Rosewater and Soda Bread (13 page)

“Well, I didn't do it alone. I have my sisters. And some great
friends who made it possible. Without them, none of this could have happened.”

She looked up at the little stone building with its purple shutters with fondness.

“Friends and relatives aside, I know you are still the one that makes it all happen inside that bit of a kitchen. You could bottle up that magic of yours and make a fortune, Miss Aminpour.” Julian ran his hands over the wooden shutters, stopping midway. “May I call you Marjan?”

“Of course.” Marjan paused. “Julian.”

“Well, Marjan. I know it's not drizzling in any sense of the word, but I was hoping to take that rain check after all. How about a pint next door?”

Marjan stared at the pub's glowing windows. Paddy McGuire's was filling up with its usual crowd of weekday locals. It was the first evening she had had free all week, in a couple of weeks, actually, she thought. Her nights were usually spent in prepping for the next morning's menu, or going over the café's books, which, if not extensive, still challenged her elementary mathematics skills. The idea of sitting down to a ledger suddenly seemed very unappealing.

Julian was looking at her expectantly.

Bahar was not impressed when her older sister stuck her head in the kitchen a minute later. “Back by ten,” Marjan said, whipping off her apron. “Lock the front door, will you?” Before Bahar could voice an opinion, Marjan found herself seated in the Confessional, a carafe of the pub's house red between her and Julian.

He held up the carafe. “Now this is something you don't see every day in a pub,” he said, pouring her a glass of the rose-colored wine.

“It's a new addition,” said Marjan, taking the glass in both hands.

“Something tells me you had a hand in that suggestion.”

Marjan laughed. “Maybe. But Margaret—she runs the pub— is really good with new ideas.” She tipped her head toward the bar, where a buxom woman with gingery curls was laughing uproariously with a few punters.

Julian persisted. “I think you're underestimating your powers over this little hamlet of ours. I've seen you rushing about in that van of yours, spreading those peace signs all over the place.”

Marjan gave an indulgent nod. “It's not the most glamorous car, I know. But it's been really handy when I've needed it.” She raised the glass to her nose, inhaling cherry, vanilla, and blackberry tones. Delicious.

“It's a grand piece of machinery. Especially those peace signs. Quite apropos to the responsibility you've taken on.”

Marjan turned to him with a curious look. “Responsibility? What do you mean?”

“Well, it's not every day a backwater gets a taste of the world's greatest culture. The seat of all learning.”

“I wouldn't exactly call it a backwater,” Marjan said. “But thank you for the compliment.”

“Don't mistake me—I think this is one of the loveliest spots on the planet, right here, this town, the Bay. I come from a long line of Mayo men, after all.”

“But you've never lived here yourself?”

“Boarding school and Oxford, London all the way. But I always knew I'd come back to Mayo,” Julian said, a fondness in his voice.

“So you're renovating your family home?”

“Yes, that's right. Restoring the ancestral seat to its former glory—that sort of thing. I've hired a firm from Dublin to oversee the finer details. Don't want some local Mick taking a sledgehammer
to its precious walls.” He turned to her intently. “I would love to show the old place to you sometime.”

Marjan paused, took a sip from her wine. “I'd like that,” she said softly. She glanced up. Fiona Athey had just come in with Father Mahoney.

Her friend raised her eyebrows and nodded provocatively at Julian, a large grin spreading across her face. Marjan's eyes widened, embarrassment rushing over her.

She'd be hearing about this tomorrow, she could bet on it.

She turned her attention back to Julian. “So, why Iran?”

“Why?”

“Yes. I mean, how did you get interested in traveling there in the first place?”

“I fell in love with a Persian girl. At Oxford.” Julian settled back in the booth. The tasseled curtain brushed over his hair, ruffling it attractively.

“Ah. A Persian girl.” Marjan nodded.

Julian chuckled. “That's all there is to know, isn't there? Fall in love with a Persian girl, and you'll never be the same?” His lips twitched with amusement.

