Solace (13 page)

‘Charlie says there’s never been a girlfriend,’ Tom broke into his thoughts, ‘and sure you’d know well just by looking at him. Sure he was done up there on
Christmas morning like a man going to his wedding.’ He finished his pint. ‘And,’ he added, ‘he used to be a great lad for the choir.’

‘He had a good voice before his balls dropped,’ Mark said. ‘That doesn’t mean he has a preference for other people’s.’

‘Other people’s what?’ said Tom, as Keogh came over and asked if they were ready for two more.

‘Other people’s balls,’ said Mark, and he nodded to Keogh, whose mouth opened and closed for a second before he moved off to get the drinks.

‘Ah, Jesus,’ said Tom, but he was laughing. He waited until Keogh was out of earshot again before continuing. ‘Charlie’s awful worried about him, though. Ah, poor ould
Charlie, you wouldn’t wish it on him.’

‘He’ll manage,’ Mark said. ‘He’s not going to be any less fond of him.’

‘No, but . . .’ His father sighed. He was in uncertain territory now, Mark knew. ‘It’s not easy for him,’ Tom said at last, and groped around in the pocket of his
trousers for his cash.

‘I’ll get this,’ Mark said. ‘Charlie’ll be grand. Sure what difference does it make to him?’

‘Jesus, it makes a lot of difference,’ his father said, almost in a whisper, and he looked around him before he went on. ‘Won’t everyone about the place be talking about
him?’

‘Isn’t that what we’re doing now?’

His father paused. ‘It is, but we’re Charlie’s friends,’ he said, frowning. ‘He can’t count on everyone else around here to be his friend.’

‘He can’t control it, so he should forget about it,’ Mark said, and his father looked at him as though what he was saying was madness.

‘And of course he’ll never get married now, and there’s an awful lot to worry about, you know, when you have a son that way.’

‘Like what?’ Mark said, knowing the answer.

‘Like . . .’ His father stopped.

‘Like AIDS, you mean,’ Mark said, and his father clicked his tongue.

‘Would you shut up about AIDS,’ he said, under his breath. ‘I don’t want that fucker Keogh knowing Charlie’s business.’

‘You’re the only one thinks it’s Charlie’s business,’ Mark said. ‘There’s no reason why Brian McCabe would get AIDS, any more than I’d get it or
anyone else would.’ From the way his father started beside him, Mark could tell that he had provided him with cold comfort. ‘And there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have as
good a life as anyone can have. He can’t get married, I’ll grant you, but not everybody wants to get married. And anyway, that might change. For Brian, I mean. In a few years, he might
be able.’

His father said nothing. A conversation about gay marriage was hardly what he had had in mind when he had come into Mark’s room and invited him to Keogh’s. Then again, it was not
something Mark himself had had in mind. It was time to change the subject. He lifted his pint. ‘So Charlie shouldn’t be worrying himself. Let’s leave it at that. Brian always
seems happy to me.’

Tom was still quiet. ‘Do you know him well?’ he said eventually.

‘I see him around here the odd time.’

‘You never see him out and about in Dublin?’

‘No, you needn’t be worrying,’ Mark said drily. ‘I never see him out and about in Dublin.’

‘I’m only asking.’

‘Yeah,’ Mark said.

They were silent for a long moment, during which Mark wondered what, after all, it would be like to be with Brian McCabe. Because the more he thought about it, the more he reckoned McCabe
probably was into him. It could be worse.

McCabe was a good-looking guy. If it had to be someone, if it had to be some guy, he wouldn’t mind it being McCabe.

‘There’s the farm, too, of course,’ Tom said, his voice stronger, surer now. ‘Charlie’s getting to the stage where he could do with his son to help him. Not much
chance of that buck coming down and putting on his wellingtons.’

Mark felt his jaw clamp. He had walked into it. ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake,’ he said, loudly enough for the three or four drinkers in the bar to look up and take notice.
‘Don’t start.’

‘I’m only saying it’s hard on Charlie.’

‘Charlie seems to manage well enough by himself.’

‘Ah, you think that.’

Mark sighed. This was going exactly where he had suspected it would go. And there was a long way to go yet. They always stayed until closing time on these nights in Keogh’s. He could try
to shut the conversation down, or he could face up to it. It was probably time he told his father a few things. It was time he spoke to him directly. He cleared his throat. ‘Charlie’s
son has his own life, and his own career, and I’m sure Charlie is glad about that,’ he said.

‘Ah, he is, he is, of course he is,’ Tom said. ‘Apart from the worry of the other thing.’

