The Firebird (22 page)

But it hadn’t worked out that way. For starters, the table – a small, square grey table dressed up with a grey linen cloth draped across it – was so small there wasn’t a way we could sit at it without our knees touching. Ever the gentleman, Rob had made room for me, shifting his feet a bit further apart, but that hadn’t helped. Now my knees were between his, and that only made me a lot more aware of him.

And for another thing, I hadn’t counted on just how seductive this mental connection would be, that we’d shared today following Anna. Breaking that connection had been difficult, like stepping from a warm room to the wintry world beyond. It had been harder because Rob’s mind had stayed open to me, fully open, as though …

That was it, I realised. He’d had no defences up at all, as though he hadn’t had the energy to raise them.

He’d finished my dinner. The cutlery clanked as he set it on top of his stacked empty plates and slid everything off to one side to make room for his elbows. He didn’t exactly lean closer, but in that confined space it felt like he did as he lifted his gaze so it levelled on mine.

‘I’m fine,’ he assured me. ‘I’ve done this afore, and with less cause. Truth is, I enjoy it. So stop feeling guilty.’

‘I’m not. I just—’

‘Nick.’

No one else ever called me that. And if they had, it would never have hit me with all the effect of that one little syllable rolled in his deep Scottish voice. I’d forgotten the sound of it. Now it brought back a whole rush of remembered scenes I wasn’t ready to face, so instead I said, ‘I’m just concerned.’

‘No need for that.’ His tone was light, but it was meant to make a point. ‘I’ve got a mother.’

‘And you don’t need two?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Sorry. But you look—’

‘Like hell?’ he guessed.

‘No.’
Hardly that,
I thought, then quickly closed my mind before he heard me.

‘Like what, then?’

The rain spared me from answering. It came on unexpectedly, and pattered hard against the bright red awning overhead and made the people who’d been standing round outside scoop up their parcels and their cameras and dash in to find a place to sit.

An older couple took the table nearest ours, and Rob was forced to move his leg again to give them space, while to our other side a family with young children dragged another chair across and squeezed themselves into the corner.

We were well surrounded, now. Their conversations, private as they were, flowed round and over us and I knew anything I said to Rob they’d hear as well, so I said nothing for a while.

The waitress came and took our empty plates, and brought another beer for Rob, and for myself a cup of coffee garnished with a tiny biscuit and a little square of Belgian chocolate. I drank it while the older couple tried to choose which battlefield to visit the next morning, and the children on the other side decided on their meals, with much negotiating, and I couldn’t help but wonder what they’d think if I asked Rob the question forming in my mind.

No doubt they’d all react the same way as that big man and his mates had in the pub that night in Edinburgh two years ago. They’d think us freaks.

I carefully unwrapped my chocolate, thinking. Then I let down my defences.
Rob?

He looked at me expectantly, not giving any sign that he had noticed how I’d spoken. Not surprising, since he’d told me it all sounded just the same to him.

I took a breath, and went on,
Can I ask you something?

Watching him, I saw the moment’s lapse before the realisation struck him; saw his gaze dip down to touch my mouth before returning to my own, a dawning light of pleasure in the depths of his blue eyes as though he’d just received an unexpected gift. He answered with his own thoughts:
Ask me anything you like.

There was a freedom, I thought, talking to him like this, while the people seated round us carried on their conversations unaware.
How do you stop and skip ahead like that?

I’m sorry?

Well, when we were watching Anna in the convent …

Aye?

We didn’t stay and watch her all the time that she was sleeping, for example. You just stopped, and skipped ahead and found her somewhere else, and then went on from there. How did you do that?

Practice.
He leant back and looked away from me, relaxed.
I stumbled on the way to do it when I was at school, by chance, and found it saved a lot of time when doing things like this. And so I practised. I could teach you, if you like.

My scepticism must have carried clearly in my thoughts without my having to express it, because Rob, still looking out towards the square, half-smiled while making his reply.
You underestimate yourself, I think.

Yes, well. I haven’t got your skills.

