Quentins (15 page)

They said nothing.

Dr. Flynn said that adoption wasn't as easy as it used to be, too many people chasing after a small pool of babies. The days were gone when single girls gave up their babies to orphanages or for adoption. Very much healthier attitude of course, but not helpful when you were looking for a child.

And of course there was the age factor, nobody over forty was really in with a chance of adopting, so it would have to be speedy if they wanted to try and apply.

To the outer world, nothing had changed, but for the great team that had been Brenda and Patrick Brennan, something had. Only those very close to them guessed that there was anything wrong at all. Blouse and Mary thought the couple was very overworked, that they didn't seem to laugh as much as they had in earlier times. Brenda's mother noticed nothing except that anytime she was unwise enough to inquire about the patter of tiny feet, she got a very short answer.

Quentin Barry noticed in his weekly phone call that the same spark wasn't there in Brenda.

He put it down to strain and rules and regulations and anxiety. “Don't kill yourselves,” he wrote kindly. “I
know that we won't be trading at a profit for quite a long time. My accountant barks much more loudly than he bites. Together we will have something marvelous, don't lose your passion and fire over this.”

If Patrick and Brenda had both read his instructions about not losing fire and passion with a wry laugh, they said nothing to each other. They had been serving food and changing everything restlessly for months now.

There were so many teething troubles. Who would have known . . . that parking would be such a nightmare. That taxi firms would be so likely to let them down. That the fish catch would be so unreliable at times. That well-known people would have used-up credit cards. That people would steal ashtrays and linen napkins. They learned, slowly and sometimes bitterly. This was the first time they had run their own place. Or Quentin's place. He had told them to think of it as theirs.

But when Brenda saw Patrick sighing, she remembered how he had asked, “What's it all for? What am I doing all this for?” Her heart was heavy.

By the time the end of their first year approached, Brenda had lost a great deal of weight and looked very tired. Mary, Blouse's wife, who looked blooming in motherhood, was also, it appeared, able to hold down a series of jobs as well. Through her contacts she had arranged huge publicity for the first anniversary party.

Three nights before the event, when every catastrophe that
could
have happened
had
happened, Patrick and Brenda were still in the restaurant kitchen at three
A
.
M
. They had lived through a day when a car had reversed into one of their windows, leaving broken glass and a whistling wind until the whole thing could be boarded up and made to appear like a bomb site. Then there had been a gas leak, a shelf containing a lot of
valuable produce collapsing and a lavatory in the ladies' room overflowing. Somebody had sent back the fish because it tasted “funny” and everyone else felt uneasy about their portions, which had tasted fine up to then. One of the waiters had left because he said, frankly, the place was a shambles and would never take off as a top-class place to work.

“What are we doing it for?” Patrick asked again.

“Sorry, Patrick?”

“You heard me. What's it
for
? I'm bloody exhausted. You're like skin and bone. You've aged twenty years. We were mad to try to do all this. Crazy, that's what we were . . .”

“Would it have been worth it if we had a child or even the prospect of one, do you think? Would it have made sense out of a day from hell like today!”

“You know it would.”

“No, I don't. We would have been just as tired, even more so.”

“You know what I mean. There would have been some sort of purpose to it all. Something at the end.”

“And there's nothing now, no purpose in anything, is this what you're saying?”

“You're picking a row, Brenda. It's far too late.”

“You're right. Why don't you go on up to bed?”

“Aren't you coming?”

“In a while. Please go on up.”

Patrick dragged himself to the door and climbed the stairs.

Brenda looked around the place where she had soldiered since seven
A
.
M
. Twenty hours. She walked thoughtfully over to a mirror they had put strategically for the staff to give themselves a quick glance before going into the dining room. Skin and bone, he had said. Aged twenty years, he had said.

She wrote a short note to Patrick.

I'm sorry, but I don't feel like sharing a bed with you tonight. Not if you think I'm old and sad and wretched-looking. Not if you see no hope, no purpose in anything. I'm going to a friend for the night, or what's left of it. But whatever I am, I am a pro. I'll be back tomorrow, 12 noon, for the photo call Mary has arranged, and for my lunchtime shift. I don't feel the need to say anything about this to anyone, so you needn't either. Brenda.

She left it on the table beside where he slept in a deep sleep, arm thrown across to her side of the bed as he had done for years. She took her coat, a change of clothes and some washing things, and let herself out into the early morning of Dublin City.

She took a taxi to Tara Road, where Colm ran a restaurant. He was a recovering alcoholic, a man who slept lightly. He, too, lived over the premises.

They had always joked about being rivals, but his restaurant in its green suburb catered to an entirely different clientele than Quentins' center-city trade.

She rang the bell and he answered in a wide-awake voice. “Brenda Brennan? The very person.”

“Colm, could I have a bed for the night, what's left of it?”

“Sure. Will you have tea and toast or do you want to sleep straightaway?”

