Chapter 11
11
For a few weeks Connor and I co-existed without seeing too much of one another. We shared the odd meal, but I was sorting out the contents of my forthcoming book in earnest, so spent much of my time at home in front of my computer or shut in my bedroom. Connor came and went, students seemed to have been persuaded to pick him up and drop him off, so he rarely travelled with me, heading into the university early and coming back late, sometimes after I’d gone to bed. Now he had my mobile number he assiduously messaged me to let me know when he would be late or needed a lift back. He paid up on time, bought the occasional takeaway, was quiet, punctilious and clean.
It was almost uncanny.
He also didn’t mention the stone. But I’d told him not to, so I couldn’t really get suspicious. Besides he was still deeply involved in attempts to identify the possible Roman construction, which seemed to absorb much of his time and energy, I was grateful to note. Apart from catching him sometimes staring at the map and muttering about the ideal placement for a cemetery, he’d gone completely quiet on the subject of stone-raising altogether.
Then I got home one evening to find him singing.
I could hear him as I parked the car. It sounded like an Irish folk song, plaintive and deep, the syllables rolling out across the frosted dark like invisible clouds, to meet me at the door. I stomped my way inside and he stopped, suddenly, seeming embarrassed.
‘Oh! I didn’t hear the car. And you’re early.’
‘Early’ was a strange concept now that the evenings grew dark before five and my tendency to work until bedtime meant that I was eating at my computer anyway. There was no ‘early’, only ‘home’ and ‘bed’.
‘Chess was full of cold, so I sent her home and then thought I might as well be gone too.’ I unwound myself from coat and scarf. ‘It was chilly in the office.’
‘Okay.’
‘You were singing?’ I didn’t know why I phrased it as a question. Since there was nobody else here it had to have been him, either that or the ducks had formed a choir.
In the bright white light he flamed a sudden pink. ‘Er, yes.’
‘It sounded lovely. Was it Irish?’
Connor turned away now and began fiddling with the fridge, bending to look at supplies. ‘My granda taught me the songs. Long time ago now, he’s been gone, oh, twenty years or more. But when I was a child and we’d go down to the farm in Lahinch, he’d take me out on the land and we’d carve wood and he’d teach me the old songs.’
He straightened up, a pat of butter in one hand and an incongruous cucumber in the other, with his eyes looking somewhere in the long past. ‘Dad’s Da,’ he said. ‘Dad grew up on a farm. Not much of a farm, all bog and potatoes as they say.’ Then he seemed to realise what he was doing and the cucumber was tucked back in between the packages and he swung the door closed. ‘Anyway. Good day?’
‘So-so. They want the first few chapters of the book before the Christmas holidays start, to read over.’
‘The grants people? You must have enough to show them, surely, you’ve done nothing but write for weeks.’
I waved an arm to airily indicate that this would probably be the case and anyway I wasn’t in the least worried about having enough material of the quality that would keep the money coming. ‘How about you? You sound happy.’
‘I think I’ve finally done enough work for us to be able to send the archaeologists up on the moor there.’ He pointed with an elbow in the direction of his disputed ‘settlement’. ‘They won’t go out without a good chance of coming down on some decent archaeology. It’s too expensive to start digging with no idea if there’s anything there.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yep. I found documents that talk of tracks and buildings that seem to have been laid out in a grid pattern, typical of a small Roman township.’ He put the butter down and rolled up his sleeves. ‘Could be the discovery of a lifetime,’ he said, hunting down the bread.
‘Yes, you’ve stressed the life-changing possibilities.’
Now he turned around. My expression must have given away what I felt, because he took half a step towards me, then clearly thought better of it. I could get up quite a swing with my handbag, if I needed to.
‘We’ll not be touching your Fairy Stane, Rowan.’
‘Good.’ I sounded short, as though the word had been snipped off from a much longer unsaid sentence.
‘Unless we absolutely have to,’ he went on. ‘But I’m pretty confident we’ll find what we need without disturbing your site.’
