Chapter 24
24
We slept in my bed that night and woke to the distant sound of Christmas bells chiming through the valley from the little church so far away. The snow was leaving, waving a reluctant farewell in tatty little piles and ice fragments, and dripping its way out with the coming of a warmer wind and gusty showers. Connor and I stayed in bed.
‘We could go to Chess’s,’ I said thoughtfully, from my position; I’d got out of bed to lean on the windowsill to watch the melting snow receding from the river edge. ‘If we wanted. I think I could probably get the car up the hill.’
‘Do you want to?’ Connor asked from the bed behind me. ‘We can. Or I can rummage in the freezer and create a culinary delight from whatever miscellany is in there.’
‘Or we can stay in here, with a sandwich.’ I turned around.
‘Ah, now, you’re insatiable, woman!’ Connor laughed, flipping back a corner of the duvet to reveal that insatiability wasn’t unique to me.
‘Three years. More than three years,’ I said. ‘I’ve got some making-up to do.’
But it wasn’t just the sex, although that was a not inconsiderable part of it. It was the lying close with someone, breathing in their scent and watching the way their hair caught in stubble, or their sleepy bundling of the duvet. It was laughing at awkwardness and talking – about stuff. Nothing important, no futures had come into our conversation, but we talked about our pasts. We talked about history, about folklore. I told Connor some of the stories about the area, and he talked about the Roman occupation of Britain. It was a lot more fun and a lot sexier than it sounds.
We got up and cooked, draped in dressing gowns. My lack of real Christmas preparation meant that we didn’t have the full table-groaner of a Christmas dinner. Instead we had a weird scratch meal of assorted foods fried, and the ducks glared in at us with an antipathy built of a lack of toast crusts and leftovers.
‘Was this Christmas different enough for you?’ Connor asked as we got back into bed, replete in many different ways and satisfied in many others. He’d stood his little Roman centurion on the shelf, from where he watched our activities with his vaguely censorious painted expression conveying the same emotion as my mother did about my life.
‘Oh, yes. Very different.’ I settled back into the comfort of his embrace. ‘I mean, there were some similarities, of course. Starting the day with sex isn’t totally unknown to me, and at least one component of Christmas dinner has to be burned or it isn’t really Christmas, is it?’
‘Hmmm.’ Connor had been a bit sensitive about burning the noodles, although it hadn’t been entirely his fault as I’d been showing him a folklore book at the time.
‘But what about you?’ I turned to face him. ‘You’ve talked a lot about me making new memories and everything, but what about your memories? They must be mostly good, surely?’
He sighed and his gaze went from my face to a space above my head, a distant, inward-looking stare. ‘When we were kids, yes. Very. But then, when I decided that the Catholic faith wasn’t for me any more, so Midnight Mass wasn’t really a thing, well, then the magic sort of evaporated as it does when you get older – it got to be a bone of contention with Mam. Dad goes along with anything for a smooth ride, and the house full of the brothers and their wives and fiancées and then the kids … ’ His focus moved back to my eyes. ‘You’re not the only one to want new memories, Rowan,’ he said. ‘Saoirse and I, we’d planned out our Christmases. The little cottage, hopefully a couple of kids, just us as a family without having to include every passing congregation member and Father MacDermot, a man who I am convinced had at least fifteen Christmas dinners whilst “visiting his parishioners”.’ He squeezed me gently. ‘All those lies. They’ve made me a bit wary of forward planning.’
‘I think…’ I began, and then paused to make sense of my thoughts before starting again. ‘I think too much forward planning might be a bad thing. It kind of leaves you open to disappointment when everything doesn’t fall into place like you wanted. Elliot and I had our lives planned out – house, children, careers, all that, but then the children weren’t happening…’ Another memory: that bathroom, that morning, that hope . ‘Then he died. And, in some ways, it was twice as bad because I didn’t just lose Elliot, I lost a whole future life. If we’d been a bit less rigid about things, had more of a “take it as it comes” attitude, maybe I wouldn’t have felt so lost for so long.’
‘That’s the folklore talking.’ Connor squeezed me again. ‘History is all about the documentation and the proof, a bit like planning, only backwards. But I know what you mean. If Saoirse hadn’t been one for the talking about what we’d do in the future, I’d have taken it more in my stride. Just a wee thing that happened, a mistake. But it wasn’t just her , as you say, it was the whole of my future life went “pop” when I found out about her.’ He sighed. ‘Future faking. Only yours wasn’t faking, it was a genuine expectation of how things would be.’
I pushed his hair back from his face, grinning at his expression, at the fact he hadn’t shaved for two days, at the whole dark package that was so uniquely Connor . ‘So, this time round I think we should take it as it comes, don’t you? No plans, no expectations, no certainties. Just us.’
‘Ah, and there’s still the matter of your stone up there.’ An elbow jutted to indicate the distant hump of moorland beyond. ‘I’d like to know what’s going on with that.’
‘And your Roman settlement.’
‘That can wait until summer. The archaeology boys can get up there and see if my theories are right.’
I ran my hand down his cheek, feeling the sheer realness of his cheekbones, his jawline, that stubble. ‘Does that mean you’re not going to lift my stone to prove your case?’
He sighed. ‘If I’m right, we might not want to. But let’s wait until Eamonn gets here for that.’
‘Fairyland,’ I muttered as I started to drop into sleep, feeling Connor’s breath and his arms tight around me. ‘We can’t let fairyland out.’
I heard him say ‘the Little People ought to be known’ before I fell into dreams of joyful little winged fairies bouncing around and granting wishes.