The Restaurant

by Roisin Meaney

Genres: General Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

The sparkling new novel from the bestselling Irish author Roisin Meaney.

When chef Emily is left at the altar in front of her family and friends, she swears off love and instead throws herself into her new business: a restaurant with a difference. There's only one communal table, designed with the single diner in mind.
Now it's two years later, and with her business thriving with regular customers, romance is still the last thing on Emily's mind - until she receives a letter from her ex who is returning home from Canada with a burning question for her ...
Will Emily give up her business for the life she used to want, or will she realise that happiness might be on the menu a little closer to home?

(P)2020 Hachette Books Ireland

Release date: June 4, 2020

Publisher: Hachette Ireland

Print pages: 384

Sample

EMILY FEENEY, TWENTY-NINE AND STILL IN PYJAMAS, flings wide her bedroom window on a Thursday and tilts her face to the early-morning sky, the better to inhale the fresh, hopeful scent of April. She loves beginnings of days, particularly at this time of year, with the vigorous bloom of spring not yet spent, and the promise of summer in every burst of birdsong, every drift of cherry blossom, every budding geranium.

A sound in the street below catches her attention. There is Vinnie Corbett, reliable as the dawn, emerging from his house across the way. She watches as he slips a key into his pocket and pulls the red front door closed behind him. She sees him tap with his fingertips, like he always does, on the adjacent kitchen window before moving off. Saying another goodbye to Angie, who will have filled the yellow lunchbox that’s tucked under his arm.

‘Hey, Vinnie,’ Emily calls softly.

He lifts his head and finds her, and sends her up a smile. ‘Morning to you, Emily,’ he says. ‘Lovely day.’

‘Sure is.’

After he’s vanished around the corner, off to his barber’s shop two blocks away, Emily turns her attention back to the street that’s been her home for the past two years, give or take. A short ramble from the town’s main shopping area, it’s a pleasing undulation of one and two storeys, and a happy juxtaposition of commercial and residential, with little alleys scooting between every two or three buildings, and a line of trees – rowan, maple, willow, cherry – running along the edge of the wider pavement on Emily’s side.

No chain stores are to be found here. There’s the carpet shop owned by Karl, whose name is different in his native Syria, and who’s lived in Ireland long enough to curse as fluently as any local. There’s the launderette run by cousins Sheila and Denise, source of glorious wafts of fragrant cottony air each time its door is opened. There’s Pauline’s crèche, and Joan and Frank’s secondhand bookshop, and Imelda’s minimart, and Barbara’s chemist, and Tony and Charlie’s hardware store. All the businesses of the street scattered about – and nestling between them are the homes. She knows everyone. At various stages she’s fed everyone.

She watches by the window as the place comes slowly to life. Vans arrive and slot into alleys, shop shutters are rattled up, workers and schoolgoers emerge from houses, car engines sputter on.

At twenty to nine, James appears. He props his bicycle against the painted wooden bench outside Emily’s front window and takes a bundle of mail from the canvas bag that sits in his large wire basket. A second or two later she hears the rattle of her letterbox. ‘Thanks, James,’ she calls.

He looks up and grins. ‘Hello, you. Not a bad morning.’

‘Not bad at all.’

At length she leaves her position to shower and brush her teeth and get dressed. The swirly pink skirt she’s in the mood for today, a crisp white shirt above. She wriggles her feet into slippers and dabs colour from the same small pot onto her lips and cheeks. She runs a wide-toothed wooden comb through her curls and goes downstairs, fingertips skimming the ridges of the wallpaper in an ashes-of-roses shade that has hung there for decades, and that she sees no need at all to change.

A cream envelope lies face down on the hall floor. She knows before she turns it over that it will have a Portuguese stamp on it, and her mother’s slanted handwriting. She takes it unopened into the restaurant kitchen, where she sees Barney sitting on the sill outside, waiting to be let in. At the sight of her he gets to his feet and presses his way along the glass, tail high, mouth moving in silent, hungry mews. She leaves the kitchen and opens the back door to let him into the corridor. Strictly no animals in a commercial kitchen, she was told by the health inspector before she was given the go-ahead to open the restaurant, and she obeys.