‘So why would he want his son to give his own life up to run a farm of less than sixty acres?’

‘He could run the farm and still have his own life. The farm wouldn’t stop him.’

Mark snorted. ‘Brian McCabe is a software engineer in one of the biggest companies in the world. He lives in an apartment on one of the most expensive streets in the city. He goes to New
York and London and God knows where else several times a year. He eats in the best restaurants and drinks in the best bars.’

‘I thought you said you didn’t see him in Dublin?’

‘I don’t.’ Mark sighed. ‘I’m just saying, that’s the kind of lifestyle you can expect someone like him to be having.’

‘Because he’s queer?’

‘Because he’s rich.’

‘Ah,’ Tom shrugged.

‘And so, tell me, how would a life like that be compatible with running a farm like Charlie’s? How would he do both at once? Spend every weekend to his oxters in cowshit, is that
it?’

‘There wouldn’t be any need of that.’

‘So how?’

‘There’s ways.’

Mark laughed. ‘Tell me the ways. Go on. I’m interested.’ At this, he saw, his father himself grew interested.

He turned to face Mark. ‘There’s jobs around here too, you know,’ he said.

‘Not jobs that Brian McCabe would want,’ Mark said slowly. ‘Not jobs that anyone, really, would want.’

His father was unruffled. ‘Athlone or Sligo, then,’ he said. ‘There’s everything there – they’ve factories, businesses, universities, the whole lot. A man
could easily be living down here and doing whatever he wanted to do with the time he wasn’t at work.’

‘It’s not the same.’

‘How is it not?’

‘It’s just not.’

‘And that’s a great answer,’ his father said, a line he had been using on Mark since he was a child. He was on his feet and heading for the toilet before Mark could reply.

‘Two more, Mark?’ said Paddy Keogh, who had, Mark realized, been standing close enough to hear the last few minutes of the exchange. Charlie McCabe had a gay son now, whether he
liked it or not.

‘Two more, please,’ said Mark.

‘That’s the stuff,’ said Keogh, with a slow smile. ‘But if I’m not mistaken, it’s your father’s round.’

On warm summer evenings a crowd always surrounded the pub on the corner of South Anne Street, not trying to get in, but taking pleasure in being outside, drinks in hand,
soaking up the last of the sun. Suit jackets were shrugged off, ties were loosened, the work day done, the night stretching out ahead. The atmosphere was at its most elated on Fridays, when a
communal sense of liberation descended, so that proximity could lead to banter, and banter could lead to bed, but evenings like this were so rare in Dublin – so balmy, so beautiful, the low
sunlight burnishing the deep red brick of the buildings – that a weekday could seem like a Friday, and nobody would say a thing to shatter the illusion.

Inside it was cool and dim, and few of the tables were occupied. The pub was made up of several small rooms, and a rickety staircase, lined with old photographs of writers and musicians, led to
more narrow rooms and a second bar. Mark moved through them quickly, his gaze taking in every table. Several of the drinkers looked at him, out of boredom or curiosity, as he passed. She was not
upstairs. He checked downstairs again, stuck his head into the snug at the front of the pub. He had to elbow through an animated throng at the door, and then he saw her. She was in a skirt, and
heels, and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She was talking to some guy who hadn’t taken off his jacket or his tie. She looked up and saw Mark, and she excused herself from the gathering
and came towards him, smiling, the beginnings of a blush spreading on her face.

She leaned in for a kiss, not on the lips but on the cheek; he was thankful he’d figured that out in time.

‘So you’re good for another winter?’ she said.

He didn’t have a clue what she was on about, but he wasn’t going to let her see that: he’d muddle through it, whatever it was. He didn’t want his first sober words to her
to suggest that either she was making no sense or that he was a bit slow. ‘Yeah,’ he said enthusiastically.

‘So everything’s saved?’

Shit
, he thought. This one he couldn’t just nod and guffaw his way through. ‘How do you mean?’ he said apologetically.

She laughed. ‘Some farmer you are. The hay, obviously. That’s what you went down to do, isn’t it? You saved the hay?’

‘Oh. Right. Yeah. All in safe and sound.’ And that’s the last thing I plan to say about hay for at least another twelve months, he added silently. ‘Drink?’ he said,
and she said yes.

‘Don’t go away,’ he said, as he turned.

