Solace (25 page)

‘It’s OK,’ Joanne said, smiling at him. ‘It’s only me.’

‘I knew it was you,’ he said.

When Mark got a text inviting him to Niall Nagle’s stag party, Joanne encouraged him to go. It would be a weekend in Glendalough in late April. He would be on a break
from his classes by then, she said. It would be good for him to get away. And the case she was working on, the one with the developers, would, with any luck, be finished by then. It would be a good
time for her to have a weekend alone with Aoife. ‘We can bond,’ she said, lifting Aoife from the playmat on to her lap, bouncing her up and down. ‘Isn’t that right,
Aoife?’

‘I think you’re meant to have bonded with her by now,’ Mark said wryly.

‘Ah, you know what I mean,’ Joanne said. ‘A girls’ day out. And you can have a weekend with the lads. Are you seriously going to argue with me on this?’

‘No.’ Mark shook his head. ‘I’m not stupid.’

‘Good,’ Joanne said, and curled herself forward around Aoife. ‘We’ll have a great time.’

‘I don’t know why Nagle’s inviting me,’ Mark said, frowning at the screen of his phone. ‘We’re not exactly friends. I’m probably going to be the only
one there who’s not on the way to CEO of some bank.’

‘Mossy will be there, won’t he?’

Mark laughed. ‘Mossy could end up running a bank yet.’

‘Just text Nagle back and tell him you’re going,’ Joanne said. ‘Before I change my mind.’

On the Friday night after Mark had gone to Glendalough, Sarah and Deirdre came around for dinner. They had accepted the invitation on condition that Joanne would not cook. They
brought takeaway from the Indian on Manor Street, and two bottles of wine. They also brought a tiny birthday cake for Aoife, who would turn one in a few weeks, and who was still up when they
arrived. They played with her, and fussed over her, and from her bag Sarah took a wrapped gift and placed it on the carpet in front of her. Aoife stared first at it and then at her mother. Joanne
opened the gift. It was a set of board books. Bending down to Aoife, she pointed to things on the pages: a cat, a giraffe, a dog. Aoife looked at the pictures as though they were photographs of
people she was expected to recognize. She took the book from her mother and chewed its spine.

‘Definitely another PhD student in the making,’ Deirdre said.

Over dinner Deirdre, who had qualified as a solicitor the previous year, talked about the firm she worked for, a new outfit in Smithfield that sounded like a dream to Joanne; they specialized in
family law, which was what she wanted to get into, and the partners were young and sounded decent and smart. Deirdre said the vibe in the office was always good, even if everyone was worked to the
bone. She promised to introduce Joanne to one of the partners. There was a staff night out planned in May, she said, and Joanne should come as her guest.

‘You can pretend to be my new girl,’ she said, ribbing Sarah.

‘For that to work, they’d have to know you actually have an old girl,’ Sarah said drily, and for a moment nobody spoke. Sarah shook her head quickly then, and reached for the
wine.

‘Sorry,’ she said to Joanne. ‘That’s beside the point. Deirdre’s right. You should go along and meet her bosses. I’m sure they’d be impressed. You can
tell them you just helped yours to win another case.’

‘For all the good it will do,’ Joanne said. ‘Any job I get after I qualify is likely to be with Imelda and Eoin. Your firm will have its own trainees to promote.’

Before Deirdre could argue, Joanne asked Sarah about her group of Koreans this year, and Sarah rolled her eyes and launched into a long and comical description of her students, the questions
they asked her and the gifts they gave her. But it was definitely going to be her last year teaching Koreans, she said, with an almost bashful glance at Deirdre. She was going to go back to college
in the autumn. ‘And I mean it this time. I’ve applied and everything,’ she said.

‘That’s brilliant, Sarah,’ Joanne said. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘Journalism,’ she said, and Deirdre gave a mock groan.

‘Another hack hanging around the Four Courts,’ she said, as Sarah swatted at her. ‘That’s all we bloody need.’

‘It’s great, Sarah,’ Joanne said, and poured them more wine. ‘You were always too good at English to end up just teaching it.’

Deirdre snorted with laughter. ‘There’s something not quite right about that sentence,’ she said.

‘Oh, well,’ Joanne shrugged. ‘Here’s to you anyway.’ She raised her glass to Sarah, and they clinked.

