Solace (22 page)

Joanne liked to be there to bathe her before bed; to sit her into the soapy water and watch her pleasure at the warmth of it, to watch her squirm and kick and stare as she relaxed her way
towards sleep. She would carry her, wrapped in a towel, into the room where she and Mark slept, and she would change her into a clean nappy and a Babygro. Then she would lay her down under a pink
crochet blanket. It had been Joanne’s when she was a baby; her mother had kept it all these years, had brought it into the hospital to them on that very first day. They had a nightlight of
gently turning sheep and moons and stars. The baby’s eyes followed the twirling reflections on the walls and the ceiling, like the ticking hands of a clock. Joanne watched her, often, as her
eyes closed. As the child slept, she clutched with one hand the top of the blanket. The other hand was always thrown wide. Often as she watched her sleep or drift into sleep Joanne felt again the
dread she had felt during the pregnancy, during the labour, in the impossible first weeks. How would she do for this person all that needed to be done?

She still could not think of herself as a mother. Six months on, it was still too strange. She had expected the change to be monumental. In other women, it seemed to have been. She had no close
friends with babies, but she had talked online to women who were giving birth around the same time as her, and their emotion seemed to be so much more intense than Joanne’s. She worried from
time to time about this. But what she felt for her baby, felt, at the same time, right; felt normal. She loved her. She would have killed for her. She found it painful to look at her sometimes, she
was so beautiful; she found it painful to realize how transient this beauty was. It would grow into another kind of beauty, she knew, but the baby face, the baby smell, the body that could be
bundled and carried in the crook of her arm – already that body was no longer light enough to be spirited around as in the first days and weeks. Already she was growing heavy.

Joanne felt that somehow she must be getting it wrong. None of the mothers online seemed afraid of their babies, as she sometimes was. They seemed hysterical with pride and obsessive interest,
and with worry and anxiety when the child was ill or not sleeping, but they never seemed less than sure of who they were: mothers to these new boys and girls. They displayed photographs of their
babies on the forum; they displayed names and dates under the comments and questions and answers they wrote. They advised one another, congratulated one another, backed one another up. Joanne
rarely posted anything on the forum now but when she did it was short, a request for advice on some specific thing.

She found herself longing, sometimes, for a neighbour. Someone she could have coffee with in the mornings. It was madness. She had neighbours, and she never spoke to them, except sometimes to
the old woman who ran the sewing business next door. She did not want to have coffee with that woman; she did not want to answer her questions, take her advice. The woman had some huge number of
grandchildren; she was too full of information, she irritated Joanne. And even if there had been a neighbour she wanted to talk to, she was never at home. At least, not at an hour when she would
drink coffee. At that hour, and most hours, she was in the office, doing three times as much work as she had done before the birth, working on a case involving two property developers who were
accusing each other of fraud. It was boring work, and it was distasteful, and it seemed endless. She despised each of the developers equally.

‘You’re not always going to have someone to feel sorry for, you know,’ Mark said one evening, as she complained about the case.

‘I know that,’ she said irritably.

‘Anyway, it’ll be over soon. That case. Won’t it?’

She shrugged. ‘They’re running circles around each other in court. It could drag on and on. Our guy is lying just as much as the other fella.’

‘You’re not helping the other fella to lie this time?’

‘No.’ Joanne smiled.

‘No secrets from Imelda? You haven’t found out that the other developer has signed everything over to his second family and just neglected to mention it?’

‘Come on.’

‘Come on yourself. I can’t believe you got away with that stuff last time. It’s amazing what you lot get up to. Corrupt,’ he said, and he laughed.

‘That’s not true,’ Joanne said, and Mark raised an eyebrow at her.

‘It’s not,’ she said again.

‘No, you’re right, of course it’s not,’ he said, standing. ‘I’m knackered. I have to go up. Are you coming?’

‘I’ll be up in a minute,’ she said, but more than a minute passed before she followed.