I stalked past him and went upstairs to change. It wasn’t fair, this constant making me aware that he could ruin an entire lifetime’s worth of storytelling with one casual order. All right, the stone could be an important proof for his work. But wasn’t it equally important that it remained a mystery? All those stories of the Little People, the fairyland parties, the possible release of the fey into the world, they’d all be blown out of the water if it became known that the stone had been lifted and proved to reveal – what? Nothing but dirt? A small hole filled in by a farmer so his cattle didn’t break a leg?
Stories are important too.
I changed slowly and went back down to find that Connor had made a sandwich and was sitting at the table with a book open, flipping pages with buttery fingers. ‘I finally got around to reading some of your material,’ he said, swallowing vigorously. ‘It’s pretty good.’
I pursed my lips and put the kettle on. ‘Yes, well, they don’t give you grants for this kind of thing if you can barely string two words together.’
He closed the book up and I saw the cover. It was one of mine, an early publication that had been part of my PhD. ‘You’ve got butter all over it,’ I said, mildly for an author watching their work despoiled with dairy products.
‘I’ll give it a wipe. So, why the fairy stories? Nieces and nephews queuing up to listen to you read?’
I shook my head. ‘Only child,’ I said.
‘That’s lucky.’ Almost without thinking, Connor opened the window and flung his sandwich crusts outside. ‘Two of the boys are married, and there seems to be a new offspring every fortnight.’ Then he smiled at me. ‘Ah, they’re grand really.’
It wasn’t so bad now. After Elliot died, when it had turned out that I wasn’t pregnant, I’d found it hard to hear tales of others seemingly spontaneously giving birth. Friends, acquaintances, workmates – for a while it had seemed as though everyone was sporting a bump or wearing a baby strapped to their chest. Part of the whole feeling of loss, I’d reasoned, once I’d managed my way out of the grief-imposed sensation that the whole world was carrying on to spite me. There was absolutely no reason why everyone I met should stop breeding because I’d lost my husband and my chance.
‘How lovely,’ I said politely.
‘Mam’s beside herself with joy.’ He seemed to realise that I was not cooing and wanting details, pictures, names. ‘She’d like all of us to repopulate Ireland, if it was up to her.’
‘Apart, presumably, from Eamonn.’ I began making two mugs of tea, and Connor laughed.
‘Well, yes. But it’s interesting, y’know, how Catholic things were up here too. That manor you talked about, the one on your map?’
‘Evercey Manor?’
‘That’s your man. The family there managed to slip under the radar. Presumably they paid lip service to the new official religion but stayed Catholic. Most of their tenants out here were Catholic too.’
‘Well, they would be. You didn’t go against the lord of the manor,’ I said tartly, putting a mug down next to him. ‘Way out here I shouldn’t think they were bothered too much. It was too isolated. Three miles or more to the church, perhaps they had their own chapel.’
‘Keep quiet, pretend to do as you’re told, worship in your own way when nobody is looking.’ Connor raised his mug to me. ‘Thank you.’
‘Why are you so interested in the old manor?’ I was glad to move away from the subject of the stone. The more he dwelled on his Roman town, the more chance there was that he’d decide to lift my stone on a whim. ‘Bit outside your area of expertise, isn’t it?’
He leaned back in his chair, sipping from the mug and looking out into the blackness of the night that lay beyond the window. ‘I was raised a Catholic,’ he said. ‘I’m interested, that’s all. You don’t think that the past religious history might have an impact on some of the folk stories out here? Oppression of the old religion, being forced underground, living your lives in a state of denial? Maybe a nasty case of guilt about having to pretend to turn your back on your religion while you practised in secret?’
‘Maybe. There are lots of reasons why people create myths. To make sense of the unknown, as cautionary tales, to put things into perspective, to account for losses. Back before the days when science ran riot, people had to find their own reasons for things they didn’t understand, and they did it through stories.’
