Solace (26 page)

‘We’re going in a minute now,’ Joanne said to her, and Robinson stirred beside her.

‘I don’t want to hold you up, my dear,’ he said quietly. ‘You go on ahead. I’m just going to catch my breath here.’

‘Oh, no, there’s no rush,’ said Joanne. ‘I was talking to the child.’

Robinson opened his eyes and peered at Aoife. ‘Do you have good conversations, the two of you?’ he said, and Joanne wondered which of them he was addressing. ‘And you have an
interesting case to work on now?’ he said then, and this time he was looking directly at her.

Joanne shrugged. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘A lot of the work is very dull.’

‘Ah,’ he said.

‘Of course, I’ll be done with my traineeship soon,’ she said. ‘I’m hoping then to get into a firm that works more directly in the areas that interest me.’

She expected him to ask what those areas were, but he did not. His interest in things seemed as thinned as his body was. She felt suddenly intensely sorry for him. There was no way he could not
realize how much he had changed in himself, how diluted the energies of his mind had become. As though the shelves of a library had been ransacked. It’s not fair, she thought, and for a
moment she thought she might even say this to him, but it was out of the question. It would not help in any way. It would embarrass them both, and he would look at her . . . he would look at her,
she thought, much as he was looking at her right now. Was she imagining it? That he was looking at her so knowingly, with something so much like tolerance? As though he could hear or read what had
been going through her mind? He had always seemed capable of that. She told herself to snap out of it, to stop wallowing in this nonsense, and she found that he was still regarding her, and smiling
at her, in exactly the same way.

‘You’re interested in family law, I recall,’ he said, and she was taken aback. He had remembered. So his memory was not the wreck she had imagined; he was not the poor senile
old dear she had been picturing and so energetically pitying. He was just as sharp, just as good on the small details of other people’s lives as he had ever been, even if he had shown no
interest in the man who had fathered her baby. Maybe he simply had good manners, she told herself. Maybe he just knew when to keep his nose out of things that were none of his concern.

‘And now here you are,’ he said then. ‘Here you are with a family all your own. Isn’t it strange? After all?’

She waited for something, some nub of wisdom, to follow in the wake of this, but there was nothing. He looked now as though he might be growing sleepy in the sun. But then he shook himself and
sat up.

‘You heard, of course, that the woman on Fitzwilliam Square sold up?’ he said, in a much more strident tone.

Joanne considered pretending not to know who he meant. But it was obvious. ‘Elizabeth Lefroy sold the house?’ she said.

‘Yes.’ Robinson nodded. ‘I think for a huge sum. You know how much those houses are selling for these days.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Joanne said, almost stammering.

‘I imagine the legal fees would have been significant,’ Robinson said. He glanced her way. Joanne felt prodded on to the defensive.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘hardly to the tune of that kind of amount.’

‘I expect there would have been some profit,’ Robinson said mildly, glancing to the lawn. ‘But then again, I imagine that the woman just wanted to get away. In light of what
had happened, I imagine she could no longer be happy in that house.’

‘No longer quite at home.’

Robinson looked to her. ‘I’m sorry?’

Joanne shook her head. ‘Something from her testimony. I remember noticing it at the time. Sorry,’ she said, as though she had interrupted him.

‘Yes, that is a nice phrase,’ Robinson said, his hands laid flat on his thighs. How thin his legs were. ‘A very nice way of putting it indeed. And true too, I imagine. True
too.’

‘It was all very sad, what happened,’ Joanne said, and he looked at her kindly.

‘Oh, it was far from your fault, my dear,’ he said, patting her hand. ‘When you get to your family law, there’ll be time enough for it to be your fault.’ He smiled,
showing his slightly browned teeth. ‘So you go easy on yourself until then.’

