‘And you told him you couldn’t because you weren’t a priest.’
There was a pause while Mary-P digested this and tinkled an uncertain laugh.
Meanwhile Molly decided she was being ungracious and launched into effusive congratulations.
‘It was so unexpected,’ burbled Mary-P, who worked as a physiotherapist in their home town of Derry. ‘He must have been planning it for weeks. We were in Donegal and he brought me to a picture-postcard waterfall just outside Ardara. I thought we’d stumbled across it but Paul had gone on a reconnaissance mission the previous week when he claimed he was visiting his parents and he decided it would make an ideal backdrop to a marriage proposal. We turned the corner and there it was, tumbling amid the heather. We stepped out of the car for a closer look and then he asked me. I must have looked a sight, the wind was gale force and my hair was plastered to my head but I said yes straight off, not a second’s hesitation, and then he told me he’d like us to be married as quickly as possible rather than linger with a protracted engagement and …’
Molly watched Barry send an email; she squinted to detect the identity of the recipient but drew a blank.
‘… so he rang my father, who hasn’t been asked his opinion in twenty years, never mind his permission, but Paul is so wonderfully correct, I adore an old-fashioned man …’
Just so long as she doesn’t ask me to be bridesmaid. Molly mentally ransacked her wardrobe and pondered whether she’d need a new outfit or could she wear the primrose coat and dress bought for the last wedding she’d attended. Nine weeks’ time was early April, perfect spring weather for the combination. Could she trot out the same clothes, though? It depended on whether there’d be a substantial number of guests common to both Mary-P’s and those other nasty nuptials. All she seemed to remember was sitting on a slice of the strawberry meringue confection they’d substituted for a wedding cake and being obliged to keep the coat on all evening to cover the stain. She wondered if Paul had any unattached friends likely to be at the bash. Then again, Paul was an anorak so there was a fair-to-middling chance his friends were anoraks too. She wasn’t that desperate.
‘What do you think, Molly?’
What did she think about what? She improvised. ‘It’s a tricky one,’ she hazarded.
‘Don’t I know it,’ said Mary-P. ‘But there must be some compromise. It’s not that I expect to be able to exchange vows by the waterfall – I understand it has to be in a church – but if we could even pledge our love in a public manner there it would add immeasurably to the occasion. I feel such an affinity with that waterfall; it’s our special place.’
Molly shelved the lemon outfit. Standing by a waterfall in the wilds of Donegal in April required thermals and waterproof clothing. Mary-P was back on her ‘Paul caught me totally unawares’ hobbyhorse. How unexpected could a marriage proposal be when she’d been courted by the man for eight years including living with him for two? Molly decided fifteen minutes of this blithe-spirit session were as much as anyone could be expected to endure – even if she did sit beside Mary-P for most of her secondary school days. Naturally she hoped she’d be ecstatically happy, of course she’d be at the wedding, now would she ever feck off and stop making her feel like a failure because nobody, not even a nerd such as Mary-P’s Paul Sheerin, wanted her hand in marriage? Or any other body part.
Molly pushed the phone away and contemplated notching up her blonde curls from streaks to an all-over peroxide. Say, a corkscrew version of the Marilyn Monroe look – subtlety was wasted on men.
‘Do you think I should go blonder?’ she asked Barry.
‘Will my answer alter your decision to swap weekend duty with me?’ His hazel eyes behind their John Lennon spectacles flickered anxiously.
‘No.’
‘Lash ahead if you fancy it.’
‘But will it have men swooning at my feet?’
‘Sure they do that already. So we’re definitely on for the weekend transfer then?’
‘Barry, I feel bound to tell you that your objectivity is under the microscope and not standing up to scrutiny. Now stop annoying me, I have to push on with this jail report.’
She managed to work her way through to page twenty-seven before Barry spoke again.
‘Call for you, Molly, on my line. Which extension are you on?’
‘It’s probably a reader.’ Molly shrank into her seat. Readers had a tendency to keep you talking for ages, suggesting an exposé on whatever little unnewsworthy – they were always unnewsworthy – obsession they’d latched on to. ‘You wouldn’t take a message, Barry? I’ll never wade through this tome before lunchtime if interruptions keep annoying me.’
‘Fine by me but it sounds like a personal call. I formed the impression he knows you. He asked for Molly, not Molly Molloy.’
She brightened. ‘He’ and ‘personal call’; the combination equalled promising.
‘Four-six-three-seven please, Bar.’
It was a very personal call; Molly’s pulse accelerated as soon as she heard his voice. It was Fionn McCullagh, her ex-almost-fiancé. Technically he’d never proposed but they’d lived together for a year and had gone out with each other for another year before that, and everyone had assumed they’d eventually marry. Molly knew it was only a matter of time, although Fionn had insisted from day one he didn’t believe in marriage and failed to see how it enhanced a relationship. ‘It brings nothing to the party’ were the words he’d used. You were with someone because you wanted to be and not because a piece of paper decreed it, that’s what he’d told her. She didn’t mind too much so long as they were together. She hadn’t started practising her wedding march at that stage.
Molly and Fionn had been a couple because they’d chosen to be. Because they’d been inseparable. Because everyone had said they were meant for one another. Because they’d laughed at the same jokes. Because they’d both liked Indian food. Because the weak Irish sunshine had warmed their backs when they’d felt it together. Because the rain mattered less when they’d shared an umbrella. Because they’d been in love.
Except a trial three-month separation (his idea) had intervened. And when they’d met again in the Westmoreland Street Bewley’s, à la An Affair to Remember, he was married to someone else. Already. In the space of three months. Some men can’t be trusted out of your sight. The fellow who told her marriage was an anachronism and the only vows he’d contemplate were mountaintop pledges in the presence of a druid – and even that would be only for the craic – had stood up in church and said ‘I do’. Wearing a cravat.
Hypocrite. Even now she tasted bile when she thought of Fionn married to someone else. It had happened four years ago and Molly could still feel the shock, the outrage and, above all, the grief coil in the pit of her stomach as though it were yesterday. He had sat opposite her in a corner seat – it took her fourteen months to set foot in that branch of Bewley’s – and she hadn’t noticed his wedding band. The shiny yellow ring. He’d waited until she’d taken a bite of her almond slice before telling her; she couldn’t smell almonds now, even in hand-cream, without her innards convulsing. Her eyes had been drawn to his left hand as he’d spoken and the proof had glinted at her. Molly had never seen a colder metal.
His wife was a Scandinavian-born American citizen and as far as Molly knew Fionn was living in Seattle, probably drinking better coffee than he’d been accustomed to in Ireland. Now he was obviously back on holiday and strapped for company, she decided, even as they meandered through the social niceties whereby former lovers pretend they’re great friends when one or both of them would much prefer the other to slide off the face of the planet.
Fionn. Taller than average but otherwise your standard Irishman. Medium face, medium voice, medium frame, medium fellow – at first glance. To Molly he was anything but medium. She’d never been able to establish