Solace (17 page)

She had never even seen the woman. She had only read her words in the transcripts; she had not even listened to the tapes. And she had heard only poor accounts of Elizabeth by now, from her son
and from her daughter, and whatever about Rupert, she believed what Antonia had said about her mother; she had heard nothing to doubt or to treat with suspicion in Antonia’s tone. So why did
she keep thinking of her? Seeing her standing there, wearing those beads? She would hardly even
know
jet beads if she saw them. She would not recognize them if they flew off their string and
struck her in the eye. And yet, as she heard footsteps on the stairs now, she ripped from her notepad the pages on which she had scribbled during the phone call and tossed them into the bin. Her
heart beat so hard she felt it almost as pain. When Imelda came in, Joanne turned to face her, then looked immediately away.

Imelda came over to her desk and tapped a fingernail on the wood. ‘So. You got her? Mademoiselle Lefroy?’

Joanne nodded. ‘I called her,’ she said, as casually as she could. ‘It wasn’t very useful, I’m afraid.’

‘How could it not be useful? What did you ask her? What did she say?’

‘She says she’s not estranged from her mother,’ Joanne said, looking at her computer screen, watching as, noiselessly, another new email piled its black weight on to the top of
her queue. It was spam. ‘She says she phones her mother often, says she visits her once a year, says she worries about her all the time. She says the problem is her mother is confused,
that’s all. That the mother doesn’t really know what she’s saying when she says that she and her daughter are estranged. That she doesn’t really know the meaning of the
word.’ With a tiny click, she deleted the email.

Imelda, seeing the motion of her finger on the mouse, frowned. ‘She’s saying her mother is senile,’ she said, with a wave of her hand. ‘Well, we’ve argued that
already. No harm in arguing it some more.’

‘No.’ Joanne shook her head. ‘She says her mother is just getting old.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Imelda said sharply. ‘Don’t give me semantics. She’s saying her mother is no longer the full shilling. We can definitely use that. We
need her over here for next week’s hearing. Get her on the phone again.’

‘No,’ Joanne said, and she felt sweat break out on her skin.

Imelda laughed. ‘
No?
I’m sorry? Did you just say no?’

‘I mean, no, I don’t think we can use her. I don’t think she’d be useful to us.’

‘Why?’ Imelda snapped.

‘She hates Rupert. Says he’s a liar.’

Imelda shrugged. ‘So? We can put up with that.’

‘She says he stole from her.’

Imelda’s face changed. A stare, still, but not just a cold stare: something dawning in it, something uncomfortable. ‘For Christ’s sake. Stole what?’

Joanne looked at the screen. The bank website she’d been on earlier was still open. ‘Money. A lot of money. Says he forged cheques. Says he used her bank card.’

‘She says he did this or a conviction says he did it? Which is it? Is there anything to prove this actually happened?’

‘Not that I know of,’ Joanne said, feeling weak.

‘Not that you
know
of ?’

‘I mean, no. No, there isn’t. Nothing ever came to court. She never took it that far. Antonia. She didn’t want to go through a court case with her own family.’

Imelda raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you sure this woman is actually related to the other two?’

Joanne forced a laugh. ‘I know. It’s funny, isn’t it?’

‘What’s funny?’

‘Just . . . how different they are.’

Imelda sighed. ‘She’s different enough from Rupert to cause us some serious problems if Paddy Glackin gets his hands on this. I can’t understand why the mother’s
solicitors haven’t been on to her. I can’t believe they wouldn’t chase her up. We should have chased her up ourselves weeks ago.’

‘But she’s not going to be of any use to us,’ Joanne said, her hands and her armpits clammy. What was she doing? Whatever it was, she had to go on with it now. She had to see
it through. ‘She says they haven’t been on to her, her mother’s solicitors, I mean,’ she said. ‘She was just as surprised as we were. But that has to be good for us,
right?’

‘Does it?’ Imelda said, warily, looking at Joanne. ‘Go on.’

‘It just means they don’t have a clue what they’re doing, really.’ Joanne tried to laugh, but it came out as a gasp. ‘I mean, doesn’t it?’ she said, and
in her voice she could hear the plea. She forced herself to look Imelda in the eye. She forced herself to look sure. She forced herself not to faint, because that was what she felt like doing, as
Imelda eyeballed her, seemed to assess her, seemed to make a decision on whether she could be trusted or whether she needed to be fired.

