Page 35 of The Start of the Story
Connor turned around. He had a packet of feta cheese in one hand and an onion in the other, but, despite the fact that I was hungry, I found myself drawn to look at his face. His expression was –cloudedwas the best I could do. As though a thousand thoughts ranged at once through his mind and he couldn’t sift out which ones should be given priority.
He took a very deep breath and then blew it out. ‘Yes. Well,’ he said, and then turned back to the worktop to finish making tea and begin chopping cheese. ‘Is it always this hard?’ he asked, his voice indistinct under the sound of the knife.
‘It’s probably been in the fridge too long.’
‘I meant life.’ There was a rise to his tone now, as though he was smiling. ‘As I think you well know.’
I thought of my uncertainty this morning, as I’d stood on the city walls. My near dismissal of everything I’d studied and believed in the last ten years in a brief desire to have everything easily explainable, and then my sudden certainty that remembering the past was still important. ‘It has its moments,’ I said.
The kettle boiled, a pan clanged onto the stove, and Connor was a whirl of cracking eggs, pouring water, swirling and cutting, as though he was trying to think through movement.
‘I’m sending her home,’ he said at last.
‘Saoirse?’
‘No, my mother. Yes, of course Saoirse, who else would I be talking about, now?’
Good. Connor being irritated with me was better. I knew where I was when someone was cross, but he was vulnerable and uncertain and I didn’t know how to deal with him. I didn’t know how Iwantedto deal with him.
‘It’s been a long day. There might have been fifty women since this morning.’
Now he laughed. ‘Ah, you’re right there. What with me being a playboy and wild, rampant seducer and all.’
He actually looked more like a mythical being than a playboy. There was something different about him, as though he were a selkie or dark sidhe wearing human form. As though he were moving through a mist of memories while he cooked, all the other times he’d cooked a meal overlaid on this present moment.
‘So, what’s happened?’ I asked at last.
He didn’t answer at once. Instead, he turned back from the stove, bearing two plates of cheese omelette and a small mixedsalad. He laid one plate in front of me, sat down on the other side of the table, put his plate down, and stared at it.
‘Connor?’
Another sigh. ‘You know what you said?’ He didn’t look at me. He was prodding the omelette as though it were an unidentified creature that had come in through the window. ‘About how I’d feel if she died?’
I did remember. I’d been thinking of Elliot never coming back. The feeling of loss and despair and how I would have given anything in those first months to have him with me again.
And then about Connor kissing my cheek. A brief, impersonal contact, and yet… and yet. How that touch had made me fire back into the kind of life that had been in abeyance for years.
‘Yes,’ was all I said.
‘I thought about it. When I got upstairs, she’d packed my bags, she was sosure, so certain that it was the right thing. She’d left Michael, come all the way to England, found me…’ He trailed off and poked the blameless, and delicious, omelette a bit more, keeping his eyes on the plate. ‘I thought about what you’d said. And you know what?’
I stopped, a forkful of cheesy egg halfway to my mouth. ‘What?’
He raised his eyes now. Focused first on the forkful, slowly making its way off the tines and back to the plate as it hung in suspended animation, then moving his gaze up to my face. ‘I thought, if Saoirse died, right here, right now, what I’d mainly feel would be relief.’
I dropped my fork and pushed my chair back, suddenly upright with alarm. ‘Oh, God. You haven’t… you didn’tmurderher?’
His dark eyes widened, his head jerked in panic and then he grinned. ‘What? Ah, come on, woman, of course I didn’t murderher. I took her in a taxi to Pickering, put her in a B&B and told her to fly back to Dublin. Not in so many words, of course, actually in a lot,lotmore words, but I explained that I couldn’t be with her. I only left her an hour ago. She wanted me to stay but it wasn’t doing either of us any good.’
I felt a pull inside, an echo of loss. ‘That poor woman,’ I said softly.
‘I know, I know.’ Now Connor began to eat his omelette. ‘I tried to be gentle. I told her that this was no basis to begin a relationship. That I’d loved her once but it hadn’t beenher, it had been who I thought she was. We’d been planning a life, but we’d been doing it from the basis of thinking we were two single people, free to do as we wanted, not taking into account an ex-husband and two young children.’
‘How was she?’ I thought again of that pale face, those huge eyes. ‘I’m not sure Saoirse is entirely well, Connor.’
He shook his head. ‘I know. I think it might be delayed post-natal depression. The wee one is only ten months, and Saoirse does get left alone an awful lot, two children under three and a husband who works away – I think she needs help, not me. I was a symptom, not the cure.’
I resettled myself at the table, feeling a bit daft for my overreaction. ‘But you loved her,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t just go away.’
