‘So,’ he said, as though we were starting all over again. ‘Having a good time?’
‘Well, I just met Bridget O’Flaherty, weather supremo, meteorological tsar…so that was exciting.’ I was working hard to keep things light, to stop myself from either slipping into our easy repartee which left me confused or to start crying and force him to confront what happened. Neither was going to help our current working situation but all I knew was, standing there with him, his body close to mine, bending to speak into each other’s ears so we could hear each other above the music, I was happy. For the first time in years, I was happy. I could feel it, a warmth in my stomach, a fizzing in my synapses, and a lightness in my toes. Happiness. A strange and lovely feeling. Fun. I was in danger of actually having fun.
‘Tsarina.’
‘What?’
‘Weather tsarina, surely?’
‘Indeed, weather tsarina, sultana… princess of precipitation? Which do you prefer?’
‘Sultana, definitely. I see no raisin not to.’
‘Red!’ I giggled. ‘You can do better than that.’
‘The problem is, I can’t,’ he said, making us both laugh again. ‘So meeting this sultana then. Highlight of your life?’
‘The highlight,’ I said. ‘Apart from the time I met Orville the duck at the stage door of the Gaiety after the panto.’
He laughed. ‘You see, I did not know that about you. Mine was meeting Ray Houghton. I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I was eighteen,’ he chuckled. ‘Old enough to know better, but he was such a hero. Scoring that goal at Italia ’90. But he was well used to idiot boys like me being goggle-eyed and slack-jawed. A real hero. You don’t meet many of them every day.’
‘A bit better than Orville,’ I said. ‘And there I was thinking that meeting a green puppet could be the greatest brush with fame and you go and trump me with your story of meeting a man who single-handedly improved the mental health of an entire nation.’
‘Sorry about that,’ he said, laughing again. From behind us we heard the sound of ‘Happy Birthday’ being sung. We watched as a huge cake was pushed on a trolley towards Clodagh and a surge of people followed, all singing. And then a chorus of ‘For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow’, which someone changed to ‘For She’s A Jolly Good Newsreader’ started up, whilst Clodagh attempted to blow out the candles. But for some reason, before she had even mustered enough breath, Bridget had swept over them, with the zeal of a firefighter determined to put out all flames, however miniature.
‘Sorry!’ she smiled at everyone. ‘Instinct! I see birthday candles and I just have to blow them out!’ She clutched Clodagh’s arm. ‘I hope you don’t mind, Clodes?’
Clodagh looked as though she minded a great deal indeed. And as the cake began to be sliced up and handed around, she and Max were asked to pose for some photographer. But Bridget slipped in between them, holding a slice of cake in a paper napkin and as the shutter clicked, the cake totally obscured Clodagh’s face. I thought of Clodagh’s stricken expression whenever Max was around. Why did she bother with him? Why was such a cool and successful woman like Clodagh bothering her arse with Maximum Pratt?
‘What the hell is happening to this country?’ said Red. ‘I leave and everything is normal and upstaging people is considered entirely un-Irish. I come back and we’re all in competition with each other. It’s dog eat dog.’
‘If anyone blew out my birthday candles,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’d be too happy. It’s one of those things that you just don’t do. Like cancel the barbecue because it’s raining or not watch Christmas Top of the Pops.’ I’d decided somewhere between Orville and Ray Houghton that I was just going to give in to this. I wasn’t going to run off. I wanted to be here, right now. Talking to an old friend. Okay, so we had history and it was slightly awkward and there was so much we weren’t saying, but for now, at this level, it was glorious.
‘Do people still do that?’ he asked. ‘Really?’
‘I don’t know if it’s still on,’ I admitted. ‘But every Christmas, when I am sitting at my mother-in-law’s dining table eating turkey, I wish I was at home, just me and Rosie, watching Top of the Pops.’
‘We watched it,’ he said. ‘Do you remember? It was just us and we roasted a chicken. You made the worst gravy I have ever tasted.’
‘And you insisted on making something from Delia Smith. Something involving asparagus. It didn’t work. Mushy asparagus, if I remember rightly.’ We’d had fun that day too. We’d had a lot of fun when we were together. We used to laugh a lot. And I’d stopped laughing over the years, and it was incredible to remember that I was still that person who laughed. Red seemed to be enjoying himself because he was laughing as much as I was.
‘I was just trying to show off,’ he said. ‘Impress you. Obviously didn’t work.’
‘Well…’ I wasn’t quite sure what to say. Yes, it did work. You did impress me. And I’m still impressed. More than impressed, actually.
He was looking at me. ‘You look… you look beautiful.’
‘Sorry?’ I said, frowning. What did he just say?
‘You look beautiful,’ he repeated. And he blushed. I could see it, the pink spreading from his neck to the top of his head. I’d forgotten that he used to blush but now it all came back to me. He blushed that time he asked me out for a drink, and the first time we kissed on the bandstand on the pier when it had begun to rain. How could I have forgotten? But if I had remembered it, I would have thought it was just a youthful affliction, not something a grown man, someone so assured, could do.
And I wanted to kiss him again just like that time on the bandstand. I wanted to be that twenty-two-year-old all over again.
‘Red…’ I began. ‘Red… I…’ I wanted to say that I was sorry. I wanted to explain why it had happened, my excuse, my reason. An answer for him.
He was looking at me, intently.
‘Red, there’s something I need to say…’ But behind us we heard a voice. Bridget.
.
*
‘There you are, Tabitha,’ she said, as though we were old friends. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere…’ She turned to Red. ‘Oh hello. Bridget O’Flaherty.’ She held out her hand. ‘And who are you?’ She inched a shoulder in front of me, so that it was just her and Red talking and me hanging around. ‘Don’t tell me what you do,’ she said. ‘Production company? Managing director?’
‘Nothing like that,’ he said. ‘I’m a school teacher. Red Power. Good to meet you.’
‘Oh.’ For a moment, Bridget was quiet, the only sound was her brain whirring, trying to work out if it was worth her while to be attracted to a teacher. ‘When did teachers get to be so handsome?’ She put her hand on the lapel of Red’s jacket and stood so I was slightly obscured.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘There’s something I’ve always wondered… how teachers manage to keep control of a classroom? I mean, we were always so naughty. I just wondered what you might do if someone you were trying to teach was being bold.’
I could hear Red laugh but I couldn’t see his face because Bridget had actually moved so she was blocking me off entirely. And then another group edged towards us so I was being cut off from them, Bridget’s back right in my face. Clodagh came up to me and pulled me to the bar. ‘I need a drink. A large one. Or a tiny but lethal one.’
‘Not tequila?’ I said, looking back at Red and Bridget. ‘You know what dark powers tequila has over you.’
‘Don’t care,’ she said, waving to the bar tender. Red had moved and was looking over at me but maybe, I thought, Bridget had done us a service. We couldn’t stand there, having a good time. I was married. There was a whole lifetime behind us. We had grown up. It we tried to be friends, then it would very likely go wrong, leaving us worse off, perhaps, than before. And Red was a handsome and lovely man. He needed to find someone with whom he could settle down. I had to let him go a second time, wipe out any thoughts or feelings I might have for him.