Chapter 20
20
My hopes for a swift end to our joint imprisonment were dashed by the frequent snow showers that came and went throughout the day. The air would darken and the windows became claustrophobic with the dashing of snowflakes against them. Then the snow would whirl away and leave the day a brilliant gold and white for a few minutes before the next shower drew in.
I could hear Connor rattling on his keyboard in his room, while I dragged a huge velvet eiderdown out of the cupboard and wrapped it around me on the loveseat, so I could sit and stare moodily out at the snow. It was nice not to have to work, but Connor’s extreme productivity made me feel both guilty and resentful and his occasional forays out for tea or biscuits sent me scurrying to my computer to try to look busy, even though I hadn’t much to do, apart from look up the weather forecast every ten minutes just in case an unexpected thaw was due.
But at least the winter’s day was short. By three, Connor was back downstairs again, now wearing his all-purpose hoodie and jogging bottoms.
‘It’s the day before Christmas Eve tomorrow,’ he announced, as though I’d been living on the moon for the last six months and had become unaware of the calendar. ‘We should go out for a walk.’
I stared at him from under my voluminous wrapping. ‘Have you seen “out”, Connor? There’s three feet of snow and counting. Why would we want to go for a walk in that?’
His face creased in a moment of apparent confusion. ‘Well, it’s… What are you going to do, sit in here until the snow all melts? We always go for a walk on the twenty-third. It’s traditional.’
‘Your traditional, maybe. Not mine.’
‘What are your traditions? Should I expect you out cutting greenery to deck the halls?’ Connor looked around at the obvious lack of any decoration in the house. The only sign that Christmas might be happening at all was two Christmas cards, one from my parents and one from an aged aunt, on the shelf above the log burner.
‘I haven’t really done Christmas for the last few years,’ I said, slightly defensively. He was right, it could have been any season in the cottage, apart from the two squares of card showing robustly secular winter scenes on the shelf. ‘Elliot… well, he died in early November, so I wasn’t up to anything that first year. And after that – there didn’t seem to be any need. I’ve just holed up here with the TV and a big bar of chocolate and got through it.’
‘And before?’ Connor put his hands in his hoodie pockets, tilted his head to one side. ‘What did you do before?’
I unhuddled a little. The velvet of the eiderdown stroked my cheek like a caress. Elliot is gone. But life goes on. ‘We’d get up late.’ I smiled at the memory of why we’d got up late. ‘Have a big breakfast, open our presents, walk up on the moor and then come home to cook a massive dinner.’ Walking until it got dark, and then the lights of the cottage beckoning us home to the cosy warmth. Fairy lights swinging above the doors, the smell of meat roasting as we walked in, the fug and steam of dinner . Music and laughing and Elliot never knowing how to cook potatoes properly and the annual half-serious half-amused arguing over Monopoly late into the evening while we ate an entire box of chocolate mints as the papers crackled in the fire… ‘It was nice,’ I finished.
‘Well, then.’ Connor didn’t seem to know what to say next. ‘Well.’
‘But you might be right,’ I admitted. ‘I can’t sit here on my own every Christmas for the next sixty years. Elliot was always one for the next thing, moving on to the next stage, looking forward. He wouldn’t have liked the idea that I sat here remembering him forever.’
Connor smiled. ‘No.’ He nodded slowly. ‘I can see that. I mean,’ he added quickly, ‘I wouldn’t want anyone pining away after me if I were gone. It would be nice to know that I was remembered with a smile, but not with the memories held up like paragons to aspire to. So, walk tomorrow, then?’ Then quickly, because I’d opened my mouth to object and my expression must have given me away, ‘We could away up to your stone, and have an argument about it, if that would make you feel better?’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Connor was very good at taking the irritated wind out of my sails. ‘I suppose so. It’s quite a hike through snow though.’
‘The exercise will be good for us.’
‘And we can’t go if it’s blizzarding. People get lost in the snow on the moors all the time.’
‘Seriously? All the time?’
‘Well, no, but sometimes. I’d rather not be a frozen corpse for Christmas, thank you.’
