I walked in circles around the smoking area outside. Why had she called him? Why did she want him there? Every time I saw him, all of the old hurts came to the surface. No son of mine is soft. That’s what he said the first time I fell off my bike and started crying. Then he gave me a thump that knocked me over again. You need to toughen up in this world. I certainly needed to toughen up with him as a father. What kind of a grandfather would he be? I wondered. Then that made me even angrier. He’d probably be the perfect grandfather – get everything right this time around, now that he’d made all his mistakes on me. Lu escaped the brunt of his behaviour, maybe because she was a girl. Sometimes I resented her, but mostly I was relieved that she didn’t have to go through it.
I thought of Martha again. For so long I had hidden the parts of me that seemed broken beyond repair. But she had seen past my feeble attempts at being someone people would like, hiding the breaches within me that always caused me to fall short. I had learned nothing from my father, only how to feel inadequate all the time. I realised now that this was the hollow inheritance passed down through the men in my family. And we spent our lives doing whatever it took to look like a strong man. Like scaffolding around me, it was only ever meant to be temporary. Something was supposed to get fixed inside. Only it never did. And somehow, Martha saw that brokenness and made it okay to be there. She didn’t expect perfection, just honesty. Kindness. After everything she had been through, she was still willing to see that in me. To have the bravery to care about someone again. I checked my phone again. Nothing. If I wanted to be with Martha, I had to make sure I was worthy of her first.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
OPALINE
Dublin, 1922
It was almost Christmas. Matthew arrived with some sprigs of holly to decorate the shop and little parcels with cooked ham, biscuits and cake. Whatever he bought for his own house, I knew he always set aside a little for me, and the kindness of this gesture made my heart ache. I was in no position to refuse his charity. Whilst my catalogue of books was selling well in Ireland and even in the States, money was still quite tight and I was trying to put small amounts aside for the future. No sooner had he stepped inside the door than the stained-glass windows began to bloom with mistletoe.
‘Stop it at once!’ I said.
‘Stop what?’ Matthew asked, holding a sprig of holly aloft.
‘Oh, nothing.’ I blushed. ‘The baby is kicking.’
He placed the holly on the table and gave me a lopsided smile.
‘I remember when Muriel was pregnant with little Ollie. He used to perform all of his gymnastics at night.’
The baby wasn’t really kicking, I’d only said it as an excuse, but when Matthew took a step closer, he asked if he could touch my stomach. I wanted him to, but I couldn’t even speak. I just nodded. As soon as he put his palm gently on the curve of my belly, she began to move.
‘Ha! There she is.’ He grinned. ‘That’s real magic.’
He hadn’t judged me when I told him about the pregnancy. He didn’t even ask for any explanation about who the father was, or where he was. He simply asked if there was anything he could do.
‘Why didn’t you take over the shop?’ I asked. ‘You must have wanted to, when you were younger.’
He took his hand away and I felt the absence keenly.
‘I grew up,’ was all he said, shrugging and looking over the place with misty eyes. ‘Besides, it’s in the right hands now.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, running my hands along the shelf, wondering if he could hear the spines creak and pages sigh as I did.
‘My father was never a wealthy man, Opaline. At least not financially. Yet I remember when times were hard he would never doubt himself, he would simply say that perhaps the shop was waiting to become a library again. And seeing your books here now, I believe he was right. It didn’t want to be a nostalgia shop or even a magic shop.’ He reached out and patted the wooden walls. ‘It has returned to its roots.’
When he left, I filled the silence with a seasonal recording of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker on the Victrola and took down a copy of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which the ballet was based. I recalled a note from the library in Yorkshire, which remarked that he was one of Emily Bront?’s favourite authors. If I remembered correctly, she had read his novel The Sandman in its original German. And it was this simple thread of thoughts that brought to mind a possession I had put away and given no further thought since my trip to London. The sewing box.
The little purchase I had made from Mrs Brown was so plain and uninteresting that I had never given it more than a cursory look. And since I also suspected it had never truly been a part of the Bront? household, I had carelessly dropped it in the bottom drawer of my bureau, untouched.
I leaned down and took it out, placing it in front of me on the desk. I let my fingers run across the surface and closed my eyes as if I could somehow divine its provenance. It wasn’t even a proper sewing box, but an old tin cash box. Inside was a collection of bobbins, needles, thimbles and thread. I removed them all, one by one, as I had done the first time on the boat back from Liverpool. Perhaps I had missed something – a name scratched in the metal or a clue of some sort. Nothing.
I could hear thunder rumbling in the distance and when I looked up, fat drops of rain began to hit the windowpane. I stroked my belly. ‘Don’t worry, little one, the gods are playing games in the clouds,’ I said gently. Normally I hated storms, but I was determined not to pass this on. Besides, there was a magical feel to the air, as though something exciting might happen.
I got up to close the shutters on the windows and wrapped a woollen shawl around my shoulders. I took the sewing box into my hands and again tried to feel the past somehow. I had read of people who could touch an object and have a vision of the previous owner. Silly, of course, but I closed my eyes and as I turned it over in my hands, I found something. I hardly dared to open my eyes, reluctant to prove my sense of touch incorrect, but there it was – an almost invisible groove at the base of the box. If anyone passing by the shop could see my face, I’m sure that I resembled a treasure hunter at the entrance to an ancient Egyptian tomb!
Slowly, I slid the outer cover back and out slipped a tiny black notebook, the size of a playing card. I gasped. What had I discovered? How long had it been secreted in this hidden compartment and who had put it there? All of the possibilities crashed into one another and for quite some time I was frozen into inaction. I hadn’t even realised how my hand pressed hard over my beating heart while my head bent low to the desk, as if the notebook would somehow speak to me.
While I savoured that delicious moment just before the unknown becomes known, I could delay no longer. My curiosity was at its peak. I reached tentatively for the cover and began to carefully open it. It released a dry, woody smell. Immediately I imagined a young woman scribbling notes by the fireside – as though its fragrance was still imbued with the environment in which it was created.
1846
I have devoted an entire lifetime to escaping the confines of this wretched place, only to find myself further entangled in its gnarled roots and oppressed by its looming towers. I am now satisfied that no one born on this land can wipe the dust of it from one’s heels.
I held my flushed cheeks with the palm of my hands. Was this it? What I had been searching for all of these years?