A Taste for It

by Monica McInerney

  “And Dominic certainly enjoyed his meal,” Bernadette said, shooting Maura a glance under her lashes to see how she would react. “All the restaurants in Dublin must have suddenly closed down – that’s the second weekend he’s been here, had you noticed?”

  Maura just smiled and said nothing. Had she noticed? Had she what! She seemed to have grown a pair of invisible antennae that started humming furiously whenever Dominic was within five kilometres of Ardmahon House. His sudden arrivals weren’t helping her already taut nerves either. She wished he would give a little more warning before he turned up, even if it was his house.

  She’d had only a few brief conversations with him, but each one had unsettled her. She had a feeling that he had forgiven her for her outburst in Ennis. Certainly, he didn’t seem angry with her, and the coldness had thawed between them too. Now there was just a strange awkwardness. Maura didn’t like it. It had been bad enough being a teenager the first time around, all jumping hormones and embarrassed silences. She wasn’t ready for a second run at it.

  She had surreptitiously kept an eye on him in the restaurant the night before. Carla had hardly picked at her food, making a great act of choosing the smallest entrée on the menu and drawing attention to the slenderness of her waist. She had worn clothes to emphasise her slight figure too, Maura had noticed, remembering that her outfit had been made not so much of material as some sort of gauze. She was surprised you couldn’t physically see the tiny leaves of lettuce make their way down into Carla’s stomach.

  But Dominic had ordered adventurously, trying the most unusual of the dishes on the menu. Not only that, but he had sent back compliments with the young Ennis girl waiting on their table.

  “The dark-haired man at the window table said to tell you that the chicken was the finest he has ever tasted,” she had said breathlessly, still flushed in her cheeks from the attention Dominic had obviously given her. “He said to make sure to tell you it had exactly the right amount of spice to suit him.”

  Maura grinned despite herself.

  “Please tell him the chef accepts his comments with immense gratitude,” Maura said in as serious a voice as she could manage. “And please ask him if he is ready for a refreshing glass of water.”

  The waitress was about to obediently return to Dominic’s table with the message when Maura stopped her. If she wanted to tease him, she’d do it herself. “No, no message after all. Just thank him for his kind words,” she said to the confused girl.

  Maura had started to think perhaps she and Dominic could manage a proper conversation again and had looked forward to seeing him at breakfast. But by the time she had come down this morning Dominic’s car was no longer in the driveway.

  Now Maura stretched again, before leaning down and folding the newspapers into a neat pile. “Do you feel like a walk?” she asked Bernadette. “We’ve got the whole afternoon free, haven’t we?”

  “We sure do. That’s a great idea – I’m supposed to give this foot of mine some regular exercise,” Bernadette answered, flexing her left foot, which was now free of bandages. “We just need to have a quick look over this week’s classes, and then we’re free as birds.”

  Maura fetched the students’ folders from the kitchen and sat down in front of the fire again to run through them. She wanted to check that all the introductory notes and recipes were inside, the name-tags were done and that each of the new students had been allocated a bedroom.

  She counted the folders under her breath, frowned, then counted them again. “Nine? Have we had an extra booking this week?”

  Bernadette looked up, slightly embarrassed. “Ah yes, I was asked last night if we had room for one more, and, really, it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  “Someone asked you last night?” Maura asked, puzzled. “At the dinner? That’s late notice, isn’t it? I mean, it’s great, of course we’ve room for one more, I’m just surprised they left it so late. Who is it anyway?” she asked, rifling through the folders again, this time looking at the students’ names.

  She found the newly written folder just as Bernadette coughed slightly.

  “Carla?” Maura said in amazement.

  “Carla,” Bernadette confirmed, a little sheepishly.

  Maura looked over in shock. “Carla is doing my cooking course? Bernadette, Carla doesn’t like food. It’s like a teetotaller joining Alcoholics Anonymous. What do we teach her – how to boil water and roll her own cigarettes?”

  Bernadette explained. “I don’t think it’s the course so much as the company we’re providing.”

