Solace (7 page)

And then he swooped out of view, and there came the rattle of the letterbox. She pressed herself against the wall.

‘Too late,’ he said, and he pushed his hand through the slot. Something was scrawled on it in messy blue handwriting, in
her
handwriting, she saw: her address. ‘Too
late,’ he said again. ‘I know you’re in there. I saw your legs.’

She said nothing. She watched as he waggled his fingers in her direction, as his hand groped the air like the hand of a child playing blind man’s buff. His wrist was thin. It was upturned,
and through its skin she could see the blue of his veins branching up into his palm. When she reached her own fingers out to his twitching ones, she did not touch them at first, but circled them,
slowly, with the curve of her hand, and cupped them, still without touching, from below. Then she raised her hand slightly. His fingers stilled. She ran a finger and thumb along each one, feeling
how slender they were, how hard their bones, how smooth and cool their skin. She unlatched the door. Almost as soon as his grasp had slipped away, the rest of him was on her. He tasted of beer and
smoke and of the cold night air.

Joanne made it to her desk by eight, and once she had had a coffee and got down to the work of the transcripts, it wasn’t so bad. She was actually interested in the case,
she remembered, even if she did sympathize far less with their own client than with the plaintiff. It was a dispute over property: a man was being sued by his mother for demolishing a building at
the back of her house and putting a restaurant in its place. Their client was the son, who maintained that his mother had signed the building – a mews house – over to him years
previously, granting him permission to do with it whatever he pleased. The mother was in her eighties, and in the transcripts her personality came vividly through; she was determined, she was
elegant, and she was proud. Joanne found herself reading the mother’s words as though they were the lines of a novel with which she had fallen in love; the haughty paragraphs seemed to her
beautiful, the way they rambled backwards into long-ago passages of the old woman’s life. This morning she was going back over the account the woman had given in court the week before of her
relationship with her son, who had been born in East Africa, where the woman and her husband, an officer in the British Army, had been based in the 1950s. Shortly afterwards, they had moved to
Dublin, and her husband had bought the house on Fitzwilliam Square, and then, a couple of years later, very suddenly, her husband had died. At first, the woman said, she had ‘minded
terribly’, and found the house with its four floors and its high ceilings and its huge windows onto the park too much to bear, but in time she had come to love it again. And she knew, she
said, that her son, only a schoolboy when he lost his father, had come to love the house too.

But as he grew up, she said, her son grew fond of the old mews at the back of the house, which had never been renovated, which was still, for all purposes, a stable; downstairs, it still looked
ready for a horse and carriage, and upstairs, it was just a couple of shabby rooms with a fireplace that smoked badly. Rupert did not care about the fireplace, or the damp on the walls. Rupert
liked to invite his schoolfriends there, to have them gather in the narrow rooms to listen to records, or to play card games, or to do whatever it was that boys of his age liked to do. And
Elizabeth – that was the woman’s name, Elizabeth Lefroy – had liked to stand at her own sitting-room window and look down on the mews, and to think of the life happening within
its walls, of her son and his little circle. Slowly but surely, then, her son had begun to move all of his things into the mews, to decorate the walls with photographs torn from magazines, to add
his own books to the squat pine shelves. And the summer after he had finished school – the months before he started at Trinity – he had begun to sleep in there every night. Elizabeth
had worried about him – that he was not warm enough, that he would wake up hungry in the night and have no fridge to go to – but her son had told her not to worry, that he could take
care of himself. And then, while he was at college, he had started, on Sunday afternoons, to do this ‘darling thing’, she said, of inviting her over for lunch, even though there was no
kitchen to speak of in the place; he had ordered in, and together they had enjoyed all sorts of dishes at the rickety little table, and all kinds of wines, and they had talked, and her son had told
her about his plans for his career, and asked her to tell him things he could not know or remember about his father, and about Kenya, and about all the people she and his father had known there.
She had told him these things, and he had listened to her and, she felt, they had grown closer still, and that was a joy, she said, ‘a marvellous joy’. And on Sunday evenings, when she
had crossed the yard to the main house – to her own house, as she had thought of it by then – she had begun to feel, somehow, as though she were the one living in the chilly little
rooms, as though she were the one who was, as she put it, no longer quite at home.

