Solace (24 page)

As he took the handles of the pushchair and steered it out of the shop, Pamela was still watching him, a faint smile on her lips, her eyebrows raised. He nodded to her, another goodbye, and she
nodded back, but he could see it on her face: all that he had not told her, all that he had not admitted to, all that he had tried to hide.

It was raining outside, and the night had fallen completely now, the Christmas lights high over Main Street in their gaudy yellows and greens and reds. The sound of the rain splashing against
the footpath seemed to calm Aoife, and he stood by the bright shop window with the slickly dressed mannequins, rocking the pushchair back and forth, until his mother emerged with a shopping bag and
they headed for their cars.

*

It happened again that night. The wailing drifted into their room, angry, jagged, catching on itself like an engine trying to start in the cold. Maura pulled on her
dressing-gown, left the room without turning on a light. She called out to the child as she moved along the landing.

Then Tom could hear Mark’s voice along with hers, puncturing the clamour of the child’s hunger. A door opened and the cries grew louder for a second, nearer, then more distant; they
were taking her downstairs. Tom lifted himself slightly to look at the clock; it was almost six. He stared into the half-light of the room. Already his mind had stretched open to sleeplessness, to
the blankness of an hour too early to use. He thought about going down to the kitchen, but Maura would be fussing over the child. The tiles would be cold under his feet. He pushed his knees
together and drew them closer to his chest; he pressed the quilt between his shoulder and his chin. He wondered if the dog, in the back kitchen, would be confused now, if the noise had made her
think it was time to get up, time for the day’s work to begin. Footsteps sounded on the landing again, and the bedroom door opened quietly. A blade of light fell over the pillow beside him,
then vanished as Maura shut the door. He kept his eyes closed as she eased back into the bed, kept them closed as she pulled the quilt to her. He did not open them until he felt her shuddering her
way back to sleep. Then he heaved himself out of bed and dressed quickly in the clothes he had taken off the night before. As he closed the door behind him, he heard a sudden rustle of the
bedclothes. Maura, he knew, had jolted awake again.

The child seemed to be quietening as he made his way down the stairs, and when he reached the kitchen the crying had stopped completely. Mark stood facing the window, the
bottle jerking in his hand as the child sucked. He looked at Tom’s reflection and nodded a greeting.

‘Did she waken you?’

Tom shook his head. He looked at the tiny Christmas tree with its scattered ornaments, its thin lengths of tinsel as frayed as old twine.

‘I’d be up soon anyway,’ he said, pulling at a small silver bell on the tree. It came away in his hand. He set it down on the counter beside the sugar bowl.

Mark glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. ‘You must be busy,’ he said evenly.

‘Busy enough.’

‘Six o’clock in the morning in the dead middle of winter?’ His voice was careful.

‘What needs doing needs doing.’

Mark said nothing. He held the bottle away from the child for a moment, watching as she dribbled milk on to her chin, her mouth moving as though the teat was still in it. He wiped at the white
spittle with a cloth. She whined.

‘Can’t you let her suck at it when she’s hungry?’ Tom said.

Mark raised the baby high on to his shoulder and rubbed her back, the white folds of her sleepsuit sliding up and down with his hand. ‘She makes herself sick if she drinks it all at
once.’

Tom watched Mark’s fingers travel over the child’s shoulders, the skin of her neck, the fluff of her hair. She burped. He lowered her back into the crook of his arm, touching her
lips again with the cloth. As she started to kick and whimper, he eased the teat into her mouth. She sucked. Her eyes were wide open and locked on Mark’s.

‘When’s her mother coming down?’ Tom said.

Mark looked at him. ‘Joanne,’ he said. He did not answer the question.

‘Yiz won’t be here for the Christmas,’ Tom said, and Mark shook his head.

‘We won’t,’ he said. ‘We’ll be down again after Stephen’s Day.’

‘Yeah,’ Tom said. He handled the small bell again and placed it on a branch of the tree. As soon as he took his hand away, it fell. He caught it before it clattered to the counter,
closing it in his fist. The child watched him. For a moment, he thought about offering her the bell. But she would probably just choke on it. He put it back on the counter.

‘She doesn’t see too much of the mother, I’ve noticed,’ Tom said.

Mark raised his eyebrows. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’ There was a warning in his tone.

Tom let the silence stretch out another moment before giving an answer. ‘Joanne,’ he said then, and Mark exhaled. ‘She doesn’t be up at Caldragh too often when yiz are
here. Herself and the mother don’t get on, is that it?’

Mark sighed. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said, looking at the child.

Tom laughed. ‘Nothing’s complicated with Irene Lynch. Nothing was complicated with the husband either. Either they had a use for you or they didn’t.’

