Her doorbell rang before she managed the first squirt. Still clutching the can she answered it – to be confronted by a ceramic pot of snowdrops on her doorstep with a luggage label attached and her name penned in violet ink. She hunted for a note but there wasn’t one. As she stooped to grasp the pot, its concave centre encircled by a gauzy lilac ribbon, Patrick moved into her field of vision and spoke.
‘Let me give you a hand with that. You look far too delicate to carry an ungainly weight.’
Helen dropped the aerosol.
‘It’s not that heavy, to be honest, but I’d still like to carry it in for you.’ Patrick lifted both spray can and snowdrops, and stood aside to allow her precede him into the house.
‘So, Helen.’ He rested himself with such ease on one of her sofas he appeared to be a permanent fixture. She marvelled at the music his voice created, transforming a name she’d never particularly liked before. ‘So, Helen, what have you been doing since our walk in the park?’
‘Fretting.’ She made no effort to disguise her agitation.
His face creased into worry lines. ‘I’m sorry for being such a pest the other day. I don’t know what came over me, practically demanding you invite me to your place. I just didn’t want to let you go. I’m here to apologise.’
So his idea of a mea culpa was to turn up anyway. A novel approach. But she was too beguiled by the unexpected sight of him to voice an objection. Nonsense, of course she could protest; she took a deep breath and managed an approximation.
‘Shouldn’t you be in London planning a wedding with your fiancée?’
‘You’re right, I should. Treat me as a mirage.’ Patrick pulled off his flying jacket and tossed it on the arm of the sofa. Helen noticed the zip was coming adrift at the bottom and smothered an impulse to sew it up for him – she wasn’t his mother.
‘I see neither hide nor hair of you for three years and now you’re back twice in a matter of weeks. Miriam must think it strange.’
Patrick shrugged. ‘A man’s entitled to go home.’
‘Dublin’s not your home.’
It blazed out more jaggedly than she’d have chosen but the acerbity of her denial couldn’t detract from its truth. Nevertheless she regretted it when rejection flared in his eyes. Then they clouded over and strayed around the room, ingesting its contents, lingering at a windowsill on a framed photograph of three children: two little girls in tartan skirts and buckled shoes with their smaller brother sandwiched between them, a pudgy hand clasped in each. His gaze seesawed from the younger of the two girls to Helen and back again.
‘Ringlets,’ he said.
‘I wasn’t consulted.’ She flattened her bob with tremulous fingers; she could control her voice and expression but not her hands.
Helen hovered by the mantelpiece, irresolute where to sit. It struck her as singularly unsafe to join Patrick on the sofa, where she’d be close enough to detect the fabric conditioner smell from his clothes, to trace the indentations of a chicken pox scar on his forehead. Staying on her feet was the most sensible recourse.
‘Come and sit next to me,’ he invited. ‘You’re too far away.’
Helen threw caution to the winds and perched alongside him, simultaneously poised for flight and prepared to nestle against him.
Just as she remembered the obligations of hospitality and realised she should offer him something to eat or drink, he confessed: ‘I’m not here to apologise at all.’
‘I suspected as much, Patrick.’
‘I’m here because I couldn’t remember what your voice sounded like and that seemed quite literally sinful. I wished and wished that I could conjure it up but I couldn’t. So I decided to do something about it.’ Patrick folded his arms mock-aggressively across his chest and added: ‘And before you tell me that I could have had a more straightforward reminder by lifting the telephone, you’re absolutely right. But straightforward didn’t appeal to me. Why be guileless when you can be circuitous?’
Helen chuckled but when the merriment died away she was equivocal about how to respond. Her head was telling her to tread carefully; her heart was waltzing. Finally, because she could not hold the words back, she murmured, ‘Your face gladdens me, Patrick.’
They sat looking at one another for a few moments, both flooded with emotion. Then a gust of wind that sent a tree branch scratching against the patio doors fragmented the spell. She roused herself and bent to sniff the snowdrops.
‘They’re sublime. Did you have trouble finding them?’
‘None at all. I knew exactly where to go. I prowled around the park with my trowel and as soon as the light dimmed I was in like Flynn.’
‘You didn’t!’
‘I didn’t. The concierge at the hotel recommended a couple of flower shops. None of them had any snowdrops in pots for sale but I persuaded one enterprising member of staff to rustle up something for me. I can be very persuasive when I put my mind to it, Helen. In fact –’ he leaned conspiratorially towards her – ‘I’m a bit of an operator.’
‘Don’t I know it.’ She lowered her nose to the miniature blooms again, floating above the foliage like froth on the sea. ‘I’ve never seen anything so flawless in my life.’
‘I have,’ said Patrick.
The silence between them was charged with a thousand volts of electricity.
Finally he said: ‘We have to talk.’
‘That’s what we did last time and look how we ended up. Canoodling on a park bench like a couple of youngsters, without even the sense to wait until the weather was fine.’
‘True, but forewarned is forearmed. I’m prepared for the gravitational pull I feel when you’re in my vicinity. I’m wearing my Superman vest under my shirt. So your wiles are useless against me unless you’ve Kryptonite secreted about the house.’
‘I had a springclean and threw it all out,’ she said. ‘You’ve no idea what a dust collector that Kryptonite is. Will we do the talking now or would you like some coffee first?’
‘Better make it now,’ said Patrick. ‘We have to knock this on the head as quickly as possible. We’re in limbo at the minute.’
The day which had started so bleakly, with Helen spooning coffee granules into a mug and wondering how she was going to decimate time on her own, seemed rainbow-hued. Even if what they had to discuss was tinged with sepia.
‘Limbo,’ she reflected. ‘I suppose that’s about the height of it. Although technically it’s been wiped from the theological map.’
‘Since when?’ asked Patrick.
‘Years ago, the Church quietly dropped it. Limbo was never doctrine anyway, although that wasn’t much consolation to all those generations of bereaved parents who were told their unbaptised babies would never go to heaven.’
‘Helen,’ said Patrick, with the determination of a man resolved to return the conversation to relevant matters, ‘I’m in love with you. I don’t want to marry Miriam – attractive, groomed, suitable, organised Miriam waiting for me in Camden Town. Waiting for me to set a wedding date with the same graceful patience she waited for me to propose. It took months to do it. I could trace the outline of her disappointment like you’d skim your hands around the contours of a bowl when another day passed and I couldn’t eject the words. But ultimately I did it. I should never have asked her to be my wife. I thought it would exorcise my feelings for you, Helen, except it didn’t.