A Taste for It

by Monica McInerney

  As they made their way down the long drive, she forced a wide smile onto her face, and looked over at Cormac.

  “I need a drink,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Maura settled back into the comfortable bench seat, and took a grateful sip of the hot whiskey Cormac had ordered from the bar. She looked around at the small pub, one of only a handful in the tiny village of Doolin.

  On the journey Cormac had picked up on his concise tour of Ireland, pointing out stone circles and historic ruins in the fields alongside the winding roads. The blue skies were giving away to dark cloud, and by the time they pulled up in front of the pub a cold wind had struck up and heavy droplets of rain were falling.

  She enjoyed Cormac’s company. There was something uncomplicated about him, and his outrageous flirtation was obviously well-practised and not to be taken too seriously.

  “Let’s just pretend you’re on holiday with me here, Maura,” he had said, cheerfully slipping into tour-guide mode. “Doolin’s famous for music and good pub food. This is picture-postcard Ireland for you now. And with any luck there will be some real Irish people for you to look at among all the Germans and Swiss and French and Australians and Americans in the pubs down here.”

  She’d seen what he meant within minutes of coming into the pub. The tables were packed with groups of tourists, recognisable by their backpacks and postcard-writing as much as their foreign voices.

  Once again, one long bench had been kept empty, the positions claimed by a row of musical instruments, she was glad to see. She’d very much enjoyed the music session she and Dominic had walked into in Galway, despite the way the evening had ended. And at least she didn’t have to give a series of talks tomorrow, like that time. She could relax a little, knowing that everything was ready for tomorrow night’s dinner.

  Cormac ordered her another hot whiskey before she had finished the first. She enjoyed the taste very much, the cloves and sugar and water diluting the strong spirit taste.

  Cormac returned from the bar with the two steaming glasses and gestured over to the musicians’ bench. A half a dozen men and women had now gathered and were taking violins and guitars from their cases, and doing a few lively snatches of tunes as warm-ups.

  “You’re in for a treat,” Cormac leaned over to whisper. “It might be put on for the tourists tonight, but it’s still a hell of a show.”

  Maura leaned back against the headrest and relaxed as the music began to swell around them. All the postcard-writing was put away and the empty soup bowls pushed to one side, as all the customers gave their full attention to the music.

  The sight of the empty dishes reminded Maura that she hadn’t eaten properly since breakfast that morning. She’d had only a little bit of salad at lunchtime and it was now close to nine o’clock. Cormac affectionately placed his arm around her shoulders and she realised in the gentle haze of the whiskey that the weight of it was quite pleasant. It was a shame there was no spark between them, she thought mistily. He really was a lovely fellow.

  But Cormac seemed to realise that she saw him just as a friend too, and was happily playing the genial host.

  She stood up to go to the bathroom, and was surprised to find the room spinning slightly. She’d have to ask Cormac for a glass of water, she realised –the whiskey had obviously gone to her head a little bit.

  But when she returned it was to find that Cormac had slipped up to the bar and bought her another. One more won’t hurt, she decided. And she really was getting very accustomed to the distinctive smoky taste of the whiskey.

  The music had changed from jigs and reels to some lively singing of traditional songs. She was surprised to realise she knew some of the tunes and was able to join in with many of the others.

  “You’ve a lovely singing voice,” Cormac leaned over to say. “You’ll have to sing us a traditional Australian one yourself.”

  Maura shook her head and laughed. Her voice was okay, but nothing special. But others in the pub seemed to be volunteering to sing some of their national tunes, bravely starting without accompaniment, but giving the musicians grateful glances as they joined in once the tune became familiar to them.

  The leader of the musicians applauded enthusiastically as one of the German visitors sat down, red-faced, having sung a lusty version of a traditional German folk song.

  “Any other volunteers?”

  To Maura’s embarrassment, Cormac stood up and said, “We’ve an Australian here, I’m sure she’d love to sing us a good outback song, wouldn’t you, Maura?”