Mark shook his head. ‘That’s your concern, not ours,’ he said. ‘Not mine and Joanne’s. We don’t know anything about what happened between you and her
parents.’

‘You don’t know?’ Tom said. ‘You know bloody well. You were here, weren’t you?’

‘I was a kid.’

Tom snorted. ‘You had eyes. You had plenty of sense.’

‘Well, Joanne doesn’t know anything about it,’ Mark said. ‘It has nothing to do with us. And it definitely has nothing to do with Aoife. So leave it. Forget about
it.’

‘I haven’t much of a chance of that now,’ Tom said, and he let Mark see him looking at Aoife as he spoke.

‘Cut it out,’ Mark said, and his voice was quick, hard.

‘I’m only saying what everyone around here is saying.’

‘Fuck everyone around here.’

‘It’s easy for you to say that. We’re the ones that has to live here after you making a show of us. Your mother and me.’

Mark seemed to shiver. Then he moved forward so quickly that Tom began to raise his hands to protect himself. But Mark went past him, heading for the stairs, and Tom caught sight of himself in
the window’s black mirror, his hands hanging uselessly in the air. He turned. Against Mark’s chest, the child was fumbling with her fists, moving her head from side to side. Mark
pressed his lips to her hair.

‘That’s enough, now,’ Mark said quietly. ‘Don’t say any more.’

‘I’m only saying what’s the truth of things,’ Tom said, slamming a hand down on the counter.

‘You don’t know anything about truth,’ Mark said. ‘You’ve been living in your own world for years.’ He sighed. ‘I’m going back upstairs,’ he
said. ‘You should go back up too.’

‘I have work to do,’ Tom said, but his heart was beating hard. He wanted to take a hold of what was happening. He wanted to turn it back. Mark’s footsteps sounded on the
staircase, and then there was nothing in the room but the buzzing of the fridge and the fluorescent light overhead. Tom found that he was shaking. The light was making his eyes ache. The drip of
the tap was itching his brain. He walked quickly out into the back kitchen, where the dog was awake and waiting. He thrust his feet into the cold tubes of his wellingtons and pulled on his coat and
cap. Stepping outside, he blew on his hands and rubbed them together before reaching for the stick that stood in its usual place against the wall. Above him, in a sky still far off dawn, the stars
glinted like shards of steel.

Mark brought Aoife back from Longford with a cold, and that was their Christmas, nursing her through it and catching it themselves. Joanne had only a few days off from work,
and she returned to the office more exhausted than she had been leaving it on Christmas Eve. She hoped they would send her home when they saw the state of her – the red nose, the streaming
eyes, the scarf muffled around her throat, the scraggy tissues tucked in her cuffs – but they did not. There was too much to do. Instead, they all caught the cold too, and blamed Joanne.

With the new term in Trinity, Mark began to teach a second class. It was on something more closely related to his thesis, something into which a couple of Edgeworth’s novels fitted, and he
was glad about that. And though the pay was meagre, the extra money was good to have. While he was teaching, Mark left Aoife with Eileen, the woman who ran a dressmaker’s shop in the house
next door. She refused to take any money. It was only a couple of hours, she told him, and she would be more than happy to have Aoife for the whole week if he wanted to go off and work at a proper
job. Joanne had roared with laughter when Mark told her the story that evening, and he had laughed too, but in a different way. A couple of days later, he had brought up once more an idea that he
had aired several times since Aoife’s birth. He thought he should look around for a second job, he said, something that would help them to be more secure. They were always talking, he
reminded her, about how they needed to start up a savings account for Aoife.

Joanne shook her head. ‘Yes, but you don’t have to get a second job for us to do that. We should do that anyway. Even if we only put a tenner a week into it, we should be doing it
now.’

‘But a tenner a week is going to get us nowhere.’

‘It won’t always be that little,’ she said. ‘I’m saying that the point is to save, not to wait until we might have more to save. And, anyway, we’ve talked
about this before. If you work full-time too, the cost of putting her in a crèche is probably going to cost us double what you earn.’

Mark gestured to the door. ‘But Eileen says—’

‘Come on, Mark. We’re not going to leave her in a dressmaker’s shop all day. That’s not going to work. It’s probably not even safe to leave her in there as little
as we do. As soon as she starts crawling, we’re going to have to find somehere else. Eileen might have reared her kids among pins and scissors and plastic bags, but we’re not going
to.’

‘She doesn’t leave her in the shop the whole time.’

‘She leaves her by herself ?’

‘She leaves the door open between the shop and her sitting room.’

