Maeve Binchy - Quentins

"Are you a golfer, Mr. Ball?" Drew asked desperately.

"Oh no, Drew, never saw the sense of it, actually," Mr. Ball said, closing the door to any more talk of that.

Drew wasn't giving up. "But you look so fit, Mr. Ball, I thought you must do some sport and I know I once asked you, did you play football, and you said no."

Mr. Ball looked left of him and right of him and then he told Drew in endless detail about his visits to the gym. There was no point in going once or twice a week, he said. You had to go five days a week. Fortunately, this hotel here in Dublin had a reasonable workout room. Had Drew seen it? No? Well, Mr. Ball would show him round it tomorrow.

Tm sorry to drone on about money, Mr. Ball, but is that gym you go to back home expensive?"

Mr. Ball mentioned the annual figure and saw the look on Drew's face.

"Of course, when you get to the next level in the firm, if you"re promoted, the company will pay for your subscription. It's in their interest to have fit personnel," he said. In truth, he had never thought of Drew as on the fast track.

"And tell me about your programme, Mr. Ball," Drew said in desperation, nailing on to his face a smile of interest as he heard about muscles and movements and routines. He nodded and shook his head as he heard of machines that did all they promised and those that did not. He got an ache in his face but Mr. Ball thought that Drew was fascinated. Drew saw that Mr. Ball was loath to leave the conversation and only had to do so out of a sense of duty.

Drew joined his own colleagues again. They were still talking about the girl and speculating abut whether she might be an available companion for the evening.

"Get sense," Drew advised them. "She'd be no fun at all. Look at her, she's crying. Didn't any of you notice?"

At that moment, Mrs. Brennan the manageress woman had arranged that the customer with tears in her eyes be helped to the door gently and discreetly by one of the young waiters. The taxi had already been phoned for by the restaurant. Possibly she was someone who ate here regularly and maybe drank a little too much. Someone worth looking after. It was all done with great dignity, Drew noticed. Then he saw the wallet on the floor.

He leaned back and put it into his pocket. Nobody had seen. He went to the gentlemen's cloakroom. Inside the cubicle he opened it. A big, black, soft leather wallet. It had credit cards, receipts, tickets for a theatre and a letter.

It also had plenty of cash.

Silly girl, drunk on her own, leaving without checking. She could have lost it in the taxi. Or on the pavement while getting into the taxi. Or getting out of the taxi.

He would take the cash and tomorrow he would mail the wallet back to the restaurant anonymously.

He never knew when he decided to read the letter. He wasn't a criminal, just someone taking a chance. She was called Judy and she wrote to some guy saying she was sorry to plead and beg with him to have this last dinner with her, but she had so many things to tell him - how much she loved him and how nothing else mattered. And she had to tell him that she was pregnant, but she would be noble about it and never tell his wife.

And Judy would not ask him for child support. She wanted nothing from him, except the memory of their love and the hope of their child in the future. She would have this last dinner, leave early and hand him this letter and then go out of his life. She wanted only that he would know how much he had been loved.

Drew sat there and thought about love and deception and how some people had it really very, very difficult indeed.

He left the men's room and went straight to Mrs. Brennan.

"I found this under a table," he said.

"Yes, I sort of noticed you did," she said.

She wasn't disapproving or anything.

"Did you know anything about the .. . um ... the situation?" he asked.

"A little. It was not a happy one, but I don't think I want to go into any of that . . ."

"It's just, I'm from miles away. I'll never be here again. I wondered should anyone tell him she's pregnant?"

If Mrs. Brennan was startled that he revealed this to her, admitting that he had read a private letter, she made no criticism.

"I don't think that will change anything at all one way or the other," she said reflectively.

"But shouldn't a man know that he was going to be a father? She intended giving it to him tonight but he didn't show up."

"He's quite good at not showing up, it never stops the ladies." She shook her head at the folly of people and their relationships.

"So he'll never know?" Drew was astounded.

"Or maybe care," Brenda said.

"That's hard to believe," he said.

"For a nice young man like you and a decent, hardworking woman like me it is, but not for people like the no-show tonight."

"I'm not a nice young man," Drew said. "But it's all there, every penny of it."

"I'm sure it is," Brenda Brennan said with a smile.

"Why are you sure?" He was puzzled. She was serene and she was non-judgemental.

"Because if it wasn't all there, then you'd just have kicked it under the table when you had a change of heart," she said simply.

"A change of heart!" he said, surprised at her accuracy.

"Sure, that's "what it "was. Can I offer you a dinner here some evening, another time, you and a friend?" she suggested.

"It would mean getting back here all the way from Scotland," Drew said.

The others were all getting up to leave now, and asking about nightclubs.

"Not for me, alas," Drew said. "Too old and staid. I'm heading off in my Head of Department's taxi for an early night."

"I've a feeling it will stand to you," Brenda Brennan said.

Drew saw her talking to Mr. Ball, but he knew that she wasn't telling tales, that he had almost stolen a wallet.

He only discovered next day what she had been saying.

That he was a remarkable young man, who had not only rescued a wallet for another customer and handed it in, but who had been caring enough to be concerned over the woman's distress.

Mr. Ball felt the very same about Drew. A boy who might have been overlooked before.

But once he had discovered Drew's interest in the gym and his obvious sense of disappointment that he couldn't afford to join one, Mr. Ball, too, had a change of heart. He would recommend the boy's promotion the moment they got back to Scotland. Mon often wished that she was back in Sydney, Australia. On a day like today, she could go out to the beach and lie there with her friends. In Ireland it was what they thought of as summer, but truly it was not a day for the sand. She would be blown to death by the wind, heartbroken by the small tidal ripple instead of the rollers she knew and loved back home, frozen by the ice-cold water if she ever dared get into it.

Still, she hadn't come to Ireland looking for a life of surf. She had come as part of a great world tour. Oddly, there had not been all that much of a tour. It was meant to start with a week in Rome, and then a week in Dublin and six weeks hitchhiking around the rest of Ireland, then a dozen other lands before going back to the rest of her life. But something strange had happened - after the week in Rome she had arrived in Dublin totally broke.

It wasn't exactly that her money had been stolen or lost or anything. It was just that she had managed to spend in one week almost all her two years" savings on a man called Antonio. It was hard to realise quite how, but this had somehow happened. And so, on her first day in Ireland, she needed a job. There was an advertisement in the newspaper that she read on her way in from Dublin airport and she had phoned for an

interview, got the job in Quentins. Somehow the time had passed.

"You've fallen in love, that's why you're still there," her mother accused her by e-mail. But it wasn't true.