Aoife was asleep now in the pushchair. Joanne tried to see her through Robinson’s eyes. The red hair, that was from way back on her side, she imagined telling him. The full lips: those
were Mark’s. The nose was Joanne’s, and the pale skin too. The striped tights and the purple suede booties and the corduroy dress with the green cat stitched into it somehow suggested a
more colourful life, a life of more treats and more excitement than was actually the case; they were all gifts from friends, and Aoife had never worn them before. Joanne had chosen them in the
bedroom that morning, for their big day out. And the way she had thrown her head back in sleep, the way she had flopped her hands forward, that was the absolute surrender that made Joanne want to
pick her up and carry her everywhere for the rest of her life. That was the ability to trust that she must have inherited from somewhere deep inside her father, because it was not anywhere on her
father’s surface, and it was not anywhere in her mother at all. And that’s my daughter, Joanne imagined herself saying to Robinson, but he was not even looking at the child now: he was
staring over to the arts block, to its cement terraces blotched with the varying darknesses of age and wear. And it was time to go home, with the green cat, and the purple booties, and the little
hands thrown down like rejected toys. Beside her, Clive Robinson looked ready to fall asleep himself, to doze off right there, and to stay until someone came and found him, until with a nudge
someone woke him – what would they call him? Professor? Darling? Dad? – and took him home.

‘We’d better go,’ Joanne said, calling him nothing at all.

‘Of course you must,’ said Clive Robinson, and he stood with her and kissed her cheek, and on his breath she smelt the thing she had imagined to be happening to his mind. And though
she wished he would sit down again, and not tire himself, he stood and watched and waved as she walked away, until she had gone around the corner of the old library and out of his sight.

She searched her bookshelves for it that evening after she had put Aoife to bed for the night. She had loved it in college; she had read it several times. She found it on the
bottom shelf, hidden under an old photo album. She poured herself the last of the wine that Deirdre and Sarah had brought the previous evening, and she curled up on the couch. Her phone beeped and
she read the new message from Mark,
Having good time. How is Aoife?
, and she texted back to say that Aoife was asleep and that she was reading.
Xx
, he texted back, and
she thought of the note she had written on his Edgeworth book, and wondered if he had found it yet. She put the phone down. She opened Robinson’s book. She turned to the first line.
Never
are the philosophical problems of identity and difference so poignantly formulated as when they bear on the dimensions of social life
, she read, and she saw how she had underlined the sentence
several times, in different colours; how she had pushed at its meaning for herself again and again.
What does it mean to belong to a family, to a group of friends, to an organization?
she
read.
How is it possible to say ‘we’? Who counts as a stranger? What is it to be truly conscious of ourselves, let alone of someone else?

Joanne looked at the words, and she looked at the traces of herself as she had been years previously, reading them, noting them, needing them. She needed them now, she felt; she needed them once
again, but she did not know how. She did not know why. She read on, but the rest of the paragraph pulled her into territory that she was no longer certain how to traverse. As they always did now,
the words began to slip from their moorings. The sentences began to slide off a ledge. She went back to those first lines and used them to steady her grip. She let them lead her on. After a couple
of pages, as she had known they would, her eyes began to close. She went upstairs, taking the book with her. In the room, Aoife’s nightlight was throwing coloured stars to the ceiling, like
confetti to a summer sky. She left it on. Some time during the hours to come, it would turn itself off.

It was on the following Saturday afternoon that Maura’s car met with an overtaking van on the Longford road. Joanne and Mark had come down to Dorvaragh that morning.
Maura intended to throw Aoife a birthday party; there was a cake in Longford that she wanted to pick up. As she had been getting ready to leave the house, Aoife had woken up from her nap.
‘Sure come with me for the drive,’ Maura had said to Joanne. ‘There must be a few things you need to get in town.’

