Be Careful What You Wish For, page 21
‘It’s healthy cake, if you overlook the butter cream topping.’
He examined the plates with interest. ‘Carrot cake is the business, healthy or not. Are these lattes or cappuccinos?’
‘One of each, I was feeling indecisive. Still pining for my friend Helen?’ she asked, having practised sounding casual at least a dozen times in her mind before saying the words.
‘Pining might be an exaggeration.’
‘Supply the verb of your choice,’ invited Molly.
‘Noticing her is a possibility.’
‘When do you see her to notice her? You work in my off-licence, not hers.’
‘I think she must live near me. I’ve seen her in down-town Glasthule a couple of times.’
‘Trundling around The Tool – that makes sense,’ admitted Molly. ‘I seem to remember some salerooms she mentioned wanting to visit there in search of furniture. She’s only round the corner from you in Sandycove.’
‘Whereabouts?’
The question rang in Molly’s ears with studied nonchalance. ‘I don’t know if it’s safe to divulge that information. You could be a stalker. Or a Scientologist. Or a travelling salesman who won’t rest until she buys a complete set of plastic bowls for the freezer.’
‘You don’t have a firm grasp on sanity, do you?’ remarked Hercules, a globule of butter frosting clinging to his lower lip.
She had trouble thinking of him as Georgie. Nearly as much trouble as she had stopping herself from retrieving the icing and depositing it inside his mouth. Or hers.
‘Sorry, what was that?’ She needed to carry a cold water spray in her bag at this rate.
‘You aren’t one hundred per cent sane.’
‘Wouldn’t want to be. Are you?’
He appeared to consider the query seriously. ‘Near enough, ninety-eight or -nine per cent, which is probably top-of-the range. I don’t imagine anyone has perfect sanity.’
Such certainty, marvelled Molly. It was begging to be teased. ‘They say mad people believe they’re the full shilling and everyone else is a lunatic’
He considered it, chin on hand, while Molly stared; who was this man, Rodin’s model? Think less, react more.
‘If I were a lunatic I would have gauged my sanity at one hundred per cent,’ he pointed out. ‘It’s common sense.’
True. But Molly still didn’t feel like giving him the location of Helen’s house, not even the street name. It was probably jealousy, although she could gloss over such an unattractive response by calling it instinct.
‘Common sense isn’t all that common,’ she said, meanwhile plotting a 180 degree-angled change of subject. ‘Do you cook, Herc – Georgie?’
He was confounded; she saw the yellow flecks in his eyes glowing as he tried to take the measure of her. ‘Naturally I cook, why?’
‘I always associate you Mediterranean men with stirring vast bubbling cauldrons of pasta sauce, while the record player (never a CD player) blasts out a song about someone’s tiny hand being frozen.’
‘I’m Greek, not Italian.’
‘So you’re not going to lecture me on buying the best quality olive oil I can afford, explain how to skin tomatoes or produce a bottle of bellissimo vino from your father’s vineyard?’
‘No.’
‘Well, how about if you put me straight on the best way to stuff dolmades, pit olives and avoid retsina?’
Hercules rubbed his chin and took stock of her. It was a square chin with a cleft; Molly ordered her trembles to get a grip before they became visible.
‘Are you always like this?’ His air was faintly admiring. It wasn’t outright appreciation but there was a certain element of the partisan.
It had a narcotic effect on Molly – she was illuminated.
‘Afraid so. I’ve been this way since I could talk. Which I started doing at the age of fifteen months and I haven’t shut up since. Look, it’s time for me to lay my cards on the table – I worship people who cook for me. It’s the ultimate sensual experience. The idea of their hands chopping and stirring and ladling out food for my delectation is ecstasy. I adore eating, but as for shopping for food, forget it. Your brain hurts making shopping lists and I always overlook something crucial like the lamb for the lamb balti or the cauliflower for the cauliflower cheese. Some people can improvise – I bet you’d find yourself out of cauliflower so you’d rustle up a broccoli instead and have everyone say they were only going to eat broccoli cheese from now on. So tell me what you like to cook. Name your seduction speciality.’
Hercules didn’t hesitate. ‘Caesar salad followed by seafood risotto and then fresh fruit salad soaked in Cointreau.’
