Page 48 of The Start of the Story
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Connor was very good at taking the irritated wind out of my sails. ‘I suppose so. It’s quite a hike through snow though.’
‘The exercise will be good for us.’
‘And we can’t go if it’s blizzarding. People get lost in the snow on the moors all the time.’
‘Seriously?Allthe time?’
‘Well, no, but sometimes. I’d rather not be a frozen corpse for Christmas, thank you.’
The light was almost gone from the room, what little illumination remained was mostly evening sky bounced off the snow; an unearthly whiteness reflecting off the walls and ceiling.It meant Connor was a shadowy shape, his face hidden in the depths of his hood. ‘Saoirse messaged me,’ he said.
I jerked my head up. ‘Saying what?’
He shrugged. ‘Mostly goodbye. She put in a message for you too. I have to say thank you to you. She’s getting help and she and Michael are trying to make a go of things. She said it’s because you talked sense to her.’
There was a moment of snow-kissed silence. ‘And you’re all right with that?’ I asked eventually, keeping my voice quiet and level.
‘It’s the best thing,’ he said, although there was a thickness to his voice that told me he was struggling a little with the emotional fallout. ‘No, really, it is. She and I were never real, so what I felt for her wasn’t real either. It couldn’t be.’
‘Doesn’t mean you didn’t love her, though, does it?’
I couldn’t see his reaction. It was too dim, despite the snowlight. ‘I didn’t loveher,’ he said slowly. ‘I loved who I thought she was. Sending her away was the only thing to do.’ Then, with his voice a little stronger, ‘And it sounds as though she’s getting herself sorted, which is grand. She was running away, and I’m not the person to run to, now, am I?’
‘Aren’t you?’ I said and could have kicked myself. ‘No,’ I added hastily. ‘You’re right. It might have felt real, but it wasn’t, and how would you have felt if youhadgone off with her and only found out about the husband and children later? It could have been far worse. I sat with her in that room, and she was tearing herself apart over the children and what she was doing to them. It wouldn’t have worked. You did the right thing, Connor, honestly.’
He stood for a second longer, unmoving. ‘Thank you again, Rowan,’ he breathed. ‘For understanding.’ Another moment of silence, and then, ‘Shall I do us something to eat now? We’ve notgot long before the ducks start looking in and wondering why we’re not throwing out the leftovers now.’
He was back to being the Connor I knew, with a smile in his voice and movement surrounding him as though someone had drawn cartoon lines to show his energy. But there was a dip to his shoulders and a ferociously over-the-top nature to his bustling into the kitchen.
‘You’ll get over it,’ I said, following him into the brightly lit room. ‘It hurts, I know, but the pain starts to fade after a while, like an injury. You never lose the scar, but that awful grinding agony really does mitigate.’
I watched him rummage in the fridge. ‘You’re not one for meal planning, now, Rowan, are you?’ He moved cheese and bottles around.
‘And it’s no good disengaging. You have to face it square on. It’s the best way.’
Quite what I was doing, giving advice on getting over a lost relationship, I had no idea. I still held the idea of Elliot to me like a cosy comfort blanket.
‘They’ll all be talking about me.’ Connor withdrew from the depths of the fridge carrying some pork chops. ‘At home. Ah, I was never sure about the going back. It’ll be all hushed conversations in corners and Mam a bit tight-lipped while Da gives me a beer and pats my shoulder and whispers not to worry. Iknowit’ll blow over and they love me really and that it was a bit of stupidity, now, but… there will be thelooks, y’know?’
‘You really care what they think of you, don’t you?’
‘Doesn’t everyone? Deep down? Even those yokes that pretend to be all careless and casual and free spirits and everything? It’s hard to hear the disapproval when it comesen masse.’
The chops went into a pan and I cut up some veg without really thinking about it. Connor moved back and forth acrossthe kitchen behind me, restlessly searching the cupboards, but, I thought, to really keeping moving because it was easier than standing and letting the memories hit.
‘The disapproval is their problem though,’ I said, slicing carefully. ‘You can’t legislate for what everyone else thinks of you, you only have to be able to live with yourself. That Catholic upbringing is giving you some grief, isn’t it, for all you say that you’ve left it behind?’
I turned around and saw him frozen at the far side of the kitchen, a spatula in hand, arrested in the movement of turning the chops, which were sizzling in a way that spoke of slight burning. ‘You might be at the heart of it now,’ he said slowly. ‘Me feeling an idiot, losing the woman I thought I loved and the whole future, it’s all tied up with the guilt and letting the family down.’ He poked the spitting chops. ‘You sound as though you know what you’re talking about here? From experience?’
I paused, knife blade suspended over the pak choi. ‘A little, perhaps. My parents didn’t altogether approve of Elliot. I mean, they were nice enough to him, very accepting when they met him, but I always got the feeling that they thought I could have done better than what my mother called “a builder”. He wasn’t “just” a builder, of course he wasn’t, he was a skilled tradesman. He was trained in historical methods of reconstruction – he could build a wattle and daub wall the old way.’ I smiled at the memory. ‘Treading the dung and straw into the clay with bare feet to get it to mix properly.’
‘Sounds like you’re well in recovery,’ Connor observed.
‘Like I said, you never really get over it. Every single reminder picks away at the scab. But—’ I turned and he stepped back – I was flourishing a really big knife ‘—you learn to live with it. Like… like giving yourself a bad knee from ice skating. It aches away in the background and every now and then you do something strenuous and it kicks up big time, but it alwaysdies back to that general background ache that you put up with, because it reminds you of what you once had.’
‘“Ice skating”?’
‘You know what I mean. Sometimes it’s nice to have that little bit of pain. It links you to what went before. Elliot’s never truly gone, because I remember him with that little ache. And you can remember the good times with Saoirse. It will hurt, but it reminds you that youhadthem.’
