, none of them really satisfactory, none of them giving scope to what they thought they could do. But they had no money, no one to back them, to set them up in a place where they could make their mark.

And as time went by there was no sign of the daughter they had spoken of, or the son. But they were still young and perhaps it was better that they didn't have to worry yet about raising a family.