‘Served with Greek yoghurt?’ asked Molly. Mischievously, of course.
‘Extra thick cream. I whip sugar into it for added energy.’ His eyes were catlike.
Ooh, thought Molly, he was finally being bold. ‘Added energy for … ?’
‘Tackling the dishes.’
She laughed; a touch of one-upmanship never harmed anyone. ‘Love makes cooks of men, you know.’ She was conscious that she might be prolonging a conversational volley – but then he was returning her serve with as much zest.
‘How did you work that one out?’ asked Hercules.
‘It’s that primitive hunter instinct. They aren’t out there tracking down herds of bison-type creatures into extinction any more to show their cavegirls what top-of-the-range caveboys they are, so they rely on cooking lumps of meat instead of slaughtering them. Prowling butchers’ shops fulfils their tracking instincts, ditto deciphering recipes, and then when the meal is served up they move in for the kill.’
‘The anthropological imperative,’ Hercules said approvingly. ‘So it’s not lust at all. I’ve been ashamed of it needlessly all these years. I wonder if that would work as a chat-up line: fancy pandering to my biological impulses?’
For one unhinged moment Molly imagined he was genuinely posing the question. But Hercules was already on his feet and helping her into her coat; it was one of those rhetorical questions. Those literary devices should be arraigned for misleading people. As he shrugged on his black donkey jacket she noticed a patch of silky blonde hairs on the lapel and had to fold her arms to resist the inclination to pull them off – she’d be damping down wayward tufts of hair next. His eyes followed hers to the hairs.
‘The cat,’ he smiled, ‘she tries to nest in this coat.’
I don’t know why I’m feeling so relieved, thought Molly. Which was a huge fat lie because she knew exactly why.
She reached for her umbrella at the street door. Raindrops dribbled, although in no great hurry, but as for the night sky – not a star in sight. Even the moon was hidden behind a bank of cloud. Where were the props when you needed them? Last night with Fionn there’d been a perfect yellow sphere suspended in the sky. If she’d known the romantic accoutrements were going to be in short supply she’d have sent back yesterday’s moon to the manufacturer and asked for a replacement by today.
‘Where are you headed?’ she enquired.
‘Pearse Street.’
‘Me too. I’ll share my brolly with you as an act of supreme sacrifice because these yokes are incapable of keeping two people dry.’
He ducked his head under the somewhat battered umbrella, avoiding an exposed spike, and she felt his hand on her elbow. Such a nice feeling. She knew nice was an anodyne word but there was no other way of describing it. It felt nice walking in the rain under an umbrella with Hercules.
‘Just to tether our twin themes this evening onto one pole,’ she said, hoping for delays on the southbound DART line. Say of two or three weeks.
‘What twin themes would they be?’
‘Insanity and love.’ Molly shook out the raindrops from her umbrella by the station escalator. ‘They go hand in hand, you know.’ (She should be hand in hand with Hercules.) ‘Writers were always ranting about how they’d sooner someone took a whip to them than that they’d fall in love. That must be why the rose is the symbol of love – the thorns are handy for flagellation.’
He smiled and by a passing van beam she saw a raindrop cling, as though fitted with a magnet, to the tip of his nose. On Hercules, make that Georgie, it looked appealing.
I’m talking way too much, Molly reminded herself as they caught their train. So she wired her mouth shut and they sat in companionable silence watching the diadem of lights blink around Dublin Bay. He had four stops further to travel than she and as the train pulled into Blackrock Molly hoped he’d suggest another meeting. They sparked off each other, that had to count for something. Hercules simply said, ‘Be seeing you,’ which was hardly up there with the great one-liners. Now if he’d told her, ‘I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows’ she’d have been ready to go cavort on it, even in a biblical deluge. A bed of dandelions would do just as well.
Instead of which she had a drizzly walk back to her flat, a lightning chat with Elizabeth, her neighbour, who was dressed to kill, thrill, fulfil and anything else she chose in a ruffled señorita dress which ended so close to her waist it was a wonder she bothered with a bottom half at all.
‘That’s quite something you’re almost wearing. Expecting a heatwave?’
