‘Of course. Thank you, Mrs Leech.’
In the lobby Finbarr sat on the settee, his pea coat open, rubbing his hands across his knees. He stood, and we walked outside together into the cold, where I stepped into him, sliding my hands into his coat pocket. I felt a square of paper, glossy against my fingertips, and pulled out the photograph I’d sent him, years ago. It was bent and battered, tearing around the edges. Tiny holes at its corners gathered upon themselves, indicating it had been pinned to more than one wall.
Have you ever looked at a picture of someone – from when they were very young – and thought: how sad? All that promise, all that hope. The girl looking back at me from that photograph may have known sadness （her broken mother, stiff upper lip, bringing her to have the picture made） but she didn’t know where her own road would lead. She grieved for her sister but felt sure no such fate would ever befall her. She knew the war was on but didn’t quite believe it. How could any war reach English shores? Impossible. If I had presented that girl with any of the obstacles approaching her – as predictions – she would have offered intractable solutions to each one. The face staring back at me believed better things lay ahead. Making a picture for a soldier, who’d return from the war exactly as he had been, to marry her, escorting her off to Ireland and perpetual happiness.
‘I wish I had a picture of you from that time,’ I said. ‘Why is it girls send pictures to soldiers but not the other way round?’
‘Listen to me, Nan.’ Finbarr took the picture back from me carefully, a precious relic, and returned it to his pocket. ‘Come away with me now and I won’t carry this with me anymore. We’ll have a new one taken. We’ll put this one in a book to show our children.’
‘But then I’ll never be able to show myself again. To our child.’
‘We’ve both become things we never saw for ourselves,’ he persisted. ‘I never wanted to go to war. I never wanted to fall sick. I never wanted to leave my own country, or even Ballycotton. What I never wanted most of all were the things that happened to you.’
I grabbed his hands and kissed them.
‘I’ll tell you something terrible,’ he went on. ‘If I had a choice, to make every man that died in war, from 1914 till now – Irishmen, Englishmen, Australians, Germans, Turks, all of them – if I had the choice to go back in time and let them live, or put our baby back in your arms, they’d all remain dead, every last one of them.’
‘If you can see that, Finbarr, can’t you see I need to continue?’
‘There’s only one road back to you, the real you. The road back to yourself, Nan. And that’s with me.’
‘But I don’t want the road back to me. I want the road to Genevieve.’
For the first time in a long while I pictured my daughter’s face not as the little girl purported to belong to the Christies, but the baby I’d last seen, seven years ago, carried away by Sister Mary Clare. I breathed in, unexpectedly harsh, like my own lungs had received a dose of mustard gas. Perhaps the kindest thing Agatha Christie could do – not only for Finbarr, but for me – was to convince me the child was indeed hers.
By the time Chilton reached the Timeless Manor’s second floor, the sound of Agatha’s typewriter was audible. A cheerful and industrious click clack click clack. He could imagine the way it would fill a house of his own. Every evening he would come home and put on a kettle, the sound of the typewriter from the other room, she so absorbed that she wouldn’t know he’d arrived, until he came into the room with a steaming mug of tea. Oh, darling, she would say, the day was lost to me. That would be fine with Chilton. He was used to doing for himself and would be glad to do for her, too. You keep writing, he’d say. I’ll take care of dinner.
Now she answered his knock, industry ceasing, her face alight with the joy of seeing him. Once he was no longer a novelty, disturbing her work would be something they’d quarrel about. It pleased Chilton to think of it, how he’d have to learn to tiptoe. He’d become adept at removing the kettle just before it whistled, slipping a mug quietly on the table beside her, and still she’d scold him for breaking her concentration. Must you always interrupt me? He’d kiss the crown of her head and steal away, leaving her to her work.