Lena goes to the counter and starts realigning the chocolate bars and rolls of sweets. “What’d he get in the end?”
“Packet of Maltesers and one of them fizzy lollipops. D’you see what I mean? Them’s sweeties for a child. Grown men get the Snickers, or maybe a Mars bar.”
“See, I was right to turn him down,” Lena points out. Before Cal arrived, Noreen felt that Lena should consider Bobby as an option, if only so that his farm didn’t go to waste by being left to his Offaly cousins. “I couldn’t spend the rest of my life watching that fella suck fizzy lollies.”
“Ah, there’s no harm in Bobby,” Noreen says promptly. Noreen is still determined to put Bobby to use, if she can just find the right woman. “He has himself all worked up because of Johnny Reddy coming home, is all. You know what Bobby’s like: any change’d send him into a spin.” She throws a glance at Lena, over her shoulder. Noreen and Lena look nothing alike: Noreen is short, round, and quick-moving, with a tight perm and sharp dark eyes. “Did you see Johnny yet?”
“I did. He came strolling by to show off his tail feathers.” Lena swaps the Maltesers around to be front and center, so Bobby can get at them without ruining Noreen’s day.
“Don’t you go falling for Johnny’s rubbish,” Noreen says, pointing a tin of beans at Lena. “You’re well sorted with Cal Hooper. He’s ten times the man Johnny is, any day of the week.”
“Ah, I don’t know. Cal’s all right, but he never got a scarf off Kate Winslet.”
Noreen lets out a scornful pfft. “Didja see that scarf yoke? Wee bitta chiffon that wouldn’t keep a baba warm. That’s Johnny all over: anything he’s got looks lovely, but it’s pure useless. What was he saying to you?”
Lena shrugs. “He didn’t make his fortune over in London, and he missed the fields. That’s as far as he got before I ran him off.”
Noreen snorts and smacks a tin of peas onto the top of a stack. “The fields. Feckin’ state of him. That’s tourist talk. Missed having someone to do his washing and cooking, more like.”
“You don’t reckon Kate Winslet can cook a roast dinner?”
“I’d say she can, all right, but I’d say she’d have better sense than to do it for the likes of Johnny Reddy. No: that lad got his arse dumped, is what happened him. Didja see the hair on him? That fella would only leave himself get that scruffy if he’d some poor foolish one wrapped round his little finger. If he was single, he’d be done up to the nines, for going out on the prowl. I’m telling you: he had a one, she found out what he was made of and kicked him to the curb, and he came home sooner than fend for himself.”
Lena straightens Twix bars and thinks this over. It’s an angle she hadn’t previously considered. It’s both plausible and reassuring.
“And Sheila’d better not get used to having him about the place,” Noreen adds. “If he convinces the bit on the side to take him back, we won’t see him for dust.”
“The bit on the side won’t have him back,” Lena says. “Johnny’s one of them fellas that are outa sight, outa mind. He’s making a big splash coming home, but when he was gone, no one thought twice about him. I didn’t hear one word about him, the whole four years. There was no one saying their nephew ran into him in a pub, or their brother was working with him on the building sites. I don’t know what he was at, even.”
Noreen instantly takes up the challenge. “Ah, I heard the odd word. A year or two back, Annie O’Riordan, you know her, from up towards Lisnacarragh? Her cousin in London saw him in a pub, with some young one bet into a pair of black leather leggings laughing her arse off at his jokes. D’you see what I mean? That fella couldn’t make it through a wet weekend without a woman to look after him and tell him he’s only amazing.”
“Sounds like Johnny, all right,” Lena says. Sheila used to think Johnny was only amazing. Lena doubts she does any more.
“And d’you remember Bernadette Madigan, that I usedta do the choir with? She’s got a wee little antique shop in London now, and didn’t Johnny come in trying to sell her a necklace that he said was diamonds, with some sob story about his wife running off and leaving him with three starving childer. He didn’t recognize her—Bernadette’s after putting on the weight something awful, God love her—but she recognized him, all right. She told him to stick his fake diamonds up his hole.”
“Did she ride him, back in school?” Lena asks.
“That’s her business, not mine,” Noreen says primly. “I’d say so, though, yeah.”
The spark of reassurance in Lena’s mind is fading. Johnny was never crooked, exactly, but it was hard to tell whether that was just happenstance. If he’s happened to drift over that line, who knows how far he might have drifted, and what he might have brought back on his trail. “When’d she see him?” she asks.
“Back before Christmas. The feckin’ eejit—Johnny, not Bernadette. She said a blind man coulda told you those were no diamonds.”
“You never said anything.”
“I hear a lot more than I say,” Noreen informs her with dignity. “You’ve some notion that I’m the biggest gossip in the county, but I can keep my mouth shut when I want. I said nothing to anyone about Johnny’s goings-on, because I knew yourself and Cal were working your arses off to keep that child on the straight and narrow, and I wasn’t going to scupper that by giving her family a worse name than they’ve already got. Now.”
“Now,” Lena says, grinning at her. “That’s me told.”
“It’d better be. How’s the child getting on, anyway?”
“Grand. She’s been over putting a new coat of wax on Nana’s old bed.”
“Ah, that’ll be nice. What does she think of her daddy coming home?”
Lena shrugs. “Trey, sure. She said he was back, and then she said the dog needed feeding, and that was the end of that.”
“That dog’s mad-looking,” Noreen says. “Like it was put together outa bits of other dogs that got left over. Your Daisy needs better taste in fellas.”
“She should’ve consulted you,” Lena says. “You’d’ve had her set up with a gorgeous stud with a pedigree as long as my arm, before she knew what hit her.”
“I don’t see you complaining,” Noreen tells her. Lena tilts her head, acknowledging the hit, and Noreen goes back to work with a little nod of victory. She says, “I heard the child stayed over at yours, after Johnny came home.”
“Fair play to you,” Lena says, impressed. “She did, yeah. Cal gets nervous about her walking up that mountain in the dark. He thinks she’ll fall in a bog. She won’t, but there’s no convincing him.”
Noreen darts Lena a sharp glance. “Pass me over that box there, with the jam. What about Cal?”
Lena nudges the cardboard box along the floor with a foot. “What about him?”
“What does he think about Johnny?”
“Sure, he’s hardly met the man. He hasn’t had a chance to come up with much of an opinion.”
Noreen whips jam jars onto the shelf with expert speed. She says, “Are you planning on marrying that fella?”
“Ah, God, no,” Lena says, going back to the Fruit Pastilles. “White doesn’t suit me.”
“Sure you wouldn’t wear white the second time around anyway, and that’s not the point. What I’m telling you is, if you’re planning on marrying him, there’s no reason to wait. Go on and get the job done.”
Lena looks at her. She inquires, “Is someone dying, are they?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what are you on about? No one’s dying!”
“Then what’s the rush?”
Noreen gives her a prickly stare and goes back to the jam. Lena waits.
“You can’t trust a Reddy,” Noreen says. “No harm to the child, she might turn out grand, but the rest of them. You know as well as I do, you wouldn’t know what notion Johnny’d get into his head. If he took against Cal and decided to make trouble…”