Semi-Sweet

by Roisin Meaney

  “Well,” he said, dipping another shard into his coffee, preoccupied all at once with the task at hand, “since she’s the only one I know who teaches, I thought I may as well ask her.” Raising and lowering the softening piece of chocolate into the steaming coffee, head bent. “Of course, there’s no guarantee that she’ll agree.”

  Hannah put down her mug. “Look at me,” she demanded.

  Adam turned an innocent face toward her. “What?”

  “You fancy her. You fancy the scary woman.”

  He laughed incredulously. “You’re such a drama queen. Just because I decide that I’d like to—”

  “You fancy her. It’s written all over your face.”

  “Look, I don’t know what you—”

  “You bought a clarinet because you fancy her, and you’re going to pretend you want to play it.”

  “I won’t be pretending,” he protested. “I think it might be…interesting, learning to play a musical instrument.”

  “You know how I know?” she demanded. “Because I did the same with John Wyatt. I pretended to be really interested in learning how to play something, just because I…sort of fancy him.”

  His eyes widened. “You fancy the Scotsman? You sneaky thing.”

  “Don’t change the subject. You haven’t a note in your head. You haven’t a musical bone in your body.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with—”

  “I bet you didn’t even know what a clarinet was until you started fancying her. I bet you thought it was a flute she was playing.”

  “Of course I knew what a clarinet was,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I’m familiar with all the woodwind instruments.”

  “Woodwind instruments,” Hannah said triumphantly. “You’ve been cramming so you’ll sound as if you know about them in case she asks you.”

  He stopped. “Damn,” he said, a bashful grin spreading over his face. “You’re good.”

  “So you do fancy her.”

  “Yes,” he said, replacing his remaining half egg in its cardboard box. “I do. I’m not sure how it happened, but I find myself quite…taken with this woman.” He got up and brought his mug to the sink. “And just for the record, she’s not a bit scary. She’s very shy, and quite sweet, I’m sure.”

  Hannah stood, too, brushing chocolate crumbs from her clothes. “Well, I have to say I think it’s terribly romantic, buying a clarinet just to get to know someone. Terribly foolish, of course, and extremely wasteful, but very romantic.” She put her mug in the sink. “So when are you going to ask her about lessons?”

  He ran water. “Soon. Next time I go to the bar. Probably next weekend.”

  “I have to be there.”

  “Fine.”

  “But what if she says no? What if you have to have some kind of musical qualification or something before she’ll take you on?”

  He looked at her in dismay. “I never thought of that.”

  “What did you pay for it?”

  “Forty-eight pounds sterling. I had to bid a bit.”

  “Wow.” Hannah picked up the tea towel. “But could you not have tried asking her out? It might have been slightly less trouble than buying a clarinet on eBay.” She giggled. “Sorry, but it’s funny.”

  “Go on, laugh. I did consider asking her out, but to be honest I think she’d run a mile. I think I’ll have to take the softly-softly approach.”

  Hannah looked fondly at him. “Have you ever actually spoken to this woman?”

  “Not as such, no—except for asking her the name of a piece they played one evening, and I think I nearly gave her a heart attack.”

  “So in fact you don’t even know if she’s single.”

  “Well, not exactly—”

  “She could be married. She could have half a dozen kids.”

  Adam threw her a pained look. “I’ve decided to assume otherwise, until I know for sure.”

  “I see.” Hannah dried a mug. “I have to say, though, she’s nothing at all like the ones you usually go for.”

  “I know.” He smiled as he lifted the second mug from the water. “Maybe I’ve been going for the wrong ones.”

  “Maybe we both have,” she said thoughtfully.

  “So tell me more,” he said, “about you fancying the Scotsman.”

  Hannah considered. “Ah, maybe I don’t really,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t even buy a saxophone—how serious can I be?”

  “Very funny.”

  Alice gave her husband new pajamas, handing them across the table when they’d finished breakfast. Sunday was the only day they had breakfast together now.

