Authors: Maeve Binchy
Peter Barry had always been cautious and careful. It was essential as a pharmacist that you should not be slapdash or reckless, and he was proud that he kept all aspects of his life under meticulous control.
His daughter, Amy, had inherited none of these qualities. She was much more like her late mother: feckless, casual and unconcerned. Laura had been so hopeless about keeping records and having control of money that Peter had taken the whole thing over himself. He had immaculate accounts books. The bookkeeper and the accountant said that he didn't need anyone to oversee his figures; he had the whole thing under control.
Laura had been the arty one. She had known how to spread a piece of Indian cotton on the back of a sofa and make it look regal. She had always done the windows in the pharmacy for him. Laura had made beautiful clothes for Amy when she was a toddler. No other four-year-old had such dresses.
He looked back on the old pictures. Amy was like a little princess. But of course in recent years she looked like a terrorist or a member of the Addams Family, with her matted hair and white makeup and black straggly clothes.
It was impossible to know what would have happened if Laura had lived. Would they have been great friends and conspirators, the two of them ganging up on silly old Daddy? Or were his customers
right when they said that teenage daughters hated their mothers even more than they hated their fathers? He would never know.
Amy was in her last year at school. But she had warned him not to expect any kind of good results. She hadn't been able to study because all they were offering in that school was “pure crap.” If only her father could be in her classroom he would realize that it was rubbish, meaningless, nothing.
He had felt utterly inadequate and completely at sea when he went to the parents-teachers meeting. Her teachers, one after the other, told him that Amy was no trouble in class but paid no attention in any subject—she just stared out the window.
He suggested that she attend one of those sixth-form colleges or cram colleges.
“For what?” Amy had asked. “To learn more crap, except at high speed?”
Everything was an effort. It was an effort to get up and go to school. An effort to wash her clothes in the washing machine.
They lived in a small apartment over the pharmacy. It had been part of the new mall's plan to mix housing with commercial zoning in an effort to make the place more human and avoid the empty-precinct syndrome. Amy grumbled because they didn't have a garden.
“Who would keep the garden if we had one?” Peter asked, not unreasonably.
Amy shrugged. She had a good line in shrugs. Expressive and defeated and then moving swiftly on to the next issue, which in this case was going to a seaside resort in Cyprus to celebrate her graduation from school.
“But you tell me you have nothing to celebrate, Amy.”
“All the more reason to go and cheer myself up,” she said. But nothing ever cheered her up.
It was eight a.m. and she was showing him a brochure about a holiday that cost some astronomical sum of money. Peter was adamant. He was not going to finance two weeks of Amy staying in a hotel, entering wet T-shirt competitions and partying all night.
“What are you doing it all
for,
Dad?” she asked him, her black-rimmed eyes looking at him as if she had never seen him before.
“Doing all what?” he asked.
“Oh—standing in a white coat looking at prescriptions and tutting over things and spending hours talking to reps from drug companies.”
“Well, it's my work.” Peter was bewildered.
“Yes, but what's it for, Dad, if it isn't for me?”
“It
is
for you—but not for you to go to Cyprus.”
“Okay, that's your final word, is it?”
“Yes, it is, Amy. And I'm going to work now.”
“To make more money to give me when I'm too old to enjoy it.”
“People are never too old to enjoy it,” Peter said.
“Oh, they are, Dad,” Amy said. She didn't say any more, but she obviously thought that her father was the perfect example of the point she was making.
She didn't really speak to him that day. She was polite but distant. She thanked him when he cooked their meal but announced that she was going out with a school friend. The next morning she read a magazine during breakfast, washed up her own cereal bowl and left at the same time as Peter did.
“This is silly, Amy. Where are you going?” He was worried. A silence had never gone on for twenty-four hours before.
“To get a job!” Amy called over her shoulder.