Down he bounds, graceful as a ballerina. ‘Good morning, best boy,’ she says, crouching to scratch between his ears. He butts his head against her hand; she feels the vibration of his purring. ‘Come on,’ she tells him, ‘your breakfast is waiting.’ They travel together up the stairs. He pads eagerly towards his filled bowl and begins to eat.

Back in the kitchen she washes her hands before weighing ingredients – flour, salt, yeast – into a large bowl. She scoops out a crater and dribbles in oil and tepid water and coaxes it all together. She tips the soft, warm dough onto a floured worktop and kneads, the comfort of the familiar movements allowing her mind to wander away, to touch on half-remembered snatches of conversation, to hum a song about a wandering minstrel that has snagged lately on a corner of her mind, to think ahead to the evening’s dessert ingredients. Lemons and eggs for the tarts, bitter chocolate for the mousse.

When she’s worked the dough into a shiny elastic ball she sets it by the window to rise and starts another loaf, and after that another, and another. She halves olives. She chops marjoram and thyme and rosemary. She spoons seeds – pumpkin, caraway, sunflower, sesame – into a small bowl. Minestrone and cream of tomato the soups on today’s lunch menu, accompanied by slices of crusty bread, herby olive or seeded.

She returns upstairs to find Barney washing himself. She crouches to gather up the usual small scatter of his food pellets on the tiles, and return them to his bowl. So small he was when she found him, not a fortnight after moving here. Abandoned in the alley between the launderette and the bookshop, his tiny high cries caught her attention as she walked by on an evening stroll, her head full of the new direction her life was taking. She halted and peered up the alley, straining in the muddy twilight gloom to find the source of the sound – and there he was, clambering unsteadily over what she first took to be a little heap of rags, but which turned out to be the limp bodies of two others, presumably his siblings, lying half in and half out of the plastic bag they must have been transported in.

She stooped and gathered him up without thinking. She tucked him inside her coat – how he trembled! – and returned home with him, where she warmed milk and poured it into a saucer. He spluttered and choked, drenching his face and paws, too small to manage. She tried feeding him from a teaspoon. Here he fared slightly better, but still the process was messy, with more milk ending up on his face than in his tiny stomach.

She lined a pudding bowl with one of her scarves and deposited him there, and returned for the other two casualties. She wrapped them in an old tea towel and dug a hole for them in the shrubbery at the end of her narrow garden – but what was she to do with the survivor? With many splatters and splashes she coaxed a few more mouthfuls of milk into him, wondering if it was the right food for this helpless little creature, or if she was doing him more harm than good.

She returned him to his bowl and placed it next to her pillow, and spent the night straining to hear the small sounds of him. She listened to the fierce little rapid breaths and imagined his tiny lungs working frantically to keep him alive. She heard his snuffles and scratches and mews as he clambered his unsteady way around the bowl, her heart in her mouth in case all his noises stopped.

The following day she brought him to the vet, who told her that he was a he, and roughly a month old. ‘You’ll need to bottle-feed him for a couple of weeks,’ he said, and gave her a bottle hardly bigger than her thumb, a funnel and a carton of kitten milk. She filled the bottle and wriggled its teat into the small mouth; her charge sucked at it greedily, like a baby, and grew round and tubby within a fortnight. After each feed she brought him out to the garden and set him on a patch of earth. Tiny as he was, he burrowed out a little hole and squatted over it.

Two years later, look at him. ‘My big boy,’ she says, and he runs a licked paw over his ear again and again and ignores her. He is her first pet, the first animal she has ever owned – if anyone can truly own a cat. By night he prowls the rear gardens and yards of the street, returning at dawn to his windowsill; during the day he sleeps a lot, curled in a corner of the sofa on one of Gran’s old cushions that Emily hadn’t had the heart to throw out.

Most of the time, apart from his morning welcome, he exhibits little evidence of fondness for her. He’ll shy away from an attempted caress, making her feel that he looks on her purely as a source of food and shelter – but every now and again, when she’s tapping on her computer or engrossed in a book, he’ll leave his cushion and butt against her leg, demanding to be lifted and stroked and scratched before settling in her lap to purr and doze. She cherishes these unexpected episodes, this evidence that he holds her after all in some affection.

