Be Careful What You Wish For, page 16
Barry brightened. ‘Could it work?’
‘Absolutely.’ A thought struck her. ‘Barry, did this tongue-lashing from your mild little Kay have anything to do with Valentine’s Day? – because if it did you’re in more serious trouble than I suspected.’
Barry wriggled. ‘It might have done. Kay was in a strop when I arrived home with the Chinese takeaway and Chianti. She said all the other beauticians in her salon were being chauffeured to expensive restaurants or having gourmet meals cooked for them while they sipped Krug with their feet up.’
‘The Krug was probably a flight of fancy on Kay’s part, but she had a point. You weren’t exactly fanning the embers of passion with a takeaway and some red wine – a drink, by the way, which you like better than she does. A woman needs pampering occasionally, Barry Dalton. Haven’t you worked that one out by now?’
‘I thought I was spoiling her,’ he lamented.
‘It’s not too late. Go straight home, shave and make yourself presentable, and book dinner somewhere grandiose. Better still, check into one of those country house hotels while you’re at it. Try Tinakilly House – Wicklow’s about the right distance to drive. When you reach it stick rigorously to this plan: a cocktail at the bar; dinner with no cheapskate remarks about their prices; something bubbly to accompany the meal, although not necessarily Krug; retire to the four-poster where you give her a foot massage and you can wing it from there. And remember to order breakfast in bed the next morning. Possibly incorporating a pitcher of Bucks Fizz if you have the energy to play the don again.’
‘Don Corleone?’
‘Don Juan, you sap.’ Molly resisted the inclination to shake him – but only just. ‘If you follow my instructions without deviating she’ll be putty in your hands for another fifteen years. I’ll waive my consultancy fee but feel free to keep me in coffee supplies until Hallowe’en.’
‘So that’s how you pamper a woman.’ Barry sounded exhausted at the prospect. ‘They have lofty standards, don’t they?’
‘If they had any kind of standards they’d never take up with men. Now run along and rescue your marriage.’ Molly decided she’d held Barry’s hand long enough.
Left to her own devices, she contemplated calling over to Helen’s to replay the details of her deeply satisfying Valentine’s Night. But Helen had probably sat in on her own watching Frasier last night so it seemed unfair to crow about Fionn. Especially as Helen might tackle her about becoming involved with him again. She believed everyone should share her aptitude for chastity.
Alternatively she could ring Fionn and see a late afternoon film with him as he’d somewhat plaintively suggested. But if he were disposed to make assumptions about her already on the strength of one set of twisted sheets, meeting up with him again so soon would only copperfasten his hyper-confidence. Molly considered. What she really wanted was to see her mother. It was a hike without a car but if she caught the four o’clock bus she could be in Derry by dinnertime, spend the night and return to Dublin on Sunday evening. A lengthy round trip for less than twenty-four hours, but what the heck, she was young and fit. Or young and fat, depending on her time of the month, which tended to distend her stomach. Had to be menstrual, couldn’t possibly be her fondness for chocolate. Her mother had an immune deficiency in that sphere too. It was obviously a familial disposition and beyond Molly’s control, she reasoned, throwing Fionn’s heart-shaped tin in her bag for a mother – daughter bacchanal.
Molly carried her overnight bag to the front door, debating whether she should also arrange a Sunday lunchtime drink with Mary-P. Ah sure, why not? She could trowel on a smile for an hour while her old schoolfriend from Thornhill burbled about wedding plans. It would also give her the opportunity to probe whether there was the remotest possibility of someone unattached and uncertified on the guest list. Male too, obviously. No point in getting all excited about a sane, available female. The phone rang but she decided against taking the call, waiting while the answerphone screened it. Fionn’s voice sounded over the speaker. She noticed for the first time that he’d acquired a slight American twang. After only four years there. Shame on him.
Fionn was hoping she’d be free later, he’d love to see her. He had a sensational time with her last night, it stripped away the years. (Molly chortled like a skittish schoolgirl at his choice of verb.) If she were busy tonight maybe they could meet tomorrow – there was still that walk on Dun Laoghaire pier outstanding.
