Be Careful What You Wish For, page 36
They were at the corner of St Stephen’s Green when Molly realised she’d forgotten her jacket and they had to retrace their steps.
‘More haste, less speed,’ said Helen, stepping around a pile of discarded Harp cans.
‘It’s speed I need. Starvation will propel me into Abrakebabra for some fast food if there’s any delay,’ threatened Molly.
‘Noodles are fast food. And you’re the one holding us up.’
They cut across the side of the Green and minutes later were reading menus in Yamamori. Molly refused to comment on Helen’s plans until she’d shovelled several overladen forkfuls into her mouth. Helen, meanwhile, swished her food around the bowl with chopsticks and waited for Molly to turn dissuader.
‘You’re throwing over your home, your job and your friends,’ said Molly. ‘Aren’t you taking a chance? Just a diminutive one?’
‘I’ve always wished for excitement and adventure – this is it.’ Helen’s breathing was shallow.
‘You’ll be financially dependent on him. He’s the one with the job and the friend so at least he knows somebody else.’ Molly stabbed the air with her fork between each group of three or four words.
‘I’ll find work, I’ll make new friends. Anyway, I don’t need anyone but Patrick.’
‘Thanks for writing me out of your life so readily.’ Molly returned to her noodles, lowering her face over the bowl to minimise distance between mouth and fork and thereby the potential for slurping accidents.
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ Helen reached out to touch one of Molly’s blonde curls, hovered a few inches adrift of her shoulder and then patted her upper arm. ‘Of course I’ll never find another friend like you but we won’t lose contact. Say we won’t, Molly.’ Helen looked at her appealingly but Molly was sucking in noodles as though her life depended on it. ‘You can come and visit us and I’ll …’ Her voice trailed off.
‘You can’t, can you?’ Molly finally laid down the fork. ‘You won’t be able to come back here for holidays. You’re burning your bridges. This really is the long goodbye. You’re leaving behind everything you know.’
No dimmer switch could reduce Helen’s happiness. ‘Be glad for me, Molly. I’m in love. I’m only trying to follow my heart,’ she whispered. ‘Maybe it’s a mistake to go but, God knows, it’s a mistake not to – those hackneyed descriptions about being two halves of a whole and two hearts beating as one apply to Patrick and me. I know it sounds trite but that’s how it is with us.’
Molly’s own heart shrivelled. ‘Oh, Helen, you’re leaping into something so unquantifiable that I quail for you. It can’t but turn out wrong, it’s intrinsically unnatural. You’ll have no luck from it, angel face. Please, if you feel anything for me, don’t do this.’
Helen ground her knuckles into her mouth to stem the tears. ‘I love you, Molly, but I love Patrick too and what I feel for him is more compelling. I –’ her voice stumbled – ‘I don’t seem to have any choice in the matter.’
‘But you do have a choice,’ insisted Molly, glaring at a couple inclined to slide in alongside them on the bench seating. They took the hint and retreated.
‘Helen, I’m not trying to stop you from doing what you honestly want to do, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself unless I emphasised all the drawbacks. What about Patrick’s fiancée in London? What about Geraldine? What about the life you’ve made for yourself here? You’re well thought of at work, you have a comfortable home, you have people who respect you and care about you. Surely all that must count for something?’
Helen traced the life line in the palm of her hand with a fingernail. There was an air of familiarity to Molly’s words – she’d said them to herself often enough before the decision was taken.
‘I hear what you’re saying but the difficult part’s over. I know the direction my life is headed in. I’m tired of swimming against the tide, I’m going to coast along with the current for a change.’ She looked up from her palm doodling and dared Molly to continue arguing with her.
Molly changed tack. ‘What if you get pregnant?’
Helen was stunned into silence.
Molly pressed home her advantage: ‘You know the pill doesn’t agree with you and condoms aren’t completely safe. There’s a chance you could end up carrying your own brother’s child. Assuming you decided to have it, imagine the repercussions for the baby. Even if it’s physically and intellectually unimpaired, which is by no means guaranteed, the mental ramifications are appalling. So while you gather ye rosebuds while ye may, remember there are aphids out there with a nasty habit of nipping blooms in the bud.’
