"Doing what?"
"Didn't they teach you anything at that catering college? Molluscs. Single shell, double shell. There's thousands of them out there, stuck to rocks. All we have to do is get them to the table."
"Do you mean things like mussels or whelks or cockles?" Cathy felt dizzy.
"Yes, and everything else ... clams, razor shells, limpets ... Blouse will know where to find them. Where is he, anyway?"
Til get him to call you in the hospital, Patrick," Cathy sighed. The restaurant must be in a poor position if Blouse Brennan was going to be sent off to scrape limpets off rocks.
Tom rang again. "The party's over but the children won't go home. They wouldn't even come up for the group picture with the Graduate. Blouse has them hypnotised, he's like the Pied Piper. I wouldn't be surprised if they followed him back to Quentins."
"Yeah, well ask him to break off just long enough to call his brother in the hospital. Patrick wants him to do the Pied Piper thing along the shore tomorrow to collect limpets."
"Isn't this a totally crazy life?" Tom said, with the tone of a man who would never live any other kind of life.
Cathy felt the same. But with one proviso. She wished mightily that tomorrow night was over. She couldn't see one redeeming feature that would save them. But she had reckoned without Blouse and his newly found self-confidence.
And the next night they all watched, astounded, as the boy they had all considered slow, pointed out, with an elegant cane, the variety of shellfish displayed on what he called the Mollusc Medley. The limpet, the cockle, the whelk and the winkle ... all of them praised for their qualities of constancy. The oyster, the scallop, the mussel likewise. These were loyal invertebrates, Blouse told the group earnestly. Like the insurance company they were here to honour, these magnificent molluscs were noted for their sticking power in a world where, alas, not everything could be relied upon.
Patrick Brennan sighed a very great, long sigh. His early release from the hospital had been justified. The PR man was as delighted as the Graduate's demon mother. The PR company he ran was booking further spectaculars, but only if Blouse could be part of the package.
"He doesn't come cheap, of course," Patrick heard himself saying. His voice sounded weak. It had taken hours to persuade Blouse not to stress the lonely, futile and pathetic lifestyle of the mollusc. He hadn't been sure if Blouse had grasped it until the very last moment. But there were lots of things he wasn't sure of any more. Like how Blouse had found all those children to help him get buckets of those terrible things to the restaurant. They kept coming in all afternoon and all they needed for payment was an ice-cream.
Best not to question good news, Patrick always believed, like the look of love and huge relief in Brenda's eyes as she reached out her hand and stroked his through the most extraordinary - and successful - evening that Quentins had known so far.
When Brenda's great friend Nora had lived all those years in Italy, she had written long, long letters. Always she began with the word "Carissima" ... It sounded a bit fancy, Brenda thought, a little over the top, but Nora had insisted. She spoke Italian, she dreamed Italian now. To say "Dear Brenda" would sound flat and dull.
Carissima .. . dearest . .. was a better way to begin.
And Brenda wrote back faithfully. She charted a changing Ireland for her friend, for Nora who lived in the timeless Sicilian village of Anninziata. Brenda wrote how the waves of emigration were halted, how affluence came gradually to the cities, how the power of the Church seemed to slip away and change into something entirely different.
Brenda wrote that young people from different lands came to find work in Ireland now, girls who found themselves pregnant kept their babies instead of giving them up for adoption, young couples lived together for six months or a year before their marriages.
Things that were unheard of when Brenda and Nora were young.
Nora wrote about her friends in this village. The young couple who rented the pottery shop. Signora Leone. And of course Mario.
Mario, who ran the hotel.
Nora never wrote of Mario's wife Gabriella or their children. But that was all right. Some things were too huge to write about.
Brenda wrote about a lot of things, how she had met this guy they used to call Pillowcase, but was most definitely called Patrick Brennan these days, how they had fallen in love and worked in many restaurants. She told how the good fortune of running Quentins had fallen into their lap and they were rapidly making a great name for themselves. She wrote about the people who came and went, staff, and those like Patrick's brother Blouse, who had stayed and flourished there.
But Brenda only once told the deepest secrets of her soul, their great wish to have children, the long, often humiliating and eventually disappointing road of fertility guidance. That was too hard to write about.
Brenda was very helpful in that she acted as a spy for Nora O'Donoghue by going to see Nora's family. Hard, unforgiving people, who regarded her as a sinner and a fool, someone who had disgraced them by running off after a married man.
They were so uncaring about Nora's life that Brenda urged her friend to forget them. "They have forgotten you unless it suits them," she had written to Sicily. "I beg you, don't listen to any pleas they may have when they are older that you should return and be their nurse."
"Carissima," Nora had written, "I will never leave this place while there is a chance that I can see my Mario. I wish they could share my happiness. But perhaps one day they will be able to."
Nora's Mario died, killed in an accident on the mountain roads which he drove across so fast. The village implied that the Signora Irlandese should now leave and go home.
Brenda would never forget the day Nora had appeared at Quentins, long dress, wild hair, her face mad with grief for the only man she had ever loved. She still called Brenda "Carissima". They were still best friends. The long years apart, well over two decades, had changed nothing between them.
And when Nora found a new love, Aidan, the teacher up in Mountainview School, she and Brenda clutched each other like teenagers. Til dance at your wedding," Brenda promised.
"Hardly, there is the little problem of his first "wife," Nora had giggled.
"Come on, Nora, drag yourself to the present day ... there is divorce since 1995."
I managed for well over twenty years without marriage first time round. I can do it again." Nora wasn't asking for the moon and stars. "You do what you like, but I'm not giving up on it," Brenda threatened. Patrick said that it was amazing they found so much to talk about. He was never jealous of their friendship, but often said that men just didn't have conversations like that about every single aspect of life. "You are the losers," Brenda said. "I agree, that's what I'm saying," Patrick said unexpectedly. Nora went every week to the hospital where her elderly father lived in the geriatric ward. Ram or shine she wheeled him in the grounds. Sometimes he smiled at her and seemed pleased, other times he just stared ahead. She told him about any happy things that she remembered about her childhood. Often these were difficult to dredge up. She didn't tell him about Sicily because already it was fading in her mind like a highly coloured photograph left in bright sunlight. So she told him about Aidan Dunne and Mountainview School and the Italian classes. And she talked pleasantly about her sisters Rita and Helen, and her large!} silent brothers, even though she hardly saw them at all.
The news that she had moved into a bed-sitting-room with a married Latin teacher had horrified them all over again. Really, Nora seemed to be a scourge sent to lash their backs.