Solace (33 page)

Mark nodded. He should say something about the swimming-pool, he thought. He should say that he had never lost his temper like that with Aoife before, that he did not intend to lose it again.
That he had never before done something like that to her – whatever it was he had done, shaking her or snapping at her or being rough with her, whatever it was that Robinson had seen, that
Robinson had watched.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ he said instead.

‘Not at all,’ Robinson said, lowering himself into the second leather armchair. ‘I’m just so surprised that we’ve met before. Without even realizing.’ He
attempted a smile. ‘And your daughter, whom, of course, I had met on an earlier occasion, but, well, babies.’ He shook his head. ‘They change so rapidly.’

‘She’s grown a lot since April,’ Mark said.

‘April?’ Robinson looked confused.

‘You said in your letter that it was April when you bumped into Joanne.’

‘Did I?’ said Robinson, looking no more certain.

‘You said in your letter it was April,’ Mark said again.

‘Well, yes, I suppose it must have been.’

‘You said, too, that you and Joanne had a conversation,’ Mark said, and he took a deep breath before going on. ‘What did you talk about, do you remember?’ This time,
while he waited for Robinson to respond, he found himself holding his breath. He sat perfectly still. He did not want to miss a word that Robinson might say about Joanne. He did not want to miss
the slightest twitch of expression on his face as he thought about her, as he talked about her. Anything that was about her, that was to do with her, he wanted to see it, he wanted to know it. He
wanted to hear about her; he wanted news of her. It did not matter if that news could only be of the past; just for a moment, it would come to him as something new, something living, and he wanted
it more than he wanted air.

‘April, yes,’ said Robinson, thoughtfully. ‘They were taking a walk around Fellows’ Square. It was a Saturday, a cold day. The little one’s cheeks were bright
red.’ He looked at Mark as though he had suddenly remembered something. ‘What is it, your daughter’s name?’

‘Aoife.’

‘That’s right.’ Robinson nodded. ‘Aoife, from the Children of Lir.’

‘No,’ Mark began to say, but he stopped himself. He found that he did not want to admit to Robinson that he and Joanne had not taken Aoife’s name from any myth or legend, that
they had chosen it only because they both liked it. He did not want Robinson to think less of Joanne for this. But, it struck him, what if Joanne had, indeed, told Robinson that they had chosen the
name for some such reason? Would she have done that? Was Robinson someone she had so desperately wanted to impress? The vision of him sodden and dripping in the shower stall came to Mark: the
withered skin at his elbows, the hard, stark bulbs of his knees. Or, he thought then, could Aoife’s name have held some meaning for Joanne, a meaning she had never shared with Mark, a meaning
she had for some reason kept to herself? What else did Robinson know about her? What else had she told him that she had never told Mark?

‘It struck me that day,’ said Robinson, looking to the empty fireplace, ‘that she was very content, your Joanne. Richly content, I would say. She seemed very different from the
young woman I’d met, oh, I suppose, two years previously.’ He frowned. ‘I think it was about that. Since I’d seen her.’

Out of the questions that spilled into Mark’s mind then, he could not choose just one to ask. Where had she been that day? What had she talked about with Robinson? Where had she been going
when she saw him? What had she been doing – what had been going on in her life? Had he met her yet, had they been seeing each other? He calculated; no, two years back from April she would
still have been innocent of him, still clear of everything to do with him – every connection, every moment afterwards that would lead to Aoife, and to all that went with Aoife, and to being
in a car with his mother on the Longford road on a Saturday afternoon in April. Two Aprils ago, she had been free, Joanne. She had had a chance. But Robinson was saying she was different then
– that she was not so happy, was that what he had said? How could he tell that she was happier the second time? Mark tried to picture her, walking with the pushchair through campus: what had
she been doing there? Taking a break from shopping? Sitting on a bench to eat lunch, or read the newspaper, or throw crumbs to the pigeons on the lawn while Aoife reached out for them and squealed?
He stared at Robinson as though the folds of his clothes, the curl of his beard, the grip of his fingers on the coffee mug would give the answers. Joanne, alive and content, on a Saturday in April.
Which Saturday, of the few that had been left to her? What had she been thinking that day? What had she been planning? And where had Mark been while she was doing it?

