Kitabı oxu: «The Book of Love»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part One

Chapter 1. Dominic

Chapter 2. Erin

Chapter 3. Erin

Chapter 4. Dominic

Chapter 5. Erin

Chapter 6. Erin

Chapter Part Two

Chapter 7. Dominic

Chapter 8. Erin

Chapter 9. Erin

Chapter 10. Dominic

Chapter 11. Erin

Chapter 12. Erin

Chapter 13. Dominic

Chapter 14. Erin

Chapter 15. Erin

Chapter 16. Dominic

Chapter 17. Erin

Chapter 18. Erin

Part Three

Chapter 19. Erin

Chapter 20. Dominic

Chapter 21. Dominic

Chapter 22. Erin

Chapter 23. Dominic

Chapter 24. Dominic

Chapter 25. Erin

Chapter 26. Dominic

Chapter 27. Dominic

Chapter 28. Erin

Chapter 29. Dominic

Chapter 30. Dominic

Part Four

Chapter 31. Erin

Chapter 32. Dominic

Chapter 33. Erin

Chapter 34. Dominic

Chapter 35. Erin

Chapter 36. Dominic

Chapter 37. Erin

Chapter 38. Dominic

Chapter 39. Erin

Chapter 40. Dominic

Chapter 41. Erin

Chapter 42. Dominic

Part Five

Chapter 43.

Chapter 44.

Chapter 45.

Chapter 46.

Chapter 47.

Chapter 48.

Chapter 49.

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

A Q&A with Fionnuala Kearney

Book Club Questions for The Book of Love by Fionnuala Kearney

Read More …

About the Author

Also by Fionnuala Kearney

About the Publisher

1. Dominic

NOW – 3rd June 2017

From The Book of Love:

‘I love you because you found me.’

I’m wide awake when I shouldn’t be. Completely still, I’m sitting bolt upright on the edge of our bed, ears pricked for any hint of her. There’s nothing but familiar sounds from the old building echoing in the silence. A fly buzzes around the bedroom window. Through the oak floorboards, from below in the kitchen, the fridge motor whines. The pipes groan in the walls like a quick, expectant heartbeat. Even the house misses Erin.

Standing, I stretch tall, my hands just about touching the ceiling. Then I start my sweep of 44 Valentine’s Way, my early walkabout. The children’s bedrooms get a mere glance, nothing new there but another fine layer of dust. I head downstairs, my left hand tracing the original, deco style, curved staircase. At the bottom, just to the right in the study, the desk lamp that sits next to a pile of architectural drawings is switched on. A glance past them, to my paper diary, brings a stabbing memory of Erin, months ago, trying to convince me to digitally diarise everything onto my phone. I resisted, laughed, ignored the jibe about my Jurassic ways and reminded her that it was she who’d dragged me kicking and screaming to the written word in the first place.

Today’s date, with a spidery doodle right in the middle of the page also confirms Lydia’s birthday party tonight. My sister will have staff, borrowed from the cafés she owns, bearing trays of minuscule canapés and warm prosecco. She’ll be floating through our group of friends, and some of hers whom I don’t know, with a painted smile firmly in place, pretending everything’s fine.

The phone ringing in the hall makes me flinch but I don’t move, sensing it will be another hang-up.

‘Hi,’ Erin says from beyond the doorway. ‘We’re not home right now. Leave a message.’ My voice pitches in, ‘If anyone cares, I’m not here either’ and she giggles just before the beep and the final click. I walk to the hall – hear her laugh resonate, almost bounce off the walls, and wonder how days without her seem so achingly exhausting. It’s always been like that. From that first moment I saw her, and her ridiculous dancing, to the last time we spoke, she has lived in my soul. She just moved in, took up residence. No discussion. No permission. No regrets.

Without realising it, I’ve approached the mahogany console table, towards the single drawer. The book seems to beckon to me. I imagine flashing lights warning me of the perils ahead, yet the comfort of it in my hand brings familiar relief; the soft nappa leather, like myself, scarred in places. I find myself fanning our handwritten pages. They smell of Erin, a vague whiff of her peony scent. I raise them to my face and inhale deeply before opening it on her last entry. In the hallway of the home we made together, I pace the tiled black and white floor. The first rays of morning light from the glazed dome in the roof above help me read her words aloud:

12th May 2017

Darling Dom,

Back in August 2004, you took something from here, remember?

Sometimes, usually lying in bed around daybreak, I wonder – no, more than that, I’m quite desperate to know – whether we might have avoided so much heartache if you hadn’t.

