Patrick shrugged into his flying jacket that he’d draped over the back of the chair. ‘Repeat after me, Helen: self-limitation is a concept we reject.’

  She smiled as she fetched maps and a coat. ‘There’s a fish restaurant just around the corner – you tend to need a reservation but I’m feeling lucky today. Let’s chance it.’

  They were both fortunate and unfortunate: a cancellation at Caviston’s allowed them to lunch on fish pie and salad, conversing as companionably as they had in former times. Helen described her visit to Geraldine, and Patrick mentioned Miriam was always cajoling him to meet his sisters because she had none and longed to share his. Helen shifted on her wooden seat, ill at ease with Miriam’s name cropping up so naturally, but then decided it was better if Patrick felt able to refer to her; her name shouldn’t be a graveyard to cross the road to avoid.

  They spoke of their weekend together. Patrick was anxious they should have two nights away and volunteered to take a half-day from work on Friday afternoon. Helen thought she’d manage that too, even though she’d had time off only last week. They debated flying to Paris or Amsterdam and meeting one another there but Helen said she was too busy to arrange a flight and currency, so Ireland was agreed on and they decided to visit Westport.

  The arrival of a neighbour in the narrow restaurant intruded on their intimacy and crippled Helen’s enjoyment of what could possibly be construed as a date. It was the woman who had snowdrops in her garden, although their season was finished now, and hybrid tulips nodded in their place. She approached Helen with a smile and glanced expectantly at Patrick. Helen began to make the introductions obediently.

  ‘This is my –’ she began, then paused. Her what? Her brother, lover, friend? ‘Agnes, this is Patrick,’ she managed lamely.

  ‘He has to be a connection of yours,’ said the country-woman, button eyes twitching from one to the other. ‘Isn’t he the spit from your mouth? You must be brother and sister.’

  The room rang in Helen’s ears. She heard snatches of conversations alongside her – ‘So she said to him, “You’re not the man I married twenty-five years ago”’ – and the neighbour’s stocky shape swayed before her. She wondered if she were about to faint. Then she felt Patrick’s hand on hers and the haze cleared.

  ‘We’re cousins, quite distant ones,’ he responded. ‘It’s lovely to meet you, Agnes. I’ll ask for the bill, Helen. Remember I have a plane to catch.’

  On the street he slid his arm around her waist to steady her; she was whey-faced, grey eyes smeared to black.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m reacting in this way,’ Helen apologised. ‘It’s so foolish. I hardly know the woman. But I feel like a criminal.’

  ‘You’re not a criminal,’ he assured her. ‘What’s between us is natural.’

  ‘It’s not natural.’ Her voice was low; she struggled to put one foot in front of the other.

  He brooked no argument. ‘It is to us.’

  Back at Helen’s house, Patrick chafed her hands while she huddled by a radiator, chilled to the core.

  ‘Do you have a flight to catch?’ Helen asked.

  ‘No, I have an open ticket. I don’t need to be in London until nine a.m. on Monday. Would you like me to spend the rest of today with you?’ His face as it bent towards her was bathed in love.

  She fed off it momentarily, then said: ‘No, Patrick, go back to London.’

  ‘But I’ll see you next weekend, right?’

  She gazed at him blankly.

  ‘Right?’ he repeated. There was an urgency within him that she swam towards.

  ‘Right,’ she agreed. And felt elated.

  As he prepared to leave Helen made a half-hearted offer to drive him to the airport.

  ‘DART and airport bus from Bus Aras are just as handy,’ he countered. ‘I can pick up a couple of papers to pass the journey – does Carlos Murphy still do his restaurant reviews on a Saturday?’

  She laughed: why on earth would Patrick care about reading a restaurant review for a city that was not his home?

  He shrugged. ‘I’m as likely to eat out here as I am in London, maybe more so because Miriam thinks we shouldn’t waste money in restaurants when we ought to be saving up for the wedding of the decade. Besides, I like Carlos’s critiques. He’ll do everywhere from his local chipper to a four-star shrine to affectation. I’m convinced I even read a McDonald’s review by him once.’

