Chapter 4
4
‘So where did you leave him?’ Chess asked, so utterly absorbed in my story that she’d been standing with her finger on the print button for nearly five minutes and the little green light had given up and gone out.
‘At the traffic lights on Huntington Road,’ I said, with my head in my hands. ‘I couldn’t stand him sitting there all “I’ve got the upper hand” any longer. So I told him to get out and walk from there.’
Chess sighed. ‘He seems really nice, though.’
‘He was lucky that I didn’t order him out ten miles earlier, or he’d be trying to find a bus stop in Sheriff Hutton. Honestly, Chess, it was horrible . He’s so smug and so self-satisfied and sure that he’s right and all I’m doing is writing down stories and he doesn’t even realise how insufferable he is.’
‘You don’t think that might be a “you” thing, rather than a “him” thing?’ Chess admired her reflection in the printer screen for a moment. ‘You can be a bit…’ She pulled a duck face, which was further exaggerated by the streaky glass. ‘A bit touchy.’
A thorn of shame drove through my heart. She was right, I was touchy; short and snappy and impatient these days. Not enough sleep and bad dreams would do that to a person, plus the worry of bill paying and the other intricacies of solo living. It all wore away at the back of my head until it felt as though bare nerves reacted to every draught, like ice cream on a tooth. It was nobody’s fault but mine. Nobody’s responsibility, but mine.
‘Sorry, Chess.’ I tried to sound conciliatory rather than annoyed. ‘I do try.’
‘You go in your office and I’ll bring you a cup of tea,’ she suggested, forgetting, Chess-like, that she might have said something to upset me.
‘I can’t. I can’t sit down. My bum is still all wet and I’m not sure that chair can take any more unpleasantness without disintegrating.’
‘Go and hover, then. I’ll find you something dry to put on. And make you a cup of tea.’
I gave in and went down the tiny narrow windowless corridor that led to my office behind the main rooms in the little library. My encounter with Professor Smuggo had had the same effect on my nerves as a night of tossing and turning. It made me feel as though my skin were too small and the inside of my head were too hot. A kind of sensation of the whole world being wrong and nobody could tell except me.
At least the office smelled familiar – of cheap fibreboard, sun-scorched papers, dust and carpet squares cannibalised from, from the smell of them, a cats’ home. I nearly made the mistake of sitting down, but managed to pull myself back at the last moment and went to lean against the desk. I was lucky to have a desk. I was lucky to have an office and Chess, and a grant for ‘Recording Local Oral Traditions and Tales and Maintaining Social Historical Artefacts and Material Culture relating to Tradition’. Most folklorists had to freelance, recording and writing as and when they could whilst having a day job. I’d drawn the long straw, got a council grant, a workspace and the budget for an assistant. Even if the assistant was someone with no real interest in the subject, a desire to try all the hair-colour products in Boots and a somewhat loose approach to actual working hours.
As for the office… I looked around at the walls and the windows, which showed only a view of more walls. We were slightly below ground level; folklore hadn’t been relegated quite as far as the basement, but there was an air of damp fernyness about this room that let me know that basement dwelling was still a possibility, should I not manage to keep my work sufficiently within the public view. Or, I thought in my more charitable moments, the room was sinking slowly under the weight of information inside it. All those years of oral history, all those stories of grandmothers who’d ‘turned’ the butter using charms, or healed wounds with certain herbs and told bedtime stories about exactly why the children shouldn’t go out onto the high moor after dark, weighted even the air and added gravity.
I gritted my teeth. It was important. Recording these memories before they were subsumed beneath computerisation, globalisation and the generalisation of a population who moved every five years was important. I was already hearing the memories of memories, one more generation and most of it would be lost or diluted by popular fiction and television.
I looked around again, at the stacked box files of written evidence donated by families who hadn’t known what to do with granny’s notes, recipes and charms; at the cupboard that contained artefacts like someone’s great-uncle’s water-divining rods, corn dollies, a jar of home-made ointment for keeping the snow from balling in horses’ hooves. And I couldn’t help the feeling that I was drowning in it all.
‘Here!’ Chess burst in, dragging an air of enthusiasm and a carrier bag with her. ‘I borrowed these off Magda. They’re all I could find.’
I opened the carrier bag to reveal what looked like a set of curtains. ‘What is it?’
‘She’s got her belly-dancing class tonight, but she says you can borrow the trousers for the rest of the day if you want.’ Chess gave me an encouraging smile. ‘Better than getting your chair seat wet and having to sit on damp for the next week or so, isn’t it? I’ll go and make that tea now.’
