"Where did he get the money to own a place like this?" Mon whispered to Yan.
"I heard it was from some inheritance," Yan said.
"But who? Not his awful father, for sure." Mon shook her head. "Look at his face. He looks like a sort of saint really, doesn't he?"
You couldn't speak softly enough to avoid detection by Brenda Brennan, who could, after all, lip-read. "Quentin's not exactly a saint," she said to them pleasantly. "But he came by the place legally. From an old friend."
She watched their mouths drop open with the shock of being overheard and smiled to herself. It had been so useful, that little trick, she'd learned so very much over the years. Quentin saw her smile when she came back to the table.
"I'd love to know what you're thinking," he said gently.
"I might even tell you later. Now I have to get the show on the road."
Brenda made sure that Quentin had two kinds of bottled water. She sensed he would not drink wine. She ordered a tray of appetisers. Something he could pick from. She had seen enough people come and go to know that he was not going to eat very much. Quentin Barry was a sick man. He ate in the booth and watched his mother come to lunch with three of her friends. Sara Barry had aged in a way that she would not have enjoyed had she been able to observe it properly. She looked puffy and rather silly. He would have advised her against the light pastel colours and the fussy jewellery.
Quentin's mother had no idea that she was being closely watched from the discreet little booth across the restaurant. All she cared about was that the four women at her table realised just how much she spent on clothes. She talked to them about the wisdom of having an account at Haywards store, it saved so much trouble in the end. You just waved your card and that was that, they were so obliging.
Quentin felt sorry for her. The staff in Haywards would be equally helpful and obliging had she waved a credit card, a chequebook or a fistful of notes. He had worked there for long enough to know. All those years before his luck had changed. He knew Mr. George, Mr. Harold and Miss Lucy and how little respect they had for card holders above anyone else.
And he thought back on how his future had been written for him through the generosity of Mr. Toby Hayward, who still wrote to him from Australia and who had given him this strange, unexpected start and a chance to own his own restaurant.
It had all been so mysterious. Quentin had been told that his best policy was to ask no deep questions.
Katar had said the restaurant had been given to him by God, some vague Irish god who knew Quentin was unhappy and wanted him to have a business that would eventually give him the funds to go out to Morocco. But then, Katar was the sunniest person Quentin ever knew.
Ever had known. Impossible to believe that he would never hear that laugh or see those dancing eyes again. He had brought Katar to this very table once. Quentin smiled as he remembered the occasion.
I would like to run around and tell them all at every table that this is ours, ours. Then I would like there to be a trumpet sound .. . ta-ra, ta-ra . .. and you would stand up and we would all sing .. . "For Quentin, he ees the jolly fine fellow"."
Katar would have liked that, and would have seen nothing silly or inappropriate in it. Only a celebration, like his whole happy life had been. Even the last months of his illness.
"It's so good for me, I have you to look after me, to tell me stories in the dark night. Who will do the same for you?"
"Ah, there are plenty who will." Quentin had put cold rose water on Katar's hot brow.
"Well, you must go and find them, be ready to ask them, let them know you need help. Not the false braveness, swear to me. I will know, I will be looking at you."
"I swear, Katar," Quentin had said. "No false braveness."
But oddly, when the time did come, Quentin didn't need any friend. He just looked at the beauty of the hot country he had come to think of as his own. Lying calmly and resting there brought him peace. Life didn't seem so huge and important somehow. You were just part of a process, like mountain ranges and sandstorms and the blossoms that came in springtime. Next week he would be back there and he would wait. It would not be frightening. But first, he had decisions to make here.
About his father and mother there would be few problems. They had already said goodbye to him in a meaningful sense, long, long ago.
"Mother, can I take you out and buy you a hat?" Quentin asked on the phone.
"I'm not going out to some awful souk in Marrakesh."
"I'm in Dublin, Mother."
"That's good." She didn't sound excited or pleased.
"So?"
"So, of course I'd love a hat," Sara Barry said. She didn't say she would love to see her son, but then she didn't know he was dying. "Did you know that Quentin's in Dublin?" Sara asked her husband that night.
"No, but he'll call from the airport before he leaves, that's what he usually does." Derek Barry barely looked up from his newspaper.
"That's because you have nothing to talk to him about," she criticised.
"Yes, that's true, unlike you who can compare shades of lipstick with him after all." Derek spoke bitterly.
"See what I mean, ready to pick a fight where none exists."
"Oh, my fights with Quentin are long over," Derek Barry sighed. Quentin had one more decision to make.
The restaurant. The place that bore his name. He had asked Tobe Hayward his thoughts, but the old man had said quite simply, "Believe me, when it comes to your time, you will do something worthwhile."
That's all Tobe Hayward could come up with. But he also reminded him that everything was in Quentin's name.
Quentin had always supposed that he would know what to do when the time came. But he had not known how soon the time would come. How ridiculously early in fact. Still, he felt in his heart that everything was clear now, as Tobe had forecast it would be. He knew what should happen next.
For now he would get to know the staff and to talk to them.
The beautiful Mon who told him every heartbeat of her romance with Mr. Clive Harris, and how she didn't give a damn about the Italian who had sweet-talked her out of all her money. He was welcome to it.
He heard from Yan about how his father back in Brittany wanted to put money into a small restaurant there for him. And how Yan didn't know how to tell him he was having too much fun in Ireland to leave.
He discovered that Harry had thought working in Dublin, the heart of the Republic of Ireland, would be a misery that he was prepared to endure in order to get a good training. But in fact he was never happier, and all his friends came down to Dublin for the weekends now. Times had changed, he explained to Quentin. Quentin got to meet some of Brenda and Patrick's friends. The extraordinary woman who called herself Signora, who chopped vegetables, cleaned brasses, spoke flawless Italian, was going to marry a divorced man at her age, and confided to Quentin that she had the happiest life of any human on the planet.
The man she was going to marry had apparently lost money to some financier. They had been planning to have a wedding party with it but they could well survive without a party. And anyway maybe they were too old for one.
He met Blouse Brennan, brother of Patrick, so proud of his red haired wife Mary and their little son. Blouse confided that, compared to a lot of the fellows he had been at school with like Horse and Shay Harris, he had done very well. And no one would have expected it at the time.
Quentin met all kinds of people that he never knew existed in the old Ireland. There were Ella Brady and Derry King, who were
going to put together a documentary about the place. His restaurant! Quentin made a note to write to Tobe about that.