The rattle of the doorknob startled Joanne. As she turned to greet Mona, the other trainee, she felt herself flush, guilty at her absorption in Elizabeth Lefroy’s testimony, at the
fullness with which she had been living through these moments of the old woman’s life.

‘Morning,’ she said, too brightly.

‘You’re in early,’ Mona said, as Joanne had known she would. She looked perfectly put-together, as always; today a dark linen suit – a new one, Joanne thought –
carefully pressed, the skirt hitting just below the knee, and black patent heels, and her makeup as flawless as though she had come from a stool in the Brown Thomas cosmetics hall.

‘Catching up,’ Joanne said. ‘I didn’t get much done over the weekend.’

Mona smiled knowingly as she laid her huge leather handbag on her desk. ‘Must have been a good one, so,’ she said.

Joanne shrugged. ‘It was fine.’

‘Yeah, right,’ Mona said. ‘You’re blushing. You’re
scarlet
. Something went down.’ She smirked.

It would have been easy to take it from there; to talk about meeting him, about the party, about him turning up at her door last night, about how he had come in and kissed her for ten minutes
and then fallen asleep on the couch, about how she had covered him with a blanket and left him there for the night, about how bashful and sweet he’d been earlier, as she was leaving for work.
He’d made her promise that she’d answer her phone when he called her later that week; he’d asked for her number, then, and discovered that he’d lost his own phone. And so
he’d written her number, too, on the hand with the blurred ink.

But coke rooms and hangovers and hands through letterboxes and lost phones were not, she suspected, Mona’s idea of a fine romance, and Mona would be horrified, and probably a little
disgusted, by the idea of leaving a stranger on your couch and trusting him not to steal anything – let alone by the idea of letting that stranger sleep on your couch while you yourself were
asleep just a staircase away. Mona was not that kind of girl. She still lived with her parents in Castleknock. The only powder that went near her nose came out of a compact marked Chanel. She
expected her boyfriends to be in control and in possession of a number of things, including their own apartments, in which they did not, ever, pass out on their own expensive couches. The parties
she went to were catered. The gardens she sat in were not attached to the back walls of Thomas Street pubs.

‘So how was your weekend?’ Joanne asked, because it seemed polite.

‘Oh, you know,’ Mona said, and launched into an account of how swamped the Dundrum centre had been on Saturday, and how it always seemed impossible to get her size in anything in
Harvey Nichols, and how some new restaurant on Dawson Street had sushi to die for, and how she thought maybe that she was getting tired of the nightclub she and her friends always went to on
Saturday night, but how there was nowhere else worth going to, really, so what could you do?

‘Right,’ said Joanne, summoning all her reserves of empathy. ‘I suppose those places get tired fairly quickly, don’t they?’

‘They really do,’ Mona said, spinning around in her chair and seeming about to extend the analysis, but then she took a long look at the open folder on Joanne’s desk. She
frowned. ‘That’s the transcript from the Lefroy case?’

Joanne nodded.

‘Crazy old bat,’ Mona said.

‘She’s definitely eccentric,’ Joanne said, and Mona arched an eyebrow.

‘I couldn’t
believe
the stuff she was coming out with in the witness box. She sounded like she was high on something. You know?’

‘Mmm,’ Joanne said. She looked at the last sentence she had underlined in the transcript.
No longer quite at home
. She thought of Elizabeth Lefroy crossing the yard at dusk on
Sunday evenings, standing in the window of her silent home, looking out at the smoke-clogged outhouse her son had made his own. She imagined her in the witness box, deep lines on her face, a
necklace of dark stones – jet, she thought – at her throat, a soft cardigan hanging on her thin frame. She tried to imagine her voice. She kept hearing one that, embarrassingly, was
probably the Queen of England’s. She tried to be more imaginative than that, but the Queen or some woman from
Poirot
was the best she could do.