Elizabeth winked. ‘Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find.’ Her hair was dyed a shade of magenta that exactly matched the almost-frock.
‘You must have the constitution of an ox,’ said Molly. ‘I’d be sneezing before I was halfway down the street in that number. No shortage of volunteers to take your temperature, however, I imagine. Remind me to buy one exactly like it.’
Her answerphone had two messages: one dull, the other potentially exciting. The boring one was from Fionn. He wanted to let her know what a wonderful time he had last night. Ho-hum, he was behaving like a big girl’s blouse. Whatever happened to hump-’em-and-dump-’em men? He wasn’t giving her a single sleepless night. If this was love it had lost its edge.
The other message was from Barry, who’d been off work since Monday and wanted to meet her. But under no circumstances was she to ring him at home. Molly wiped Fionn’s message and replayed Barry’s to assess whether there was defeat or victory in his voice. She couldn’t gauge. And how was she supposed to ring him back if contacting him at home was embargoed. Unfathomable. Or just plain dense. She stomped into the kitchen to scrutinise the contents of the fridge, although she had a suspicion they’d be uninspiring because she hadn’t darkened a shop in at least a week, but was saved from a fruitless errand by the phone jangling. She snatched up the receiver. Barry was on the line in autocratic mode.
‘Caught you in, you gallivanter. Stay where you are – I’m on my way over,’ he all but bullied.
CHAPTER 16
Nothing to do while she waited but eat. Nothing to eat but bread. Molly couldn’t locate any jam or honey so she spread it with treacle, a sloppy operation. It was all that discussion of seduction theme meals with Hercules – her body was stirred up and she craved something sweet. Treacle dripped onto her fingers and she licked them; the sugar rush shimmered in her eyes as she opened the door to Barry.
Something utterly unexpected happened. She’d have been less surprised if the moon had emerged from behind a cloud and Barry had metamorphosed into a werewolf, a haunted-looking Lon Chaney Junior with a lilting Cork accent in her hall. It was verging on the lupine all the same. Barry seized her in his arms and planted a prolonged kiss on her goldfish gaping mouth.
Her initial reaction was: this is sizzling, he’s quite an operator. Swiftly followed by the realisation it was Barry kissing her and it had to stop. Swiftly followed by the realisation it must simply be gratitude for her efforts in activating the matrimonial lifeboat patrol. Swiftly followed by the realisation it was nothing of the sort as she felt his tongue probing to separate her lips.
She prised him off. ‘Barry, are you insane?’ (There was dementia in the air tonight, a full moon had to be lurking behind that cloud cover.)
‘No, I had a moment of epiphany. I realised it was a waste of time attempting a reconciliation with Kay when I’ve loved you all along. Kay taxed me with it during yet another argument – strictly speaking, it was a conflagration; arguments are too tame for the thrashing we give one another – and it was as if cataracts fell from my eyes. She said, “You’ve always had a massive crush on Molly Molloy, whose parents should be shot for saddling her with that name, but you’re too stupid to see it.” And suddenly everything made sense.’
Barry’s eyes had acquired the deeply disturbing glint of the zealot. He reached for Molly again but she stepped back in the nick of time. His hands groped space.
‘I knew beyond a shadow of doubt this was it, The Big One. I’ve been treading water but not any more. You’re my love, Molly. Kay was an aberration.’
‘Barry, aberrations don’t last fifteen years and produce two beautiful daughters.’ Molly was hoping mention of his children would deliver a slap-in-the-face reality check.
Barry paused and wrinkled his forehead, more like a man temporarily pulled up short by the referee’s end-of-round whistle than someone flattened by an upper cut.
Meanwhile, Molly was dismayed. This development wasn’t going to win her an Agony Aunt of the Year award. Some fancy jetés were de rigueur, if only to take her sailing out of his reach, as opposed to leaping like a scalded cat if he made another lunge for her. Life was a nuisance. She’d just left a monk who wouldn’t dream of touching her and here she was with Rasputin, convinced he’d only to snog her and she’d say: ‘Move all your worldly goods into my flat. And half-inch a couple of those cute Fabergé eggs from the Tsarina’s dressing table while you’re about it.’
