Page 43 of The Start of the Story
‘I’m not promiscuous,’ Connor said suddenly, making me jump, as we rose to the top of the hill before the cottage.
‘Er. That’s nice to know, although I’m not quite sure why it would come up,’ I replied, trying to remember whether I’d left the porch light on before I left.
‘Tomcat. Me. I’m drawing a parallel here, as I suspect you intended.’
‘Did I?’
‘Rowan.’ He shifted in his seat, and I nearly drove into the hedge. There was a patch of ice that had frozen right across the whole road – water that had poured from overflowing drainshad formed a slick surface where the car had no grip. ‘Saoirse fooled me. If I’d known she was married, if I’d known that she was making it all up, do you think I would have gone near her?’
I muttered something and drew the car up into its usual parking spot. I went to open my door, but Connor put a hand out to stop me. ‘I know you think I’m a bit of a dick, and I hold my hands up to having been an idiot. But she was telling me what I wanted to hear and future-faking it all down the line. Now, tell me that if I were a woman and I came to you having been fooled by a married man who told me all the stories of how we’d get married and have a few children, live by the sea and all that – you wouldn’t be sympathetic? You wouldn’t call him a bastard and berate him for having lied?’ He moved a little more, so that he could see my face properly. ‘So why is it different because I’m a man?’
It wasn’t different. Of course it wasn’t. But I was so used to seeing Connor as breezily careless that it was hard to get my head around the idea that he had been fooled. He always seemed to know exactly what he was doing – like with his historical research. He was sure that there was something Roman up there on that moor so he was working hard to get to the bottom of what it was. He researched, he investigated. And yet, one pretty woman came along and told him what he wanted to hear and he’d fallen into believing her without any question.
‘You always seem to know what you’re doing,’ I said. ‘You’re always so sure of yourself. Like… like with the Fairy Stane. You research and you check all angles and you’re desperate to get to the bottom of it. I have the feeling that if I turn my back you’ll be up there with a crowbar, to give yourself the advantage over other historians. You’re single-minded. So that’s why it’s hard for me to see how Saoirse managed to fool you, because you could have blown her story open with a bit of research and a fewquestions – like “where are your photographs published?” – but you didn’t ask.’
His hand dropped away from me and I got out of the car. I was shaking slightly from the flare of adrenaline that was currently sending emergency signals to my entire body.Why did I care?Connor was just a man who was taking up my spare room and cooking great meals. He would, as he repeatedly reminded me, be gone in four months. Why should I care why he fell for Saoirse?
I went round to the boot of the car and began hauling out plastic bags of groceries. Connor had begun to stalk off towards the cottage, but, seeing me lifting out bag after bag, he came back and took a bag in each hand before he did the Indignant Stomp again.
I caught up with him as he used his key to open the door, and we stormed inside together, on a gust of wind-blown snowflakes and irritation.
‘Look.’ He put one bag on the worktop and began unpacking it, almost as though he wasn’t thinking about the actual shopping but needed something to do with his hands. ‘I can tell you think I’m a fool for going along with Saoirse.’
I was unpacking on the other side of the kitchen, with my back to him. ‘I don’t think you’re a fool, Connor. People can get caught up in situations. But I do think that you went into that relationship with your eyes closed. A photographer should have a portfolio of published work, a website. You’re a historian. You check everything. But with her, you neverchecked.’
I slammed the freezer door, having shoved in more bread than the drawer could really take, and there was a sharp crack of plastic breaking. The sound annoyed me.
‘Are you telling me that you check out every man you’re dating? You look them up? On the Internet?’ He sounded aghast.
‘Well, no, but only because I’ve been with Elliot since forever, and I didn’t date much before him.’ I’d used the present tense again, I noted.Elliot’s gone. ‘But it’s a sensible thing for a woman to do. We don’t know if a man has a criminal record, or pictures of himself with his wife all over Facebook, so we check.’
‘That’s… that’sweird.’
‘No.’ Beans into the cupboard. I’d bought an awful lot of beans. ‘It’s common sense. No one wants to go on a date with a bloke only to find out he was headline news in theMirrorfor murdering his landlady or something.’
‘Right.’ Connor put the last packet of biscuits – I’d also bought a lot of biscuits, for some reason – into the cupboard and closed the door definitively. ‘Come on.’
‘What?’
I followed him through into the living room, where my computer blinked at us. Connor didn’t even turn on the light. He wiggled the mouse to wake the computer, and then typed ‘Connor William Patrick O’Keefe’ into the search bar.
‘Connor, what are you doing?’
He didn’t answer again. He stood back, waving a hand at the brightness of the screen, where his name was listed in blue above a whole host of sites.
‘There,’ he said at last. ‘That’s me. No secrets. No murders, no newspaper headlines. A load of research, some publications, a couple of awards and a mention when Mam got to be head of her department.’
‘Well, that’s…’ I started weakly.
‘I was lonely, Rowan. I was lonely and she was pretty and funny and bright – a touch brittle, but I thought she worked too hard. I told her what I was looking for and she echoed it all back to me, and when you’re living for your work and your family are all doing the good Catholic thing of marrying and producing children…’
‘Except Eamonn,’ I felt bound to add.
‘Ah, but Eamonn is exempt, he’s got his own trajectory, being a priest. So there was I feeling a failure and left behind, and all I can see is a future of being an academic, burying myself in the journals and reviews… Do you see how I fell for her?’
He was talking fast, pointing at the screen showing his name every now and then as though to punctuate his words. It felt a little as though the easy-going Connor I had got to know had been subsumed under this wild-eyed, gesticulating man, trying to make me see something when I didn’t know what I was meant to be looking at.
‘Connor, you don’t need to prove anything to me,’ I said softly. ‘It’s fine. Iknowyou weren’t stupid. You took a woman at face value. You believed her because you had no reason not to. That’s not stupidity, that’s just good-natured optimism.’
