‘Nan,’ Finbarr said. ‘You can’t go through with this. It’s wrongheaded, and wrong, besides. You belong with me, not with a man already married.’
So he had received the letter I’d sent him. And this was his answer. It had been a mistake to write to him, a moment of weakness.
‘It’s too late,’ I said, hoping my voice sounded more sad than reproachful. ‘You’re too late.’
He put his hand around my wrist, firm but gentle, and pulled me further into the wood. My hat had started to fall and he pulled it back onto my head, down over my ears, which must have been burning red from high dudgeon, and the chill. Finbarr didn’t want me to be cold. After the Armistice celebrations, when we had lain together in London, in the midst of a passion that had been building for years, he’d paused to adjust the pillow beneath my head.
This was the third time I’d seen him since that day. The first was in Ballycotton, when he lay delirious with influenza. The second was nearly a year later, after I had left Ireland forever, and finally he came to find me in London. He had pleaded with me to go away with him to Australia. But I didn’t.
The Finbarr who’d made love to me on the day of the Armistice celebration had seemed his old self. Or it could be that was just what I’d wanted to see – a blissful, fleeting illusion. By the time he came back for me, neither of us were ourselves. I was wrecked by loss. And he was just wrecked. Twenty pounds lighter. No trace of the joyful air that had been his salient trait. His voice, ruined by the mustard gas, didn’t sound a bit like the boy I remembered.
（‘Sometimes,’ Agatha Christie wrote, years later, ‘one cannot help a tide of rage coming over one when one thinks of war.’）
‘No,’ I’d told him then. ‘I can’t go away with you. I can’t go anywhere.’
Now, six years later, in Harrogate, Finbarr and I might not have returned to our original selves. But we could at least face each other calmly. I could look at him and feel no recrimination. None of this had ever been his fault.
‘What we need,’ he said, gathering my hands up in his, ‘is to get away from here. We can start over. You and me.’
‘Oh, Finbarr,’ I said. ‘That’s not what I need. Not at all.’
I pulled away from him. There was a considerable amount of brush to crash through, to get back to the road. The winter sky opened wide above me and I hugged myself tightly. Breathe in, breathe out. That’s how I’d get through these next days. One breath followed by another.
Finbarr was just behind me. He put his hand on my shoulder and I shrugged it off. The last time I’d seen him, my insides were melted to grey. There was still so much to be reckoned with. And then there was the change in him. A few days from this moment Inspector Chilton would say something to me about going to war. How the world seemed one way beforehand. Then, afterwards, you had seen the Big Sadness and you couldn’t ever unsee it. Finbarr had not a single line on his face. He owned the same tall, spare and agile form. But the sun had left him. Like the rasp in his voice had replaced the old clarity, the Big Sadness had replaced his joy. If it hadn’t made him seem like a ship that had lost its anchor, it might have made me love him even more. I had seen a measure of that sadness myself.
He reached out and pulled me back into his arms. Three beats. Then he let me go, turned and trudged off down the road, the same way he’d come. Perhaps he thought I’d follow him but I didn’t. I just stood watching him go. He knew I was still there because while I was still in earshot he raised one arm, without looking back, and called, ‘You’ll see me again soon, Nan. Very soon.’
More than an hour later, just before entering the baths with Lizzie Clarke, I asked myself the logical question Finbarr hadn’t answered: how had he known to find me in Harrogate?
‘Are you all right?’ asked Lizzie, as I settled beside her in the hot water.