Be Careful What You Wish For, page 7
His wife was a Scandinavian-born American citizen and as far as Molly knew Fionn was living in Seattle, probably drinking better coffee than he’d been accustomed to in Ireland. Now he was obviously back on holiday and strapped for company, she decided, even as they meandered through the social niceties whereby former lovers pretend they’re great friends when one or both of them would much prefer the other to slide off the face of the planet.
Fionn. Taller than average but otherwise your standard Irishman. Medium face, medium voice, medium frame, medium fellow – at first glance. To Molly he was anything but medium. She’d never been able to establish to her own satisfaction how or why it was he colonised her affections, and seemingly effortlessly. There were other men around with fairer hair and bluer eyes but none of them looked at her in quite the way Fionn did. He’d fractured her heart, although she’d patched it up eventually, because you never knew when you might need your heart again.
‘So will we meet in Bewley’s for old times’ sake, Molly? I’ll buy you an almond slice.’
That doused her in reality; the sense of betrayal writhed inside her again.
‘Grand, tomorrow it is then. It’s about time you introduced Helga to that staple Dublin tradition, coffee and cake in Bewley’s.’
‘Olga –’ he emphasised the name – ‘is in Seattle. I’m home on my own, Molly. For good.’
Which meant the whirlwind romance had blown itself out. Which meant Fionn was on the market again. Which meant her heart could be broken again … or maybe not. She was four years older, four years wiser, four years better armoured against Fionn McCullagh. Anyway, chances were he was only being friendly; she shouldn’t read too much into coffee. It was hardly a declaration of passion. For all Molly knew he hadn’t thought of her once during his blissful years in blissful Seattle.
‘Molly.’ Fionn’s voice dipped to a whisper. ‘You’re my one regret in life.’
The connection was severed.
CHAPTER 6
Molly had contemplated (a) a day at one of those health farms where they guarantee chip-pans of fat reduction or, preferably, (b) a body transplant before meeting Fionn, but there wasn’t time for either. Instead she bought a new shampoo – an inadequate substitute but then life can be an inadequate substitute, for that matter. She also purchased a breath freshener and had almost used up the spray before she walked into Bewley’s, eyes searching for an ordinary-looking man of thirty-three who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. Not half.
As soon as he smiled at her everyone else evaporated into obscurity. She was pathetic; she’d swear someone was playing a violin. Snap out of it, it’s not as though this is a date with Hercules. It’s coffee with an ex. A former lover who’s now exactly the right age to be crucified. Which he deserved to be for his treatment of her. Maybe that was extreme; a simple crowning with thorns might suffice.
After a few minutes in his company Fionn seemed maybe not her saviour but definitely not her tormentor. The familiarity was the deceptive part as they sat opposite one another, catching up on four years’ worth of news. It lulled her into a false sense of security; she had to keep reminding herself this man had chipped at the corners of her heart. If that organ was lopsided now it was because of him.
But Molly was charmed, all the same, to discover they still shared the same sense of humour as they automatically began sparring with each other. There was also something intriguingly different about him. She assessed Fionn as he chatted: the trademark arrogance appeared dented, but he was changed in other ways too, she was uncertain specifically how.
Molly didn’t mention his wife, waiting for him to bite the bullet, but he showed remarkably little interest in grasping nettles or seizing bulls by the horns or … For God’s sake, woman, repeat after me: bullets, nettles and bulls’ horns have nothing to do with this date. Meeting. Old friends meeting. It wasn’t a date.
She decided she’d have to raise the subject of his wife herself. She’d do it discreetly, lend him the opportunity to disclose as much or as little of the marriage collapse as he chose.
‘So, Fionn, Helga turned wise to your wicked ways and dumped you. Was it your pathological aversion to washing or did she read the psychiatric report?’
‘I think it was the phone call from the Vatican telling her she was giving shelter to a defrocked priest that did the trick.’
‘I didn’t think you could defrock priests; I thought the Catholic Church was stuck with them for life,’ objected Molly.
