Page 23 of The Start of the Story
‘You got the frame fixed and a ride home?’ I wanted to turn it around to check the repairs on the back, but it seemed ungrateful, so I settled for a bit more staring.
‘The amount I was paying, they should have flown me back on a silver unicorn,’ he said, but sounded as though he was trying not to laugh. ‘But it looks all right up there now, does it not?’
‘It does indeed,’ I half breathed the words. The map was smooth, the frame was intact, it was as if nothing had ever happened.
‘I got the fastening reinforced. Quite frankly it had been hanging by one tack for months. Accident waiting to happen.’
We stood for a moment together. The single lamp gave the room more corners than it should have had.
‘Thank you, Connor,’ I said softly, still keeping my eyes on the map.
‘You’re not upset? After what you said before, about – well, about your husband making the frame, I didn’t want to do anything that might make any of it worse.’
‘I’m not upset.’ My voice was still very level. ‘It was a very kind thing to do. And I’m sorry that I got so angry with you over the other frame, but…’ I tailed off.
‘No, no, you were right.’ Connor adjusted the hang of the map, where my touching the frame had unbalanced it and made it list towards Pickering. ‘That awful pine frame wasn’t good. Like hanging the Mona Lisa in something you picked up from IKEA.’
‘I wouldn’t go quitethatfar,’ I said. ‘It’s just a map.’
‘But for you, it’s memory, isn’t it?’ His voice was soft now. ‘Everything tied up with everything else, all leading back to the one thing. Your husband, in this case. The stone, in another.’
I began to move towards the stairs. ‘Can we not talk about the stone for now? I’m going to have a shower and go to bed with my laptop. The house is all yours. Turn the lights out when you go up.’
I left him standing in the middle of the barely lit room. He stood very still and quiet and I couldn’t see what he was looking at as I trod my weary way up the steep staircase towards a hot shower, my bed, and some rubbish on YouTube.
11
For a few weeks Connor and I co-existed without seeing too much of one another. We shared the odd meal, but I was sorting out the contents of my forthcoming book in earnest, so spent much of my time at home in front of my computer or shut in my bedroom. Connor came and went, students seemed to have been persuaded to pick him up and drop him off, so he rarely travelled with me, heading into the university early and coming back late, sometimes after I’d gone to bed. Now he had my mobile number he assiduously messaged me to let me know when he would be late or needed a lift back. He paid up on time, bought the occasional takeaway, was quiet, punctilious and clean.
It was almost uncanny.
He also didn’t mention the stone. But I’d told him not to, so I couldn’t really get suspicious. Besides he was still deeply involved in attempts to identify the possible Roman construction, which seemed to absorb much of his time and energy, I was grateful to note. Apart from catching him sometimes staring at the map and muttering about the ideal placement for a cemetery, he’d gone completely quiet on the subject of stone-raising altogether.
Then I got home one evening to find him singing.
I could hear him as I parked the car. It sounded like an Irish folk song, plaintive and deep, the syllables rolling out across the frosted dark like invisible clouds, to meet me at the door. I stomped my way inside and he stopped, suddenly, seeming embarrassed.
‘Oh! I didn’t hear the car. And you’re early.’
‘Early’ was a strange concept now that the evenings grew dark before five and my tendency to work until bedtime meant that I was eating at my computer anyway. There was no ‘early’, only ‘home’ and ‘bed’.
‘Chess was full of cold, so I sent her home and then thought I might as well be gone too.’ I unwound myself from coat and scarf. ‘It was chilly in the office.’
‘Okay.’
‘You were singing?’ I didn’t know why I phrased it as a question. Since there was nobody else here it had to have been him, either that or the ducks had formed a choir.
In the bright white light he flamed a sudden pink. ‘Er, yes.’
‘It sounded lovely. Was it Irish?’
Connor turned away now and began fiddling with the fridge, bending to look at supplies. ‘My granda taught me the songs. Long time ago now, he’s been gone, oh, twenty years or more. But when I was a child and we’d go down to the farm in Lahinch, he’d take me out on the land and we’d carve wood and he’d teach me the old songs.’
He straightened up, a pat of butter in one hand and an incongruous cucumber in the other, with his eyes looking somewhere in the long past. ‘Dad’s Da,’ he said. ‘Dad grew up on a farm. Not much of a farm, all bog and potatoes as they say.’ Then he seemed to realise what he was doing and the cucumber was tucked back in between the packages and he swung the door closed. ‘Anyway. Good day?’
‘So-so. They want the first few chapters of the book before the Christmas holidays start, to read over.’
‘The grants people? You must have enough to show them, surely, you’ve done nothing but write for weeks.’
