Solace (28 page)

*

Later, as Mark sat in front of the television, Sarah phoned to ask him to come to dinner with her and Deirdre in their house in Phibsborough the following evening.

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes, tomorrow. You don’t have anything else on, do you?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘And how’s Aoife?’

‘She’s asleep upstairs. Finally.’

‘The little pet. You can bring her, needless to say.’

‘That’s all right. Eileen will watch her.’

‘Aw,’ Sarah said.

‘You wouldn’t say that if you were here with her all day.’ He smiled as he spoke, but he could hear that she was not smiling; he could hear her suck her breath in suddenly, and
he knew an apology was tumbling his way.

‘Oh, of course, of course, of course you need your time to yourself. Don’t mind me. Sure we’ll see lots of Aoife. We’ll all have a day out or something soon.’

‘What should I bring? To dinner.’

‘Just yourself.’

‘No. Come on. I’ll bring wine, obviously. But do you want me to bring dessert?’

‘Bring wine, then,’ Sarah said. ‘But there’s really no need. We have plenty.’

*

Eileen worked in the space where the shelves and counters of a grocery store had once been. Fabrics were piled high on chairs, and rails held trousers and dresses and skirts
waiting to be altered. Aoife reached for a small plastic lunchbox full of coloured thread and emptied it on the floor, sitting down heavily among the spools to grab at them and arrange them around
herself in some unknowable order. Mark apologized for the mess, but Eileen shook her head.

‘She’s doing no harm,’ she said. ‘She’ll be fine here for the evening, and don’t you worry your head about her at all.’

Aoife did not react to his leaving, at least not that he could hear as he walked down the street. The evening was still warm, the brick of the terraces glowing a rich, baked red. Something
flashed through his mind: red brick burnished on the street outside Kehoe’s that July evening the year before, but then a taxi was passing, and he was hailing it, and there was need to think
of other things, the address for Sarah and Deirdre’s house, the speed with which the driver pulled away, the fact that he had forgotten, after all, to buy a bottle of wine.

The driver, thin and sickly and wearing a thick gold chain, asked him questions about his job and his holidays and how long he thought the good weather was likely to last. ‘Christ knows we
deserve some kind of fucking summer,’ he said.

‘We do,’ Mark said, and for the rest of the drive they were silent. When they got to Phibsborough, Mark directed him through the narrow streets, and when the driver pulled up outside
the house Sarah, in a blue summer dress, was at the front door, waving. She hugged him tight in greeting.

‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she said, and from the tone of her voice he knew it was going to be a long night. She was already close to tears.

He considered, for a moment, asking her to pretend that everything was normal, but he knew this was something he could not do. He pulled himself out of her embrace as gently as he could and
smiled. ‘I forgot the bloody wine,’ he said.

‘Oh, Mark,’ Sarah said, and she put her arms around him again, and kept them there until Deirdre came into the hall to coax her away.

*

Joanne had lived for nine days after the accident. She had come closest to consciousness just before dying. The doctors had given him reason to believe that she would survive,
but on the Thursday, after he had watched her eyelids flicker for more than an hour and believed that her eyes were about to open and that they were about to hold the sight of each other clear in
their minds again, something burst or blocked or broke apart in her brain stem, and in place of the beautiful, minimalist music of her pulse came the falsetto siren of its absence. He had been with
her when the last signals to her brain had stalled and stumbled and bubbled away into nothingness. He had been holding her wrist firmly enough so that she could feel it, if she could feel anything,
which they said she could. He had been talking to her, silently, and his mind had been not in the present, not in this actual, living moment, but in some daydream of the future, some fantasy of
weather and brightness and sound, some symphony of his words and hers and the still unarticulated words of their daughter, some place far from silence. He had been with her, he had told himself
over and over afterwards, but he had not: he had been somewhere else, somewhere impossible, and while he was in that elsewhere, she had stopped and turned and dissolved into an elsewhere that was
beyond even his dreams.

