Maeve Binchy - Quentins

Brenda Brennan had noticed the girl looking around with interest. She was exactly the teenage daughter that Brenda would have loved to have had. Alert, friendly, laughing with her parents and grateful for being taken out to a smart place to eat. You didn't always see them like that. Often they were bored and sulky and she would tell Patrick later on in the night that possibly they had been lucky to escape parenthood. But this one was every mother's dream. And her parents didn't look all that young, either. The man could be sixty, he was tired and slightly stooped, the mother in her fifties. Lucky people, the Bradys, to have had such a treasure late in their years.

"What do most people like best to eat, are there any favourites?" the girl asked Brenda when she brought them the menu.

"A lot of our customers like the way we do fish . .. we keep it very simple, with a sauce on the side. And of course many more people are vegetarian nowadays, so Chef has to think up new recipes all the time."

"He must be very clever," Ella said. "And does he talk to you all normally and everything while he's working? I mean, is he temperamental?"

"Oh, he talks all right, not always normally; then of course he's married to me, so he has to talk to me or I'd murder him." They all laughed together and Ella felt so good to be treated as one of the grown-ups. Then Brenda moved on to another table.

Ella saw both her parents looking at her very intensely.

"What's wrong? Did I talk too much?" she asked, looking from one to the other. She knew she was inclined to prattle on.

"Nothing's wrong, sweetheart. I was just thinking what a pleasure it is to bring you anywhere, you get so much out of everything and everyone" her mother said.

"And I was thinking almost the very same thing," her father said, beaming at her.

And as Ella went on to high school she wondered if it was possible that they might care too much about her. All the other girls at school said that their parents were utterly monstrous. She gave a little shiver in case suddenly everything went sour. Maybe her parents wouldn't like her clothes, her career, her husband? It was going dangerously smoothly so far. And it continued to go well during what were meant to be the years from Hell, when Ella was sixteen and seventeen. Every other girl at the school had been in open warfare with one or both parents. There had been scenes and tears and dramas. But never in the Brady household.

Barbara may have thought the party dresses Ella bought were far too skimpy. Tim may have thought the music coming from Ella's bedroom too loud. Ella might have wished that her father didn't turn up in his nice safe car and wait outside the disco to take her home at the end of an evening, as if she were a six-year-old. But if anyone thought these things they "were never said. Ella did complain that her father fussed over her too much and that her mother worried about her, but she did it lovingly. By the time Ella was eighteen and ready to go to university, it was still one of the most cheerful, peaceful households in the Western Hemisphere.

Ella's friend Deirdre was full of envy. "It's not fair, really it isn't. They haven't even got annoyed with you for doing science. Most parents refuse point-blank to let you do what you want."

I know," Ella said, worried. "It's a bit abnormal, isn't it?"

"They don't have rows, either," Deirdre grumbled. "Mine are always on at each other about money and drink ... everything, in fact."

Ella shrugged. "No, they don't drink, and of course we rent out the flat so they have plenty of money .. . and I'm not a drug addict or anything, so I suppose they don't have any worries."

"But why are they all on red alert about everything in my house?" Deirdre wailed. Ella shrugged. She couldn't explain it ... it just didn't seem to be a problem.

"Wait until we want to stay out all night and go to bed with fellows, then it will be a problem," Deirdre said with her voice full of menace.

But oddly when that happened it wasn't a problem at all.

In their first year at university, Ella and Deirdre had made a new friend, Nuala, who was from the country and had her own flat. Right in the centre of the city. So whenever anything was going to be too late or too hard to get home from, the fiction of Nuala's flat was used. Ella wondered if they were truly convinced, or did they suspect that she might be up to some adventure. Perhaps they didn't want to know about any adventures, so they didn't ask questions to which the answers, if truthful, might be unacceptable. They just trusted her to get along with everything as they always had. Occasionally she felt a bit guilty, but there weren't all that many occasions.

Ella never fell in love during her four years at university, which made her unusual. She did have sex, though. Not a great deal of it. Ella's first lover was Nick, a fellow student. Nick Hayes was first and foremost a friend, but one night he told Ella that he had fancied her from the moment she had come into the first lecture. She had been so cool and calm while he had always been overeager and loud and saying the wrong thing.

"I never saw you like that," Ella said truthfully.

"It's got to do with having freckles, green eyes, and having to shout for attention as a member of a large family," he explained.

"Well, I think it's nice," she said.

"Does that mean you fancy me a bit too?" he asked hopefully.

"I'm not sure," she said.

He was so disappointed that she couldn't bear to see his face. "Couldn't we just talk a lot instead of desiring each other?" she asked. "I'd love to know about you and why you think science is a good way into film-making, and, well.. . lots of things," she ended lamely.

"Does that mean that you find me loathsome, repulsive?" he asked.

Ella looked at him. He was trying to joke, but his face looked very vulnerable. "I find you very attractive, Nick," she said.

And so they became lovers.

It was less than successful. Oddly they weren't either upset or embarrassed. They were just surprised.

After a few attempts they agreed that it wasn't all they had expected it to be. Nick said that it was his first time too, and that perhaps they should both go off and get experience with people who knew all about it.

"Maybe it was like driving a car," he said seriously. "You should learn from someone who knows how to do it."

Then she was fancied by a sporting hero, who was astonished when she said she didn't want to have sex with him.

"Are you frigid, or what?" he had asked, searching for an explanation.

I don't think so, no," Ella had said.

"Oh, I think you must be," said the sporting hero in an aggrieved manner. So then Ella thought it might be no harm to try it with him, since he was known to have had a lot of ladies. It wasn't any better than with Nick, and there was nothing to talk about, so it was probably worse. She had the small compliment of being told by the sporting hero that she most definitely wasn't frigid.

There were only two other brief experiences, which, compared to Deirdre and Nuala's adventures, were very poor. But Ella wasn't put out. She was twenty-two and a science graduate; she would find love sooner or later. Like everyone.

Nuala found love first. Frank, dark and brooding. Nuala adored him. When he said that he wanted to join his two brothers in their construction business in London, she was heartbroken.

This called for an emergency dinner at Quentins. "I really and truly thought he cared, how could I have been so taken in, so humiliated?" she wept to Deirdre and Ella when they settled at their table.

It was meant to be an Early Bird dinner, where people came in at six-thirty and left by eight. It was intended for pre-theatre goers, and the restaurant hoped to be able to have a second sitting for the table. But Deirdre, Ella and Nuala showed no signs of leaving. Mon, the lively little blonde waitress, cleared her throat a couple of times but it was no use.