Most skills are learnt. Or at the very least, developed. If I
handed you a cello, would ye ken the way to play it? No. But given time and practice, ye could learn.

You’re an optimist
. It came out as an accusation.
Anyway, it’s not a good analogy. You’re working with a cello, I’ve just got a ukulele.

His gaze slid back to mine, amused.
You finished with that coffee, yet?

Almost. Why, do you want to leave?

You read my mind.
A wave of warmth rode with those words, and then his thoughts withdrew. He hailed the waitress, paid our bill, and pushed his chair back as though he’d been sitting long enough. Aloud he said, ‘Let’s take a walk.’

It was dark now, after ten o’clock according to the clock face on the tower of the Cloth Hall, which at every quarter hour let loose a beautifully melodic peal of bells, a proper carillon that lingered in the fresh night air. The rain had stopped, and left a fairyland of bright reflections on the street outside and in the square – the glimmer of the funfair’s flashing lights and coloured neon, and the even wilder colours of the prizes hung in clusters from the ceilings of the side stalls.

Couples sauntered past with pushchairs bearing tired toddlers, fighting sleep and watching fascinated as the dragon roller coaster rattled round its loops to the delighted screams of those inside it.

‘Want to ride the roller coaster?’ Rob asked, teasing.

‘No thanks. I’m not good with thrills,’ I told him. ‘I get sick.’

‘I’ll make a note of that.’

We passed a stall hung thickly with assorted cuddly toys including two huge purple unicorns, and looking up I thought of Anna’s father’s grave and of the dancing unicorns that graced his stone memorial within the convent’s church. The showman in the stall, misunderstanding my interest, called a challenge out to Rob that needed no translation.

Pausing, hands in pockets, Rob looked down at me and grinned. ‘Are you wishing for one of the unicorns, then? Shall I win you one?’

It wasn’t a ball-in-the-bucket or hoopla game, but a full-sized shooting gallery with tethered air rifles set in a row, watched by large mural paintings of James Bond and Wild West gunslingers.

Doubtful, I asked, ‘
Could
you win me one?’

‘Aye, I’m a decent shot.’

Of course, he would be, I thought, given his profession. Policemen might not go around shooting their guns all the time, but they had to be trained how to use them.

He handed his coins to the showman and shouldered a rifle and started to pick off the targets.

‘You’re showing off,’ I said.

‘I might be. Why?’ he asked me, sighting down the barrel of the gun. ‘Are ye concerned?’

He said it lightly, but I knew then that this wasn’t about winning me a prize, because my brother did the same thing, sometimes, when he felt the need to prove himself. He went all manly and competitive.

I must have stung Rob’s pride, I thought, implying that the day had taken more from him than he could handle, so in penance I stood by and let him demonstrate how wrong I’d been. He did it so decisively that in the end the showman finally stopped him, made a gesture of defeat, and with a long pole hooked one giant purple unicorn down from the ceiling.

Rob handed it on to me, looking decidedly pleased with himself. ‘There you go, that’ll mind ye of Scotland.’

It would remind me of much more than that, I knew. ‘Thanks,’ I told him. ‘But what on earth am I supposed to do with it?’

‘Anything you want to. That’s the point,’ he said, ‘of having one.’

It proved, if nothing else, to be a brilliant conversation starter. On our way back down towards Sint Jacobsstraat we met half a dozen strangers who felt moved to stop and chat and comment on my unicorn, and it drew a lot of interest from the knot of men who’d spilt out from the Old Bill Pub across from our hotel, to stand and drink their pints there on the pavement near a little chalkboard sign that read: ‘Live Football’.

Rob got talking with them, friendly as he was, and learnt they’d come from Belfast just this morning, and done duty as the honour guard this evening at the last post ceremony at the Menin Gate. And so of course he bought them all another round, but when they tried to urge him to stay longer, have a drink with them, he shook his head and told them thanks, but no.

‘You’ve better things to do, eh?’ one man joked as we were leaving.

‘Aye.’ Rob smiled in reply, but there was nothing in his tone or face to match their own suggestive laughter as we started off again along the pavement, and he didn’t sling his arm around my shoulders as he’d done when we were dating. Both his hands stayed in his pockets as he matched his steps to mine. It was like walking with my brother.

