Page 18 of The Start of the Story
We stared at one another for a moment, then I turned and dashed the frame from his hand. I couldn’t have told if it was an accident, a mere contact of body against the pale, thin wood, or whether I’d intended to catch the corner and sweep it to the floor. Either way, it fell, spinning, from his grasp and broke on the tiles.
‘My husband made the old frame.’ My voice was so swollen by all the extra, unsaid words that it came out an octave lower.
Water dripped. We both stood and looked at the wreckage on the kitchen floor, a tangle of pine strips, staples and cracked glass.
‘You have a husband,’ Connor said. Then he turned and, without another look, opened the back door and walked out into the night.
I cleared up the second wrecked frame of the week and waited for him to come back in and explain himself. Whyshouldn’tI have a husband? He’d never, at any point, asked about my domestic arrangements or, more importantly, how someone who lived on a grant for folklore research could afford a cottage and a car. And why should he care? He was living here against my better judgement until he could find somewhere closer to the university, not mooning at my heels like a lovesick swain. My domestic arrangements, my life,were none of his business.
So whyshouldhe care? Walking off into a dark, although unfortunately for his internal narrative not stormy, night – whata total overreaction! I put the twisted cardboard and fragmented mess into the bin and looked out across the ford, up the valley side where the track ran, and saw the slim shape of someone silhouetted by the bright light of the full moon into a stick form. He was heading to the stone, I realised. He was going to go up onto the moor and lift my stone, just because I’d mentioned that I had a husband. Why? Had he been hoping that he could somehow use Irish charm and sex appeal to persuade me to let him ruin an item central to local folklore? Had he been trying to get round me with his cooking and chat?
Shit.I could not let that happen. He hadn’t got a coat on – the big black coat was still hanging from its hook on the back of the kitchen door. He’d waded the ford and he was walking up onto the high moor in a black sweater and jeans, and from the way the moon’s light was crystallising out on every sharp angle out there, there was going to be a frost. November didn’t mess about out here, it could be sub-zero in an hour and if he stopped for any length of time the cold would get him, if the bogs didn’t or he didn’t break a leg.
‘Bloody idiot.’ I pulled on my own coat, pushed my feet into boots and headed out to the car. All the time my mind was full of the confusion of the last ten minutes, and I dropped the car keys in the mud, which necessitated a few fumbling minutes while I patted down the ground all around the car door until I found them.Whyhad he walked out? The normal response to hearing that someone was married would be – Oh? I didn’t know you were married. What’s his name? Where is he at the moment? Iwonderedhow you’d managed to bag yourself a lovely cottage in the wilds… Then my mouth dried as I realised that any of those questions would have meant a conversation. About Elliot. A conversation that I still wasn’t sure that I was ready for, full of words I wasn’t sure I could say.
The car splashed reluctantly through the ford, the water spraying up the sides after the rain of the previous couple of days, and then gained purchase on the track beyond. Connor was gone and when I reached the top there was no sign of him further along, so I knew he’d gone out over the moor. There was only one destination point out here, unless he was going to stride moodily through knee-deep heather all night. The stone. He reallyhadgone out to the stone, the utter shit. I spared a momentary thought for him scrabbling about at its corners, trying to find something to act as a lever. Eight square feet of heavy local gritstone would not be an easy lift solo, but he might decide to try it, and the thought had me leaving the car and sprinting out along the almost invisible path by the inadequate light of the moon, now filtering through cloud like a Halloween illustration.
I knew the route. I’d been out here so often that I didn’t slip on the very wet patch of peaty mud where the moor sloped gently downwards, or sprain my ankle on the loose gravelly part, where scree could take your feet from under you and sprawl you into the wet undergrowth. I ran until I could see Connor’s form, hunched into a hook shape as he looked down on the stone. The moon was relentless. There was nothing gentle about its light as it rendered the moor stark and endless and the stone a black slab.
‘What thehellare you doing?’ I was a little breathless after my dash.
He kept his back to me, head bowed like a mourner at a graveside, and didn’t speak. The moon caught in his hair, in his clothes. He looked like an illustration in this monochrome landscape, a dark, upright foreground figure against the tangled shaded background.
