Solace (15 page)

‘You wanted to be a
monk
? So . . . are you religious?’

He shook his head. ‘Not even slightly.’

‘So you wanted to be an atheist monk.’

He shrugged. ‘I doubt all the monks in there are that cracked on religion,’ he said. ‘The guy I was reading about spends most of his time writing.’

‘Writing what?’

‘Chick-lit.’

‘Ah, come on.’ Under the table, she hit his knee with hers. ‘You’re taking the piss.’

‘No, no, no, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I mean, I am about the chick-lit. But I just liked the idea of this guy, writing away in there without anyone to bother him.’

‘Right.’

‘And then I decided I didn’t want to get up every morning two hours before dawn. And that I’d get my essays written between nights on the tear the way everyone else
did.’

‘And that you wanted people to bother you.’

He laughed. The laugh of someone who hadn’t thought of it that way before. ‘I suppose,’ he said, looking at her. ‘Some people.’

They sat in silence for a moment. In the sitting room, Sarah roared with laughter at something on the television.

‘Should we bring her another glass of wine?’ Mark said. ‘Or should we go up and join her?’

‘No,’ Joanne said. Often, before, when she and Sarah had invited somebody around to the house, dinner for two had turned into drinks for three, and it had always been a laugh, but
not tonight; tonight, that was not what she wanted. ‘Let’s stay here for a while.’

‘Thanks for dinner,’ he said, and she smiled at him. On his forehead, between his brows, she noticed three pock-marks. Like the skin had once been a pool of something; like it had
bubbled as it dried.

‘You scratched your chicken pox,’ she said, putting her fingers to the marks.

‘Oh,’ he said, and he breathed out a laugh. ‘Yeah. My mother was raging with me. She said she’d buy me a new tape if I didn’t scratch them.’ His fingers were
over hers, stroking her hand. ‘But I couldn’t resist and I scratched them when she went into town to get me the tape. By the time she got back they were gone.’

‘You brat,’ Joanne said, and she traced her fingers over his lips. ‘What was the tape?’

‘Billy Joel,’ he said. ‘She came in and took one look at me and pegged the tape at me in the bed. I listened to it for weeks.’

‘And you got holes in your head for keeps.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Ah, well.’

She stood and gathered their empty plates, taking them to the sink as he refilled their glasses with wine.

‘You don’t have to go down home this weekend, do you?’ she said, sitting back down.

‘Not for another while.’

‘They don’t mind?’

‘They mind but they’ll manage.’

In the pub the night before he had talked to her about the farm and about his father. It was a story she recognized. It was her brothers’ story, her cousins’ story, the story of
every son with a father who owned meadows and animals and haysheds. It was hers, too, if she substituted her father’s practice for his hundred and forty acres, his clients for his cattle and
sheep. She’d said that to Mark, and he’d seemed glad that she understood, grateful, but he had not asked any questions, had not shown an interest in hearing any more. It seemed strange
to her, but it made sense, too. He had just returned from two days of dealing with his father, of working with him, of fighting with him. He probably hadn’t wanted to talk about family
– anybody’s family – or about home.

But she found herself wanting to talk about those things now, for some reason, and she had said it before she could stop herself. That she had not been home herself in several months. That she
didn’t miss it. That it would probably be months before she visited again; probably Christmas.

‘Which is the biggest fucking nightmare you can imagine,’ she said, feeling how the wine massaged her into fuller sentences, bigger descriptions, than would normally occur to her.
She was glad to have them. She was glad to be telling him this. ‘My brother Frankie spends the day on the couch reading old issues of the
Sunday World
, and my other brothers bring
their awful wives and their awful children, and my mother acts like she’s run off her feet trying to look after everybody when actually she’s in the kitchen topping up her gin and
bitching at me not to ruin the turkey. What do I know about turkey?’

‘Who knows anything about turkey?’ he said, and she laughed.

‘Exactly. So that’s Christmas, and I come back here as soon as I can, and then every April I go down as well. Every April, I should say, I get guilted into going down.’ She
paused. It seemed suddenly very important to find the right tone. But whatever that tone was, it seemed out of her range. ‘For my father’s mass,’ she said, and it came out in a
blurt. ‘I can’t stand going down there, but I can’t not be there for that. That just wouldn’t look right. You know?’