Someone should explain to Fionn the principles of playing hard to get, reflected Molly, climbing into a taxi at the rank. Although maybe not. Hadn’t he been there, done that and bought the playground? Swanning off to America for four years showed he knew all about hard-to-get. Molly was grinding her teeth as they drove towards Bus Aras for her express coach – a contradiction in terms but no mileage in quibbling with Bus Eireann. She pushed tooth against tooth until her jaw ached and reminded herself she had the whip hand now. And she wasn’t about to throw open her arms, her legs and her heart to Fionn McCullagh just because he’d said sorry and had bought her dinner. He’d have to content himself with the first two and then only on her terms. The advice she doled out to Barry applied equally to Fionn. Groveling was on the agenda. She needed some breast-beating from him. Particularly if he left his shirt open while he did it because she’d always liked that smooth, virtually hair-free chest of his.
So yes, she concluded in the back of the taxi, wrestling with her seat belt; yes, she’d play with Fionn, although it might not be the game he had in mind. That didn’t mean she’d be playing hard to get, however, for Molly had a theory about people indulging in those stratagems.
Play hard to get and you could get left behind.
CHAPTER 13
Molly arrived into work on Monday on tenterhooks to see Barry. She half expected a pot of caviar – not that she liked the taste of it – on her desk by way of exuberant thanks for resuscitating his marriage. Or a gift voucher to spend at the Powerscourt Townhouse. Or an air ticket to Bermuda. Or, better still, the unexpurgated version of Barry and Kay’s reunion. She felt she’d earned her stripes as agony aunt par excellence. However, Barry didn’t materialise, although she checked the roster and saw he was marked for an 11 a.m. shift, the same as herself. Perhaps his passion pitstop in Tinakilly had stretched to a three-day event. If there was a minibar in the room they might never have left it. You could develop a taste for foreplay in a four-poster provided there were brandy miniatures on hand for reviving flagging energy levels – at least Molly suspected she could. And Barry was so panicked for paradise regained with Kay he’d be willing to acquire a penchant for anything.
Molly tapped her teeth, wondering how to distract herself until either Barry arrived to appease her curiosity or the newsdesk lobbed a story in her direction – she wasn’t daft enough to volunteer for one. Of course she could generate her own stories. The Chronicle’s advertisements for reporters were always insisting they only employed self-starters (which made the old lags chortle), but she’d go off-diary later in the week and drum up something exclusive. In the meantime she had personal matters to deal with. First she should call Helen, who’d been trying to reach her since yesterday evening. She rang her work number but was fobbed off by voicemail. When someone compiled the top ten bêtes noires of the decade, Molly was convinced voicemail would loom large: ‘To hold until the cows come home, press 1; to hold until rigor mortis sets in, press 2; to hold until the Last Trumpet sounds, press 3.’
She was sorry she hadn’t phoned Helen last night. She’d torn off to Derry in such a flurry that she’d left her mobile plugged into the charger on her dressing table and had found messages on both her land line and mobile when she’d arrived back after midnight. However, she hadn’t liked to disturb Helen so late – she tended to be at her desk by 8 a.m. – although postponement had left her unsettled because Helen sounded desperate. Molly would have been home hours earlier if she’d caught the bus, but she’d been given a lift and that allowed her to stay on later in Derry. Swallowing the bitter pill of someone else’s bridal hire, florist and catering arrangements ad nauseam had produced a sugar coating – Mary-P’s conversationally challenged younger brother, Aidan, was driving to Dublin that night and would be glad of the company.
It provided Molly not just with door-to-door transportation but the opportunity to browse through and mentally ridicule someone else’s collection of in-car music. It didn’t produce any stimulating exchanges to pass the journey because Aidan’s notion of banter was ‘How’s about you, any craic?’ at twenty-minute intervals. Derry boys; that must be why she’d transferred her attentions further south. Hang on a minute, was she being unfair on Aidan? She’d just unearthed an Undertones tape in his car.
