The Honey Queen

At lunch, she went to buy a sandwich from Sue, and stood in the queue gazing at the bread behind the counter until Sue had to say ‘Peggy’ loudly to wake her from her reverie. She’d never felt this before about a date, ever, and she wished she had someone to share her feelings with.

If only she could phone her mother and tell her she felt as if she’d found ‘the One’. Mum knew all about Sleepless in Seattle. They’d watched it together. But she couldn’t call. Just couldn’t.

By seven that evening, she’d had a long shower to wash the shop dirt from her skin, had washed and dried her mane of hair until it fell in waves around her shoulders, and had rubbed handfuls of almond body cream luxuriantly into her skin. All this preparation felt right. She wasn’t ordinary Peggy getting ready for a dinner – she was the woman David Byrne stared at as though she was a goddess.

She was Annie waiting for Sam.

When David rang the bell at five to seven, she rushed to open the door.

‘I’m sorry I’m early,’ he began, his gaze locked on hers.

‘I’ve been ready since half six,’ said Peggy in reply. There would be no games here. This was too serious, too wonderful.

‘You look beautiful,’ he said, eyes travelling over the old-fashioned teal chiffon blouse tucked into skinny jeans that made her long legs look longer than ever. She’d worn kitten heels because David was taller than her. Few men were. Walking beside him to his car, she felt like the faerie he’d talked about, fragile and beautiful. She didn’t know what it was to feel beautiful. There had been no compliments in her young life and so there was no foundation on which to build even a hint of belief in her own beauty. But with David’s eyes upon her and his hand holding hers, she felt as beautiful and desirable as any movie star.

He took her to a small French restaurant a few miles away where the atmosphere of those Parisian bistros she’d seen in films had been perfectly recreated. With its red-checked tablecloths, low lighting and candles dripping wax everywhere, it was the perfect venue for an intimate dinner and she wanted to clap her hands with glee when she saw it.

‘It got a bad review in the papers for being a cliché,’ David said as they ignored the menu and stared at each other over the candles on their table. ‘But the food is delicious and the staff are great. So what’s wrong with candles and red tablecloths?’

‘I love it,’ said Peggy happily. ‘Let’s eat all the clichés tonight!’

‘And hold hands across the table,’ he added, reaching forward to take her hand.

‘Yes,’ she said, folding her fingers into his.

The bistro staff came from a variety of countries around the world and could speak a lexicon of languages, but all of them could recognize diners wrapped in romance and oblivious to everyone else. So Gruyere-topped French onion soup, crusty bread, boeuf bourguignon and good red wine were delivered to the table silently, leaving the couple to eat and talk uninterrupted.

Peggy felt as if they were encased in a magical bubble which nothing could break: this evening was simply perfect in every way.

David wanted to know all about her – unlike so many of the men she’d met over the years, who were too caught up in determining their own wants and needs. He asked what films she liked to see, what food she liked to eat. He’d cook her dinner at his place, he told her as they drank their wine: all he needed was to get his brothers out of the house.

Then, when talk inevitably moved onto their backgrounds and he asked about her childhood, she gently batted him away: ‘Let’s forget everything except now,’ she said. ‘Tonight is all that matters.’

As she said it, she knew this wasn’t merely a ruse to stop him asking about her past. Suddenly, her life before him had ceased to matter. Whereas normally, it coloured everything. But this wonderful night with this wonderful man had changed all that.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like Interpol – I want to know all about you, Peggy,’ he said, and she smiled across the table at him, lean and rangy in a casual grey shirt.

‘Why are you calling the shop Peggy’s Busy Bee Knitting and Stitching Shop? There’s nobody less bee-like than you. You’re so calm and serene. You don’t buzz around.’

‘I don’t have a very good answer, I’m afraid,’ she said, finally giving up on the boeuf, knowing that she would feel full for a week. ‘My mother does wonderful embroidery and for a while she embroidered napkins for a gift shop. The lady who ran it, Carola, said my mother was the most artistic person she knew and told Mum to embroider whatever she wanted. Mum chose bees. They were beautiful. Each napkin was different because she said no matter how hard you tried, each embroidered bee ended up different, same as people.’

Peggy’s bubble of happiness quivered and she felt the familiar emotions welling up in her. Thinking about her mother always made her want to cry. Sitting here with this good, kind man, she wanted to tell him everything because he ought to know. But of course, she couldn’t.

‘Dessert,’ announced David, as if he could read her face and wanted to spare her thinking about whatever was clearly hurting her. ‘I don’t think it’s very French, but they make a wonderful cheesecake here.’

And the sadness passed. Peggy pushed it all out of her mind. She’d been alone for so long and she deserved this, didn’t she?

During that glorious week, they went out three times. The second date was to the cinema; on the way there, David walked on the outside of the pavement, he automatically paid for the cinema tickets, and stood back to let her enter the line of seats so she could pick the one she wanted.

He was gentlemanly, she decided, as the film began. Such a weird, old-fashioned word, but it suited him.

