I got very, very drunk.
I was having a dream about Isabelle; she was extremely cross about something and kept shouting at me to wake up. I tried to ignore her. I didn’t want to wake up. Then her accent changed to a thick Dublin brogue.
‘Are ya all right there, love?’ said the woman in front of me.
She was kneeling on the ground, which must have meant I was on the ground too. I rubbed my eyes wide. No, it wasn’t a dream. I didn’t recognise her. She had dark hair and was wearing a puffy jacket, which seemed strange. Had I fainted? That was when I became aware of the sound of the traffic. I was outside, on the street, lying in a heap of rubbish.
‘Where am I?’ I asked.
‘Thank God, will I call ya an ambulance?’
‘What? No, of course not.’ I attempted to get to my feet, but as soon as I moved, I felt a splitting headache over my right eye. Instinctively, my hand went to touch it and when I felt a dampness on my fingertips, I realised I was bleeding.
‘He looks fairly battered, doesn’t he, Marie?’
Great. I had an audience. I tried to retrace my steps, but all I found were blank spaces. Why was I feeling so unbelievably ill?
I heaved myself upright against the steps beside me.
‘The smell of drink off him,’ I heard the woman say. ‘Like a brewery.’
Oh God. That’s when it all started coming back to me. The pub. The whiskey. The blokes who came in to celebrate their friend’s last night as a bachelor. The bet that they could drink me under the table. The whiskey. The sing-song. Had I sung ‘Molly Malone’? Standing on a chair? Oh God. Smoking a joint with someone outside on the street. Then some other people, they thought he owed them money. Me explaining I’d only just met this guy. Then the punch in the face, the rubbish bin being dumped on me, repeatedly.
‘Thank you, ladies, I think I’ll be perfectly fine in a minute. Just need to get my bearings,’ I groaned, as I held on to the railings and stood swaying, adjusting to the daylight.
‘Are ya sure, love?’
I wasn’t really sure of anything. When I’d returned to the B&B, Nora’s husband Barry had told me how Martha had called by, looking for me. He’d told her I had packed up and gone home to England. The idiot! If only his wife had been there, she would have told Martha I was coming back. And now she wanted nothing to do with me. I’d upended my entire life to be with her and now she wouldn’t even see me.
I took a few tentative steps, wincing with the effort. I looked up and saw the street sign. Ha'penny Lane. I was right outside her house. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t show up looking like this and besides, she’d made her feelings abundantly clear. The decision was taken out of my hands when I saw her pulling the curtains at the front window. She looked out, disbelieving, and bent down to get a better look. Then her hand went to her mouth. I tried to wave with my good hand. She disappeared back into the shadows and reappeared at the front door.
‘What in God’s name has happened to you?’
‘Um, I believe I had a disagreement of sorts.’
She gave me a look of pity, which, under these circumstances, I was willing to accept.
She brought me inside and down the steps to the kitchen at the back of the house. She pulled out a chair for me at the kitchen table and then searched in a cupboard for some first-aid paraphernalia.
‘How did you end up here?’
‘Honestly, I have no idea. I may have been slightly inebriated.’
She arrived back at the table with a bowl of warm water, cotton wool, a tub of some odd-smelling cream and plasters. Neither of us spoke while she went about her work. I let my eyes close and permitted myself, for these moments at least, to imagine that everything was okay. That she did still have feelings for me. That somehow, it would work out.
‘Will I live?’ I asked sheepishly as she began to clear the things away. It was torment to watch her lithe figure in simple leggings and a T-shirt, imagining how good it had felt when she was in my arms on the beach. I ached to hold her again.
She looked back at me from the sink with a welcome grin. ‘I think so.’
‘Thank you, for all of this,’ I said.
‘It’s nothing. I’ve had … practice.’
I didn’t know what to say about her husband’s death. About any of it. So I did what we Field men did best. I changed the subject.
‘You know, before you came, I used to stand out there for hours,’ I said, gesturing up to the bare patch of land just visible from one of the kitchen windows. ‘I used to think that maybe I’d find some kind of clue, an imprint of the building. Like when there’s a drought in the summer and farmers find crop circles on the land. I dunno. I was just so sure.’
‘I wonder if people are like that?’ she said, sitting back down at the table.
I shook my head in bewilderment.
‘Like, if you can still see the outline of who they were, you know, before?’
‘Wow. I don’t know. I hope so.’
I took her hand in mine and for a moment she let me hold it, before pulling it away.
‘I’m sorry, Henry, but I just can’t.’
‘But if only you’d got my note, or if that idiot at the B&B had told you I was coming back—’
‘It doesn’t matter now. Madame Bowden explained about the note, but it’s not even about that. I just, I can’t risk this.’ She pointed to the space between us. Whatever it was. ‘I have to find my crop circles.’
I smiled. Only she could make breaking my heart sound so charming. I had to respect her wishes. God knows her husband hadn’t. Yet, I didn’t have the strength to get up and walk out of there without her.
‘And I know you’ll find your manuscript,’ she said, with a sadness in her voice. ‘You’ll tell me if you do, won’t you?’
‘Of course,’ I said, remembering that I still had a printout of the letter from Opaline in my pocket. ‘Actually, I had wanted to show you this,’ I said, taking it out. I explained how I had contacted Princeton to search through Sylvia Beach’s archives, just as she had suggested. ‘It’s thanks to you really.’
I handed it to her.
She read the last paragraph aloud. ‘“Thank you once again for taking copies of my book with you – after all those days stocking the shelves at Shakespeare and Company, it’s amusing to think that my book will be there now too. Maybe one day she will find me.” She wrote a book?’ she asked, after some moments had passed.
‘Sounds like it. But the real question is, what happened to her?’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
OPALINE
Dublin, 1923
The journey seemed to go on for hours. We travelled unfamiliar roads that jolted the back of the car and me with it. I cradled my belly, instinctively protecting my little one within. It was dark when he’d pulled me from my bed and even though I knew what was happening, and had long been expecting it, it felt like an out-of-body experience. As though it were happening to someone else.