  “Happy Easter,” she said. “It’s just pajamas. You needed a new pair anyway.”

  Tom’s hand trembled slightly as he took the brown-wrapped package. “I got you nothing,” he said. “I’m sorry.” Other years she’d been given chocolate eggs, Terry’s or Toblerone.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She should tell him to pull himself together. She should be trying to get help for him, maybe urging him to talk to their doctor about his drinking. But the rage was still there, keeping her immobile. The rage had made her buy the pajamas, knowing she would get nothing in return. Another little portion of guilt for him to carry around.

  He’d stopped shaving every day; now it was two or three times a week. He looked worse after he shaved, his chin littered with cuts. No way could he do any dental work with those shaking hands.

  She’d stopped going into his bedroom—his bedroom now, not theirs anymore—apart from once a fortnight when she took the old sheets off his bed and put clean ones on. The room smelled of whiskey, although he was keeping it fairly clean.

  “I’m going to eleven Mass,” she told him.

  “Are you?”

  She didn’t think he’d been to Mass since the accident, unless he went during the week when she was out at work.

  “I’ll go for a walk by the river afterward,” she said. “It’s a good day for walking.” Sunday mornings they’d often have gone for a walk after Mass if the weather was good.

  “That’ll be nice,” he said. “You’ll enjoy that.”

  “I’m doing lamb chops for dinner,” she said. Not the stuffed turkey crown that she usually got at Easter. Chops would do him this year.

  “Lovely,” he said. “I look forward to that.”

  Fiona brought a bottle of Glenfiddich for Patrick and a set of bath oils for Leah, and she was presented with a string of chunky lilac beads that Leah had bought with Patrick’s credit card.

  “It’s from both of us,” she said as Fiona opened the long gray box. “Happy Easter, Mum.”

  No hug. They didn’t hug each other these days, Patrick noticed.

  “Thank you, darling,” Fiona said, glancing at the beads before snapping the box shut. “They’re delightful. And thank you, too, Patrick,” she added. “It’s thoughtful of you both.”

  She was making an effort. Patrick poured her a generous gin, added bitter lemon and a lemon slice. “Cheers,” he said, raising his glass.

  This would be all right. Fiona was getting over her resentment of how he and Leah had gotten together. Somewhere along the way, she’d learned to live with the idea of the baby. Maybe she was even beginning to look forward to the arrival of her first grandchild.

  The conversation over the drinks was formal, as he’d expected. They talked about the abrupt closure of Clongarvin’s only music store, and the helicopter crash in Donegal, and the changeable weather. Leah asked her mother about the garden, and Fiona talked about kerria and forsythia and pyracantha and other names that didn’t mean a thing to Patrick.

  Lunch was chicken, Fiona’s meat of choice. Patrick opened a bottle of sauvignon blanc from New Zealand that had cost him more than thirty euro, and he poured a glass each for himself and Fiona. They talked about an exhibition in the National Gallery that Fiona had visited on a recent trip to Dublin and a reiki course Leah was planning to do after the baby arrived. Patrick mentioned a
n upcoming trip to France, to attend a journalists’ convention in Lyon. The main course passed peacefully.

  And then, as they were just starting on the crème caramel, Fiona said, “May I ask again if you two have any plans to get married?”

  Leah shot Patrick a look—warning? pleading?—before turning to her mother. “It’s not something we’ve talked about.”

  “I see.” Fiona rested her spoon on the side of her plate. “And I take it you’re going to continue living here after the baby is born.”

  “Mum,” Leah said quietly.

  “We’ll find a bigger place when we get the chance,” Patrick said quickly. “One thing at a time.”

  “As I understand it,” Fiona said coolly, “you have no property of your own.”

  “Please, Mum,” Leah said, “don’t ruin this.”

  “I’m just attempting to establish the facts, darling.” Fiona’s eyes didn’t leave Patrick’s face. “You lived in your parents’ house, didn’t you, until you moved in with Hannah Robinson?”