‘Eoin says she drinks a lot,’ Mona went on, sorting through the pages on her own desk now, putting a stack into her drawer. ‘And then there’s her age. Her age makes it
easy for us, really.’ She slammed the drawer shut, pulled her chair up tight to her desk, and turned her computer on with one gleamingly manicured finger. The previous week, Joanne had seen
Imelda look at Mona’s nails, then glance at her own, and then – all in the time it took her to take a document from the folder she was carrying and hand it to Mona – peer over the
room to where Joanne’s unpainted nails, with their calcium spots and tattered cuticles, were hammering away on her keyboard. Imelda had given her usual curt nod then, evidently satisfied that
her grooming was not the worst in the office, and their morning briefing had begun.

‘You know she’s over eighty?’ Mona said, over her shoulder, while her computer screen drifted through the slow, whirring slideshow of its start-up. ‘I mean, her
testimony’s
clearly
unreliable. At that age, who isn’t delirious? Anyway, it’s poor Rupert I feel sorry for.’

‘The son?’

‘Yes, the son, obviously,’ Mona said, turning around with an expression of disbelief. ‘He’s only our client, for Christ’s sake!’

‘Sorry,’ Joanne said. ‘Wasn’t thinking. Not fully awake.’

Mona took a small mirror from her desk drawer and checked her makeup; seeming to see some flecks of mascara beneath her eyes, she brushed at them with the quick, delicate strokes of a fingertip.
‘God, I’ve been awake since six,’ she said. ‘I hate dragging myself to the gym, but what can you do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Joanne said vaguely, and looked down to the page in front of her, back to Elizabeth’s words.
Clearly, they just meant so much more to me than to
him
, she was saying. She was talking about the Sunday afternoons in the mews. Her counsel had asked Elizabeth whether she now suspected those afternoons merely to have been part of a ruse, and
Elizabeth was saying, no, that she did not think that, that she could not think her son, back then, capable of such deceit. Such capability came later, her counsel offered, and Elizabeth, then,
said nothing at all.

‘Actually, it was Rupert’s new restaurant I ate in on Saturday night,’ Mona said now.

‘Nice,’ said Joanne, with what she hoped would be enough enthusiasm to satisfy Mona.

‘God, omakase to die for. Rupert says it’s as good as anything you’ll get in New York.’

‘You met Rupert in the restaurant?’

Mona looked around and gave Joanne a frown that suggested she really wasn’t keeping up. ‘I was
with
Rupert at the restaurant. He invited me. He said it was important for us to
know the kind of establishment he runs.’

‘Oh,’ Joanne said, as evenly as she could. Mona’s little crush on the Lefroy son had been evident for a while now. Joanne didn’t think Mona could be sleeping with him
– she couldn’t be that stupid: word would spread, it would hobble her career – but she was definitely past the point of professional objectivity, flirting with him on his visits
to the office, joking with him on the phone. It was nothing new: any guy with a whiff of power seemed to get her going. It was something, maybe, that Joanne should have a word with her about
– a friendly word, a word to prevent Mona from making herself look unprofessional in front of Imelda and Eoin – but, then, Joanne and Mona were not friends. If they were friends, Joanne
would surely not have been doing, in her head, what she had been doing at some level all morning: mentally retelling the story to Mark. Picking out the moments, mimicking the sentences, ramping up
the details, so that in her mind she saw him laugh, or exclaim, or shake his head in wonder or enjoyment or incredulity; saw him watch her as she told him the story, saw him like her for it, all
the more. ‘She sounds like a dose,’ she imagined Mark saying of Mona, and she saw herself smiling, and eating another forkful of the dinner they would be having together, and taking a
sip from her glass of wine.

‘Rupert’s
huge
into sushi,’ Mona said then, and Joanne imagined the mileage she and Mark would get out of this statement, and how much he would appreciate that she could
make that kind of joke, and then he would make a joke of his own about it in return. Though, on second thoughts, that might be awkward.

‘Have you been to the other restaurant?’ she asked Mona, because she wanted, somehow, to shake all of these images – Rupert, Mona, sushi, Mark’s jokes about sushi –
out of her head. Then, as an afterthought, more to herself than to Mona, she said, ‘It’s not a sushi restaurant as well, I hope.’

‘Nope,’ Mona said. ‘It’s fusion. And it’s
gorgeous
. I mean, it’s obvious he did the right thing with the place. I can’t imagine how that old
witch thinks she has a ghost of a chance to win.’