Solace (9 page)

McCarthy stared down his nose at the pages. For one awful moment, it looked like he was about to reach over and take them. That would not be good. That would be a disaster. They were appalling.
There were actual doodles on them. Mark had written his name in the margins at points. His edits consisted of scribbled, furious messages to himself, often containing expletives, telling himself
what a fucking idiot he was to have written this paragraph, to have started this argument, to have started this thesis.

McCarthy looked at Mark for a long moment, and he seemed to decide something. Slowly, he took his hands from behind his head and sat up straight at his desk again. He sighed. ‘Look,
Mark,’ he said. ‘You need to meet me halfway here. I have to write to the board to argue your case before the end of this month. What am I meant to say to them, when you haven’t
given me anything? What am I meant to put on the form?’

He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You were doing so well with this thing up to now,’ he said, and his tone was different; it was quieter. It was, Mark realized with something of a
jolt, sincere. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mark said. He hadn’t thought it was possible to feel any more disgusted with himself than he’d felt an hour previously, letting himself out of
Joanne’s front door, but he’d been wrong. McCarthy was right. What the hell had gone wrong?

‘Is there something else going on for you, do you mind me asking?’

Mark stared. ‘Something else?’

McCarthy looked out the window. ‘Family stuff, personal stuff, whatever.’ He turned back to Mark. ‘Is there some bigger reason why you can’t get on top of
things?’

‘No,’ Mark said, and now when McCarthy looked at him he found it hard to look back. ‘There’s nothing wrong.’

‘Well,’ McCarthy said, ‘I’m glad to hear that, I suppose. But this block of yours . . .’ He shook his head. ‘I mean, it seems to me to be a problem with your
subject.’

‘With Edgeworth?’

‘Well, with this whole idea you’re trying to elaborate about Edgeworth. The one you set out in your introduction. You’re arguing something about Edgeworth being wrongly
perceived as a realist writer, isn’t that it?’

‘Yes,’ Mark said, but when McCarthy nodded at him to go on, his mind went blank. ‘I mean, I think she’s been fundamentally misread,’ he was finally able to say.
‘I think she was more of an experimentalist, in her way, than has ever been understood.’ He swallowed. ‘I mean, I’d like to . . .’

‘Oh, yes,’ McCarthy said, his hands reaching back into the sunbathing pose. ‘Now I remember. Outshandying Tristram Shandy since seventeen-whatever-it-is.’ He coughed. Or
he snorted, and he turned it into a cough. ‘Well, it’s different. I’ll give you that.’

Fuck you, Mark thought. ‘Well, I mean, she’s obviously pretty different to Sterne,’ he began, but McCarthy was waving his hands in the air now, and it seemed he wanted Mark
just to stop.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right.’ He sat back into the desk and let his head drop low, as though he was tired. ‘You know, Mark, this time tomorrow, I’ll be
in my car with the windows open and the kids watching their DVDs in the back and the wife staying quiet for once because we’re finally getting out of Dublin and back down to
Clonakilty.’

‘Sounds good.’

‘It is good.’ McCarthy rubbed his hands together. ‘It’s a great spot. I can read a bloody book without visualizing a hall full of students staring up at me as I try to
explain it. Do you know what I read when I’m on my holidays?’

‘No.’

‘As little as possible. Maybe a bit of crime. Maybe the papers.’

‘Right,’ said Mark, uncertainly.

‘Do you know what I
don’t
want to read on my holidays?’

Mark paused. He was conscious of having to give the right answer here. ‘Edgeworth?’ he eventually said.

‘Close,’ said McCarthy. ‘Your bloody chapter on Edgeworth and her experiments. Or, worse still, your bloody notes towards your chapter on her experiments.’

‘OK.’

‘No offence.’

Mark shrugged. ‘None taken.’

‘Now, it’s not as though I’m exactly going to be jumping out of my skin to read about Edgeworth the experimentalist when I get back from Cork in August, but I will. And
I’ll expect to read it.’

‘OK,’ Mark said slowly.

‘It’ll want to be more than OK,’ McCarthy said. ‘It’ll want to be magnificent. And on the presumption that it will – on the presumption that you’ll get
out of here now and go straight to wherever you left your mojo and start working again, like you were working last year, I’ll fill in this form, and I’ll say I’ve read your
latest, and I’ll say you’re sufficiently on track to have your funding renewed, and I’ll send it to the board. All right?’