  ‘Thumbs up or down?’

  ‘Curate’s egg. He quite liked one of the burgers but gave out yards about the plastic bucket seats. He could see why kids were charmed by the place, though. And now, my love, I’m going to catch the big silver bird that wings across the sky. But I’m going to tell you something truly miraculous about big silver birds: they come back as well as go away.’

  His kiss on her forehead was as chaste as a parent’s. Helen lifted her face towards him and smiled into eyes that smiled back at her with the self-same expression. Her earlier misgivings in Caviston’s were atomised: she loved and was loved. Helen wrapped her exhilaration around her like an embrace and was warmed by it.

  Much later she touched her face and discovered she was still smiling. But Helen’s nature did not allow for unclouded joy.

  ‘Hope,’ she whispered. ‘I can have faith and I can hope but I needn’t expect charity. That particular part of the triumvirate won’t extend to Patrick or me.’

  Her brain worried at the deficit for a time and then she straightened her shoulders: so be it; she’d take faith and hope. Unless they were a mirage; unless you could only have the whole triumvirate or none of the components at all …

  CHAPTER 21

  During the week Helen had second thoughts. Third and fourth thoughts. She was continually on the brink of phoning Patrick to cancel their weekend. If she could have contacted him at work she’d have pressed stop and rewind but Helen only had his home number and was reluctant to risk encountering Miriam. The idea of making polite conversation with Patrick’s fiancée was more than she could stomach. There was always email, of course – she had his address – but presumably if Patrick and Miriam shared a computer they shared access to each other’s electronic messages. She couldn’t write to him in code. She cudgelled her brains for the name of the firm where he worked but drew a blank. Helen wavered from day to day about the Westport trip and by Wednesday was so unsettled her boss collared her and brought her to the canteen for coffee.

  Tony Dooley, a well-meaning company man in his early forties, whose stripey shirts were always ringed with underarm sweat stains by mid-afternoon, dreaded the encounter as much as Helen did but felt obliged to make the effort. He’d recently been sent on a management course which recommended taking an interest in staff’s personal lives. It dissuaded them from feeling like microserfs and lent the illusion of belonging to a user-friendly organisation, the evangelical trainer had insisted. Tony was dubious about the benefits of user-friendliness in the workplace. His preference was for doing the job and skedaddling home.

  However, the managing director, J. J. Patterson, was a Californian by instinct (although a Clonmel man by birth) and smitten with the notion of work and home lives merging. The concept’s appeal lay, to some extent, in the managing director’s realisation that he could expect a fair amount of unpaid overtime from staff if they felt at home by their work stations. For this reason he encouraged employees to scatter ornaments and pot plants on their desks. Snapshots of partners and children were not encouraged, although there was no formal veto, because he had a theory that a photo-framed, pigtailed daughter might galvanise a parent into signing off at the terminal to see the image made corporeal.

  ‘Ask your team about their hobbies, remember the names of their partners and take an interest in their holiday plans,’ exhorted the trainer during the weekend conference at which Tony had fretted about the rumba steps he could be perfecting instead of enjoying the luxury of the country house retreat paid for by J. J. Patterson. Probably as a tax write-off, Tony had grumped. His subordinates giggled at mental visions of Tony, representing Ireland on the international amateur ballroom dancing circuit, in cummerbunds and frilly shirts, and speculated about whether he slapped on fake tan for the spotlights. Molly met him once when Helen had invited her to a staff party, and had remarked on the dancer’s patent shoes that encased his ridiculously small feet.

  Now Tony sat opposite Helen in the canteen, size sixes tapping on the tiled floor, and struggled to download any personal information he had retained about her. There were no plants or trinkets on her desk to signpost clues. All he knew was that she was one of his most reliable and thorough programmers and she’d scarcely managed a stroke of work in the past fortnight. Should he ask about her health? He cringed at the prospect: the last time he’d formulated an enquiry along those lines a female employee had bombarded him with details about her fallopian tubes.