Could that be it? Was Barry latching on to someone with a nest before he was given his eviction notice from the house of straw on the other side of town? Molly retreated to the living room and crossed to the window, peering down at his silver Vauxhall Astra in a futile effort to see if it was crammed with possessions. Too dark to tell. Barry followed her to the window and insinuated his arm around her waist.
‘Barry, would you ever stop handling me?’ Molly twisted round, exasperated. ‘Assuming for a moment – and this is a major assumption – that you actually do love me, it’s self-conceit to convince yourself it’s reciprocated. Have I ever given you the slightest encouragement? You needn’t answer that because I haven’t. Sure don’t you know full well I’m seeing Fionn again? That’s seeing as in sharing a bed with. Didn’t you tell me yourself to shag him and ditch him, if I remember your choice of words correctly?’
Barry interjected, ‘I was in denial then. I didn’t realise how I felt about you. It took my wife to highlight it, and then it was blindingly obvious.’
‘Detour off the road to Damascus, Dalton. Now repeat after me: I love Kay.’
‘I love Molly.’ Barry’s features had an obstinate cast.
‘You love Kay, you love your daughters, you love your home, you love those hybrid tulips you grow, you love your mile-high collection of science periodicals. Not me. No. N. O. I drive you crackers demanding you do coffee runs and carping about my men problems.’
Barry snatched at the last observation. ‘But the reason you have men problems is because you haven’t met the right one yet. Except you have and he’s been under your nose all along.’
‘Men aren’t supposed to read bodice rippers. You stick to detective novels, Barry Dalton.’
‘Even gumshoes notice dames,’ muttered Barry.
Molly was at her wits’ end – there was no reasoning with him.
A knock on her front door was a gift from the gods; exactly the diversion she’d wish for, if she had the presence of mind to formulate a wish. She wrenched the door open to expose Fionn, hair plastered to his head and darkened to the colour of weathered beech from a downpour. Oh no, oh no, oh no. The scriptwriter handling her life was too attached to farce.
‘Sorry I didn’t ring the buzzer. One of your neighbours was on their way out and let me in.’
Molly was aware that frying pans and fires were featuring in this particular plot twist but bundled Fionn indoors anyhow.
‘Let’s get you out of these wet clothes,’ she said loudly for Barry’s benefit.
Fionn was patently gratified. He dripped along the hallway towards the bathroom without noticing Barry’s even more patent chagrin. Molly bustled in after Fionn with dry towels adopting the role of Concerned Girlfriend with all the underplaying of a silent screen star. Maybe when she emerged Barry would have taken the hint and shuffled off. Maybe she should develop a stoop to avoid all those flying pigs.
‘I’ll fetch you my bathrobe,’ she told Fionn, whose delight was ratcheting upwards by the nanosecond as Molly smothered him with solicitude
‘The boyfriend,’ she hissed at Barry on her way down the corridor.
‘Looking forward to meeting him.’ His face was vanilla cone bland.
She could have told him to push off. A woman of more volatile temper and less Christian forbearance (Christians needn’t think they had the monopoly on forbearance) would certainly have enjoined him to sling his hook and the whole feckin’ fishing rod. Instead of which she rolled her eyes and left her bathrobe outside the door for Fionn, then put the kettle on for tea. Hot whiskeys weren’t in the script. A sober Barry was more than she could manage, let alone an inebriated one.
Fionn balanced on the saddleboard, a distinctly unalluring figure in a faded bathrobe that showed more calf than a man with skinny legs might desire if he had any sense for his girlfriend’s need to display him at his best. Now what was she doing referring to herself as his girlfriend? Her head was all in a muddle.
‘I’m Molly’s boyfriend, Fionn.’ He extended his hand to Barry.
‘I’m her workmate, Barry.’ Palms were gripped with a degree of force not a million miles removed from the impact of a rugby tackle. Fionn’s radar must have intercepted some unworkmate-like signals from Barry.
They’d met at a Christmas party once but neither now showed a flicker of recognition. The men set about exchanging some basic information and found, despite their initial hornlocking, they occupied common ground. Manchester United players were living deities, setting foot in a balti house was on a par with entering an orgasmatron, Nick Hornby was a literary genius. Molly wet the tea while they sized one another up.