Grooming over, he leans unhurriedly into a stretch with the same fluid grace that accompanies all his movements. It ripples along the length of his body, elongating his limbs, pulling everything taut as a piano string. Watching him, she feels her own muscle groups flexing in response. He bounds onto the couch and gives a few exploratory prods of his cushion; the prelude, she knows, to his first snooze of the day.

She cuts a slice from a lemon and drops it into a cup and covers it with hot water. She spoons thick Greek yogurt into a bowl and eats it drizzled with pale yellow honey from the market and scattered with a teaspoon of toasted flaked almonds. She watches a pair of thrushes flitting about in the little back garden below, checking out the rowan hedge for a possible home. Be careful, she tells them silently. Watch out for Barney if you settle there. Keep your wits about you. Keep your babies safe.

As she dries her bowl she remembers her mother’s letter, abandoned on the worktop in the restaurant kitchen. She retrieves it and slits open the envelope. She pulls out the single page and leans against the sink to read it.

Hello there!

Hope all’s well with you. Patrick cut his foot on a rock a few days ago and had to have two stitches and a tetanus jab. He’s fine but he loves a fuss, so I’m pretending it was far more serious. One of our students won quite a big swimming competition at the weekend, great excitement! We had local press at the school, so we were all in our Sunday best. What else? A neighbour fell off a ladder and crushed a vertebra, or slipped a disc, something painful anyway. I felt obliged to visit him in hospital, although he’s a cranky so-and-so. He was asleep, which was a relief, but he looked about a decade older in the bed, and not half as fierce in his pyjamas. I left a bag of oranges and sneaked away. I might look in again in a few days, if only to make sure he knows who left the oranges!

Must go – we’ve been invited to drinks, it’s my yoga teacher’s silver wedding anniversary. Patrick did his best to wriggle out but I wasn’t having it. He sends his love, by the way,

Dol xx

Dol for Dolores. Never Mum, or Mam, or any of that. Dol and Patrick they were called, by their children as well as by everyone else. Was that why, Emily wonders, they always seemed more like amiable guardians, people who’d been entrusted with two children and instructed to see them safely into adulthood, rather than the parents who’d conceived them?

Not that Emily and Daniel were neglected, nothing like that. Never slapped or shouted at either. On the contrary, they grew up in a state of comfort, well dressed and well fed. They were brought on holidays like everyone else, and encouraged to do well at their very respectable schools, and driven to or collected from friends’ houses when they requested it. But from the time she was old enough to notice it, before she had learnt enough to put it into words, Emily was aware of some disconnect, some short circuit in the emotional current that flowed between them.

Their infrequent embraces struck her as distracted, as if they were following convention rather than demonstrating affection. Their greetings and goodbyes were breezy; their words of comfort when mishaps occurred sounded formulaic rather than heartfelt. Even their censure lacked conviction, as if whatever offence had prompted it – a negative comment on a report card, a complaint from a neighbour about loud music, a breaking of curfew at the weekend – didn’t really bother them all that much.

The harsh truth of it, Emily finally concluded, was that her parents were more interested in each other than in their children. Individually they were happy to spend time with Emily and Daniel, but the instant they came together, their focus changed. They gloried in the other’s company. They were enough for one another, with Emily and Daniel being the afterthoughts, the by-products of their union. The tolerated baggage.

Hard not to draw that conclusion, when they had packed their actual bags at the earliest opportunity. Their duty done, it felt like. Their preferred unencumbered lives ready to resume.

We’re moving to Portugal in September, they said, the summer that Daniel, younger than Emily by three years, had got his first job. We’ve been offered positions in an international school. You’ll both be welcome to visit anytime you want, as soon as we’re sorted with accommodation.

But you have work here, Emily said. They taught in separate secondary schools; Dol’s subjects were English and French, Patrick’s science and maths.