“Tea and toast will be fine,” she said.

He never asked her what it was about and she went to bed half an hour later in Colm's spare room, where she slept until ten
A
.
M
.

“Do I look skin and bone and twenty years older, Colm?” she asked at a breakfast of melon, champagne and orange juice and a freshly baked pastry.

“No, and only an overtired husband in a blind panic over his restaurant would have said that. Are you going back to him?”

“Of course I am. I'm a professional.”

“And you love him?” he pleaded.

“Maybe.”

“No, definitely,” he said.

“Anyway, Colm, could you get me a taxi, and know you are the truest friend anyone ever had?”

The taxi came in five minutes. Eleven minutes into the journey the taxi was hit by a large truck. It came from the side where Brenda was seated. The blow to her head knocked her unconscious at once. She knew nothing at all after the impact.

Brenda had never been late for anything. Patrick began to be seriously worried. She had said she would be back. He knew that she would. He wondered what friend she had gone to see. He wished that he hadn't been so sharp-tempered. Why could he not have given her a hug and said that when the world settled down they would talk? Brenda was never moody. She wouldn't make a scene like this on such a very important day.

When she hadn't turned up for the photo call, he became seriously alarmed. He had tried to reassure everyone else, insisted that Blouse and Mary be included in the pictures as well as the newly recruited staff. He said there were a million last-minute things that each of them had to see to.

They served a lunch shorthanded; every moment he expected to see her come into the kitchen and slip her coat off. But lunch was over, and there was still no sign.

The afternoon didn't bring her either. He was now getting really worried. By six o'clock he was ready to call the Guards. They were not helpful. A domestic incident at four
A
.
M
.! They were sympathetic, but they had better things to do with their time. Most missing people came home, they said. Try her friends, they suggested.

He had no idea who to call. He slapped the food onto plates for the dinner with no idea what he was serving.

She would
not
have left him like this.

In the hospital, they searched for any identification that would tell them who the dark-haired woman was. All they had was a set of keys and some bank notes in her pockets, a change of clothes in an overnight bag. No hint at all about whom they might contact.

During dinner Patrick went upstairs again. He saw Brenda's handbag on the floor beside the dressing table. She had gone away without anything. It wasn't possible that she had gone away to kill herself. He didn't want to involve Blouse and Mary. Blouse was so simple and innocent. But by eleven o'clock that night he had to tell them.

He was sitting crying in the kitchen and they demanded to know.

“We'll call the hospitals,” Mary said.

They took six of the major places and tried two each.

Blouse found her on his first go.

“Long, straight dark hair usually tied up in what is called a French pleat,” he said, proud of having gotten it all together.

Patrick wondered if he would have been able to give such a good description. He grabbed the phone. “Is she alive?” he sobbed. “Thank God. Thank God.”

She had come to for a moment, spoken in a garbled way of Patrick and Quentin, but they had no idea what she meant. They were letting her sleep now.

Blouse got out of the van. Patrick sat in the van, holding his head. Had he really said to this wonderful, strong, loyal woman that there was no hope, no purpose in anything? Could he have driven her out in the night because she couldn't bear to lie beside him? The only thing that mattered was Brenda, he knew it somewhere
inside. Why could he not have admitted it and said it to her. Please, please God, may there be years and years ahead when he could tell her.

He sat by her bed all night and stroked her thin, pale cheek. He half remembered people telling him about the accident and the taxi and the truck. She had been on her way home to him and this had happened.

Then at dawn she woke and he laid his head on her chest and sobbed as if his heart would break.

There was no concussion, very little bruising, just great shock. She had been lucky. The taxi driver had been lucky. Everyone was all right.

“I think I'll make it for the party after all,” she said.

“You're everything in the world to me, Brenda. You're enough, do you hear what I'm saying? You're more than enough. I love you so much, we have huge hope, a huge future together, you and I.”

Everyone was there that night at Quentins' anniversary party, which was as glittery a do as Dublin had seen for a long time, and they would always remember one particular moment.

It was when Patrick Brennan took his wife's hand in his and held it very tight. He looked around the crowd and lowered his voice slightly.

“Brenda and I have a wonderful baby to rejoice over with you tonight.

“The baby is one year old and we have all of you here to celebrate the fact we have a restaurant that survived a year and where we hope to make friends and strangers alike welcome and happy with us. It's not as wonderful as a real christening with a real baby, but for us it's everything that a real christening is, with a sense of fulfillment and hope and a future ahead of us all. So will you drink to our baby, Quentins, and wish us all well
in the adventures that the rest of life will bring to everyone in this room.”

Even hard-bitten media people and professional first-nighters were silent as Patrick Brennan kissed his thin, elegant wife, Brenda. As the years went on, people said that Brenda Brennan never cried, they must have imagined it. But those who were there knew that they hadn't imagined it. And it wasn't only the Brennans who had cried. Everyone in the room seemed to have been affected too.