He had stayed with her afterwards, after they had made clicks on the machines and slid tubes out of her skin and closed the plastic curtains around them and placed sorry palms on his shoulders.
He had been in the present then, in the moment of its happening, and he could not escape, and when the nurse had come in a while later and whispered that Joanne’s family were in the hall, and
that it would be good to let them say goodbye, he had been almost glad of the movement, of the encounter, of the onward rush.

When he walked into the house that evening, his father, standing at the kitchen table, had looked at him for a long moment, his mouth as heavy as though it were hung with a hook. Then he had
turned away and faced the wall, crying, his whole body twitching like that of a young dog in its sleep.

*

Deirdre was the cook. The food was good, a vegetable lasagne and a side dish of lamb. They had not known whether Mark would prefer meat or no meat, Sarah said, and they had not
liked to call him to ask, to put him on the spot. Mark began to respond that this was ridiculous, but found himself saying, instead, that it was thoughtful. ‘And they’re both
delicious,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘We didn’t want to put you on the spot,’ Sarah said again.

‘You’re so good. Thanks.’

‘So,’ Sarah said, after she had refilled their wine glasses.

‘So.’

‘You’re back in the land—’ She stopped suddenly, shaking her head, her eyes wide. ‘Jesus, Mark. Sorry. I mean . . .’

‘I know what you mean, it’s all right.’

‘Back among us.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Does that feel better?’

He shrugged. He could see that Deirdre was watching Sarah, willing her to stop asking questions, to stop pushing in this direction. She, meanwhile, was pushing just as hard in the opposite
direction, changing the subject every time Sarah tried to ask him how he was. Neither tactic helped. To be too much pitied, or to be too carefully respected. Though he could tell that the food was
very good, he did not want to eat. The wine seemed to him as bitter as cough syrup, yet Sarah had already commented on how delicious it was. He drank it anyway. Deirdre refilled his glass.

When he and Joanne had been thinking about godparents for Aoife, they had considered Sarah and Deirdre, had wondered if that would work. But while they were talking about godparents, they had
realized that they were talking about a christening, and they had remembered that they did not believe in any god, and so there had been no christening. But Sarah and Deirdre had meant enough to
them for it to have seemed right to ask them.

And now he wondered why they were friends. But he had wondered it about everyone who was left. Even Mossy. Mossy who came to see him every day, Mossy who fed him in the evenings sometimes, even
though Mossy, unlike Deirdre, could not cook. It was true, it had taken Sarah and Deirdre until now to invite him to dinner, but he knew why that was, too. They had been afraid. In the first weeks,
it was too soon. In the next weeks, everyone thought he wanted to be left by himself to get used to things, to cry his tears, to climb his walls. And then it was inching into being too late, and
people started thinking that they had missed the boat, that they should have contacted him weeks ago, and now they were too embarrassed to get in touch. But that was not fair on Sarah and Deirdre.
They had been in touch. They had called around. Sarah had always been crying so much that it had been an irritant more than anything to have them in the house. But they had made the effort. They
had let him know that they were there.

Still, he could see it in them. It was something he had noticed in other couples too. He had seen it, even, in his sister and the way she looked at him, and then looked at Denis, her husband.
Unsuspecting Denis, unaware that he was suddenly being surveyed as something precious, something almost unreal.

Sarah and Deirdre were doing exactly the same thing. In quiet moments during the lull in a conversation – or even during a conversation – he would see one of them watching the other.
One of them staring at the other, with a kind of melancholy. The first few times he had noticed people doing this, he had thought there must be something wrong in these relationships, that there
had just been some row or difficult conversation, being carried now into the rest of the evening, into interactions outside the privacy which was just their own. But it kept happening. He kept
catching it. And eventually he realized what it was. One half of the couple was looking at the other, thinking that one day the other would die. That they themselves would be left without them,
that they themselves would be left, the way Mark was left. And what would it be like, they were thinking, how would they cope? What would this house be like with only one person in it? What would
the dinner table be like when there were visitors, with only one of them to carry the conversation through the night? What would it be like, that world outside, knowing that this other person was
not in it, not out there doing their usual things? That door, if the other person were never again to walk through it, would it look different? These rooms, this furniture, what would they
mean?

