Sitting in the taxi home, with only a sixth of an ear (and even that was probably excessive) tuned to the driver ranting about teenage pregnancies and moving on seamlessly to refugees bleeding the social security system dry, Molly decided to unmask Helen’s love bug. Not to be inquisitive, God no. So she could splat him on behalf of her unhinged friend. Helen wasn’t the best at romance; come to think of it she’d only had one grand passion. That had been just after graduating, with a marketing executive called Eugene. He’d been more than presentable – apart from his predilection for wearing dark shirts under beige linen jackets, which had prompted Molly to christen him the Black and Tan, although he’d insisted he preferred Gene if a nickname were essential. That relationship had juddered to a halt when he’d shown the temerity to propose. Marriage. Time for the short step followed by the long drop for Eugene.
‘I’m never getting married,’ Helen had insisted and Molly had concurred. Never didn’t mean not ever, as Molly understood it, it meant not while you were in your twenties and could pick and choose. In your thirties, now, you might consider it. In fact Molly was actively, not to say compulsively, contemplating it. But Helen seemed curiously inflexible on the matter. One after the other their college friends had teetered up the aisle disguised as shepherdesses or woodland nymphs, surrounded by a bevy of miniature ruffians purporting to represent cherubs. Helen and Molly, meanwhile, bought cartwheel hats because there was nothing like them for creating allure, and mouthed along to The Wedding Feast at Cana during the service. By now they were word perfect.
Lately Molly had been gazing at those brides in their ivory tower dresses and wishing she were one. Wishing she were standing at the back of a church, with a man, razor nicks on his chin from an unsteady hand, waiting in the front pew for her. Not just any man, one who made her want to bolt to the altar at breakneck speed instead of decorously swishing up.
In the meantime there were best men – and second-best men – to audition at friends’ weddings. At the last wedding she’d attended, Molly had been disposed to give the best man the glad eye on the back of a spark of wit, despite his goatee beard, but a woman in a crocheted dress, complete with sausage-shaped baby-sick stain on the lapel, had swiftly signalled her prior claim.
Molly sighed. Despite fighting talk in her twenties, she wouldn’t mind being the one in satin slippers for a change, hemmed in by all those aunts from Killybegs and Gortnagallon never encountered except at weddings and funerals. Being thirty-two had much to answer for – perhaps she’d have passed safely through the stage by her mid-thirties. Everyone sympathised with women over their biological clocks but what about the ones saddled with a ticking Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. It left her wishing … wishing she were the one weighed down by Irish linen tablecloths and napkins bought in Clery’s sale and stockpiled until a gift was required. Tablecloths she’d never use because they belonged to the era of laundresses and starch, but that wasn’t the point – every newly-wed should have a selection. It left her wishing there was someone who regarded her as the most ravishing woman on the planet even when she couldn’t be bothered sliding in her contact lenses and blinked at the world from behind glasses. It left her wishing to exchange her apartment in Blackrock, with its undernourished fridge, for a house with a bulging fridge-freezer. One of those in-your-face Smeg jobs the colour of an ice lolly.
Once or twice she’d hinted as much to Helen but the shutters had grated down and her friend had made it crystalline there was to be no backsliding as far as she herself was concerned. Wedding cake was off the menu unless it was someone else’s.
Whereas Molly was finding the single life a little, well, single. She’d been in enough relationships – heck she was always falling in love; she was hooked on the adrenaline high – to know it wasn’t all roses as part of a couple. But the thorns seemed less prickly the older she waxed. Sometimes she daydreamed about how agreeable it might be to have someone to cut the grass. Not that she’d much call for gardening services living in a second-floor apartment, but it was reassuring to know you had the absolute right to dispatch a male with a lawnmower to your patch when you felt inclined to exert your authority or play at being a girlie or when – and this had to be a last resort – the grass needed it. Rules were rules. Everybody knew the marriage service ran along the lines of ‘do you promise to love her, honour her and cut the grass at her bidding as long as you both shall live?’
It was tricky, Molly reflected, imagining yourself immersed in marital bliss when you didn’t have a boyfriend. On the contrary, disagreed her opinionated inner voice, that made it easier. There was no need to cast your eye over the current boyfriend title-holder and realise this was it: this was as good as it got. Whereas the imagination, a particularly accommodating tool, allowed you to step out with Liam Neeson, who’d just happen to be rediscovering his thespian roots with a play at the Abbey when he’d bump into you one Sunday lunchtime. You’d be reading the newspapers on a caffeine and chill-out binge, despite the contradiction in terms, and you’d drop one of the sections and bend to retrieve it just as he reached it to you, and your gazes would collide. Naturally you’d both be sitting down because otherwise you’d need a stepladder to make eye contact. And even though you always looked like a regurgitated dog’s dinner on Sundays, this time you’d have bothered to wash your hair and wear something clean and pressed instead of picking over the pile of rejects on your bedroom floor and …
‘Blackrock, what street did you want, love?’
The taxi-driver curtailed Molly’s fantasy. I’m not finished with you yet, she instructed it, as she fished out her purse and advised the driver where to pull over. She debated withholding a tip in protest at his unreconstructed views on asylum seekers, hadn’t the courage, and compromised by rounding up the fare by a minimal amount.
However, the interruption returned her attention to Helen. Helen, who not only never wanted to marry but seemed disinclined for a little light relief in the jiggery pokery stakes too. Her last boyfriend had been booted into touch eighteen months ago, by Molly’s reckoning, the Daniel O’Donnell lookalike she’d dubbed Kitten Hips because he practised a panther walk. He had to practise it, reasoned Molly; nobody swayed naturally like that. Anyway, he went the way of all flesh that came into contact with Helen: namely she dumped him after four months when he turned serious, although her definition of too intense was his suggestion they should plant sunflowers in the 10-foot square of back garden where she used to live. His subtext: I intend to be around next year to see them flower. Her reaction: Pervert. What manner of man wants to make a commitment like that?
So for Helen to fall head over neat Cuban heels for someone off limits was a manifestation of natural justice. And while Molly was sorry for her friend’s palpable grief, she couldn’t help thinking: Cupid’s got you sorted, love, in one of those streetwise accents they use on television cop shows to portray gritty reality. Besides which, she was convinced Helen was overreacting. Too much red wine had blurred Molly’s recollection of the wan face weeping against her shoulder and the dejection in tones that described how life seemed to have dimmed from colour to monochrome. Molly wasn’t unsympathetic, she simply needed convincing the script was as unremittingly dire as Helen read it.
‘We’ll sort her out tomorrow night, Nelson,’ she told her teddy bear, named because he’d spent twenty-five years in a cupboard before being liberated (she’d been frightened of him as a child for no logical reason). ‘We’ll canter her out in the showing ring and she’ll be fighting them off with a broom handle. That’ll take her mind off the fellow she can’t have. And if it doesn’t, at least she might tell me some more about him. I’m agog to sneak a peek at the man who can send Helen Sharkey’s pulse ricocheting. Doesn’t the whole of Dublin know she’s the next best thing to celibate, barring lapses every eighteen months or so?’
As Molly was slinging Nelson onto the floor and climbing into bed without taking off her makeup – but remembering to collect a tumbler of water from the kitchen because Merlot furred her tongue – Helen was washing the wine glasses and bowls she’d filled with nibbles for her perpetually peckish friend. She sat on for the longest time after Molly left, her light-hearted