He examined the plates with interest. ‘Carrot cake is the business, healthy or not. Are these lattes or cappuccinos?’
‘One of each, I was feeling indecisive. Still pining for my friend Helen?’ she asked, having practised sounding casual at least a dozen times in her mind before saying the words.
‘Pining might be an exaggeration.’
‘Supply the verb of your choice,’ invited Molly.
‘Noticing her is a possibility.’
‘When do you see her to notice her? You work in my off-licence, not hers.’
‘I think she must live near me. I’ve seen her in down-town Glasthule a couple of times.’
‘Trundling around The Tool – that makes sense,’ admitted Molly. ‘I seem to remember some salerooms she mentioned wanting to visit there in search of furniture. She’s only round the corner from you in Sandycove.’
‘Whereabouts?’
The question rang in Molly’s ears with studied nonchalance. ‘I don’t know if it’s safe to divulge that information. You could be a stalker. Or a Scientologist. Or a travelling salesman who won’t rest until she buys a complete set of plastic bowls for the freezer.’
‘You don’t have a firm grasp on sanity, do you?’ remarked Hercules, a globule of butter frosting clinging to his lower lip.
She had trouble thinking of him as Georgie. Nearly as much trouble as she had stopping herself from retrieving the icing and depositing it inside his mouth. Or hers.
‘Sorry, what was that?’ She needed to carry a cold water spray in her bag at this rate.
‘You aren’t one hundred per cent sane.’
‘Wouldn’t want to be. Are you?’
He appeared to consider the query seriously. ‘Near enough, ninety-eight or -nine per cent, which is probably top-of-the range. I don’t imagine anyone has perfect sanity.’
Such certainty, marvelled Molly. It was begging to be teased. ‘They say mad people believe they’re the full shilling and everyone else is a lunatic’
He considered it, chin on hand, while Molly stared; who was this man, Rodin’s model? Think less, react more.
‘If I were a lunatic I would have gauged my sanity at one hundred per cent,’ he pointed out. ‘It’s common sense.’
True. But Molly still didn’t feel like giving him the location of Helen’s house, not even the street name. It was probably jealousy, although she could gloss over such an unattractive response by calling it instinct.
‘Common sense isn’t all that common,’ she said, meanwhile plotting a 180 degree-angled change of subject. ‘Do you cook, Herc – Georgie?’
He was confounded; she saw the yellow flecks in his eyes glowing as he tried to take the measure of her. ‘Naturally I cook, why?’
‘I always associate you Mediterranean men with stirring vast bubbling cauldrons of pasta sauce, while the record player (never a CD player) blasts out a song about someone’s tiny hand being frozen.’
‘I’m Greek, not Italian.’
‘So you’re not going to lecture me on buying the best quality olive oil I can afford, explain how to skin tomatoes or produce a bottle of bellissimo vino from your father’s vineyard?’
‘No.’
‘Well, how about if you put me straight on the best way to stuff dolmades, pit olives and avoid retsina?’
Hercules rubbed his chin and took stock of her. It was a square chin with a cleft; Molly ordered her trembles to get a grip before they became visible.
‘Are you always like this?’ His air was faintly admiring. It wasn’t outright appreciation but there was a certain element of the partisan.
It had a narcotic effect on Molly – she was illuminated.
‘Afraid so. I’ve been this way since I could talk. Which I started doing at the age of fifteen months and I haven’t shut up since. Look, it’s time for me to lay my cards on the table – I worship people who cook for me. It’s the ultimate sensual experience. The idea of their hands chopping and stirring and ladling out food for my delectation is ecstasy. I adore eating, but as for shopping for food, forget it. Your brain hurts making shopping lists and I always overlook something crucial like the lamb for the lamb balti or the cauliflower for the cauliflower cheese. Some people can improvise – I bet you’d find yourself out of cauliflower so you’d rustle up a broccoli instead and have everyone say they were only going to eat broccoli cheese from now on. So tell me what you like to cook. Name your seduction speciality.’
Hercules didn’t hesitate. ‘Caesar salad followed by seafood risotto and then fresh fruit salad soaked in Cointreau.’
