Chapter 7
7
The grants people seemed happy enough with the way things were going. The mention of a potential book – which could be displayed in shops, with an atmospheric cover and the possibility of earning real money – cheered them immensely. They fed me custard creams and coffee and released me back into the real world where, buoyed up by relief, I did some shopping and headed back to spend an afternoon forcing Chess to do some actual work while I made phone calls to set up more interviews and tracked down some old paperwork from the library’s archive resources.
I emerged from the office as the sun was going down, to find Connor and Chess sitting together in the library, forming a book club of two around the history section. Far too late I remembered that Chess’s degree was history and that she was only my assistant because there weren’t any folklore graduates in York. Or at least none who wanted to work for a pittance and a grouchy boss.
‘I find the writing approachable, but a little bit lacking in intellectual rigour,’ Chess was saying. As I hadn’t seen her read anything apart from Cosmo in the time that I’d known her, I was slightly surprised by her assessment. Unless she was covering the subject of women’s magazines, of course, which would have fitted her evaluation just as well as some of the modern takes on historical subjects.
‘A bit populist, you’re right.’ Connor put his cup down and then noticed me. ‘Ah, and you’re here.’
‘Why? You’re not talking about my work, are you?’ I prickled.
‘We are not. You’re a sensitive soul, Rowan.’ He grinned at me, but I wasn’t going to be appeased that easily and kept the scowl I’d assumed as soon as I’d seen him out there, drinking coffee. Nobody had offered me coffee.
‘Pragmatic. I prefer pragmatic,’ I said, glancing at their cups in a meaningful way. ‘It’s been a long afternoon and I’d like to get home, so if you two have finished slandering some poor struggling author…?’
‘I’m meant to be going out tonight.’ Chess pulled her phone over and glanced at the screen. ‘Yep. Time to go.’
She collected her coat, bag, keys, hat, scarf, glasses and other accoutrements as though she were a self-assembly version of an assistant, and waved us a cheery farewell, leaving Connor and I in the silent and dark library, surrounded by watchful books.
‘We really weren’t talking about you,’ he said jauntily.
‘I should hope not.’ I prepared to lock up. ‘You need my spare room and Chess needs the job. If you start ganging up behind my back, then she’s looking at going back to shelf-stacking in Tesco and you’ll be sleeping on her sofa.’
‘That really does make you sound a bit sensitive, y’know,’ Connor said in a tone so reasonable that I wanted to punch him. ‘And you can’t afford that, not if you’re putting yourself out there. Publishing theoretical research is a bloody brutal business.’
‘I’m well aware.’ I still sounded stiff and unlike myself. Connor O’Keefe had that effect on me – from his casual but expensive clothes to his jaunty air of ever so slightly having the upper hand, he made me defensive and wary. To be honest, most historians brought me out in clenched jaws and narrowed eyes, so he was ahead of the crowd there. ‘I’m multi-published in my field.’
‘So, then, why folklore?’ He followed me out and then stood while I set the alarm. I had no idea why the alarm was necessary – the library’s underused nature indicating that the population of this part of York had no insane desire to seize all the books they could carry home, and hit-and-run folklore students were thin on the ground.
‘Someone has to remember,’ I said shortly.
‘Chess said your doctorate is folklore, but your main degree was history, so you switched some time ago?’
I stopped, staring unseeing at the keypad. Here, on this busy street with the dark hustling me to hurry, the memories seemed to press more tightly, provoked by the layers of history that York possessed. Roman, Viking, Norman, Tudor… I could recite the eras as easily as I could rattle off my full name.
‘Someone has to remember. Otherwise the memories die. I started to see that history was folklore written by the winners of battles and backed up with paperwork.’ I pressed the final button and started the march around the soggy corner to where my car was squeezed into the tiny library car park, hopefully giving the full and final impression that this conversation was over. Connor jogged alongside me, seeming not to be cross at the unsurfaced nature of the car park, which sent spatters of mud up my legs with every squelchy footstep.