When they had finished eating, they moved to the sitting room. The
Late Late Show
was on, and they half watched it, passing occasional comment on the host and the guests. Deirdre and
Sarah were merry by now, and Joanne knew that she must be well on too, but she didn’t feel it: as usual, she just felt tired. She was furious the first time she caught herself secretly
longing to leave the girls by themselves in the sitting room and go upstairs to bed; it was rude of her, and more than that it was pathetic, she told herself. It was the thinking of someone who was
too old and too boring to be open to even the mildest kind of fun. But as soon as she had thought that, she was thinking that if she excused herself to go upstairs and check on Aoife – which
she would have to do soon anyway, which she would be expected to do – she could stretch out on the bed, just for a moment.

She shook herself, trying to wake up. She did not want to go to bed, no matter what her body was telling her: she wanted to be here, spending time with her friends, friends she loved, friends
she hardly ever saw now. She wanted to throw herself into the conversation they were having – the conversation in which they thought she was participating – about the politician who was
on the television screen now, and what a moron he was, and how insincere, and how dangerous, despite his homespun banter and his cartoon moustache. She wanted to talk about this with them, and to
share with them the stories she’d heard about this politician, about other politicians; she wanted to express disgust like they were expressing it. She wanted to care. And she did care. She
cared very much. She could not look at that guy, she had never been able to look at that guy, without wanting to tear that ridiculous moustache from his face. He was a gombeen man, and he thrived
on it, and because of it he got away with things for which he should have been fired, and that was outrageous, just like Deirdre was saying, just like Sarah was repeating. Joanne agreed. But even
as she was agreeing, she was thinking that it really didn’t matter what a politician did, or what he said, or what he lied about, or what he had on his upper lip. Or, rather, it mattered, but
it didn’t matter as much as other things did. And she was furious with herself when she found herself thinking that, too, because if there was one thing she didn’t want to be, it was
that kind of woman, that kind of mother, who thought that nothing in the world mattered except the shallow little breaths, the muffled little heartbeat of the person sleeping a fragile sleep in the
room upstairs. But nothing else did matter, or nothing mattered as much. Was that true? Was she still so completely hormonal? Was this thinking going to stick? Was she going to shrug at everything
except her daughter’s existence for the rest of her life? She couldn’t do that, Joanne thought, she couldn’t live with herself, and yet she didn’t see how she had a
choice.

‘Oh God, stop
lying
, you fucking weasel,’ Deirdre shouted at the television screen, and Joanne stood and said she had to nip upstairs for a second.

‘Just need to make sure she’s still alive,’ she said, raising her eyebrows, as though to suggest the tediousness of the chore. ‘That kind of thing.’

‘Don’t fall asleep up there, now,’ Sarah called after her, and as Joanne stepped into the hall, she could hear that Aoife was awake. She tripped on the stairs. It must have
been the wine.

The next morning, she took Aoife into town and bought her things. She bought her clothes in Dunnes and toys in the Early Learning Centre, and she went into Habitat and got some
picture frames for her bedroom, and she took her into St Stephen’s Green and wheeled her around the flowerbeds and across the little bridge. She felt invisible; a woman with her child. There
were so many of them around. Grafton Street was packed. She ducked up past Kehoe’s to get away from the crowds.

They had lunch in a café on Dawson Street. The waitress brought her a high chair so that Aoife could sit at the table with her. Afterwards, Joanne took out the little wooden farm animals
she had bought her; they kept Aoife occupied long enough for Joanne to read almost a whole article in the Saturday magazine. Then she packed the animals away, and left the newspaper behind, and
they walked out again into the sunshine. Joanne decided to walk through the grounds of Trinity, to find a bench and sit to soak up the day’s warmth.

Clive Robinson had aged so much in the space of a year that she barely recognized him. He must have been ill, she realized. He was walking towards the Berkeley Library, looking unsteady on his
feet; maybe it was the cobblestones, but everybody else was walking on them perfectly well. She wanted for a second to avoid him, but she could not: he had seen her, and he was coming over. She
waved and pulled the pushchair closer. As Robinson reached the bench, he pointed to the child with one hand and extended the other towards Joanne. He could not have looked more surprised.
‘This is news,’ he said, and he touched Aoife’s hair. She frowned up at him. ‘Bless every hair on her head,’ he said to Joanne. ‘She is yours?’