I mean, what if you’d left that page where it was meant to be? What if those words had been the very words in our book of love that you really needed to say to me back then? Maybe you were honest, reached out, even asked for help. And maybe if I’d read those words of yours at that time, things might have been different? What if I’d been able to see them by holding the next page up to the light and tracing the faint imprint of your pen?

I tried – it only works in the movies.

I know, I know. You call me ‘The Queen of What Ifs’. But this is just one of the things that haunts me when I wake too early in those dawn-drenched hours.

You tell me not to be silly, not to dwell on the past. You hold me and tell me everything happens as it’s meant to, not exactly ‘for a reason’, but ‘life’, you say all the time, ‘life unfolds just the way it should’.

So, that missing page stayed very much missing. Absent. Gone. I never knew what it said, and you’ve never told me. And life unfolded the way it was meant to and there was heartache – but so much love too. God, there was so much love.

There is still love.

That’s what I cling to in those restless hours that follow night.

I remind myself that love endures.

Erin x

I sit down on the first stair. The closed front door opposite seems to taunt me. ‘What if she walked in here now?’ My whisper is just about audible.

My ‘Queen of What Ifs …’ I’d hold her, touch the soft skin on her face with my fingertips and tell her that she’s right, that it’s love that brings meaning to life.

2. Erin

THEN – December 1996

‘Because without love, you’re screwed,’ Seamus Fitzpatrick, Fitz, to his friends and audience, announced.

Erin felt Dom squeeze her hand, followed his nervous glance across the table. Seeing her new mother-in-law’s pinched lips, she looked away and focused instead on a wet ring mark on the paper tablecloth.

‘We’ve another way of saying that in Ireland, you know, “screwed”, but when in Rome and all that.’ Fitz laughed; a soft, uneasy sound.

Oh God, thought Erin. Please don’t swear. Sit down now, Dad. Sit. Please.

She swallowed hard as his voice filled the small room. It was a private space at the back of the King’s Arms located right across the street from the registry office. It wasn’t the sort of place she’d imagined her wedding might be. Like almost every small girl, she had, once upon a time, pictured herself in an elegant gown saying her vows in a quaint village chapel. At a grand reception, there would have been a feast followed by a practised first waltz by the bride and groom to ‘their song’.

A room in a pub, slightly sticky underfoot, with smoke-scented flock wallpaper, worn velvet seating, loops of stringy tinsel and Christmas lights with missing bulbs had never been part of the dream. And she and Dom hadn’t known one another long enough yet to have ‘a song’. Erin rubbed her hand over her belly as a familiar anxiety began to gnaw. They’d known each other long enough to create the human being that danced inside her, but not long enough to have a song. It was only Dom’s hand on hers that calmed her doubts, reminding her that she had got the most important thing right. Dominic Carter was a prince among men.

‘See, without love,’ her father continued, ‘you’re just two people roaming through life, wandering around in a valley of … a valley of tears.’

Resisting the urge to pull on his sleeve, instead she prayed to her mother. Make him sit down, Mam, please.

‘So, it does fill me with joy …’

She looked up and her face crumpled as Fitz started to cry.

‘It fills me with joy,’ he sniffed, ‘to see that you two really do love each other, so bear with me while I say,’ he peeked at her and Dom over the rim of his oval, steel-rimmed spectacles, ‘keep hold of that love and you’ll be grand.’

Erin’s mouth twitched as she attempted a smile.

‘Finally, let’s raise a glass to the bride and groom. I wish you both health and happiness and family that will love and anchor you.’

‘Thanks, Dad,’ she touched his arm, his new, but ill-fitting, suit as he sat down.

‘Your mam would have been so proud of you today,’ he smiled.

‘Thanks, Dad,’ Erin repeated and stared at her bump. There had been no way or no gown to hide it and everyone who was there knew anyway.

‘Was it alright?’ Fitz asked.

She told her father that his speech had been perfect as she, once again, looked across the circular table towards her in-laws. Sophie was scooping imaginary crumbs from the table. Gerard smiled, gave a small nod in her direction.

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have—’ Her father leaned into her as he drained his glass. She crooked an arm around his neck and kissed his cheek.

‘I told you, Dad, it was really perfect. Thank you.’

Three round tables of ten people squeezed into the room created the background noise that she and Dom needed. ‘You wanna get out of here?’ her husband whispered.

‘You know we can’t.’ She felt his sigh in her ear and shivered. There was nothing she wanted more than to get back to the flat and curl up in bed with this man and their bump.

‘Okay, we’ll stay a bit longer,’ he agreed. ‘But no one really expects us to hang around drinking, love.’