‘Feargal Sharkey was my first fantasy figure, even before Elvis,’ she confided. ‘I wept when he moved away to London. It meant we’d never have teenage kicks together. Although I was a decade too young to have teenage kicks with him anyway.’
‘Feargal who?’ Aidan overtook a lorry outside Carrickmacross with a recklessness verging on criminal.
Molly glanced right, aghast at his ignorance. ‘Isn’t this your Undertones tape?’
‘Nah, think it’s Paul’s. How’s about you, any craic?’
Now she wandered over to check her pigeonhole for post and a reader’s letter lay there: the spidery handwriting signalled nutter. Molly ripped it open. She was an instrument of destruction and would meet with appropriately agonising perpetual punishment on the far side of the grave. What story had sparked this? Her eyes skimmed the page. Not last week’s innocuous piece about the abortion referendum, surely? She’d been straight down the middle with that article. Some people had no sense of perspective, especially children of God. Time to try to circumvent Helen’s voicemail again.
The arrival of Barry diverted her. If he’d looked exhausted on Saturday, it was exhaustion with extra whipped cream on top today – like a Munch scream without the cavernous mouth because he hadn’t the energy to open it. He slid into the only spare seat, a few desks away from Molly, so she was unable to whisper to him. She sent him a message on his computer screen instead.
‘Meet me for coffee in the canteen in five minutes. Must know everything.’
‘Can’t vanish off. Already half hour late for work,’ he tapped back.
Her fingers bickered. ‘Need to know situation. Will throw in Danish with coffee. You’ll get no work done until caffeine streams down your neck and I won’t let you have any peace until confession is recited. Agent’s orders.’
He surrendered. ‘Need extra-strong coffee. Accept nothing unless you can stand a spoon in it.’
She hoisted her bag over her shoulder.
Molly was waiting with the coffees and an apricot Danish at a corner table when he arrived. She propelled a mug and plate towards Barry as he eased himself into the bench opposite with the gingery care of a man who’d slept a handful of hours in as many days. For all the right reasons, Molly trusted.
‘You could trot a mouse on that coffee,’ she encouraged him.
‘Aren’t you having a bun?’
‘Too bloated. The mammy was fattening me up like a spring lamb at the weekend. She believes I’ll never find a husband unless I’m all rump and chest like a prize heifer. Unfortunately I’m doing very nicely on my own without her help.’ Molly regarded her curvaceous form ruefully. ‘Now that’s enough sidetracking, supply the gory details. Leave nothing out, it may be germane. Or titillating at the very least. Was Tinakilly a honey trap? Are you cooing at one another like newlyweds?’
‘Didn’t go.’ Barry aside the Danish and concentrated on his coffee.
‘Booked out?’ Molly’s eyebrows played hide and seek in her blonde curls.
‘Kay refused to go away with me. She confiscated the car and the girls and went to her sister Breda’s in Monaghan instead. And she must have been desperate to escape from me because she hates driving further than the shopping centre. She’s convinced the N2 is thick with sociopaths in company cars.’
‘So it is. But sure you loathe it when she drags you up to the home town. You insist your brother-in-law’s addiction to power tools makes you nervous.’
‘Under the circumstances I was more agitated about being left on my own. I’m convinced she and her coven of sisters made a wax doll of me and filled it with pins. I’m a walking mass of aches and pains. And I can’t stop scratching.’
The rash on his neck had spread like a choker. Molly tried not to stare as she reached across and broke off a corner of the discarded Danish.
‘Didn’t you try apologising? Didn’t you describe the four-poster beds at Tinakilly House, the unabashed opulence, the prurient pleasure of spying on Hollywood stars up close and personal?’
Barry removed his glasses, polished them against an ancient egg stain on his tie and replaced them. His hazel eyes were tram-lined with red and without their spectacles they disappeared into bruised sockets.