  “That’s true,” he said tightly, resisting the impulse to pick up the wine bottle and bring it down on her immaculately coiffed head. “My mother died when I was young, and I lived with my father up to a year and a half ago.”

  “And then you moved in with Hannah,” Fiona said, “and now you’ve moved in with Leah.”

  “Mum.” Leah’s voice held a note of desperation, but her mother didn’t even glance in her direction.

  “Mrs. Bradshaw,” Patrick said evenly, “I find your attitude quite offensive, and I suspect it’s entirely deliberate.”

  Fiona smiled thinly. “Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m not trying to offend anyone. I’m just concerned about the future upbringing of my grandchild, that’s all—and your present circumstances don’t seem particularly…stable to me.”

  Patrick said nothing. He felt a pulse throbbing in his forehead.

  Fiona turned to Leah. “Geraldine Robinson put me in a very embarrassing position at bridge last week,” she said. “She demanded, in front of everyone, that I name the father of your baby, knowing full well that everyone there knew that Patrick had been with her daughter until recently. You can imagine how that went down, can’t you?”

  “So you were embarrassed,” Patrick said tightly, ignoring Leah’s hand on his arm, “and now you’re taking it out on us.”

  Leah stood up abruptly, clumsily. Her face had flushed deeply, and her eyes were filled with imminent tears. She turned and left the room.

  Patrick watched her go, then forced himself to turn back and meet Fiona’s gaze. She was Leah’s mother. Like it or not, she was part of Leah’s life—and part of his now.

  “I’m sorry if you’ve been put into an awkward position with your friends”—he emphasized the last word slightly, imagining the bridge contingent, delighted to have a bit of a scandal to chew on—“but Leah and I will not be pushed into making any plans simply to spare your blushes. We’ll do things in our own time, as we see fit, and I hope you can accept that without causing Leah any more distress.”

  Fiona held his gaze for what seemed like an awfully long time. Her face was as devoid of expression as ever, and Patrick suddenly wondered if she’d had something done to it to prevent any movement, any alteration of her features that might cause lines to develop. Then she got up and unhooked the strap of her bag from her chair back.

  “Thank you for lunch. I’ll see myself out.”

  She left the room, and Patrick made no attempt to follow her. He didn’t get up when he heard Leah’s raised voice in the hall and her mother’s inaudible replies. He didn’t move when the bedroom door was slammed or when the front door was opened and closed quietly shortly afterward.

  Eventually he poured what remained of the wine into his glass and sipped the tepid liquid unhurriedly while he finished his dessert. Then he got up and began to clear the table.

  “And how’s the new job going? I wish you’d come out to see us more often.”

  “I would, Ma, if I could hop on a bus, but you know there’s none to Dunmallon, so I have to wait for Adam to take me.” Nora shot an apologetic glance at her brother, who glared back. “The job is okay, although I probably won’t stay there too long—it’s not me, really. I’m trying to decide what my next move should be.”

  “I hope you’re not thinking about going back to America,” her mother said quickly. “Daddy and I wouldn’t like that at all. Would we?” she demanded, turning to her husband.

  “No,” he said through a mouthful of roast potato.

  Adam smiled to himself. They probably thought she’d get married again the minute she set foot on American soil.

  “You picked up the accent,” their father said to Nora.

  “I did, didn’t I?” Nora helped herself to another spoonful of garden peas. “Ma, this lunch is amazing—I forgot how much I missed your roast lamb.”

  “Three hours in the oven, a hundred and sixty,” her mother said. “Forget twenty minutes to the pound, it’d come out half raw. Three hours, isn’t that what I always do?” she asked her husband.

  “Three hours,” he said, forking up more lamb.

  “And Adam, what’s your news?” their mother asked. “Any nice young lady?”

  “No, Ma,” Adam said. “I’m between nice young ladies right now. But I’m keeping an eye open.”

  Every time he saw her, she asked. He presumed that the question was programmed into every woman who gave birth to a son. He debated briefly telling them about the clarinet but then decided to wait until he’d at least gotten the lessons set up.

