"Not at all, if it's any help to you and Patrick. I'd be honoured."
Brenda looked at her with a lump in her throat. What a generous-spirited person she was. She didn't care if her mother and awful sisters, if the students in the Italian class she taught, if Aidan's colleagues, saw her scrubbing vegetables in a kitchen. What a wonderful way to be.
"You're tired, Brenda."
"Which means, You're ugly, Brenda."
"No, it means, You're worried, Brenda."
"All right, I am worried. Worried sick about this documentary and that we get it right."
"You don't need to do it," Nora said.
"If we are to amount to anything, then let us leave some kind of legacy after us."
Nora carefully put down her short, squat, but very sharp knife and laid her hand on Brenda's. "You? Amount to anything? Legendary, that's what they call you two already. How much more do you want to amount to? You've been giving legacies into people's lives and will continue to do so for ever."
"You're kind to think we amount to a lot, Nora, but I don't see it that way. I thought this would sort of define us in a way."
"Brenda, you have each other and all this marvellous place. In the name of God, woman, don't you have enough?" Ella ran into Mrs. Ennis, the school principal, in Haywards Cafe.
"I can't tell you how pleased I am to see you," Mrs. Ennis said.
Ella was surprised. She had left Mrs. Ennis slightly in the lurch by leaving the school so quickly. Then Mrs. Ennis, too, might have regretted her indiscretions about her own private life which she told to cheer Ella up.
"I was going to ask you, did you want any part-time work? I did try to call you, but none of your phone numbers worked."
"Oh, I went into hiding for a while," Ella admitted.
"But I gather from what I read in the papers that you're out now," Mrs. Ennis was matter-of-fact.
"Yes, that's right, I am."
"Does teaching still interest you? You were good. The girls liked you."
"I did like it, very much. It was more solid than anything else, in a way."
"But maybe solidity isn't enough."
"I think it is now. But I have to make a film documentary first."
"How long would that take?"
"A few weeks, Mrs. Ennis. I won't be part of the editing."
"What's it about?"
"It's about a day in the life of a restaurant."
"Why?" Mrs. Ennis asked baldly.
Ella looked at her for a moment. "Do you know, I'm not quite sure why. A dozen reasons along the line, partly as therapy for me at the start, I know that. Then a lot of other people got drawn in." She seemed confused, thinking about why they were doing it.
Mrs. Ennis was brisk. "You know where we are, Ella. Ring us within a week if you'd like to come back to us. We need you."
"You're very kind."
"And the other business? All right about that?"
"Oh, yes. It's as if it all happened to someone else, not me."
"Good, then you're getting better," Mrs. Ennis said. Ella hadn't talked to Derry properly for three days. He was with his cousins morning, noon and night.
"You haven't had a fight with him?" Barbara Brady asked.
"You couldn't fight with Derry," Ella said. She remembered his ex-wife Kimberly saying something similar.
When he rang later that day, he asked to see her. "We have to talk, Ella. Can we have dinner at Quentins?"
"Will I get Nick and Sandy to come?"
"No, just you."
It turned out that he had been eating there every evening with his cousins. Scan and Michael knew the place already and had come for special treats.
"I'm sorry you're going to turn all this into a sort of circus," Scan had said bluntly as he looked around him.
"What do you mean?" Derry wondered.
"Well, when you have all these people appearing on television, they'll become celebrities and folks will come in to gawp at them. They won't be able to get on with their job like they did before. Before they became actors, I mean."
"Ah, now, Scan, don't go discouraging Derry. This is his work, his business. You wouldn't like it if he were to go telling you how to paint a house," Michael said.
"I wouldn't mind if he had anything interesting to say." Sean was honest.
And that night, Derry told Ella all this. How the brothers had opened up his eyes about so many things. Filming wasn't his business, he assured them, selling was his business, creating needs for people, then filling them. That's what he was good at. He had spent time in their business and told them about ways they could expand. Sell paint as well as doing the job. Set up an advisory service after hours, in the evenings or Saturday mornings. Draw in the young couples, give them colour charts, do and don't lists. Make them your friends. You weren't doing yourself out of a market. There were two different worlds, those who painted and those who didn't.
And then, he said to Ella, he had listened to them as well. And understood what they were saying. He had grown to love Quentins, there was a possibility that a fly-on-the-wall would destroy it and the hard-working people there. He felt clear in his head about it. Now the only problem was to explain all this to Ella and to everyone else. He was amazed at how easy that turned out to be.;. The only person who was confused and annoyed in the end was Deirdre. "For week after bloody week I've been talking, sleeping, dreaming, breathing this documentary. It was going to be the making of everybody. And now suddenly, out of a clear blue sky, I'm meant to be overjoyed that it is not happening. No, Ella, give me some sense of being something rather than a nodding dog."
"You, a nodding dog, Dee! Please!"
"No, I'm serious. It's all ludicrous. What happens when you go back to teaching, your man goes back to America, your other man goes to gaol, Firefly Films become rock groupies, Quentins misses it out on immortality? Where's all the joy in that?" Deirdre was great when she grumbled. Which was never for long.
"Listen, cheer up. You're invited to a big party to celebrate."
"God, what a mad crowd you are. Celebrating! Anyone else would be in mourning."
"No, Dee, you eejit, it's for lots of things . .. the new company, Kennedy and King. Berry's going in with his cousins. It's for Aidan and Nora's wedding party. It's for Nick and Sandy's new contract. It's for my getting exactly the job I want, part-time teaching, and I'm going back to university to do a doctorate as well, and it's for my father going to have a job as a financial adviser in Kennedy and King. And for so many other things ... if you can't celebrate all that, then you're only a miserable old curmudgeon."
Deirdre threw her arms around Ella. "I never saw you so happy. So that maybe is a reason to get a new party frock. Will there be anything there that I could get my nails and teeth into?"
"Lord knows, there might be," said Ella. "It's shaping up as a very unusual party." "Yes, Mrs. Mitchell. I know it's inconvenient. Perhaps you could choose another night."
"But my daughter-in-law ... well, my ex-daughter-in-law, tells me she's going to Quentins on Saturday night . .. tomorrow."
"But as I'm sure she told you, it's a private function, Mrs. Mitchell."
"Well, I had thought there might be exceptions for regular clients."
"No, we have had this notice on the tables for three weeks, Mrs. Mitchell, and in the newspaper."
Brenda came off the phone and rolled her eyes up to heaven. "Amazing how Cathy didn't kill that one dead. She's the most trying woman in Dublin."
The next call was from Nora's mother. "I don't know what you're thinking of to imagine that I and my family are going to a surprise party for Nora. I never heard such nonsense, and at her age. And at such short notice."
"We had to keep it at short notice in case they heard about it." Brenda's eyes rolled further around in her head.
"But I thought that this ceremony was going to be in a bookshop. That's what Nora said, and we wouldn't have gone to that either," Mrs. O'Donoghue sniffed.