We’ve resigned, her mother replied. We thought this was a good opportunity: if we left it much longer we’d be too old for anyone to want us.

So arrangements had been made, without any consultation with their children. Hard not to feel abandoned, even if you were twenty-two and earning a fair enough salary, even if you were still going to have a roof over your head – the house is yours and Daniel’s, they were told, for as long as you need it. Hard all the same not to feel that they were making their escape.

And you’ll have Gran with you, Dol said. Gran, Patrick’s mother, lived in town, in the flat above the hat shop she’d opened after handing over the family home to her son and his new wife, twenty-five years earlier.

She’s finally ready to retire, Dol went on. We’ve asked if she’d like to move back here, to live with you two.

Another decision taken without Emily and Daniel being consulted – but this was one Emily was all in favour of. Gran felt like family, real family. All through her teens Emily had so often dropped into the hat shop after school, to sit behind the counter and watch Gran with her customers, or to climb the stairs on days the shop was closed, to drink tea and eat Garibaldi biscuits.

She’d never known her builder grandfather: he’d fallen to his death from scaffolding when Emily’s father was still a toddler. I worked from home while Patrick was growing up, Gran told her. I was always handy with a needle so I did alterations, and made hats to order. When Patrick announced he was getting married it gave me the push I needed – I’d been dreaming about opening a hat shop for years. I was thrilled when I found this little place with accommodation upstairs. It was perfect.

The shop was an Aladdin’s cave to young Emily. There was a large room to the rear where Gran made her hats, with a big trestle table covered with rolls of fabric and bundles of lace and stacks of felt, and two giant glass-fronted cabinets whose presses and drawers held her various trimmings and threads and tools, and a large family of pin-cushions that put Emily in mind of hedgehogs.

In the main shop the hats were displayed on tiered shelving, with their curving magnificent feathers, their tulle veils and delicate lace edging, their ribbons and buttons and sequins and flowers. It was a place riotous with colour, and glorious with shape and texture. There was a small dressing table with a mirrored triptych, in front of which frowning customers would tilt their heads this way and that while Gran kept up a running commentary, and sometimes reached out to tip the hat further to the front, or an inch to the side. There! she would exclaim, beaming, clasping her hands. That’s made all the difference!

I’m leaving it to you, she told Emily once, during one of their conversations. This place. It’ll be yours after I’m gone – and Emily, shy and sixteen, couldn’t imagine having the confidence to run a hat shop, or any shop, could only protest at the unconscionable thought of Gran not being around any more. She’d pushed the remark to the back of her mind and it hadn’t been mentioned again – and thirteen years later here she is, three and a half years after the unthinkable happened, and Gran left them. Here she is, living in the apartment that was Gran’s home, proprietor for the past two years of the restaurant that used to be a hat shop.

Here she is, after the future she’d planned fell apart, forcing her to create a new one.

She folds the letter and slips it into the left dresser drawer with all the others. Her father doesn’t write: he phones every Monday evening, and they spend ten minutes in the kind of amicable but empty conversation people make when they aren’t close enough for anything deeper.

She must remember to ask him about the injury to his foot; that’ll use up a minute or two. She can tell him about the young couple who’ve moved into Frances Cooney’s house, along with their small baby and several cats – Daniel thinks five, but it could be more.

Frances, childless and unmarried, lived next door to them all through Emily’s growing-up years, behind net-curtained windows that were never opened. Her rear garden, for as long as Emily could remember, was home to her various discards: a rusting fridge, an assortment of woebegone kitchen chairs, the tangled skeletal remains of several umbrellas, numerous bicycle wheels and frames, a lopsided wardrobe missing its door. Frances, tatty and friendly, collapsed and died without a murmur on her way into the supermarket on the morning of her seventieth birthday.

Emily spends the next few hours at her computer, stopping only to return to the restaurant kitchen and attend to the intermittent demands of her bread. At length, the warm, wonderful scent of the baking loaves begins to drift up the stairs as it does every working morning, causing Barney to purr happily in his sleep. Emily drinks vanilla chai and types on.