‘I think you’re right,’ Imelda said eventually, slowly, and Joanne exhaled.

‘You don’t think we need her?’

‘I know we don’t need her. I know that Elizabeth’s solicitors do. But, as you say, they don’t have the intelligence to look for her. So why should we help them?’
She picked up the transcript from Joanne’s desk; it was open at the page on which Joanne had written
Check
. ‘Check what?’ she said.

‘Check the daughter,’ Joanne said. ‘Check Antonia. That was what made me realize it was something I had to do.’

‘Good job,’ Imelda said, after a pause. ‘But now it’s your job to forget you ever spoke to Antonia Lefroy. If Glackin and his all-stars dig her up, we’ll deal with
that bridge when we have to cross it. But we’re bypassing it now. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes,’ Joanne said, and Imelda nodded.

‘That’s the girl,’ she said, and turned towards her office. ‘Now, would you ever make me a cup of tea?’

Mark checked his watch again. Joanne had said the judgment was likely to be given by four. She was nervous as hell; he had asked her to text him and tell him how things went.
He hadn’t heard from her all day, which didn’t worry him, because over the last few weeks, work had become so busy for her that she hardly ever had time even to send him a text. One of
her bosses, the woman, had decided she liked her, or trusted her or something, after the incident with the phone call to the woman in New York, and had given her a whole load of new
responsibilities, with the consequence that Joanne was knackered all the time. She went into the office every morning practically at the crack of dawn, and she stayed every night until nine or ten.
She had worked three Saturdays in a row now, and last Sunday as well. She had said it would definitely ease off when this case was over, and he hoped so: he didn’t think he could stand it
much longer.

They had not even been seeing each other for two months yet. It was way too soon for this kind of stress; her snapping at him out of exhaustion, him getting resentful because she was never
around. He was being as understanding as he could, was trying to fit himself into her schedule as much as he could – was trying to look after her a bit, walking her home, or cooking her
dinner, or getting her DVDs from Mossy, even though she was too shattered even to open them. He listened to her talk about her work, not just before they went up to bed, but in bed; the deadlines
she was worried about, the research she had to do, the notes she had to write up. And, over and over, the case that was in the High Court, the old woman and her son, the feuding Anglos. They might
as well have been squashed in beside him in the bed. He couldn’t escape them. But now he was going to escape them; he was determined. When the judgment came through, whatever it was, whether
it was in favour of Joanne’s firm or not, he would go to the wine shop on Dawson Street, the one closest to Trinity, and buy a bottle of champagne. He didn’t exactly have the money to
be spending on champagne at the moment but he didn’t care. He wanted to celebrate. He wanted to turn up on Joanne’s doorstep and bring her flowers and drink the champagne with her and
take her to bed. And take her out somewhere the next night, and the next. He wanted to do what people did with their girlfriends, or with the girls they were seeing; not just the sex – though
he was ready to get back to that as well – but the other stuff, the dinners, the films, the dates. He looked at his watch again. Half an hour to go.

He hoped the case would go the way she wanted. Not that he was entirely certain which way that was. She’d told him about the phone call to the old woman’s daughter, and about how
she’d given a different version of their conversation to her boss; he’d been impressed by her gumption, but also more than a little uneasy about the whole thing. It wasn’t that
Joanne wanted to protect the mother from the daughter, he thought, but that she wanted to protect the mother from herself, somehow. She’d been a dominating old shrew, and Joanne saw that, saw
the madness in how the mother had behaved, trying to turn her daughter into some kind of Miss Havisham, or worse. She agreed that the mother was completely in the wrong. And yet she felt sorry for
her. So she had hidden the things the daughter had told her and spun them into something else. She didn’t know why she had done it, she told him; it had just felt like the right thing to do.
And he felt nervous about it. He’d felt nervous about it for the past month. He couldn’t see how it could possibly benefit her to conceal evidence like that – not just to conceal
it, but to manipulate it – and he worried that it was going to backfire on her drastically, that her bosses would discover that she’d essentially tricked them out of calling a witness
who sounded like she could be very valuable to them, with everything she had to say about the old woman; that he’d soon be seeing Joanne in bits, sacked, disgraced, shit-scared about her
future. But nothing like that happened. It went completely the other way. Yes, she was in bits, after a week or so of the new workload, but she was in bits in the way that, according to her, was
actually good for your career. If you were drained and pale and hollow-eyed, if you were all skin and bones, then you were doing something right as a trainee solicitor, it seemed; you’d go
far.

