250

I

Peter arrived with a bottle of wine.

‘That’s nice of you. Will you open it for us?’ Clara handed him the corkscrew.

‘I’m afraid it’s a screw-top. They’re on sale at the off licence, but I gather they’re very drinkable,’ he said.

‘Sure, personally I think all wine should be screw-top,’

Clara said as she laid out some smoked salmon on brown

bread.

‘I think there’s a lot of nonsense in the wine business,’ Peter said. ‘People buy just according to price; if it’s dear it must be good. That’s like the Emperor’s New Clothes really. Some wines like this are very good and they’re half the price of some of the so-called “good” wines.’

She wished he would stop talking about money. They were

middle-aged, middle-class people. She was a doctor, he was a pharmacist, they owned their houses — they could afford a bottle of wine, for God’s sake. But she knew she must beat down this small irritation.

Again the conversation was easy. He admired her home: it was bright and airy, and the garden was secluded and full of colour. She told him that the trick in gardens was to have big, colourful bushes that did all the work for you and needed no care. They took their glasses of wine and strolled around the small garden as she pointed out this plant and that.

‘Do you grow them from seed?’ he asked.

‘No, I haven’t got a greenhouse or cloche frames or anything you’d need to be in the whole of your health to get into that kind of thing.’

‘But isn’t it a fraction of the price?’ he asked.

‘Not if you had to buy a greenhouse and spend all day and all night pricking out seeds,’ Clara said with spirit.

‘No.’ Peter was thoughtful. Friends of his had told him that having a garden was a great drain on your money, and he had

consoled himself with this as he went upstairs to his apartment.

‘If

you come here again during the summer we could sit out

and have our lunch in this corner,’ she said.

‘I hope we’ll still be friends in the summer,’ he said simply.

They had steak and kidney pie for lunch and cheese afterwards.

Clara opened a bottle of red wine. When he asked her

where she had got it and how much it had cost, she lied and said she didn’t know, it had been a gift. She couldn’t bear to tell him that she had gone into a wine shop and asked for something full-bodied and classy, a Burgundy perhaps, and had paid accordingly. Peter Barry would have found that a great sin, not a generous, hospitable gesture.

He talked about the reps from the drugs companies who

came to sell their wares.

Clara told him that it was very encouraging to see people living so well with heart failure. Patients who had come in a few short months ago in a panic seeing the clinic as some kind of anteroom to the next world were now confident and able to manage on their own. He told her that they had had a drug addict in his pharmacy during the week. A boy totally out of his mind, demanding to be given access to morphine and antidepressants.

He carried the leg of a chair as a weapon; he was

thin and covered with scabs. Peter had brought him into the back and shown him the safe and the locked drawers. He had told the boy that they needed three keys to open them and one of the staff was on lunch break.

‘What did he do?’

‘He believed me. He began to cry and shake. I knew the

others had called the Guards so all I had to do was keep him there. I gave him a couple of tranquillisers and talked to him.

He thought we were waiting for someone to come back from lunch — then the Guards came. It was very upsetting.’

‘He’s somebody’s son, you mean?’ Clara asked.

‘Yes, someone had great hopes for him, gave him the full cream milk at the top of the bottle. And look at him now …’

He seemed genuinely concerned.

‘I know, but we can’t play God. I had a man in the other day, dizzy spells and irregular heartbeat, so Declan and I decided he needed to wear a Holter Monitor for twenty-four hours, to check on his heart rhythms. So we strapped him up and told him to come back the next day. When we printed out the report, we could see it had been turned off just before midnight. “Well, why did you turn it off?” I asked him. “I got lucky, Doctor, I picked up a fine dame and went home with her. You couldn’t expect me to wear that bloody thing, she’d think I was a weirdo . .

‘Can’t have been all that much wrong with his heart if he could score and bring someone back to his bed by eleven

thirty!’ Peter said.

‘Yes, well, we don’t know whether it did him any good or not. He took offence that we were so cross with him and he hasn’t been back!’

‘What will you do?’

‘Declan is the diplomat, he’ll find a ruse one way or

another, believe me.’

They talked about their daughters. Amy off learning about bondage garments in London, Adi hugging trees and Linda

sulking and mutinous. It wasn’t what either of them had

expected when they had first become parents.

‘Will you come to the theatre with me during the week?

There’s a new play at the Abbey,’ Peter asked suddenly.

‘That would be great, I was just reading about it this morning,’

she said.

Dervla rang her that night. ‘Has he gone?’ she whispered.

‘Oh, hours ago,’ Clara said.

‘I forgot he was Mr Early-to-bed,’ Dervla said.

‘Well, it was lunch I invited him to.’

‘Right, right — now the third date, has it been mentioned?’

‘The Abbey Theatre, Wednesday,’ Clara said.

Dervla gave a yelp of pleasure. ‘So it’s more than a whirl then?’

‘I don’t know.’ Clara was cautious.

‘And a fling? It’s not really a fling.’ Dervla was searching for a definition.

‘I’m a bit old for a fling,’ Clara said.

‘Right - will we call it a thing? Clara is having a thing with Peter …’

‘Really, Dervla, you are an idiot!’ Clara said, but she

laughed.

‘It’s a thing,’ Dervla cried. ‘It has now been officially designated a thing …’

Amy came in from the airport exhausted.

‘Were they interesting, the clothes you saw?’ he asked. He and Clara had decided they must assume some kind of

enthusiasm for their daughters’ lives or they would lose them altogether.

‘Oh, Dad, please.’ Amy seemed to think he was pathetic.

But he ploughed on. ‘You’re my daughter, Amy, you’ve

taken up a new career, is it so bad that I be interested?’

Amy was still suspicious. ‘You’re only going to say what a waste, how I threw away my opportunities and all that.’

‘Well, no, I wasn’t going to say that, I was just wondering did you see things you might import? But if it annoys you, let’s just leave it.’ His voice was different somehow.

Amy spoke slowly. ‘It was interesting, yes, but I think it might be risky spending big money on some of the things they have — a lot of leather, restraints, dominatrix gear, if you know what I mean.’

‘I know.’ Peter nodded gravely.

‘It’s not that there isn’t a call for it, there is, but most of our customers almost prefer to go to London to be anonymous.

That’s what I think anyway, I may be wrong.’

‘That’s intelligent, to notice that; so it wasn’t a wasted trip?’

‘No, not at all. And I met a lovely guy on the plane coming back tonight. We’re going out tomorrow.’

‘Is he in the same line of business?’

‘Ben? Oh no, Ben is an embalmer.’