Chapter 23
23
When I got up the next morning, Connor had gone out. Where he had gone out to , bearing in mind the grey, overcast snowfield outside the door, I didn’t know, but I was quite glad of his absence.
It meant I didn’t have to look at him and remember last night, hungry mouths and hands and the kind of longing I had thought was in the past. I did some housework, called my parents, phoned the electricity company (‘power should be back by lunchtime!’), banked up the fire and watched some TV when the power finally reappeared.
The greenery still festooned the living room, giving it the look and smell of a forest glade. The branch in the bucket, which Connor had decorated with the fallen duck feathers, had a wild, random appearance, as though a festively inclined hurricane had blown through and deposited it where it could be appreciated. It kept snagging my attention, although I tried to lose myself in Christmas episodes of programmes I usually liked. Out of the corner of my eye I kept seeing the scarecrow version of the Christmas tree, its tufted twigs skulking. In the end it irritated me so much that I gave in.
‘All right,’ I told its stick-waving form. ‘You’re a Christmas tree. I get it.’ And I went upstairs, pulled down the ladder and squeezed myself up into the attic space. The cold and dust lay thick up there so I didn’t hang around. I raided the box for a random collection of baubles and brought them downstairs, carrying them cupped in the palm of my hands like precious eggs.
When Connor came in, red-faced and stamping the snow off his boots, I was sitting, firelit, the tinted glass balls rotating and reflecting in the draught from the warm air.
‘Oh,’ he said, draping his coat over the table. ‘Oh!’
I didn’t say anything. I thought the Christmas tree was suitably illustrative of my desire to move away from my past relationship and really hoped that he wasn’t going to ask any questions – I was a touch wobbly on the subject and still not entirely sure I’d done the right thing.
‘This is grand.’ He toed off his boots in the doorway and kicked them across the kitchen, then, obviously with the voice of his mother in the back of his mind, he went over and put them neatly together by the back door.
‘Remind me to thank your parents at some point,’ I said. ‘The training stuck.’
‘Five boys.’ Connor bounced across to stand in front of the fire, warming his hands. ‘If it hadn’t, we’d have been living in squalor after the first five years. You’ve reminded me, I need to speak to Eamonn. You all right here?’ As though his socks had springs in, he moved across, touched me briefly on the top of my head, and went out. I heard him rattle up the stairs and then, after a moment, the muffled sound of his voice talking in his bedroom.
He hadn’t acknowledged the tree with its old decorations causing multicoloured lights to spiral around the room like a seventies disco. He’d seen it and knew what it meant. There would have to be new baubles, some of these had too many memories attached for them to be truly assimilated into any new household I might make, but they would do for now. Spun glass in seasonal colours, jewel-coloured birds, two pinecone hedgehogs and a plus-sized acorn made of balsa hung innocently from their pine supports, ushering in Christmas but showing out my old relationship in a carefully understated way. They’d been there that last Christmas when Elliot and I had been reading up about IVF and the possibilities it invoked. When we’d dared to dream that the impossible might actually become possible or, at least, more probable that it had been. When he’d given me the eternity ring that now languished in its tiny box upstairs, guarding the wedding ring that I’d torn off in a fury the night he’d died, so angry that he could have left me. That tiny box that I’d put under my pillow and slept with, with the memories wrapped around my mind as I’d wrapped Elliot’s dressing gown around my body.
Gone. Elliot was gone.
But that didn’t mean I had to stop living. His ending was not my ending.
I leaned back against the sofa, listening to the sound of Connor pacing up and down, his voice a rise and fall of Irish cadences in the background. Elliot hadn’t been able to talk on the phone without walking either, I thought with a smile. It must be a guy thing.
Outside the cottage the wind was getting up. I could hear it slapping the river surface against the old mill supports and humming its way through the trees down the lane. The weather must be changing. I looked out of the window and the snow that had ironed the scenery flat beneath its weight was tattering at the edges into icy lace as a thaw moved in, borne on the wind and hastened by the splatter of rain that came with it.
Good. We’d be able to get out. Maybe even tomorrow the hill would have enough clear patches for me to be able to drive up, and Christmas Day could be diluted by Chess and cocktails.
I wondered what Connor would do. Whether we had moved into the kind of relationship where he would come to Chess’s with me, hold my hand on her sofa and drape himself casually around me to the music playing in her living room. Or whether we were still at the cautious distance stage, and he would go to his lecturer friends for food, make Lego models with their clever ten-year-old children on the floor in front of the fire and sleep over in the careful décor of their spare room.
Which version of Connor did I want?
Feet rattled on the stairs, and he erupted into the living room, making the branch-tree sway dangerously in its bucket.
‘Eamonn is coming over,’ he said, as though this were the result of a conversation we’d already had. ‘After Boxing Day though. Mam will have a stupendous amount of leftovers and she’ll probably kill him if he doesn’t eat his own weight in turkey before he leaves.’
‘Oh,’ I said weakly.
‘Ah, now, it’s fine. He won’t stay here. After all, we’re an unmarried couple, cohabiting under the same roof. He might spontaneously combust.’
My expression must have been one of startled horror, because Connor started to laugh. ‘Your face! No, Eamonn likes his creature comforts, he’s not one for the spare bed or the sofa. He’ll take himself to a hotel around abouts. And you’ve no worry, he’s a twenty-first-century man, he’s not going to castigate us for living in sin. He’s got a great line in censorious frowning, though, I’ll warn you now.’