*

After the birth they did not have sex, not properly, for months. There were stitches, there was soreness, there was blood and, besides, bed had become a place to collapse into,
already asleep, and nothing else. But one evening as she stood over the cot watching the baby drift into sleep, he came into the room behind her and put his arms around her, and she felt him, and
she turned. She worried at first that the noise would wake the baby, but she soon forgot that anxiety and they moved on each other like they had before there was any of this, any house together,
any baby, anything besides their separate selves making pleasure for each other and for themselves. Her breasts were still bigger. She was as turned on by this as he was. She was hungrier for him,
she realized. The hormones must still have been at work. She wanted him on her. She wanted him to make noise with her, to make her make noise, however much the baby heard. He was beautiful to her
again as he had been that first night, those first weeks. His dark eyes. His calm face with the fine bones. His lean body, his sallow arms. The hard knuckles of his hands.

*

They had been down to Longford a few times since the baby was born. Always, they had stayed with Mark’s parents, but Joanne’s mother wanted to see Aoife too, and she
did not feel comfortable coming to Dorvaragh, so they would go to Caldragh for an afternoon, watch Irene fuss over the baby, answer her questions about feeding and sleeping and waking. Even during
short visits, Joanne would grow weary of her mother: her snippiness, her bitterness would come out with a sly comment here, a loaded question there. Mark said she was overreacting, but Joanne could
hear what her mother was saying to her, and she wanted, always, to get away. Aoife, though, seemed to like Irene. She was quiet with her, she smiled at her; one day, lying in her arms, she began to
make an absurd, burbling sound. The three of them had stared at her, panic-stricken for a moment, until they realized what it was. She was laughing. It was the first time. Her mother, Joanne could
see, was lit up with pride. Back in Dorvaragh, Mark kept trying all that evening to get the child to laugh again, to put on a show of the ridiculous, tiny chuckling for his parents, but she would
only smile. Maura said it was good enough, that she would laugh for them in her own good time. Tom, Joanne had thought, had been disappointed.

Tom had seemed to grow used to Joanne, and to the baby. He was still not talkative, but Mark told her that that was just his father’s way. Despite herself, Joanne was fond of him.
Sometimes she saw him watching her and felt certain he wanted just for an easy conversation between the two of them to begin. But if she tried to start one, he would seem uncomfortable, would
excuse himself saying that he needed to see to something outside, or that there was a call he needed Maura to make for him. He seemed never to make his own calls.

Christmas approached. On Grafton Street, the lights were already up in early November. Aoife was too young to notice any of the gifts they would buy her, any of the decorations they would hang
in the house or point to in the streets, but there would be a first Christmas for her only once and they wanted to make something of it. Maura and Tom wanted them down home for the day, as did
Joanne’s mother, but they had decided they wanted to spend it in their own home. When Maura and Irene both pleaded, Joanne and Mark decided he would take Aoife down to Longford for a couple
of days before Christmas; Joanne would still be at work. They bought a tree in the square at Smithfield and draped it with tinsel and baubles from a stall on Henry Street. Mark put fairy lights
over the doorway and the window in the sitting room, and Joanne bought Aoife a huge stocking in Arnotts, and even before the middle of December, they had filled it with toys. For New Year’s
Eve, they planned to close out the world. They would light candles, have a fire going, roast a chicken, drink champagne. Maybe it would snow. Probably it would just piss rain. But that was OK. It
would be some time away from the office. The steps of the Four Courts would be quiet, except for the odd drunk, except for the homeless people wrapped in blankets or in sleeping bags. These would
be their days, hers and Mark’s and Aoife’s, to stay home, to stay inside. To stay inside and have the last hours of what had been for them such a year.

‘The shortest day,’ said Maura, as she handed Mark a mug of tea. ‘They’ll all have been out at Newgrange this past couple of hours.’

‘I’d forgotten about that.’

‘You and Nuala used to have to write about it for your homework every year at this time when you were in primary school.’ She bit from a slice of toast spread thick with butter and
marmalade. The rumpled cotton of her nightdress showed beneath her dressing-gown. Around her eyes, the lines seemed scored more deeply than they had the night before.

‘They built it in alignment to the solstice,’ Mark said. ‘The sunrise today comes in through a roof box and lights up the whole passageway. They’ve people buried in there.
They don’t know who.’

