Two Fridays in April (30 page)

And suddenly, unexpectedly, flying a kite with him seems like the best idea in the world.

‘Can you get them?’ she asks.

He looks up.

‘Can you? The kites, can you get them?’

He laughs. She loves his laugh: it’s like music. It’s like musical happiness.

‘What – you want to fly them now?’

She nods.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Let’s do it,’ she says – so he collects his father’s car keys while she waits in the corridor, and they slip out of the hotel.

And as soon as they reach the grass, she takes off her shoes.

It’s hopeless.
She
’s hopeless.

Run with it
, he said,
throw it up, let the wind catch it
– but each time she tried –
Now, let it go NOW!
– her kite flopped to the ground and dragged along behind her. After twenty minutes
she’s disheartened and breathless and frozen, even though he’s given her his suit jacket to wear – and her feet in their tights are soaked from the wet grass.

He’s at the far side of the lawn, his red kite sailing high in the air, tail fluttering. He shouts something, but she can’t hear him.

She drops her kite on the grass and plops down on the bench where she left her bag. She pulls out her phone and finds Daphne’s number. She types as rapidly as her nearly numb fingers will allow:
Sorry, having dinner at Ciaras, her dad will drive me home
,
hope thats OK
,
c u later

‘Here.’

She looks up and there he is, offering the taut string of his still-airborne kite to her. His face is flushed and shiny. She sends off the text and shoves her phone back into the bag. ‘Don’t let it go,’ he orders, placing the string in her hand, waiting until her fingers close around it.

She can feel the tug of it, doing its best to get free. She holds it tightly, watching as the breeze lifts and drops it, feeling the dance of it in the pull and release of the string. She turns to see Theo running back across the lawn, and the blue kite taking off at last, soaring up in a wide arc, and the sight exhilarates her, as if she was up there swooping and dipping along with it.

‘Run!’ he shouts, and she runs towards him, laughing, hair bouncing out behind her, dress blotchy with sweat. And when they meet he scoops her up and swings her around, and she screams that she’ll let go of the kite but she doesn’t, she manages to hang on, and when he lowers her to the ground her heart is racing, and the kites are still dancing together high above them, and he hasn’t let her go, and his head is dipping towards her, and
she’s rising up on tiptoe to meet him – heedless now of the wet grass, her frozen toes forgotten – and she’s closing her eyes for his kiss.

‘Thanks a million,’ she says to Judy. ‘It was great.’

It must be written all over her face, everyone must see – but incredibly, nobody is laughing or whispering or nudging their neighbour, or even looking in her direction. They’re too busy dancing, or drinking, or chatting.

Amazing. Astounding.

Judy gives no sign that she’s noticed anything either. ‘You’ll get a taxi home,’ she says, and Una crosses her fingers and promises that she will. ‘And you’ll come and see us next week sometime – what about Thursday?’

‘OK.’

She’d replenished her lipstick in the loo, after they’d replaced the kites in the car boot, after they’d made their way, fingers interlocked, back to the hotel.
He kissed my lipstick off
, she told the mirror, and giggled.
He’s a good kisser
, she told the mirror, because she had to say it out loud, it was bursting to come out of her, and a rather spotted hotel mirror was all she had.
I could have kissed him all night
, she told it, the feel of his mouth on hers still vivid, the taste of him still on her tongue. Astonishing, amazing that nobody can see the change he’s wrought in her.

I’m mad about you
, he told her between kisses.
I’ve been mad about you for months
. She was sitting on his lap on a stone bench, the kites in the grass beside them.

I could hardly look at you today
, he said, his hands cradling her face,
you were – you
are
– so beautiful. I was afraid you’d see by my face how I felt, and I thought you mightn’t want to see it
.

I’ve had the kites for weeks
, he said, tucking her hands under his shirt to warm them.
I wanted to ask you to come and fly them
–
I thought it mightn’t seem like a date. I thought if I could get you away from my family you might actually notice me, and I might grow on you, or something. I shoved them into the car last night, but this morning I thought it was a stupid idea, and it was too late to take them out again, everyone would have seen, so I had to leave them. I wasn’t going to mention them, and then it just … came out when we were standing in the church porch
.

I love your hair
, he said, touching it, pushing his fingers into it, lifting handfuls to press to his face.
I love your hair, it’s beautiful
.

I’ll call you in the morning
, he said, after he’d added her number to his phone, after he’d placed a call to her so she’d have his.
I’ll call you first thing
.

Incredible that it should have happened today. Incredible that it has happened at all.

Theo Quirk, of all the boys in all the world.

After saying goodbye to Kevin – there’s no sign of Charlotte and Brian – she collects her bag of clothes from the reception desk and changes in the bathroom while Theo waits for her outside. She laughs when she realises she’s left her runners on the floor in Charlotte’s bedroom, socks stuffed into them – who cares? She slips her feet back into the heels: she’ll tell Daphne she borrowed them from Ciara, she’ll collect the runners over the weekend.

She folds the green dress – it’s so thin it fits into Charlotte’s
clutch bag – and slips her phone into her jeans pocket. The navy wrap she drapes loosely around her neck.

