It wasn’t a taxing job to set out the tea things; I’d done it countless times before. But when all the cups and saucers were set out, the biscuits displayed on plates and the ‘50p per cup’ sign prominently displayed, I still had thirty minutes to kill before the first of the thirsty hordes were likely to descend. I messed around with my phone for a while, checked my emails, replied to a text from Rich and generally did everything I could to distract myself from what was going on in the hall.
I straightened a teacup and looked critically at the display. Were there enough cups? There were more in the cupboard that I had judged unnecessary – but what if my prejudice was underestimating the popularity of this event? What if I let Tina down?
It was a matter of seconds between the thought creeping into my head and my feet carrying me to the door of the hall. Standing to one side, I peered through the glass panel, focusing only on the rows of chairs stretching back down the length of the hall. It was far busier than I had expected, with the rows occupied to at least halfway; I would need more teacups after all.
I turned away and was about to return to the canteen when a familiar burst of laughter stopped me in my tracks, the sound slinking into my reluctant ears and pinning me to where I stood. I tried to ignore it, but his voice carried through the door as he spoke about the Viking occupation of Lancashire and the Cuerdale Hoard that had been found by workmen repairing the banks of the River Ribble near Preston in 1840; it was one of the largest Viking silver hoards ever found, and we had once been to see it at the British Museum. The Vikings had always been Paddy’s favourite era, and his genuine enthusiasm was clear, to me at least; the Irish accent dimmed, and he sounded less like the TV star and more like the boy I had known. I closed my eyes and listened.
The scrape of a chair along the wooden floor brought me to my senses, and I dashed back downstairs, my heart pounding with renewed fascination about archaeology, and frustration that Paddy had helped inspire it. I set out more cups, filled the urns with tea and coffee, and prepared to lurk at the back of the room, out of sight.
It wasn’t long before the audience arrived, laughing and smiling as if they’d had a good time – although the realisation that they had to pay for refreshments wiped a few of the smiles away. I sensed rather than saw Paddy’s arrival; I was well hidden behind a group of parents, and a gaggle of Year 9s who thought they could pilfer biscuits without me noticing. But the sound in the room changed when he walked in: conversations dimmed; feet shuffled as people turned to get a better look. The air was thick with the consciousness of his presence, and with anticipation of who he might talk to.
It was sickening. All this, because he had appeared on television, and was objectively what some might consider handsome? I thrust a teacup into a waiting hand, sloshing the contents onto the saucer as I seethed at the shallowness of today’s society. And then I smiled to myself for sounding more like someone of Gran’s age than my own, and as I looked across the room, Paddy caught my eye and returned my smile.
Damn the man! He was as bad as the Year 9s, pilfering things that weren’t meant for him. I focused on dispensing refreshments again, but the queue was drying up, and at 50p per cup, no one was coming back for seconds. I felt like a sitting duck behind my table as the crowd thinned around me. Spotting that Jo Blair was engaged in earnest conversation with a governor, I grabbed the almost-empty urn of tea and carried it into the kitchen, with the spurious intention of filling it up while hiding for as long as I could.
‘Eve?’
My hand slipped, and scalding water splashed over it, making me yelp. Paddy was at my side at once, switching on the cold tap and holding my arm so that the cold water ran over the back of my hand. As soon as the pain was replaced by a heavy numbness, I shook my arm free.
‘I can manage.’
‘You should leave it under for fifteen minutes.’
‘I am aware of that. I’m one of the school’s designated first aiders.’
I didn’t know why I added that. If we were going to trade achievements since our time together, it was hardly going to trump anything he could offer.
‘Well done,’ he said, and I glanced up, expecting sarcasm, but his smile appeared genuine. But then it always did. A line from Caitlyn’s A-level Shakespeare text floated into my head: ‘that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.’ It summed up Paddy perfectly.
‘You’re not supposed to be in here,’ I said, turning off the tap and drying my hand on a paper towel. I had no intention of being trapped here for fifteen minutes. ‘What do you want?’
‘Did you come and hear the talk?’ he asked.
‘No.’ I threw the paper towel in the bin. ‘Don’t you have enough adoring fans out there? Are you so desperate for praise that you have to follow people, hoping for a bit of flattery?’
‘I don’t give a stuff about adoring fans. None of that matters.’
‘Really? Is it just the money you care about, then?’ I said. ‘Something must have motivated you to take the part in Celebrity Speed Dating, as it certainly can’t have been for the critical acclaim.’
Caitlyn had been hooked on the show, and I’d been unlucky enough to catch a few minutes of it – fortunately not a segment featuring Paddy. It had been one of the worst things I’d ever seen on television, and had picked up scathing reviews – so of course, it had been a huge ratings hit.
‘Sure I did it for the money. I’m not ashamed of that.’
The old Paddy would have been, the Paddy I thought I’d known: he was passionate about his subject – devoted to it, as I knew to my cost – and wouldn’t have risked degrading it with tawdry TV shows. Briefly, I wondered what had happened to wreak the change, but I soon let the thought slip away. I had better things to do than waste a second of my time on Paddy Friel.
‘Did you get my postcard?’
‘Yes. It went straight in the recycling bin. We have nothing to talk about. I made that perfectly clear before. You were happy enough to leave me alone once, when it suited you. Why can’t you leave me alone now, when it suits me?’
Paddy leant against the stainless steel work surfaces, his hands stuffed in his pockets.
‘There are things we need to talk about,’ he said. ‘Important things. Don’t be like this. I know this bitterness isn’t you. What’s happened to you?’
My mouth and my eyes gaped wide. Was he criticising me? Who had made me bitter? Why had I ended up this way? He knew nothing about me, about who I was now.
‘Life happened,’ I said – no doubt in a bitter fashion. ‘It doesn’t always go the way you want it to.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’ Something in his face, in his voice as he said that, caught my attention – something undoubtedly real. But before I could process that, my second least favourite voice cut through the kitchen.
‘Eve? What are you doing? Why have you left the tea money unattended?’
Jo Blair stopped when she noticed Paddy, and her frown quickly changed to a smile.
‘Mr Friel! Have you lost your way? Eve, couldn’t you have shown him where to go?’
‘I tried.’
Paddy’s eyes glittered with amusement from behind Jo’s back, and all at once, I remembered how different things had once been between us. How laughter had bound us together; how he had acted the clown, never satisfied until I collapsed, clutching the stitch in my side; how I had stored up stories from my day, exaggerating the absurdities in the hope of hearing his laughter; how our radar for comedy had been so finely attuned that it had often taken only one shared glance to set us both off. I had never experienced that with anyone else. It felt like I hadn’t laughed like that in years. Seventeen years, if I was inclined to count.
‘Hurry up with the tea,’ Jo said, oblivious to the atmosphere in the kitchen. ‘There’s time to sell