All right,’ said Mark, weakly. Then the wave of sheer relief that washed over him was met with the sensation of his skin detaching from his body and crawling right away from it as he
thanked McCarthy effusively not once, not twice, but three times. ‘I promise I won’t disappoint, Maurice,’ he heard himself say, the
pièce de résistance,
and
he thought, If I had a pen in my hand right now I would use it to stab myself in the eye.

‘Damn right you won’t disappoint me,’ McCarthy said, and he stood. ‘But, Mark?’

‘Yes?’ Mark said, standing too, and his voice sounded very small. He should have said, ‘Yeah?’ not ‘Yes?’ he thought; it might have sounded less like he was
lying on the ground under McCarthy’s boot. ‘Yeah?’ he said then, before he could stop himself, and he heard the ridiculousness of it echoing around the room.

‘Don’t pull this shit on me again,’ McCarthy said, as he walked him to the door. ‘You’re in your fourth year. You’re not in a position to mess around. Do you
understand?’

‘I do,’ Mark said, and he said goodbye. Then he spotted his bag where he had left it, under the chair he had been sitting on, and, making noises of apology to McCarthy, he had to
duck back and get it, and apologize again, and say goodbye again, all while McCarthy looked at him with perfect indifference and, as he turned around to say a last – stop it! – goodbye,
closed the door in his face with what definitely qualified as a bang.

In his jeans pocket, Mark felt his phone vibrate. He didn’t need to answer it. He didn’t need to check the number. It was Monday, and it was midday. He knew who it was.

She had written novels, Maria Edgeworth, and Maura had tried to read one of them, but it had had nothing she could recognize. She liked to read, but only stories she could
imagine happening around her, in her own time, in her own world. Anyway, any time she asked Mark about his writer, he said he was tired of her himself by now. He said he could not wait until the
thesis was finished, until he did not have to think about her any more. And yet he could never really say when he thought that would be. Neither could he ever say, for sure, when he might able to
come home again for a couple of days to help Tom with the work of the farm. Usually he just turned up, and usually just at the point where Tom’s impatience seemed on the verge of darkening
into real anger. He had inherited her own ability to gauge Tom’s impatience at a remove, and to know when it was no longer a good idea to delay. She never asked him to come home; she would
not plead. When he had to come, he came.

He was waiting at the station when she got there, sitting on a window ledge with his bag at his feet. He had cut his hair since last she saw him; it made him look like a boy again. He would soon
be thirty, her only boy, and still she was driving to the station to meet him. Other women watched out their windows as their sons arrived from Dublin in their new cars, as they came for a weekend
away from the jobs that had given them their houses, their dark pressed suits, their air of being older than they were. Whether she should want those things for Mark, whether she should feel
disappointed in him for not having them, she could not tell. If there was a job like that, if there was a house, then the break between his life there and his life here would be clear: Tom could no
longer push it, could no longer press his wanting on the situation until it yielded to him. But such a break would mean other things, too, things she did not want to picture, and so Maura never
went on long with this line of thought. Mark could drive, but the train was cheaper, and handier, and that for now was probably the best way to have it, she thought. Besides, there was the drive in
to meet him, the drive back to the house with him at her side. He was crossing the street to the car now, raising a hand in reply to her wave, smiling in a way that let her know that, as much as he
loved her, she was an embarrassment, waving like that. He threw his bag in the back seat. He put one arm tight around her shoulders as he kissed her on the cheek.

‘Well,’ he said, and she started the car.

He was talkative. That was what surprised her. Usually on the way home from the station he only ever talked in response to her questions, or sometimes to ask questions of his
own. But now he was full of news, volunteering stories, jumping from one thing to the next. Mossy, the lad he lived with, was going to be someone’s best man in a couple of weeks, he said. The
new flats in Smithfield were almost finished. In the grocery shop beside his house, he had got talking to an old woman somehow, and it had turned out she was from Ballymahon; she had known
Tom’s sister Rose in the domestic college in Ardagh. And coming out of the National Library the other evening he had seen Bertie Ahern and Brian Lenihan in front of the Dáil.

