CHAPTER 19
Ella knew he was gone, before she even opened her eyes. She thought he had been gone a long time.
At least in daylight she could see where he was. From their room at the back of the house, an expanse of lawn swept down to a river fed by a stream from the hillside. As far as the eye could see was green: lawns and pasture and hillside, lush even at this barren season, punctuated with the solid-trunked, fragile-fingered outlines of skeletal winter trees.
If he had to pace, he had chosen a beautiful place to do it, Ella thought. He looked thin, as he walked alongside the river and back again, then back once more. Had he lost weight in the last few months, or was she just looking at him as a stranger would, in the distance, noticing his angular shape? Had his shoulders always been hunched like that? Surely he usually stood taller and straighter?
His silver hair was like a beacon, a white flame against the scarlet branches of dogwood in the garden and the spent brown embers of bulrushes along the riverbank.
I love this man, she thought, and the thought ached. She hoped that her love would be wide enough to encompass what she didn’t know of him yet. She did know him, she told herself. It was only facts that she didn’t know. Her cautious head, accustomed to mistrusting strangers, would never have let her heart go this far in loving a man whose secrets would render him unlovable to her. Or so she hoped.
He had promised he would tell her everything, if only she didn’t ask questions. She sighed, stroking the unborn child in her stomach. She had another unknown being to prepare for; she hoped Franz’s unknown self wouldn’t take so long to emerge.
She dressed, layering a long-sleeved top over a camisole, topped by an Indian cotton tunic top and her velvet patchwork waistcoat, with a tiered long skirt over thick black tights and buttoned boots. The mist was lifting, except by the river where it still floated in wraiths like a ghost among the bulrushes, and a patch of blue sky was appearing above the hill, but still it was damp. An ethereal kind of setting, Ella mused, brought down to earth by the smell of bacon wafting up from downstairs.
Ella hoped there were other guests staying and Tom wasn’t frying the bacon for them, forgetting they were vegetarian.
There was no sign of Tom when she went downstairs, nor of other guests in the dining room. Ella wondered whether to try and attract Franz’s attention by waving from the window or go out and call him, and while she was hovering uncertainly a woman came into the room.
‘Good morning, my love! You’ll be Ella? I’m Mary, Tom’s wife.’
‘Hello.’
Mary was exactly as Tom’s wife should be, Ella thought – like a female Tom, with the same round shape and curly hair that had once been red and was giving way to grey.
‘Your man’s like the priest we have staying here sometimes,’ Mary said, waving a hand towards Franz out in the garden.
‘A priest?’ Ella stifled a laugh. Franz would so not appreciate the comparison.
‘Up at dawn and walking up and down the garden saying his prayers,’ Mary explained. ‘You’re not a Catholic,’ she stated, looking Ella up and down, ‘or you’d know to be glad that he’s not a priest, because our priests of course don’t marry.’
Ella felt justified in laughing this time. ‘You can tell I’m not a Catholic, can you?’ she said. ‘Just by looking at me?’
‘I can,’ Mary said with finality. ‘It takes one to know one, as in everything else. So, what are you then?’
‘Uh – I guess, a New Age Jewish agnostic, if anything,’ Ella said, realizing she’d never been asked the question before.
‘Well, each to their own,’ said Mary comfortably. ‘Now, you’ll not see Tom at breakfast. He does the evening welcoming and I do the mornings, unless we’re full, which we’re very far from at this time of year, as you can see for yourself. He’s the night owl, you see, and I’m the lark.’
‘That’s well arranged,’ Ella agreed. ‘He cooked us a lovely supper last night.’
‘He told me you ate nothing. What will you have this morning? I’m doing bacon for him and me but you won’t want that, you and your man out there, will yez?’
Ella blenched. ‘Just orange juice for me. I’ll go and call Franz.’
‘Leave him be, love. I’ll make him something soon enough when he comes in, but men need to be left alone with their thoughts, such as they are, when they’re striding about like that. Dry toast is good for the morning sickness, if you can manage a slice.’
Ella laughed again. ‘Can you tell that as well, by looking at me?’
‘Sure, there’s nothing clever about that,’ Mary assured her. ‘I’ve seen that look too many times, and been through it myself with five. All grown up now, and two with children of their own. When is the babby due? You’re not far along the line, are you?’
‘September.’
‘An autumn child. Do you want a girl or a boy?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘Have the boys first,’ Mary advised. ‘The fathers bond with sons and you’ll need all the help you can get: they get up to more mischief than a barrel-load of monkeys.’
Ella wasn’t sure whether she meant the boys or the fathers and thought she had better not ask.
‘Then by the time the girls come along,’ Mary continued, ‘you’ll find them easy to rear by comparison, and able to lend a hand around the house as they grow up, and useful at helping you get around your husband and get your own way once in a while. Dry toast and orange juice it is, then.’