  What about her romantic life? Tony pondered Helen as she twirled an amber drop in her earlobe and affected equilibrium; she wasn’t helping him out in his task as chief redcoat to a team of happy campers. An eyecatcher like her must have a partner, he thought. Not that she was his type, Tony amended hastily; he preferred his women a little less shatter-proof. Helen’s fragility alarmed rather than attracted him. He couldn’t remember her bringing anyone to the last office party – alternatively, he might not have noticed. All he could call to mind about last Christmas’s enforced merriment was his wife remarking how few young women took the trouble to accessorise nowadays. They’d buy the dress and slingbacks but not the matching earrings, tights and nailpolish, she criticised. Helen had been singled out for censure as particularly under-accessorised; but was she matched with a man?

  Tony oscillated about raising the subject of male friends as he plaited stilted conversational threads with Helen about a forthcoming salsa competition in Edinburgh, downhearted that she remembered his obsession and encouraged him to talk about it while he could call to mind nothing about her. Just a minute, she’d taken a few days off the other week on family business. Tony’s sweat circles emerged earlier in the day than usual as he loosened his tie and longed to be anywhere else but here, charged with probing into whatever was bothering this self-contained young woman. Still, family business might be less messy to deal with than blocked tubes.

  Best foot forward, he advised himself. It’s what he always said when his name was called out to step onto the dancefloor. Not original but appropriate. Best foot forward.

  He dusted off his competition smile; it struck an inappropriate note. ‘Helen, you’ve seemed a little distracted lately. Is there anything we can help you with?’ (The trainer at the country house session always advised talking in the plural to convey an impression of benevolence.)

  Helen was startled. She knew her work had been patchy but convinced herself she was adept enough to disguise it in the short term. Heaven forfend she was in line for a ‘how do you like to spend your free time’ chat with Tony.

  Oh God, he seemed to require a reply. She ought to cobble together something.

  ‘Thank you,’ she murmured. Lame-brain, she scolded herself.

  ‘Don’t thank me, I mean us, until we’ve sorted something out for you.’ Tony flashed that disconcerting spangled smile again. He waited.

  Helen harried her braincells into action. They ignored her.

  ‘Are you still having family difficulties?’ he prompted her.

  Gratitude was instantaneous. ‘Yes. Family difficulties.’

  Would that do? She peered sideways to see if she was off the hook, trying to ignore a disconcerting picture that sneaked into her mind of Tony in an angler’s hat and herself coated with silver scales. He seemed to want an elaboration. Her heart plummeted.

  ‘There are … difficulties,’ she managed.

  He inclined his head in what he believed to be a gesture of encouragement.

  ‘It’s tricky to explain. We’re not a close family and when problems arise the, um, difficulties take more effort to sort out.’

  Please let that be adequate. Sufficient unto the day. Helen found herself crossing the fingers on both hands the way she used to as a small girl.

  To hell with J. J. Patterson and his user-friendliness, Tony decided. That was as much touchy-feely palaver as he was prepared to expose himself to; Helen Sharkey was an adult perfectly capable of conducting her own business. He didn’t have any more time to play nursemaid to programmers, he had an interview panel to sit on this afternoon. And he was not, oh boy was he not, intending to ask applicants how they spent their weekends.

  ‘We value your contribution.’ He rose to his feet.

  He had double buckles on his patent shoes, noticed Helen. Even Michael Flatley would balk at them. She subdued a hysterical giggle.

  ‘If you feel you need more time out to arrange something at home … ?’ Tony looked down at Helen, who was still seated.

  She denied this would be necessary, to his manifest relief. There was already someone in her section on maternity leave who hadn’t yet been replaced. It was becoming increasingly impossible to find and hold on to programmers. Tony suspected the day wasn’t far off when he’d be stocking up their fridges and collecting their dry-cleaning, simply to keep them on side. The circumference of each sweat patch expanded by an inch.

  ‘You haven’t forgotten I’m taking a half-day on Friday. I arranged to work an afternoon on Saturday week instead.’ Helen intruded on his nightmare.

  Tony agreed, anxious to be gone. Friday afternoons were never particularly productive anyhow. Staff tended to extend their lunch breaks and evacuate to the pub as soon as was decently possible in the late afternoon. He sidled away. ‘Remember, my door is always open.’

