Page 39 of The Start of the Story
‘Yes, I think I need to ease myself back into Christmas slowly,’ I said. ‘More on the crackers and pudding and less on the rows about Catholic dogma.’
‘Ah, well. Don’t say I didn’t ask you.’
‘I won’t. Thank you.’
He raised an eyebrow at me through his tea steam. ‘For?’
‘Inviting me.’
‘No trouble.’
From outside there came a splashy imperative sort of quacking. ‘I’d better make some toast,’ I said, tiredly. ‘They’ll only bang on the windows if I don’t, and I could do with something to eat.’
‘Here, I’ll do it. You stay put, you look done in.’
But I didn’t want to sit alone in the living room with memories of dreams in my head and the reality of Connor in another room. I followed him through to the kitchen again and sat on the edge of the kitchen table, looking out of the window at the sun, sloshing its light down into our little valley from a china-blue sky. Overnight a frost had iced the recent puddles into lace-edged solidity and crayoned around the edges of the windows in flaky white. The mud was solid ridges and even the river had a slow, jelly-like appearance as it curved across the ford, wide and dappled.
‘Why did you go?’ Connor asked suddenly, pushing bread into the toaster with some force, by the sound of it.
‘Go?’ I was tired, my brain wasn’t processing words properly. I couldn’t think of anywhere that I might have been that would have caused him to ask.
‘To Saoirse. Last night. You seemed so worried about her. I mean, yes, I had my concerns but – she’s a grown woman.’
I hesitated before turning back from the window. ‘I know what it’s like to suddenly find everything has turned upside down and the person you most want to talk to about it is the onewho caused it,’ I said. ‘When Elliot died, what Ireallywanted –allI really wanted – was to be able to talk to him about what I should do. But he wasn’t here, so I had to handle everything on my own. And that was… hard.’
The image of that line of pills sprang again, unwanted, into my head. Connor seemed to see it too, somehow. Maybe my expression gave it away, because he was watching my face very closely. When I let my eyes flicker from where tiredness had dragged them down to examine the tiled floor, he was frowning at my forehead.
‘It was good of you,’ he said at last, the words sounding slightly awkward. ‘I knew she was unhappy, but it was me making her so. I couldn’t stay.’
‘No.’
‘What else could I do?’ There was an anxiety now in his tone.
I reached out and touched his shoulder. ‘Nothing. Really, Connor, there was nothing else you could have done. But it wasn’t just you making Saoirse unhappy. I think, deep down, she knew that it wasn’t you, it was the whole situation. It can’t be much of a joke, moving hundreds of miles for your husband’s job, with two tiny children. Her mum helped her with the babies, but her mum can’t drive, and two hundred miles is too far to pop round and babysit. Listening to her last night, it was like she separated herself off into two people: at home she was Saoirse, wife and mother, and she wanted the chance to be seen as the Saoirse she used to be, which was where you came in.’
The toast popped up but Connor didn’t react. He stood, his shoulder rigid under my hand. ‘I feel so guilty,’ he said quietly. ‘I should haveknown.’
I let my hand fall. ‘Brought up a Catholic? Ofcourseyou feel guilty. It’s your default state.’
That made him laugh, and he was back to being the bright and breezy Connor again. ‘Ah, you’re right there. And it’sprobably the upbringing that’s making me so interested in your manor there.’ He pointed with an elbow, both hands being involved in toast, in the direction of the moor.
‘I thought you were interested in the Roman remains underneath it?’ I decided not to go back to the subject of Saoirse. He was beating himself up, I didn’t need to add to the percussion, and, really, it hadn’t been his fault. He’d come to realise that, of course, but for now the whole thing hurt and blaming Saoirse wouldn’t help him.
The ducks were fighting a wet war under the window for prime crust-snatching place, and Connor glanced out at them as he buttered the toast. ‘Well, yes, I am,’ he said, opening the window and hurling the end of the loaf in the direction of the birds. ‘But I’m also intrigued about how it all went out here. It’s not my period, of course, but I’m looking at some documents. I’ve got a load of tangential stuff that applies to the area, trying to trace old buildings and references to old roads and suchlike.’
A brief prickle of ownership went down my spine. ‘More my area of interest than yours, I’d have thought?’
‘That’s why I’ve been reading your books.’ Connor licked his fingers, which were covered in badly aimed butter.
‘Oh. Right.’ A tiny dropping sensation in my midriff told me that I was disappointed. I’d hoped he’d been reading my books to find out what an erudite and amusing writer I was and how I could turn folk tales into a commentary on social history. To find that he’d only been doing it so that he could research his area more thoroughly was – yes, disappointing.
I ate the toast he handed me, in silence. Well, comparative silence. There was a flap of wings and the big white duck, the swaggering leader of the bunch, arrived on the outside window ledge. An orange eye angled in through the glass.
Connor watched the avian activity with a look of amusement, and then stood uncertainly, holding his crusts.
‘Well, go on, then,’ I said. ‘That’s what they’re waiting for.’
‘I know.’ He stood, one hand on the window catch. ‘But if I open the window, that one will fall off. He’s in the way.’