‘You’re right, I’m not a defrocked priest. I’m still entitled to practise all the sacraments including hearing confession. So if there’s anything you feel the need to get off your chest, my child …’
‘Your confession would be streets ahead of mine in terms of audience ratings. However, if you’re too ashamed to admit your life is a failure and the most important relationship you embarked on went belly up, who am I to compel you? Confession is only good for the soul if you have a soul. Obviously that rules you out, McCullagh.’
He laughed, caught her eye and reached out to cover her hand with his.
‘You’re wrong, you know.’ Fionn pitched his voice so low she had to lean across the table to catch his words.
‘You’re claiming to have a soul after all?’
‘No, Helga, I mean Olga, wasn’t the most important relationship I had. That was the time I spent with you.’
It was one of those freeze-frame moments. Molly’s hand curled around his, she opened her mouth to speak – and then she saw him. Hercules. Reflected in the mirror at a table just along from them. She turned her head, checked down the row for confirmation and sure enough, it was her Greek. Except he appeared to be someone else’s Greek judging from the proprietorial way a sultry young woman was rearranging his jacket collar.
Fionn followed her line of vision. ‘Someone you know?’
‘Yes. No. Sort of.’
‘That’s as clear as mud. Would you like to join them?’
‘No, they look fairly content in each other’s company. I don’t care to intrude.’ Her eyes lingered on Hercules, engaged in such an intense conversation with the woman he appeared to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Of course that would make him Atlas, not Hercules.
‘Penny for them.’ Fionn interrupted her meandering brainwaves.
With an effort Molly refocused her attention, steeling herself not to watch Hercules in the mirror. ‘You have been away a long time; a penny wouldn’t buy you much. Whereas in the days when you lived here you could have snapped up a house in Dublin 4 for that.’
‘Even Cromwell couldn’t have snapped up a house in D4 for a penny, Molly.’
‘True. He’d have taken it for free. No point in being a conqueror if you turn all law-abiding afterwards.’
When Molly glanced again, Hercules was gone. But it was time for her to leave too. She was due into the office at 4.30 p.m., so she gathered up her belongings and prepared to make tracks.
‘I never did recite my confession,’ said Fionn. ‘Can I see you again? I’m still working up to the great unburdening.’
‘Must be a whopper. Of a lie or a confession.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Won’t finish until twelve thirty – bit late in the day for gallivanting. But I’m off tomorrow.’
‘I’ll drop by your place in Portobello and whisk you away for a pub lunch,’ he offered.
‘You see, you’ve been gone for centuries, Fionn McCullagh. I’m out in Blackrock now. I submitted to the responsibilities of adulthood two years ago and bought an apartment. One of these days I may even manage to buy some decent furniture for it.’
‘Blackrock with the indecent furniture it is then.’
‘No!’ She rejected his offer with sudden vehemence, then hastily amended her refusal. ‘I mean, somewhere other than Blackrock would make a change.’
‘How about if I borrow my father’s car and we drive into the Dublin mountains? I missed those fellows in Seattle. We could call into Glendalough if you like,’ Fionn suggested
‘Fine. I’ll meet you in front of the DART station at midday.’
‘I can collect you from your apartment, Molly. I wouldn’t want you loitering around street corners in this weather.’
‘The station would suit me better. It’s only a few minutes’ walk and I, um, I can drop off my dry-cleaning on the way. Besides, if you don’t want me skulking on street corners there’s simple enough solution – don’t be late. See you tomorrow.’
For a moment Fionn looked as if he were about to kiss her but Molly stepped backwards so quickly he didn’t have a chance. That was a kneejerk reaction too. What was wrong with her? A kiss wouldn’t have triggered the end of the world. But her assiduously reconstructed universe wasn’t ready for a peck on the cheek from Fionn McCullagh.
