Solace (19 page)

At the chemist on the corner, Joanne bought what she needed, and when she got home, she dumped her things in the sitting room. She went upstairs without a word in response to Sarah’s
greeting. She had taken pregnancy tests before. They had always been accurate – that is, they had always been negative. This time, as she stood in her best suit in the upstairs bathroom, the
two pink lines were as clear and as definite as the tracks of two tyres through a fresh fall of snow.

From downstairs, she heard Sarah shouting her name. She walked to the bathroom door without feeling that she had the use of her legs.

‘What?’ she shouted downstairs, and her voice did not sound like her own.

‘You’re all on the six o’clock news!’ Sarah shouted back up to her. ‘You, and Mona Manolo, and yer man she’s shagging, and his mother, and you all! Come down
and look at yourself! You’ve made it, my girl! You’re the news!’

The baby was born in May. It was a girl with nobody’s eyes and nobody’s shock of fine red hair. There had been red hair way back on the Lynch side once, Joanne
said, but none of them that Maura remembered had ever had that colouring.

Of course, that would be another doubt in Tom’s mind, she thought, as soon as she laid eyes on the baby. That would be another reason for him to refuse to have anything to do with his
grandchild. She was a lovely little thing, really, as lovely as a newborn could be. She still looked battered and bewildered from the fright of being born, and naturally Joanne looked like a
frightened child herself, propped up against the hospital pillows, the gown hanging off her, her cheeks blotched almost purple. By the bed, Mark sat trying, Maura could see, to appear calm, but his
eyes were jumping out of his head. He was talking too much, talking nonsense; she could see he was bothering Joanne, crowding her with questions about the child’s scalp and the child’s
feet and the plastic bracelet around the child’s wrist, and about Joanne’s pillows and whether they were hard enough, or soft enough, and about whether the child would need to be fed
again soon, or whether they should wait until they heard her cry.

‘She’s grand, Mark,’ Maura said, and the two of them looked to her anxiously, imploringly. You, both their stares seemed to say. You know what to do with one of these. You had
one. You had two. You know the rules. Show us. Tell us. Make this thing possible for us to do.

But then, just as quickly, they looked away, to the child again, and they were focused tight in on her as though on a button they were trying to unfasten; pulling the white cap back down over
her head, taking the little hands and hiding them under white cotton cuffs, touching the tiny, crumpled face and willing it to smooth into contentment. And at that kind of willing, that kind of
wishing, they would spend, probably, most of the rest of their days. She would be back in a couple of minutes, Maura told them, and she stepped out into the narrow, nurse-bustling hall.

Maura had worked in a hospital with mothers and babies for nearly half her life. When they had taken children out of women with forceps, or when they had broken women’s pelvic bones, or
when they had taken stillborns away in tin buckets, thrown them out with the slops, she had not thought of any of it as inhuman, as horrific. It had merely been the way. Still, when her own time
had come, with Nuala and then with Mark, she had gone not to the manor in Edgeworthstown but to the big hospital in Mullingar, where everything was new and the doctors were young and the maternity
wards were like something out of a film. But still it had felt like a slaughtering to bring each of them into the world. Still there had been the forceps, and the blade to make room for
Nuala’s head to come, and still there would have been a bucket, or something like it, if anything had gone wrong. She had lost one, but that had been before she had gone her full term; for
that, she had been alone. That had been a boy, and he had been given his father’s name.

In the hall she tried to call home again. Tom never picked up the house phone anyway, so she did not know why she was hoping for anything different today, but she let it ring, let it ring until
the climb and trill of it started to sound shrill, hysterical, unreal. He could be out on the land or in the yard, or he could be away in the jeep or on the tractor, but he could just as well be
there, in the sitting room, staring at the phone as it rang itself out. He would fight her to the last on this, she knew. He would stand his ground. But she would stand hers, and though it was
always important to give him the appearance of having got what he wanted, the truth of it was that she always won.