  Maura protested laughingly, as the other patrons urged her to give them a song. She was distracted for a second as she looked through the bar into the room beyond. The whiskey must have affected her eyesight. She could have sworn she saw Dominic and Carla in a group of people in the room through the bar. She shook her head, declining their offer.

  But Cormac wasn’t to be put off so easily and several others in the crowd continued to urge her on.

  Feeling a little dazed, she stood shakily to her feet, looking around in vain for some other Australian in the pub who could help her. All of a sudden she was damned if she could remember the tune let alone the words of any Australian song. Exactly how many whiskeys had she had tonight?

  A familiar tune suddenly popped into her head. Fuelled with Dutch courage, she decided she’d give it a go. What the hell, she was a long way from home. She smiled and nodded at Cormac.

  “Good girl yourself,” he smiled encouragingly. “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Maura Carmody all the way from Clare, South Australia, with a traditional Australian song.”

  Maura stood up, and half-closed her eyes, trying vainly to remember all the words of the tune in her head.

  Smiling at Cormac and swaying ever so slightly, she began to sing. Midway through the second verse, she noticed some confused glances between several of the tourists and stopped, losing her confidence. “Is that an Australian song? I thought it was Scottish,” she heard one beside her whisper. Through the whiskey haze, Maura mentally rewound the words she’d just been singing – something about Donald and Isle of Skye and lassies shouting about troosers. She suddenly realised that she’d launched into the Scottish ditty ‘Donald, Where’s Your Troosers?’ How on earth had that come into her head? The last time she’d sung it was in a very bad student revue years before. Cormac seemed to find it completely hilarious, as Maura brought her hands up to her face to hide her embarrasment. The whiskey obviously had a lot to answer for.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, laughing through her fingers. “The wrong one came into my head.”

  The musicians didn’t seem to mind, picking up the tune and gaily ending the song. Maura suddenly remembered the one Australian song she did know the words to. Feeling brave now and convinced she couldn’t embarrass herself any further, she stood up again.

  “I’ll give it another go.” With that, she began softly, singing the first verse of ‘And the band played Waltzing Matilda’, a lilting, haunting song about young Australian soldiers going off to the First World War.

  To her surprise, the musicians all knew it very well, and one or two other people joined in the singing, until Maura no longer needed to lead them. She took her seat again in relief, shyly accepting Cormac’s effusive compliments.

  “That was gorgeous. Not a patch on the other for novelty value, but beautiful all the same,” he whispered.

  She leaned into him gratefully, her head spinning slightly. After a minute she opening her eyes and found herself looking straight at Dominic. She hadn’t imagined it. He and Carla had come out from the back dining-room and must have seen not only her version of Eric Bogle’s song, but by the sneering look Carla was giving her, they had obviously heard her surprise rendition of ‘Donald, Where’s Your Troosers?’

  Maura resisted a temptation to poke her tongue out. She suddenly felt too weary - and to be honest with herself, too drunk - to be bothered about the pair of them. Feeling Dominic’s eyes still
on her, she leaned against Cormac and whispered, “Can you please take me home to bed?”

  “Well, haven’t I been just dying to hear you say that,” Cormac laughed down at her. “Will you not just stay for one more? The musicians are just warming up.”

  “I really think I should lie down,” she said, feeling a rush of nausea come over her.

  Cormac looked at her closely, realising she wasn’t used to the strong whiskey.

  “Come on then, I’ll take you back and between myself and Bernadette we’ll have you safely tucked up in no time.”

  * * *

  The sound of a gentle knock at the door awoke her the next morning. She lifted her head from the pillow, groaning softly as a dull headache made itself felt. She looked at her bedside clock. Five o’clock.

  “Oh, no,” she thought with a low moan, remembering the whiskies and her singing the night before. Cormac had reassured her the whole way back to Ardmahon House – no, she hadn’t made a fool of herself and she didn’t seem at all drunk to him. But Maura knew she had drunk far more than she should have and hoped she wouldn’t pay for it too badly today. Not with forty certified foodies coming for dinner that night.