‘Oh, I’m not saying it’s not an interesting subject. I’m wondering why you chose to switch allegiance.’ He grinned at me, his expression caught for a moment in the lights of a passing car. ‘You could have been one of us.’
‘I was one of you,’ I couldn’t help but retort. I needed to learn to bite my tongue and cultivate a serene air that touchy subjects bounced off, but I wasn’t there yet. ‘That’s how I know it’s all evidence , no room for conjecture, it’s walls and measurements and original sources. It’s just all so damn concrete .’ Then, ashamed of my outburst, I threw my bag onto the back seat of the car and got in behind the wheel. Connor was still standing at the passenger door. ‘Don’t hang about. I’ve got work to do at home.’
‘You haven’t unlocked my door,’ he said, with a curious inflection in his voice, almost as though he was trying to stop other words from coming out.
I pressed the button that opened the other doors and he got in. ‘There you go now,’ he said and his voice was cheery again, with something that sounded almost like relief. Had he thought I’d been going to drive away and leave him?
But then, I thought, steering carefully out into the traffic, I’d done it before, hadn’t I? Maybe he’d been traumatised by being left. After all, I’d known that he was only a mile from the centre of York, but he hadn’t, when I’d ordered him out at the traffic lights.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, in a small voice that didn’t really want to be heard, just so I could say I’d said it.
‘For maligning my profession? You’re all right, I do it a fair bit myself.’ Connor raised a hand and scuffed through his hair. ‘I’ve no illusions about the way we work, Rowan. But there has to be evidence, otherwise it’s a load of people, each with their own opinions, and that’s not history, that’s a shouting match.’
We reached the edge of the city and the countryside began to unfold on either side of the road in huge patches of black broken by the lights of occasional farmhouses. Trees leaned over the car, skeletal in their winter uniform of branch, twig and owl, whilst beneath our wheels the lost leaves of autumn formed a frictionless carpet.
Neither of us spoke. I wanted to – there were justifications and accusations that I had lined up and ready. I’d used them before, they were a well-trodden path for the arguments that frequently broke out, usually when funding was involved, but for now I kept them stoppered up behind concentration. The winding roads with their impromptu tight bends and suicidal wildlife meant that I didn’t want to be distracted by explaining to Connor why I’d switched from history to folklore. No, scratch that. It wasn’t the distraction. I just didn’t want to talk about it, particularly not to him.
Finally we breasted the last hill and began the descent towards Mill Cottage. I’d left a light on in the porch, as I always did at this time of year, and it glowed, a welcoming beacon in the pool of darkness that was the ford, the river and the house.
‘You don’t mind being so isolated?’ It was the first thing Connor had said in miles. Perhaps he felt he’d said too much earlier. I could only hope that tact and shame were beginning to creep into his make-up.
‘No.’ I steered into my parking spot. Then, feeling that maybe a degree of rapprochement might be called for before we spent an evening together in chilly silence, ‘And there are always the ducks.’
We got out of the car, into the cool and the quiet. There was no sound apart from the plop and gurgle of the river, and a distant wind running its way through the reeds, as though searching for something.
‘They’re not exactly popping round for a drink and a bowl of peanuts though, are they?’ Connor, too, was keeping it light. I felt my shoulders drop a little and realised I’d been tensing myself against a continuation of his questioning about my life choices.
‘They sit outside the window in the morning waiting for toast,’ I pointed out. ‘And things can get quite heated if there isn’t enough to go round.’
‘Like our old neighbours in Dublin. You should have heard the rows when the sherry ran out.’
That made me smile and the smile made me loosen up sufficiently when I unlocked the front door to offer to put the kettle on and make some tea. ‘What about food? Have you eaten?’
‘I’m a history professor. I’m lucky to catch the last pack of sandwiches in the shop down on campus. I’ve had a few biscuits, in the meeting.’
‘How are you still standing?’
‘I had toast.’ He pointed at my toaster. ‘This morning. You made me toast, remember?’
