44
Roisin had wondered if her abrupt change of heart regarding her mother’s personnel resources issue would register as odd to Lorraine. She had forgotten that not only was her mum not a woman to look a gift horse in the mouth, but she also wasn’t a woman to ask for the gift horse’s backstory or motivations in any way.
‘Thank God, I thought I was going to have to put a mop up my arse,’ Lorraine said when Roisin called to say that she’d move back for a bit, returning for social-life engagements in Manchester. ‘It’s not as if it’s easy to do a busy shift with two, even.’
‘You mispronounced “thank you”,’ Roisin said.
‘Thank you! I’ll grovel if that’s what you want.’
Roisin rung off and sighed. It was relatively easy to flee.
Joe, now full of lavish apologies for it, was once again cloistered in his study, wearing a headset mic as if he was giving a Ted talk, taking part in meetings about the meetings.
‘I’d bin these off so we could go to dinner tonight but there’s no binning these people unless you’re in intensive care. Even then, they’d probably ask what the hospital WiFi’s like.’
Roisin grimaced a smile, like she’d not heard that spiel before. She said, ‘Sure, it’s fine,’ and that she was going anyway.
On her drive out to Webberley, she asked herself again and again: Do you still love Joe? Is this a love of many years, on pause during a rough patch? Or is it former love?
Why does he want to mend this? Every last person she knew would reply, ‘Because he loves you! Why wouldn’t he?’
During service that evening, she saw she had a missed call: Matt. She’d never felt dismayed to see his name before.
Roisin didn’t want to ring him back, but she also knew she’d be completely distracted until she did.
She chose a quiet moment to step outside the front. The Mallory was mostly gravel and space for parked cars outside, only four tables for customers, which were inevitably monopolised by smokers. The August air was balmy and blowsy, in that last gasp of summer way.
‘Hi, Matt,’ she said, tucking the phone under her chin as she picked up two foam-clouded pint glasses from the flower bed.
‘Hello! I went for a drink with Rick.’
‘That was fast!’ Roisin said, adjusting her phone again. ‘Thanks.’
‘Gardening leave means I have the time. I even watched Hunter as my homework. I don’t want to do any gameshow host ticking clock suspense here, so I would describe my findings as something and nothing, but ninety per cent nothing.’
Ten per cent of something startled Roisin. She’d declared it possible and now, on the brink of it, she couldn’t allow that it was possible.
‘… Scarves being left behind rang no bells for Rick, and he didn’t recognise Joe.’
‘You showed him a picture?’
‘Yeah. I kind of had to. Did you not want me to?’
‘No, I … hadn’t thought what your inquiry would entail.’
That was exactly it. Adrenaline surged. Joe will never find out, it’s fine. Not gonna happen. If he did find out, could she justify it as payback for Hunter? Point out how much turmoil she had to be in, to check up on him like this? She could try, but distrusting your partner this deeply wasn’t something you could easily come back from. It would change things between them. Did it not change things if she kept it to herself?
‘However,’ Matt said, as Roisin’s stomach pancake-flipped, ‘around two years ago, Rick tells me they employed this flaky Croatian girl called Petra. She’d disappear for long smoking breaks whenever she fancied – notorious for it. Apparently she got the nickname Fagatha Christie for such disappearances. She told other waitresses she was seeing an older, married guy. They thought it was BS because she had no photos with him. She said she didn’t even know his real name to look him up. He was very low profile because of his job. You’d think “the wife” was more likely the reason, but …’
Roisin blew air out of her mouth. So it was a colourful ten per cent. ‘He’d originally been a customer?’
‘Yup, she said so. His job was in the military police. He said his secrecy protocols were so strict, he couldn’t be in any house with an Alexa.’
‘An Alexa? Who’s she?’
‘An Alexa. You know, your speaker that’s a virtual assistant-cum-listening device that you pay Amazon to install in your home.’
‘Oh! Alexa, Play Cher! Right. That much doesn’t sound like Joe.’ Roisin’s nerves started climbing down from the roof.
‘Nope, it doesn’t. Anyway, Sesso finally let her go after she went for a smoking break during a closing up and didn’t return until her shift the following day. That was high summer, he remembered. I asked what she looked like. He found an old photo of a staff night out on his phone. She had bobbed hair. She looked reasonably like the actress.’
‘Right,’ Roisin said dully. Her nerves, currently shinning down the drainpipe, hesitated.
‘There’s no getting in touch with Petra, either. She used a fake surname on her payslips. I quote Rick: the type of girl who’s a tax ghost, a social media ghost, the lot. Probably has different-coloured hair now, working a bar in Dubrovnik and dating Jason Bourne.’
‘Hah.’
‘All we have is the coincidence of a popular haircut and a shady private life, which is many waitresses I’ve met. I wouldn’t convict on this much evidence.’
In the absence of anything conclusive, he was patching this up, making it right. Given there was no love lost between him and Joe, it was honourable. It put Roisin first.
‘I wondered if I could ask you a favour of sorts in return,’ Matt said. ‘I have nothing to do, and I can’t get a job yet. I took a real shine to your mum’s pub and you say she’s short-handed. Could I help out?’
‘Oh NO!’ Roisin squealed in self-consciousness and genuine amusement. ‘Seriously? You want to pull Carlsbergs at The Mall? It’s a village. There’s nothing here for a gentleman like you. Apart from the hen dos, I suppose …’
Matt laughed. ‘I won’t push if you’d find it weird. I’m longing to feel like I’m any good for anybody or anything at the moment, that’s all.’
There was such a note of authentic sadness in that statement that Roisin couldn’t possibly refuse.
‘Alright. Thank you. My mum will flirt with you relentlessly. Please bear it with good humour but absolutely DO NOT succumb and sleep with her. I don’t want my stepdad coming this much out of left field.’
‘Roisin!’ Matt exclaimed, in an un-Mattlike way, genuinely shocked. ‘What on EARTH? How much of an Uncle Disgusting do you seriously think I am?’
Roisin laughed and felt a little grief-stricken that she couldn’t confidently answer that.