‘The house gave me permission to stay,’ he told me. ‘That’s more important than permission from the owners.’
Oak trees bent in a bald canopy overhead, sagging with the memory of their lost leaves, starlight making its way through the branches, creating a kind of mist with our exhaled breath.
‘Shall we run to the front door?’ Finbarr asked.
I laughed. But all at once, before my voice could object, my body answered. I gave myself a head start by kicking off without warning, my muscles creaky but coming to life against the cold air. Finbarr overtook me quickly but not so quickly that I didn’t feel proud, almost at his heels, the good, lost feeling of blood and breath pumping through every ventricle to every cell.
Finbarr finished, slamming against the front door. We walked inside, breathing hard, past the smouldering fire in the front hall.
‘Is Mrs Christie here?’ I asked.
‘Yes. She’s here.’
I followed Finbarr up the staircase to what must have been the grandest bedroom, his spare possessions already settled into occupancy, a scarf over a chair, a battered satchel with his father’s initials barely visible resting in a corner. Nice of Agatha, I thought, to let him have this room instead of taking it for herself. He kneeled and rebuilt the fire while I stood, watching his face in the glow. My hands cupped their opposite elbows. I knew I should be shivering until the fire crackled in earnest, but instead I felt as warm as I ever had.
Finbarr stood. He took off his coat and tossed it into a corner. He put his arms around me and pulled me close.
‘Nan,’ he said, ‘I know you grieve. I grieve, too. We’ll never forget her, but we can have another. We can be together.’
‘We can’t be together,’ I said, even as I let him ease off my coat and felt his lips against my neck. ‘Because I have to be with her. I can’t go off to live in a different hemisphere to my own child.’
‘Nan,’ he said, more sharply. He gave my shoulders a little shake, as if trying to wake me. ‘I’m right here. But she’s gone. There’s no point in looking for something you’ll never find, or holding on to something that’s already lost.’
Finbarr had never seen or touched our baby. He could love her but he couldn’t understand. There was no point in saying so. I didn’t want to argue. This night had arrived unexpectedly, a gift out of nowhere, and I just wanted it to continue, separate in time, a little bubble away from the world and everything it had done to us. I would have traded this moment with Finbarr in an instant if it would rearrange the past. But that wasn’t possible. So I took it, never mind how it might affect the future. I hadn’t packed my contraceptive sponge when I left London. Why would I? But I found myself not caring. Anything that happened this time would be very different from the last.
‘Hush, Finbarr,’ I said. ‘Just hush.’
I silenced him with a kiss that led us to the bed, finally a place and time carved out of all these years, to be together in the way we were always meant to be.
Chilton had learned to walk silently during the war. One of the benefits of not being a tall man, and being slight in build, was that if he led with his heel, moving from the hip, he could walk with hardly any footfall, even with his longest strides.
And the truth was, even if he’d stomped, with no attention to keeping us from knowing he was there, we might not have known he was following us, so absorbed were we in each other.
But follow us he did, undetected, even when Finbarr turned to point the dog towards home. Chilton froze then, arms by his side, as if he could make himself invisible even to an animal. When Finbarr turned, and we resumed our walk, Chilton didn’t hesitate before resuming his stride. A sad pair, weren’t we? Chilton could tell, he knew, we’d been separated by the war, only now coming back together. What he couldn’t figure out was our connection to Agatha Christie. He just knew we’d lead him directly to her. And so we did.