Solace (31 page)

‘So what was it you were looking for from him?’

‘Ah,’ Tom said, and as he shrugged, his shoulders felt like someone else’s. ‘Just a few bits for the Massey. Nothin’ much.’

‘It’s giving you trouble?’

‘Ah,’ Tom said. ‘The usual.’

‘I’ll take a look at it for you when I get down again,’ Mark said.

The room felt darker to Tom. It felt as though it had begun to move. ‘You’ll be down soon?’ he said, and he put a hand on the counter to steady himself.

‘Next weekend, maybe,’ Mark said. ‘I’ve a lot of work now.’

‘You won’t be down this weekend coming?’

‘Tomorrow?’ Mark said. ‘Ah, no. No way. Sorry.’

‘It’s all right,’ Tom said, quietly.

Mark said nothing for a moment. ‘We can get through a lot when I’m down next weekend,’ he said then. ‘You must have a cattle test coming up this month some time, have
you?’

‘No.’

‘But they’re always around the end of October. Did Farrell not send you a card?’

‘I had one earlier in the month,’ Tom said, his voice so loud that the dog raised its head. ‘I’ll let you go.’

‘All right,’ said Mark, and he sounded uncertain. ‘Sure if you need help with that tractor before the weekend, I’m sure Sammy could help you.’

‘I’m sure he could,’ Tom said. ‘I’ll let you go,’ he said again.

It was not that Mark had been lying to his father. He had meant to get down to Dorvaragh the following weekend. It had seemed possible when they spoke on the phone: there had
been the stretch of another whole week ahead. But by Wednesday it was obvious that he could not be out of Dublin, not even for a couple of days. There was too much to do. He was on a roll with a
new chapter: if he left it, he would lose the rhythm of it. He could not afford to be away.

He could barely even afford, he felt, to be out of the house; even going to the library was a disruption, but it had to be done. Other things had to be cut back on; it was not always feasible to
take Aoife for a walk in the morning. She was always in better form if he did, so he felt guilty, but he found that he wanted, needed, to get down to work earlier and earlier, and the walk always
wound up taking an hour at the time of day when he felt his mind was at its sharpest. It made more sense just to put her in front of one of her DVDs. He had it down almost to an exact system by
now. Each episode of the things she watched was twenty minutes long. She sat or stood in front of the television, absorbed, staring, dancing along, and she whined only if she caught sight of him,
so he worked on his chapter in the kitchen. If she came in, whining, he would give her Cheese Strings, or a yoghurt, and he would carry her around for a while, or he would change her nappy, if it
needed to be changed, and then he would put her in front of the television again. And that would take her up to her nap time, when she usually slept for almost an hour, and after her lunch, she was
happy to watch the DVDs again. He had accumulated a huge pile for her – Mossy let him borrow them from the shop for nothing – and she barely had to watch the same thing twice in the
same week.

Eileen from next door called around sometimes in the evening. She brought bread she had baked, or apple tarts, and sometimes she brought little presents for Aoife. Aoife loved her. She always
wanted, the moment she set eyes on her, to play with her or to sit on her knee. She offered Eileen her toys; she shouted and pointed to the characters on the television screen as though wanting to
introduce Eileen to her friends. Mark saw the way Eileen looked at the kitchen table now, covered as it was with his books and notes, and the way she looked at him as he sat there; he knew she
disapproved. But it was only for a while. In a week or two, he would be done with this chapter, and things could go back to normal. He would take Aoife out walking, out playing; he would take her
everywhere. Eileen always offered to take her into her own house and watch her if he needed to work, but there was no need, and he told Eileen so, and he thanked her. Even though he was busy, he
wanted Aoife with him in the house. He knew it was important for her to have him there, in the next room. He wanted to be able to see her, to hear her, to hear the chatter and jangle of her
programmes, even if the theme tunes seemed, by now, to be burning themselves into his inner ear.

