Maeve Binchy - Quentins

Ever had known. Impossible to believe that he would never hear that laugh or see those dancing eyes again. He had brought Katar to this very table once. Quentin smiled as he remembered the occasion.

I would like to run around and tell them all at every table that this is ours, ours. Then I would like there to be a trumpet sound .. . ta-ra, ta-ra . .. and you would stand up and we would all sing .. . "For Quentin, he ees the jolly fine fellow"."

Katar would have liked that, and would have seen nothing silly or inappropriate in it. Only a celebration, like his whole happy life had been. Even the last months of his illness.

"It's so good for me, I have you to look after me, to tell me stories in the dark night. Who will do the same for you?"

"Ah, there are plenty who will." Quentin had put cold rose water on Katar's hot brow.

"Well, you must go and find them, be ready to ask them, let them know you need help. Not the false braveness, swear to me. I will know, I will be looking at you."

"I swear, Katar," Quentin had said. "No false braveness."

But oddly, when the time did come, Quentin didn't need any friend. He just looked at the beauty of the hot country he had come to think of as his own. Lying calmly and resting there brought him peace. Life didn't seem so huge and important somehow. You were just part of a process, like mountain ranges and sandstorms and the blossoms that came in springtime. Next week he would be back there and he would wait. It would not be frightening. But first, he had decisions to make here.

About his father and mother there would be few problems. They had already said goodbye to him in a meaningful sense, long, long ago.

"Mother, can I take you out and buy you a hat?" Quentin asked on the phone.

"I'm not going out to some awful souk in Marrakesh."

"I'm in Dublin, Mother."

"That's good." She didn't sound excited or pleased.

"So?"

"So, of course I'd love a hat," Sara Barry said. She didn't say she would love to see her son, but then she didn't know he was dying. "Did you know that Quentin's in Dublin?" Sara asked her husband that night.

"No, but he'll call from the airport before he leaves, that's what he usually does." Derek Barry barely looked up from his newspaper.

"That's because you have nothing to talk to him about," she criticised.

"Yes, that's true, unlike you who can compare shades of lipstick with him after all." Derek spoke bitterly.

"See what I mean, ready to pick a fight where none exists."

"Oh, my fights with Quentin are long over," Derek Barry sighed. Quentin had one more decision to make.

The restaurant. The place that bore his name. He had asked Tobe Hayward his thoughts, but the old man had said quite simply, "Believe me, when it comes to your time, you will do something worthwhile."

That's all Tobe Hayward could come up with. But he also reminded him that everything was in Quentin's name.

Quentin had always supposed that he would know what to do when the time came. But he had not known how soon the time would come. How ridiculously early in fact. Still, he felt in his heart that everything was clear now, as Tobe had forecast it would be. He knew what should happen next.

For now he would get to know the staff and to talk to them.

The beautiful Mon who told him every heartbeat of her romance with Mr. Clive Harris, and how she didn't give a damn about the Italian who had sweet-talked her out of all her money. He was welcome to it.

He heard from Yan about how his father back in Brittany wanted to put money into a small restaurant there for him. And how Yan didn't know how to tell him he was having too much fun in Ireland to leave.

He discovered that Harry had thought working in Dublin, the heart of the Republic of Ireland, would be a misery that he was prepared to endure in order to get a good training. But in fact he was never happier, and all his friends came down to Dublin for the weekends now. Times had changed, he explained to Quentin. Quentin got to meet some of Brenda and Patrick's friends. The extraordinary woman who called herself Signora, who chopped vegetables, cleaned brasses, spoke flawless Italian, was going to marry a divorced man at her age, and confided to Quentin that she had the happiest life of any human on the planet.

The man she was going to marry had apparently lost money to some financier. They had been planning to have a wedding party with it but they could well survive without a party. And anyway maybe they were too old for one.

He met Blouse Brennan, brother of Patrick, so proud of his red haired wife Mary and their little son. Blouse confided that, compared to a lot of the fellows he had been at school with like Horse and Shay Harris, he had done very well. And no one would have expected it at the time.

Quentin met all kinds of people that he never knew existed in the old Ireland. There were Ella Brady and Derry King, who were

going to put together a documentary about the place. His restaurant! Quentin made a note to write to Tobe about that.

And their colleagues in Firefly Films, Sandy and Nick. Utterly dedicated to their job.

Were there people like that around when he was young, full of courage and determination? Quentin wondered. There was no one to ask. Brother Rooney wasn't there to visit any more. He had gone to some big garden in the sky.

There were Tom and Cathy, who ran a catering service. Sometimes they did outside catering for the restaurant's clients, so they were in and out of the place a lot. They were expecting a baby, and there was a lot of kissing and hugging and wishing them good luck about that from time to time.

Quentin saw the sad look on Brenda's face one day when they had gone.

"Was that something you would have liked?" he asked gently.

"Oh yes, so much. And Patrick would have been a wonderful father."

"Still, there have been compensations?" he asked hopefully.

"This restaurant is our baby," Brenda said, looking around the place very proudly.

He smiled and suddenly she realised that perhaps she had been presumptuous. I didn't mean to suggest anything except that we have loved working here," she said, flustered.

"Did you wonder why I came back, Brenda?" Quentin asked her gently.

"Why shouldn't you come back to see how well it's all going? I told you we wanted to show off."

Her eyes were too bright. She knew all right.

"I'm dying, Brenda," he said. I brought those dates and nuts over to the booth like you asked me," Blouse Brennan explained to his brother. "But Brenda and Quentin were crying, so I decided not to interrupt them," he said.

"Crying?" Patrick was surprised.

"Yes, Brenda was using the starched napkin to wipe her face."

"That's serious crying. You were right not to disturb them," Patrick said. "Any other dramas out there?"

I was afraid to look," Blouse admitted. "It's safer in the kitchen." And he went back to the vegetables with Signora, the two of them chopping contentedly and expertly. It was good to be far away from All Human Life, which seemed to be fairly volatile out in the dining room. "What about your friend, Katar?" Brenda asked, unaware of her tear-stained face.

"He went before me, last year," Quentin said. "Thank you for remembering his name."

"Who would forget him? He was charming and so full of life . .. to say something which is foolish, because it's no longer true."

"He liked it here. We sat at this table and Katar said that if the poor and the sick could only eat great food like this, they would surely get well ... or at any rate, they would die happy."

They laughed at the memory of the handsome laughing Moroccan boy, unafraid to face death, full of optimistic philosophy to the end.

"Well, that's what you could do, Quentin. Sell this place as a going concern and with the money you get set up a kind of charity ... very high-quality food for those who would not have been able to afford it."