The kitchen light came on, bright and invasive. ‘I was going to make a stir-fry,’ I said. ‘Would you like some?’ Then I wanted to bite my tongue again. It wasn’t my fault that he didn’t feed himself properly – I’d had a fair few of those meetings myself, the ones that went on for hours and ended with you feeling so wrung out that you could barely sip a Cup-A-Soup afterwards. I’d had evenings where I went to bed with a bowl of cereal and realised I’d had nothing else since breakfast.
Connor was watching me under the unforgiving glare of the fluorescent bulb. I knew it washed out my skin and made me look pasty and couldn’t work out why it didn’t do the same to him. Probably because there wasn’t enough skin showing between the barely shaved cheeks and the flopping hair and the coat collar, I decided.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Show me where the stuff is, and I’ll cook. You sit yourself down, you look a wee bit…’ He tailed off.
‘Frazzled,’ I supplied. ‘I look frazzled. It’s how I end every day.’ I waved a hand to indicate the fridge, where all the stir-fry ingredients lived, and he bent to open the door and investigate.
‘Ah, I didn’t like to say,’ his voice came muffled from inside the fridge. ‘Chicken, veg and some sauce, that right?’
‘There’s some noodles in the cupboard.’ I leaned back in the kitchen chair and closed my eyes, only to jerk back upright with my eyes pinging open like untethered blinds. ‘Can you cook? I don’t want you setting my kitchen on fire and ruining practically the only food I’ve got in.’
A snort. ‘Course I can cook. Mam was away at conferences more often than not, and Da thinks cooking is making a cup of tea, so the lads and I learned defensive cookery at an early age.’ A moment’s fumbling later and ingredients began to hit the counter. ‘Except young Eamonn, of course.’
‘The priest,’ I said, wanting to show that I had, at least, listened to him.
‘That’s your man. I think he has parishioners bringing him hot meals most days. Like offerings.’ The wok hung from a rail above the worktop, and Connor unhooked it deftly and swung it onto the stove. ‘Why don’t you leave me to this and you go and have a shower or get changed or whatever it is you do when you get in. I’ll earn my keep here.’
How long had it been since someone had cooked for me? I asked myself the question as I wandered out of the kitchen and up the stairs without even raising the energy for arguing. A long time. A long time. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been able to shower with the smell of cooking wafting up the stairs and the sound of dishes clanking, a voice singing and muttering in the kitchen below and lights randomly going on and off as someone moved from room to room.
For a moment I tasted memory. A cup of tea brought in bed. A fried breakfast before a winter walk. Home baking. How long?
I knew how long, of course. I knew, almost to the day. And sometimes that time felt like a lifetime, and sometimes only yesterday.
When I got back to the kitchen the air was full of the blue haze of hot oil and the smell of soy sauce. Connor had opened the window and the chill of the intruding breeze contrasted with the heat of the cooker so sharply that I half feared it would snow on the table.
‘Good timing. You look brighter.’ Connor plonked two plates on the table, without ceremony. Veg and noodles flopped over the edges and a piece of pak choi left the launch pad to fly onto the floor.
‘Presentation from the University Canteen school of cookery?’ I asked, but I half smiled as I said it.
‘Ah, when you’ve four starving brothers sitting waiting with their napkins tucked in and their forks raised in a threatening fashion, you care more about getting it onto the table than Instagram.’ He sat opposite me, fork already in hand.
The food was good. I’d been half afraid that Connor’s idea of ‘cooking’ might have involved burning everything to a uniform ‘hard brown and crispy’, but he’d got it just right.
‘Garlic salt,’ he said, pausing from his eating like a starving peasant. ‘It’s the secret to everything. Apart from Victoria sponge.’
‘I didn’t even know I had garlic salt.’ I was eating in a more decorous fashion. ‘But you’re right. It’s good.’
‘I’m softening you up. In case I have to stay longer than intended.’ He gulped down the last forkful. ‘I had a quick look around properties to rent between meetings, and there’s not much about.’