If he had to go to Trinity to check on a reference or borrow a book, he brought Aoife along: it was a chance to take her out in the fresh air, and it was a diversion for her. They were used to
the sight of her in the library by now: the security men greeted her at the entrance, and often someone came over from the reference desk to talk to her, to offer to keep an eye on her while Mark
went down to the stacks or up to the fourth floor to get what he needed. They had a pile of children’s books she could look at, and it didn’t matter, they said, if they were torn or if
she drew on them with the crayons they gave her: that was what they were for, those books. But he couldn’t remember seeing a child in the library before: he couldn’t remember, before
Aoife, standing at the circulation desk and looking down to see, behind it, a baby sitting on the thin green carpet, scribbling with a red crayon on the page of a picture book. Though maybe he had
not been looking, back then.

By Friday, he had a rough draft of the chapter and he wanted McCarthy to look at it. He left Aoife with the librarian and went upstairs to the English Department to leave the pages with Grace,
the secretary. But when he walked into her office, Grace handed him an envelope. Mark looked at it, surprised. His name was written on it in black ink. ‘This isn’t Maurice’s
handwriting,’ he said.

Grace shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Then who?’

‘Do you know Professor Clive Robinson?’ She pointed to the ceiling. ‘Used to teach in the philosophy department upstairs. He’s retired a couple of years now, but
he’s still around a lot.’ She laughed. ‘Institutionalized.’

Mark did not reply. The name meant something to him, but he did not know what, not at first. At first, all he knew was that the sound of it took the air from his lungs and replaced it with a
soreness; the soreness that meant Joanne. She had studied philosophy, but that was not it, that was not all – and then it came back to him. The day in the house in Stoneybatter: his first day
to go back there after the crash. The day after his mother’s funeral. Joanne was still in Beaumont, still hooked up to the machines. She would need things, Mark had told himself; she would
need things soon. He had gone back to the house to get her night clothes, and sweaters, and her iPod and some books. She would need books to read, he had told himself, and he had looked to the
locker on her side of the bed. There were some novels, and a law textbook: Joanne had marked whole pages with yellow highlighter. And there was a philosophy book, and it had been heavily underlined
too. Mark had been surprised by this. He knew Joanne had studied philosophy for a while in college, but she had never said anything to suggest that it was of interest to her still. He scanned the
back cover: the book seemed to be about consciousness. He had stared at it. What had been her interest in consciousness? Had it been something to do with her work? He looked at the author’s
name and read his biographical note. And it had been this guy. Clive Robinson. Mark had not heard of him before. He left the book on the bedside locker and threw a couple of the novels into a bag.
He did not know where those novels were now. He did not know what he had done with that bag of things.

‘Mark?’ Grace said, and he looked at her. Her face was a study of concern.

‘I don’t think I know him,’ he said.

Grace smiled. ‘Well, he dropped that in for you. Asked me to make sure you got it. I was going to post it out to you, but I thought . . .’

‘Did he say what it was about?’ Mark said, indicating the envelope.

Grace shook her head slowly, sadly, the way she always shook her head at him now. It had been months since he had seen the old brusque Grace. ‘Maybe he heard about what
happened.’

Talking to you, it wouldn’t have taken him long to find out, Mark wanted to say, but he just nodded. ‘Anyway, thanks. You’ll give that draft to Maurice?’

‘I will, of course,’ Grace said. ‘He’ll be amazed you have another draft in to him so quickly. I know he’s hoping to get a chance to talk to you about the other
one.’

‘Well, I’m around,’ Mark said. ‘Tell him I’ll come in whenever he wants to talk to me. I can come in again tomorrow if it suits.’

Grace looked uncertain; she looked, Mark realized, embarrassed. ‘I think he’s away tomorrow,’ she said, and she frowned down at the diary which lay open on her desk. ‘I
think he has a conference in Galway. But I’ll be sure to tell him you’re ready to talk to him.’