‘Mine.’ Joanne nodded, and they smiled at each other for a moment and then both looked down to the pushchair. ‘How are you?’ she heard herself ask in the very instant she
warned herself, silently, not to ask that very question, and she cringed. She thought she saw him laugh a little as he sat on the bench beside her.

‘How am I?’ he said, and he made a face at the baby. ‘I’m seventy.’ He shook his head. ‘This is what seventy looks like.’ He turned to her.
‘I’ve seen better years, but I’m here. And you? Are you well?’

‘I’m fine,’ Joanne smiled. ‘This is Aoife.’

‘Aoife,’ he said, and he looked at the baby as though seeing her for the first time. ‘Which one was Aoife, again?’

Joanne hesitated. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘In the myths. Aoife was in the Children of Lir, am I right? Isn’t that where you find her name?’

‘Oh.’ Joanne nodded as though in agreement. ‘Right.’ In fact, she and Mark had not even considered the meaning of the name when they chose it. It had been one of the few
they could agree on. But she wasn’t going to let Robinson know that, she decided. The legend was a better story. ‘We did wonder whether we’d have to give her three
brothers,’ she laughed.

Robinson looked at her for a moment, and she knew she had said something wrong. ‘But Aoife was the wicked stepmother in that story, wasn’t she?’ he said, with the apologetic
half-smile she remembered from whenever she had made a fool of herself in class. ‘Fionnuala was the girl, if I remember. And Fiachra, Conn and Aodh were the sons. Poor creatures. Nine hundred
years as swans. Imagine their loneliness.’

Joanne searched for a response. ‘It can’t have been fun,’ she said, eventually, and she blushed at how inane it sounded. But what was she supposed to say? He was talking about
a fairy story. He was feeling sympathy for people who had never lived. She looked around the square. ‘It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?’ she blurted.

Robinson leaned back into the green slats of the bench. ‘Spring again,’ he said.

Joanne felt relieved. They were back on some kind of normal track. She could manage this. ‘Are you busy, these days?’ she asked, and Robinson smiled and shook his head.

‘I’m doing very little,’ he said. ‘Doctor’s orders.’

‘I see,’ she said, trying to sound at once discreet and surprised. What was the etiquette in this situation? Were you meant to ask outright?

‘It
is
cancer,’ Robinson said, as though answering a very specific question. ‘But it seems the doctors got to it in time, and that I’m off the hook for now.’
He glanced at her. ‘Though I’m aware that it doesn’t look that way.’

‘Oh, no, no,’ Joanne said, in a rush. ‘I mean, you look thinner than before, maybe, but,’ she nodded vigorously, ‘you look good.’

‘There was radiation therapy, there was chemotherapy, and there have been drugs,’ Robinson said lightly. ‘The drugs have not been allowing me to sleep so well, I find. But
that’s not a bad price to pay for life, is it?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Which you, more than any of us, should know,’ he said, looking at her almost mischievously.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, though it was clear that she did not know his meaning.

‘New motherhood.’ He put a hand to the pushchair. Aoife was leaning out of it, staring at the passing pigeons. ‘New life, in exchange for an end to nights of any sleep worthy
of the name. Isn’t that how it goes?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Joanne said, with altogether more certainty. ‘Yes, it definitely is.’

‘I remember those nights. Of course, my wife did most of the work – that was the way then – but still, I remember.’ He laughed. ‘My God, the stamina these little
creatures have for their own discontent.’ He leaned to look at Aoife again. ‘It’s remarkable, when you think about it. We spend our first years in this world furiously refusing
the luxury of what we’ll spend the rest of it longing to do.’ He sat back on the bench. ‘Sleep, that is.’

‘Her father helps out a lot, though,’ Joanne said, after a long moment of silence. ‘I mean, her father actually looks after her most of the time. I’m at work.’

‘That’s admirable,’ said Robinson.

‘He’s doing a PhD in the English department here, actually,’ Joanne said, and she pointed to the arts block, as though Robinson needed the illustration. ‘On Maria
Edge-worth and Walter Scott.’ She thought for a moment. What was it about those writers, exactly, that Mark was working on, again? Robinson was sure to ask her. ‘Their novels,’
she added pointlessly.

‘I see,’ said Robinson, but he did not ask for any more details. He seemed to have no interest. And she wanted him to be interested, Joanne realized. She wanted Robinson to ask about
the man she had met, the man she had made a child with. But he just sat beside her and lifted his face to the sun. He closed his eyes. From her pushchair, Aoife called out.