  Maura was even more surprised at that. “Company? She loathes me and she ignores you.”

  She suddenly remembered Bernadette and Dominic having a lengthy conversation toward the end of the evening. Carla had gone upstairs to her room straight after the meal and many of the other diners had left. Maura had been in conversation with one of the wine importers from Dublin, but had been unable to stop herself from glancing up, and now and then disconcertingly finding Dominic looking over at her too.

  “Are you doing this as a favour to Dominic?” Maura asked.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Bernadette said, in a strange tone of voice.

  Maura was suddenly embarrassed she had reacted badly to Bernadette taking on an extra student. “I’m sorry, I’ve no right to tell you how many students you can take on. I’m just surprised it’s Carla, that’s all.”

  “I was too,” Bernadette admitted. “But Dominic’s going to be in the UK all this week for business. Carla was going to go with him, but apparently that doesn’t suit now, so he’s asked if we would mind her staying on here. I said no, of course not. And actually it was my suggestion that she do the cooking course. You know the saying, the devil makes work for idle hands.”

  Does that apply when the girl in question is already a she-devil? Maura wondered. “I would have thought she’d prefer to stay in Dublin,” Maura asked innocently. “Bright lights, night clubs, all of her model friends . . .”

  Bernadette raised her eyebrows. “From what Dominic hinted, it’s those model friends that he wants to keep her away from.”

  Maura smiled. In case any of them happened to know and accidentally blurted out the details of his deal with her father probably. Well, the week ahead would be more of a challenge than she expected. She only hoped Carla didn’t disrupt the classes for the other students.

  “So she’s still here, I guess,” she said, with a glance upstairs.

  Bernadette looked at her watch. It was nearly midday. “She is, but I doubt we’ll see her for some time yet. Why don’t we have that walk and if she’s up when we get back she can give us a hand setting up the rooms for the other students.”

  “Oh, I can just see that,” Maura laughed, as they walked out into the hallway to fetch their coats and scarves.

  They walked for nearly an hour, taking it slowly, the cold breeze whipping at their cheeks. Hardly a car passed them as they walked along the narrow tree-lined lane that ran past Ardmahon House, almost to the edge of the Burren, the strange lunar-landscaped area of County Clare. Maura had not heard of it before she arrived in Ireland. Areas like the Ring of Kerry and Blarney Castle were the popular tourist haunts, but she had fallen in love with the Burren. The grey rocky landscape had a strange kind of beauty and the limestone seemed to affect the surrounding light as well, making it sharper and clearer.

  “I’ve come out again without my camera,” she groaned, as they stopped to catch their breath and look out over the landscape. “I’m going to have to buy some postcards and try to pass them off as my own work for that article at this rate.”

  “You’ve over a week left,” Bernadette soothed her. “Plenty of time to take lots of photos. Now come on, we’d better be going back, it looks like there’s rain coming.”

  Carla was ambling out of the sitting-room as they let themselves in through the big front door.

  “Good afternoon,” Bernadette called brightly. To their surprise, Carla di
dn’t ignore them.

  “You had a phone call while you were out, Maura,” the young woman said, pointing at the hall table. “I took a message.”

  Maura picked up the note and read it with some difficulty. Carla’s writing was very scrawled and she hadn’t taken a number. “Is it Tim McBild?” she tried to pronounce it.

  Carla sauntered over. She always walked as if a thousand eyes were on her, Maura noticed. “I couldn’t really understand his accent,” she drawled. “It was Tim or Jim somebody. McDaid or Mcsomething. He sounded like an old guy.”

  “Did he leave a number?” Maura asked.

  “No, he said he’d call back later,” Carla said in a bored voice, before sauntering into the sitting-room again. Seconds later they heard loud music as the television was switched on, then the door to the hall was slammed shut.

  “Who’s Tim McDaid or McBild?” Maura asked Bernadette. “He’s not a parent, is he? I don’t remember any students with that surname.”

  “If it’s McBride, isn’t he the old fellow we met on Thursday – the one that knew your mother?”

