Don’t You Forget About Me(59)

Lucas grimaces. ‘I don’t even know the word so I won’t ask more.’

I hesitate. ‘Is that true about the fine for filming? When you got his agent to delete the video?’

‘Oh, no. Private property but open to the public, so he was within his rights. But I thought you’d prefer there not to be a record.’

‘Hah! But you seemed so certain?’

‘That’s how you get anyone to believe anything.’

I say thanks to Lucas, a sincere thank you, tinged with slight awe. And a lingering question about whether I’ve been similarly made to believe anything.

‘Enough! I can’t do my job in these conditions!’ Devlin says, over the strains of Ed Sheeran. The last punter has left, Dev’s abandoned the kitchen and the clean-up is underway. He disappears for a fiddle with the music system and Guns ’n’ Roses ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ peals out at deafening volume.

Dev and I get on, we have good colleague chemistry. Both of us understand you don’t whine or sulk. If there’s a crap task, get on the other side of it; complaining about it only makes it loom larger.

‘Fridge my fancy fruit!’ Dev calls to me, as I’m putting the garnishes away, and bowls a Sicilian blood orange at me.

I catch it and put it on the side of the bar. ‘That was easy. Over arm next time.’

I am conscious of Lucas watching me. First he was looking at his phone, now me. My skin prickles.

Dev lobs another orange and I lunge and catch it.

‘Oh you’re good. Let me guess, always centre in netball?’

I laugh. Another volley. Another catch.

‘I’ll leave you two to it,’ Lucas says, with a sigh, unsticking himself from the wall and vanishing upstairs.

I wipe the tables down while Devlin rinses the drip trays and crashes empties into the bottle bin.

As he’s cashing up and I’m slotting the wine glasses from the dishwasher into the shelves, I risk an observation about the dispositional difference between the McCarthy brothers.

‘Oh yeah. I’m louder, but Luc has a strong sense of humour. He’s very dry. Dry and sly, that’s him.’

‘Oh sure, I didn’t mean that. Just the outgoingness, I suppose. He’s great to work with,’ I add, hurriedly, worried that I might capsize good relations by this being relayed back to Lucas in blunt terms.

‘You’re not seeing Lucas at his best, either,’ Devlin says, swigging from a pint of tap water, under the pumps.

‘No …?’ I say, gingerly.

‘Nah,’ he shakes his head. ‘Not with what he’s been through.’

I get the impression that Devlin, while in no way malicious, is fairly indiscreet, and that this might well be another point of friction between the brothers. Especially given the younger is a Sphinx-like riddle.

I can’t resist asking now. I mean, I’m clearly being invited to ask.

‘Been through …?’

‘With his wife,’ Devlin says, and the word wife hits me like a sparring jab to the ribs. Lucas. Wife? He’s a lad in a faded t-shirt and Dr Martens who has to share his homework with me, he can’t have a wife?!

It’s the strangest thing, especially given Lucas is so easy on the eye, but I never considered until this moment that he had any serious Significant Other. He walked back into my life without anyone at his side, and I assumed … Wishful? I don’t know.

I mean, in time I was braced for some astonishing creature with hair like molasses to sashay up to the bar, and say in a Celtic brogue: Is Luc about? then vanish upstairs, as someone with the sort of rights that meant they didn’t need to knock first. And for us not to see Lucas at all for the next forty-eight hours, and for me to spend a lot of time trying not to think about that. But she wasn’t going to be a wife. I’d made up the rules.

‘He’s married?’ I say, hoping I sound casual. He doesn’t wear a wedding ring? A wife.

‘Yes, well, he was. She died. He’s a widower.’

I open my mouth and close it again. Devlin continues:

‘Brain tumour. Very sudden, last year. She had eight weeks from diagnosis,’ he shakes his head. ‘He doesn’t say much so it’s hard to know what’s going on inside his head. I pushed to buy this place because I thought he needed a distraction, something to focus on, you know? He’s always been down on Sheffield, I was surprised he agreed.’

‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.’

‘Don’t say anything will you?’ Devlin says. ‘He’s not one for opening up and sharing and I probably shouldn’t have said.’

‘No of course not, don’t worry.’

I’ve tried, very carefully, to hide my special interest in Lucas from Devlin – well, from anyone – but there’s something I want to know so much that I can’t stop myself.

‘Devlin. What was her name? Lucas’s wife?’

‘Oh, Niamh. We called our daughter after her. You know, you say it NEVE but it’s got a crackpot Gaelic spelling. N-I-A-M-H.’

‘That’s beautiful.’

Devlin nods back and gives a sad smile.

I don’t concentrate on anything I’m doing, as I head off to my taxi in quiet turmoil.

I feel more foolish than ever about my reaction to Lucas to forgetting me.