‘Be quiet the pair of you.’ She slapped the table to distract herself as much as Mammy and Moira. They blinked at her and then both spoke over the top of one another. ‘Tom said Paula said you threw your ring back at Quinn.’ ‘Moira’s after telling me you’ve called the wedding off.’
Aisling shook her head. ‘Do you want to know what happened?’ It was a stupid question and her answer lay in their frenetic nodding.
She took a gulp of her milky tea and then began to talk, ‘Quinn wanted us to buy a house on the Crumlin Road as a rental investment. We’d been to the bank and had a verbal agreement with the manager as to what sum we could borrow based on the deposit we had.’
‘Very sensible young man, your Quinn, one in a million so he is,’ Mammy said.
‘He’s not my Quinn, Mammy. Not any more, because I’m not sensible I’m a fecking eejit.’
Maureen didn’t have the heart to tell her to watch her mouth.
‘I spent the best part of the deposit on the wedding without telling him.’
‘So, it’s your fault.’
Moira that’s not helpful,’ Maureen snapped. ‘But Aisling what about what I offered to put towards the wedding.’
Moira’s gaze whiplashed toward her mammy. ‘You never said you were giving Aisling money, and me a poor student.’
Maureen gave her youngest child a look that could curdle milk straight from the cow and Moira busied herself with her toast.
Aisling shrugged. ‘It’s all gotten out of hand, Mammy. The dress, the bridesmaids’ dresses, the photographer, the pumpkin carriage—’
‘The pumpkin what?’ Moira snorted. ‘Who do you think you are, Cinderella?’
Aisling swung around in her seat, her temper fraying. ‘And you didn’t help with your poor student routine. Do you have any idea how much those dresses cost? Did you even look at the price tag?’ Her voice was shrill.
‘Don’t blame me,’ Moira shouted back. ‘You offered.’
Aisling drew breath but Maureen intervened. ‘Moira O’Mara, go to your room right now and don’t come out until you’ve something helpful to say,’ Maureen ordered.
‘Mammy, I’m twenty-five. You can’t send me to my room.’
‘You’re still my daughter and not too old to feel the back of my hand.’ Maureen stared her daughter down – the Mammy Whisperer – Moira slunk off to her bedroom.
‘I don’t know where we got that one from.’ She shook her head watching her go. She let Aisling drain her tea before leaning across the table and smoothing a wisp of hair stuck to her daughter’s cheek. ‘Well, my girl, what are we going to do to fix this? Your Uncle Cormac is somewhere over the Atlantic about now. Great Aunty Noreen telephoned to say she and Great Aunty Rosamunde are riding up together, not to mention the Brothers Grimm will be dusting off their suits about now.’
Aisling bit back the smile that came unbidden at her mammy’s referencing of her brothers.
‘I don’t know how to fix it though, Mammy. What do I do?’
‘Aisling, you are a marvel at sorting other people’s lives out but when it comes to your own,’ she shook her head. ‘Talk to him,’ she offered up simply. ‘If you can’t talk to each other then you shouldn’t be getting married. Your daddy and I had an unspoken rule in our marriage.’
Aisling looked up meeting her mammy’s dark eyes. ‘What was it?’
‘We’d never go to sleep on an argument.’
Aisling sparked at the blatant fib. ‘Mammy, that’s not true! I remember you giving Daddy the silent treatment for nearly a week when we were small.’
‘Ah, well now, Aisling, that was different. Your daddy had been very bold.’
Aisling’s scalp prickled. She never had found out what the week was about where Mammy had communicated through Roisin, ‘Tell your daddy, I said he can cook his own tea tonight.’. Had he been unfaithful? ‘What did he do, Mammy?’ she half whispered, fearful of finding out.
‘He spent the money I’d set aside for a new dress to wear to my friend Geraldine’s birthday party on an engine overhaul for the car.’
Aisling nearly laughed with the relief of it all.
‘What I was trying to say, Aisling, before you started nitpicking was, a marriage needs three simple ingredients to thrive. I like to call it the three ‘c’s’
‘What are they?’
‘Communication and compromise.’
‘That’s only two.’
‘I can’t remember the third, it might have been compassion or care for one another. I told you to stop picking holes. You get the idea.’
‘Well Quinn and I aren’t doing very well are we, Mammy? We haven’t even gotten to the church and we can’t find a way to compromise.’
‘Ah, but you will, Aisling, because you and Quinn are like me and your daddy. You’re meant to be together.’
A voice bellowed, ‘Can I come out now?!’
Aisling and Maureen looked at one another and exchanged complicit smiles. ‘No, you can’t!’
Chapter 31
Cormac O’Mara stood in the guesthouse lobby, larger than life for a little man, his Louis Vuitton luggage abandoned on either side of him as he waited for Maureen to bring the last case in. He’d been unable to carry it all himself because he was a man who believed in packing for all occasions, except it would seem he thought, shaking off the cold, the inclement Irish weather. He was making a statement in his trademark crumpled linen suit which was highly unsuitable for flying and for the country