  In fact he hadn’t so much as a screen around his desk in J. J. Patterson’s vision of the optimum office environment but Helen nodded vigorously. They were even Stevens now on the embarrassment front, if they only knew it.

  Back at her desk she attacked a job she’d been stockpiling and worked steadily through her lunch break and into the afternoon before slowing down. By four o’clock she had a tranche of computer code rewritten, and allowed herself to idle for a few moments, her weekend away with Patrick monopolising her attention. Realistically, Helen reasoned, she couldn’t call a halt at this late stage. She was due to meet Patrick at 1.30 p.m. on Friday, less than forty-eight hours’ time, and he’d have booked his time off, his flight, and devised a story for Miriam by now. The arrangement was that she’d collect him from the airport and they’d boot straight for Westport, stopping en route for a meal although not until they’d put an hour or two between themselves and the streets of Dublin.

  Helen doodled ‘Mayo’ on a notepad. She hadn’t been there in years, not since she’d set off from college with a group of friends who’d planned to join the annual expedition of pilgrims, many barefoot, climbing Croagh Patrick. They decided against it when the weather turned foggy, and adjourned to a pub near the village instead for pints of Guinness – apart from Helen, who could never manage more than a glass at a time despite experimenting with blackcurrant to sweeten it. One of the innumerable benefits of forfeiting student status was no longer being obliged to drink Guinness.

  Perhaps it was incalculably foolhardy of her to accede to this time away with Patrick. She was no Daniel to venture into the lion’s den. Not that their relationship would stray into a physical one, on that she was resolved. When Patrick had told her he’d book a hotel he’d also mentioned two rooms. Helen remembered it clearly because she had been chagrined to find herself overtaken by a mottled blush that swept from forehead to chest. Wouldn’t you think at the age of thirty-two she could discuss sleeping arrangements with a man without behaving like a vestal virgin?

  Helen glanced at her scribbles and saw that in addition to doodling ‘Mayo’ and ‘airport’ she’d looped a rosary of hearts along the page. Disgusted, she crumpled the page into her wastepaper bin and slopped in the dregs of a coffee she’d been nursing.

  Doubts clamoured as profuse as dust motes now. She couldn’t go through with the trip, she shouldn’t go through with it, it wasn’t sensible. But she’d been prudent most of her life – she wished she could throw caution to the winds for a change. Backwards and forwards her brain whirred as she frittered time. It was a mercy Tony was off interviewing graduates who thought the world was their oyster when it was really a lobster tank with glass-walled limitations.

  And then clarity intervened. Molly would steer her through this. Helen dialled the Chronicle and was elated to discover her friend had a day off. Which meant she could meet her to thrash out whether or not to go ahead with the weekend plans. But both Molly’s home number and mobile were switched to answerphone. Helen left forlorn messages on each; Molly could be incommunicado for the rest of the day. However, her friend rang back within ten minutes, declaring herself free to meet Helen after work.

  ‘I’ll call for you at the back door of the building, if you like,’ she volunteered. ‘Sorry I’ve been a bit evasive this week. It’s been …’

  ‘Difficult?’ suggested Helen.

  ‘Difficult,’ Molly agreed. ‘For a swarming horde of reasons, I’ll fill you in later. But I’m delighted you left those messages, Helen. I’ve been meaning to have a proper chat with you.’

  Relief at catching up with Molly sent a shaft of giddiness through Helen. ‘That’s a coincidence because I’ve been meaning to have an improper chat with you,’ she responded.

  Another confessional session was looming and she welcomed it. Even if Molly couldn’t give her absolution she could manage guidance.

  ‘An improper chat? Sounds promising. See you at five.’ Molly kept her tone deliberately carefree, although she suspected Patrick was on the agenda. But it wasn’t her place to moralise to Helen, just see to it that she didn’t end up like Humpty Dumpty.

  ‘Don’t let go of the wall,’ she advised

  Helen was disconcerted. ‘Which wall would that be?’

 

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