He nodded, but he did not say anything; he did not ask her to go on. She looked at him. She wanted, she realized, for him to ask about her mother, to ask what it was about her mother that
bothered her so much. She wanted him to draw her out, to let her tell him things, to let her vent – to let her get upset, even, if it came to that. She wanted his eyes on her, she wanted his
hands on her, stroking her, giving her the attention he had given her a minute ago, giving her more of it, pulling her close. She wanted to say, My mother, I don’t think she ever actually
loved me. It sounded like something a teenager would say. She wanted to say, My mother, she saw me as a nuisance, as a rival, as a drain on her money and her nerves. She wanted to tell him how her
mother had always sided with her father. How she had told Joanne she was only a stuck-up little bitch for throwing everything back in his face. You’ve always thought you were better than us,
her mother had said to her, the night Joanne had announced that she wouldn’t work for her father any more. But she’d never thought that. She’d just thought, for a long time, that
something was missing in her, or that something was wrong with her, because she felt so different from them all.

‘I’m sorry about your father,’ Mark said, and he touched her hand, but not like she had wanted him to; too briefly, too lightly, his hand already back in his lap. ‘That
must have been hard.’

‘It was hard because it was sudden. I didn’t think I’d miss him.’

‘Of course you miss him,’ Mark said, and the smile he gave her had something unsettled in it, something awkward. Of course it has, she thought, here you are, trying to talk about
emotions with an Irish man. It doesn’t matter that he’s an Irish man who writes about books. It matters even less that those books were written by a woman. He’s still an Irish
man. So change the record. Change the mood, if you want to keep him in this house with you, if you don’t want to ruin the entire night. She shook her head, vigorously, as though shaking
something away from herself.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Nobody wants to talk about that old stuff.’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Mark. ‘Talk about anything you want to talk about.’

‘Well, I don’t want to talk about my father, really,’ she said, and she heard how unconvincing the words were. ‘I don’t know where that came from.’

‘I don’t remember much about him,’ Mark said, and he was looking not at her, but at the table, at the crumbs scattered where his plate had been. ‘He and your mother used
to call up to our house sometimes at Christmas, but that was when I was very young.’

‘My father always fancied himself as some kind of local politician,’ she said, and Mark glanced up at her; he looked as though he might laugh. But he did not. ‘Except he
wouldn’t have been able to play politics half as well if he’d been on the inside of it instead of fiddling it from the outside. So he probably did do that kind of thing. He probably did
go around bringing Christmas boxes to his constituents. Kissing babies.’ She poked Mark in the side. ‘Kissing you.’

‘Jesus,’ Mark said, and as she leaned in towards him, he looked startled for a moment, but then all the watchfulness went out of his eyes, and he met her mouth with his own.

*

Upstairs, he looked at her very steadily. As he kissed her, he touched her ass and her thighs, her belly and her breasts. Her dress was light cotton, hardly more than a
sundress. He threw it to the floor. She could feel him against her, that shape against denim that had drifted through her mind when she was meant to be thinking of other things. His mouth was
against her, wetter now, and harder. He seemed, as he pushed against her, to want to lift her, and in turn she pushed against him, trying to keep her feet on the ground. He lowered one bra strap,
kissing her shoulder, and then the other, and he reached behind her to unfasten the clasp. She pulled away from him and sat on the bed; she watched his face and watched his eyes. His hands came for
her, and she caught them, and held them, and felt the strength of them, and he let her guide them, let her show him how to touch her so lightly that he must hardly have felt her, must hardly have
realized the warmth and the dampness of her skin. He wanted more. His breath fought her. His body tried to press on her. With his hands, he traced her all over, traced circles on her breasts and
lines on her throat and a feather-stroke up inside each thigh. And when his eyes said enough, she felt how the sweat had pooled at the base of his spine, and she drew him to her, and she let
herself be drawn.

When she woke again near dawn it was to the sound of his voice beside her; he was mumbling to himself in his sleep. She tried to make it out, but it was nonsense, just noises, not even words.
She shook him and he woke, gasping. His breath was stale on her face as he asked her the time.

‘Time to be asleep,’ she said, and she curled her body back into his.

And time for work was three hours later. Mona was already in the office when Joanne got there, standing by the coffee machine, clicking a stiletto heel on the tile floor. Her
shoes had red soles that glinted like nail polish.

‘Yes,’ she said, when she saw Joanne glance at them.

‘Yes what?’ Joanne said, as she slumped into her chair.

