Page 36 of The Start of the Story
‘That I did. But she made me feel stupid, when I found out what she’d been playing at. There’s nothing like knowing you’ve been fooled for making you see someone in a different light. She’d no need to have been spinning all those tales about travelling the world to take pictures and meeting all your celebrities, she could have told me she was a wee girl from Kerry who’d left her husband. It would still have been a lie, but not such a wild one.’
‘I think,’ I said gently, ‘that she pretended to be what she wished she was. Free, travelling the world, meeting people. Notsomething that’s easy to do with two small children. She used you to be her fantasy self.’
All the pity that I’d stopped myself from feeling this morning came flooding in. That confused, grey-eyed girl who’d sat at this table as though she’d owned the house wasn’t quite the wilful liar I’d assumed, capturing herself a gorgeous professor in a net of untruths. She was a sick young woman who’d tried to escape a life that she was struggling with.
Then I had the awful thought that I had stopped myself from feeling sorry for her earlierbecause I’d thought she was taking Connor away. I pushed that thought away and squashed it hard under the knowledge that he was only here because he had nowhere else to go. He was a historian to my folklorist, and he wanted to move my stone.Still the enemy. A good-looking, fun one, but. Still.
‘Which B&B did you leave her in?’ I asked, putting my fork down on my plate with a clatter that rang through the room.
‘The one next to the pub? On the road in, near the bridge.’
I knew which one he meant. A nice place, clean and boutique. ‘I think I ought to go and make sure she’s all right,’ I said, grabbing my bag. ‘I don’t think she should be alone.’
Connor stared for a moment, then stood up too. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.
I stared at him. ‘Seriously?You’ve dumped her, conclusively, and you think it will make thingsbetterif you turn up? I just want to make sure that she’s all right. If she’s ill I don’t think she should be left alone just now.’
He nodded, slowly. ‘I called her mother. When I left Saoirse, I got her to give me her mother’s number and I told her everything. But she won’t be able to get over until tomorrow. I stayed with Saoirse as long as I could and I did ask the people at the B&B to keep an eye out.’
I was glad he’d even thought about it. Connor wasn’t the type to dump a girl and run, he’d wanted to make sure that someone would be there for her when he couldn’t be.
‘If it is depression then she’s not thinking straight. Look, you call the B&B and ask them to check up on her with some excuse. I’m going over there.’
Connor’s eyes were enormous with shock. ‘D’you think she might…? Ah, no, come on, now, I’m not worth that.’
I thought back to those days after Elliot’s death. The awful, aching hole that had suddenly opened in my life, that place that I had thought would be filled with parenthood, grandparenthood; that hole from which every lonely Christmas and special occasion, every Sunday morning walking alone, every evening in watching stupid TV programmes in silence, had stared back at me. I thought of those days spent lining up all the pills and tablets in the cottage and looking at them. Knowing that I could follow Elliot any time I chose, and it would stop this dreadful emptiness; the twitch every time a door banged, or a vehicle went past, when my heart would rise with the certainty that all this had been a mistake and he was coming home.
‘She’s very unhappy,’ I said softly. ‘And she might not be able to see any other way out.’ I pulled on my coat and walked out of the door.
The B&B was a five-mile drive away. Connor phoned me whilst I was en route, to say that he’d called the B&B and they’d checked on Saoirse. She was in her room, and they could hear her crying.
I hesitated after he hung up. Should I be doing this? Maybe Saoirse was best left alone to come to terms with what had happened? A strange woman turning up out of the blue couldn’t help her, could she?
But then I thought of how I’d felt. How anyone who had offered me understanding and company had been a lifeline backto the world that held coffee and cartoons, sunshine andStrictly. How talking about Elliot, about what had happened, had pulled me inch by inch out of that galactic black hole and back into real life. It had hurt, of course, but gradually the pain had eased, and I’d been able to crawl my way back into the world.
Maybe Saoirse needed that same lifeline.
I got to the B&B, under a crisp sky, where stars drilled their way through the night, and got the lady who was busy laying tables for breakfast to show me up to Saoirse’s room, where I tapped on the door.
‘Saoirse? It’s Rowan. We met in my kitchen this morning.’
I could hear her breathing on the other side of the door. The gasping grunts of breath that told of recent sobbing, now abated but not far away.
‘I came to talk,’ I said, reasoning that this sounded better and gave her more agency than ‘I came to make sure you were all right.’
‘What about?’ The voice was broken but distinct. She was sitting right by the door, from the sound of it. Probably on the floor.
‘Whatever you like. I think you might need some company, that’s all. It’s not a good time to be alone, and the nights are the worst.’
A long pause, during which I could hear the ragged, uncertain breathing. Then, faintly, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Almost a wail, and I could feel the truth in the words. Hadn’t I been there, only with a different cause?
‘It gets better,’ I said earnestly. Then, because anything was better than the silence, I sat on the floor on the landing outside her room and told her, through the carefully stripped pine panels of the door, how I’d lost my husband. Of the deeper griefs, of how we’d wanted a baby, how we’d tried, how it had seemed utterly hopeless. How we’d discussed IVF with thedoctors and then, that morning, that miraculous positive test that I’d never had chance to tell him about.
‘I still don’t know whether I was actually pregnant,’ I said to the doorknob. ‘Whether I misread the lines, or whether the grief at losing Elliot made it not stick. I will never know, and it was just that one, extra uncertainty that felt so dreadful.’
‘I’ve got two,’ the voice confessed. ‘Two girls. My two babies.’ Her words split under sobbing. ‘What have Idone?’
I thought carefully. ‘I think you’ve been very tired and very depressed, and Connor gave you a chance to escape for a while,’ I said softly. ‘And I think people will understand that you need help.’
