Solace (4 page)

For a while, he kept telling his mother how his thesis was going, and sharing with her any stories he had managed to turn up about the old house, and in these even his father took an interest,
but eventually Mark ran out of such stories. Eventually, it was just him and Edgeworth’s writing and the theories he needed, now, to apply to it, and when his parents asked him whether he had
found out anything new about the house or the history of the town, he had replied regretfully at first, and eventually irritably, until, it seemed, they learned no longer to ask.

He did not need to be around Edgeworthstown any more to do his research. He needed to be in the library; he needed to be in his carrel. And his carrel was a long way from Edgeworthstown, and
from his father’s farm.

Mark’s father did not expect him to come and live at home. He did not expect him to gradually take over the running of the farm. In the first place, his father had no intention of handing
control of the farm to anybody – it was his life, and its daily rituals and its daily difficulties were like oxygen to him, much as he might complain of them. Nor, Mark knew, did his father
honestly think that farming offered any kind of future. Especially on the small scale on which he farmed, it was impossible to make a living from it. Yet none of this kept his father from thinking
that Mark should do more of what he called taking an interest; that Mark should be around more often, there for the larger jobs, there to advise his father on whether to expand the yard or to buy a
new piece of machinery – or, at least, there to express approval at the decisions his father had already made on these things. He did not want an heir, Mark’s father. He wanted a
partner. And a life in Dublin that required Mark to be physically present in the city for only two hours a week – for the undergrad class he taught, and for the office hour he was obliged to
hold afterwards – seemed to Mark’s father no barrier to the kind of partnership he had in mind.

Mark was the only son. He had an older sister, Nuala, who had lived in England for years. His father had neighbours, but he would not ask them for help. He had brothers-in-law, but they lived in
the town, played bridge, went with their wives to Tesco and Supervalu to do the weekly shop. They did not drive tractors. They did not haul bales. They did not talk traneens and wet clumps and oil
filters and phone calls to the Met Office. And there were no brothers. His father had not been born an only child, but he was as good as one now. And he knew how to turn the tricks of an only child
when there was something he wanted.

But with Mark – with Mark and the farm – those tricks were not turning, at least not as Tom expected them to turn. Mark knew this. He had seen it on his father’s face so many
times, on so many of those evenings when it was time for him to return to Dublin after a weekend at home. It was not anger, it was not disappointment; it was, instead, a sort of uncomprehending
surprise. How could he be leaving, when things had been running so smoothly with both of their shoulders to the wheel, when there were still jobs to be done and to be discussed? How could he have
failed to hear his father’s many pleas for his continued presence, delivered in the guise of casual conversation since the minute he had arrived from the railway station? How could he be
going when the fact of what he needed to be doing was laid out all around them in acres and herd numbers and ear tags and calendar markings for tests and marts and dehornings and cows that were due
to calve?

‘Jesus, I didn’t think you were going so soon. And you have to be back up there?’

It was the same from his father every time. The same words. The same tone – the tone other fathers might have used upon discovering that their sons had just been redeployed to Iraq. Mark
always managed, always succeeded with his tactic of being at once firm and vague, but he always knew, too, that in a week, or in a fortnight, or in a month, he would be back again, having a
conversation that felt like an ulcer, making himself late for the Sunday evening train.

It was a small farm. A hundred acres, meadows around the farmyard and a stretch of bog at the far end of the lane; thirty cows or so spending their year in those meadows and in that bog instead
of in the slatted shed that, Mark knew, his father wanted his help to build. A slatted shed, somehow, was the sign of a real farm, and it was essential if you wanted to get at the really good
grants, but Mark scarcely knew what to say any time his father hinted at the need for one, because Mark barely knew how to build a fire, let alone a slatted shed. Was he supposed to come down one
weekend and suddenly take on the skills of a builder, a carpenter, an engineer of the flow and storage of bovine sewage? You built the shed over a pit of some sort, that he knew, and you put slats
over the pit, and then you kept cattle in the shed for long periods, and you fed them there, and in the pit beneath the slats you collected their shit, and at the end of the season you had a
shedful of saleable animals and a pitful of pedigree manure, and the grant cheque came in the post and you went to the bank to lodge it with all the other proper farmers. And then you did something
with the money – invested it back in the farm somehow, made some strategic decisions about the way the next year was going to go. You sold your animals, and you bought new ones, and you
bought new machinery, and maybe you bought new land, and you expanded, you extended, you excelled, and all the other farmers and all the other farmers’ sons welcomed you to the club.