Maura stopped at Keogh’s and asked him to go in for a batch loaf and a half-pound of ham. She had already been into Keogh’s herself that morning and didn’t feel like facing a
second time into the bored curiosity of Annie McGurk, the girl behind the counter, into her questions about town, and whether it had been busy, and whether there had been many at the station, and
how long Mark was home for this time. Annie McGurk had been in school with Nuala, which made her only thirty-one or thirty-two, but working behind that counter since her schooldays had turned her
into the kind of character that was sent up, now, on television comedies. She asked too many questions, and she talked dull, mouthy circles on the same subjects all day to anyone who would listen.
She would wring everything she could get out of Mark now, Maura knew. Probably he would come back to the car in a black mood, and maybe she should not have sent him in there after all, she thought;
that mood was bound to come on him soon enough during his days at home. But she could not face into it herself again. She was too tired for it. She turned the car radio off and wanted nothing more
than to close her eyes and get a few moments’ sleep. But if she was seen sleeping in the car it would be all over the country by evening: they would say she was drinking, on anti-depressants,
dying. Breda Keogh was probably watching her right now from the upstairs window.

Instead Maura fixed her gaze on Paddy Keogh’s field beyond the petrol pumps, the field that had been wild, and scattered with wild-looking cattle, for as long as she had been about the
place. Every other wild field in the area was a field of new houses now, and Keogh could make a fortune on his field if he sold it to the developers who were known to be interested in it, but Keogh
would not sell. He would never believe that the price he was offered was the highest price he could get, no matter how high that price went, no matter by how much it climbed above the little that
the land, in truth, was worth.

Maura had met Paddy and Breda Keogh long before there was any need to meet them. She and Tom had been going together for only five or six months at that stage, and there had been no reason,
really, for him to bring Maura to see the place he had built up the road from his parents’ old house, no reason for them to see each other anywhere other than in the dancehalls and pubs and
at the pictures. But one Saturday night he had announced that he wanted to know what she thought of the house, and he had arranged to collect her from the manor the next evening and take her out to
see it.

Since they had been together she had wondered what the house could be like, knowing that he had done it all himself in the two years since his mother’s death; the building, the painting,
the buying of the things inside. She tried to imagine it, a house furnished and decorated by a man all on his own, and she tried not to imagine what that could mean for her, what kind of place she
was setting herself up for, getting closer and closer to every time she lifted her mouth to his in the front seat of his car. And so as they drove down that summer evening, the sun still high in
the sky, she was as fearful as she was curious, and when he pulled the car into Keogh’s yard she had looked at him and looked out at the rough-built house in front of her, the ugly extension
piled up on top of what must have been an old cottage, and she had only shaken her head and tried not to burst into tears. It was not until Tom got out of the car and went into the house that she
registered it, the way the door was wide open, the way there was someone already in there, looking out at her through the uncurtained window, the way that person was standing in front of shelves of
what looked like sweets and chocolate bars, and reaching back, now, to those shelves to take something down. She had laughed at herself in relief, and seconds later, she had almost jumped out of
her skin at a knock on the windscreen. Paddy Keogh had had more hair then, but the gap-toothed grin was the same, and the white shirt and black trousers were dirty-looking even on a Sunday. He had
gestured at her to roll down the car window, and then he had thrust in at her a hand brown with sun and lined with grime, and shaken her hand so vigorously that she had wondered if the rocking she
could feel was just herself or the whole car.

‘This lad is the envy of the whole place with his little Anglia,’ Keogh said, clapping his hand to the roof of the car. ‘I’d say ye cover fierce country in her all the
days we see Tom heading off there on the Longford road.’

Almost before Maura had nodded in reply he had her door open and was pulling her out; she was too surprised to resist, and found herself being ushered on through the shop door. There was a step
down, and then she was in what seemed like a storeroom packed with everything anyone could ever want to buy. Plastic toys hung on strings from the ceiling beside onions and hoses and kitchen pans.
Sacks of potatoes and cattle feed were lined up together along the inside wall. Women’s aprons and housecoats were slung and stacked above the shelved cans and packets of food; bottles of
orange and lemonade were stuffed into the legs of new wellingtons. In one corner a child’s pram held boxes of carrots and parsnips, and in a set of shining metal buckets the local newspapers
stood in neat, fat rolls. A machine for making ice-cream cones was the biggest thing in the room, and from its rubber-tipped handles a broken piece of Christmas tinsel trailed. Tom was hunched with
both elbows on the counter, looking over his shoulder to where she stood at the door. He was buying a Swiss roll, a packet of cigarettes and a bag of Rowntree’s Eclairs. When the woman came
out from behind the counter to shake her hand, Maura saw that she was heavily pregnant; she looked only a couple of weeks from her time.