Cecelia Ahern - How to Fall in Love

I looked at Adam to see if he looked as nervous as I was. He was looking at me. I’d caught him.

He cleared his throat and looked away. ‘I was … do you know you’re missing an earring?’

‘What?’ I felt my earlobe. ‘Shit.’ I started searching my body for the earring, shaking my clothes roughly, hoping it would fall out. I had to find it. When I still didn’t find it I got down on my hands and knees in the car.

‘Careful, Christine,’ Adam warned and I felt his hand on my head as I bumped it against the door as Pat rounded another corner sharply.

‘It was my mother’s,’ I said, leaning over on his side and pushing away his feet to check the floor around him.

Adam winced, as though feeling my pain at losing it.

After finding nothing, I sat down, red-faced and flustered. I didn’t want to talk to anyone for a while.

‘Do you remember her?’

I rarely spoke about my mother; not a deliberate decision but because my mother had been in my life for such a short time that I had no references to her. I tried to summon her up now and then but had little to remember and therefore little to say.

‘These earrings are one of the very few memories I have of her. I used to sit on the edge of the bath and watch her when she was getting dressed to go out. I loved watching her put on her make-up.’ I closed my eyes. ‘I can see her now, facing the mirror, her hair back off her shoulders in a clasp. She’d be wearing these earrings – she only ever wore these on special nights out.’ I fingered my naked earlobe. ‘It’s funny the things we remember. I can see from the photographs that we did so much more together, I don’t know why I remember that moment more than anything.’

I was silent for a while, then said, ‘So to answer your question: no. It’s a long way of saying no, I don’t really remember her. I suppose that’s why I wear these earrings every day. I hadn’t figured that out until now. When people comment on my earrings, I know I can say, “Thanks. They’re my mother’s.” It’s a way to creep her into my conversations every day, somehow make her real and a part of my life. I feel like she’s an idea , a bunch of other people’s stories, a person who changes all the time in photographs, who looks different in each one, in different lights, different angles. I used to ask my sisters all the time when we’d look through the album: Is that the mum you remember? Or is that her? But they’d say no, then describe her in a way that no photograph captured. Even my own image of her at her mirror is of the back of her head, her right ear, her chin. Sometimes I wish that she’d turn around in that memory so I can see her fully; sometimes I make her do that in my imagination. It probably sounds weird.’

‘It’s not weird at all,’ Adam said gently.

‘Do you remember your mother?’

‘Bits and pieces. Small things. Problem was, I didn’t have anybody to talk to about her. I think it helps your memory of a person, when people share stories, but my dad never talked about her.’

‘Wasn’t there anybody else to talk to?’

‘We had a new nanny every summer; the gardener was the closest we had to a regular person about the house, and he wasn’t allowed to talk to us.’

‘Why not?’

‘Dad’s rules.’

We left a long silence.

‘Your earring will turn up,’ he said.

I hoped so.

‘Maria said she’d come to my birthday party.’

I had forgotten to ask him. How had I forgotten that?

‘Good. Great. That’s … Adam that’s really great.’

He looked at me. Big blue eyes searing into my soul. ‘I’m glad you think it’s really great.’

‘I do. It’s …’ I couldn’t think of any other word other than great so I let the sentence die.

Finally the car slowed and I sat up, eager to catch a glimpse of the place where Adam had grown up. The plaques on the grand pillars announced ‘Avalon Manor’. Pat heeded the speed limits here and crawled down the driveway, which went on for miles. The trees fell away to reveal a wide open green before an enormous period manor house.

‘Wow.’

Adam looked unimpressed.

‘You grew up here?’

‘I grew up in boarding school. I spent holidays here.’

‘It must have been incredibly exciting for a young boy, lots of places to explore. Look at that ruin.’

‘I wasn’t allowed to play in there. And it was lonely. Our nearest neighbours are a considerable distance away.’ He must have heard the poor little rich boy tone in his voice because he dropped it. ‘That’s the old ice-house. I always thought I’d renovate it and live there.’

‘So you did want to live here,’ I said.

‘Once upon a time.’ He looked away from me, out of his window.

The car pulled up before the sweeping steps that led to the enormous front door. The door opened and a woman with a warm face welcomed us. I recalled her from Adam’s stories: Maureen, wife of Pat the driver. She had been housekeeper, or house manager as Adam called her, for thirty-five years, for as long as Adam had been alive. Though Adam never considered her as a maternal figure in his life – the nannies were employed to mind him, and Maureen, though warm, had children of her own, while her sole responsibility as an employee was the wellbeing of the house – I was sure Adam was missing a trick. I was dubious as to how she could have turned a blind eye to the two motherless children under the same roof, and I felt sure that Adam was being obtuse if he believed that.

‘Adam.’ She embraced him warmly and he visibly stiffened. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

‘Thanks. This is Christine, she’ll be staying for a few days.’

Maureen couldn’t quite hide her surprise at the sight of a woman in Adam’s company who wasn’t Maria, but it was quickly masked by her welcome, though nothing could be done to hide the awkwardness which I know we both felt when it came to deciding the sleeping arrangements. The house had ten bedrooms and Maureen didn’t know whether to lead me to one of them, or to Adam’s room. She led the way tentatively, looking behind her now and then to try and catch Adam’s eye for guidance, for a hint as to what to do, but as well as being laden with our bags, he was lost in his mind, his forehead furrowed as he tried to decode a cipher. I guessed that he’d left last week thinking he would be returning an engaged, soon-to-be-betrothed man and when that went suddenly pear-shaped he didn’t intend to return at all. Now here he was, back in the place he seemed to detest so much.

I had been worried about our ‘deal’ all week, but that concern was nothing to what I felt now in Adam’s company. He seemed detached, cold, even when I met his eye and smiled encouragingly. I imagined how Maria felt when she tried to engage with him, reach out to him, be intimate with him and then was greeted by this withdrawal. I first thought of it as a shell of Adam, but then realised I was entirely wrong. He wasn’t a shell, he was completely filled by someone else, possessed by an Adam who felt rage and loss and anger and resentment at the loss of control of his life. An Adam who was profoundly unhappy. He had lost his mother at a young age but in other ways his life had been sheltered. He didn’t have to wonder about his next meal, schoolbooks, toys at Christmas, a home being taken from him. In his life, all of these things were taken for granted. And he’d taken it for granted that he was free to break away from his father’s rule, plot his own destiny, with an older sister to step into the family business. Then all that had changed. Duty, the thing he had so avoided and celebrated avoiding successfully had strolled casually up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder and respectfully requested that he follow it this way. The party was over, the belief that he had control over his own fate, that he could build a different kind of life for himself, evaporated, melted before his very eyes like a house of wax.