Solace (20 page)

Sammy shrugged. ‘Must have been.’ He took the saw and cut away another chunk of the same branch. It fell like a shot bird into the nettles clumped along the edge of the meadow.

‘Well, that’s grand, Tom,’ Sammy said, as he turned off the saw.

‘It’ll last you another while yet.’

‘I was in Keogh’s before I came here,’ Sammy said then, quickly, and Tom heard how careful his voice had become. So he knew.

‘Is that right?’

‘Paddy Keogh has the whole story, Tom. I’m just telling you, now. I thought you’d want to know.’

Tom nodded. ‘Thanks.’

‘So congratulations to you.’

Tom put his toe to the quietened blade of the chainsaw. The dog, who had disappeared at the first sound of the cutting, had come back to stand between the two men, her tail still low but wagging
warily, and she stepped forward now to sniff at his boot as he took it back from the saw. ‘Did Keogh say where he heard it from?’

‘No, Tom, and I didn’t ask him,’ Sammy said, his voice full of apology. ‘You know that he’d only be dying for me to ask him that kind of thing. It’d make him
feel important, to have people coming in and telling him the news, and for him to be giving it out.’

They stood in silence for a moment.

‘Lookit, Tom,’ said Sammy then. ‘Fuck Paddy Keogh.’

‘I’d say it made his morning.’

‘I’d say it did, the fucker, but sure lookit, isn’t it a sad state of affairs when you have to be waiting on another man’s news for there to be a bit of excitement in
your own morning? Jesus, when you think about it, it’s little Paddy Keogh has to be grinning about. You don’t see any sign of one of those useless fools of his to be giving him any
grand-childer.’

‘Still,’ Tom said, and wanted to say more, but nothing clear would come. ‘Still,’ he said again, and he looked to where the tractor and the chain harrow were parked
outside the shed. The harrow was laid out behind it like a quilt. Have you your own harrow ready, he was about to say to Sammy, but then heavily, dramatically, Sammy sighed. Tom felt his throat
tighten as he looked towards him.

‘Frank Lynch is dead a long time now, Tom,’ Sammy said. He shook his head. ‘You don’t find the years going by. Mark a father. My God.’

Tom said nothing. Sammy knew what had happened with Lynch. Sammy had been Tom’s friend. He had listened. He had given his advice. He had turned his back on Frank Lynch in solidarity with
Tom. But he had said, also, that it was the fault of none of the rest of the family. That Irene was a good woman. That the lads were decent. He had never mentioned the girl. The girl would have
been too young, and there would have been no reason for Sammy to know her.

‘Tom,’ said Sammy, breaking into his thoughts. ‘I have two grandchildren. Alan has them over in Prague. The little fella is three and the girl is just gone a year now. You
remember the boy being born.’

Tom nodded. ‘I remember it well.’ Sammy had come to the house that morning, the horn blowing, the window down, nearly – to Tom’s discomfort – crying as he shouted
the news. A boy. A boy had been born. Their son was a father. In a few days, he and Helen would be going out to Prague to see the child for themselves. He could hardly wait. Later, Helen had told
Tom and Maura that Sammy had nearly driven her demented over those few days. Wanting to ring Alan and his wife every half-hour. Wanting Helen to go on to her email to see if there were any new
photographs of the child. Wanting to see if any earlier plane tickets could be got.

‘Anyway,’ Sammy said, ‘they’re home here to us as often as they can. And they think they’ll be able to move back here in a couple of years.’

‘That’ll be grand for yourself and Helen,’ Tom was able to say.

‘It will,’ Sammy said. ‘But those children won’t be as small then as they are now. And those years when they were small and all that won’t come back to us again, no
matter how close they build their house to us. I’m awful sorry I don’t see more of them sometimes. A lot of times, to tell you the truth. Do you know?’

‘I do, Sammy.’

‘The young fella talks to me over the phone at the weekends. David. Jesus, I don’t know what kind of accent he has on him. You wouldn’t understand the half of it. Granddad, I
want to go with you on the truck, he says to me.’

‘The tractor,’ said Tom, and he was able, at least half able, to laugh.

Sammy pointed to the old Ford, half buried under logs in the turf shed. ‘Do you mind the time Mark was up with you on that yoke over there?’

‘Couldn’t get him off the thing,’ Tom said. ‘That was the sort of him.’