It had to be to do with her own mother, he knew, all this stuff with the old woman and her daughter. A first-year psychology student could have worked that out. Mark didn’t ask her about
her mother. He knew that he should. He knew that, whatever it was, the problem between them, the estrangement, it was painful – probably much more painful than whatever was going on between
the other pair. He knew that if things got serious, they would have to talk about all of that stuff, but for now he just wanted them to get to know each other, to enjoy each other, without having
to drag their families into it, without having to look at each other in terms of who their parents were, and what their parents had said and done.

And he knew he was being naïve. He knew he was procrastinating, as usual. Because the fact was, things were already beginning to feel serious between them. He found himself, constantly,
thinking of things he wanted to tell her about, places he wanted to show her, things he wanted them to share. Even slogging through his thesis chapter over the last few weeks, he’d been
thinking about her; wanting to talk to her about what he was finding in
Harrington
, about what Edgeworth was doing with form there, about what she was doing with the line between the real
and the fabricated. Joanne was always too worn out, obviously, for him to inflict on her an excited monologue about Edgeworth and self-reflexivity and autobiographical interpolation, and about how
she used these things to play with what people expected fiction to be, but he wanted to tell her anyway. He wanted to tell her about what he was working on now, as he waited for her to text, about
what he was trying to concentrate on – about why Edgeworth’s irony in
Castle Rackrent
had backfired, about how everyone thought she was giving just a straight account of mad old
peasants and ruined old estates, when in fact she was doing anything but. When, in fact, she was writing something so batshit insane, in technique and voice, that she barely even wanted it to be
read as a novel at all. But Joanne would have other things on her mind. And, if he was honest with himself, he had other things on his mind. Though it was not yet four, he packed up his books and
his notes.

As he walked down Dawson Street his phone vibrated in his pocket. The case must have ended early. But it was not Joanne, it was his mother, and he cursed as he remembered that he had agreed to
go home this weekend. Now that the meadows were bare of grass, they needed to be spread with manure, and his father was wondering, his mother said, whether Mark would come for a couple of days and
get the job done. So you’re literally asking me to come down to shovel shit, he wanted to say. But he just said that, yes, he would try to get down, and his mother had sounded so grateful
that he’d felt more guilt than frustration as he hung up. Now he looked at the screen as it flashed again with
Home
. He didn’t answer. He stuffed the phone back into his pocket
and stopped to look at the display in the bookshop window.

Joanne understood that he had to go down home sometimes. She had grown up on a farm. She knew what it was like. She knew what it was like to have a father who expected things. Though that was
something else he had not asked her about much. It had come up a couple of times, usually when she was drunk and running off at the mouth a bit – which meant, he knew, that it was probably
something she really needed to talk about, that it was on her mind, but it was territory he didn’t want to get into with her. Not while she was drinking. Or not while she was sober.

She seemed to have no idea of what had taken place between their fathers years ago. She showed no sign of knowing that they had been friends once, his father and hers, or something like friends,
and that they had fallen out badly. But she would have been young when it happened; six years old, maybe, or seven. There would have been no reason for her to notice. It would not have mattered in
her house the way it had mattered in Mark’s.

His father never talked about the Lynches now. He did not curse them. He did not articulate the things he felt about them. And his father was not, Mark thought, afraid of them. He just wanted to
act as though he did not have to share a world with them. Yet that was impossible. He could not ignore them. And it did not take the sight of Lynch’s widow Irene, or of one of his sons, or of
their big farm at Caldragh, or of their jeeps on the road, to remind his father of that fact. He needed only to drive half a mile over his own lane. He needed only to see the fields and the yard
and the fallen-down cottage where, for nearly fifty years of his life, he had spent a large part of every day. Where he had worked with the man who had treated him like a son, old Tommy Burke; the
man who had told Tom, always, that one day those fields and those gates and that cottage would become his own. It was the old story, Mark thought now, but it was a story that was never going to
disappear. There was a book of essays by Declan Kiberd in the bookshop window; he stood and stared at it for a moment. It was a book he should have read. He thought about going in and buying it.
But he had only thirty euro in his pocket and he needed it for the champagne. He walked on.