Just shy of midday, as she hacked at the tangles in her hair, Molly still wasn’t lucid on why she’d circumvented his kiss. He seemed to be aiming at her cheek – there was no harm in that. Social kisses were simply sociable. She occasionally allowed men she couldn’t bear the sight of to kiss her cheek (the tyranny of manners), never mind someone she once imagined spending her life with – growing old holding hands with him. Molly marvelled at elderly couples she saw ambling hand in hand along the street: was it habit, was it affection, was it affectionate habit? They couldn’t all be foreigners; some of them had to be Irish. Imagine your arthritic hands clasping someone else’s arthritic hands and the touch sustaining you. She wasn’t inclined towards wallowing but when she indulged in the rare one, say if she were confined to bed with flu, she sniffled at the thought of being wrinkled and unloved. Heck, she was already wrinkled and unloved at thirty-two. She longed to believe there was someone out there who’d take her gnarled eighty-year-old hand and make her feel cherished. It wasn’t going to be Fionn McCullagh, that much was cast in stone. Even with his melodramatic regrets. Second chances were so second-rate.
Her buzzer sounded as she laced on boots. Must be the postman with a package.
‘Molly? I see you’ve grown no more punctual since I knew you before.’
Fionn was standing on her doorstep – specifically hers and twenty-three others – and she hadn’t even applied her lipstick. Courtesy demanded that she buzz him up.
‘Stay where you are, I’ll be straight down,’ she instructed him. Courtesy could take a running jump. And since when did ten minutes late count as being late? Anyway, it was his fault she wasn’t there on time, confusing her by parachuting into her life again. She addressed a running commentary to the mirror. ‘Where’s my lickstick? Feck it, I can’t even say it right – he has me all fingers and tongues.’ She dropped the silver tube into the wash-hand basin.
‘Thumbs, thumbs,’ she screeched at her reflection. ‘No tongues.’
Now, deep breaths and slick it on; Molly wasn’t letting him see her without a painted pout. No point in giving him cause to believe he’d had a lucky escape from her. Despair at a life wasted because it wasn’t spent in her embrace, that’s what she’d prefer to inculcate in Fionn McCullagh. If she could just draw her Cupid’s bow straight she could let those arrows fly.
Fionn was reading the notice board when she emerged from the stairwell. Something about the hot water being shut off for a day while electrical repairs were effected had him riveted. When he turned she was struck, as she had been yesterday, by the way his American tan turned his eyes to the colour of the ocean at Mullaghmore on a summer’s day. His eyes had slid off hers on that Thursday evening when he’d told her he had a brand-new wife. Scarcely out of her packaging. So instead of reading the reason for his defection in his eyes she’d concentrated on his mouth as it opened and shut, the lips coiling around words she couldn’t believe she was hearing. His mouth had betrayed his nervousness, the tongue flicking across to moisten it after each poisonous parcel of words plopped out. As he’d spoken she noticed a crumb clinging to the left side of the slit, not far from where a dimple would indent if he smiled. But he hadn’t been smiling that day four years ago. Nor had she.
‘Are you fit?’ Fionn was smiling now.
Molly wasn’t. He needn’t imagine she’d be a pushover. ‘Fit? Not yet but it’s my New Year’s resolution. I’m only a month late starting.’
‘I meant are you ready – but feel at liberty to run through your New Year’s resolutions, Molly.’
‘Well, there’s getting fit, solving global conflict, developing a machine that turns base metal into gold and repairing the hole in the ozone layer. I thought that might keep me occupied until summer and then I could reassess. How about yourself?’
‘I didn’t consciously make one but I suppose it would be to put my house in order.’ Fionn looked sombre.
Molly panicked. It was too early for self-analysis – she’d like something in a glass to put hairs on her chest first, the depilatory cream could eradicate the damage later – so she started jabbering, ‘Housework. Strangely enough I left that one off the list. Anyway, I thought we were supposed to meet at the station. I’m not that late. And how did you know my address? I don’t remember giving it to you.’
‘Spadework. You dropped clues about being a few minutes from the DART and passing a dry-cleaner’s to reach it. So I continued driving past the station and this is the first apartment block I reached. Your name is above the bell.’