‘Served with Greek yoghurt?’ asked Molly. Mischievously, of course.
‘Extra thick cream. I whip sugar into it for added energy.’ His eyes were catlike.
Ooh, thought Molly, he was finally being bold. ‘Added energy for … ?’
‘Tackling the dishes.’
She laughed; a touch of one-upmanship never harmed anyone. ‘Love makes cooks of men, you know.’ She was conscious that she might be prolonging a conversational volley – but then he was returning her serve with as much zest.
‘How did you work that one out?’ asked Hercules.
‘It’s that primitive hunter instinct. They aren’t out there tracking down herds of bison-type creatures into extinction any more to show their cavegirls what top-of-the-range caveboys they are, so they rely on cooking lumps of meat instead of slaughtering them. Prowling butchers’ shops fulfils their tracking instincts, ditto deciphering recipes, and then when the meal is served up they move in for the kill.’
‘The anthropological imperative,’ Hercules said approvingly. ‘So it’s not lust at all. I’ve been ashamed of it needlessly all these years. I wonder if that would work as a chat-up line: fancy pandering to my biological impulses?’
For one unhinged moment Molly imagined he was genuinely posing the question. But Hercules was already on his feet and helping her into her coat; it was one of those rhetorical questions. Those literary devices should be arraigned for misleading people. As he shrugged on his black donkey jacket she noticed a patch of silky blonde hairs on the lapel and had to fold her arms to resist the inclination to pull them off – she’d be damping down wayward tufts of hair next. His eyes followed hers to the hairs.
‘The cat,’ he smiled, ‘she tries to nest in this coat.’
I don’t know why I’m feeling so relieved, thought Molly. Which was a huge fat lie because she knew exactly why.
She reached for her umbrella at the street door. Raindrops dribbled, although in no great hurry, but as for the night sky – not a star in sight. Even the moon was hidden behind a bank of cloud. Where were the props when you needed them? Last night with Fionn there’d been a perfect yellow sphere suspended in the sky. If she’d known the romantic accoutrements were going to be in short supply she’d have sent back yesterday’s moon to the manufacturer and asked for a replacement by today.
‘Where are you headed?’ she enquired.
‘Pearse Street.’
‘Me too. I’ll share my brolly with you as an act of supreme sacrifice because these yokes are incapable of keeping two people dry.’
He ducked his head under the somewhat battered umbrella, avoiding an exposed spike, and she felt his hand on her elbow. Such a nice feeling. She knew nice was an anodyne word but there was no other way of describing it. It felt nice walking in the rain under an umbrella with Hercules.
‘Just to tether our twin themes this evening onto one pole,’ she said, hoping for delays on the southbound DART line. Say of two or three weeks.
‘What twin themes would they be?’
‘Insanity and love.’ Molly shook out the raindrops from her umbrella by the station escalator. ‘They go hand in hand, you know.’ (She should be hand in hand with Hercules.) ‘Writers were always ranting about how they’d sooner someone took a whip to them than that they’d fall in love. That must be why the rose is the symbol of love – the thorns are handy for flagellation.’
He smiled and by a passing van beam she saw a raindrop cling, as though fitted with a magnet, to the tip of his nose. On Hercules, make that Georgie, it looked appealing.
I’m talking way too much, Molly reminded herself as they caught their train. So she wired her mouth shut and they sat in companionable silence watching the diadem of lights blink around Dublin Bay. He had four stops further to travel than she and as the train pulled into Blackrock Molly hoped he’d suggest another meeting. They sparked off each other, that had to count for something. Hercules simply said, ‘Be seeing you,’ which was hardly up there with the great one-liners. Now if he’d told her, ‘I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows’ she’d have been ready to go cavort on it, even in a biblical deluge. A bed of dandelions would do just as well.
Instead of which she had a drizzly walk back to her flat, a lightning chat with Elizabeth, her neighbour, who was dressed to kill, thrill, fulfil and anything else she chose in a ruffled señorita dress which ended so close to her waist it was a wonder she bothered with a bottom half at all.
‘That’s quite something you’re almost wearing. Expecting a heatwave?’
Elizabeth winked. ‘Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find.’ Her hair was dyed a shade of magenta that exactly matched the almost-frock.