‘You were at a bachelor party that weekend, if I remember correctly,’ Robinson said, and Mark looked at him, startled. Had he spoken aloud? Was Robinson responding to what he had
said? But he knew he had been silent. Robinson was just doing what Mark wanted him, after all, to do: putting together the pieces of the day. But it was painful to be reminded of how he had spent
that last weekend, of how he had wasted it: getting pissed in Wicklow for two days on Nagle’s stag party. Joanne had encouraged him to go; it didn’t matter how he felt about Nagle, she
said. Nagle had invited him, and Mossy would be there, and it would be fun, and he should go, she said. She could look after Aoife by herself for one weekend. You need the break, she had said to
him. Just go.

‘In Glendalough,’ Mark said. ‘A friend of mine from college.’

‘Beautiful spot,’ Robinson said. ‘Once you get away from the business end of it. High up in the valley, you could forget you were part of this life at all. Though I doubt the
bachelor party was spent in the quiet of the valley?’

Mark managed a laugh. ‘It wasn’t exactly monastic,’ he said, and that hurt as well, because as soon as he said it he was back in the kitchen with her that first night she had
cooked him dinner, that first night she had led him up to her room, and he thought now it had been a mistake, after all, to have come looking for details of her that were new to him, when he was
barely able to manage the details he already had.

‘And your research?’ Robinson said, out of the silence. ‘Joanne mentioned that you were working on Scott? I know only what Bertrand Russell said of him, I’m afraid, which
is only the painfully obvious. “Scott is the author of
Waverley
.” Which is not the same as Scott being Scott.’

Mark felt at once panic at not understanding whatever it was that Robinson was talking about – could he be raving? – and relief at being able to close it down with an entirely
different subject. ‘It’s actually Edgeworth I’m working on,’ he said. ‘Though she and Scott were very good friends.’

‘Ah,’ said Robinson. ‘
Castle Rackrent.
I think old Thady Quirk is one of the most memorable of characters, don’t you?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Mark said, without enthusiasm. He did not want to talk about Thady Quirk. He wanted to talk about Joanne. Or at least he had thought he did until a minute ago.
‘Thady’s a gas man,’ he said, and immediately cringed.

But Robinson nodded. ‘An utter cliché, but like so many clichés, an absolute truth.’

‘Right,’ Mark said uncertainly.

‘I mean, they’re still everywhere in this country, really, aren’t they?’ Robinson said airily. ‘I believe they’re referred to as local characters.’ He
looked at Mark more closely. ‘You’re from the country, aren’t you?’

‘I’m from the same place Joanne was from,’ Mark said.

‘Really?’ Robinson looked surprised.

‘Yeah. Longford.’

‘Oh, well,’ Robinson said, ‘I don’t mean to suggest you have them only in Longford. Or in the country, for that matter.’

Mark frowned. ‘Have who?’

‘Oh . . .’ Robinson waved a hand. ‘Ignore me. I ramble. My children tell me that all the time. Their mother did too.’

He looked at Mark suddenly, a flutter of panic on his face. ‘God!’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve completely neglected to tell you how sorry I am about your mother. I do
apologize.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Mark.

‘Indeed, it’s quite unforgivable.’ Robinson shook his head. ‘Not even in the card, if I remember?’

‘Really, it’s not a problem,’ Mark said. ‘Thank you.’

Robinson weighed this for a moment. ‘And your father?’

‘My father’s fine,’ said Mark. ‘As fine as can be expected. He’s busy.’

‘The only way,’ Robinson said. ‘Partly because it’s the only way to get other people to leave you alone. That’s what I found.’

‘This is it,’ Mark said. He wanted, now, very much to leave. The conversation had seemed never to go beyond an awkward and useless skimming of facts. Robinson had told him nothing,
given him nothing that he could take home and add to the store of kept traces. It had been a wasted journey. He made a move to stand, to announce that it was time for him to go, but then Robinson
sighed deeply and looked over to him, nodding slowly.

‘I’m afraid it’s just a matter of forward equilibrum, you see,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Mark said carefully.

‘Time marches on, and you’re best to go along with it.’

‘You are.’

Now Robinson stood. Leaving his unfinished mug of coffee on the floor beneath the armchair, Mark did the same. ‘Thanks for seeing me,’ he said.

‘I’m very glad you came,’ said Robinson. ‘Though I’m afraid I haven’t been very good company for you.’

‘No, no.’ Mark shook his head energetically. ‘I mean, you have. Of course you have.’

