Quentins (21 page)

Martin felt almost weak as he read these words.

What had he been
thinking
of to want to change Kit?

She was utterly essential to the office the way she was.

Thank God he had said nothing to her, it would have been unforgivable.

Jody talked on about names and plans and how he would look after the baby as much as Jenny would.

“I wish I had done that with you,” Martin said slowly.

“I asked Mother about that, but she said you had far too short a fuse for minding a child,” said Jody, who didn't seem to have an ounce of resentment in his body.

“When I say good-bye to the people in the boardroom this evening, can I come around to you and Jenny to celebrate?”

Jody looked at him in amazement. His father had never been to his flat. Perhaps the short fuse wasn't as important for grandfathers.

W
hen Maggie Nolan completed high school with honors, her father said it was something that called for a Serious Celebration. The Nolan family were going out to have dinner in a hotel.

This had never happened before. They had never even been in an ordinary restaurant, let alone a hotel restaurant. Other people went to the Chinese or the Italian—the country was becoming cosmopolitan. Well, some of it was.

But not the Nolans.

There was never the money to spare. There was so much to pay for and so many calls on their time. Mrs. Nolan's mam lived with them for one thing, and Mr. Nolan's dad had to have his dinner cooked for him and taken over to his flat every day.

Mr. Nolan worked in charge of the bacon counter at one of those old-fashioned grocery stores that people said were on the way out. He was very happy and well-respected there, but, of course, if the store really were on the way out, it would be hard for Mr. Nolan to get another job.

Mrs. Nolan worked as a cleaner in the hospital. She was very popular with the nurses and with the patients, but the hours were long and tiring, her veins were bad and she hoped she would be able to continue working until all the children had been accounted for.

Maggie was the eldest of five. The others were all boys who wanted to play for English soccer teams. They had no interest in their studies and were utterly amazed that their big sister had gotten enough marks in exams to make people talk seriously about her going to college. They were even more amazed that their father was going to take them to the big posh hotel where nobody they knew had even been inside the door.

But he kept saying Maggie's marks would mean nothing unless there was a Serious Celebration.

“Will it be just the three of you—Mam, Dad and Maggie?” they wanted to know.

“A family celebration,” he insisted.

“Will Grandma come?” they asked.

Grandma was inclined to take her teeth out in public. The money would not extend to Grandma, it was explained firmly. Grandpa said that he wouldn't cross the door of such a place on principle. He said this before anyone had invited him, without explaining what the exact principle was.

But that still meant seven people going to a preposterously expensive hotel.

“We can't do it—it's ludicrous, Mam,” Maggie said. Her mother looked tired after a long day pushing a heavy, awkward cleaning cart around the wards.

“Listen, child, we are so proud of you, and what has your father been in there slicing bacon for you, year after year, if he can't take his family to a posh place when the eldest turns out to be a genius?” Maggie's mother's eyes were bright as they shone in her weary face.

So this stopped the discussion. There could be no more protesting.

Maggie went to her room.

She was eighteen. She knew that the celebration dinner would cost a fortune, maybe two weeks of her father's wages. He would have to borrow from the credit
union at work. Maggie would have much preferred them to have had chicken and chips and for her father to have given her fifty pounds toward books for college.

But she listened to her mother. This Serious Celebration at the best restaurant in Dublin would give some meaning to a lot of lives. Not only her father—her mother, too, would like to walk around the ward mentioning casually what was on the menu at the dinner party last night.

Her two difficult grandparents would rejoice as much as if they had been there. Her four younger brothers would think it was a great adventure. And if they could perhaps be persuaded not to peel the potatoes with their nails . . .

Mr. Nolan made the reservation.

“Did they need a deposit?” Maggie's mother wondered.

“Indeed they did not. They asked for a phone number and I gave them the bacon counter extension,” he said proudly.

The boys became very annoyed about the amount of washing and scrubbing and clean shirts involved in it all. Maggie's mother said that she had told the head nurse where she was going and the head nurse had kindly lent her a stole. Maggie's father had told the general manager where he was going and the general manager had insisted that he would phone ahead and offer them a cocktail before dinner with his compliments.

And eventually the evening arrived.

Maggie had thought not a great deal about it because there was so much else to think of, like the fees for school and how to fit in her studies with all the hours that she would have to work earning the money. The night out in the posh restaurant, the Serious Celebration, was only one more crisis along the line. Since the Nolans didn't have a car, they took two buses to get
there. Mr. Nolan had the money in an envelope in his inside pocket. He patted it proudly half a dozen times on the journey. Maggie felt an urge to cry every time she saw this, but she kept cheerful and said over and over that she couldn't believe they were all going to this restaurant. Her friend would be so envious, she said over and over. And she was rewarded by her mother hitching her borrowed stole higher, and her father saying that the general manager was altogether too good to arrange the cocktails.

They arrived at the door and the place seemed enormous and intimidating, nobody wanted to be the first up the steps.

They felt nervous and out of place once in the restaurant. Mr. Nolan wondered, should they have the cocktails in the lounge or at the table? Maggie, who thought that the boys might do less damage if corralled into just one destination, was in favor of the dining room, but her mother thought that Mr. Nolan might like to see the lounge as well.

There was endless confusion when Mr. Nolan mentioned the general manager's name. There had been no message about cocktails. Apparently nobody had phoned ahead with any such order.

“Just as well, Da, we'd have all been on our ear if we had them,” Maggie said, and tried not to watch the waiter wince as he overheard her remark.

They decided to study the menu and bypass the cocktails.

The menu was in French.

“Can you translate it for us, please?” Maggie said to the scornful waiter.

She was maddened with grief that the Serious Celebration was somehow going to be dimmed.