The light was almost gone from the room, what little illumination remained was mostly evening sky bounced off the snow; an unearthly whiteness reflecting off the walls and ceiling. It meant Connor was a shadowy shape, his face hidden in the depths of his hood. ‘Saoirse messaged me,’ he said.
I jerked my head up. ‘Saying what?’
He shrugged. ‘Mostly goodbye. She put in a message for you too. I have to say thank you to you. She’s getting help and she and Michael are trying to make a go of things. She said it’s because you talked sense to her.’
There was a moment of snow-kissed silence. ‘And you’re all right with that?’ I asked eventually, keeping my voice quiet and level.
‘It’s the best thing,’ he said, although there was a thickness to his voice that told me he was struggling a little with the emotional fallout. ‘No, really, it is. She and I were never real, so what I felt for her wasn’t real either. It couldn’t be.’
‘Doesn’t mean you didn’t love her, though, does it?’
I couldn’t see his reaction. It was too dim, despite the snowlight. ‘I didn’t love her ,’ he said slowly. ‘I loved who I thought she was. Sending her away was the only thing to do.’ Then, with his voice a little stronger, ‘And it sounds as though she’s getting herself sorted, which is grand. She was running away, and I’m not the person to run to, now, am I?’
‘Aren’t you?’ I said and could have kicked myself. ‘No,’ I added hastily. ‘You’re right. It might have felt real, but it wasn’t, and how would you have felt if you had gone off with her and only found out about the husband and children later? It could have been far worse. I sat with her in that room, and she was tearing herself apart over the children and what she was doing to them. It wouldn’t have worked. You did the right thing, Connor, honestly.’
He stood for a second longer, unmoving. ‘Thank you again, Rowan,’ he breathed. ‘For understanding.’ Another moment of silence, and then, ‘Shall I do us something to eat now? We’ve not got long before the ducks start looking in and wondering why we’re not throwing out the leftovers now.’
He was back to being the Connor I knew, with a smile in his voice and movement surrounding him as though someone had drawn cartoon lines to show his energy. But there was a dip to his shoulders and a ferociously over-the-top nature to his bustling into the kitchen.
‘You’ll get over it,’ I said, following him into the brightly lit room. ‘It hurts, I know, but the pain starts to fade after a while, like an injury. You never lose the scar, but that awful grinding agony really does mitigate.’
I watched him rummage in the fridge. ‘You’re not one for meal planning, now, Rowan, are you?’ He moved cheese and bottles around.
‘And it’s no good disengaging. You have to face it square on. It’s the best way.’
Quite what I was doing, giving advice on getting over a lost relationship, I had no idea. I still held the idea of Elliot to me like a cosy comfort blanket.
‘They’ll all be talking about me.’ Connor withdrew from the depths of the fridge carrying some pork chops. ‘At home. Ah, I was never sure about the going back. It’ll be all hushed conversations in corners and Mam a bit tight-lipped while Da gives me a beer and pats my shoulder and whispers not to worry. I know it’ll blow over and they love me really and that it was a bit of stupidity, now, but… there will be the looks , y’know?’
‘You really care what they think of you, don’t you?’
‘Doesn’t everyone? Deep down? Even those yokes that pretend to be all careless and casual and free spirits and everything? It’s hard to hear the disapproval when it comes en masse .’
The chops went into a pan and I cut up some veg without really thinking about it. Connor moved back and forth across the kitchen behind me, restlessly searching the cupboards, but, I thought, to really keeping moving because it was easier than standing and letting the memories hit.
‘The disapproval is their problem though,’ I said, slicing carefully. ‘You can’t legislate for what everyone else thinks of you, you only have to be able to live with yourself. That Catholic upbringing is giving you some grief, isn’t it, for all you say that you’ve left it behind?’
I turned around and saw him frozen at the far side of the kitchen, a spatula in hand, arrested in the movement of turning the chops, which were sizzling in a way that spoke of slight burning. ‘You might be at the heart of it now,’ he said slowly. ‘Me feeling an idiot, losing the woman I thought I loved and the whole future, it’s all tied up with the guilt and letting the family down.’ He poked the spitting chops. ‘You sound as though you know what you’re talking about here? From experience?’