But Mark was writing a doctorate on a nineteenth-century novelist, and when he finished it, he wanted to do the things that you did after you finished a doctorate on a nineteenth-century
novelist: maybe write a book about a nineteenth-century novelist, maybe teach a course or two on nineteenth-century novelists, or maybe run the hell as far away from nineteenth-century novelists as
he could. He didn’t know. He had to get his thesis finished first, and he had to publish many more papers, and present at many more conferences, and he had to ingratiate himself with the
English departments of various universities, which was something he kept meaning to get around to but had not yet quite achieved. As a teacher – or, more accurately, as a teaching assistant
– he suspected he was terrible; he had recognized, in his students’ eyes, the same slow dawn of scorn and incredulity of which he had been a master in his own undergraduate years. He
suspected, too, that he was writing an appalling excuse for a thesis, but still he felt sure that he wanted to have a career as an academic, to spend his days reading and researching and writing,
figuring things out and pinning things down. What those things were, he no longer felt sure, but they were the things he wanted to do; he knew. And he knew that what he did not want to do was to
live in Dorvaragh, even half of the time, even a quarter of the time, and farm with his father, and fight with his father, and watch himself becoming more and more the image of his father every
day. But still he could not turn his back on him. He could not refuse him. He tried to be honest with him – he told him, over and over, that his life would be in Dublin, and that his trips to
the farm would be occasional, but they would be as often as he could manage, and that that was the most and the best he could do. He knew that, with his father, the words were not taking. But he
could not find in that fact justification to stay away, justification for anything like a final break. And, besides, a final break was not something that he even knew how to want.

In all of this, Mark’s mother was sympathetic. She told him to do what he had to do, to concentrate on his own work, to take with a pinch of salt his father’s air of being winded by
his leaving, confused by his inability to stay. And yet, after a couple of weeks had passed, she would be on the phone again, wondering when he would be coming down. In the spaces between her words
he felt he could almost hear his father’s breath.

‘Monday,’ his mother had said on the phone that morning, when he had explained to her about the deadline. ‘Monday, you’ll be finished? Monday we’ll see you,
so?’

He had said yes. Or he had made some noise that sounded like it. Then he had said goodbye and, looking to the clock radio beside his bed, he had discovered that there were technically three more
hours left in the morning, despite the sharpness of the sunlight splaying itself through the blinds. He had slipped back into a heavy, dream-crazed sleep, and when he had gone down to the kitchen
more than three hours later, Mossy had cooked breakfast and had planned for them both what he called a knockout of a day.

And this was the knockout. A back yard in the Liberties, barely bigger than the sitting room of their flat, heaving with the sun-blistered bodies of strangers and skangers and shits like Nagle,
and a bar that looked populated entirely by jailbirds and jailbait, with a few pissed grandmothers and breastfeeding infants thrown into the mix. He knew he was kidding himself to think he’d
get anything done now if he went back to the flat, back to his bedroom, where he’d set up an old kitchen table as his desk, across which his notes and books and printouts lay in the kind of
neat and careful order that, in truth, only meant that he wasn’t working, that he hadn’t been working for some time. Because there was on that desk no sign of the scuffling and
flittering and leafing and scrambling it took to really get through a piece of academic work, with its footnotes and its quotations and its weavings in and out of elements from every scrap of paper
touched and filed and vanished over the course of long months and years. It would be useless, Mark thought, but he would be better off there, so he drained his pint and went to say goodbye to
Mossy, pushing his way through the crowd, elbows and tummies and tits and arses and pint glasses raised and pint glasses slopping.