‘Let’s circulate, give it another half hour,’ she said. Pulling herself to a standing position, she dismissed thoughts of the absent music and first dance, reminded herself to be grateful to Dom for putting this together so quickly – on his own, without much help from her or anyone. ‘I’m going for a quick pee,’ she whispered before heading to the back of the function room towards the corridor and the loos. Just as she was about to turn the corner, a voice she recognised stopped her in her tracks.

‘She’s shameless.’

Erin’s hand automatically protected her stomach. Every nerve ending in her body told her to turn around; that she had no business listening, but her feet had rooted to the tacky carpet.

‘You’re tired. We’ll go soon.’

‘Gerard, do not patronise me! I’m not tired. I simply can’t stand the girl.’

‘That “girl”, as you call her, is carrying our grandchild. Keep your bloody voice down.’

Erin backed herself up against the wall. She tried to edge each vertebra, one by one against it, suddenly caring little for the off-white dress she had carefully chosen in a small vintage shop near Putney. Closing her eyes, she willed herself invisible.

‘Is she?’ Sophie hissed. ‘We don’t know that, do we, and he’s too besotted to care!’

‘Stop!’ her husband snapped. ‘You want to go, we’ll go, but this is not the time or the place for a scene.’

She should walk on up there, Erin told herself. Just walk on up that narrow, dirt-brown corridor, make her way slowly past them, brandishing her bump between them. She should smile sweetly at her mother-in-law, and widen her grateful eyes at Gerard, the man who thankfully seemed to have donated most of Dom’s character. Erin knew what she should do but, instead, she pleaded with her bladder and backed into the room to mingle with their friends as best she could.

‘You look angelic,’ Lydia whispered.

‘Divine,’ Hannah agreed.

‘Well, I would,’ Nigel, Dom’s best man grinned. ‘Seriously, there’s something very sexy about pregnant women.’

And with one eye on Sophie emerging from the corridor, Erin laughed.

Later, as they were leaving, everyone made a guard of honour to an out of tune ‘Here Comes the Bride’. It was only as Dom steered her underneath, past Fitz and her brother Rob, that Erin saw Sophie waiting at the very end. She would be waiting to whisper that he’d always have a home if he changed his mind. Erin stooped low. Dom was not going to change his mind. Dom loved her. He hadn’t stopped smiling since she’d told him about the baby. And even though she had never asked it or expected it of him, Dom had asked her to marry him within days of the news. Dom had married her. Because he loved her.

Erin appreciated the thought in the gift but still replaced it in its box shaking her head, unable to imagine a time when she and Dom couldn’t simply say exactly what they wanted to one another.

The sound of the soft pad of his feet on the tiled floor made her turn around.

‘Come to bed, love.’ Dom, wearing striped pyjama bottoms but bare chested, rubbed one of his eyes.

‘I can’t sleep.’ From behind, she felt both his arms circle her waist.

‘It’s three a.m.’ he yawned. ‘What’s in the box?’

‘A gift from Dad.’

Dom pulled a chair up beside her, took a sip from her mug and grimaced. ‘No wonder you can’t sleep. That stuff is powdered shit.’ His head jerked towards the gift. ‘So, what is it?’

‘It doesn’t matter – just one of Dad’s hare-brained ideas.’

Dom took her hand. ‘You remember when we first met, Mrs Carter?’

She laughed. ‘It was only a year ago. Of course.’

‘Lydia’s New Year party. The first time I saw you, you were dancing, all five-foot-ten of you.’ He stroked the downy hair on her arm. ‘You were doing that weird hippy-sway-thing you do, those long limbs of yours flailing about.’

‘You called me Tree-Girl and I hated you.’

‘You fancied me.’

‘Okay, I fancied you a little. I hated the nickname.’

‘I knew I’d marry you, right then, that first moment I saw you.’

‘You did not.’

‘I did so.’

Erin cupped his stubbled chin in her hands, focused on the amber speckles in his tired brown eyes. ‘Really?’

‘Really,’ he nodded. ‘Mind you, if I’d known I’d be awake at three a.m. on my sexless wedding night, I’d have left you there, bopping away in the living room.’

‘Ouch.’

‘I’d have turned right around and never looked back.’

‘Liar.’

‘You know me so well,’ he smiled.

She stared back at the box. ‘You reckon we’ll always be able to talk to one another. Like this? Just spit out whatever’s on our mind?’

‘Sure. As long as it’s not always at three a.m. It’s been a long day, love, come back to bed?’