I paused, knife blade suspended over the pak choi. ‘A little, perhaps. My parents didn’t altogether approve of Elliot. I mean, they were nice enough to him, very accepting when they met him, but I always got the feeling that they thought I could have done better than what my mother called “a builder”. He wasn’t “just” a builder, of course he wasn’t, he was a skilled tradesman. He was trained in historical methods of reconstruction – he could build a wattle and daub wall the old way.’ I smiled at the memory. ‘Treading the dung and straw into the clay with bare feet to get it to mix properly.’
‘Sounds like you’re well in recovery,’ Connor observed.
‘Like I said, you never really get over it. Every single reminder picks away at the scab. But—’ I turned and he stepped back – I was flourishing a really big knife ‘—you learn to live with it. Like… like giving yourself a bad knee from ice skating. It aches away in the background and every now and then you do something strenuous and it kicks up big time, but it always dies back to that general background ache that you put up with, because it reminds you of what you once had.’
‘“Ice skating”?’
‘You know what I mean. Sometimes it’s nice to have that little bit of pain. It links you to what went before. Elliot’s never truly gone, because I remember him with that little ache. And you can remember the good times with Saoirse. It will hurt, but it reminds you that you had them.’
‘Lies that they were.’
We went quiet. The chops spat and sizzled a bit more, and I cooked the vegetables in water that roiled and boiled and added more atmosphere to the silence.
‘What about making new memories?’ Connor said eventually.
‘I’m starting to try. I know that I can’t live in stasis any more; I need to move on with my life, not despite Elliot, but because of him.’ I drained the vegetables while Connor ladled out the chops. ‘He loved me and I loved him and that’s gone now. But he left me with the memory of what love can be, and how much fun life is, so I should honour that memory and enjoy myself again.’
Even I noticed the hesitancy in my voice. I’d done the thinking and I was speaking the words, but I wasn’t quite sure how I was supposed to carry out the actions. Here I was, talking like some kind of women’s magazine heroine with all the ‘I must learn to love again’ stuff, but deep down I knew that it wasn’t that simple. It was never that simple.
‘But you’re going to worry, every time any man walks out of that door, that he might not come back,’ Connor said, succinctly. ‘And that sort of worry isn’t going to be good for your health or your relationship.’
It stung somewhat to hear it laid out like that, but he was right, damn him.
‘While you’re going to worry that every woman you meet is keeping massive secrets about a whole other life,’ I responded in kind. See how he liked it.
‘Ah, well.’ Connor slid the plates onto the table and we sat down and eyeballed each other over the slightly singed chops. ‘We’re a right pair of romantic disasters, aren’t we?’
I nodded. ‘We’re practically a rom-com.’ I began to eat my dinner.
‘That we are.’
There was cutting and chewing now taking the place of conversation, but it actually felt rather pleasant. The lamp on the dresser shone a cheerful pool of light and even the overhead fluorescent bulb didn’t feel quite as stark as usual.
The window threw a patch of brightness into the darkness of outside, illuminating a square of white snow, dark and slow river, and a few spare ducks pecking idly at protruding growth around the edges. Everywhere else was almost silent. There wasn’t even the usual distant sound of cars travelling the road along the top of the ridge, only the far-off whirr of a generator on one of the farms as evening milking continued.
‘What do you think, then,’ Connor said eventually, when the plates were nearly clear.
‘About what?’ I leaned back. He really was a good cook – those chops weren’t as burned as I’d feared.
‘About making new traditions? Doing things differently so it’s not a matter of stirring up old memories but making new ones? Because I was thinking, there’s no point now in raking over the old stuff and trying to make it feel different. How about breaking new ground instead?’
He opened the window to scrape the plates out and the ducks fell upon our scraps with much quacking into the snow-shaded dark.
‘Why have you been thinking about new traditions? I mean, you’re fine, aren’t you? The snow won’t last forever, you aren’t going to be stuck in the cottage for the next fifteen years.’