‘And a wee girl, of course, you won’t be putting a wee girl up on a tractor,’ Sammy said, and then he laughed. ‘Or maybe you might, if the mother will let you, but,
Jesus, it’s nice to have them around you all the same, Tom. The small ones.’

Sammy bent to take the saw up again. As he lifted it, he shook his head. ‘Jesus, you wouldn’t know the years going by, Tom. Do you know?’

Was he drunk, Tom found himself thinking, but pushed the thought away. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t kind: Sammy was a good man, had always been a good friend. He was carrying the saw
to the car now. After he had stowed it and slammed the boot down, he turned back to Tom. ‘That lassie could be nothing like her father, Tom,’ he said.

Tom looked at him. ‘The child?’ he said, and Sammy shook his head.

‘No, Tom. The girl. Mark’s girlfriend. Or his partner, I suppose.’

It was the first time Tom had heard her referred to like this. He swallowed. ‘The mother, you mean,’ he said.

‘The mother. What’s this it is?’

‘What?’

Sammy looked at him. ‘Her name, Tom,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ Tom said. ‘Joanne.’

‘Joanne. And any name on the child yet?’

Tom shook his head, more vigorously than he had meant to. It was a shock to hear that said. The child would be named.

‘No name,’ he said.

‘No name only Casey so far,’ said Sammy, and laughed.

‘Jesus,’ said Tom, ‘I hope so.’ And that was another shock, as it hit him: there was another Casey, now, in the world. Another of them. Another of his own.

‘Ah, I wouldn’t worry about that, Tom,’ Sammy said. ‘It was the same with David over there. Alan and Teresa weren’t married that time and I was wondering would she
want to give him her own name, but they don’t really seem to. They seem to want to give them the father’s name.’

‘I see.’

‘And I was saying, you know, that the girl, she might be very different from the father.’

‘She might,’ Tom said, wanting to talk about anything else.

‘Sure face it, Tom, she must be, if Mark wants anything to do with her.’

‘I don’t know,’ Tom said. ‘It all happened very quick.’

‘Everything happens very quick, Tom. That’s what I’m saying to you. The years. The way they go.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Lookit, Tom,’ said Sammy, as he opened the door of his car, ‘the child is here now. Would you go up and have a look at her?’ He sat into the driver’s seat and
gestured back to the boot with his thumb. ‘Thanks for looking at that engine for me.’

‘There wasn’t too much wrong with it, now,’ said Tom, and Sammy shook his head.

‘It needed to be looked at, Tom,’ he said, ‘and you were the only one who’d know what to do with it. I’ll see you some night in Keogh’s.’

Tom nodded. ‘Good luck.’

As Sammy headed off, his old Volvo estate bumping over the uneven ground leading from the yard to the drive, Tom thought he heard the sound of the phone from inside. But when he went closer to
the back door he realized that he was imagining it. Nobody was looking for him. Nobody was standing at a phone some place where he couldn’t see them, waiting for him to pick up. He whistled
to the dog and headed down the yard towards the lower fields.

Mossy turned up in Holles Street on Sunday, hung-over, carrying a bunch of flowers and a knitted baby’s hat in the shape of a strawberry.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Mark laughed when he unwrapped it. ‘Where did you get this thing?’

‘The Avoca shop,’ Mossy said, acting offended.

‘So you were drinking in O’Neill’s for the cure this morning?’

‘Stag’s,’ Mossy said sheepishly.

‘Don’t mind him, Mossy,’ Joanne said, fixing the hat on the baby’s head. ‘It’s gorgeous.’

Mossy sat with Aoife a while, holding her up too close to him, like he was afraid she would roll out of his grip. She couldn’t focus on anything yet, the nurse had told them, but she
seemed to see his curls; she stared up at them. They sat there talking for a few minutes, and then there was a knock on the door, and there was Mark’s mother, smiling as proudly as though she
were bringing a newborn of her own in to show them, and there was his father behind her, looking down at the floor.

As far as Mark could gather, his parents had been to one o’clock mass in the cathedral in Longford, and then they had been for their lunch in the Longford Arms, and then they had driven in
the direction of home, his mother at the wheel. And when she had come to the turn for their lane, she had not taken it, but had kept going on the Dublin road.

‘And here we are,’ she said, not to him but to the baby. ‘What do you think of her, Mossy?’

‘Ah, you couldn’t resist her,’ said Mossy. He smiled up at Maura, and he looked, then, to where Tom still stood at the door. ‘I’d better let her introduce herself
to her granddad,’ he said, and he offered Aoife out in his arms.

