Chapter 15
15
‘I’m back.’ Chess snuffled her way into the office, divesting herself of layers of coat, scarves and hats as she came. ‘Wow. You look crappy. Have you caught the cold?’
I sat with my head hanging over a handwritten book of charms. I wasn’t reading it. I wasn’t even attempting to turn the pages. I was letting myself settle back into my solitude.
‘I do feel a bit off colour,’ was as far as I would go. ‘But I don’t want to stay at home too often. They might do away with our office if I do that, and it’s good to have somewhere to store everything.’
Maybe Chess was right, I thought. Maybe this feeling was – what was it? A lowering of the spirits, as they would have called it back in the day; that sensation of the shine being taken off things, almost a disappointment in life itself. A ridiculous feeling. I shrugged my shoulders to try to lose the tightness in them, and turned back to the manuscript, a donated artefact from someone’s grandmother, full of potions and spells from a farm near Durham at the turn of the twentieth century. That had been the pivotal era. People had gone past walling up cats as a house protection and putting shoes up chimneys but hadn’t yet moved into the world of the telephone and artificial fertiliser. They had straddled the world of the past and the world of the now and lived in a time that was fascinating in its near modernity with a twist of superstition.
Chess brought me a cup of tea and I managed to avoid her putting it down on the crabbed pages only by a narrow margin. ‘So—’ she hitched herself against the corner of my desk ‘—what are you doing for Christmas this year? You know you’re always welcome to come to mine – open house and cocktails?’
Christmas. Just under a week away and yesterday I’d been contemplating the solitary day with a measure of contentment. I’d been looking on it as a break from having Connor around – that he’d go back to Ireland for the holiday and then come back. Why did it now feel more like a life sentence?
‘I’m not sure, Chess. But thanks for the invitation.’
‘Or is Connor staying over? You’re welcome to bring him too, of course. I have the feeling he’d liven up a party a treat!’
‘Connor’s moved out,’ I said dully. Those packed bags still stood stacked in my memory, that empty room like a testament to the rest of my life. ‘His ex came back and they were off to look for a hotel in York.’
‘Oh.’ She shifted. ‘That’s a shame.’ Another shift of her weight. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ This was said softly and with a measure of sympathy that I didn’t want, and, besides, it was unwarranted. Connor leaving had always been the desired end result, and Saoirse’s arrival had only precipitated it by a few months. It wasn’t as though it were a huge shock, after all.
‘I’m fine, honestly, Chess. It was a late night, and you might be right, I think I’ve caught something, making me feel a bit run down, that’s all. Look, I’ll head up to the records office. I want to look up some of the old maps and the fresh air will do me good.’
I stood up and my undrunk tea wobbled.
‘If you’re sure.’ Chess’s concern made my eyes water again. Definitely rundown. Probably a virus. ‘Get some mince pies while you’re out!’ she called over her shoulder as she went back into her cubbyhole in the library.
I didn’t go to the records office. Instead, I took a walk along the city walls, hoping that the chilly air and cold stone would clear my head. I’d got myself stuck in a revolving series of thoughts of how glad I was that Connor was gone and my house was mine again, and how quiet and empty it was going to seem now.
The potential cat crept a little closer.
Folklore suddenly felt pointless. A jumble of stories, a recited list of inventions and delusions with no more relevance to today than the narrow gateways that filtered ill-tempered traffic in and out of York, all traffic lights and hold ups. Once folklore had been useful. It had helped people make sense of their lives and given them an illusion of control over the natural world. Charms to help the cheese along and fairies to populate the high moors and watch over the cattle, to keep the water flowing and the bogs from sucking sheep under. They’d all meant something, once.
Now I found myself thinking of my years of study and my PhD as cute stories, fit only for pinning to the page to keep the tourists happy. Really, seriously, would it matter if Connor and his students lifted the Fairy Stane? There was no fairyland. There were no happy endings.
Roman, Viking, Norman, Tudor. I ran the rosary of the ages again. Connor was right, history was real, recorded facts. Folklore was myth and magic, so why was I trying so hard to preserve it?
I rounded the top of the wall, close to where there was a large gap, where fishponds and wetlands had once prevented entry to York, and stared out over the city. Down the alleyway lay the headquarters of Elliot’s workplace, the big salvage yard where materials were brought from all over the country when ancient buildings were demolished. I could almost see the roof of his office from here; that higgledy-piggledy mix of corridor and corner that had been my second home for such a long time, that had smelled of soup and microwave meals, where laughter had echoed at odd angles and Elliot had held chair races with his workmates on quiet days.
A place I no longer had a tie to. Elliot was gone. If I’d turned up there now, they would have been polite, pleased to see me in a baffled kind of way – they’d have fed me coffee and made enquiries into how the cottage was getting on, and how I was doing. All very concerned, but not involved . Then they would have turned away and got on with their work and I would have wandered back out into the chilly day, and Elliot still wouldn’t be here.
It was just me. And that meant only me to remember the importance of things. Those witch marks that people had carved into wooden beams to keep the house protected from evil, they’d mean nothing more than random graffiti if people like me didn’t list them, date them, keep the story alive. Shoes up chimneys, cats in walls, they’d all meant safety to the people that had put them there, and what right had we, as twenty-first-century people, to call them stupid superstitions? They’d made their own security back then, in a time of uncertainty, as Elliot and I had made ours. Those people were gone just as he was, and I was holding the memories of all of them, the fairy believers and my husband, to stop them from being lost.
I stared out over the city, where the brittle sunlight lay smoothly over ancient buildings, and shadows piled in corners. Memory. All this came down to memory. Those things that were gone still existed, as long as someone remembered them. The folk tales, the myths, the fairies, they all lived on somewhere for as long as their stories were told. Elliot still lived on in my memory, in all those things in the cottage that he’d rebuilt. None of it was completely over, because I remembered. The quiet acknowledgement of the importance of never allowing anything to vanish completely ticked away in my head.
It was my job to remember.
I took a deep breath and carefully descended the steep and slippery steps that took me down to street level, then went in search of mince pies to keep Chess happy.