He had not reacted well to the news of the pregnancy. Neither of them had. She was not proud of how she had behaved, of what she had said to Mark, of what she had said about Joanne. But she had
apologized, and quickly, and that had been the important thing. She had meant none of it. Mark turning up like that one Saturday in November, with the girl she knew only as the Lynch daughter in
tow: it had been too much of a shock. Tom had been at the mart in Granard, and all she had been able to think about, at first, was how she had to get Mark and the girl out of the house before Tom
returned, so that she could break the news of their involvement to him in her own way, in her own time. But there was more to it, she had known from their faces, almost as soon as they had walked
in the door; she had known right inside herself what it was. So when Mark had told her, it was no surprise, not really, not after she had seen the paleness of the girl’s face as she stood by
the range and looked at the floor. Maura had imagined this conversation, or some version of it, all through Mark’s teenage years. Once he was in his twenties she had not worried about it in
the same way, and now he was heading for thirty, it should not have been a problem at all, not really, but there was the matter of the girl. And so, Mark had told her that the girl was pregnant,
and well pregnant, and that they were moving together into her house in Stoneybatter and making it into something of a home. That the girl was a solicitor, or training to be a solicitor, and had
worked it out with her employers: they would keep her on, on condition that she worked right up to the birth and went back again very soon afterwards. And Mark had his grant, and the money he was
making from teaching, and that, along with Joanne’s pay from the solicitors, should be enough to get them through the first year.

‘And then?’ Maura had said, and through the crack in her voice there escaped the sourest of laughs. ‘And after the first year is done, what the hell do you propose to
do?’

Mark looked stricken. The girl would still not meet her eye. ‘We’ll manage,’ he had said. ‘We’re just trying to work out how to get through the first part for now.
It’s all . . . it’s all very new.’

‘The first part,’ said Maura, shaking her head. ‘Jesus tonight.’

‘Mam,’ Mark said quietly. ‘Please.’

She had looked at him, standing beside the girl at the range. They were both too awkward, too nervous, to sit down, and Maura was not in the humour, now, to try to make them more comfortable.
The girl was still early enough along not to need to be petted, anyway, not to need to get off her feet. She was younger than Mark. She looked like Irene: the strong bones at her cheeks, the high
forehead, the freckled skin. But she was like her father in the eyes.

Tom would take this badly. How would she get this story under control by the time he returned? And then, she had realized with a sickening lurch, there was no way to get this under control, no
way to manage it. No way to turn it into something other than what it was.

‘And what does your mother think of this, Joanne?’ Maura had asked, and she saw how the girl started.

‘She doesn’t know yet,’ the girl had said.

‘She’ll get a right land, I’m sure, like myself,’ Maura said, and she sighed.

‘I know that.’ For a moment, Maura had thought the girl was going to cry – in fact, Maura had thought the girl should cry – but the tears did not come. What had come
instead was the sound of Tom’s jeep on the drive.

The hours afterwards were not something Maura liked to remember. Tom had looked at Maura suspiciously as soon as he walked in. Joanne had been introduced, and there had been for Maura the pain
of watching confusion spread over his face, of watching fear set in. When Mark had told him about the pregnancy, all he had said was ‘What? What?’ over and over again, and he had looked
to Maura, the way he always did when he wanted something fixed or something righted or something arranged; he had looked to her, waiting for her to make it go away. And then he had gone very quiet,
and very still, and he had looked first to Mark and then to the girl. ‘You’d better sit down, so,’ he had told her.

When she had sat, she had sat in Tom’s seat, the one beside the range, but that had hardly mattered any more.

The call had come to the house before seven o’clock that morning. Maura had answered it, her heart pounding. It was Mark. A baby girl, he said, just over seven pounds. A
little mite, Maura had answered, shocked to find herself in tears.

He didn’t think she had felt like a mite to Joanne, Mark had said in return, and Maura could hear the shock still in his voice. He had been in there with her. Of course: that was how it
was done now. Well, he had seen something that he would never forget. Maura was seized with a longing to comfort him but then she was surprised to find herself thinking, instead, of Joanne. She
would see them at the hospital in a couple of hours, she said.

