Page 19 of The Start of the Story
My fingers traced the edge of the stone, where it ended in softly rounded contours and mossy beds. They curled into the lip of stone, almost as though I were about to lift it myself, and neither of us spoke. The owl called again, a lost and lonely note that wailed into the silence like a siren.
‘We need to go back,’ I said at last. ‘It’s going to freeze out here tonight.’
‘Did you drive up?’ He sounded almost conversational now.
‘No, I got a bloody piggyback – of course I drove.’
‘Why?’ He turned so I could see his face fully and it was washed pale by the moonlight.
‘I couldn’t be sure of catching you if I walked.’
‘You seriously thought I’d come up here to turn your stone?’ Connor slapped at the stone between us. ‘Really?I mean, I’m pretty keen on my job but I’m notthatdedicated that I’d be up here in the dark and the cold.’
‘But youareup here in the dark and the cold,’ I pointed out, and he sighed.
‘Fair play.’ He nodded and then looked down at the stone’s mossy granulated surface. ‘And fairyland is really supposed to be under here?’
I didn’t know what to say to that. It was what the stories said, those legends of the moor, but right now, here, in the dark with an owl being atmospheric and the moon breasting the cloud banks like a schooner in a dark sea, I didn’t really want to think too deeply about it. ‘Yes. You’re supposed to be able to hear the fairies, if you put your ear to the stone.’
‘Have you tried?’
I didn’t know what to say. Did I admit that, yes, after Elliot died, I’d come out here in the deep of another sleepless night and lain on the stone? That I’d begged and pleaded with the fairies to come and take me so that I didn’t have to exist any longer in this world that had lost all meaning for me? ‘No,’ I said, reasoning that admissions like this would open a can of worms that would wriggle all over my carefully cultivated calm exterior. ‘What are you doing?’
Connor sprawled the length of the stone, with his head at the top and his legs bent at the knee so that he’d fit entirely onto it. ‘I’m going to listen. Come on.’ A hand reached out and pulled me so that I half toppled next to him. There wasn’t a lot of room. ‘Let’s see if we can hear them partying down there.’
‘It’s just a story,’ I tried to reason with his new and energetic mood. He seemed to have flipped from the sadness of his disappointing love life to a more whimsical turn of thought.
‘Yeah, but stories come fromsomewhere, Rowan. All stories come from somewhere. Maybe not fairyland, maybe there really was a Roman buried out here, under this stone. Maybe they had a reputation for being a bit wild and the story has come down, word of mouth, generation after generation.’ He stretched his legs off the end of the stone and out into the heather. ‘Every story has a beginning,’ he said again, quietly now into the night.
I lay with the cold biting into every joint. All I could hear was the sound of Connor’s breathing, the distant sound of the river running over the ford, and the owl that was becoming really rather insistent.
No fairies. No parties. No midnight abduction of humans, taken underground and kept. You weren’t supposed to eat fairy food, because that meant they had power over you, but how long could you stay hungry?
‘They aren’t there,’ I said when the cold got too much. ‘It really is just a story, Connor. There are no little people out here.’ The tears of an unaccountable sadness rose up my throat and threatened my eyes. ‘There’s nobody here.’
‘Ah, now. We’re here.’ He rolled onto one elbow and looked over at me. ‘And you’re awful sad now, Rowan. I’m sorry.’
The tears were falling, pushed out by the weight of my heart. ‘No, it’s all right,’ I said, all the words in a rush to be said. ‘I – I don’t often think about it now.’
‘Can you tell me?’
Oh, it was the voice, that soft Irish lilt that gave his words gravity. The gentle accent put an emphasis on his sympathy and it cut right through those memory barriers like a welding lance.
‘He got up to go to work one day and said he didn’t feel well. Collapsed at lunchtime, they called an ambulance and then me. By the time I got to the hospital, he was dead.’ The tears felt divorced from the emotion now, as though I were crying over something else. ‘Some kind of cardiac incident. I don’t know.’ I wiped a hand over my eyes and then my nose on my sleeve. ‘I’d done a pregnancy test that morning, and it had been positive. I was waiting to tell him when we got home that night. We’d been trying for months,’ I finished, as though Connor needed to know that.
‘Oh, Rowan.’
‘It didn’t last. A chemical pregnancy, the doctor said. Or maybe I misread the test – I was so keen for it to be positive I may have made a mistake. But I never got to tell him.’ I sat up now, curling myself over my knees as I tried not to fall back into that awful litany, those words echoing inside my head and squeezing themselves out with the tears – I never got to tell him.
‘I’m so sorry.’ Connor spoke quietly. ‘Truly, I am. When did… I mean, how long ago was this?’
‘Three years. We’d been married for two years when he died, together for five years before that. We wanted to get the cottage restored and liveable before we got married, I’ve no idea why now, but it seemed a good idea at the time.’ I gave a snotty half-laugh and wiped my face again.
‘And the stone?’ Connor looked down at it for a moment and then leaped up as though an electric shock had gone through him. ‘Oh, Lord, he’s not under here now, is he?’
That made me laugh, properly, for the first time in a very long time. ‘No! Of course he isn’t! He was cremated and his ashes were buried in the church over there.’ I pointed in the general direction of the tiny parish church, which snuggled into the valley about three miles further down the river.
‘Thank the Lord for that.’ Connor watched me clamber inelegantly to my feet. ‘You do seem very attached to the stone though, so I wondered.’