The hotel’s front façade was a bright blaze of light, the glass doors sliding open as we neared them, but instead of heading through them Rob walked on and led me further down to where the car sat parked along the quiet square of green before the looming shadow of the church.

The street was darker here, although the sulphur-yellow street lamps fixed along the gabled rooflines of the huddled houses made the rain-washed cobbles glitter gold in places.

Rob said, ‘Let’s put your wee friend, there, in the boot.’

He travelled well prepared. I watched him shift a first-aid kit, a toolbox and a duffle bag to make room for my unicorn, and then from underneath a folded tarp he took a heavy woollen tartan blanket. And another.

‘What are those for?’

‘Well, it’s like I said.’ He slammed the boot securely closed and locked it, turning back to me, his eyebrow lifting. ‘I have better things to do.’

The covered passageway of brick beneath the houses where we’d stood that afternoon was now closed up, great wooden garage doors securely locked against intruders, but there still remained the sheltered spot beneath the trees where we’d sat first this morning. The narrow street here, with the banks and trees all down the one side and the few dark shuttered houses on the other, was so quiet I could hear the murmur of the moat that ran unseen behind us.

As Rob spread one of the blankets down I said, ‘You’re mad. We’ll freeze to death out here.’

We wouldn’t, I knew. It was only that sitting with Rob in the daylight was different to sitting with him in the dark.

‘Have ye no faith at all?’ He was waiting for me to sit down, so I did, with reluctance. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we’ll be off back to London, and Anna’s still well stuck in Ypres.’

‘She could be here awhile,’ I said.

‘Aye, so she could.’ He sat too, close beside me but giving me space. ‘But we won’t be.’ The heavy warm weight of the second wool blanket shut out the night’s chill as Rob tucked it around me. ‘We’ve only the one night left.’ Holding his hand out, he looked at me. ‘Let’s make it count.’

Anna knew that she was not the only one within the convent’s walls who felt alone. Sometimes at night she heard a woman weeping, softly distant, and the melancholy sound stole down the corridor and seemed to wrap around her own small body lying silent in her bed, and give a voice to her own misery.

She’d thought that it might be Dame Clare. She’d heard the story from the older girls, about the young and tragic lady who had loved a soldier from the Regiment of Clare, that gallant regiment that charged a nearby battlefield ten years before and captured the enemy’s colours for their bravery, those colours that now hung within the choir here at the convent. But the lady’s soldier fell in that same charge, and grief had brought her here to live and be a pensioner and daily make her peace with that same God who’d cruelly taken all her dreams.

Dame Clare, thought Anna, had cause to spend her nights lamenting, but the other students told her it was not Dame Clare she’d heard. The weeping woman was, they said, a new arrival to the convent, neither nun nor pupil.

‘I was told,’ one of the older girls said, hushed and speaking slowly so they’d not be overheard at dinner, ‘that her lover was an English spy, who wooed her for the simple fact her family lived at St Germain and had connections to King James. But finding she could tell him nothing useful, he abandoned her, and now he’s gone to Paris and her shame has been discovered so her family sent her here.’

The older girls thought this was wildly romantic, and one of the younger girls thought it a scandal, but Anna just thought it unfair.

After all, it hadn’t been the sad young woman’s fault that she had caught the eye of someone so deceitful, and had trusted him, and Anna thought it very wrong the spy was still at liberty while the young woman had now been disgraced and shut away.

When she said so to Sister Xaveria after their prayers the next morning, and asked her how God could allow such injustice, the nun asked, ‘And how did you hear of this?’

Anna explained, ending with, ‘… and so she telt me that it couldnae be Dame Clare.’

They were still standing in the choir of the convent church, and Anna cast a quick look upwards at the captured flags that hung above them, swaying slightly to the unseen movement of the air.

‘She telt me,’ Anna added as an afterthought, ‘that Dame Clare disnae weep.’

‘’Tis true.’ Sister Xaveria looked up, as well. ‘She does not weep. She prays.’