‘You’re wasted in architecture. You should have been a taxman,’ she muttered sourly. ‘Mustn’t keep the great outdoors waiting; after you, super-sleuth.’ And she held the door open for Fionn to wrongfoot him because he liked to be the one doling out gentlemanly gestures.
They parked near the entrance to Glendalough and managed a fifteen-minute stroll along a country lane before sleet sent them scurrying to the car.
‘At least we’ve earned our hot whiskeys now.’ Fionn drove the short distance down the mountain to a pub in Laragh. ‘You didn’t want to stay up there for a wander inside Glendalough, did you, admire a few ancient monuments, glory in our cultural heritage?’
‘I wasn’t tempted before the sleet came lashing and I’m even less disposed now. A hot whiskey sounds infinitely more promising. Anyway, we mustn’t be purist about cultural heritage. Whiskey’s just as much a part of it as monastic ruins.’
A coach party of Swiss senior citizens, a pile of sodden raincoats at their feet, were immersed in an alcohol-free lunch at two trestle tables towards the rear of the pub. But a cushion-jammed bench alongside the inglenook fireplace was vacant and Molly and Fionn commandeered it.
‘Those monks had funny-peculiar attitudes anyway,’ remarked Molly, apropos of nothing. ‘Especially where women were concerned. Your medieval aesthetics viewed us as she-devils. Of course, that’s just because they were scared witless of the other sex and in complete denial of their bodily urges.’
Fionn nodded. ‘Denial of bodily urges is unhealthy – that’s always been my credo.’
Molly frowned. ‘On the other hand, gratifying all your inclinations is probably not advisable either. There has to be something to separate us from the beasts.’ Fionn was excessively complacent. He needn’t imagine a couple of hot whiskeys would generate any body heat from her. Just because their sex life had been sensational … Molly’s hand flew to her mouth. Where had that sprung from? It was years since she’d allowed herself to dwell on their times in bed – and on the living-room rug and in the shower and on the beach at Mullaghmore that night when she’d admitted it had always been her ambition to make love beneath the stars. Only she’d anticipated a Caribbean sky rather than a low-lying Sligo one, but it had seemed churlish to mention it when he was co-operating so enthusiastically with making her wish come true.
‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Molly whispered.
‘What did you say?’ Fionn set down his glass and slid along the bench towards her.
Startled, because she hadn’t realised she’d spoken aloud, Molly improvised. ‘I was thinking about those monks. They were great ones for making rash vows and having to work around them, like St Columcille, who swore his feet would never touch Irish soil again after he stormed off to Iona. When he had to return he filled his boots with Scottish earth so they never did. Those fellows had plenty of mantras but they seemed not to extend to cleanliness is next to godliness.’
Molly noticed her fingernails weren’t exactly pious using that criterion and sat on her hands in case Fionn spotted them too. She continued: ‘But they were cunning enough to weasel their way out of definitive statements. Exactly like my first newspaper editor who wrote a provocative column and always concluded with: “If anyone proves me wrong I’ll eat my Sunday bowler on the steps of the town hall.” He had a supply of chocolate hats on standby in case anyone ever called his bluff.’
Fionn scratched the back of his neck and Molly noticed how the hair curled around the collar of his rugby shirt.
‘Your conversations are deranged. Fascinating but demented,’ he said. ‘What have chocolate bowlers to do with medieval monks, or do all your stories feature chocolate? I haven’t forgotten you’re fixated on the stuff. Wasn’t it myself who introduced you to white Toblerone?’
Molly smiled at him properly for the first time. ‘I glimpsed Paradise, thanks to you,’ she breathed. ‘My gratitude is boundless. I’ll buy you a drink to prove it.’
‘That’s another advantage to not being a monk,’ said Fionn. ‘You have licence to sip hot whiskeys with a divine creature on a weekday. And she buys her round.’
Molly vacillated between being flattered and indignant. But she felt obliged to put him straight on the monastic life as she riffled through her handbag for her purse.