And talking to Mossy was a girl who made Mark decide, the instant he saw her, that he was staying where he was.

She was dark-haired. No: brown-haired, Mark saw, as she turned in the low slant of sun. Brown hair that looked heavy, the way it fell in its thick, loose curls. As she listened
to whatever Mossy was saying now, she put a hand to her fringe, pushed it aside; she smiled, and Mark saw the gap in her smile, the sliver of nothing between her front teeth, and he swallowed.

She was tall. Almost Mossy’s height, and taller than either of the girls who were with her as she talked to him, standing beside her doing things with their handbags and their sunglasses
and their phones, like people who were getting themselves organized to go somewhere. Like people who were leaving.

And she was leaving. That was what she was saying to Mossy now, Mark could hear, as he came close; that she was heading, that she would see Mossy later, that he was to text her if he
couldn’t find the house. And then she was coming towards Mark, and when she saw him, as she passed him, she was smiling.

‘Hiya,’ she said, and he saw that her eyes were green. And she was gone. He nodded a response, but too late for her to see; one of her friends saw instead, and gave him a strange
look. They must have been the girls Nagle had turned to when he and Mossy went into the bar, Mark realized. They must have been the ones at the next table. He tried to remember. Had he noticed her?
He would have noticed her. He would have stared. Staring would have been a better use of his afternoon. Talking to her would have been better still. What had he been doing? Talking shite to Mossy,
taking shite from Nagle? He raised his eyebrows as he handed Mossy his pint.

‘What?’ Mossy said, innocently.

‘What yourself?’ Mark said. ‘What was that about?’

‘That girl?’

‘Yeah, that girl. Who is she?’

‘Joanne. Comes into Laser a lot. Gets the new releases. Nice girl. Training to be a solicitor. Joanne.’

‘I heard you the first time.’

‘Yeah, well,’ said Mossy, and he stretched. He looked lazy, unbothered, almost post-coital; either he’d slept with her already, or he was utterly confident of sleeping with her
soon. Mossy scored whenever he wanted to score. Mark did not do too badly – at least, he liked to think of it that way – but Mossy was always miles ahead. It was the accent, or it was
the wild head of hair, or it was the fact that he could speak Irish, or something. Mark didn’t know what it was. But it worked. There were weeks when he bumped into two or three different
women in the morning. Not on the same morning. But even that he wouldn’t put past Mossy. Even in their first year in college, when everyone was talking about it and nobody was getting it,
Mossy had been getting it. And he didn’t brag about it. He barely ever talked about it. But he got it. And now it looked like he was on track with this girl. He yawned. Mark wanted to give
him a dig in the stomach.

‘So you’re meeting up with her later?’

Mossy took a drag from his cigarette. ‘We’re going to a party,’ he said. ‘Some of her solicitor friends just bought a house out in Booterstown. Mustn’t mind the
place getting trashed already, I don’t know. Or maybe they’re just desperate for a lawsuit.’ He laughed, and Nagle brayingly joined in.

‘Christ, outstanding rack on that blonde friend of hers,’ Nagle said, inclining his head to where her friends had been sitting. ‘She gonna be at this party?’

Mark stared at him. The thought of being left in the pub with Nagle while Mossy fucked off to meet the girl was bad enough, but if Nagle was invited to the party too, Mark was going to do damage
with one of those Miller bottles. This was what he got, he thought. This was what came of sitting by himself at the bar inside, moping over his thesis – moping over his
parents
, for
Christ’s sake – while out here Mossy and Nagle were doing what anyone with any cop-on would be doing in a beer garden on a sweltering Saturday afternoon: talking to chicks and laying
the groundwork for Saturday night.

‘They’re all going to be out there,’ Mossy, stubbing out his cigarette, said to Nagle. ‘They’re all going out there now to help this friend of theirs get the place
ready. We’ll head out there around ten.’ He turned to Mark.