He saw her walking through the shopping precinct. It seemed such a short time since he had held her by the hand at her mother's funeral and promised that he would look after her. He hadn't delivered on that promise. He had tried, but his own daughter looked at him with the eyes of a stranger.
It had been so simple when he was that age. His father had just assumed that his two boys would study pharmacy, and they did. Then, as now, it was very fiercely competitive to get a place on the course. Though chemists often told each other that they were just
glorified shop assistants, they did have a pride in it all. They were people of authority.
Of course it had been so different in his father's time. In his small-town, one-chemist shop, Mr. Barry Senior was able to do so much more than Peter was nowadays. It wasn't said aloud, but everyone knew that Mr. Barry was as good as any doctor. He could give a child with a bad chest a course of antibiotics without needing to wait for a doctor's prescription; he could take a piece of broken glass out of a finger or tell you if a weak ankle was a sprain or a break. He made his own elixirs, which people came from far and near to get because they had such faith in them. And he had a cough medicine that worked pure magic.
His father knew there wouldn't be enough work for both boys in the shop. He was in an agony of indecision about which of them to take in, but as it happened Peter wanted to move to Dublin, and his brother, Michael, had gone to live in Cork.
Problem solved.
But not forgotten.
In Cork, Michael often bewailed the fact that he hadn't made a bid for the family business. In Dublin, when Peter came upstairs in his shopping precinct premises after long hours in the shop, he wondered why he hadn't either.
When his wife died, their father eventually sold the business to a young, thrusting assistant who had turned it into a gold mine. Then Mr. Barry Senior went to live in a bungalow in the west of Ireland where there was good fishing. He had taken up with a “lady companion.”
Peter drove over to see him once a year.
On his latest visit, the place was warm and comfortable. Ruby, his father's friend, had cooked a lovely meal, and had talked of their going on a cruise.
A cruise!
Peter and Amy had spent the night and as they drove home the next day, there was some discontent niggling away inside him. A feeling that somehow his father had done altogether too well out of this
deal. He even bragged about the old shop and spoke proudly about how many square feet had been added to the original premises.
Amy had looked out the car window as they went through towns and over rivers and passed ruined castles on the way home.
“What are you thinking?” he asked her.
“I was wondering do those two old people still have sex?” she said.
And Peter found the image so unsettling he resolved never to ask Amy or anyone else what they were thinking. It was never good to know …
As he watched Amy go off to get a job, he had no idea what was in her mind. Was she full of regret that she hadn't studied properly? Or resentment that she had no mother, only a crusty, mean-spirited father who didn't understand her need to go and get drunk for fifteen days in Cyprus? He wondered who would employ Amy, and as what?
He wished that he had a batty old friend like Ruby, someone he could speak openly with about Amy. But there was nobody.
Just at that moment, Clara Casey from the heart clinic came in.
“Peter, I've come with my begging bowl,” she began straightaway.
“Right, what good cause is it this time?” He put on a mock-martyred look.
“Now, I never asked you for any money for
any
cause before, did I? No, it's your time, not your money.” She explained that they were going to have a series of lectures at the clinic for patients and their families as well as the general public. It was all part of trying to get a wider understanding of how the heart functioned. She would love it if he, as the local pharmacist, would come in and talk about the different kinds of medication: beta-blockers, ACEI medicines. If he could do it in layperson's terms it would be much more satisfactory than doctors blinding them with science and long names. People trusted their chemists, they had faith in their pharmacists, Clara said flatteringly. It would come better from the man they saw in his white coat every time they went into the shop.
Peter was pleased that she thought so well of him. “You've never
heard me speak in public. I'm not one of the world's great orators,” he confessed.
“You're the person they'll be meeting, Peter; in fact, you may even get more customers if you make yourself sound appealing and attractive and easy to approach.”
“Oh, well, if it's a matter of drumming up business, then I have to go,” he said with a smile.
