Quentins (13 page)

They worked in a place which served only food smothered in batter. In another, where there was after-hours drinking and people wanted omelets way into the night. They tried to take over an office canteen but were given so little money, it was impossible to present decent food. Finally, they were in a place where they realized that tax avoidance and cutting corners were going to have it closed down. This last place began to break their hearts. Particularly, since the management was supercilious and snobbish and made the guests feel uneasy.

“We'll have to leave here,” Brenda said. “If you saw how they humiliate people in the dining room.”

“Don't let's go until we have somewhere else,” Patrick begged.

That very next night Brenda saw the nice boy Quentin Barry, whom she often met when doing extra afternoon shifts at Hayward's. He was with his mother and had chosen a quiet table far across the room from her.

It was a quiet night. She had served her tables. Quietly she took off her shoes as she stood behind a serving table with its long tablecloth hiding her indiscretion from the restaurant. Her shoes were tight and high and she had been on her feet since eight
A
.
M
. It was bliss to be in her stocking feet.

She looked across at the mother and son talking. Very alike in blond and handsome looks but not in manner. Mrs. Barry was fussy and very self-conscious. Quentin was gentle and a listener. But not tonight. He was telling his mother about something that seemed to astonish her.

Automatically, Brenda tuned in. She didn't have any sense of eavesdropping; to her this was as if they were speaking at the top of their voices.

“You only get peanuts, working as a waiter,” Sara Barry was saying.

“I got enough working there to keep myself for several years.” Quentin was quiet.

“Yes, but you can't
buy
a place, Quentin. Be serious, sweetheart. You're not the kind of person who can
buy
a place and make a restaurant out of it.”

“It's not very smart now. In fact, Mick's café, well, it's very down at heel, but if I get the right people . . .”

“No, darling, listen to me. You know nothing of business. You'd be bankrupt in a month . . .”

“I'll get people who would know, people who were trained, who would do it right.”

“You'd tire of it every day. The anxiety . . .”

“I wouldn't be there. I'd be traveling.”

“I feel quite weak, Quentin,” Sara said.

“No, Mother. Don't feel weak. I just wanted you to know how happy I am. I haven't been happy for a very long time. You used to tell me I was the love and the light of your life. I thought you'd be pleased to know I am so happy.”

Brenda then for the first time realized she was in a private conversation and looked away. She put on her shoes, walked to the kitchen on unsteady feet.

“Patrick,” she said. “Could you pour me a small brandy?”

“You look as if you've seen a ghost.”

“I've seen our future,” she said.

And in a matter of days it was sorted out.

It would be their future to turn Mick's café into the restaurant they had always dreamed of.

“What will you call it?” they asked Quentin.

“If you don't think it's too arrogant, I think my own name,” he said shyly. “And now, can I ask you one thing—how did you hear I was buying Mick's place? I know he didn't tell anyone, and I didn't tell anyone. So it's a mystery.” He smiled.

Brenda paused. “I don't put it on my CV. It's not a nice quality. But I lip-read. I heard you telling your mother.” She looked down.

“It's a good quality to have when you run a restaurant,” Quentin said. “I bet we'll be glad of it through the years.”

N
o one could remember why he was called Blouse Brennan. No one except his big brother, Patrick.

Blouse was a bit slow at school, but he was very willing so they didn't make fun of him. The Brothers liked him, Blouse was always there to deliver a message or run downtown and get them a pack of cigarettes, and the shopkeepers never minded giving them to Blouse though he was well underage, because you'd know they weren't for himself.

The other boys decided that Blouse was not to be tormented because of his brother, Patrick. Patrick was built like a tank and you'd be a foolish lad to take him on. So Blouse lived a fairly peaceful life for a guy who couldn't play games properly, who stumbled over his shoes and couldn't remember more than two lines of poetry no matter how long he studied.

When Patrick left school to serve his time in a hotel, Blouse worried. “They might beat me when you're gone next term,” he said fearfully.

“They won't.” Patrick was a man of few words.

“But you won't be there, Patrick.”

“I'll come in once a week until they understand,” Patrick said. And true to his word, he was there on the first day of term walking idly around the schoolyard, giving a cuff here, a push there, to establish a presence.
Anyone who had even contemplated picking on Blouse Brennan had a severe change of mind.

Patrick Brennan would be back.

Patrick came home every weekend and always took his brother out for a run. The boy could talk to him in a way he didn't talk at home. Their parents were elderly and distant. Too absorbed in making a living from the small holding with its few animals and its rocky soil.

“Why do they call me Blouse, do you know, Patrick?”

“Sure, they have to call you something, they call me Pillowcase at work.” Patrick was shruggy about it all.