As the booze kicked in, he started to lean back into the evening properly, to watch her as she talked, to take pleasure in the sight and nearness of her, instead of trying to
think of the right thing to say. She was talking, now, about the case she was working on – something about feuding Ascendancy throwbacks, as far as he could tell – and she was gesturing
like crazy, which gave him an excuse to look at all of her. He looked at her arms, trailed by freckles, a mole nestled in the shadowy veins of her inner elbow. He looked at her throat, smooth and
lightly tanned, and at the top two buttons of her blouse, how they were undone, and how, intermittently, an arc of dark lace at her left breast revealed itself, hid itself, hinted at itself. She
had a small nose, and she was wearing lipstick, but it seemed to be the same shade as her lips – or was that the point of all lipstick? The green of her eyes was flecked with copper. As she
talked, she turned her palms upward, spread them wide, stiffened them as though to catch something falling from above.

‘She’s unbelievable,’ she said – he raced backwards through the last couple of things he’d heard, and worked out that she was talking about her colleague.

He nodded. ‘She sounds it.’

She jiggled the ice in her glass. ‘So, how about you?’ she said, glancing at him. ‘What have you been up to?’

What had he been up to? Tugs of war with his father over every little thing. Tense encounters with his mother as she tried, like always, to encourage him to do two contradictory things: go back
to Dublin as soon as he wanted and yet stick around in Dorvaragh for another few days. And there’d been the night in Keogh’s, and a conversation with Sammy Stewart from over the road
about baler pins, and a conversation with another neighbour about what the neighbour referred to as ‘global warning’, and there’d been farcical attempts to read.

‘I got a bit of writing done,’ he said.

‘Oh, you got your chapter finished?’ Joanne said. ‘You were talking about it the other night.’

‘Which night?’

‘Both of them,’ she said, laughing, and Mark groaned.

‘Sorry to have inflicted that on you,’ he said.

‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘I actually found it really interesting. I don’t know anything about Maria Edgeworth.’

‘It’s pronounced Mur-eye-a, actually,’ he said. ‘Like pariah.’

She looked at him for a moment, and he wanted to kick himself. It was an automatic thing by now, correcting people when they said the name wrong – almost everybody did – but he
wished he could have held back, just this once. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Force of habit.’

‘That’s OK,’ she said, and sipped her drink.

‘And nobody knows much about her. I don’t know much about her myself.’ He attempted a laugh. She returned it.

‘It’s gas to think someone like her lived in Edgeworthstown, though. I mean, from what you were saying the other night, it sounded like she was a pretty big deal.’

‘Yeah, she was, then,’ Mark said, and he knew what was coming next.

‘I mean, you were saying that she was good friends with Jane Austen? And that she had a thing with, what do you call him, William Scott?’

‘Walter Scott.’ Mark winced, but not at the mistake, which was kind of hilarious, and something he would have enjoyed if he hadn’t been seething at himself over the drivel
about his research that he had obviously, once again, been spouting. It happened every time he talked about it with a few drinks on him: he homed in on the most obvious claims to fame in
Edgeworth’s biography and blew them up to be much more significant than they actually were. Look, this woman from up the road knew Wordsworth! And Austen! And Erasmus Darwin! And
Virginia
Woolf
, for Christ’s sake, and
Turgenev
! And she had an affair with
Walter Scott
!

When, in fact, all there had been with Wordsworth was one very boring-sounding afternoon in 1829 when he had swung by Edgeworthstown House unannounced, as part of his tour of Ireland, and
afterwards Edgeworth had written to her aunt complaining that he was too fond of the sound of his own voice. As for Austen, that had been no friendship, either, even though Austen herself had sent
Edgeworth a copy of
Emma
; Edgeworth had dumped it on a friend because she could find no story in it, nothing close to life, and because it had in it some unconvincing detail about soup. As
for Darwin, he was just part of her father’s crazy circle of friends and, anyway, he wasn’t the right Darwin, just his grandfather, and yes, what Turgenev said about Edgeworth’s
novels had been impressive – that if she hadn’t written about ‘the poor Irish of the co. Longford and the squires and squireens’, he might never have written the Russian
equivalent – but then, there was reason to believe that Turgenev might not have said that at all, that someone writing an obituary had just made it up. And while Edgeworth had definitely been
close to Scott, the theory about their actually having slept together was just a rumour Mark had heard at a conference or, more accurately, in the pub after the conference. Anyway, the point was,
he got excited about all the wrong things in Edgeworth: not the novels, not the tales, not the innovations in realism and autobiography about which he kept prattling on to McCarthy. Instead, he
found himself getting fixated on the fact of all the famous people Edgeworth had known. It was pathetic. It was just another aspect of the stupid provincialism with which he’d chosen the
subject in the first place. It was as though he was writing some kind of nineteenth-century version of a celebrity magazine as his thesis.