She had got there by noon. She had brought a bag filled with the things she knew Joanne would need – not just Babygros and nightgowns, but sanitary pads, and nipple pads, and creams, and a
few new pairs of underwear. It had been a short enough labour, seven hours, but one of the nurses had told Maura that it had gone very hard on Joanne. ‘And on Dad too,’ she had added,
for a moment confusing Maura, who had thought of Tom, and of how she had gone back up to the bedroom that morning to give him the news, and of how he had just turned away from her in the bed.

He would come around. He would come here. She was sure of it. She would see to it. Joanne would be here for another night at least, and when Maura came back the next afternoon, she would have
Tom with her if it killed her. This was his granddaughter. He would just have to get used to it. His son had a daughter now, and that was a great thing, at the end of the day, and she wanted
desperately, she realized – again surprising herself – to see her husband looking on as their son held his child. She wanted it so badly, so strongly, that she knew it must be some
instinct. And so Tom would be here. He would manage. Whether Irene Lynch would also be here was irrelevant. They would manage that as well. In a small metal cot by a hospital bed, their
granddaughter was sleeping and crying and staring. Tom would be meeting her. He would be here.

*

Tom planned to be out on the land all day. There was work to be done. The fields needed to be dragged and rolled, the rushes cut from out of the thickening grass, the ground
spread with fertilizer and readied for the haymaking months ahead. It was work that he could not easily do alone, but it would have to be done alone. As he was dragging the chain harrow out of the
ditch where it had been left after the work of the previous spring, Maura came out to the yard to tell him she was leaving for Dublin. She asked him again if he was sure that he would not go with
her.

‘Of course I’m sure,’ he said. ‘Who else do you think will do these jobs? Am I meant to go up to Lynches’ and ask one of the sons to roll these fields for me so I
can go up to Dublin to gawk at a child?’

‘She’s your granddaughter, Tom,’ Maura said, but she was already leaving, closing her jacket and checking for something in her bag.

‘I’m sure she’s very lonesome for me,’ Tom called, as she opened the door of the car. ‘Or for you. I’m sure she’ll thank you for taking the trouble to
go up and see her.’

Maura turned. ‘Mark might thank me,’ she said, and she looked at him with some question in her eyes. ‘Do you have any message for him at all?’

‘No message,’ Tom said, and turned back to the machine. The chain harrow was tangled and seized. It would take an hour or more of careful work to set it right. As he fixed his pliers
around the first link, he heard Maura’s engine cough itself up to a rev, and then she was gone. He stood up and stretched, noticing how clear and blue the sky was, what a warm day it was
shaping up to be. It was a May morning, and he had the place to himself. It was peaceful. There were far worse places you could find yourself.

When he had finished with the chain harrow, and was laying its rusted lengths out behind the tractor, Sammy Stewart came around with a saw he wanted Tom to have a look at. It was a knack Tom had
picked up when he was a young man, how to listen to a saw, how to look at the blade as it ran and as it was still, how to know what part of it to take out and clean or screw tighter, what part of
it to leave alone. Sometimes strangers came to the house and paid him to fix an engine for them or to have a look at a lawnmower or a strimmer, but he wouldn’t take money from Sammy. Things
went back too long between the pair of them. Sammy knew that too.

‘Maura’s not around today,’ Sammy said, as he put the chainsaw down on the ground between them.

Tom looked at him to see if he showed a sign of knowing anything. ‘She was talking about heading into Longford to get a few things,’ Tom said after a moment, and Sammy nodded.

‘I thought I saw her on the road there,’ he said.

Tom went down on his hunkers to take a look at the chainsaw. The chain could do with tightening, and the filter with a clean, but apart from that it barely needed to be seen to at all. He looked
at Sammy. ‘There’s hardly a hilt wrong with this engine at all.’

Sammy seemed surprised. ‘I thought I felt a pull on it yesterday evening when I was using it.’

Tom stood and yanked the starter cord. The noise of the saw scared a clatter of birds out of the trees over the yard. The engine ran clear. Tom knocked it off again and took it across to the
fence, to where the lower branches of the trees along the meadow drooped and jutted in towards the yard. On one of them, he tried the saw, leaning back as he did so, away from the yellow dust that
leaped up around the blade. It sliced steadily through the damp green wood of the branch and Tom stood back to watch it fall. ‘You must have been imagining things,’ he said to
Sammy.