Connor paused, elbows on the open windowsill. ‘No, no, you’re right.’ He said it lightly and cheerily, but with an undertone that I couldn’t place. ‘I’m not, am I?’ He came back inside and closed the window. ‘But my reluctance to go back this year is opening my eyes to a few things.’
‘Such as?’
He sighed. For a moment he looked tired and a little disillusioned. ‘I’m trying too hard to fit in,’ he said and then turned away, bustling with the dishes. ‘To be the son that they want rather than who I am. Why don’t you get a dishwasher?’
‘I’ve already told you, because there’s only me and I don’t make that much washing up.’
He clanked a few more plates and ran hot water without answering me. I stood with my back to those carefully argued-over oak worktops and looked at my lovely kitchen, built by my wonderful husband. When my parents had come on a visit after Elliot and I had bought the place, when it was still a building site filled with planks and holes in the wall, I’d proudly showed them around. My mother had pursed her lips and frowned and said, ‘It’s a bit small, isn’t it? For the money you paid?’ Unable to see beyond what it was, and into what it could be, and coloured by her disapproval of Elliot’s profession, she’d put a damper on my excitement and enthusiasm that day.
I’d been so determined to prove her wrong. I’d sent pictures of the cottage in every stage of construction; photos of the huge oak dresser being put together – Elliot had found it in a salvage yard and trimmed bits off to make it fit our room – anything I could think of to show her that I’d been right. So maybe I wasn’t quite as innocent of the crime of ‘wanting family approval’ as I thought. I’d wanted my mother to see Elliot as I saw him, a hard- working, kind, practical man who loved me and had a vision for our future. I knew she saw him as stolid and unimaginative, not a high-flier. Unsuitable for her educated daughter, even though that daughter was pushing forward with such an esoteric field of study, not something she could boast about to her friends, such as jewellery or royal palaces. ‘Fairy tales, darling?’ she’d said, when I’d told her about my doctorate. ‘Aren’t you a bit old for that sort of thing?’
But she, and my long-suffering father, who had enjoyed Elliot’s company, and who had cornered him to talk about football at every chance, were in Spain now. Too far for me to need to make any accommodations for them.
‘What you said, about going for a walk tomorrow.’ Connor spoke again, his back to me now as he sluiced water into the sink. ‘And traditions. Yes, going for a pre-Christmas Eve walk was one of ours but, y’know, maybe you could make it yours too. Different from what you did before, with Elliot. Something for you , a new Christmassy way to be.’
I let myself imagine all those lost Christmases that could have been. The cottage alive with lights and a tree and small plastic toys scattered over the rug. Stockings hung, turnips put out for the reindeer, and Elliot making boot marks in soot by the chimney to let the children know that Father Christmas had been. Hopeless laughter over badly cooked sprouts, a handmade rocking horse, and nights cuddled under a blanket while we watched the stars.
‘Are you all right?’ Connor had turned suddenly and caught me with the memories sparkling in the corners of my eyes and the imagination of what ought to have been running down my cheeks.
‘Yes,’ I said, choked. ‘I’m just – oh, it’s so unfair ! We had plans, we had a life! I wanted… more, so much more. All those years we’ll never have…’ The words stopped, caught up behind the regret and the grief, which I always thought I was getting over, but which would ambush me at inopportune moments.
‘Hey,’ he said. And the next thing I knew I was being embraced, gathered into a tight hug. ‘It’s fine, now.’
‘I keep thinking I’m over it.’ I sobbed out the words. ‘But then it finds another way to get me.’
Connor adjusted his hold so that he could poke the corner of a tea towel into the hug for me to wipe my face on. ‘That’s a big life change to get used to, widowhood, and you so young. You’re allowed to feel that life can be a proper feck when something like that happens.’
I cried on for a bit longer. Oddly enough I didn’t feel embarrassed at breaking down in front of Connor, and the way he seemed to take my tears in his stride was reassuring. I blew my nose on the damp tea towel, noisily.
‘My mother thinks it was my fault for marrying him.’ I sniffed loudly. ‘If I’d married some history graduate with a professional pathway and a life plan, we’d have four children by now and a Georgian rectory in a village somewhere. I wouldn’t be a widow with a precarious grant writing books about things nobody believes in any more.’