The miracle, everyone said afterwards, was that Aoife had escaped without so much as a bang on the head. Everyone talked about the new child seats, how sophisticated and modern they were, and
quite a few people talked about mercy, and about how at least the little girl had been spared. But the truth was that Aoife had simply been lucky. That she had, purely by chance, been sitting at
exactly the right distance from both sides of the car to stay shy of the inward crumpling. That she had been tiny enough not to have her neck broken by the car roof as it was thrown sideways
against the wall. Mark pictured it for a long time afterwards, what the police and the firemen had told him about lifting this little red-haired thing clean and clear out of the wreckage –
although it wasn’t that clean, he knew. They would have had to cut through the crushed metal of the roof before they had got that far, hoping to Jesus she would not die of some unseen wound
or bleeding before then. But they described it to him as though it had been a sort of religious experience for them, getting this pale, quiet baby into their arms, not crying, not calling for her
mother – and they told him this, he knew, so that he would think she had not suffered, that she had not seen anything, that she had not been hysterical with fear and incomprehension at
anything she had seen. He thought, afterwards, about the use of that word ‘clean’ – because they had used it, more than one of them, the priest who had been there, too – and
what it was meant to signify. That she had no blood on her. That she had no wounds. But also that she had not been touched by the blood of her mother. The blood of his mother. And at this he
stopped himself. At this he knew he had gone far enough. This was more than they had told him. More than they had given him. What they had given him was this child, lying now in this pine cot,
sleeping now, impossibly soundly, beneath a knitted blanket and a flannel sheet. Her cheeks were fiery red. Her forehead was damp. But it was normal, he told himself. She was teething.

With Mark gone back to the city, there was less for Tom to do in the morning. Tea could be made in a mug, the used bag tossed into the small bin on the draining-board. A slice
of bread with butter and marmalade was enough for breakfast; the smell of bacon and pudding browning on the pan seemed too heavy now on the air of the small room. Afterwards, he would rinse the mug
and the spoon and the plate and the knife and put them back in the cupboard, ready for the next morning. At midday he would make himself another mug of tea and eat a sandwich – baked ham well
sharpened with salt – and later he would boil four potatoes, empty a can of baked beans into a saucepan, and fry a pork chop in a dark, spitting pool of butter and oil.

There were no longer enough scraps from the table to feed the dog. She followed him around the kitchen. He began to buy cans of dog food in Keogh’s. There was more than a euro in the
difference between the cheapest and the most expensive. The brand he chose had a dog like her pictured on the label.

He spent most of the day outdoors, moving between the hayshed and the yard, the byre and the fields. He drove around the lower meadows and into the bog, over the back lane to call on Sammy
Stewart or Jimmy Flynn, over to Keogh’s to shop for groceries. If he sat into the bar for a pint during the day, he took the newspaper with him. There were seldom many others there and they
talked to him only of farming and of football, of the going prices for land or for animals, of the weather and how it had been. He had his pint, and he left, and he found something to tip around at
for the rest of the day. The dog went everywhere with him, riding high in the cab of the tractor, her back pressed warm against his.

In the evenings, soap operas came on the television. He began to follow some of them. The Australian one after the news was for youngsters, he thought, but he liked looking at it, liked the
scenes of fighting and smiling and fussing played out against the backdrop of the beach. The tumbling blueness of the waves and the sky filled the television screen. The girls were impossibly
good-looking, blonde and suntanned, wearing short dresses and swimsuits. They were all very young. There was one older woman in it, and she, too, was very attractive, but she was made out, most of
the time, to be a sort of laughing-stock. She gossiped or eavesdropped or interfered, and her actions always backfired. When the programme ended, always with a mystery or a surprise, he would go to
the kitchen and cook his dinner, standing over the range until it was ready, turning the meat and stirring the beans, putting a plate in to warm when the potatoes yielded to the touch of a
fork.

He ate at the kitchen table, drinking a glass of milk with his food. He spread butter thickly across the steaming potatoes cracked open on the plate. He sprinkled grains of salt and watched them
melt. The dog sat at his feet. From the other room he could hear the drone of the television, bursts of talk and music and applause, and the louder blasts of the advertisements. When he had
finished eating, he washed and dried the things he had used and returned to the armchair. Before the news at nine o’clock there were two English soaps and one set in Dublin, moving between
offices and sitting rooms and pubs. In these, the women were older, their clothes duller, their mouths downturned, their accents either sullen or shrill. The men sat nursing pints in bars that were
too quiet to be real. Outdoors, the skies always looked swollen with rain, but no rain fell. The young people’s lives were ruined with worries about sex and money and family. The old people
worried about petty things, sick pets and broken ornaments and the carry-on of drunken neighbours. Their worries were there for the sake of comedy. He sometimes laughed.