Erin sighed, stood up with him and slipped into the crook of his arm, knowing he wouldn’t sleep again unless she tried to.

Seconds later, when they climbed into bed, she shivered in the cold sheets. She curled her body into a foetal position, slipped gratefully into his spoon, instantly feeling his body warm hers; feeling his quiet mind soothe hers; feeling his love melt from his pores into hers, nourishing her. In the slivers of light angling through the Venetian blind, she caught sight of the third finger on his left hand where, rather than a ring, he’d had ‘Erin forever’ tattooed. His mother had almost had a coronary when she saw it. Erin had loved it, unable to believe that any man, especially this man; this man who had such passion for everything, had stamped himself as hers.

Her hand squeezed his. With her free hand, she reached back and touched his cheek, the scent of leather still lingering on her fingertips.

‘I am Love,’ she whispered.

‘You too,’ he said softly.

She smiled and closed her eyes.

3. Erin

THEN – April 1997

‘You’re kidding, right?’

Dom was shaking his head, his expression deadpan.

‘Yes, you are! You’re kidding,’ Erin laughed. ‘Even you wouldn’t suggest strip poker to a woman who’s nine months pregnant and who can no longer see her feet.’

She watched him as he held the tray steady in his hands, almost tripping over the small hospital bag she’d packed weeks ago.

‘What? So, I get a cup of tea and toast in bed if we play “because it’s the weekend and we can”?’

‘Yep,’ he said setting the tray down beside her. ‘And I’ll thrash you. You will be naked first.’

Erin took a bite of toast, flicked the crumbs from her flannel pyjamas, remembering the first outing of naked card games. It was only weeks after they met and they hadn’t left her room for an entire weekend. ‘I have two items of clothing on and I’m not taking them off,’ she said, but he was already pulling a deck of cards from his pocket.

‘Well, you’d better win then, hadn’t you?’

Erin groaned. ‘Dom … I—’ She felt his eyes on her.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he told her. ‘I know you don’t feel it right now but there is nothing sexier than your pregnant body having my baby. And I’m trying to keep your mind off that – the “having the baby” thing.’

Erin rubbed her tongue over her front teeth. She had morning breath. She had crumbs sticking to the creases at the edge of her lips. She’d been hoping for a lie-in, but here he was with his breakfast tray and his infectious way. She smiled, her hand held aloft for some of the cards he was already shuffling. ‘Hang onto your trousers, Dom,’ she said.

‘Won’t need to.’ He took a bite of her toast. ‘Ugh, sorry. It’s a bit cold.’

‘When I win, you can go and make some more.’

‘When I win, after you’ve put some clothes back on, I’ll take you out for an early lunch.’

‘Deal,’ she said, curling her hair around her ears, already practising her best poker face.

Having spent a perfect, lazy day with Dom, Erin leaned against the back doorway and tried to swallow a sense of unease. Her natural anxiety was, of late, worsened by pregnancy hormones.

‘You don’t understand,’ she whispered, her hand making tiny circles around her navel.

‘So, explain it to me.’ Dom stopped her hand moving by taking it in his.

Her voice faltered, unsure. ‘I suppose I’m afraid.’

‘Of what? I mean tell me exactly what you’re afraid of.’

Erin lowered her eyes. Just outside the door by her stockinged feet lay a cluster of late-blooming crocuses still not quite ready for spring. Maybe the next day, she thought, maybe the next day the purple and golden yellow flowers would open and flash their bright stamens proudly. She watched her bump rise and fall with the pull and push of her lungs. And maybe once her baby was born she would feel ready to become a mother.

Sometimes she couldn’t believe that there was another human being alive inside of her. Other times, the ones when the child kicked and complained in the confined space of her stretched womb, she was acutely aware of it. And tonight, as her insides tightened with more Braxton Hicks contractions, ‘teasers’ that could only have been named such by a man – she wondered if now would be a good time to tell Dom that she wasn’t doing this ever again. The thought of having someone else taking over her body again …

‘Talk to me,’ he pressed her.

She closed her eyes, conscious that if she said how she really felt, was truly honest with him, Dom would only worry. She could have confessed she was afraid that becoming parents would change them, that their love might not have space for another person. She might have told him that her hormones seemed to play havoc with old anxieties, fears that had been prodded and poked awake. She might have told him she was afraid she was going to die in childbirth. The sensible part of her brain knew there was nothing logical about the panic that set in when she thought about giving birth, but … She batted away the scary thoughts.

‘Erin?’ Dom said.

Raising his hand to her face, she angled it to cup her cheek, leaning into it. ‘I’m just being silly.’