‘Didn’t have a chance. As soon as I started apologising she lambasted into me again. She appears to have compiled and memorised a list of every transgression I’ve committed in the past fifteen years. There was the time I declined to drive her to Breda’s for some tedious family get-together involving a barbecue and holiday slide show, and my excuse that I was working wasn’t palatable. It’s true I could have changed shifts but it was a last-minute invitation and I didn’t want to go.’ He added more milk to his coffee, slopping it over the rim. ‘There was the Christmas I bought her a pair of size six shoes when if I’d really loved her I’d have known she wore a five. There was the time I wilfully and maliciously added tea towels to a white load and turned the wash pink. And there was the honeymoon débâcle.’
By now Molly had commandeered the Danish and was on her penultimate mouthful. ‘I didn’t know your honeymoon was a débâcle, Barry. Where did you go?’
‘Minorca. And it wasn’t a débâcle, it was fabulous. In fact I was contemplating bringing her back there for a second honeymoon for our twentieth wedding anniversary a few years down the line. But Kay claims the place is tinged with unfortunate memories for her. She has some notion she left me alone for a couple of hours one afternoon while she had a nap in the hotel bedroom and I attached myself like a limpet to a German woman.’ Barry eyed his coffee mournfully. ‘I don’t recollect ever meeting a German woman, never mind attaching myself like a limpet to one on my honeymoon. It’s the sort of incident a man would remember.’
‘So is Kay tippling? Inhaling the cosmetics in her salon? Sliding into a midlife crisis? Growing magic mushrooms in her vegetable patch and sprinkling them on her pizza?’
‘Ssh.’ Animation flitted across Barry’s morose features. Molly’s suggestions were uttered loudly enough to attract the attention of a couple of business journalists at the next table and Barry didn’t want his personal life to become office gossip. Other people’s personal lives should fulfil that function.
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he sighed. ‘But it transpires she’s been nursing a grievance about this imaginary woman for a decade and a half.’
Molly insisted: ‘There must be some substance to the accusation. I’ve seen the way you drool over the classified girls, Barry.’
‘I’d been married less than a week.’ He was indignant. ‘Anyway, I never salivate, I simply admire in a theoretical way. But a foreign woman did ask me to read the news headlines to her one afternoon when the sun was too powerful for Kay and she left me alone at the poolside while she had a snooze in the hotel. She may have been from Germany; she may have been from Pluto for all I know.’
‘Venus.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You know, women are from Venus. Never mind, what about your poolside pick-up?’ prompted Molly.
‘She was hardly that. I can’t remember what the woman looked like but Kay even described her swimming costume.’
‘Scanty,’ guessed Molly.
‘An orange bikini with a white trim. Apparently. She was on the sun lounger next to me, she noticed I was reading a newspaper and asked me to check it for election results in whichever country she was from.’ Barry’s fingers fiddled with his rash and he undid his shirt top button to relieve pressure on the inflammation. ‘I could see it if Kay returned to find me sharing a lounger and whispering sweet nothings, but I was calling out exit poll predictions.’
‘There’s no reasoning with a woman when she decides she’s been wronged, especially if she’s harboured the grudge for years. Accept it, pal, you’re for the divorce courts.’ Molly clattered her chair as she stood up.
Alarmed, Barry caught her by the arm. ‘Tell me you’re joking.’
Molly sat down again. ‘I’m joking. But decisive action is imperative. There’s no one else involved, right?’
‘Of course not.’ Barry looked affronted. ‘Kay is a lady.’
‘I meant you, actually. Have you been messing around and did she catch you?’
Barry was doubly affronted. ‘I never mess around.’
‘Thought crimes, Bar. Fortunately, Kay doesn’t seem to share my gift for reading your murky little mind. And I wouldn’t wish a man homeless, childless and penniless for imaginary transgressions. Otherwise half the married men in Ireland would be sleeping under railway arches.’ Molly tapped the opening bars of Suspicious Minds on her front tooth. ‘I need to ponder this situation. I’ll report back to you later in the day when inspiration strikes. Are you owed any holiday time? Excellent, you may need to take a few days. Leave it with me. Problem-busting is my forté.’
Outside the canteen door Barry touched her elbow. ‘I really do love her, Molly. Promise me it will be all right.’
‘I’m not one of the Sibyls,’ replied Molly, ‘but neither am I Cassandra. Everything will be fine.’