‘But why,’ I asked faintly, ‘is he coming at all? Not just to bring you your share of the leftovers?’
Connor wandered over and sat down beside me, close enough that our bodies touched all down one side. He didn’t look at me but stared ahead with his eyes focused on the flicker of flame in the log burner. Reflected red light caught his hair from the glass baubles and his eyes were very dark.
‘I think we might need him,’ he said.
‘I’m not bloody marrying you,’ I said snippily. ‘And there’s no other conceivable reason to bring a priest into this.’
Connor turned his head and gave me a little wink. ‘Ah, sure, you’re not meaning that,’ he said jauntily. ‘I’m irresistible. But—’ and my shoulder got a little nudge ‘—that’s away in the future. For now – well, I was up at your Stane today, for a wee bit of the research, and I think I want my brother here.’
‘It’s…’ All I could think of was fairies, breaking through into the world and being fought off with the power of the Church, but the whole idea was too Gothic even for me. ‘What on earth for? Bell, book and candle?’
He opened his mouth as though he wanted to say something, but then closed it again and shifted his weight to put some space between us. ‘I’m not quite certain yet. I’ll tell you when I am.’
‘Get you, man of mystery.’ Then, after a moment’s consideration, ‘You didn’t lift the stone, did you?’
Connor reared back and stared at me, then lifted one arm to demonstrate his unbulging biceps. ‘Er, I said I was irresistible, not Thor. Have you seen the weight of that thing?’
‘So what were you doing up there? You were gone ages.’
‘Oh, you know. Looking. Bit of scrabbling in the old bog there. Checking sightlines, nothing important.’
‘No Romans, then?’
‘There’s three feet of snow, Rowan, what could I be doing for them?’ Connor stretched himself out towards the fire, a faint blush of warmth showing on his cheekbones above the dark lines of stubble.
‘Isn’t that what you’re here for? Discovering the settlement?’ I tried to keep the emotion out of my words. What would he do after that? He was here for six months, to map out and uncover the putative Roman settlement, and then he’d be gone back to Dublin. Did I really want to start anything with a man who would leave? Despite last night, or maybe because of last night, I had a choice to make and for all my talk of moving on and making new memories, none of those memories or new life had to include Connor. I could make my own life.
The cat was still a possibility.
He gave me another small sideways look. ‘You know the Romans were a bit of a ruse, now, don’t you?’ he said. ‘I’m not going to be the one digging – I do the research and the paperwork, the archaeology department takes over from there. I came for a look at the site and to get a better idea of the topography. From here on in I can work from anywhere.’
‘But you’re still here,’ I said. ‘Eating my food, sleeping in my spare bed and annoying the ducks.’
‘And paying for the privilege,’ he replied, his voice still calm. ‘I think you know why I’ve stayed now, don’t you, Rowan?’
He turned to look properly at me and I returned the look with eyes fresh from new knowledge and realisations. The light reflected from the baubles glowed across our faces. ‘You stayed because of me?’
He smiled, a softening grin that made his face crinkle in an attractive way. ‘I did. And I don’t want you to think it’s just physical, although I do have to say that I find your whole person quite pleasing. You’ve a way with you, Rowan, and I like who you are.’
The flames crackled and almost as sudden as the thaw outside came the realisation that I really, really liked Connor.
Our mouths met, and this time it was frenzied, hungry. We tore at one another’s clothes without finesse and the sex was almost desperate, as though the end of the world had been announced and we had to celebrate what life we had left; desperate, but very, very satisfying, and we collapsed back on the living-room floor gasping for breath and both slightly surprised.
‘An unexpected conclusion to a conversation about my brother.’ Connor held me against his chest as we scrambled for space in front of the fire. ‘And probably as close to sex as Eamonn will ever get.’
I pulled a rug down from where its drape across the sofa had been meant to indicate that I lived a carefully curated existence in my impeccable home. Scattered cushions on the floor and the way the sheepskin in front of the wood burner had been rucked against the grate now blew that illusion, so moving the rug wasn’t going to cause Instagram panic.
‘I think it helped, not being in my bedroom,’ I said, wrapping the rug around us both. ‘Not so many memories.’
‘You’re not telling me you never had a good shag in here.’ Connor pushed my hair off my face. ‘Go on, I’ll not believe that.’
‘Oh, no, we did. But it was different. You are different. This whole thing is different. And you’ve still got your socks on.’
‘Sorry about that.’ Connor wiggled a foot that stuck out from the end of the rug attached to a hairy ankle. ‘I’ve yet to master a sexy way of taking my socks off.’
I started to laugh. It was different. The ghost of Elliot had left me, not in a hauntingly sad leave-taking, but quietly evaporating to condense softly in a corner of my memory. He would always be with me, of course he would. But he had no need to sit in the front seat any more. He could merge into memory and only appear on anniversaries and holidays to be gently taken out and dusted down with a smile.
I had a glimmer of a future again, with this lanky dark Irishman who was laughing alongside me, or, rather, underneath me, wobbling the covering rug so hard that it slithered off us and I had to grab it back with my spare hand.
Different. As though happiness had more than one shape, and I hadn’t realised.