“I've no idea how it all came about,” Blouse said. So Patrick told him what he knew. It had all started when the lad had been heard calling his shirt his blouse years back and some of the kids had picked up on the name.

For some reason it had stuck. Even the Brothers called him that and half the people in the town. His mother and father called him Sonny, so hardly anyone knew that he had been baptized Joseph Matthew Brennan.

Patrick worked very hard in the hotel business. He rose from scullery helper to kitchen hand, he did stints as a porter and at the front desk and eventually went to take a catering course, where he met a girl called Brenda and brought her photograph home for inspection.

“She's got a lovely smile,” said Blouse.

“She looks healthy enough,” his father admitted grudgingly.

“Not a girl to settle in the land, I'd say,” his mother complained.

“Well, that's also for the best, then, since Brenda and I haven't a notion of running this place. Blouse will be in charge here in the fullness of time.”

Patrick spoke very definitely.

The parents, as was their custom, said nothing at all.

And that was the day Blouse got his great bout of confidence. He was fourteen years old, but one day he would be a landowner. That made him superior to nearly everyone else in his class at school. He made the mistake of telling Horse Harris, who was a bully, and Horse mocked him and pushed him around. “Squire Blouse,” he kept calling him.

Patrick made one appearance in the schoolyard and rearranged the nose of Horse Harris. Nothing more was said, the word “Squire” was never mentioned again.

One day Patrick bought Blouse a pint and said that when he and Brenda married, he would like Blouse to be their best man.

“Imagine you a married man with a home of your own,” Blouse said.

“You're always welcome to come and see us, stay the night, even a weekend.”

“I know, but I wouldn't have much call going to Dublin. What would a fellow called Blouse be doing in a big city?” he asked.

Patrick brought Brenda home for a visit.

Very good looking, Blouse thought, and confident. Not like people round here. She was very polite to his mother and father, helped with the washing up and didn't mind the big hairy dog pawing her smart skirt.

She explained to Blouse and Patrick's mother that the wedding would be performed by her uncle, who was a priest, and she reassured their father that it would be a very small affair, only twenty people at the most. They were going to have a beautiful wedding cake and bottles of wine.

Wouldn't people think it off not to have plates of cold chicken and ham? Blouse's mother wanted to know.

Apparently not in Dublin, where people were as odd as two left shoes.

There was a lot of groaning and grumbling when the day came. Blouse drove his parents to the railway station and Patrick met them in Dublin. Blouse wondered how anyone could live in a place as full of noise and strangers as Dublin, but he said nothing, just smiled at everyone and shook hands when it seemed the right thing to do.

He thought the meal was extraordinary all right, no bit of dinner but the cakes a miracle. Imagine, his own big brother had iced it and done all those curly bits himself and the pink writing, too, with the names and the date.

He was taking his parents home on the five o'clock train. There had been no question of an overnight in Dublin. It would have been too much for them.

Brenda, his new sister-in-law, had been very kind. “When we get a place with more room than just the floor, Blouse, you'll come and stay with us. We'd like that and we'll show you Dublin.”

“I'll do that one day, maybe even drive the whole way in the van,” Blouse said proudly.

It would be something to think about, look forward to. Something to say around the village. “My sister-in-law in Dublin wants me to go and stay.”

His father got a pain in his chest and died three months after Patrick's wedding. His mother seemed to think it was just one more low in life, like the hens not laying properly or the blight in the apple trees. Blouse looked after her the best he could. And time went on the way it always had.

There weren't any girlfriends because Blouse said he wasn't really at ease with girls. He never understood what they were laughing at, and if he laughed, too, they stopped laughing. But he wasn't lonely. He even went to Dublin to see his brother and sister-in-law. He drove the van the whole way.

Brenda and Patrick worried about how Blouse would
cope with the traffic, but it wasn't necessary. He arrived at the house without a bother.

“I meant to tell you about the quays being one way,” Patrick said.

“That wasn't a problem,” Blouse said. He sat eagerly, like a child waiting to be entertained.

They talked to him easily and told him how they were hoping to get a job running a really classy restaurant, for a man called Quentin Barry.

“It has all been due to Brenda,” Patrick said proudly. She had managed to find them this opportunity just at the right time.

Quentin Barry had come into some money, bought Mick's café and wanted to set up a restaurant. He needed a chef and manager.

If this were to happen!

If they got this place going properly, they were made, because the man would hardly be back at all. They could put their own stamp on the restaurant.

Blouse wasn't a drinker, but he had a glass of champagne with them to celebrate. When he got home, his mother said that Horse Harris had been around to talk business about the farm.

