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For my own Molly, Molly Eccles, an aunt who’s also a friend … although infinitely better behaved than her namesake.
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‘Red wine or white?’ asked Helen.
‘Red – our bodies need the iron,’ said Molly. ‘But imagine having both in stock. Helen, it’s official, you’re a grown-up.’ She lolled on the sofa, waiting for her friend to prise open the bottle.
Despite a smorgasbord of corkscrews, Helen was fundamentally challenged in the uncorking department. Every so often she’d say wistfully, ‘Isn’t it a pity that Liebfrausquilch in the screwtop bottle tastes revolting? It’d be so handy,’ and Molly would threaten to report her to the taste Gestapo.
‘Give it here, Sharkey,’ she ordered now. ‘I’ll die of iron deficiency if I wait for you to relieve me.’ And she extracted both Merlot and corkscrew from Helen’s fumbling hands. ‘I thought this was supposed to be a foolproof gadget,’ she added. ‘Didn’t the Image magazine testers give it the full Orion’s Belt of stars?’
‘Misled again,’ mourned Helen. ‘I read, I bought, I faltered. Fill up my glass to the brim there, Molly, this is an emergency. I need to funnel the alcohol into my bloodstream in jig-speed time.’
‘You know what getting drunk on alcohol is called,’ said Molly, dribbling only a few drops as she poured.
Helen waited for Molly to fill her own glass and then clinked. ‘Tell me.’
‘A return on your investment.’
They swigged in companionable silence, facing each other on Helen’s somewhat mauled matching sofas from which, until she could afford two identical new ones, she wouldn’t be parted. Helen favoured pairs, whereas Molly shuddered if she accidentally found herself with a double – mugs, earrings, socks, towels were all deliberately mismatched. Shoes were about all she’d concede needed to come in pairs. ‘Eclectic’ was the word she dredged up whenever anyone suggested her taste veered towards the idiosyncratic; nobody came right out and told her she looked like a walking jumble sale, at least not since being staffed, after years as a freelance journalist, allowed her to relax her financial guard enough to buy clothes in the Powerscourt Townhouse.
‘So what’s the emergency, oh inheritor of the face that launched a thousand computer blips?’ she asked Helen, who was a software programmer.
The reference usually didn’t fail to make her friend blush or giggle, or at least twiddle an eyebrow, but tonight she didn’t react – an ominous sign. Helen took a protracted swallow that emptied her glass and said, ‘Thanks for galloping around at a moment’s notice.’
‘You know me,’ shrugged Molly. ‘I’d do the Lough Derg pilgrimage