And there was no denying that she was intensely physically attracted to him. From the moment she’d spotted him walking towards her in the wine bar where they’d arranged to meet before the movie, broad-shouldered and handsome in a sweater and jeans, she’d found herself imagining that body close to hers. In the darkness of the cinema she experienced pure pleasure when David put an arm around her shoulders and whispered into her ear: ‘Are you enjoying the film?’

‘Yes,’ she said, although in truth she had hardly paid any attention to it. She’d been too preoccupied thinking about him, sitting beside her.

As the week went on, the real world forced its way into her head and reminded her that happy endings were for movies. She tried to dismiss the voice inside her head, telling her this, that it was better to stay away from people like David. The Davids of this world expected a girl to be normal, with an ordinary background and a loving family behind them. He wouldn’t know what to make of Peggy’s past. The voice said it was time to back off, to stop him from getting too close. The business ought to be her focus. She had no time for men. Even the nice ones couldn’t be trusted.

Persistent as the voice was, it was just possible to ignore it. Because David Byrne was trying so hard to prove that he could be trusted and because Peggy wanted the dream to stay alive for a little while longer.

He loved her beautiful shop when she showed it to him and said he and his brothers would give a hand with the painting. Due to lack of funds, Peggy had been planning to do it all herself.

‘No, it’s fine,’ she said, instinctively, aching inside at how hurt he looked.

In moments of clarity, she wondered how the hell she had attracted this gorgeous, decent man? His family sounded wonderful. The townhouse where he lived with his two brothers was only half a mile away from the home where they’d grown up in St Brigid’s Terrace, just round the corner from Peggy’s cottage. He and his two brothers often went home to Mum for Sunday lunch, he told her. On odd occasions – well, once a week, actually, he said ruefully – their mum turned up at the bachelor house to tut about the state of the place and do his brothers’ washing.

‘I keep telling her not to, but she insists on doing it.’

‘You do yours?’ she asked, thinking how utterly lovely this all sounded.

‘As I keep telling Brian and Steve, if they’re old enough to vote, they’re old enough to work the washing machine,’ David said.

He mentioned, too, that he had a sister, Meredith.

‘She lives in a pretty swanky apartment in Dublin,’ he said, ‘and runs an art gallery with someone else. None of us get to see her much.’

‘Oh.’ The words slipped out: ‘Do you not get on with her?’ Meredith seemed to be the one flaw in the Byrne family.

‘No, I get on with her fine,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘She’s changed, that’s all. I think she got caught up caring about the wrong sort of stuff. Money, labels – you know, that type of thing. I miss her, actually, but she’s moved on from us.’

Peggy detected a flash of something in his eyes: not rancour but sadness.

Though their own children had all flown the nest, his parents still had a teenager in the house: David’s cousin Freya. His face lit up when he talked about her.

‘Crazy like a fox,’ he said. ‘Knows everything. Fifteen going on thirty-seven. Myself and the lads keep an eye on her, because there’s no knowing what she might get up to next.’

‘Why does she live with your mum and dad?’ Peggy asked, not wanting to sound too much like a grand inquisitor but utterly fascinated all the same. Hearing about the family was like basking in the glow of their loving normality. Besides, asking questions was a great way of distracting people from asking about her, and the more she knew David, the more she didn’t want him to know her truth.

‘My dad’s youngest brother, Will, died in a car crash and his wife, my Aunt Gemma, had a nervous breakdown. I don’t know what the psychiatrists called it but that’s what happened,’ David said sadly. ‘She never recovered from his death. Not that anyone would recover from that,’ he added, ‘but afterwards, she literally ceased to function. She’d always been an anxious person but she simply went to pieces. Freya was their only child and, after a while, when it became apparent that Gemma wasn’t functioning, Mum stepped in and said Freya couldn’t live like that any more. Gemma would forget to buy food, forget to cook dinner, forget to get Freya from school, that sort of thing. So Freya’s with Mum now and it’s brilliant. She keeps Mum young, Mum says. We all get a great kick out of her. Gemma’s doing much better now, too. She can’t work, though, but she sees Freya all the time, things are good there.’

Peggy loved hearing about his family. Apart from poor Aunt Gemma, they sounded nice and normal: the sort of family she’d love to have been a part of. That’s when she knew the fantasy was over and that she had to listen to the voice telling her she should end it. Normal wasn’t for her. She’d screw up normal. She was probably a lot more like Aunt Gemma than anyone else in David’s grounded family. Not that she was likely to forget to buy food or cook – Peggy was incredibly organized and seldom forgot anything – but she was far from normal.

‘Now you know all about me,’ he said. ‘Tell me about you, about your family.’

Peggy had a well-rehearsed story about a small family who lived in a bungalow in a town in the centre of the country: a gentle mother who loved needlework and knitting, and a father who was a mechanic. He’d come from a farming background, while her mother had been born in Dublin’s city centre.

‘No brothers or sisters, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’d have loved to be part of a big family like yours. I’m jealous. I was such a tomboy when I was younger, climbing trees with the boys, having fights!’

Normally, people lapped up this story and laughed at the notion of Peggy getting into fights. It was a perfect distraction and nobody had ever questioned the truth of it. Until now.