‘Very ready,’ Mark said, pulling on his backpack.

‘How’s Aoife?’ Grace smiled.

‘She’s great,’ Mark said, and he left the office before she could ask any more.

*

On the front of the card there was an image of a moon in a pale sky, its light mirrored and muddled in an ocean. The writing inside was neat and slanted, the same black ink
covering almost all of the white space. He looked first for the signature, and it was the name Grace had given him, and below it was an address and a phone number.

The address was in Ranelagh; Ashfield Avenue. Mark looked again at the card’s illustration. The moon was a clumsy thumbprint in an insipid sky. He turned it over; it had come from the
National Gallery. In their first weeks together, he and Joanne had gone there on a date one weekend afternoon. They had seen something about Beckett, some grouping of paintings and drawings that,
supposedly, Beckett had liked. This was the kind of worthy thing you did on a date early on, when you were still trying to impress each other, still telling each other stories about the kinds of
people you were. When you were not facing into having a baby together after having been together for only a matter of weeks. And later, if you got to that later, you would see through those stories
that you’d told each other, but by then it wouldn’t matter, either because you no longer cared about each other, or because you really did, because you no longer cared about anything
else. Sometimes, Mark didn’t know if he and Joanne had even reached that point. Twenty months: was that enough time? To really know each other? She had never mentioned this guy to him, for
instance, this Clive Robinson. Or maybe she had. Maybe she had, and he hadn’t heard her. Or remembered. Or maybe he had heard her, and remembered for a little while, and maybe, now, it was
gone. Maybe it was just one of the countless things he had been unable to keep.

*

His father called three times that afternoon, but Mark did not answer. He was in the kitchen, reworking his chapter, making notes on a letter from Edgeworth to Scott. He thought
now that he had taken an entirely wrong approach in the draft he had just finished, the one he had delivered to McCarthy; he had failed, in that draft, to place enough emphasis on Edgeworth’s
correspondence, on particular letters she had written to Scott and to her aunt. He was becoming certain, now, that it was in the letters – in their style, in their curious marriage of
formality and gossip – that he would find the key to everything he wanted to do in his research. He wanted to gather the letters, as many of them as he could, and he wanted to read them all
the time. He had been avoiding them, procrastinating on getting around to them, for months – for years – and now he had found that they were what he had been looking for all along.
There was such pleasure in hunting through them. In matching up the phrases between one person and another. In finding their intimacies, in finding their news. He wanted to start the whole thesis
over now, not just this chapter – he wanted to do the whole thing differently. That night he stayed at the kitchen table, working, until he was disturbed by Aoife’s cries from upstairs.
He was surprised to look up and discover that, outside, it was almost dawn. He did not go up to her immediately. He needed to finish a sentence before he could do that: he knew if he walked away
from it he would never be able to make the point in the way it needed to be made.

After he had fed Aoife, he put her in front of her DVD and went upstairs to take a shower. He needed it. He felt sticky from having sat up over his work all night, and he knew he must smell bad.
When he stepped out of the shower, he could hear Aoife screaming downstairs. He wrapped a towel around himself and hurried down to her, calling to her, his heart racing. When he saw that she was
not hurt, the relief that coursed through him was like physical pain. Her DVD had ended, and he had not been there to change it: that was all that was wrong. That was why she was crying, shouting,
standing in front of the television, banging at its screen with the remote. He went over to her. He lifted her, and he took the remote out of her hand. Then he saw that it was not the remote. It
was his phone, and as he looked at it more closely, he saw that the screen was displaying the tiny graphic of a handset, which meant that it was on a call. Slowly, cautiously, Mark lifted the phone
to his ear. It was his father’s voice he could hear. He was saying hello, over and over. Mark slipped the phone back into his palm and pressed a button to cancel the call. In his arms, Aoife
howled and pointed to the television. He sat her on the couch and changed the DVD; she calmed. In his pocket, he felt the vibration of his phone. He let it ring out.