She paused in case Helen had a contribution to make but her vocal cords had seized up. So she dredged deep for the coup de grâce and a quotation swam to the surface. ‘One of those old Greek boys knew all about urging caution. He said: “One swallow does not make a summer. Similarly one brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”’ Molly was seized by a desperate compulsion to force Helen to see sense, to ram it into her. ‘You may think it’s a bower of bliss now but, trust me, you won’t stay happy for long. I know you, Helen, I know you’re too straight to live crookedly.’
Helen stooped for her bag and threw her reefer jacket over her arm. ‘I love Patrick and I’m going to make a life with him. I don’t care about right and wrong or good and bad. I’ve been a good girl all my days and what has it achieved? A sterile life with a boring house, a boring job, a boring car and nothing in it to make me believe there’s any rhyme or reason to this existence. Now I’ve found that something and I’m not going to lose it again. Not for Aristotle, not for convention and not for you, Molly.’ Helen threw some cash on the table and walked towards the exit.
Molly’s glance fell on her fork. She lifted it and propelled cold noodles towards her mouth. They tasted like cardboard but she ladled and chewed. Helen had made her position clear. Exhausted by the enormity of it all, Molly ate until the bowl was empty, and then she pulled Helen’s discarded meal towards her and finished that.
She didn’t even ask me what my news was. There wasn’t a flicker of interest in the decision I’ve taken, Molly thought as she paid the bill. For all she knows or cares I could be emigrating to Seattle with Fionn or to Athens with Hercules. I could be setting up in a ménage á trois with Helga and Fionn. I could be planning to convert to the Greek Orthodox faith for an extravagant wedding. I could even have taken a head stagger and thrown in my lot with Barry. But she doesn’t care and she didn’t enquire. So she can wallow in ignorance and she needn’t think I’ll be keeping an eye on her house while she’s gallivanting in Australia.
Bombarded with righteous indignation, Molly climbed the steps to the street. Helen was waiting there for her under a lamppost. Wordlessly she hugged Molly, who hugged her back.
‘What’s going to happen to us?’ Helen asked when they emerged from the embrace.
Molly could find nothing that would pass muster for an answer.
CHAPTER 26
Molly failed to make it along to the art lecture, deliberately dawdling over her work, but she turned up in time for coffee with Hercules afterwards. She cringed when she saw his pleasure in her belated appearance.
‘I thought you’d forgotten about our date,’ he said.
She played for time until they were seated and had a modicum of privacy. ‘Would I forget something as important as that?’
‘I don’t know.’ The look he sent her way was measured.
Take a deep breath, she advised herself. ‘There’s someone else.’
Hercules’ disappointment struck her as (a) guilt-inducing, (b) flattering and (c) disproportionate to their fledging relationship. They’d only been out once and shared a few intimacies and lattes. She’d been languishing over him for months and he hadn’t even noticed her; her credit card balance would be infinitely more manageable if he hadn’t proved so immune to her charms, thereby necessitating frequent return visits to his off-licence. Fortified by this lateral – and somewhat inaccurate – deduction, Molly resumed her Dear John.
‘There’s someone older,’ she explained, ‘closer to me in age. Not that you’re a million miles away from it but you are a little younger and, well, I feel more at ease with someone in my own age group.’
‘So I’m too young for you this week,’ said Hercules. ‘I’m seven days older than I was last week when the age difference didn’t matter.’
‘I can’t deny it,’ agreed Molly. ‘All I can tell you is that I’ve had a change of heart since last Thursday. Believe me, life would be infinitely less complicated if I could scoop you up and keep you but the fact is I realise I’m in love with someone else and I don’t have the heart to carry on with this –’ she gesticulated loosely – ‘whatever this is between us.’