  “Of course, that’s who it is – Jim McBride,” Maura said, relieved to remember. “But why would he be ringing here?”

  The phone began to ring as she spoke. “I guess you’re about to find out,” Bernadette smiled. “I’ll leave you to it,” she mouthed, as Maura picked up the phone receiver. “Good afternoon, Ardmahon House, Maura Carmody speaking,” she said brightly.

  “Hello, Maura, this is Jim McBride speaking.” His voice was low and she could hear what sounded like pub noises in the background. She was about to speak when he spoke hurriedly. “I met you in the pub on Thursday.”

  “Oh hello, Mr McBride,” Maura replied. “I remember you of course.”

  There was a pause, then he spoke again. “Yes, you were in asking about your mother.”

  Maura took a deep breath. “Oh, no, you must have misheard me. I was asking about a lady I used to work with in Australia.”

  Jim’s voice was very kind. “Maura, I guessed the moment I saw you. You’re the image of Catherine. And there’s not many in the world with that shade of dark-red hair. I’m only surprised Eileen didn’t pick up on it as well. But as you know she gets very upset when she thinks about Catherine – she’s probably tried to block out the memory of her face.” He laughed fondly.

  Maura suddenly had a shocking thought. She dropped all the pretence. “Mr McBride, are you my father? Is that why you’re ringing?”

  The old man gave his youthful laugh again. “No, Maura, I’m not. You wouldn’t be as good-looking as you are if I’d been your father. No, I’m not him. And call me Jim, not Mr McBride, won’t you?”

  He spoke hurriedly again, his voice serious. “But listen, I didn’t tell the whole truth when I said I didn’t have any photos of Catherine. I’ve a few bits and pieces. Would you have an hour to meet me? Can I show them to you?”

  She immediately said yes. Jim named a village just five miles away, in the opposite direction to his home village. “There’s a small pub called Moloney’s there. People may see us and people may talk, but then isn’t that the nature of country life?” he said. “It’ll give Eileen a little something extra to worry about.”

  In less than ten minutes she was strapped into Bernadette’s little car and negotiating her way down the narrow lane, following Jim’s directions. Bernadette had handed over her car keys without hesitation. “Do you want me to come with you?” she had asked. Maura had thought for a moment and then shook her head.

  “No, but thank you very much for offering,” she said quietly. “I think I need to do this one on my own.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Jim McBride was sitting up on a high stool at the end of the bar when Maura came in. She noticed a brown paper package on the stool beside him and fought an impulse to snatch it up and run out the door with it.

  Jim smiled shyly at her. “Hello, Maura, can I get you something to drink?” He was staring intently at her and then smiled again. “You really are the image of her. Sit yourself down and we’ll get you settled with a drink and now we’ve a bit of privacy, I’ll tell you what I know about your mother.”

  Maura barely took in her surroundings as she waited for the pot of tea Jim had ordered. Jim seemed equally nervous, reluctant to start any conversation until the barman had served them and retreated to the other end of the pub.

  They were finally on their own. Maura looked at him. “Thank you for ringing,” she said softly. “It was a shock to find out the little I did about Catherine.” She couldn’t bring herself to say the words ‘my mother’. “The idea of her running off to Australia so young has been going round and round in my head since you told me. Did something terrible happen to her here as a child?” she asked, in a rush.

  Jim laughed his soft, rippling laugh again. “No, nothing terrible happened to her here. Have you been reading Angela’s Ashes? Lord, not every Irish child of that generation had a terrible childhood, and Catherine and I certainly didn’t. No, she just wanted adventure, more than she was ever going to find here. She only lasted in America for less than a year, then she took a notion to go to Australia and, as you well know, that’s where she ended up.”

  “Did you hear from her after she left, then?” Maura whispered.

  Jim lowered his voice even more. “A letter every few months or so, for the first five years she went away. Then myself and Eileen got together, and well, Eileen is a very jealous woman, and she wasn’t at all happy with the idea of me exchanging mail with an old girlfriend, so she put a stop to it.”