‘Connor?’ His silence disturbed me. I walked across and ended up facing him across the Fairy Stane, both of us looking down on its pitted surface.
Finally he spoke. ‘I didn’t know you were married,’ he said, and now it was his turn with the low octaves. An owl hooted atmospherically from the trees near the river, and it echoed through the night like emphasis.
‘Why should it matter?’ I asked, pushing my hands into my pockets to try to warm them, and shrugging my shoulders up. It was definitely going to be frosty tonight. There was already an element of crunch about the long reedy grass at our feet. ‘My marital status is nothing to do with you.’
Connor sighed and sat down on the edge of the stone. This made him hunch even more, so that he looked like a grasshopper taking a break. ‘I had to leave Dublin,’ he said.
‘Yes, I know. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, would you?’ I walked around the stone now so that I could face him, and I could see that he was shivering slightly. Good. That would teach him that you couldn’t do ‘moody stomping about the night’ in North Yorkshire in November – it wasn’t practical.
‘No, I mean…’ He looked up at me. His face was stark in the moonlight. ‘Ihadto leave Dublin. I got… involved with a girl and I thought it was getting serious. Turned out she had a husband who thoughtverydifferently about our relationship.’
He looked so miserable and pathetic that I didn’t laugh, even though I half-wanted to. I blinked at him until he realised that this probably wasn’t sufficient to explain his walking out.
‘We met in a bar, she was very chatty, great company, so we started meeting up the odd evening and it – well, it turned into overnights and dinners and I thought we… I thought it was turning into something that couldbesomething, if you know what I mean.’ Now his expression was almost pleading. ‘I took her home, everyone loved her, the brothers, Mam, Dad, she wasa real hit with the family, and I thought,This is it.I really thought I’d got myself a good one. And then…’ He took a deep breath. ‘Then one day, I was at work, up at the university, and this bloke walks into my office and asks if I’m Connor, so I say yes, and he takes a swing at my head, puts a load of photographs down on the table and tells me to lay off his wife.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said, inadequately.
Connor slumped forwards and put his face in his hands. ‘She’d been telling him she was away with girlfriends,’ he said, his words filtered through his fingers. ‘She’d got two wee ones at home, and she was telling him she was helping a friend with an emotional crisis.’ A half-laugh. ‘Well, the emotional crisis came later, and there wasn’t any helping.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I sat down next to him. The stone was very, very cold.
‘So, I not only lose the woman I was falling in love with, but I have to face that everything she told me was a lie. She wasn’t a photographer, she was a mum who’d worked as ground staff for Aer Lingus. She wasn’t orphaned, she didn’t want me to meet her parents because they’d have spilt the beans, and, more importantly,she wasn’t fecking single.’ I heard him swallow hard. ‘So, you can see, I’m a little bit sensitive when I suddenly hear that there’s a husband who might be home any minute, swinging his fists and demanding to know what the hell I’m playing at.’ He looked across at me and there was a long, and slightly desperate, pause. ‘But I’m looking at you now and realising that I might have gone off the deep end and overreacted just a touch. I’m sorry. It was a shock, y’know?’
I could feel my face had frozen and it had nothing to do with the temperature. ‘He won’t be home,’ I said. Repression was practically my middle name by now; the feelings stayed locked down where I could see the very tips of them, waving up at mefrom beneath the heavy weight of suppressed memory. I wasn’t about to let them out now.
Connor kept looking at me. It was hard to read his expression in this blank light, when his face was eye sockets, the shadows under cheekbones and a tangle of hair.
‘Okay,’ he said slowly. ‘Divorced?’
I kept my chin up and switched my focus to the moon, a watching circle poised above a mountainscape of cloud. ‘Widowed,’ I said, and stopped.
‘Okay,’ he said again. And then, ‘Okay,’ as though he were talking himself down from a precipice. ‘I’m sorry.’
I wasn’t sure what he was apologising for. Bringing all this up? Walking out on me for a simple misunderstanding? Making me sit here on this bloody hard and freezing cold stone in the middle of the night?