‘You must have the constitution of an ox,’ said Molly. ‘I’d be sneezing before I was halfway down the street in that number. No shortage of volunteers to take your temperature, however, I imagine. Remind me to buy one exactly like it.’
Her answerphone had two messages: one dull, the other potentially exciting. The boring one was from Fionn. He wanted to let her know what a wonderful time he had last night. Ho-hum, he was behaving like a big girl’s blouse. Whatever happened to hump-’em-and-dump-’em men? He wasn’t giving her a single sleepless night. If this was love it had lost its edge.
The other message was from Barry, who’d been off work since Monday and wanted to meet her. But under no circumstances was she to ring him at home. Molly wiped Fionn’s message and replayed Barry’s to assess whether there was defeat or victory in his voice. She couldn’t gauge. And how was she supposed to ring him back if contacting him at home was embargoed. Unfathomable. Or just plain dense. She stomped into the kitchen to scrutinise the contents of the fridge, although she had a suspicion they’d be uninspiring because she hadn’t darkened a shop in at least a week, but was saved from a fruitless errand by the phone jangling. She snatched up the receiver. Barry was on the line in autocratic mode.
‘Caught you in, you gallivanter. Stay where you are – I’m on my way over,’ he all but bullied.
CHAPTER 16
Nothing to do while she waited but eat. Nothing to eat but bread. Molly couldn’t locate any jam or honey so she spread it with treacle, a sloppy operation. It was all that discussion of seduction theme meals with Hercules – her body was stirred up and she craved something sweet. Treacle dripped onto her fingers and she licked them; the sugar rush shimmered in her eyes as she opened the door to Barry.
Something utterly unexpected happened. She’d have been less surprised if the moon had emerged from behind a cloud and Barry had metamorphosed into a werewolf, a haunted-looking Lon Chaney Junior with a lilting Cork accent in her hall. It was verging on the lupine all the same. Barry seized her in his arms and planted a prolonged kiss on her goldfish gaping mouth.
Her initial reaction was: this is sizzling, he’s quite an operator. Swiftly followed by the realisation it was Barry kissing her and it had to stop. Swiftly followed by the realisation it must simply be gratitude for her efforts in activating the matrimonial lifeboat patrol. Swiftly followed by the realisation it was nothing of the sort as she felt his tongue probing to separate her lips.
She prised him off. ‘Barry, are you insane?’ (There was dementia in the air tonight, a full moon had to be lurking behind that cloud cover.)
‘No, I had a moment of epiphany. I realised it was a waste of time attempting a reconciliation with Kay when I’ve loved you all along. Kay taxed me with it during yet another argument – strictly speaking, it was a conflagration; arguments are too tame for the thrashing we give one another – and it was as if cataracts fell from my eyes. She said, “You’ve always had a massive crush on Molly Molloy, whose parents should be shot for saddling her with that name, but you’re too stupid to see it.” And suddenly everything made sense.’
Barry’s eyes had acquired the deeply disturbing glint of the zealot. He reached for Molly again but she stepped back in the nick of time. His hands groped space.
‘I knew beyond a shadow of doubt this was it, The Big One. I’ve been treading water but not any more. You’re my love, Molly. Kay was an aberration.’
‘Barry, aberrations don’t last fifteen years and produce two beautiful daughters.’ Molly was hoping mention of his children would deliver a slap-in-the-face reality check.
Barry paused and wrinkled his forehead, more like a man temporarily pulled up short by the referee’s end-of-round whistle than someone flattened by an upper cut.
Meanwhile, Molly was dismayed. This development wasn’t going to win her an Agony Aunt of the Year award. Some fancy jetés were de rigueur, if only to take her sailing out of his reach, as opposed to leaping like a scalded cat if he made another lunge for her. Life was a nuisance. She’d just left a monk who wouldn’t dream of touching her and here she was with Rasputin, convinced he’d only to snog her and she’d say: ‘Move all your worldly goods into my flat. And half-inch a couple of those cute Fabergé eggs from the Tsarina’s dressing table while you’re about it.’