“I didn't mean that,” Marjan started. “I just meant—”

“I know, I know …” He reached over and touched her hand. A ripple of pleasure ran up Marjan's arm. “I just wanted to see your reaction.”

“Oh.” Marjan blushed. She sipped some more wine to steady herself. “What was her name? The Persian girl from Oxford?”

Julian looked off into the distance. “Mina Khalestoun. I met her in the registration line that first day.” He turned his gaze back on her. “We were choosing our alternatives, and I thought it might be nice to rehash some of the old guard: Blake,
Wordsworth, the Romantics. A good chance to get a bit of a kip after a weekend at the local, the Lamb and Flag.”

He smiled at the memory. “Here I was contemplating a pile of dusty old codgers, ready to plunge into what promised to be one numbing ride of a term, when I saw her. She was signing up for a poetry class as well, but hers was a tutorial on the Sufi tradition. I had no near notion what that was, but I was going to find out. Signed right under her, and that's where it all began.

“We had a glorious two years together, and then she left. Packed up and went with her family to California. Heartbroken doesn't begin to pin it. Her family never liked me, but it was nothing to do with who I was, I think. It was where I was from. I wasn't an Iranian. And they wanted their daughter to marry an Iranian. Tell me, are all Persian girls like that?” Julian planted his green eyes on Marjan, catching her off-guard.

She blushed again. “I don't think so,” she said, looking down at her glass. She could feel his intense gaze on her, and it took her a few seconds to look up again.

Julian stared at her for a moment longer before continuing. “I pined for two more years, and after my thesis, I took to the road. Backpacked. Followed Marco Polo's trail, the Silk Road, from China through Samarkand, hitched all the way to the Black Sea. But it was in Iran I stayed the longest. Strange way of getting over a broken heart, you might say. Going to the place where your beloved was born. But I wasn't thinking too clearly back then.”

Julian paused to drink from his wine. “Best experience of my life, it was. Nothing like the desert to make a man out of you.”

Marjan shook her head in awe. “I am not sure I could ever do anything like that.”

“Oh, I'm sure you could. You've seen a bit of the world. Am I right?”

More than he could have known, thought Marjan, briefly recalling the arid mounds of the Dasht-e Lut. The desert of the East, where she and her sisters had escaped the first time Hossein Jaferi had coming looking for them. “I suppose, but it was more out of bad timing than for adventure's sake,” she said, shaking the dark vision away. “Even in Iran, I never visited Hafez's grave. And our father was from Shiraz, as well.”

“Ah, Shiraz! What a town! The rose gardens, the nightingales. Paradise. You know, I got hold of some wine while I was there. I'll never forget that bouquet.” Julian cleared his throat. “ ‘Rose petals let us scatter and fill the cup with red wine, the firmaments let us shatter and come with a new design.’ ”

He lifted his glass in a toast to Hafez's ode to the fermented grape.

Marjan met his toast with her own glass.

The evening flew by in the same hazy, soft manner. It seemed as though they were in their own world, and it must have been so because no one had approached them, not Fiona, not Michael and Peter Donnelly playing darts in the back parlor. Their only interruption came around nine o'clock, when the Cat wobbled in with an equally teetering Godot.

A persona non grata before Margaret McGuire had taken charge of her brother Thomas's affairs, the Cat was now as ever-present as the iron-rich stout that kept Paddy's a known destination. Swimming in his scotch and water with one ice, the old drunkard would spend entire days in the bar, tossing out Schopenhauer and Jungian theories with his customary mixture of native Bulgarian, English, and pig Latin.

And that was before the bottle of Dewar's had had its effect.