‘Must be some sight,’ Maura said. ‘I’d love to get in to see it some day.’

‘Only clout would get you in this morning,’ Mark said. ‘It’ll be all politicians and journalists blocking the place up for a gawk. I’m surprised any light gets in
at all.’

‘Only clout would have got you in there the first time round,’ said Maura.

Mark leafed through the pages of the local newspaper he had spread on his side of the table. It was all court reports and office-party photos and advertorials; there was a whole page about the
cathedral in Longford and about how busy the priests were in the run-up to Christmas. ‘During this very busy season in the hustle and bustle of Longford, be sure to drop into St Mel’s
Cathedral and be confronted by serenity,’ the piece ended. Mark had long been meaning to call into the small museum at the back of the cathedral: he had heard that the nuns at the manor had
donated a couple of boxes of old letters and documents from the Edgeworth family’s time. He should go in to have a look at the stuff, he knew. There might be something he could use. He would
get around to it eventually.

‘She’s sleeping late,’ his mother interrupted his thoughts.

He nodded. ‘She always does, in this house. I don’t know why.’

‘Country air.’ His mother smiled. ‘You should bring her out for a walk in it later.’

Mark nodded. ‘I want to go down to see what Dad’s at in the fields. I’ll bring her in the pushchair.’

‘Well, wrap her up warm,’ his mother said. ‘I don’t want Joanne blaming me if you bring her back to Dublin with a cold.’

‘Joanne’s not going to do that,’ Mark said, glancing across the table.

‘I wish you could all be here for the day itself,’ his mother said. ‘I’d love to see her face when she gets her Santy presents.’

‘Come on, she doesn’t know Santy from Adam, Mam,’ Mark said, and he closed the newspaper and folded it away.

‘Still,’ his mother said. ‘You’ll be missed.’

It was strange being in Dorvaragh with Aoife and without Joanne. He was acutely aware, for some reason, of the child’s breathing as she lay in the cot at the foot of his
bed. That was his old cot. His father – under orders from his mother – had taken it down from the attic and assembled it in Mark’s old room. Mark found himself looking at it as
though he might somehow remember it, which was impossible; of course he could not remember it. Still, the worn smoothness of its wooden bars seemed familiar, somehow. That morning as he had watched
Aoife sleep he had reached over and gripped one, held it tightly, the way he must have done thirty years ago when his hands were as small as Aoife’s were now. But nothing had come back to
him.

An hour later he put Aoife in the pushchair and walked down the lane. From the gate to the lower fields, he could see that his father was fencing, using a sledge to hammer a
paling post into the soft ground along the drain. Behind him, more posts jutted awkwardly from the transport box fixed to the tractor. Mark opened the gate and made his way over the bog, the thin
frame of the pushchair jerking and rattling across the bumps. Seeing him approach, Tom stopped work. He was sweating, and one cheek was dirty with peat. He had taken his coat off and thrown it
across the tractor’s front wheel.

‘These’re the sleepers?’ Mark asked, as he drew up beside him. He recognized the wood from the haul Tom had bought from the railway station in Longford a few years
previously.

Tom nodded. ‘Time to be doing something with them,’ he said.

‘The ground must be hard enough, this time of year?’ Mark said, studying the spot where the last post had gone in. He pressed his foot to it. It felt nothing like bog. ‘Jesus,
it’s like cement,’ he said. His father shrugged.

‘Bloody cattle are breaking out over this drain on me all winter,’ he said, and took up the sledge.

‘Right,’ said Mark, and he bent to check on Aoife. She was gazing at her grandfather from beneath her fleece hood, her cheeks so flushed they seemed chafed. Her nose had started to
run; he pressed a tissue to it, and she tried to turn away.

‘They buy those in from Poland now, you know,’ said Mark to his father, over the noise of the sledge as it came down on the wood.

Tom stepped back to examine the post. He drew the back of his hand over his mouth.

‘Do they,’ he said, lifting a bottle of orange from the transport box. He took a long drink, his head back, and glanced at Mark as he replaced the cap. ‘Poland. Didn’t
that used to be Russian? Communist, like?’