‘Tom,’ Mark’s mother said, a dip of pleading in her tone, and his father walked into the room. He stood at the bottom of the bed for a moment, clearly not knowing what to do.
Then he shook Mark’s hand, stiffly, without looking at him, and Joanne’s hand, in the same way. And then, finding himself beside Mossy, he shook his hand, too.

‘Are you going to shake this one’s hand as well?’ Mossy said, and everyone laughed, and Tom looked as though he might laugh too, but he did not, and still he did not take the
baby. He walked over to the window and looked out at the car park below, his back to the room.

‘Did you see anyone you know at one o’clock mass?’ Mark said, after a long moment. It was the standard question, the question his parents always asked each other, the question
everyone asked everyone else at home, but it was the wrong question, he knew, as soon as it was out of his mouth. He saw his father stiffen.

‘Ah, you know, the usual,’ his mother said quickly. ‘Lots of people asking for you. Lots of people wondering how you were getting on, Joanne. And lots of people sending their
congratulations.’

‘Breda Keogh was very worried about you,’ Mark’s father said then. They all looked at him in surprise.

‘Breda Keogh wasn’t at one o’clock mass, sure,’ Maura said, in a clipped tone. She glanced at Mark, and he saw the anxiety in her eyes. They both knew that whatever
reason his father had for making this his first comment could not be a good one.

‘I was talking to her in the shop,’ Tom said, half turning, addressing himself not to Maura but to Joanne. ‘She was terrible worried about you when she heard you were after
having the baby.’

‘Really?’ Joanne said uncertainly.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Tom, his voice beginning to rise now. Mark’s heart sank. It meant trouble when his father’s voice began to swell like that.

‘Very worried about the babby,’ Tom went on. ‘She said, sure that babby couldn’t be due for another month or six weeks yet, could it now, Tom? She said it could only be
seven or eight months since she heard the news. Oh, she was terrible worried. Terrible concerned at it being premature.’

Nobody spoke. Mossy and Joanne were looking at Tom, waiting for him to go on, waiting for him to make clear whatever it was he was trying to say. Mark and Maura did not look at him. They looked
at each other. Maura knew what his father was saying, Mark could see – that terrible strain on her face – and he was coming to understand it too.

‘Tom, stop that,’ his mother said. ‘Sure Breda Keogh doesn’t even know Joanne.’

‘Oh, Breda knows everybody,’ Tom said, in a sing-song voice.

‘Breda Keogh’s a poisonous bitch,’ Mark said, and he walked over and took the baby from Mossy. He moved in close to his father at the window, holding the baby up to him so that
he could not ignore her. The baby began to whimper.

‘Mark,’ Joanne said, from the bed, but he only pushed the child in closer and closer to his father’s face.

‘Look at her, Dad,’ he said, and his father’s gaze flickered and flitted before coming to settle on the top of the baby’s head.

‘Isn’t she a lovely little one?’ his mother said, with great deliberateness. ‘Tom,’ she said, when Mark’s father did not reply, and then, finally, his father
nodded.

‘Good luck to the both of yiz,’ he said, with great solemnity, looking only to Mark and the child.

‘Thanks, Tom,’ said Joanne, from the bed.

‘She’s a lovely little one,’ Maura said again. ‘Give her to him, Mark, will you not?’

‘Mark,’ said Joanne. ‘That window. I don’t want her near to that draught.’

*

She cried every night for almost every last minute of the night, and she cried in the early morning, and for a good part of the day. In theory, that was no surprise. That much
they had been warned about. But the exhaustion, and the drudgery, and the fear of getting something horribly wrong: nobody had described any of that. Nobody had described the way everything would
shrink to this pinprick. It all became about getting this unknowable being, this powerless and yet infinitely powerful little reptile, through the day and through the night when day and night
scarcely seemed divided. The hours seemed to stop passing, becoming just a wall of insomnia and of the same actions repeated over and over until all awareness of a world outside fell away, came to
seem like a rumour they both remembered hearing, but which they never had the time, never a moment, to sit down and straighten out. Of course they went into this world, of course they had to; once
or twice a day one or the other of them went down the street and around the corner to the Centra, which sold milk and bread and nappies and formula at extortionate prices, but it was a five-minute
walk, and it passed in a daze of thought and confusion and absorption in whatever scene they had just left behind: what hour of screaming, what fragment of silence, what rash, what shiver, what
colour of puke, and what the next hour would bring, what needed to be done, what needed to be guarded against.