Most of the punters at Paddy's found it a mystery why Margaret allowed such a spectacle the most prized stool in the house, near the roaring, sweet turf fire, but the proprietress had her reasons:
it was the Cat who had saved her nephew Tom Junior from true oblivion. Were it not for the philosopher's hospitality that strange summer before last, Tom Junior would never have been able to escape his father's domineering shadow and find his inner serenity. Tom Junior's letters to his aunt, written from the Northern California ashram he was living in, attested to the Cat's sincerity.

But catering to his burps and foggy philosophies was one thing; having to accommodate a hiccuping and clearly intoxicated billy goat was something entirely different—pushing the bounds of hospitality, the “
Céad Míle Fáilte
,” or “100,000 Welcomes,” written above the pub's front arch.

After ordering the alcoholic duo off the premises with little effect, Margaret had been forced to pull the goat by his beard and the Cat by the tail of his tweed overcoat, a sight that had provided punters with a good few limericks and one very dirty pun.

The Cat wouldn't have wanted it any other way.

DERVLA QUIGLEY LEFT
her thumb poised on the dark rosary bead as she reached over to part her chintz bedroom curtains. The two inches of space was all she needed to confirm her deepest suspicions: there it was again, the midday muck, the pitiless horde, the bustle of that caf é named for all things sinister:
Babylon
. To think, naming a place of dining after some heathen palace, some Oriental den of diversions. No one born and bred in Balli-nacroagh would think to do it, that's for certain.

She squinted through the partition again, sniffing in contempt. Midday muck it was, though those foreign women were calling it lunch—not dinner like decent folk, mind you, but
lunch
. Every day from noon to the time of tea, at half past three, then swinging until the evening Angelus took its beat.

Sure, the Wilton Inn's carvery had no chance. Not with those three knocking their hips up and down the dining aisles.

Next thing you knew there'd be a string of the like: stinking
spots, places run by hippies and degenerates, places where they would serve those plant things, that scourge called Mary Wanna in their teas and cakes.

She had heard a radio program about it the other day. A place in Europe proper called Amsterdam, where that very thing went on under the guards' watch. The shame, the absolute horror was beyond her reason. If only Thomas McGuire were here to stop it, thought Dervla. He'd never have put up with such a display if he were still running the street.

Sooner or later the big man would have found a way of closing the place for good, got his brother-in-law Padraig Carey down at the council to find them a loophole, some sort of bylaw to prevent leasing to foreigners. What good was it having a politician marry into the family if he couldn't pull a few strings? Then again, the gossip conjectured, had it not been for Thomas breaking into the place two summers ago, they'd never have this problem.

The eejit. He should have come to her before taking his hand to the place. Had Thomas let on his intentions beforehand, she could have sent him a word or two of caution. She could have told him it wasn't the slam of his fist that would do the café in but the force of a stronger punch. It was the Word that brought down empires; good old-fashioned gossip that sent highfalutin floozies to their judgment, not a banged-up kitchen and a half-arsed heart attack.

Her tongue, lashed with the right fortitude, could move mountains and Babylons, if it so desired. Sure, Dervla reminded herself, hadn't it been her very words that had sent Headmaster Finton packing some fifteen years back? The man was found crawling the convent's ridgepole, in clear view of her window at night. Finton later claimed to have lost his keys to Saint Joseph's, but that was a likely tale if she ever heard one. No doubt he had
been having a gander at those poor, helpless nuns in their slips and garters, not a habit among them. The dirty thing, the terrible liar.

Dervla clucked her tongue at the memory. And what about that jeweler down in Louisburgh, that swarthy, round one with the mustache? Hadn't she seen him tuck a ring box into Bachelor Jennings's post slot one spring dawn? Wasn't she the first to blow the whistle on that dirty affair? The jeweler, a married man of thirty years and with eight children grown, had later claimed it was the drink that made him propose the Claddagh to another fellow. As if that was going to fly with the decent folks of Balli-nacroagh. The last she heard he had been peddling his baubles in some seaside kiosk in Cork.

Good riddance to them all.

“Wetted the tea, so. It'll be ready when you come out of the toilet.”