For a moment Fionn looked as if he were about to kiss her but Molly stepped backwards so quickly he didn’t have a chance. That was a kneejerk reaction too. What was wrong with her? A kiss wouldn’t have triggered the end of the world. But her assiduously reconstructed universe wasn’t ready for a peck on the cheek from Fionn McCullagh.
Just shy of midday, as she hacked at the tangles in her hair, Molly still wasn’t lucid on why she’d circumvented his kiss. He seemed to be aiming at her cheek – there was no harm in that. Social kisses were simply sociable. She occasionally allowed men she couldn’t bear the sight of to kiss her cheek (the tyranny of manners), never mind someone she once imagined spending her life with – growing old holding hands with him. Molly marvelled at elderly couples she saw ambling hand in hand along the street: was it habit, was it affection, was it affectionate habit? They couldn’t all be foreigners; some of them had to be Irish. Imagine your arthritic hands clasping someone else’s arthritic hands and the touch sustaining you. She wasn’t inclined towards wallowing but when she indulged in the rare one, say if she were confined to bed with flu, she sniffled at the thought of being wrinkled and unloved. Heck, she was already wrinkled and unloved at thirty-two. She longed to believe there was someone out there who’d take her gnarled eighty-year-old hand and make her feel cherished. It wasn’t going to be Fionn McCullagh, that much was cast in stone. Even with his melodramatic regrets. Second chances were so second-rate.
Her buzzer sounded as she laced on boots. Must be the postman with a package.
‘Molly? I see you’ve grown no more punctual since I knew you before.’
Fionn was standing on her doorstep – specifically hers and twenty-three others – and she hadn’t even applied her lipstick. Courtesy demanded that she buzz him up.
‘Stay where you are, I’ll be straight down,’ she instructed him. Courtesy could take a running jump. And since when did ten minutes late count as being late? Anyway, it was his fault she wasn’t there on time, confusing her by parachuting into her life again. She addressed a running commentary to the mirror. ‘Where’s my lickstick? Feck it, I can’t even say it right – he has me all fingers and tongues.’ She dropped the silver tube into the wash-hand basin.
‘Thumbs, thumbs,’ she screeched at her reflection. ‘No tongues.’
Now, deep breaths and slick it on; Molly wasn’t letting him see her without a painted pout. No point in giving him cause to believe he’d had a lucky escape from her. Despair at a life wasted because it wasn’t spent in her embrace, that’s what she’d prefer to inculcate in Fionn McCullagh. If she could just draw her Cupid’s bow straight she could let those arrows fly.
Fionn was reading the notice board when she emerged from the stairwell. Something about the hot water being shut off for a day while electrical repairs were effected had him riveted. When he turned she was struck, as she had been yesterday, by the way his American tan turned his eyes to the colour of the ocean at Mullaghmore on a summer’s day. His eyes had slid off hers on that Thursday evening when he’d told her he had a brand-new wife. Scarcely out of her packaging. So instead of reading the reason for his defection in his eyes she’d concentrated on his mouth as it opened and shut, the lips coiling around words she couldn’t believe she was hearing. His mouth had betrayed his nervousness, the tongue flicking across to moisten it after each poisonous parcel of words plopped out. As he’d spoken she noticed a crumb clinging to the left side of the slit, not far from where a dimple would indent if he smiled. But he hadn’t been smiling that day four years ago. Nor had she.
‘Are you fit?’ Fionn was smiling now.
Molly wasn’t. He needn’t imagine she’d be a pushover. ‘Fit? Not yet but it’s my New Year’s resolution. I’m only a month late starting.’
‘I meant are you ready – but feel at liberty to run through your New Year’s resolutions, Molly.’
‘Well, there’s getting fit, solving global conflict, developing a machine that turns base metal into gold and repairing the hole in the ozone layer. I thought that might keep me occupied until summer and then I could reassess. How about yourself?’
‘I didn’t consciously make one but I suppose it would be to put my house in order.’ Fionn looked sombre.
Molly panicked. It was too early for self-analysis – she’d like something in a glass to put hairs on her chest first, the depilatory cream could eradicate the damage later – so she started jabbering, ‘Housework. Strangely enough I left that one off the list. Anyway, I thought we were supposed to meet at the station. I’m not that late. And how did you know my address? I don’t remember giving it to you.’
‘Spadework. You dropped clues about being a few minutes from the DART and passing a dry-cleaner’s to reach it. So I continued driving past the station and this is the first apartment block I reached. Your name is above the bell.’
‘You’re wasted in architecture. You should have been a taxman,’ she muttered sourly. ‘Mustn’t keep the great outdoors waiting; after you, super-sleuth.’ And she held the door open for Fionn to wrongfoot him because he liked to be the one doling out gentlemanly gestures.
They parked near the entrance to Glendalough and managed a fifteen-minute stroll along a country lane before sleet sent them scurrying to the car.
‘At least we’ve earned our hot whiskeys now.’ Fionn drove the short distance down the mountain to a pub in Laragh. ‘You didn’t want to stay up there for a wander inside Glendalough, did you, admire a few ancient monuments, glory in our cultural heritage?’
‘I wasn’t tempted before the sleet came lashing and I’m even less disposed now. A hot whiskey sounds infinitely more promising. Anyway, we mustn’t be purist about cultural heritage. Whiskey’s just as much a part of it as monastic ruins.’
A coach party of Swiss senior citizens, a pile of sodden raincoats at their feet, were immersed in an alcohol-free lunch at two trestle tables towards the rear of the pub. But a cushion-jammed bench alongside the inglenook fireplace was vacant and Molly and Fionn commandeered it.
‘Those monks had funny-peculiar attitudes anyway,’ remarked Molly, apropos of nothing. ‘Especially where women were concerned. Your medieval aesthetics viewed us as she-devils. Of course, that’s just because they were scared witless of the other sex and in complete denial of their bodily urges.’
Fionn nodded. ‘Denial of bodily urges is unhealthy – that’s always been my credo.’
Molly frowned. ‘On the other hand, gratifying all your inclinations is probably not advisable either. There has to be something to separate us from the beasts.’ Fionn was excessively complacent. He needn’t imagine a couple of hot whiskeys would generate any body heat from her. Just because their sex life had been sensational … Molly’s hand flew to her mouth. Where had that sprung from? It was years since she’d allowed herself to dwell on their times in bed – and on the living-room rug and in the shower and on the beach at Mullaghmore that night when she’d admitted it had always been her ambition to make love beneath the stars. Only she’d anticipated a Caribbean sky rather than a low-lying Sligo one, but it had seemed churlish to mention it when he was co-operating so enthusiastically with making her wish come true.
‘Be careful what you wish for,’ Molly whispered.
‘What did you say?’ Fionn set down his glass and slid along the bench towards her.
Startled, because she hadn’t realised she’d spoken aloud, Molly improvised. ‘I was thinking about those monks. They were great ones for making rash vows and having to work around them, like St Columcille, who swore his feet would never touch Irish soil again after he stormed off to Iona. When he had to return he filled his boots with Scottish earth so they never did. Those fellows had plenty of mantras but they seemed not to extend to cleanliness is next to godliness.’
Molly noticed her fingernails weren’t exactly pious using that criterion and sat on her hands in case Fionn spotted them too. She