She rested her chin on the palm of her hand, where it still felt too heavy for her head. ‘The joke of it is he doesn’t even want me, he’s married, but that appears not to alter my emotions for him, loser that I am. If anything it solidifies my feelings. When he wavered between myself and his wife I faltered too; when he indicated his choice I realised my decision had been made all along and I was too moronic or too obstinate or too –’ she trawled for the description – ‘clogged up with pride to recognise it. You see, he left me for her once before. And now I’ve lost him again. I wanted him then, I still do, but I can’t have him. And that, Georgie, is my dilemma. But it needn’t concern you and I’d be doing you no favours if I continued to see you under the circumstances. You’re young, you’re ravishing, you deserve to be with somebody who only has eyes for you instead of a preposterous woman wishing for the impossible.’ Molly ground to a halt, suffused by emotion – a chunk of it self-pity.
Hercules behaved irreproachably. He told her if she ever changed her mind she should contact him, that she was exceptional and talented, that he appreciated her candour, that his sister rated her (‘What’s that got to do with the price of fish?’ wondered the unromantic voice which occasionally surfaced in Molly’s brain). They hugged briefly, bodies carefully not touching, and parted amicably. So amicably it was an anti-climax. Molly dallied along Nassau Street towards a taxi rank, reluctant to stand on a DART platform with Hercules now that ties were servered, and acknowledged there was never much in the way of lasting attraction from the outset. Face it, she scolded her reflection in the Celtic Notes music shop, she’d been moping over a handsomely presented package for months on end like a teenager. She didn’t deserve a successful relationship because she was the thirty-two-year-old equivalent of a teen-mag reader. Comic strip emotions, comic strip dénouement.
Queuing for a taxi by the Bank of Ireland arts centre, she wondered whether she should behave like a big grown-up girl and meet Fionn, allow him to offer regretful apologies and make his escape with conscience salved. She’d been avoiding him since Helen told her about the scene with his wife at the airport and hadn’t returned any of his calls. Elizabeth had knocked on her door at breakfast that morning and outlined gleefully how he’d camped out in the foyer of the apartment block last night when Molly was working until 1 a.m.
‘I saw him when I came in from work to change at six, hanging around the letter boxes; he was still there an hour later when I went out to meet the gang except he was sitting on the steps near the lift,’ Elizabeth had said. ‘I had an early night and came home about midnight just in time to see him being escorted from the premises by the Guards after a couple of the residents complained.’ She’d annexed one of Molly’s rounds of toast. ‘Lemon curd, haven’t tasted that in years. He didn’t appear to be drunk or on some chemical kick but you never know. You two had a row?’
‘You could say that.’ Molly had dropped more bread into the toaster and declined to elaborate.
‘Work beckons,’ Elizabeth had buttoned her wet look chessboard mac over paisley-patterned hotpants and simultaneously licked lemon curd from her fingers ‘The tourists are going to have to compete very hard for my interest today.’
‘Elizabeth, do you really work for Bord Fáilte or is it just a story you’ve devised for your own entertainment?’
‘Why would I do that?’
‘You look like someone who works in a record store or with a theatre group, maybe in an arts complex.’ The timer on Molly’s toaster had wound down and she’d collected the burned offerings. ‘I imagined that people who dealt with tourists would have to play the Maureen O’Hara card. Maybe not dye your hair red but certainly conform a little more obviously to a stereotype.’
‘I change into my Riverdance frock and slap on the orange wig and freckles at the office. Are you planning to eat all of that toast?’
‘Allow me to bedeck one in lemon curd for you to eat on your way to the DART.’ Molly had retrieved the knife she’d been using from the draining board.
Recalling that morning’s conversation as she counted how many people were still ahead of her in the taxi queue, Molly weighed up the pros and cons of seeing Fionn one last time. The advantages were all on his side. He wanted to slope off to Seattle with an unmuddied conscience and couldn’t do that while she played hide-and-seek. The only benefit to be gained for her was that cold comforter called Doing The Right Thing. Ah sure, for feck’s sake get it out of the way and fire ahead with your life, she exhorted herself, and produced her mobile to ring Fionn then and there.
Yelling above the roar of the traffic, she arranged to meet him the following evening.
‘Where are you now? It sounds like you’re standing by the Anna Livia statue in O’Connell Street with juggernauts whizzing by,’ said Fionn.