  She barely remembered leaving the pub the night before. They had walked past Dominic and Caria on their way to the door. Maura had managed a feeble sort of smile, glad she had the support of Cormac’s arm around her. In return, she had been ignored by Carla and received a distracted nod from Dominic. Maura thought they looked like they were in the middle of a furious row.

  Maura lay back in the darkness, trying to work out just how bad she felt. She had just decided it was luckily more of an embarrassment hangover than a whiskey one, when there was another knock at the door. She heard Bernadette’s voice calling her softly.

  “I’m awake, come in,” she answered.

  “It’s Nick, calling from Australia,” Bernadette whispered. “He said he knows how early it is, but you have to get up.”

  Maura leapt out of her bed. The baby! She forgot about her headache as she practically sprinted down the stairs to the phone in the hallway.

  “Nick, what is it, tell me!” she nearly shouted into the mouthpiece.

  She could practically feel the smile in her brother’s voice. “It’s a little boy, can you hear him? I’m calling from Fran’s hospital room.”

  Maura could just make out the sound of a baby crying in the background. “Is everything all right, is Fran all right, is the baby all right?” she asked in a rush.

  Nick laughed down the line, sounding as relieved and happy as she was.

  “Everything is just great. It all happened in a bit of a rush, and Fran’s pretty exhausted, but we’ve a little son and you’ve a little nephew. We’re going to call him Quinn. It was our great-grandfather’s name – what do you think?’’

  Maura thought it was beautiful. “I don’t believe it, I saw a sign here for a village called Quin yesterday and I was thinking of you. Maybe it was an omen.”

  She then spoke briefly to Fran, who sounded as relaxed as ever, very tired but very happy.

  She gently put the phone down and turned as Bernadette came down the stairs behind her. She was smiling broadly, having guessed what the call was about.

  “Congratulations, Auntie Maura. Come and have a cup of tea and tell me everything.” She looked closely at Maura. Maura grinned sheepishly back as Bernadette obviously recalled helping her to bed the evening before.

  “No, perhaps we’ll make it a strong black coffee.”

  * * *

  There was no time to feel hungover or embarrassed once the preparations for the two nights of the restaurant got into full swing.

  Maura felt the adrenalin rush, as she fell into the familiar pattern of organising a restaurant for two busy nights. There was the waiting staff to meet and brief, the menus to finalise, the usual last-minute hitches with supplies and getting used to the layout of the kitchen to serve fifty people a night. It was quite a different proposition to the relaxed cooking school.

  She was aware that Dominic and Carla were around the house, but was glad the activity gave her enough reason to keep well away from the pair of them. Dominic was polite to her, but since her outburst in Ennis, he had built a wall around himself. She had given up trying to explain or apologise and had retreated to the same, unnatural politeness he was displaying. Their rare conversations were like stilted exchanges from an 18th century novel. “I am well, ma’am. And you?” “I too am well, sir.”

  If it wasn’t making her feel so bad, she’d find it funny. And she knew Bernadette hadn’t missed a trick. She seemed to be keeping a very close eye on both of them.

  Carla seemed to have noticed the tension too and was enjoying it. She wandered into the kitchen late on Friday afternoon, deliberately leaning against one of the counters and whistling a Scottish tune under her breath to rile Maura. But Bernadette had saved Maura the effort by practically ordering her out of the kitchen.

  “If you’re not here to peel carrots, you’re not welcome here, I’m afraid,” she said, her wide smile masking any rudeness. To Maura’s surprise and relief, Carla sauntered out.

  The first night’s dinner was a success. Maura knew it, even as her waiting staff carried out the last of the desserts. Cormac poked his head around the kitchen door toward the end of the night to shout his congratulations, giving her an enthusiastic thumbs-up sign.