Okay, I thought, with the sense of resignation that often overcame me when I was here. I had a meeting later with a lady who was coming down from Durham with some tape recordings of her father’s reminiscences of growing up in the wilds of High Cup Nick. I needed to get my jeans dry for that.
There were little brass discs that chimed to contend with, I discovered as I clambered into the borrowed trousers to the accompaniment of hundreds of little metal castanets. Luckily I had emergency knickers, kept in the secret lower drawer of my desk where most researchers would have a bottle of whisky, against those months when nature didn’t play ball, so at least I wasn’t having to go commando in the voluminous trousers. Having dry, warm buttocks again was comforting. I hadn’t realised how much of my ire at the professor had been occasioned by the unpleasant chafing of damp jeans.
Then I put my headphones on and set to work typing up some more memories from the tape I’d made a few days before. Properly evidenced, collated and dated material was the bedrock of my life. It would all make a book one day – at least that was what I’d told the grants committee, and maybe it would, but I needed to find an angle first. Nobody was going to read this loose collection of stories, memories of the elderly who sometimes wandered back into times when their tales had been current or third-hand retellings of family reminiscences, not as it currently stood anyway. I had to find something concrete to peg it all to, a loom to weave the stories so that they felt as though they all came from the same cloth, rather than disparate recollections from varying locations.
Then the thought came to me – I had the Fairy Stane. Though I’d told Professor O’Keefe that I was researching the area, obviously I’d lied to give him second thoughts about raising the stone. But what if I actually did write that book? If I used the stone, the idea that fairyland lay beneath the North York Moors, the theory that disturbing the fairies would bring doom and destruction… yes, it might work. And it might put another obstacle in the way of his interfering with my landscape.
I found I’d stopped typing and put my chin in my hand as I thought. My face was reflected in the bland blank screen and I could see my hair hadn’t benefitted from the rain any more than my bottom had from sitting on the damp stone. Both ends of me were rebelling. At least my lower regions were recovering slowly, now encased in the capacious and startlingly coloured belly-dancing trousers, but my hair wasn’t so lucky and was twisting upwards into the kind of dreadlocks normally seen in illustrations of Grendel from Beowulf. No wonder the professor had been giving me those covert, amused looks right up until I’d slowed down at the traffic lights and told him he could find his own way back from there. I looked less fey and more forty thousand volts.
But the Fairy Stane… yes. I could do it. I’d got enough general material on belief in fairies, hobs, boggarts and sprites from the locality. If I could link it all back to the late nineteenth century generalised acceptance of the liminality of the moors and the accessibility of the fair folk and their propensity for hanging around human farms… I teased a hand up and through my hair, thoughtfully. Yes, it could work. Plus, that would give me a legitimate reason to hang around the stone and make sure that nothing untoward happened to it.
Of course, he could lift the stone, examine the underside and drop it back down again without telling me. But the disruption it would cause to all the overgrowing lichens and bog grass would be an absolute giveaway and I could, and would, raise not only fairyland but merry hell if he tried it. I didn’t think that whoever had seconded him down to York to look into the Romans and their possible settlement would be too keen on that kind of publicity. They’d at least knock his charm back to Ireland and he could go and brood and wear his expensive wardrobe over there.
The thought made me smile, and my reflection softened at the edges.
‘Here’s your tea.’ Chess wafted back in again. ‘And he’s here again.’
‘Who is?’ I shifted around in my chair to take the tea and my trousers clattered and chimed.
‘Our hunky professor. He looks a bit annoyed, mind.’
‘Tell him to go away. There must be something he has to do apart from hang around being a pain to me. Doesn’t he have lectures to do or a modelling contract to fulfil or something?’
‘No, he bloody doesn’t. Right now he has the little matter of being lost to take up with you,’ came the ringing tones from the corridor outside. His voice echoed off the walls like someone shouting into a trumpet. ‘You left me. I’ve only been over here three days, I have no idea where I am most of the time, and you left me.’
Guilt instantly washed over me, flushing my skin and making me cough on my tea. Three days ? He’d only been here three days and I’d ordered him out of my car well beyond the city centre and where, if memory served, there weren’t even any helpful signs.
‘I had to stop a bunch of kids and ask them the way into town!’ Connor burst through the door looking hot and dishevelled. ‘ And the cheeky gobshites pretended they couldn’t understand my accent.’
‘I think you’d better make another cup of tea,’ I said weakly to Chess as the professor slumped wearily into the spare chair, as though he’d hiked fourteen miles up a vertical slope, rather than walking the mile and a half to my out-of-the centre library and office.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, genuinely, once Chess had returned to the little kitchenette, probably to evict the library volunteers, who tended to cluster around the kettle and any biscuits or cake that had been donated. ‘I didn’t know you were new to York.’
