"I didn't put it that way." Tears of hurt sprang in Brenda's eyes.
"It's what you meant, though, Brenda. The fool of the family is able to get his girl pregnant but you can't say the same for the elder brother."
I will not have you speak of Blouse that way, Patrick. You never did before. You never let anyone else do so. He told me you used to go to his schoolyard and fight battles with anyone who made such a remark, and now you're doing it yourself."
He felt ashamed, she could see it, his head hung down. "I'm sorry. I don't know what came into me."
"What came into you is what's in me too, a longing, a longing to have a child of our own, no wonder it unbalances us, Patrick."
"You're not unbalanced about it. You're very calm," he said.
"No, that's my way of coping, pretend everything's normal and it may become normal."
"I'm sorry, Brenda. It's hard on you too. I'm not trying to excuse myself for anything. It's just sometimes when I'm as tired as a dog at the end of a day, I wonder what it's all for."
"All what?"
"All the hard work. What are we doing it for, exactly?"
Brenda thought they were doing it for themselves, for each in other, for the shared dream. But she knew she must speak very carefully. "I know, I feel the same," she said slowly.
"You do?" He seemed surprised.
"Well, of course I do, Patrick. What do you think I feel?"
"It's just that last month you said . .. when we realised once more that it hadn't happened .. . you said maybe, just maybe, it was all for the best for the moment."
"What would you have preferred, that I would have opened my mouth and howled out from the bathroom in front of everyone, the suppliers, the customers, Blouse and Mary, anyone else passing through, that yet again we had failed to make a child? Should I have sobbed and upset everyone? You tell me, so that I'll do it right next month."
He put his arms around her and she cried into his chest for about fifteen minutes before her shoulders stopped shaking. Then he held her away from him and he looked at her tear-stained face. "Come on, now, put on your face for both of us, brave Brenda Brennan," he said, and kissed her for the first time in a long time. Mary and Blouse had a little boy. They called him Brendan Patrick. He was perfect.
Brenda went in to see him every day. His little fingers tightened over hers. He smiled sleepily up at her. He would stop crying when she held him. She was good with children. One day she would have one of her own.
She rang Dr. Flynn and said yes to any fertility drugs available, including experimental ones. He urged caution and waiting. She said there wasn't any question of that any more.
She kept the smile of welcome and delight about little Brendan Patrick nailed to her face. She was sure that nobody saw in her face the yearning, the longing for her own child. Then one day her lip reading skills showed her a conversation between Blouse and Mary.
"Isn't it great that Brenda loves him so much?" Blouse was saying. V: "
"Yes, but I think we shouldn't boast about him so much," Mary said.
"Boast? Doesn't she admire him and talk about him just like us?" Blouse was astonished.
"It's just that she might have wanted one of her own," said little Mary O'Brien with the red curls and the perfect new baby.
There were reasons why the drugs didn't seem to suit. High blood pressure, allergies, centra-indications. In vitro fertilisation had a very long waiting list. Brenda never really understood what each problem was because the shroud of disappointment was so great, and the hard lines of Patrick's face more firmly etched.
Dr. Flynn tried to explain it to them. He got the feeling he was talking to two brick walls. He talked about resuming and keeping up the active happy sex life they had told him they had before. He mentioned adoption tentatively. Very often this was a wonderful thing, not only in itself but it had the additional side effect of leaving the parents more relaxed and therefore having a successful conception.
They said nothing.
Dr. Flynn said that adoption wasn't as easy as it used to be, too many people chasing after a small pool of babies. The days were gone when single girls gave up their babies to orphanages or for adoption. Very much healthier attitude, of course, but not helpful when you were looking for a child.
And of course there was the age factor, nobody over forty was really in with a chance of adopting, so it would have to be speedy if they wanted to try and apply.
To the outside world, nothing had changed, but for the great team that had been Brenda and Patrick Brennan, something had. Only those very close to them guessed that there was anything wrong at all. Blouse and Mary thought the couple were very overworked, that they didn't seem to laugh as much as they had in earlier times. Brenda's mother noticed nothing except that any time she was unwise enough to enquire about the patter of tiny feet, she got a very short answer.
Quentin Barry noticed in his weekly phone call that the same spark wasn't there in Brenda.
He put it down to strain and rules and regulations and anxiety. "Don't kill yourselves," he wrote kindly. I know that we won't be trading at a profit for quite a long time. My accountant barks much more loudly than he bites. Together we will have something marvellous, don't lose your passion and fire over this."
If Patrick and Brenda had both read his instructions about not losing fire and passion with a wry laugh they said nothing to each other. They had been serving food and changing everything restlessly for months now.
There were so many teething troubles. Who would have known that parking would be such a nightmare. That taxi firms would be so likely to let them down. That the fish catch would be so unreliable at times. That well-known people would have used-up credit cards. That people would steal ashtrays and linen napkins. They learned, slowly and sometimes bitterly. This was the first time they had run their own place. Or Quentin's place. He had told them to think of it as theirs.
But when Brenda saw Patrick sighing, she remembered how he had asked, "What's it all for? What am I doing all this for?" Her heart was heavy.
By the time the end of their first year approached, Brenda had lost a great deal of weight and looked very tired. Mary, Blouse's wife, who looked blooming in motherhood, was also, it appeared, able to hold down a series of jobs as well. Through her contacts she had arranged huge publicity for the first anniversary party.
Three nights before the event, when every catastrophe that could have happened had happened, Patrick and Brenda were still in the restaurant kitchen at 3 a.m. They had lived through a day when a car had reversed into one of their windows, leaving broken glass and a whistling wind until the whole thing could be boarded up and made to appear like a bomb site. Then there had been a gas leak, a shelf containing a lot of valuable produce collapsing, and a lavatory in the ladies" room overflowing. Somebody had sent back the fish because it tasted "funny" and everyone else felt uneasy about their portions, which had tasted fine up to then. One of the waiters had left because he said, frankly, the place was a shambles and would never take off as a top-class place to work.
"What are we doing it for?" Patrick asked again.
"Sorry, Patrick?"
"You heard me. What's it for? I'm bloody exhausted. You're like skin and bone. You've aged twenty years. We were mad to try to do all this. Crazy, that's what we were ..."