Connor looked at me over his mug, eyebrows raised. ‘And this is where we’re both on the same side, Rowan. Memories. Yours are embodied in the stories and mine are trapped in the stones and the documents. We don’t have to fight over it.’
‘We do if you try to lift my stone.’
‘Well, all right. Our disciplines aren’t entirely compatible, perhaps, but we’re still fighting the same battle, to remember the past. And sometimes it feels as though no one cares about what went before.’
‘At least you get television programmes.’ I tried to drink my tea too hot. ‘Digging up gold hoards or building castles, it’s all glamorous and attention-grabbing. I’m lucky if I get the odd podcast and a few panels at a literary festival where they only wanted blood and gore and descriptions of wolf kills.’
‘Ah, that’s rough now.’
We lapsed into silence, or as much silence as can be obtained by two people drinking tea that is rather too warm to go down smoothly, whilst outside waterfowl fight to the death over a Warburton’s crust.
‘Well, I’d better…’ I nodded towards the living room and my computer.
‘Yes, and I ought to…’ Connor indicated his bag on the floor, bulging with paperwork.
‘Right, then.’
‘Right.’
But we continued to occupy the kitchen, sipping our tea, him sitting stretched at the table and me standing leaning against the countertop, feeling the roughness of the wood surface.
‘You rebuilt this place yourselves, then?’ Connor stared out of the window, towards the black night, where occasional wavelets in the passing water caught the lights and gleamed like the eyes of freshwater sharks.
I found myself less reluctant to answer this question than I usually was. ‘Yes. It was a ruin when we bought it. We lived in a friend’s camper van for a year until we got the roof on, and then without water for six months after that. It’s as accurate as we could get it, only we put a bathroom in because there’s a lot I’m prepared to do for historical accuracy but pissing in a bucket is out.’ I smiled at the memory. ‘Elliot could turn his hand to anything, and he had friends who are electricians and plumbers, that kind of thing. He was the sort of person who made friends easily.’
Connor met my eye in our reflections in the window. ‘He sounds like a useful guy.’
‘He was lovely,’ I said, realising that this was probably the first time I’d actually really spoken about Elliot since his death. Being here in this house that he’d done so much work on helped, as though I were being protected from the worst of the memories by being surrounded by evidence of his existence.
‘I can see you miss him.’ There was a note of sadness in Connor’s voice, as though he wasn’t really talking about me but was looking inwards.
I looked at him, but he continued to stare out into the dark. ‘Do you miss her?’ I asked softly. After all, he’d had his hopes and expectations for the future dashed, not quite as definitively as mine had been, but it had still happened.
‘Yes. No.’ He swung around, catching me looking at him. ‘I miss what I thought she was, and what I thought we had.’ He sighed. ‘But none of it was real, I know that now. All the promises and the stories – they were all inventions of the person she wanted to be.’ Another sigh. ‘I feel bad for her husband. Telling me what she’d been up to must have been the worst day of his life.’ He stood up. ‘God knows, it was the worst day of mine.’
‘There will be other women,’ I said.
I got raised eyebrows for that. ‘I’m sure people telling you that you’d find someone else after your husband died didn’t help,’ he said tartly.
‘No. Actually it didn’t. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound so glib. It really isn’t that simple, is it?’
‘You have to admit a whole lot of stuff to yourself before you can begin to heal and move forward,’ Connor said, picking up his bag. ‘I have to learn that I can be gullible and stupid when a woman tells me what I want to hear. I am clearly not great at sorting out the truth. And you…’ He stopped.
‘Me? I’m not sure I have to admit anything to myself,’ I said, bridling. ‘Apart from don’t let your husband blithely go off to work when he says he’s not feeling well.’
‘I think you have to admit that memories are all grand and that, but you can’t hang on to them forever.’ He swung his bag up. ‘And I’m off to my room to do some work. Goodnight.’
Leaving me open-mouthed with annoyance, he was gone, quietly, up the stairs. I waited until I heard his door close and then threw one of my shoes at the wall.