‘Well, I am. I only know my way from the house I’ve rented to the university, and even that’s a bit of a stretch still. There’s too many turns and roads and they all look the same out there!’ Connor was unmollified. He gathered his coat around him like a villain’s cape, drawing himself in until he was one pencil-slim tube of blackness. ‘I could be anywhere in the world, and yet here I am looking at some quite frankly shaky evidence for another Roman town somewhere where it never bloody stops raining, like you don’t have Roman experts of your own.’
The words came out of him in a torrent of pent-up exasperation. I still felt too guilty about making him find his way back to town to really appreciate the fact that I’d finally managed to wipe the charming smile off his face. There was also that tiny tickle of shame that Chess had engendered in me with her accusation of touchiness. Whilst I didn’t really care what people thought of me, I couldn’t afford a reputation for being hard to deal with. It might put people off from coming forward to tell me their stories if they heard I was testy and grumpy.
‘You’re Irish, though,’ I pointed out, trying to sound a little more friendly. ‘You must be used to rain.’
‘Not,’ he enunciated carefully, ‘Yorkshire rain. We have proper rain, the sort that makes everything soft. Yours just goes through fifteen layers of clothing, and then you’re wet and cold and it still doesn’t stop.’
I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, apologise for the weather. It was autumn in North Yorkshire. What had he expected, thirty-degree sunshine and barbecues?
‘It’s cold and it’s wet and I’m living in a house with neighbours who’ve got the Hound of the Baskervilles one side and what sounds like a family of fifteen the other.’ He hunched forward now, hiding his face in his hands. ‘I’ve not had a night’s sleep since I arrived, and I’d book into a hotel only I’ve signed up to be here for six months and a professor’s salary isn’t up to it. I’ve only got two more days before I have to sign for the house for the full six months and I don’t think I can stand the torture, but it’s that or a tent.’ He raised his face, and I could see the shadows under his eyes now I wasn’t being misled by the cheeky grin and the incessant upbeat chat. ‘I don’t suppose you know someone who’s renting a room out, do you?’
I mentally combed through my list of acquaintances. It was short. ‘Not really. I might know someone over in Helmsley who’s looking for a housemate…’
‘Helmsley.’ Connor slumped even further into the chair. ‘That’s one of those places about a hundred miles from York, yes?’
‘Twenty-five. On a good day. You could rent a car. It’s a very pretty drive.’
‘Is that where you live?’
The question surprised me. My domestic situation had absolutely nothing to do with the present circumstances, but the backwash of guilt made me answer. ‘Er, no, I live out in the middle of nowhere, about ten miles from Helmsley. On the moors,’ I added, just to reinforce the idea that I might spend my days sitting on the Fairy Stane, in case that had been featuring anywhere in his thought processes.
‘Only I don’t drive, y’see.’ This admission startled me almost as much as his question about my living arrangements. ‘I’ve no sense of direction at all, and I’m a danger to myself and every mortal soul when I’m behind a wheel.’ The merest hint of a return of the charm began to tinge his words. ‘And I shouldn’t have come over here without even knowing where I was going to live or how I was going to travel around, but…’ He shrugged. ‘Ah, y’know, life happens and it’s good to be out of Dublin for a while.’
Chess came in with the extra mug of tea and perched herself on the edge of my desk, looking from one of us to the other. ‘What’s wrong with the house you’re in now?’ she asked, interestedly. Then, seeing my slightly taken-aback look, ‘I was listening. It’s really quite hard not to, when he’s yelling and the kitchen is only half an inch of plywood away.’ She made a ‘sorry-not-sorry’ face.
Connor took the offered tea and stared into it as though the answer to Chess’s question might be inscribed on the surface.
‘Ah, it’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘It’s only six months. How long does it take to die of sleep deprivation anyway?’
‘Stop it,’ I said firmly. ‘What exactly is wrong with your current place?’
I got a return of the smile now. It seemed that Professor O’Keefe couldn’t keep dissatisfaction up for very long and his usual upbeat demeanour was bouncing back. ‘On the left they’ve got a dog that sits outside and howls all hours, and on the other what sounds like the population of a small town, all under the age of seven. So all day it’s competitive shrieking on the one side, and then when they go quiet, out goes the dog and starts up with the howling. It’s like one of those modern novels,’ he added.
‘Wow.’ Chess fiddled with her updo. She’d retouched her eye make-up whilst she’d been making the tea, I noticed, and now looked like an Amy Winehouse album cover. Connor O’Keefe was clearly on her radar. ‘That sounds dreadful.’
‘Do you know anyone who’s got somewhere the professor could rent for six months?’ I asked her. The problem of his housing situation had blended with my sense of remorse and become something I needed to remedy. ‘You’ve got loads of friends, Chess, you must know someone.’