Could that be it? Was Barry latching on to someone with a nest before he was given his eviction notice from the house of straw on the other side of town? Molly retreated to the living room and crossed to the window, peering down at his silver Vauxhall Astra in a futile effort to see if it was crammed with possessions. Too dark to tell. Barry followed her to the window and insinuated his arm around her waist.
‘Barry, would you ever stop handling me?’ Molly twisted round, exasperated. ‘Assuming for a moment – and this is a major assumption – that you actually do love me, it’s self-conceit to convince yourself it’s reciprocated. Have I ever given you the slightest encouragement? You needn’t answer that because I haven’t. Sure don’t you know full well I’m seeing Fionn again? That’s seeing as in sharing a bed with. Didn’t you tell me yourself to shag him and ditch him, if I remember your choice of words correctly?’
Barry interjected, ‘I was in denial then. I didn’t realise how I felt about you. It took my wife to highlight it, and then it was blindingly obvious.’
‘Detour off the road to Damascus, Dalton. Now repeat after me: I love Kay.’
‘I love Molly.’ Barry’s features had an obstinate cast.
‘You love Kay, you love your daughters, you love your home, you love those hybrid tulips you grow, you love your mile-high collection of science periodicals. Not me. No. N. O. I drive you crackers demanding you do coffee runs and carping about my men problems.’
Barry snatched at the last observation. ‘But the reason you have men problems is because you haven’t met the right one yet. Except you have and he’s been under your nose all along.’
‘Men aren’t supposed to read bodice rippers. You stick to detective novels, Barry Dalton.’
‘Even gumshoes notice dames,’ muttered Barry.
Molly was at her wits’ end – there was no reasoning with him.
A knock on her front door was a gift from the gods; exactly the diversion she’d wish for, if she had the presence of mind to formulate a wish. She wrenched the door open to expose Fionn, hair plastered to his head and darkened to the colour of weathered beech from a downpour. Oh no, oh no, oh no. The scriptwriter handling her life was too attached to farce.
‘Sorry I didn’t ring the buzzer. One of your neighbours was on their way out and let me in.’
Molly was aware that frying pans and fires were featuring in this particular plot twist but bundled Fionn indoors anyhow.
‘Let’s get you out of these wet clothes,’ she said loudly for Barry’s benefit.
Fionn was patently gratified. He dripped along the hallway towards the bathroom without noticing Barry’s even more patent chagrin. Molly bustled in after Fionn with dry towels adopting the role of Concerned Girlfriend with all the underplaying of a silent screen star. Maybe when she emerged Barry would have taken the hint and shuffled off. Maybe she should develop a stoop to avoid all those flying pigs.
‘I’ll fetch you my bathrobe,’ she told Fionn, whose delight was ratcheting upwards by the nanosecond as Molly smothered him with solicitude
‘The boyfriend,’ she hissed at Barry on her way down the corridor.
‘Looking forward to meeting him.’ His face was vanilla cone bland.
She could have told him to push off. A woman of more volatile temper and less Christian forbearance (Christians needn’t think they had the monopoly on forbearance) would certainly have enjoined him to sling his hook and the whole feckin’ fishing rod. Instead of which she rolled her eyes and left her bathrobe outside the door for Fionn, then put the kettle on for tea. Hot whiskeys weren’t in the script. A sober Barry was more than she could manage, let alone an inebriated one.
Fionn balanced on the saddleboard, a distinctly unalluring figure in a faded bathrobe that showed more calf than a man with skinny legs might desire if he had any sense for his girlfriend’s need to display him at his best. Now what was she doing referring to herself as his girlfriend? Her head was all in a muddle.
‘I’m Molly’s boyfriend, Fionn.’ He extended his hand to Barry.
‘I’m her workmate, Barry.’ Palms were gripped with a degree of force not a million miles removed from the impact of a rugby tackle. Fionn’s radar must have intercepted some unworkmate-like signals from Barry.
They’d met at a Christmas party once but neither now showed a flicker of recognition. The men set about exchanging some basic information and found, despite their initial hornlocking, they occupied common ground. Manchester United players were living deities, setting foot in a balti house was on a par with entering an orgasmatron, Nick Hornby was a literary genius. Molly wet the tea while they sized one another up.