He felt suddenly very tired. He had had trouble sleeping since the day of the accident, but now he thought he could lie down on the couch across from the dinner table and pass out for hours, for
the whole night, for days. It exhausted him to listen to the conversation, to take part in it, and at the same time, to take part in the unspoken conversation, to watch and know and understand what
was happening in the spaces in between.

‘Are you all right?’

It was Sarah. She looked, Mark noticed with a twinge of alarm, close to tears again. ‘Are you feeling bad?’ she said, and reached out for his hand.

‘I’m fine,’ Mark said, feeling guilty at having allowed his face to give so much away. He squeezed her hand. ‘I’m just a bit tired.’ It was tiring in itself,
this swinging between being sick of someone and being fond of them.

‘Of course you’re tired,’ Deirdre said, and she gestured to the couch. ‘Why don’t you sit down? We can have dessert over there.’

‘Thanks,’ said Mark, and as he rose from the table he could see that more glances were being exchanged between the two women. There was, he realized, something in the air, something
other than the awkwardness he had felt all evening: an agitation, a restlessness, almost a panic. Was it that they wanted him to be gone? That they could not take it any longer, this sadness he
must be trailing around with him – this grief he was forcing them, by his presence, to see and to feel?

‘I won’t stay late,’ he started to say, but as he glanced at them he could see that he had got it all wrong. They were smiling at each other, almost glowing, sharing some
secret, some private joy, and in the instant before they became aware that he was watching them, he realized that there were always new ways to feel it, the loneliness. It was not just bottomless,
or endless, it was also inventive. It was smart, self-generating; it was various.
The drunkenness of things being various
: a line from a poem came into his head, and he blinked at it,
dismissed it. Was it that they wanted to be alone? But he had only just arrived. They were still, technically, in the middle of dinner. That was rude, he thought, and then thought, You’re
such a fucking moron. He could not be sure, actually, that he had not said it aloud. They were both staring at him. He was standing in the middle of the room.

‘We have something to ask you,’ said Deirdre, at exactly the same time as Sarah said, ‘We have news.’

‘Really?’ Mark said, and he stammered.

‘Yeah,’ said Deirdre, with a laugh.

‘Oh, right,’ said Mark.

They stood in silence for a moment.

‘I hope you’re not going to ask me to help you have a kid or something,’ Mark said, and he tried to laugh. It was meant to be a joke. He had wanted to say something that made
him sound less nervous, made him feel more in control. But as soon as he had said it, he knew it was the wrong thing. At first, they both looked stricken, and then Sarah’s face moved into
deeper upset and Deirdre’s into what he knew to be annoyance, though they both moved very quickly to cover these expressions. His face burned.

‘You’re not . . . ?’ he said, and felt stupider still as he saw how absolutely they refused his suggestion. They shook their heads as though he had confused them with two
entirely different people. So it was not that he had blurted out precisely what they wanted from him, not that he had trodden on their announcement in that way: it was worse. He had crossed some
line of propriety, of correctness; he had exposed himself as the narrow-minded boor who was still, in some part of himself, unused to the idea of them – two women in a relationship, two women
sharing a bed. He was still a gawking schoolboy, ready at any moment to be found out, likely at any moment to make a comment that would give him away. And now he had done it, and they were looking
at him so strangely. They were seeing him. They were judging him.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said. He put his head into his hands. When he looked up, a man on the television was pulling a foal out from between a mare’s bloody haunches. The foal was
covered with yellow slime. It seemed impossibly long. At the table, Sarah and Deirdre were silent. Then Sarah rose from the table and came over close to the television, settling into the armchair
opposite Mark.

‘God, I hate those animal programmes,’ she said.