Chapter 17
17
I got back to the cottage before the sun did. Connor must have heard the car because he was there in the doorway like a Victorian parent but wearing a tracksuit and with his hair on end.
‘How is she?’ He had one hand on the doorframe.
‘I think she’ll be all right. Her mum and Michael came over together to fetch her back, and she knows she needs help.’
Connor let out a huge breath and slumped. ‘Grand,’ he said, with his head practically on his knees. ‘That’s grand.’ Then he looked up at me from under his hair. ‘You look like you should be in bed.’
The dreams. ‘No, I’m good,’ I said. ‘But I think I’ll work from home today.’
He nodded slowly, breathing deeply as though he’d just come to the surface from a long dive. ‘I’ve made such a fecking mess of things, haven’t I?’
I hoped it was a rhetorical question, because the only applicable answer I could give was ‘yes, actually you have’. ‘If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else,’ I said. ‘Saoirse was running away. She was pretty lucky that she ran to you and you’re a decent human being, because it could have been much, much worse.’
‘I dunno.’
‘Well, yes, imagine if she’d run into someone who’d got really angry about being lied to? Or someone who used her vulnerability in some way?’
‘I meant about me being a decent human being, but I see what you mean.’ Connor clawed his way back up the woodwork and stood aside to let me into the cottage. ‘I hope she’ll get back on track now. But I won’t contact her again.’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’ I half fell onto the loveseat, desperate for a shower and a nap. ‘Stick the kettle on, Connor, will you? It’s been a hell of a night.’ Then I stared at him. ‘Why aren’t you working?’
‘Christmas vacs.’ He went into the kitchen, and I heard tea-making noises. ‘Another of the advantages of working in further education.’
‘Oh, right.’
He came in carrying a steaming mug and pushed it into my hand. ‘So, what are you doing for Christmas?’
I shrugged and hid my Billy No-Mates face in my mug. ‘Haven’t decided yet. What about you – are you flying back to Dublin?’
A tiny part of me hoped that he’d say no, that he was staying over here, flying home was too much trouble, he didn’t know if he’d be welcome, the house would be full of his siblings and their offspring, no room at the inn.
‘Yep, I leave in two days. Mam will be waiting to treat me like I’m sixteen again and I can’t wait. I might even take all my dirty washing home, so she’s got something else to berate me about.’
‘Don’t you dare.’ But I laughed despite myself. ‘I might go round to Chess’s place. She has an open house over Christmas, cocktails and games, and it’s always good fun.’ I managed to say it like I knew. Chess made it sound good fun, but I’d never made it over in the two Christmases we’d known each other. I’d been too busy wallowing in my solitude.
I thought of Saoirse and her despair. Mine seemed old and tired in comparison, as though it had worn thin now. It was time to stop thinking about what should have been and start thinking of what could be. It wasn’t as though Elliot was going to come back and complain about all the times I’d gone out or had fun without him. In fact, and the thought made the tea surface slide alarmingly close to the mug rim as my hand shook, Elliot would have been the first person to tell me to get out there and enjoy myself. Sitting at home under a blanket watching blooper reels on YouTube wasn’t honouring his memory, it was allowing self-pity to rule my life. I’d lost my husband, but his life insurances had meant that I didn’t have a mortgage and there’d been enough money to allow me to finish my folklore doctorate. I should stop giving Miss Havisham a run for her money and start living life.
‘Yes,’ I said again and more firmly. ‘I could go to Chess’s. Or I might volunteer somewhere.’
‘Or you could come with me,’ Connor said. ‘To Dublin. Ma won’t mind, one more in the house won’t make any difference, and you can help even up the male-female split.’
I hesitated. To Dublin. With Connor. But then I conjured the idea of a house full of brothers, their partners, small children, all people I didn’t know, and the noise. I shook my head. ‘I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet,’ I said. ‘At Chess’s I can come home when it gets too much.’
‘Ah, you’re probably right.’ He picked up his mug. ‘It can be a fair old ding-dong when they all get going. And I think we’re even getting the sainted Eamonn with us this year.’ But he said it with evident affection. ‘I’m looking forward to a proper fight about the Second Vatican Council,’ he said, with relish.