I felt the shutters come down again. I didn’t altogether relish the feeling as I might have done before, probably because I’d been half enjoying this relaxed conversation over hot food, with the cottage illuminated and the glow from the lights shining out over the water. ‘You can’t,’ I said shortly and picked up my plate. I hadn’t quite finished eating, but I wanted to indicate that the matter was indisputable. ‘We agreed.’ I scraped the remains of my food into the bin with enough noise to drown out any comebacks.
Connor nodded over his last forkful. ‘Of course. I was teasing.’
I relaxed a fraction again. ‘I knew that.’
‘You’re very easy to wind up, y’know.’
‘So there’s no challenge in doing it,’ I retorted, putting my plate in the sink and running water onto it, which resulted in splashing myself up the front.
‘Touché.’ Connor got up and stood beside me. ‘Let me wash up. Why d’you not have the dishwasher?’
‘Because there’s only me.’ I felt oddly exposed standing there next to him. I’d put on a fleecy tracksuit after my shower, while he’d taken off his coat and hung it behind the door but was otherwise still wearing his usual black jumper and jeans combo. It made me feel as though I were unfinished, unprepared, whilst he was ready to face anything. I sat down again. He’d seemed too tall, too intrusive to be close to.
‘And what do you do in the evenings around here?’ He washed up efficiently and stacked the pots and pans to dry as though it was his usual task. All those brothers, I thought. If they were all this domesticated, that house in Dublin must be immaculate. ‘You’ve a TV, I notice.’
‘The signal down here is dreadful though,’ I said. ‘We’re in a dip. I stream stuff on my laptop, but usually I’m working.’
‘Isn’t that what daytime is for?’ Connor dried his hands on the kitchen towel and sat down opposite me again.
‘Daytime is for recording, for visiting people. Collecting their stories, going through various libraries, old papers. Evening is when I type stuff up, collate, cross-reference. That kind of thing,’ I finished lamely, aware that this did not make it sound as though I were hosting riotous gambling evenings with exotic cocktails.
‘No socialising?’ He rolled his sleeves down.
‘I socialise.’ Now, that sounded defensive. ‘I sometimes go out with Chess, or – friends.’ And how long since that happened? ‘But I’m busy. I’ve told the grant board that I’m going to publish some of our stories, the more local ones, and they’re very interested in that, so I need to have something to show them at the next meeting. I need the money,’ I finished, hoping that some overt vulnerability might make him back off.
‘The overhanging bogeyman of the grant board.’ Connor leaned back in the wooden chair, stretching his legs out in front of him. ‘Now that’s one thing we can agree on. I’m trying to raise the funding for a full investigation of that potential Roman settlement up on the moor there.’ He shifted about, crossed long legs ankle over ankle. ‘It is no secret to say that they are not keen.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said, with a lack of sympathy exuding from both syllables.
‘Which is why it would be good to lift your stone there. I’m still thinking it could have Roman origins. Or even pre-Roman, they sometimes re-used Iron Age or Neolithic artefacts as grave markers, and the cemeteries were usually on the road outside the settlement, so that might be even better.’
‘You’re not lifting the stone.’ My words were heavy, individually enunciated to leave no room for doubt, and he went quiet, tugging at the day or so’s growth of stubble that adorned his chin.
We had sat in this self-imposed sullenness for a minute or so, when there came a most tremendous crash from the living room, as though someone had thrown a brick through the window, and we both leaped up, wide-eyed.
‘What the hell was that?’ I’d frozen, clutching the edge of the table as though, should this be some kind of zombie attack, I could upturn it and hide.
‘Dunno.’ He looked at me and then at the dark doorway to the room beyond. ‘Shall I go and look?’
‘It might be dangerous.’ I grabbed at his arm to prevent him walking into whatever-it-was. ‘Someone trying to break in.’
‘Are you breeding attack-ducks out here?’ Connor gently removed my hand from his sleeve. ‘If they’re breaking in then they’re already here, and unless we barricade ourselves in the kitchen, we’re in trouble. Besides, it’s quiet now.’
He was right. Bar the odd tinkle of glass falling, there were no further sounds of onslaught, and together we shuffled our way over the threshold into the living room. I switched on the light.