‘Hey,’ Connor said again, taking half a step back and putting a hand under my chin so I had to raise my face to look at him. ‘ You believe in it. Ah, you might not believe in the fairy folk or the black dogs walking the night, but you believe the stories are important, and that should be enough.’
His eyes were smiling, but his mouth was serious, as though he was teasing me lightly.
‘That’s not what my mother thinks,’ I said.
‘Ah, well, y’see, my mother thinks I’m a wild lad for heading off to England. I’m the black sheep already for what happened with Saoirse, so I believe she thinks I’ve gone right off the rails. I suspect Eamonn has only been invited for Christmas to try to talk sense into me.’ He was still holding me close, tipping my face so he could see my expression. ‘So maybe it’s not just you that needs the new traditions and the new memories. Maybe we both have to start new lives.’
My heart started to beat very hard, as though it had enlarged and was forcing twice as much blood through my body.
‘Connor, I…’ I began, and then all the lights went out.
We stood in the dark for a moment, and then disengaged slowly. ‘Power cut,’ I said, not sure how I was meant to feel about this. ‘It happens. Snow brought down the power lines, probably.’
Connor stepped towards me, crashed into me in the pitch black of the kitchen and rebounded to hit the table. ‘Ow! Have you any candles?’
‘Of course. And a big torch. I’ll dig them out if you can put your phone torch on so I can see.’
There was a moment of fumbling and the bright light of Connor’s phone torch illuminated the side of the kitchen. I bent down and pulled the candles, matches, torch and holders out of the drawer where they lived, ready to hand for the not-infrequent moments like this.
‘There. That’s better.’ I lit several tealights and dotted them around the kitchen. ‘But we’d better get to bed – the cottage gets quite cold when the heating goes off.’
‘We could light the logs?’ Connor sounded hopeful.
‘We could, but we should save them really, in case the power stays off.’
‘It stays off ?’ He sounded indignant.
I was busy being practical, moving candles, fussing around with saucers to stop tealights dripping wax. I didn’t even want to think about what I might have said to Connor if the lights hadn’t gone out. I didn’t want to think about what I might have suggested, or how it might have gone down. Even I didn’t know what I’d been about to say. ‘You’re squashing me.’ ‘Have I got snot all down my face?’ ‘Will you take me to bed and help me stop thinking?’
No. I’d only been going to ask how new memories got made. How, given that we were stuck here without proper Christmas food or preparations, we were supposed to make any memories at all, other than those occasioned by malnutrition and hypothermia.
‘Well. All right, then.’ He sounded reluctant, although quite what he thought the alternative might be I had no idea. We were hardly going to be sitting here by inadequate candlelight reading peer-reviewed journals to further our studies, were we? ‘Goodnight, then, Rowan.’
‘Goodnight, Connor.’ I blew out the candles. I’d leave them there for tomorrow, in place ready to be lit once darkness crept back.
There was a brief moment of kerfuffle as we both tried to leave the kitchen at once, carrying our phones, torches beaming in front of us like a couple of techno Wee Willy Winkies, and we squeezed our way through into the living room with the lights whirling and causing shadows that loomed in a terrifying way.
‘So, walk tomorrow?’ Connor asked.
‘Oh, all right.’ I sounded less than excited about the prospect.
‘It could be a new tradition.’
‘I suppose it could.’
We were both standing at the bottom of the stairs, but neither of us moving to go anywhere. After a few seconds of this, Connor lowered his torch, so it lit up his feet.
‘To hell with it, Rowan.’ His arms came around me, unbalancing me so that I had to put one foot on the bottom stair so as not to fall over. ‘Would you mind very much if I kissed you, now?’
I froze. ‘I… I’m not sure,’ I said, suddenly wanting him to kiss me very much, but not sure if my face would allow it. It had been a long time – a long time – since anyone but Elliot, as though I’d forgotten how my lips worked with anyone but him.
‘Ah, you’re right.’ The arms around me loosened. ‘Bad idea all round.’