The waiter translated, under duress; Maggie remembered what everything was. She decided that her father
was going to have the steak, her mother the chicken, and that she and the boys would have well-done lamb chops. Nobody would have any starters, she said; but they would all have dessert, she promised the sneering waiter.

The boys were so shocked and overawed by it all that for once in their wild lives they agreed with her.

She had never felt so angry and upset in her whole life. The look on her parents' faces was like a knife sticking into her. They were embarrassed and ashamed—after all their borrowing and planning, it had not been a good idea.

“This is something I will always remember, Mam, Dad,” Maggie said truthfully. She would remember it every day of her life, when she was a high-flying lawyer, when she was confident enough to know every dish on the menu and to be known with admiration by every one of the hotel staff here.

“Maybe it wasn't quite . . .” Dad began.

Maggie felt faint, quite literally, as if she were going to fall over. He had wanted so much for this outing to be a success for her. The more she protested, the worse it was going to get, and the more pathetic she would make him seem.

A waitress was setting up the table with the appropriate cutlery. An elegant, groomed woman aged around thirty, she wore a white lace collar and she was probably as horrible, snobbish and dismissive as the rest of them. Maggie burned with rage at it all.

But this woman somehow managed to catch her eye with a look of understanding. This woman seemed to know it was a special occasion.

“My name is Brenda Brennan, and I'll be serving at your table. Might I inquire if this is a special family celebration?” she asked.

“My eldest—you wouldn't believe, miss, the marks
she got.” Poor Da was bursting with eagerness to tell someone, anyone, what it was all about.

“Well, I'll tell this to Chef. He just loves to hear that we have academic people in. Usually it's only people on expense accounts,” the woman called Brenda said.

Maggie wanted to get up and hug her. But she knew that she must not do that—there was a role to be played. “Thank you so much.”

“When you're a lawyer, Chef Patrick and I will have our own restaurant,” Brenda said. “We might make your father an offer he can't refuse.”

Maggie's father's face was glowing red with pleasure.

“You will leave us your name, won't you, sir, so that we can keep you on our lists?” she asked.

The scornful waiter was surprised when Patrick, the tall, dark and moody chef, said he was doing a special dessert, free, for everyone in the Nolan party.

He piped the name Maggie on it in chocolate and asked for it to be brought out and photographed. He posed beside it, wearing his chef's hat, with his arms around the family.

The supercilious waiter sniffed. Imagine making a fuss of riffraff like these people . . .

The Nolans went home on the bus with half the cake. It had been a seriously good celebration.

Maggie looked out of her window that night and thought of the length of time it would take her father to pay it all back.

By the time she was a qualified lawyer and received her degree as a solicitor, four years had passed. And a lot of things had happened.

Her father's company had sold out as had been predicted, but he had been taken on by the new buyers and he wore a straw hat and striped apron at the bacon counter, which pleased him a lot.

Maggie's mother had a successful operation on her varicose veins and felt like a new woman. She had been made supervisor of cleaning. One of her brothers had, in fact, gone to train with a big English soccer team, though the others were going nowhere fast.

Her grandmother went to a day center now; things for old people had vastly improved. She loved it there, where she could terrorize everyone happily all day.

Maggie's grandfather, who when he was seventy couldn't cook his own lunch, met when he was seventy-two a tough woman who taught him to cook everything, married him and turned round his life.

Maggie won the gold medal in law and was in a position to choose from any law firm in the country.

She knew her father wanted to take her back to the dull, snobbish restaurant, which had by then become totally passé. She couldn't tell him that the place had fallen from grace and that no one went there now.

She didn't need to tell him.

Once Maggie's gold medal was announced in the papers, an invitation arrived at her father's house. Brenda and Patrick Brennan, who were now managing the magnificent Quentins restaurant, hoped the family would join them for a Serious Celebration. They wrote to say that their luck had turned on the night they met the Nolans. It was only fitting that they all mark this in a special way.

Maggie's father was a generous man. He had no idea that Quentins was the last word these days.

“Well, I'd like to have got you the best, Maggie, but seeing as these people did well, it would seem to be ungracious not to go, don't you think?”

“You've never been ungracious, Da.”

“And you know it's not just to have a free dinner? I have the money saved to go back to that smart place,” he said, anxious there should be no misunderstandings.

They went to Quentins by bus, but they would go home by taxi—this was going to be Mam's treat. Maggie's brothers were not overawed this time. They were four years older for one thing; but the place didn't try to put them down.

Maggie recognized the woman. Everyone was greeting her, trying to catch her eye. Brenda Brennan was warm to everyone but dallied at no table; she was always on the move.

“We can never thank you enough for this,” Brenda began.

“And do you run this place yourself, miss? I must say, it's very respectable looking,” Da interrupted.

Brenda said she did run it, and that Chef Patrick this time had a cake with a gold medal on it for Maggie.

It was ten times as good a meal as the one they had four years earlier, they all agreed.

Mam's taxi arrived to take them home, and they were getting their coats.

“Why did you do it for us, Ms. Brennan?” Maggie asked quietly as they were leaving. “All that business about pretending that your luck changed the night we met you . . .”

“But that was true,” Brenda said. “That was the night we realized we could not go on working for a place like that, no matter how good it looked on a CV. Supercilious, snobbish people, no welcome, no warmth, no love of food . . .”

“How do you remember it was the night we were there?” Maggie wanted to know.

“You were real people, honest people having a celebration. They treated you like dirt. We couldn't bear it. We talked about you for a long time that night. The evening seemed to sum up how degrading it was to work for a place that treated its visitors so badly. And as it happened I came across some information the next
night, sort of heard, you might say, that they were looking for people to run Quentins. And because of your family we somehow found the courage. We gave in our notice—and, as you see, it worked out rather well.”