  “They all love it,” he grinned at her. “They’re calling for the chef. Come in and take a bow, before they’re all too drunk to realise who you are.”

  She felt in her element. While she had enjoyed most of the wine-tasting evenings, and relished the compliments people had given about the wine, she had felt she had been accepting them on Nick’s behalf. This time she knew it was her skill they were celebrating. Walking through the dining-room with Bernadette, meeting the tables of diners, who included quite a few food critics and writers from Dublin and London, she felt relaxed and confident.

  She drew near Dominic and Carla’s table on the other side of the room. They were sitting with two other couples and Maura overheard Carla telling the story of her experience at Lorikeet Hill for what must have been the hundredth time. Dominic seemed preoccupied and didn’t react as Carla finished the story, but Maura cringed as she heard the others laughing politely. Still, she took solace in the fact that they had finished the meals she had cooked for them tonight.

  She recalled her conversation with Dominic in the car on the first day together, when he had seemed scornful of the ‘foodie industry’. She had tried to explain that it wasn’t always an artificial world, that the combination of good food and wine sometimes almost weaved a magic spell. People relaxed when they were enjoying such spoiling, and she could see from the lively conversations going on around her that that was what was happening tonight.

  She looked around the room again and found herself looking straight into Dominic’s eyes. She had an odd feeling he knew exactly what she was thinking.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The second week of the cooking school got off to a great start. One of the young Irish girls had even brought her equally young fiance along.

  “We both spent a year backpacking around Australia and we loved the food,” a bright-eyed Una explained in the introductory session on the first day. “We’re getting married next month, and I thought I’m not going to be the one stuck in the kitchen while he sits in front of the telly banging his knife and fork together. So we’ve given ourselves this course as our wedding present.”

  Maura looked at Brian to see what he made of all that, but he was too busy gazing admiringly at Una to reply. He’d have followed her to a macramè course by the looks of things, she thought.

  To Maura and Bernadette’s amazement, the second group also contained a lovestruck young woman. Louisa spent the first day mooning about, apparently suffering from a broken heart and repeatedly writing her boyfriend’s name in a trail of soy sauce on the counter. And a French girl at first seemed
more interested in reading glossy magazines than learning the difference between coriander and basil in Asian-style broths.

  But by day three the bewitching flavours had got to them all, and as Maura set up for her food equivalent of Blind Man’s Bluff, she had everyone’s attention.

  “A lot of the dishes I’ve shown you this week have depended on one or two distinctive flavours to really give them that extra zing. So what I want to do now is give you a refresher course on some of those special ingredients, so you’ll always know them in your supermarkets and greengrocers,” she explained, as she brought out a series of covered bowls from under the counter.

  As she spoke, she heard the door behind her open and turned around. Dominic was standing there with a stern-faced middle-aged woman beside him. He looked over at her, and half-smiled. “Excuse me,” he said apologetically. “I’m just showing Eithne around, I won’t be a moment.”

  Maura was thrown for a moment. Carla and Dominic had left for Dublin early on Saturday morning, and she hadn’t known if she would see him again. She looked over at Bernadette who didn’t look in the least bit surprised. She must have been expecting him.

  She shot a look at Eithne, who was quietly inspecting the coolroom and kitchen equipment. Maura guessed she was a potential manager of the Ardmahon House country retreat.

  She blinked and brought her attention back to the students. “So we’ll start with a few visual tests,” she said.

  She held up a tiny, bright red chilli. “Who can tell me what this is?”

  The students relaxed. This was going to be easy. “Chilli,” Una called. “And you have to be careful of the seeds, because they’re the hottest bit, and you have to make sure to wash your hands very carefully after you’ve been handling them, and not to touch your eyes or you’ll burn yourself,” she finished breathlessly.

  Maura nodded and smiled. “Exactly right. Especially about the heat. A tiny bit goes a long way with chilli, but it’s a fantastic addition to any Asian-style dish, as you tasted yesterday.”