‘Yes, I think I need to ease myself back into Christmas slowly,’ I said. ‘More on the crackers and pudding and less on the rows about Catholic dogma.’
‘Ah, well. Don’t say I didn’t ask you.’
‘I won’t. Thank you.’
He raised an eyebrow at me through his tea steam. ‘For?’
‘Inviting me.’
‘No trouble.’
From outside there came a splashy imperative sort of quacking. ‘I’d better make some toast,’ I said, tiredly. ‘They’ll only bang on the windows if I don’t, and I could do with something to eat.’
‘Here, I’ll do it. You stay put, you look done in.’
But I didn’t want to sit alone in the living room with memories of dreams in my head and the reality of Connor in another room. I followed him through to the kitchen again and sat on the edge of the kitchen table, looking out of the window at the sun, sloshing its light down into our little valley from a china-blue sky. Overnight a frost had iced the recent puddles into lace-edged solidity and crayoned around the edges of the windows in flaky white. The mud was solid ridges and even the river had a slow, jelly-like appearance as it curved across the ford, wide and dappled.
‘Why did you go?’ Connor asked suddenly, pushing bread into the toaster with some force, by the sound of it.
‘Go?’ I was tired, my brain wasn’t processing words properly. I couldn’t think of anywhere that I might have been that would have caused him to ask.
‘To Saoirse. Last night. You seemed so worried about her. I mean, yes, I had my concerns but – she’s a grown woman.’
I hesitated before turning back from the window. ‘I know what it’s like to suddenly find everything has turned upside down and the person you most want to talk to about it is the one who caused it,’ I said. ‘When Elliot died, what I really wanted – all I really wanted – was to be able to talk to him about what I should do. But he wasn’t here, so I had to handle everything on my own. And that was… hard.’
The image of that line of pills sprang again, unwanted, into my head. Connor seemed to see it too, somehow. Maybe my expression gave it away, because he was watching my face very closely. When I let my eyes flicker from where tiredness had dragged them down to examine the tiled floor, he was frowning at my forehead.
‘It was good of you,’ he said at last, the words sounding slightly awkward. ‘I knew she was unhappy, but it was me making her so. I couldn’t stay.’
‘No.’
‘What else could I do?’ There was an anxiety now in his tone.
I reached out and touched his shoulder. ‘Nothing. Really, Connor, there was nothing else you could have done. But it wasn’t just you making Saoirse unhappy. I think, deep down, she knew that it wasn’t you, it was the whole situation. It can’t be much of a joke, moving hundreds of miles for your husband’s job, with two tiny children. Her mum helped her with the babies, but her mum can’t drive, and two hundred miles is too far to pop round and babysit. Listening to her last night, it was like she separated herself off into two people: at home she was Saoirse, wife and mother, and she wanted the chance to be seen as the Saoirse she used to be, which was where you came in.’
The toast popped up but Connor didn’t react. He stood, his shoulder rigid under my hand. ‘I feel so guilty,’ he said quietly. ‘I should have known .’
I let my hand fall. ‘Brought up a Catholic? Of course you feel guilty. It’s your default state.’
That made him laugh, and he was back to being the bright and breezy Connor again. ‘Ah, you’re right there. And it’s probably the upbringing that’s making me so interested in your manor there.’ He pointed with an elbow, both hands being involved in toast, in the direction of the moor.
‘I thought you were interested in the Roman remains underneath it?’ I decided not to go back to the subject of Saoirse. He was beating himself up, I didn’t need to add to the percussion, and, really, it hadn’t been his fault. He’d come to realise that, of course, but for now the whole thing hurt and blaming Saoirse wouldn’t help him.
The ducks were fighting a wet war under the window for prime crust-snatching place, and Connor glanced out at them as he buttered the toast. ‘Well, yes, I am,’ he said, opening the window and hurling the end of the loaf in the direction of the birds. ‘But I’m also intrigued about how it all went out here. It’s not my period, of course, but I’m looking at some documents. I’ve got a load of tangential stuff that applies to the area, trying to trace old buildings and references to old roads and suchlike.’
