‘One word! I could offer ten thousand words and she’d never believe me. I could show her a birth certificate and she’d say it was forged. Don’t you see she’s been convinced of this for years now? To accept any evidence to the contrary would be to lose her child all over again.’
Did Finbarr stop in that moment, or any moment, and consider whether he believed Agatha’s denials that Teddy and Genevieve were the same person? That when Agatha said her child, she also meant his child? I doubt he did. It would have been too contrary to his primary goal. I had already told him Teddy’s birthday was the same as Genevieve’s. That Archie’s mother came from County Cork, so he’d have known the perfect place to collect a baby to pass off as his own.
The nuns wouldn’t give a baby to Protestants, Finbarr had said.
Archie’s mother is a Catholic. And please don’t ever think to tell me what nuns wouldn’t do.
That face. Finbarr had kneeled in front of Teddy when he’d given her the whittled dog. His own eyes, looking back at him. How could he not have seen it?
A person does adhere to the mission at hand. We believe what furthers our own cause. I don’t blame Finbarr for this. What was stolen from me was stolen from him, too, even more completely, so that he never understood what he had to fight for. He thought he only had to fight for me.
‘That’s why you’ve got to convince her,’ he said to Agatha. ‘You haven’t even tried.’
Agatha looked away, off into the dark distance. Frustratingly silent.
‘Tell her, then, how it’s hurting you,’ he said. ‘To lose your husband.’ I never heard Finbarr say Archie’s name, not once. ‘Nan’s not cruel. Tell her you can’t live without him.’
‘But I think perhaps I can live without him. You can live without her, too.’
‘I know I can. I’ve done it all this while, haven’t I? But I don’t want to, Agatha. Don’t you want your husband anymore?’
‘I can’t say that I do. Not entirely.’ And then, she wasn’t sure if it was to assuage him or if it were true: ‘I don’t know, Finbarr. I’m sorry, I just don’t know.’
He let go of her elbow and touched her cheek with the coarse, lovely flat of his palm. And then he turned and walked away. She hated the sag of his shoulders. She wanted to give him hope, she did. But not enough to relinquish her own.
When daylight arrived, the first thing Agatha felt was a rush of happiness. How wonderfully foreign it all was, and what a release. Casting all propriety aside could almost eliminate the question: What would she do now? Having left the world so publicly, how could she return privately?
‘Can one woman cause such a fuss,’ she said to Chilton that morning, lying in his arms under a mountain of scratchy wool blankets, ‘and then just return without any explanation?’
‘Absolutely not.’ Chilton had a complicated way of wrapping both arms around her, using the good to hoist the bad. In this way he managed to clasp too tightly for her to sit up and look at his face. ‘It’s quite clear you can never go back. You’ll have to stay with me.’
She touched her fingers to his lips, eyes fixed on the ceiling.
‘I’ve had a murder to solve, you know,’ Chilton told her.
She broke free from his grasp and sat up so she could face him. This was the first she’d heard of it. Chilton told her about the Marstons.
‘How sad,’ Agatha said, and tears did come to her eyes. She’d forgotten the wider world and its inhabitants in the midst of her various conundrums.
‘What do you think?’ Chilton asked. ‘You write detective novels. Should I agree with Lippincott’s theory and call it a day?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly solve a crime I hadn’t invented. The point of a good detective story is to make it all obvious. You throw in enough variables so the reader doubts his own solution, and then at the end he can be pleased with himself for figuring it out. In life I imagine Occam’s razor applies. The simplest solution is usually correct.’
Chilton smiled. It pleased him enormously, to listen to her.
‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘Do you suppose your man Lippincott is right about the wife? There’s no reason to suspect anyone else, is there?’
‘To be perfectly honest I find myself not caring as I should.’
She kissed him.
‘I’d like to read your books,’ he went on. ‘I’d like to read every word you’ve ever written.’
Agatha smiled and pressed her forehead to his. ‘I’m not at all ready to go home,’ she said, and their kissing recommenced in earnest.
Who would have known it was possible to make love so rapturously and still entertain so many thoughts? Agatha kept her eyes open. Taking in the Spartan room and the man who’d been a stranger mere days before. She thought she would always be grateful for this span of time, and then she thought she might make it last forever. She could start calling herself Mrs Chilton today, and the two of them could go off somewhere together where nobody knew either of them. She would never have to associate herself with that terrible word, divorce, or face the music from running away and causing such a brouhaha. Back in Berkshire, Teddy would bear a scar, but we all acquire those along the way, don’t we, despite anyone’s best efforts. Nan would take up the mother mantle with a fervour few daughters had ever seen.
Eventually, if Agatha remained hidden, the world would forget she’d ever gone missing, or existed in the first place. She imagined herself shedding everything. Her old life scattered to the wind, melting into the air as mist off the sea. Nan could claim it all – the house, the husband, the child. Of course, this would prove terrible for Finbarr. But sometimes a person had to think of herself.
She could sidestep into a new existence, taking nothing but the writing with her. She could start fresh under a new name. She could change her hair, starve or stuff herself till she was unrecognizable, the woman she’d been before nothing but an unsolved mystery. While Mrs Chilton clattered away on the typewriter, and took long walks on the beach, and rolled under the covers with her gentle husband who adored – who worshipped her.
‘Darling Agatha,’ Chilton said, lips against her ear.
It felt so good to be darling, being lost didn’t matter.
A little while later, Chilton drove back to the Bellefort through the damp, late morning, his frayed woollen coat on the seat beside him, one chapped hand on the steering wheel. The rain from Sunningdale had made its way north, falling gently. A smile contoured his face, twitching at his lips. He didn’t know the turn Agatha’s fantasies had taken – running away with him and becoming Mrs Chilton. But he would have agreed to it in a heartbeat.