They fixed the date and the time and Peter said that he'd love to know more about the whole project. Possibly Clara might have dinner with him one evening? She paused for a moment and then said that would be lovely. But it
was
her hobbyhorse and she could talk for Ireland on the subject—so if he promised to insist on other topics as well, then she'd be delighted.
“Where would you like us to go?” she asked.
He was going to say the café in the precinct, but that was more a snack-and-burgers place, not dinner as such.
“Quentins?” he heard himself suggest.
She smiled a big broad smile. “Now, that would be a lovely treat,” she said. So they fixed a date for that too and Clara went off to work.
Peter smiled to himself. The day had started well after all.
“Did you get a job?” he asked Amy that night.
“Yup, thanks,” Amy said.
“Could I ask what it is?” He knew he sounded lofty and superior and not like he should if he was trying to win her confidence.
“A bit like yours. I'm working in a shop.”
“I own my shop, Amy,” he said.
“Yup, and I may own a shop someday too.”
“And you'll be selling what, exactly?”
“Fishnet tights and stiletto heels.”
“And there are enough women out there to buy these things?”
“Who said anything about women, Dad? It's a drag shop. It's for TVs and fancy dress and the like.”
“Of course,” Peter Barry said, feeling slightly faint.
• • •
Clara was surprised that Peter suggested they should meet at Quentins around six-thirty. It seemed very early. She would have preferred to come home to shower and dress before going out. It had been a long time since she had had a real dinner date. But he seemed to think that this was the right time, so she agreed. Probably he had to be home early as he had a young daughter; anyway she would take a change of outfit to the clinic and be ready to go when work was over.
During the day she wondered why she had said yes. Her usual response was to say that she had such an exhausting job she went to bed early or to imply that there was a shadowy figure somewhere in her background that prevented her from accepting dates. But Peter had been easygoing, natural. And what the hell, a nice dinner at Quentins was just what she needed on a cool spring evening.
Brenda Brennan showed them to their table. There were a few tables occupied, and it was gracious and elegant. Clara took a look at her surroundings. She had been here twice before. Once with Alan shortly before she had found out about Cinta. He had left the table four times to make urgent phone calls. Clara had seen nothing unusual about it at the time.
Then she had come here with her friend Dervla on the night after Dervla's father, the wise Professor of Medicine, had died. Dervla had said that there would never be anything spontaneous and unexpected in her life again and Clara had suggested a posh dinner out. It had been very healing and well worth the cost.
Peter Barry had not been to Quentins before. He was still stunned at the thought that he had suggested such a top-of-the-range restaurant. There was something elegant and cool about Clara, something that called out for a place like this. He noticed immediately that she had dressed up in a smart brocade jacket and a
black silk dress. She was enthusiastic about the menu, and settled on fresh sardines followed by lamb.
Their conversation was easy from the start.
He told her about growing up in a chemist's shop in a small town. About his father's late-life romance, about how everything had changed. Not always for the better. His father had four chairs in the chemist's shop. Older people always liked to sit down. Today in his pharmacy he had one chair, and that was just in case someone felt unwell.
He told her that his mother had been kind and self-effacing; she would be amazed if she had lived to see how many women pharmacists there were now. In her day it would have been highly unusual for a woman to qualify as a chemist.
“Lord, how nice it would have been, to have a self-effacing mother,” Clara said wistfully. “Mine knew she was right about everything and still knows it.”
“And was she?” Peter asked.
“Not remotely” Clara laughed. “But then I think I'm right with
my
daughters too, and they don't take the slightest notice of me.” They talked easily about daughters and their difficulties.
Peter told how Amy had gone to work in a drag shop selling amazing red satin corsets and pointy shoes. Clara said that she wished her Linda would be as adventurous, or at any rate get a job: she seemed to think the world owed her a living. They talked about the heart clinic and how it had to be supported by a proper health education program. About how pharmacies nowadays often depended on cosmetics for their profits. Peter said he hadn't studied long hours so that he could advise some mother about red velvet hairbands for her twelve-year-old's party.