Chess stuck her tongue out, thinking. ‘No, not really,’ she said slowly. ‘Not that would be suitable, anyway. Students are back and everywhere even halfway rentable has gone to them.’ The tongue wiggled. ‘You can make a lot of money, renting to students.’
‘Ah now,’ Connor sighed. ‘There’s always the earplugs. And headphones. And probably the pillow. I’ll be fine.’
‘What about your place?’ Chess turned to me, the tongue making a sudden withdrawal as she was struck with inspiration. ‘You’ve got a spare room, haven’t you?’
I had a sudden flash of my quiet, peaceful home. That air of undisturbed silence that was sometimes my greatest friend and sometimes my worst enemy. ‘No,’ I said, quickly, and wriggled so that my borrowed trousers tinkled in emphasis.
Chess frowned against the considerable strain caused by the updo. ‘You have,’ she said accusingly. ‘You’re always saying you’ve got a room you never even go in. And you’re coming into town most days, so transport wouldn’t be a problem.’
‘No,’ I said again, even faster this time.
But Connor was sitting up straighter now and the protective coat had fallen away to flop over the sides of the chair, like a valance. ‘You say you live near the moors? So you’d be handy for the work out there?’
‘“No” is a complete sentence,’ I said, a rising sense of panic making me speak breathlessly.
There was a short pause. ‘No, it isn’t,’ Chess said eventually. ‘There’s no subject or object, so it can’t be.’
‘Well, I don’t want to impose or anything.’ Connor was still sitting up, alert, looking like a greyhound waiting for the hare to come by. ‘But it wouldn’t be for too long, just until I could find something more convenient?’
Mental images tumbled in. A man’s coat over the back of my sofa. Toiletries in the bathroom, singing on the stairs, the radio tuned to something I never listened to. Alexa randomly playing music I didn’t know. Laughter. Proper meals.
‘No,’ I said again, but aware that my tone lacked the rigour it previously had.
‘Oh, go on,’ said Chess. ‘Something’s bound to come up in York soon.’
‘Something affordable,’ Connor mitigated. ‘But I can pay you something for the room. To cover electricity and – stuff.’
The thought of the occupation of my house was pushed out by the thought of my bank balance. Not dire, not yet, but the grant was tiny and petrol costs were rising again, along with electricity and food costs. The thought of the damp patch over the back door jabbed me with a sharp corner of guilt. I did need the money, damn him. If I played host to Connor O’Keefe for a short while it might earn me enough to fix those niggling issues without having to empty the savings account.
It needn’t be for long. It had better not be for long. I needed my silent solitude.
‘The house is tiny,’ I said, and now I sounded as though the whole thing was a fait accompli and I was making excuses. ‘The spare room isn’t much more than a bed. The hot water can be unreliable, and it’s very quiet, there’s nothing to do in the evenings, and there’s no public transport at all. I’m quite often away too.’
‘But the neighbours don’t howl or play “Who can scream the loudest?” all night?’ Connor looked hopeful. As I’d been so resolutely sour-faced at him on the earlier drive back from the moors, I could infer that boarding with me would be the lesser of two evils by not very much, and the other evil must be very unpleasant indeed. ‘It really would be kind of you, Rowan. Oh, and I like the trousers, by the way. Very – er, colourful.’
I restrained myself from poking him in the eye. He’d actually used my name! Not the vaguely derogatory ‘Dr Thorpe’ that he’d been calling me up to now, as though a doctorate were something to pity. Bringing the belly-dancing gear into the conversation was a touch below the belt, although any touches below the belt would currently make me chime like a clock shop at midnight.
It was the guilt, that was what it was. Guilt, or hypnosis, one or the other. Because I found myself agreeing to host Professor Connor O’Keefe in my spare room, temporarily, mind you, only until he could find something more suitable in town, where the neighbours were reasonable human beings and the rent wasn’t eye-watering. The trousers didn’t help, because I didn’t dare stand up and hold the door open to invite him to leave, as I really wanted to do. The waist was looser than it should have been so I was forced to remain sitting or risk him getting a very close look at my underwear. I was disadvantaged in every way.
‘You’ll need to use taxis,’ I warned sternly. ‘I won’t always be coming into York, or I might need to work late some nights, and I sometimes have to attend conferences and things. I’m not going to be at your beck and call for running you back and forth.’
I carried on sitting, even though it made me feel like an interviewer with a difficult candidate, and very much at a disadvantage.
‘Understood.’
But as he stood up to take his leave and go back to get his things together, I felt a sense of impending doom as deep as though the stone had already been lifted and the grief of the fairies had been let loose on the world.
This was such a bad idea.