At eleven she hears the sound of Mike’s key in the door. She saves her file and flips the laptop closed, and goes downstairs to greet him, and to begin the lunchtime preparations in earnest.

‘Toothache,’ he says, when she enquires if all is well. ‘Kept me awake half the night. My own fault, been nagging me for a while. Should have done something about it.’ Hanging his jacket in the narrow press behind the door, reaching for a clean apron, securing it about his waist.

‘Oh, poor thing – you should have phoned. I could have got Daniel to give me a hand.’ Her brother has stepped in on a few occasions before. Daniel doesn’t have Mike’s flair, but he’s not a bad cook. Between them, he and Emily manage when they have to.

Mike rolls up his sleeves and washes his hands at the small corner sink. ‘I’m grand, the painkillers have kicked in. I’ve got the dentist booked for a quarter past two – only time he could take me, so I’ll have to leave you with the tidy up, I’m afraid.’

‘No worries.’

‘I’ll pay it back.’

‘You know you don’t have to.’

‘I know.’

But he will, of course. First person she’s ever employed, and she doubts she could have found a more dependable one. For the next half hour they chop and fry and season and stir as the kitchen grows warmer and more fragrant. While the soups bubble and the breads cool, Mike cuts lemon and orange slices for water jugs and Emily goes to the garden for primroses, a reawakened Barney padding after her. The sun is weak and pale but it’s there, the sky a patchwork of washed-out blue and pillowy white. She sniffs the air, damp and fresh from last night’s rain.

Beads of water cling to the velvety flower petals: she tries not to dislodge them as she snips stems. She arranges them in four little rinsed-out spice jars and takes them through to the restaurant. She checks place settings and straightens a fork and pulls out a tweak in the tablecloth. Ten to midday.

Upstairs she dabs fresh colour on lips and cheeks, and scent behind her ears. She pulls her hair into a ribbon that will definitely come undone before lunch is over, but elastic of any kind, once secured in her hair, becomes a prisoner of her curls. She checks her reflection in the bathroom mirror and reminds herself, as she does every day, how lucky she is. Healthy and solvent – just about – with a business she loves, and a sideline that helps pay the bills, and friends and family who care about her. Not much to complain about.

Back on the ground floor she pokes her head into the kitchen. ‘Ready?’

‘Ready.’

She walks through the silent restaurant as church bells three streets away chime for the Angelus. She unlocks the front door and throws it open. As she glances out to check on the street, a man rises from the bench outside the window, shaking out the jacket that was resting on his lap as he runs a hand through straw-coloured hair that’s every bit as unruly as her own.

She smiles at him. ‘You’re early.’

‘The boss is away,’ he says. ‘I snuck out. Don’t tell.’

HE CHOOSES MINESTRONE, BECAUSE LAST THURSDAY he picked cream of tomato, and variety is the spice of life. He wonders if he’ll meet any of the other regulars today. Sometimes their paths intersect, sometimes he’s surrounded by strangers. He doesn’t mind either way: people come here to chat, to mix, so conversations strike up easily. Today he’s the first to arrive.

After taking his order, Emily lingers. ‘Bill, I know you always tell me you don’t mind when I ask you to do something, but if you ever feel like I’m becoming a pest—’

‘Never. What do you need?’

‘One of the kitchen taps is dripping. There’s no rush, it’s not major.’

‘I’ll come Saturday afternoon, if that suits.’ He’d go to the moon on a bicycle if she asked.

‘Would you? Thanks a million, you’re a star.’

When she’s gone he selects a slice of olive bread from the basket she set before him, and spreads it with too much butter. A minute on the lips, an inch on the hips, Rosie Doyle would say if she saw it, arthritic finger prodding at the softness around his middle – but he’s fairly sure an extra inch or two on him would go largely unobserved. Long time since anyone looked at him with enough interest to notice stuff like that. He’s no George Clooney, with his tangle of hair and pointy nose, and mouth too big for its surroundings. Still got all his own teeth though, and the hair is as plentiful as it was in his twenties. Small mercies: he’s thankful.

