Fionn scratched the back of his neck and Molly noticed how the hair curled around the collar of his rugby shirt.
‘Your conversations are deranged. Fascinating but demented,’ he said. ‘What have chocolate bowlers to do with medieval monks, or do all your stories feature chocolate? I haven’t forgotten you’re fixated on the stuff. Wasn’t it myself who introduced you to white Toblerone?’
Molly smiled at him properly for the first time. ‘I glimpsed Paradise, thanks to you,’ she breathed. ‘My gratitude is boundless. I’ll buy you a drink to prove it.’
‘That’s another advantage to not being a monk,’ said Fionn. ‘You have licence to sip hot whiskeys with a divine creature on a weekday. And she buys her round.’
Molly vacillated between being flattered and indignant. But she felt obliged to put him straight on the monastic life as she riffled through her handbag for her purse.
‘They didn’t have it so spartan,’ she said. ‘St Benedict wrote that a pint of wine a day was ample per monk. I think I could manage very nicely on a similar allocation.’
‘How come you’re such an expert on the monastic life?’
‘Newspapers make you instant experts on the oddest subjects. I wrote a feature last week on the history of winemaking for the drinks column. Lucky for you that you caught me while the information is still at the top of the pile in my brain. By next week it will have been evicted to make room for the mating habits of sea birds or a history of Jewish persecution.’
Waiting for the barman to boil the kettle, Molly tapped her teeth with a mixture of vexation and attraction. There was a spark between herself and Fionn, she couldn’t deny it. But sparks could cause blazes to burn houses down. He was still a married man. Just because he and Helga were on a lay-off didn’t mean he could do his laying elsewhere. She was quite sure that wasn’t what Helga had in mind. Then again, the Scandinavians had rampaged through Ireland fairly thoroughly in the first millennium – their American descendants didn’t need to swoop down and scoop up all the available men in the third. That Helga sounded a right one. Although in fairness, admitted Molly, folding and unfolding a twenty-pound note, Fionn was biased. And not stupid. He’d make zero headway if he said: ‘She cooked cabbage and bacon to titillate my tastebuds and bought camisoles to titillate my appetite, but it wasn’t enough because I’m a self-centred animal.’ She cast a glance back at Fionn. He hadn’t even mentioned Helga; she might as well no longer exist for him. This buck took out of sight out of mind so literally his lady was in danger of being airbrushed out of existence. He’d pulled the same stunt on her.
On their second drink apiece, thawed by the combination of flames and whiskey, Fionn mentioned his wife.
‘I can’t believe how uncomplicated life is without Olga.’
Although crippled with curiosity and convinced he owed her at least a teaser in the gossip stakes, Molly found herself veering away from the subject. There’ll be no more walking this day.’ She indicated the hailstones bouncing off the nearest window. ‘So much for today being the opener for spring.’
‘Says who?’
‘Says the calendar. It’s the first of February, St Bridget’s Day.’
‘People must have been hardier in those days,’ said Fionn. ‘Most people date it from the March twenty-first equinox.’
‘We’ve gone soft since St Bridget was around running craft workshops and showing the locals how to make rush crosses to sell to the tourists,’ agreed Molly.
‘Soft, now that’s not a word you could apply to Olga.’ Fionn looked woebegone.
Molly resigned herself to a deconstruction of the concept of marriage, as experienced by Fionn McCullagh. She preferred to believe in happily ever afters, even for people who swanned off to have their happily ever after with someone else instead of her. Four years ago she’d have climbed on a table and cheered if she could have gazed into a crystal ball and witnessed Fionn telling her his marriage was a mistake and she was the one he truly loved. But four years equals 48 months, equals more than 200 weeks equals – pause for calculation – nearly 1500 days. And she didn’t want to hear a melancholy story on a storm-lashed day – or any other day for that matter.
Molly had experienced a surfeit of sorrow during the months following his rejection, when she closed down everything but the essential life-support system, and trailed vacantly from one day to the next. Helen had been predictably solid and Barry had been a rock too, cajoling her out for drinks and listening to her whine about being finished with love. Finished off by love. Even as she’d said it a spark of common sense had stirred within her and she’d realised she was talking nonsense. But she’d formed the words anyway and allowed Barry to pat her awkwardly, clearly horrified at being the recipient of so much naked emotion but determined to be supportive.
Now Molly only half-listened to Fionn’s account of how two into one wouldn’t go, swirling the honey-coloured liquid around in her glass. She inhaled: hot whiskeys always reminded her of being ill as a little girl, when her mother would add a teaspoonful of whiskey to sugar and warm milk to cosset her. ‘Time to mollycoddle my girl,’ she’d say. Suddenly she was suffused with an urge to ring her mother for a chat; she hadn’t been home since Christmas and she missed her. No lover, no friend, was endowed with the capacity to envelop her in unconditional love the way her mother could. She’d go home to Derry at the weekend and take her to lunch somewhere smart where her mother would have the satisfaction of being scandalised by the prices.
Fionn was still talking, some drivel about Olga being so consumed by her job as an interior decorator that she sidelined their relationship, and Molly drained her glass. She must be wearing an appropriately sympathetic expression because he didn’t falter as he unburdened himself of his saga; not much of a page turner but he was mesmerised by it – and he knew the ending already. All those years as a junior reporter sitting through council meetings without nodding off from the undiluted tedium were paying dividends; he hadn’t spotted how deep into her zero-interest zone he was plodding.
‘So we decided we’d take a three-month break from each other. I’ve come home to see if I can find work here and Olga is considering whether she could live in Dublin.’
Molly was so rattled she tore the menu she’d been covertly studying with a view to ordering lunch. That was more or less the same arrangement he’d made with her. The man was utterly devoid of tact.
‘But I don’t anticipate us ever being reunited, Molly. Now that I’m away from Olga I’m able to see what an ill-matched couple we were. We have nothing in common. Being with you reminds me what it’s like to spend time in the company of someone you feel wholly at ease with. Sorry if I’m being precipitate here. I don’t want to presume anything on your part, you haven’t even told me if you’re involved with someone else. But just being with you, Molly –’ he allowed his eyes to mist over at this point. She thought about offering him a tissue for his snivelly cold but reluctantly vetoed the idea – ‘allows me to recognise how sterile my life has become. And I’ve missed Dublin. She’s grown up since I’ve been away and I want to check out all the adult bumps and curves the old girl has acquired.’ He ran his fingers through his hair so that it stood up in spikes, a gesture she remembered, although he was wearing the hair shorter now and – could it be, yes – she did believe it was thinning at the crown. The sight of Fionn’s scalp cheered her inordinately.
We should order something to eat, thought Molly, deciding it was a better idea to use her menu for that purpose rather than the one she’d been contemplating: slapping Fionn McCullagh on the back of his legs with it for vacating her life for four years, not so much as a postcard, then reappearing and assuming she was his for a brace of hot whiskeys.
‘I’m ravenous. Shall we see if they can rustle up some food?’ Her face was deliberately bland.
Fionn radiated disappointment