‘Oh no.’ My map had fallen from its hook on the wall, slid down to smash on the metal of the log burner and lie face down on the carpet amid a glittering fallout of glass fragments. The frame had come apart, the mitre corners showing the nails that had held them together, newly exposed like internal organs.
‘What was it?’ Connor edged into the room now, as though the broken map might be concealing burglars.
‘It’s my 1857 map of the area. I use it for research. It shows the farms that were around then, the field boundaries and the old watercourses. The stone is marked on it too.’ I picked up the map by one side of the frame and more glass twinkled its way in shards onto the carpet. ‘It’s… I’ve had it a long time.’
‘Hmm.’ He looked at the hook, now distinctly sideways and with the lower portion bent. ‘This was never going to support that weight for long.’
‘It’s been up there since… It’s been hanging perfectly well for the last five years,’ I snapped. ‘I have no idea why it would choose now to give up the ghost, unless it’s under the sheer misery of having a historian in the house.’
‘I don’t think you can pin this on me,’ he said, equably. ‘Mind you, I don’t think you can pin anything much on a hook like that.’ He bent down beside me and gently took the frame out of my hand. It was only then that I realised I was cut and bleeding where tiny fragments of glass from the edge of the frame had sliced into my fingers. ‘Put it down, it’s sharp.’
I tightened my grip until blood oozed. The shock of the breakage had gone now, replaced by the helplessness of losing something with so much memory bound to it. The map poked a corner from the frame, horribly bare now its glass was gone, looking cheap and like just another piece of paper, rather than the historic overview of my area it had been when it had been flat and weighted and captive.
Connor looked into my face. ‘It’s not any old map now, is it?’ he asked, but it wasn’t really a question, more an observation. ‘What is it, sentimental value?’
‘Something like that.’ I ground the words out. ‘I’ll sweep up the mess.’
He lifted the map, thrusting its way clear of the broken bits of frame like a geographical tongue, and spread it carefully on my dining table. ‘Ah, it’s fine. No damage at all.’ I watched him from the kitchen as he carefully picked away the split frame and the razor edging of glass splinters until they sat in a flat pile so he could pore over the old map. ‘I see it now. There’s your stone.’ A finger jabbed down almost on the dead centre of the map. ‘And over here, that’s where we think the Roman settlement traces are.’ He squinted close to the paper. ‘Looks like there was something above ground when the map was drawn up – those could be the lines of walls.’
I came in with the dustpan and brush and a tea towel around my cut hand. ‘They could be field boundaries,’ I said.
‘Mmm. Could be, I suppose. And what’s this over here?’
‘Oh, that’s Evercey Manor.’ I began to collect the pieces together with the brush. Although my heart was still hammering, the worst of the shock and despair had worn off now and I didn’t feel as though I might burst into tears at any second. ‘A mid-fifteenth century place that got added to and built on right up until the Second World War, when there was nobody to inherit it and the place was demolished.’
He pulled a thoughtful face. ‘That’s good. Shows the land has been lived on, which bodes well for the Romans, who might have been the ones that cleared the land in the first place. We could have a villa and associated buildings – not quite as exciting as a full settlement, but it could be worth bringing the archaeologists in on.’
‘Leave the stone alone,’ I said almost automatically, trying to make sure I got every last twinkle of glass from the carpet. ‘I’ll get the hoover over this.’
Connor straightened up. ‘Why do you care so much?’ he asked. ‘On the one hand you’re this aloof personality who doesn’t want interference and on the other – no, wait a minute, actually I think I’ve answered my own question there.’
I stood for a moment looking down on the map, my hands full of dusty sharpness and cracked wood. The urge to cry was still pushing vigorously at the backs of my eyes. ‘It’s not the stone per se ,’ I said, carefully managing the words so that no emotion came with them. ‘It’s what it stands for.’
He sat down suddenly on my chair, at my dining table work desk. I bridled at the liberty. ‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘Convince me.’
Stiffly I took up station on the other side of the desk, carefully placing the dustpan full of glass in the middle, on the top of the map. Did I deliberately want to block him from looking at my map? Or did I want to make sure I didn’t knock the sweepings back onto the floor? I wasn’t sure.
‘I could say the same to you,’ I said. ‘Convince me that looking for Romans takes precedence over my work.’
Connor rolled my chair back so that he could lean back at an angle so acute that he was almost a straight line. I could have laid him on the map and measured distances. ‘You’re good at this,’ he said admiringly. ‘You’ve argued with a lot of historians, then?’
His lack of confrontation, his happy acknowledgement of my proficiency in this particular struggle and his expression of surprised enjoyment took the wind completely from my sails.
‘I’ve had to fight my corner a lot, yes,’ I said, and the desire to beat him into submission with the dustpan faded. ‘Quite a lot of people don’t take folklore studies seriously. It’s all fairy stories and rubbish as far as they are concerned.’
Connor was looking down at the part of the map still visible now. He traced his finger over the dark shading that was the moors. ‘Try me,’ he said, in a slightly softer voice. ‘I’m Irish. The fairy stories now, they’re practically part of my genetic make-up.’
The light glowed off his hair and he looked relaxed and comfortable, as though he belonged there in my wheelie chair, at my worktable, and I managed to grip onto the rapidly vanishing edges of my annoyance and distrust. ‘My work is not your business,’ I clipped out rapidly. ‘I’m going to bed now. I need an early start in the morning, so if you’re going into York, you’ll need to get a taxi.’
That had done it. The open interest vanished from his expression and he frowned it into a closed look, eyes narrowed and his mouth a lip-chewing twist. ‘Hmm, okay,’ he said thoughtfully, then, ‘I’ll not be needing one. Tomorrow I’m walking up onto the moor and having a bit of a poke around. I’m meeting a guy to put up a drone and take an overview of the proposed site.’
‘Oh.’ My heart dropped a little. Was that disappointment ? Or annoyance at his assumption that he didn’t need to tell me his plans? Had I, perhaps, been looking forward a bit too much to continuing my acerbic confrontations in the car on our morning drive? ‘I’ll be back around six.’
‘Could you leave me a key?’ He was tracing those lines again, a slow finger hovering too close to the site of the stone for my liking.
‘What for?’
He smiled at me now, but there were still traces of that tightness in his eyes and the smile wasn’t quite as easy and open as usual. ‘I’m sorry. I know you don’t know me from Adam and I might have my mates hanging around the corner with a lorry to strip out your valuables, but, truly? I want to be able to sit down and drink coffee and not have to spend all day in the company of the drone men who can, let me tell you, be a touch too single-minded for the likes of me.’ Another, slightly wider, grin. ‘Besides, it’s dark by the time you get back and I don’t want to have to hide in the bushes so the ducks don’t get me.’
I couldn’t help it. I smiled at the image of Connor crouching in the undergrowth with his coat over his head. It was only sensible for him to have a key, after all. I was sometimes away at folklore-related events or couldn’t get home. Never for exciting, fun reasons; more for lecturing or grinning-halfheartedly-whilst-standing-at-the-back-of-a-crowd-holding-a-glass-of-cheap-warm-wine reasons, but even so. Giving Connor a key was reasonable. ‘Sorry. Of course. I’ll dig out the spare key.’
His face seemed to relax a little. ‘Thank you. And goodnight now.’
I had forgotten that I was taking my high dudgeon and retiring. I’d got caught in the net of his interest, and having someone here occupying space in my home. ‘Yes. Right. I’ll hoover the bits up tomorrow.’
‘I can do it, while I’m drinking my coffee and hiding from the dual threats of drone-men and ducks.’
I flicked him a short smile of farewell and took myself off up the stairs, not sure whether to feel affronted at his casual assumption of duties in the house or happy that I wasn’t going to have to wield the hoover.
Connor was making himself far too much at home for my liking, that was it. I resolved to get Chess to spend tomorrow finding him somewhere else to stay, even if it was in Sheffield.