The bread still holds the last of its warmth. He chews slowly, relishing the generous chunks of olive he encounters. He was twenty-two before he tasted an olive; he remembers biting into its crinkled black flesh, not knowing what to expect. The surprise of his teeth hitting the stone: he’d been thinking little pips, like a grape.

Greece they’d gone to, he and Betty, less than a year into their marriage, and just a few months after her mother died. A little holiday, he’d said, trying to pull his wife’s mind away from her grief, trying to distract her with sunshine and bougainvillea and chunks of tender lamb on wooden sticks, and houses so dazzlingly white he’d had to squint at them.

Fragments of crust scatter with each bite onto the tablecloth. He swipes them into his hand and drops them back on his side plate. He reaches for the little glass jar closest to him and dips his head to sniff the primroses. He runs a finger lightly along a petal to marvel at its softness. He was never one to coax flowers from the earth – Betty was the gardener, and Christine had an interest too – but the sight of them never fails to gladden him.

The door opens to admit two women. He guesses mother and daughter. Right ages, same chins. Mother shorter, daughter thinner. They nod at him and take seats at the far end of the table. Came for the food maybe, happy keeping to themselves. He doesn’t remember seeing them here before, but this can’t be their first visit. New people always do a double-take when they walk in.

Emily reappears with his soup. She presses his shoulder briefly as she leans in to deposit the bowl before him. ‘Bon appétit,’ she says, like she always does. She turns her attention to the other two, leaving him with the echo of her touch, the soft, powdery trail of her perfume. He likes her in pink; she suits pale colours. Then again, he can’t remember seeing her in a colour that didn’t flatter her.

He tells himself to cop on, and lifts his spoon.

Over the following few minutes the table fills rapidly, as it generally does. People enter in ones and twos, seats are chosen, names exchanged with neighbours, handshakes across the table, conversations ensuing. Bill soon finds himself chatting with a holidaying Norwegian, who tells him that a barman recommended the restaurant to him the night before. ‘It is different here,’ he says.

‘You travelled to Ireland on your own?’ Bill enquires.

‘Yes. I like it, more interesting’ – but Bill can’t imagine heading off anywhere without a companion. Not for him, never for him. Took him long enough to work up the nerve to walk into this place by himself. For weeks he’d dithered, getting as far as the door and then walking on by, cursing his cowardice.

It’s your first time, Emily said, when he finally made it across the threshold. The situation plain, with him hovering on the sidelines like a red-faced fool, having missed, in his botheration, the sign that told him he could sit wherever he chose. I’m Emily, she went on, putting out her hand to clasp his. You’re very welcome. He told her he was Bill, and she seated him next to a tiny old woman with a head of sparse snow-white hair, whom she introduced as Astrid. One of my regulars, she told him, doing her best to put him at ease.

Over the course of the forty minutes or so that he spent in her company, he learnt that Astrid had been born in Austria, but had lived in Ireland for most of her life.

We got out just as the war was starting, she said, her accent barely discernible, the ‘r’s softened, the ‘t’s sharp. We were lucky: my father had contacts in high places. We came to Ireland because it was neutral, and he thought we would be safe here, and so we were. I married an Irish man but I’m a widow now, and we were not blessed with children.

Bill told her he’d been widowed too. He mentioned a daughter but didn’t dwell on her. She has her own life now, he said, and left it at that, and thankfully Astrid didn’t probe. He has since come to recognise and appreciate the sensitivity that allows her to understand what isn’t always articulated.

Emily comes and goes today, greeting known faces cheerily, keeping an eye on lone diners who look a bit lost. Bringing steaming bowls to new arrivals, keeping bread baskets filled, asking if anyone wants second helpings.

As he gets up to leave, Bill spots the two women he noticed earlier, in conversation with a pale, freckly man whose wire-rimmed spectacles perch on the bald dome of his head. As he talks, the man tears a slice of bread into pieces and floats them in his soup. He glances in Bill’s direction and catches his eye briefly before Bill lets his gaze slide away, afraid that a smile might come across as mocking the bread islands.

‘Always good to see you, Bill,’ Emily says, taking his money, and his name on her tongue sends warmth through him.

‘I’ll be back on Sa. . .