‘Yes, they are.’ Mona made a face of mock alarm.

Joanne nodded. She knew what this meant. It meant that the shoes were new, that they had cost a fortune, and that there was something about the red soles that she was meant to understand. It was
a moment, she knew, when energetic admiration was expected of her, but she felt too exhausted even to lift her gaze from the floor back to her computer screen. Two bottles of wine in the middle of
the week was something she could no longer do without suffering the consequences. A sharp arc of pain was strung between her temples, and Mona’s perfume, hanging on the air like pesticide,
was not helping. Neither was Mona’s excitable presence, as she darted now from one filing cabinet to another, pulling out folders and slapping them on to her desk. She sat down to her
computer. She stood up again. She went over to the bookcase by the window and took up a thick hardback. She leafed quickly through it, consulted a page, slammed it shut. She picked up her phone.
She put it down.

‘You’re busy,’ Joanne said carefully.

‘Oh, God, I’m run off my bloody feet,’ Mona said, and then she laughed, and looked back at her shoes. ‘I really shouldn’t have bought these. But I couldn’t
resist.’

Joanne nodded. ‘What are you working on?’

‘Oh, everything,’ Mona said. ‘I have to get a full day’s work done in half a day today. I have a lunch meeting with Rupert.’

‘So you’re taking a half-day?’

Mona looked to her screen. ‘Eoin sanctioned it. He said it’s important that we give Rupert the time he needs. Even if it’s in an informal setting. There’s still a lot of
background we have to make sense of.’

‘Don’t we have all the background we need in the case notes by now?’ Joanne said, but Mona kept her eyes on her screen.

‘Don’t ask me, ask Eoin,’ she said. ‘I’m just doing what I was told.’

Joanne sighed. What this meant was that Mona’s workload for the day would end up being hers. She had too much to do as it was. But she would have to agree. Mona had been there longer than
Joanne. She claimed seniority – as long as it was understood that seniority, in this instance, was not a matter of age.

‘You’re not going to walk all the way to the restaurant in those heels, surely,’ Joanne said. ‘It’s a fair trot to Fitzwilliam Square.’

Mona looked at her as though she were mad. ‘I’m not meeting Rupert at his restaurant,’ she said, in an incredulous tone. ‘Rupert can’t be seen at his restaurants at
the moment. The paparazzi are staking them out. Didn’t you know?’

‘I have to say, I didn’t.’

‘Well, yes, they are,’ Mona said, turning fully around in her chair now. ‘That creep over at the
Herald
has a total vendetta against Rupert.’

Joanne felt the beginnings of a smirk. She turned it into a cough. One photograph of Rupert Lefroy had, indeed, been taken outside his sushi restaurant and carried alongside coverage of the case
in an evening newspaper, but the coincidence of a high-profile American actress having eaten there on the same evening could hardly be ignored. Neither did Joanne imagine that a scattering of bored
newspaper photographers, fitting the job between an ad shoot and a football match, could be described as paparazzi.

‘I’m sure Rupert is well able for them,’ she said, and Mona nodded.

‘Well, yes, he’s used to this sort of thing,’ she said. ‘But, still, I hope they’re not waiting for us at the Shelbourne.’

‘The Shelbourne’s hardly out of the way.’

Mona ignored this. ‘So I’ll need you to step in on some stuff for me,’ she said, pulling her chair back up to her desk. ‘There’s a big section of the transcript
that I haven’t even looked at yet, and Eoin wants notes on it by this evening. It’s that old bat again, Rupert’s mother. I’m sorry to land you with more of her
ramblings.’

‘Fine,’ Joanne said, and clicked into her email window. She had no new mail. She clicked out again and into one of the websites she kept open, but hidden, on her screen for much of
the day; she knew Mona did the same. On a good day, Joanne only ever dipped into the virtuous sites – the newspapers, the things it was not so bad to be caught on by Eoin or Imelda, since you
could be looking up court reports or precedent cases – but today was not turning out to be a good day, and she let herself fall into a rabbit hole to numb the brain: news items on
celebrities, photographs of them walking in the street with their boyfriends or girlfriends or babies, links that led to more photographs, more snatches of gossip, to reader comments that were,
more often than not, defamatory. Maybe, if Eoin or Imelda walked past, she could say she was researching Internet litigation. Eoin might buy it, but Imelda would know a gossip website when she saw
one.