“What did Horse want to know?” Blouse was worried. Horse had never been good news. Apparently he had talked business with his mother. That was all she would say. Blouse wondered if he should tell Patrick all about it, but no, they were too busy and excited. They had gotten the job working for this man Quentin, who was going to let them set up their own class of a place. It wouldn't be fair, boring them with matters about Horse Harris coming to the farm and Mam's refusal to talk about it all.

Brenda wrote a note every week as regular as clockwork, and Patrick wrote a few lines at the end.

“I don't know what it is that has her writing all that
nonsense every week, and putting a stamp on it,” Mrs. Brennan said. “Too little to do, that's her problem.”

But Blouse liked it. He told Horse one day that he got a letter every week from Dublin.

“Don't bother your barney replying to those two, they're after the place, that's all,” Horse had said scathingly.

Blouse went to take his mother her mug of tea and found her dead. He knelt down beside her bed and said a prayer, then he got the doctor, the priest and Shay Harris, the undertaker. When he had everything organized he phoned Patrick and Brenda.

There was a respectable number of people there.

“You're very much liked here, Blouse,” Patrick said to him.

“Aw, sure, they all liked Mam and Dad,” Blouse said.

Shay Harris asked if Patrick was going to take his things with him when he was going back to Dublin.

“What things?” Patrick asked.

And they learned that Shay's brother Horse had bought the little farm. His money was in the bank safe and sound, it was all legal and documented. Blouse would have to leave in a month.

Patrick was incensed but oddly, Brenda didn't agree. “He'd be far too lonely here on his own, Patrick. He would become a recluse. Tell him to come and live with us in Dublin.”

“Blouse would be lost in Dublin,” said Patrick.

Blouse couldn't believe it all. “I'm too stupid to live anywhere,” he said sadly. “I should have told you about Horse coming round here, but I was afraid you'd think I wanted you to come down and hit him for me again.”

“My days of belting people are over, Blouse,” Patrick said.

“You'll come and be near us,” Brenda said. “You'll
have your own money from the sale of the farm, so when you want to find a place for yourself you can, and you'd be a great help to us.”

“What could I do? I only dig fields and mind sheep and collect eggs from under the hens.”

“Couldn't you do that for us in Dublin too?” Brenda suggested.

Patrick looked at her, bewildered.

“Well, maybe not the sheep, but we could get an allotment.”

“A what?”

“Allotment. You know, Blouse. They must have them in country towns too. Big bits of waste ground and everyone rents a patch and grows their own things on it, digs and plants and harvests.”

“And who would it belong to?” Blouse was confused.

“Well, whoever owns the bit of ground, I suppose. I'll bring you and show you. They have little sheds and huts to put your shovels and forks in and big fences of wire to grow things up against, and what you grow you keep.”

Even Patrick seemed to think it was a good idea. “We could put that on the menu. . . organic vegetables, fresh free-range eggs,” he said.

“But where would I live?” Blouse began.

“There are plenty of places letting rooms near here. I'll ask around and find out,” Patrick said.

“And you could eventually come and live with us, of course,” said Brenda. “There's a warren of old rooms in the back and upstairs. They're in the most desperate state at the moment, but it will all look fine in time. We've done our room upstairs, so when we have time to get the rubble cleared out we'd paint one of them for you. You could help choose the paint and all.”

His mother had never asked him what color room he'd like. Blouse had always wanted yellow walls and a white ceiling. He had seen a room like that in a
magazine and thought it would be very cheerful with a tartan bedspread. And now he was going to have one of his own.

“I'd love to see the place and have a vision of it,” he said.

There was something about the way he said “vision” that made Brenda and Patrick feel choked up.

They had a million other things to do which were higher priority than finding Blouse somewhere to stay, but that's not the way it seemed now.

“Come on and we'll take you to see where you might live,” Brenda said.

Once they arrived at the shambles that was going to be their beloved restaurant they found themselves leading Blouse off to the storehouses, outhouses and falling-down rooms that formed the back of Quentins.

Blouse found a room that suited him well. He was not one to sit down and talk about things. “Will I start on it now, do you think, Brenda?” he asked with his big, innocent smile.

She seemed to have tears in her eyes when she said that would be great, but he might have imagined it.

He got a wheelbarrow and got rid of the rubble. Blouse wanted the room to be nice and empty when they brought up all the furniture from home, from the little farm that Horse Harris had bought. They would bring the bed he had slept in all his life and the grandfather clock.

“Maybe I'll clear out a few other rooms for you,” Blouse offered. “We have a lot of furniture coming up from home, and if in the future you could offer the staff living accommodations, you might get them cheaper.”