‘Close. I’m on Dame Street waiting for that mythical beast, a taxi. A unicorn may come cantering by before an empty cab pulls up.’
‘Listen, it’s early yet, why don’t I drive into town and meet you somewhere for a drink, say McDaid’s at the top of Grafton Street? I should be able to find a parking space. I could be with you in twenty minutes or so.’
Molly shuddered at the suggestion of McDaid’s – the coincidence of its shared name with Hercules’ off-licence was too near the knuckle. ‘Let’s make it The Westbury,’ she countered. ‘I’ll wander up there now.’
She paused to listen to a guitarist massacre The House of the Rising Sun, read her balance and order a chequebook from a hole-in-the-wall machine, admire a cheongsam in Monsoon but admit she lacked the figure for it, and still reached The Westbury ahead of Fionn. She watched him race up the street towards the hotel, leather jacket flapping. We’ve played this scene before, thought Molly. I wonder if he’ll use the same dialogue or produce a new set of lines. Cynicism was anaesthetising her for their encounter.
‘You look well.’ Fionn dropped a kiss on her cheek.
‘So do you.’
‘Can I buy you a drink?’
‘I’m fine with the one I have.’ She nursed her gin and tonic protectively.
Fionn didn’t bother ordering for himself. ‘Olga’s gone home again,’ he said. His expression was oblique.
Molly waited for him to tell her he was working out his notice and preparing to join his wife.
‘She’s filing for divorce,’ he continued.
She held her breath.
‘I’m staying in Dublin whether you’ll have me or not. I’ve decided this is where I want to be.’
Molly realised her breathing was still suspended and decided suffocation held few attractions.
Fionn moved his chair closer but didn’t touch her. ‘I love you, Molly. I’ve loved you for years. What I felt for Olga was infatuation – with you it’s a deeper, more lasting emotion, genuinely satisfying. But I’ve also meddled with your emotions and I can’t defend myself. I’ve probably lost all chance of a present, of a future with you.’ His eyes were blue-black and pleading for a reaction but she was back in breath-holding mode, which precluded speaking. Now he reached forward and attempted to lace his fingers through hers; she seized her glass in both hands to prevent him because her brain was whirring and she needed space to think. Gently he disengaged one of the hands and held it.
‘It’ll be a few months before Olga and I can be divorced. I may have to fly back to Seattle to tie up some loose ends but there’s no reason why I can’t put this behind me and move on.’ Her hand felt safe inside his.
That’s wonderful for you, Molly thought savagely, even as she admired his smooth, hairless hands. She didn’t trust herself to speak so she nodded.
Fionn pulled his chair so close their breath mingled. The look he gave her combined anxiety with tenderness.
‘I love you, Molly,’ his voice was pillow soft. ‘I need to know how you feel about me. Whether you think, in time, you could love me again. You did once before; it’s not impossible that you might love me again – when you grow to trust me; when I prove I deserve your trust. Tell me how you’re feeling, don’t freeze me out like this.’
‘I love you.’ The words were torn from her but relief gushed through Molly as soon as she let them go.
There. She loved Fionn McCullagh. He knew it and she knew it.
Helen watched for the taxi that would carry her to the airport for her flight to Australia. Patrick should be in the air already and would be waiting at arrivals in Sydney for her. She glanced around the house. It no longer seemed like her home – already she’d disengaged from it. Perhaps the strangeness was due to the absence of so many of her personal belongings, for on the advice of a letting agent she contacted (but didn’t use) she’d packed away ornaments, framed photographs and other personal items. Molly was minding her plants although her horticultural track record was pitted with the carcasses of everything from sweetheart to cheese plants. The only species to survive her ministrations was the cactus. But Molly insisted her luck was changing and Helen was moved to think of her plants trailing their spidery fronds across her friend’s home. She lifted her airline ticket from the coffee table and checked the departure time again; the sale of her car had paid for it with enough left over for a float in her bank account for repairs to the house and to cover a few months of not working in Sydney if it took her a while to establish herself.