But then I thought ‘new traditions’. I remembered how alone I was, that Elliot, loved though he’d been, wasn’t here. I thought of the silence and the cold of the long night and that I still hadn’t got a cat. I reached up, put my arms around Connor’s neck and stretched myself against him.
We kissed in the narrow confines of my staircase, me with my back against the wall and Connor with one hand in my hair and the other on the newel post to prevent him from falling upwards. His mouth felt strange and yet very comfortable, as though we’d kissed our way through many previous lives and this was just the first time for us in this life. Outside, through the living-room window, the moon peered in like a peeping Tom, bouncing off the snow and illuminating enough of the hallway to let highlights shine in Connor’s hair.
He was warm and tall and there was a lanky firmness to him that contrasted with my memories of Elliot’s gentler softness. The whole experience, this whole new body and smell and taste, was at once alien and familiar. But while my body was losing itself in the closeness and the comfort of kissing Connor, my mind would not shut up, and kept whispering to me that it was only a kiss, it didn’t have to mean anything. This didn’t have to go any further than a mutual admission of frailty and attraction. Elliot was still safe, hidden away in that corner of my memory, with our relationship still unique and protected.
Eventually gravity got the better of both of us and I toppled gently over onto the staircase, while Connor rotated around his hand on the post until he hung over the banister. It drew our lips apart and wrenched a gap between our bodies, which was just as well because my lungs needed some space to properly expand.
‘Well,’ I said. There wasn’t much else I could say.
Connor cleared his throat but didn’t speak.
Moonbeams crept around the lower stairs as though afraid to go any higher for fear of what they might see, and then we both spoke at once.
‘I can’t…’
‘It’s too soon for us to…’
We both stopped. We were looking at each other in the vaguely lit space as though neither of us had seen the other before, and we tried again.
‘I think we should…’
‘Let’s not rush…’
We stopped again, in a spirit of muted annoyance. Finally, and cautiously, in case he was going to do it again, I spoke.
‘Perhaps we need to think about this. I’m going to go to bed.’
When he was sure I’d finished speaking, Connor started. ‘You’re right. We need a bit of time here. This doesn’t have to be… a thing, Rowan. Let’s sleep on it. Er. Separately.’
I heeled my way up another stair and then turned so that I could clear the entire staircase in two bounds, then shut myself in the bathroom with my phone clutched so tightly in my fist that the light gleamed out from between my fingers in little ripples. I was breathing fast, and my cheeks, when I held the torch up to the mirror, were flushed with a mixture of excitement and stubble burn.
No, no, no, no, no. This can’t have happened. He’s not Elliot. And I can’t… It would be disloyal.
But Elliot has gone.
Connor is nice. And he kisses well. And he doesn’t try to make you go further faster than you want.
But he’s not Elliot.
ELLIOT ISN’T COMING BACK.
For the first time in all these years it hit me properly. As though I’d been sitting here enduring the passing time, knowing that Elliot was dead and gone but secretly waiting for him to come back to me. As though a tiny corner of my mind had been tapping its foot and keeping the faith with a secret knowledge: that Elliot couldn’t – wouldn’t – have left me, not really . If I kept my life the way it had been and kept the cottage as he had known it, somehow I could call him back to me from the land of the dead.
Maybe that was what was really behind my obsession with the Fairy Stane. Not that I wanted to keep those folk tales alive with the hint of mystery, and that whispered undertone of nobody really knows what’s down there . Maybe I wanted to convince myself that Elliot hadn’t died in that hospital, that miserable Wednesday afternoon. In reality, he’d heard the fairy pipes playing and been summoned by the music to descend beneath the stone to the land of the fey, the world of the Little People. But if I held firm and truly loved him, I could bring him back into the land above, the human world.
Now, in this torchlit bathroom with my face glowing and my eyes bright, I felt the pull of the attraction to Connor and knew that I’d been lying to myself. Only very deep down, only in my imagination and those thoughts that allowed ‘what ifs’ to dwell in dark pools and secret groves, but I’d kept myself apart just in case Elliot came back.
But Elliot was never coming back.