  “How did she do that?” Maura asked, surprised.

  Jim looked sheepish. “She said she wouldn’t, uhm, let me treat her as my wife, if you know what I mean, unless I behaved like a proper husband and left past girlfriends in the past. So I wrote to Catherine one last time and asked her to stop writing. And after one last letter she did.” He gave a short laugh. “One of the few times she obeyed my wishes – the sun must have made her soft in the head, eh?” he laughed.

  Maura’s eyes were drawn to the brown-paper parcel again. “You’ve got five years’ worth of Catherine’s letters there?”

  Jim nodded, almost proudly.

  “Didn’t Eileen make you throw them away?”

  “Well, she thought I had, but my friend here,” he nodded in the direction of the barman, “he said he’d mind them for me, as a favour like. I always knew I couldn’t throw them away and now you’re here, I’m glad I didn’t. I must have known you would turn up one day, eh?” He laughed softly again, and took a long, slow swallow of his pint.

  “And can you – ” Maura tried again, “would you tell me a little about what she got up to, what was in her letters?”

  “Of course I will, love, that’s why I telephoned you and wanted to meet up with you. They are great reading altogether. She was a lively scrap of a thing, full of fun, and it seems Australia was the right place for her. You worked in a hospital with her, did you say? I still can’t imagine her as a nurse.” He shook his head, smiling.

  Maura looked embarrassed. “Jim, I made all that up, about working in a hospital with Catherine. It wasn’t true. I was just trying to find out what I could about her. She was a nurse but I never got to meet her.”

  Jim turned fully around on his stool and looked Maura full in the face. His eyes were full of feeling. “Ah, love, I didn’t realise that at all. I knew you were fishing for information, but I thought you had actually met her. Oh, I’m so sorry – so you’ve no idea of her at all? All that stuff you said about her being the award-winning nursing sister, then, is that not true?”

  Maura shook her head, even more embarrassed. “I don’t know. I spoke briefly to the matron and one of the nurses in the last hospital she worked in, but when they told me Catherine had died a few months before, I was too shocked really to ask much. And after I left I didn’t ever really want to go back.”

  Jim nodded, taking another swallow. “Aye, I guess you
wouldn’t,” he said softly. He brightened suddenly. “I suspected it wasn’t the whole truth, though, especially when you were telling the stories about her being a great teacher. Catherine would never have had the patience, she was a quick learner herself and could never understand it if other people couldn’t keep up with her. But you certainly convinced Eileen. You should have heard her that night! ‘Imagine that Catherine coming to anything, God, I’d never have believed it’,” he said, imitating his wife’s voice, then smiled again. “We needn’t worry about enlightening her, need we?”

  Maura shook her head. She suddenly felt as though she was imagining this entire conversation. The whole scene. She was standing in a smoky pub on a wet Sunday afternoon in County Clare, hearing about her Irish mother. She’d actually begun to think of her as that. Not biological mother, or birth mother, or any other term. Her mother.

  Jim spoke again. “You’re a cook, is that what you told Dymphna on Thursday?”

  Maura nodded.

  “Catherine worked as a cook for a while herself. Maybe it’s in your genes?”

  “Catherine was a cook?” Maura said, surprised. “I thought she was always a nurse?”

  “Not when I was writing to her. That must have come later, after – ” he looked at Maura and she knew they were both thinking about Catherine getting pregnant. “Well, after some other things had happened in her life. No, she worked as a cook for six months in some sort of roadside café in a place called Darwin, do you know it?”

  Maura nodded. It was the capital city of the Northern Territory, the tropical top end of Australia. She’d never been there, but knew its reputation as a frontier town. She couldn’t imagine what it would have been like for a young Irish girl in 1960s Australia.

  “How on earth did she get there?” Maura asked.

  “Oh, she met some other travellers, and they all hitched a lift up with a truck driver. It’s all in the letters, photos and all.”

  “You’ve got photos of her when she was my age?” Maura asked. She was still feeling her way through the twists and turns of Jim’s revelations.