  His mother sighed. “I’ll never be a grandmother,” she said, “with the pair of you. Nora keeps getting divorced, and you’re doing nothing at all. I can’t for the life of me see why you and Hannah wouldn’t get together and have done with it.”

  “Yes, bro, I think you and Hannah would be perfect for each other,” Nora put in, grinning.

  “Ma, you’re far too young to be thinking like that,” Adam said, shooting his sister another dark look as he tried to calculate his mother’s age. Sixty-three or thereabouts. “There’s lots of time.”

  “There is not lots of time. Everyone your age is married or getting engaged. I’m the only one I know with no grandchildren. There’ll be nobody left to choose from if you wait much longer.”

  “True…I’ll set my mind to it. Would I put an ad in the paper, d’you think?”

  As his mother sighed exasperatedly, Adam wondered what Vivienne’s home was like. He imagined a small cottage—a single woman’s house, he thought firmly—filled with things made of china and flowers in vases. Rugs in muted colors on the floors and maybe a wall hanging of birds that she’d made herself.

  A small room where she gave her lessons, her clarinet on a polished wooden table next to a music stand. Narrow attic stairs to her bedroom, the bed covered with a white crocheted spread.

  “How’s Hannah’s shop doing?” his father asked.

  “Good,” he said, relieved at the change of subject. “She’s kept busy, but it’s going well. She’s taken on a part-time assistant.”

  “We must take a trip up to see it,” his mother said, turning to her husband again. “Mustn’t we?”

  “Oh, we must, sometime soon.”

  A dreadful squawking erupted just then outside the back door, causing them to abandon the roast lamb. They rushed out to find the hysterical chickens being chased joyfully around the yard by Kirby, who’d somehow managed to wriggle free from his rope.

  He was reattached more firmly to the yard gate, well out of reach of the fowls, who soon recovered from their fright and began pecking the ground again.

  “He’s full of energy,” their father said, regarding the dog sternly.

  “I might take him for a bit of a walk after lunch,” Adam replied. “Tire him out.”

  They went back inside and followed the lamb with tea and fruitcake, and then their father disappeared to listen to the second half of a football matc
h on the radio, and Nora and her mother tackled the washing-up while Adam escaped with his dog and strolled along country roads for an hour.

  “God, nothing changes there,” Nora said on the ride home, Adam steering the car carefully between the potholes that lined the laneway to their parents’ house.

  “No, but it suits them.” He longed suddenly for that life, the comfortable coexistence with the person you chose, and who chose you.

  Nora yawned. “The boredom of it, though. Miles from anywhere, nothing going on. I’d slit my wrists. You can have my cake,” she added. “I’m watching my fabulous figure.” Ma never let any visitor leave without a generous slab of whatever she’d been baking.

  Adam hadn’t mentioned the clarinet to Nora. He could imagine her reaction. It was a daft thing to do—he knew exactly how daft it was. But there was the hope within him that this daft action, this illogical plan of his, would lead him to where he wanted to be.

  His clarinet should have arrived by next Saturday, and then everything would be in place. He’d intercept Vivienne on her way out and ask if he might please have a word. He would make every effort not to sound like a crazed stalker.

  She couldn’t possibly turn him down. He was only looking for music lessons. Where was the harm in that?

  May

  John Wyatt passed the yellow-fronted shop on the opposite side of the street. He walked half a block, and then he retraced his steps, crossing the road when he saw a gap in the traffic. He pushed the shop door open and walked in.

  The woman behind the counter wasn’t Hannah. It threw him for a second—he hadn’t been expecting that.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling.

  She was younger, hardly out of her teens. Her skin was pale, her hair tied back. She wore the same apron he’d seen on Hannah, with wide white and navy stripes overlain with a yellow smiling sun. Her shade of lipstick was too light against her pale face. Her eyes were the green of the glass marbles he remembered from childhood.

  “Hi there,” he said, glancing at the displays under the counter. “I’ll take a couple of cupcakes, please—you can choose.”