‘I’m always like this when I’m working, I’m afraid,’ Robinson said. ‘And now more so than ever, because I don’t think that what I’m working on is
going anywhere. I always think that, but this time I’m sure.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Mark said. ‘I know the feeling.’

‘To feel it at my age is infinitely worse,’ Robinson said, seeming sharper suddenly, and he led Mark to the hall.

‘What’s it about?’ Mark said.

‘It’s nothing I really want to talk about,’ Robinson said, as they reached the front door. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I remember telling Joanne about it, actually,
that day I bumped into her.’ He frowned. ‘Or maybe it was another day.’

‘I’d love to hear about it,’ Mark said.

‘I just think it’s something I’m going to have to abandon,’ Robinson said, reaching to the latch. ‘I’m sorry.’ He shook his head. ‘Little point in
talking about what’s already lost.’

Mark opened his mouth to reply, but the words would not come. He walked through the front door to the path outside. He turned and offered his hand. They shook.

‘Thank you again for coming,’ Robinson said. ‘I’m so sorry about what has happened.’

‘Don’t give up,’ Mark managed to say. ‘On the idea, I mean. I’d like to read it eventually.’

Robinson looked at him oddly. Giving Mark the slightest of nods, he closed the door.

All that week, a fist of frost held the land in mute submission. The low fields, and the bog they sank into; the bushes of berries and the brittle trees that lined the laneway
to the house; the trimmed hedges of the garden and the livid briars of the yard – all stood stiffened as in a spell. When Tom hauled open the high iron door of the hayshed, the machinery
within glinted, seemed to quiver, in the sudden icy shaft of light from the moon. He pushed out a sigh, and the shape of his breath hung white for a moment in the blind air.

Twice a day now – just after it came light in the morning, and again by evening, as the first scarves of dusk settled into the corners of the meadow – he would come to stand here,
with the sheepdog panting gladly at his back. He would keep one hand on the cold rim of the door as his gaze travelled over the hulking forms of the tractors, their sheet-glass cabs, their pristine
surfaces, the huge black haunches of their tyres, on to the hexagonal baler, the red-skirted mower, and the other equipment filling the space in which, that summer, he and Mark had stacked two
hundred bales. Whistling to the sheepdog, he moved in to walk among the machines.

The tractor seats were still clothed in clear plastic. A film of yellow oil still coated the blue axle of the seed-spreader. The inner lip of the baler still held a fine dust of brown hayseed
from August. All was exactly as he had left it that morning. He whistled a shorter note to the dog and strode back out into the yard, tapping the side of each machine with his stick as he went.

Traffic was already terrible by the time Mark backed the car out of Sitric Road and down on to Arbour Hill. Friday evening at rush-hour: there could be no stupider time to head
west. It moved at a crawl down to the river and out the quays past Heuston, and it did not ease until he was on the M4.

He did not mind the drive in the dark. There was a comfort in the straightness of the road and the width of it, and the yellow glow of the streetlamps overhead. There was a sense of ditches and
fields and forest at the edges of everything, and the small squares of light that were the windows of houses. On the car radio, the talk was of hope and change in one country and of everything
going to fuck in another. He was still waiting for it to make a difference to him, this disaster that everyone was talking about, still waiting for it to make his life impossible, this collapse of
everything, this end of everything. Apparently the country was dying on its feet. But things seemed strangely the same to him.

He let himself sink into the chatter. At some level, he realized, he was listening to everything, but there was a filter, or there were only some words about which he cared enough to make him
listen. They mentioned Garryowen, and he looked to the radio in surprise: he had been rereading the Edgeworth story of that name the night before. But it was about Garryowen the rugby club. Then,
job losses, and something about a vaccination. Banks needing billions. An item about the computer games on the market for Christmas.

When the news came on he switched to a CD. The drive-time programme, with its arguments and commentary, was one thing, but he still did not want to listen to the news. There was almost always a
certain kind of headline, and he did not want to hear it; yes, they sounded sorry, yes, they sounded sad, but to them it was just another news story. And to someone else, it was just the start, and
it was something he did not want to think about. The CD did nothing to offend. In Edgeworthstown, a guy he had gone to school with was smoking outside the Park House. At the chipper, the evening
buses were pulling in. Headlights swooping, rucksacks lifted, boot doors popping open. Students home for the weekend. He glanced in the mirror to check that Aoife was still asleep.