‘We’re going to have to get someone to come here and mind her while you’re teaching,’ Joanne said. ‘Could you see if one of your students will do it for a few
quid?’

Mark exhaled in loud protest. ‘I don’t want any of my bloody students poking around my own house. They look down their fucking noses at me enough as it is.’

‘What’s wrong with this house?’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ Mark said tiredly, and he shook his head. ‘I don’t want to have this conversation now. I’m too knackered after work.’

Joanne opened her mouth to respond, but she left it. There was no point. It would collapse into an argument and they would go to bed in a cloud of irritation and resentment. She did not want
that. She did not want to bring that into the room they shared with Aoife. She wanted nothing to press in on her sleeping child; nothing but her dreams.

They did not argue often. Usually, in the evenings, they were almost too tired to talk. Usually they watched television until bedtime, or Joanne went online and looked at gossip sites and
discussion forums, or Mark read his students’ essays and sighed and cursed and clicked his tongue as he scrawled all through their pages in indignant red pen.

Joanne tried to read. There were novels she wanted to get through. They had been sitting on her bedside table since the final months of the pregnancy. She brought one down to the sitting room
occasionally and sat with it for a while, but the paragraphs seemed to dissolve as she read them; she kept needing to go back to the start. Or the television would distract her, or she would think
of something she had been meaning to look up on the Internet, and she would put the book aside. She always meant to get back to it. She always took it back upstairs with her and tried to read it in
bed. That lasted for about the length of time it took for her eyelids to blink once, then again, and then to close.

Mark did not fare much better, but most evenings he sat for a while with a book, looking at it, writing in its margin with a pencil. He said he could not work otherwise; that he could not absorb
the information. So he scribbled, and annotated, and underlined, and while he read he frowned and squinted in a way that she told him was certain to damage his eyes.

‘No, that’s something else,’ he always joked when she said that, and she always told him he was hilarious.

One night when he had fallen asleep on the couch with a book in his lap she reached over and took it from him. It was one of Edgeworth’s, the only one Joanne had heard of.
Castle
Rackrent.
She did not know why she had heard of it: she had not read it. It had never been assigned to her in school or in university, and she had never come across it by herself. She should
read it, she thought; she should know more about Mark’s writer. Besides, it was set around Edgeworthstown. It might be interesting. It might be just the thing to help her to concentrate
again.

She fought the impulse to skip the introduction; there could be something in it, she told herself, that she needed to know. She read Edgeworth’s birth date, her death date; she did the
calculation in her head. Eighty-two. A great age, she thought, and realized that those were her father’s words, the words he had often used to describe someone who was old. You didn’t
say they were old; you said they were a great age. And when they were dead, you said that they had lived to a great age. That was a way of saying it was no big deal that they were gone. That
they’d hung on for long enough. That their family had nothing to be crying about. That crying over such a death, at such an age, was just a little bit rich. Joanne’s father had been
fifty-eight when he died. That had not been a great age.

She skimmed the next paragraph; it mentioned the American revolution. It mentioned the French one. It mentioned Rousseau. Then she read the line about how Edgeworth’s father had employed
her to write his business letters, to help him deal with his tenants and listen to their pleas, and she read it again, and then with Mark’s pencil she placed a little exclamation mark in the
margin beside it. She skimmed on through the dates and the placenames and the titles of books, and she read a couple of lines about Scott, and she read about how Edgeworth did her writing in her
sitting room with a crowd of children playing all around her. She underlined that part and gave it an exclamation mark as well.
You think you have it tough
, she wrote, beneath the
exclamation mark, and she could not help it, she laughed to herself. She looked over to Mark where he slept, and wanted to wake him, to show him what she had done, to enjoy the joke with him there
and then, but she left him sleeping. She left the joke for him to find for himself, some time when he would go back over the book, some time when he would find her writing in the margin and stare
at it for a moment and then laugh. And when she would come in from work that evening, or when he would come in to her, he would ask her, in a voice pretending sternness, to guess what he had found.
And she would have forgotten about it then, and they would laugh about it, and they would kiss. She thumbed forward twenty or thirty pages, into the novel itself. She wanted to leave him something
else to find. She glanced at a paragraph: it was something about a house being full of people and heat and smoke, something about a man hiding in a bed. On the facing margin, Mark had left a note
in pencil himself.
Anecdote
, he had written.
Effect of the Real.
Beside it, Joanne wrote,
HELLO BABY
. She put two
X
marks underneath. Jesus, she thought then, looking at
the words, you’re acting like an idiot. You need to go to bed. She closed the book, left it back on the couch beside Mark, and stood up, stretched and loudly yawned. At the noise, Mark opened
his eyes as though in fright.