Theo walks to the door with her. ‘I wish you’d stay longer,’ he says, but she tells him Daphne will be expecting her. She hates lying to him, pretending she’s going straight home, but she can’t tell him about Dave: it’s too complicated for now.

He kisses her again on the street, in full view of everyone passing. He wraps her in his arms, just like his mother does, and whispers goodnight, his breath warm in her ear. She closes her eyes and clings to him, drinking in his scent.

The first taxi they hail pulls up, and she squeezes Theo’s hand before climbing in. She shuts the door and smiles out through the window at him.

‘Where to?’

She turns. ‘The Charles Hotel, please.’ They pull off and she sits back, her head full of all that has happened as they cross the city. She remembers again that it’s her birthday, and that she should be at home.

She takes out her phone and sees a missed call from Daphne, no voicemail message. Sent directly after she’d got Una’s text, it must have been. By now they’re having dinner without her, Daphne and Mo. She can imagine how Mo took the news.

She opens the clutch bag, sniffs her dress and smells the tang of Theo’s aftershave. She checks her watch: already twenty to nine. Too much time spent saying goodnight. She smiles down at her lap.

‘Here we go,’ the taxi driver says, and charges her fifteen euro, which sounds expensive, but she pays up. Only five left, not enough to get a taxi home after this; she hadn’t bargained
on needing two. She’ll have to take a bus, whenever she finds a stop. She’s quite far from home so she’ll be late back – there’ll probably be hell to pay. Can’t be helped.

She regards the hotel façade, fifty yards or so from the road. A bit more flash than the hotel she just left. A man in the act of getting into a car, another standing under the awning by the hotel entrance. She tucks the clutch bag under her arm and walks up the paved pedestrian pathway, her high-heeled shoes clacking loudly, her earlier apprehension creeping back.

She wishes Theo was here. She should have told him: he’d have come, he’d have understood. Why didn’t she tell him?

‘Una?’

She stops, thrown. The man under the awning takes a step towards her. ‘Are you Una?’

‘Yes.’

He’s older than she imagined him to be. At least fifty, maybe a lot more. Short speckled hair grows on either side of his head, the top of which is completely bald, freckly and shiny. He’s not tall – an inch or so above her, that’s all – but his shoulders are as wide as a wrestler’s, his brown jacket tight across his chest. His neck is as thick as a tree trunk.

‘Dave,’ he says, offering her his hand so she feels obliged to take it. Why is he out here? Didn’t he say they’d meet in the lobby?

‘I’m afraid I’ve been an awful clown,’ he says, smiling, spreading his palms. ‘I’ve only gone and left my wallet at home.’

She looks uncomprehendingly at him. Why would he need his wallet?

‘It’s just,’ he goes on, ‘they mightn’t look too kindly on us sitting in their lobby without buying a coffee or something.’

Is he hinting that
she
should pay? Is he waiting for her to offer? She thinks of the fiver in her pocket. ‘I only have enough money to get a bus home,’ she says.

He laughs, shaking his head. ‘Oh dear, no, I didn’t mean that, I didn’t mean for you to fork out at all. No, what I was going to suggest –’ gesturing to the right, so she looks and sees a line of parked cars ‘– was that we head to my house. It’s only down the road, not five minutes away, and my car is just over there.’

His car? He’s asking her to get into his car? She feels a fresh stab of alarm.

‘Joan – my wife – made apple tart earlier,’ he goes on, the smile still broad on his face as he pulls keys from his pocket. ‘And I have to tell you, her apple tart is legendary. What do you say?’

Una feels trapped. He seems OK, but he’s still a stranger. ‘Why can’t you just tell me now? We don’t have to go in. We can talk out here.’

He hesitates. ‘I wish I could, Una, I know how anxious you must be to hear what I found out, but it’s not that simple. There’s quite a bit to tell you, actually, and it’s fairly complicated. That’s why I didn’t want to put it in an email. We really need to sit down and do it properly.’

Still she demurs, reluctant to take a chance on trusting him. ‘It’s just that I haven’t got long. My stepmother is expecting me home.’ She immediately regrets ‘stepmother’: she should have said ‘mother’.

‘Not a problem,’ he says immediately. ‘I’m literally a few minutes from here, and I can run you home afterwards, no bother. You can ring your stepmother and explain. I could talk to her, if you wanted.’

Talk to Daphne? Una can imagine how that would go. She looks towards the cars again, playing for time as she casts about for the right thing to do.

‘Look,’ he says, ‘I can see you’re a bit nervous, which is perfectly understandable. Let’s leave it for now. We can make a new arrangement. It’s just that I’m away all next week and the soonest I could meet you again would be the week after. So will we say same time, same place next Monday week? Would that suit you?’

He sounds reasonable. His wife is called Joan, and she’s made apple tart. The thought of having to wait more than a week to find out about her father is deeply frustrating. Why can’t he just tell her what he knows now? What could be so complicated that they’d need to sit down and talk about it?

‘Is he dead?’ she asks, the thought jumping into her head. ‘Is that what you don’t want to tell me?’

He shakes his head quickly. ‘No, no, he’s not dead, it’s not that. But … like I say, Una, it’s a bit complicated. I really don’t want to go into it like this. It just doesn’t feel right, you know?’

She makes up her mind. She can’t wait: she has to trust him.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘Where’s your car?’