A brief prickle of ownership went down my spine. ‘More my area of interest than yours, I’d have thought?’
‘That’s why I’ve been reading your books.’ Connor licked his fingers, which were covered in badly aimed butter.
‘Oh. Right.’ A tiny dropping sensation in my midriff told me that I was disappointed. I’d hoped he’d been reading my books to find out what an erudite and amusing writer I was and how I could turn folk tales into a commentary on social history. To find that he’d only been doing it so that he could research his area more thoroughly was – yes, disappointing.
I ate the toast he handed me, in silence. Well, comparative silence. There was a flap of wings and the big white duck, the swaggering leader of the bunch, arrived on the outside window ledge. An orange eye angled in through the glass.
Connor watched the avian activity with a look of amusement, and then stood uncertainly, holding his crusts.
‘Well, go on, then,’ I said. ‘That’s what they’re waiting for.’
‘I know.’ He stood, one hand on the window catch. ‘But if I open the window, that one will fall off. He’s in the way.’
I picked up my own crusts and opened the window, knocking the big white duck into flappy, panicked flight down to its usual spot on the water outside. ‘Bird, Connor,’ I said, very aware that my hand was on top of his on the window fastener. ‘They fly.’
‘So they do, now.’ He didn’t move his hand either. We watched the squabbling for a moment. ‘I was forgetting there.’
I could feel his shoulder against mine, the gentle rise and fall as he breathed, and smell the fresh-laundry scent of the tracksuit that he was wearing, unflattering though it was.
The sun scythed its way in through the window, bouncing off the surface of the river in a thousand moving reflections, and still we stood there, hands on the mechanism of the window catch, unmoving.
‘D’you think they actually like each other?’ Connor asked. ‘The ducks, I mean.’
‘They seem to. They’re quite free to go somewhere else if they don’t. There’s plenty of river.’
He nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps they pretend not to,’ he said, keeping his eyes focused on the water. ‘Maybe they think they’ll lose face if they just admit that they’re really good friends.’
‘Do ducks have faces?’
‘You know what I mean. The pointy bit at the front of their heads that they look out of. Maybe they’re worried that it’s admitting defeat if they stop being antagonistic.’ He looked at me sideways from around the dishevelled hair.
Reluctantly I dropped my hand and moved away. ‘Fascinating as ducks are, Connor, I ought to do some work. I must give Chess a ring and tell her I’ll not be in, and then get stuck into some more writing.’
He picked up the toast plates and moved to the sink. ‘I’ll clear up and then I’m off up on the moor for a bit.’
I stared at him. ‘I thought you were on holiday.’
He shrugged. ‘There’s not a lot else for me to do, to be honest. Thought I’d go and pace around a bit in a moody, Irish fashion among the heather. Try and pick up a contract modelling for Burberry.’
‘Shut up.’ But he’d made me smile, and, as I went to grab a shower and change my overnight-worn clothes, ring Chess and settle into writing, I thought that Connor could actually be quite good fun at times.
The thought that he hadn’t really been talking about ducks only grabbed me by the neck about two hours later.
I’d made myself a coffee to try to stay awake, and was rummaging through the cupboard in search of biscuits, when Connor’s words came back to me. ‘Maybe they think they’ll lose face if they just admit that they’re really good friends.’ I turned, seized with a sudden horror that made my face heat up, and stared out of the window.
Had it really been about ducks? Or was he talking about us? Had I, in my sleep-deprived state, missed an allusion? My cheeks were now so hot that my face felt as though it were on fire. I didn’t know which was worse – that Connor might have been talking about us, about me , not wanting to take a step away from my ‘All Historians Are Myth-Busting Bastards’ stance and admitting that he was actually quite a decent human being, or that I had been carrying on talking about ducks whilst he’d been meaning something else, and I hadn’t even realised .
At least, I thought, banging my forehead gently against the reclaimed wood of the cupboard door, he wasn’t here to see my mortification. And maybe, maybe , it really had been about ducks, and I was tired and overthinking the whole conversation.
Yes. That was what it was. It had all been about ducks all along.