Page 20 of The Start of the Story
‘When we bought the cottage I came up here.’ I led the way onto the track so we could leave the moor. I’d had enough of the cold biting me through my clothes. ‘Just to explore. I found the stone, of course, I didn’t know what it was then, and I sat up here, on my own, looking down the dale. It was summer and the sky was so blue it looked like china, and you could hear the river trickling away in the valley bottom. We’d got our little house, even if it was falling down, and we were in love and it was all so… perfect.’
I kept my head down, eyes on the tricky path. Even in the moonlight, filtered now through running cloud that dashed across its face and away, I could see glimpses of Connor’s expression and I didn’t want to. There was compassion there, and a kind of sad horror.
‘I decided to find out what the stone was doing here, it looked so odd, so out of place. I’d been a social historian since I left university and – I kind of slid sideways into folklore from there. The stone and the cottage, they’ve always been made of stories.’ I was hanging on to those stories now as hard as I could.
‘So, this is your happy place? And you don’t want those memories disturbed, yes, I can see that.’
‘It’s more than that.’ I trudged on. ‘Elliot was…’ I could do it now, I could speak about him in the past tense. ‘He read a lot. He was the one who told me the stories about the fairies, when he read up about the area as we were taking on the cottage. He did all the research, you see. For the restoration. So the stories, the fairies, it’s like…’ I shrugged.
‘Part of him,’ Connor supplied.
‘Then there was this day…’ My memory rushed in to fill my words with the emotions of that day, the sun hot and full overhead. The sky so blue that it felt as though darkness would never come. Elliot leading me up to the stone, our hands clasped, for a ‘surprise’. ‘He brought me up here and when we arrived he’d already been to the stone and he’d laid out a picnic on it.’
The birds had sung to us from the gorse bushes and the air hadn’t moved as Elliot had told me that the picnic was fairy food provided by the Little People from their land under the stone. It had been a surprisingly fanciful statement from my normally pragmatic boyfriend and had made me laugh as we ate thick-cut ham sandwiches and drank warm cordial from a bottle.
Then he’d produced the ring and a speech he’d obviously spent hours rehearsing. He’d carefully sat me down on the edgeof the stone and gone down on one knee – disconcerting a passing sheep and putting his foot in the remaining sandwiches – and proposed. ‘We had to be together always, he said. We’d eaten in fairyland.’
‘Oh, Rowan,’ Connor half sighed, as though he didn’t want to be heard.
I shrugged yet again. ‘So, that’s it. That’s me. A widowed, accidental folklorist, living in her tiny old cottage in the middle of nowhere.’
‘But there are ducks. I feel you are overlooking the ducks, somewhat.’
Surprised, I stopped walking. ‘What?’
‘Ducks. You know, quack quack, splash splash. You feed them your morning toast crusts and they hang around outside waiting for it. Incidentally, you’re not meant to give bread to ducks.’
‘I have to, otherwise I’m worried they might attacken masseand have my eye out.’ But I could feel my mood rising with his levity. I was almost smiling now. ‘And the fish get most of the bread, it’s the dinner leavings the ducks really want. They just like fighting over toast.’
‘But it does go to show that you’re not quite the nihilist that you’d want me to believe. Anyone who can save their crusts for the ducks is not completely gone to the other side.’
Then Connor walked off ahead, leading the way down the invisible path back towards my car, leaving me to follow and wonder what on earth he was talking about.
10
The next day I had to drive to Aberystwyth, where a colleague had requested that I take her place at a literary festival. She’d had to drop out because her young son had had an accident, and the associated mother-guilt meant that she’d felt obligated to find a replacement. I was clearly the only person she could think of who had no ties and could swan off to north Wales on a whim to spend six days being the resident expert on folklore literature. I hadn’t been fast enough to come up with a decent excuse and so I found myself filling in for her with inadequate preparation and a slight feeling of guilt of my own.
The talks were mostly based around folk horror, so huge preparation on my part hadn’t been greatly required, but at least I was there and able to give some opinions on whether the early fairy stories were really a primitive form of folk horror. It was interesting, I got my expenses paid to stay in a lovely hotel, was able to mingle with famous authors – some of them interested enough in my research to engage me in conversation – to browse around the festival, and buy too many books.
I felt a little bit guilty at leaving Connor alone, but only briefly. He was my lodger, that was all. It was none of hisbusiness what his landlady got up to, and my disappearing from his life to be An Academic wouldn’t affect him. It was also quite nice to be away, after our night of confessions up on the moor. I wasn’t quite sure how to face him again now that he knew about me and my sadness. Packing and driving off very early without telling him felt a little like a thumbed nose; a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to any thoughts he might have about using my revelations for his own ends. Distance was good. Being away from Connor was good. Let him wonder.
I’d carefully mentioned my work on the Fairy Stane to anyone who would listen at the festival, so if he’d chosen my absence to interfere with it, I had an army of bestselling fantasy authors who could help me raise hell too.
I was late in to work when I got back, after a terrible early morning drive back from Wales. ‘Good trip?’ Chess asked, wafting into the office a good twenty minutes after my arrival.
‘Not sure I converted anyone to our cause, but the back seat of my car is full of paperbacks, so depending on how you measure “good”, then yes, or no.’
‘Your professor’s been hanging around.’ She hung up her coat, hooked her bag over the back of the chair and then hitched a hip onto my desk. ‘He wanted to borrow some of your books.’
I glanced over at the bookcase. ‘Which ones?’
‘Not your books,yourbooks. Books that you wrote.’ Chess announced this with a degree of satisfaction.
‘Why doesn’t he use the library, like a normal person?’ I grouched.
‘Doesn’t have library membership. He’s Irish.’
‘Well, he could buy them, then. I presume being Irish doesn’t preclude him spending money?’