All the tables were neatly laid, despite the absence of any guests but themselves, so Ella chose the table nearest the window and looked out at the greenery and the open sky and tried to keep her gaze from following Franz. He was talking on the phone, she noticed. Surely it was too early to phone Alison. Who then?
She forced her attention back to the scenery. No wonder they call it the Emerald Isle, she pondered; you don’t get that deep almost blue shade of green anywhere in England, certainly not in February. Though what would she know, having lived all her life in the south, in Somerset or London, with occasional jaunts to Cornwall where her mother once had a lover who lived in one room of an otherwise derelict mill? There were ducks, she remembered, that wandered in and out of the downstairs room. She had liked the ducks and the mill but not the man.
What was it about this trip, this place, that kept recalling her childhood? Perhaps, as Phil had suggested to Franz, they were not on holiday at all but on some kind of pilgrimage – not to a place but to the past.
Maybe it was the place itself that drew Franz, having been born in Ireland, as he had finally told her, but he’d said it was in the west, not this part. Yet he looked at home here, Ella thought, somehow part of the environment.
He went well with the scenery. He assumed the accent of the people like slipping on an old overcoat – but then he did that with everyone, even the old Eastern European refugee couple who had slept in the doorway of the newsagent’s, two doors down from Franz’s flat, for a couple of weeks before being ‘rescued’ by a refugee charity and housed in one draughty room in a tower block daubed with graffiti and urine.
Ella had found their accent impossible to understand, whereas to Franz it had seemed effortless not only to know what they were saying but to answer them with a trace of the same accent in his own speech – presumably to put them at their ease, even if he did it unconsciously.
She had talked to Phil about Franz, feeling disloyal yet wanting to know how this man saw him, and Phil had said, ‘It could be that he tries to be Everyman, partly out of a genuine goodness of heart and desire to meet everyone on their own terms, and partly because it provides a way for him to be every man except himself.’
He was coming in. She wiped her thoughts, as swiftly as hitting Delete on a computer, as if afraid he would read them.
‘I didn’t realize the time,’ he apologized. ‘Have you had breakfast?’
‘Not yet. I didn’t order you anything. Tom’s wife’s on breakfasts. She’s in the
kitchen.’
‘What are you having?’
‘I asked for orange juice but she’s prescribed dry toast, for morning sickness. And no, I didn’t tell her – you’re right, they are all psychic here!’
She was relieved to see him laughing. His face had looked drawn, somehow older, when he came in.
She avoided asking him whether he had any thoughts on what they would do today but Mary had no such reservations.
‘You’re going to Glendalough this morning, then, Tom says, and what have you planned for the next few days you’ll be staying with us?’
So he booked us in here for a few days; we won’t be touring? Ella thought. She noticed that Franz avoided her eyes when he answered Mary.
‘We haven’t decided. Glendalough today, anyway.’
‘The mist is clearing,’ said Mary. ‘You could take the Enniskerry road later on towards Powerscourt and see the waterfall. If you’re lucky you might get a rainbow: it’s fabulous there, in the fall of the spray. You know Wicklow?’ she asked Ella.
‘No. I’ve never been to Ireland before.’
‘Then you’re in for a treat. But I won’t spoil it for you. She’ll see soon enough for herself, won’t she?’
Franz nodded, still not looking at Ella.
So he has at least been to this area before, and she knows he has – because he told Tom or because she just knows, like she knew I’m not Catholic and am pregnant? Did he live in this part of the country at some time?
If Ella hoped that Mary would elicit more from Franz, she was disappointed. Having established that he didn’t want a fry-up, porridge, Weetabix or Coco Pops, Mary went back to the kitchen to make more toast.
‘We’ll leave after breakfast, shall we?’ Franz suggested. ‘You’re not feeling too sick for a car journey?’
‘No, I’ll be okay. I’d rather drive, if you don’t mind. It takes my mind off it.’
‘If you’re happy with driving on roads you don’t know?’
‘I don’t mind.’
So you do know the roads round here, then? She hoped he was noticing how good she was being, not commenting, not asking. It was more of a strain than she had bargained for, never having considered herself particularly nosy. But surely it was normal to ask questions about things you didn’t know about a person you did know? Never mind; go with the flow and you’ll find out soon enough, if you need to know at all, she told herself firmly.
She thought of women in some cultures who would consider it impertinent to ask questions of their husbands, and who wouldn’t find it abnormal or hurtful at all that information should be kept from them.
Did she find it hurtful, being asked not to ask questions of Franz, about Franz? She had to admit that she probably did.
It’s only because of my cultural conditioning, and the century I’ve been born in, she told herself. If I were a Victorian wife, or a veiled bride in a haveli, or even an orthodox Jewish wife wearing a sheitl to cover her natural hair outside the home and ordering her kitchen into meat-cookery and milk-cookery areas, I wouldn’t dream of thinking my husband was being secretive if he didn’t tell me every detail of his life, past and present, not to mention the future. Not to mention anything, in fact.