Solace (36 page)

So Frankie Lynch had done him a favour. But Mark would not see it that way. Mark would only see it in his own way: childish and suspicious and wild. It shocked Tom how far from
calm in himself Mark still was. He had come on nothing at all since the summer. Standing there tonight, with the receipt from the sale in his hand, he had been like a young lad in a tantrum. Sense
had needed to be talked into him. Now, half an hour later, Tom knew he had gone too far with some of what he had said to Mark; with what he had said, especially, about Joanne. It had not been fair;
it had not been true. But it had seemed as though only strong words would force Mark to face up to the facts of how things really were. And it was not as though the things Mark himself had come out
with were fair or true. No father should ever have to hear such words from his son.

Tom knew where Mark was gone, and he knew he should be worried. But he could not bring himself to worry. He could hardly bring himself to care. He felt himself hoping only that Frankie would do
him another favour by telling Mark more of what Mark needed to hear.

*

‘Mark,’ Irene Lynch said, when she answered the door. Her face registered surprise only for a moment; very quickly, it turned to fright. ‘Is everything all
right? Aoife?’

‘Aoife’s fine,’ Mark said. He wondered what time it was; had the clock in the car read half past ten just now or half past eleven? Irene was ready for bed. Her dressing-gown
hung off her; she had grown even thinner. Her slippers were large: the sort of novelty slippers your children gave you for Christmas. Mark shook his head, embarrassed: he was not meant to see her
like this. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘If I woke you.’

But Irene did not look embarrassed, and she did not look, either, as though she had been woken from sleep. ‘Come in, Mark,’ she said, and led him to the sitting room, where an
armchair was drawn up close to the television.

‘I was just watching the end of the
Late Late
,’ Irene said. ‘Rubbish, as always, but I never want to miss it at the same time.’ She seemed about to lower herself
into the armchair, but she leaned instead against the door. ‘Will you have something?’ she said. ‘Would you like a drink?’

Mark shook his head. ‘I’m driving.’

Irene nodded, but still she did not sit down. ‘So you’re home for the weekend,’ she said, and she smiled.

‘I am.’

‘Your father must be delighted. How is he? How’s Aoife? Will you bring her up to see me?’

‘I will, of course. She’s gone to bed tonight. Otherwise . . .’

‘Well,’ Irene said evenly. ‘I wouldn’t expect to see the child at this hour.’

‘No.’

A clock ticked loudly from the next room. The fire made its sounds of shifting and crackling. Mark felt as though he had taken a breath in his father’s house and was exhaling it here. The
photo over the television had been there the last time he was in the house too; it was nothing he had not seen before, but it was impossible to get it out of view. It pushed into every possible
angle of his vision. It looked exactly like what it was: a photograph of a person who was dead now, a photograph chosen from an album and taken to a photographer’s shop to be enlarged and
enhanced and placed in a thick gold frame, and hung on a spot that had been cleared specially for it, right in the middle of the wall. The frame was too heavy: it made the whole thing look awkward.
In the photo, Joanne seemed barely out of her teenage years, her features undefined, her smile determined but uncertain. Her eyes were Aoife’s. He saw that now.

‘Was there anything, Mark?’ Irene said from the door.

Mark shook his head.

‘Well, won’t you please sit down anyway?’ she said, and she gestured to the couch and watched him as he went to it. ‘I wish you would take something to drink.’

She moved to her armchair and sat draping her dressing-gown more fully over her crossed legs. ‘It’s very nice of you to call around,’ she said, and she looked at the television
where the end credits of the programme were rolling. ‘I wish that you’d call around more often. And I wish that you’d phone more often, a lot more often.’ She glanced at
him. ‘I’d love it if you’d phone and tell me about Aoife. How she’s doing.’

‘She’s doing great,’ Mark said, as brightly as he could. ‘She’s great.’

‘Yes.’ Irene nodded, as though lost in thought. ‘You’ve said that. And of course she’s great. Of course she is. It’s just I’d like to hear more about
that. About what her being great entails.’

Mark was surprised by how sharp her tone had become, and how quickly. She was almost glaring at him now; he remembered what Joanne had said about her temper, about the swings in her mood. He
tried to think of some way to respond, but nothing that occurred to him seemed wise. They sat in silence for a long moment that ended when Irene gave a shaky sigh and leaned over to dig with a
poker at the fire.

‘Look, Mark, I don’t know what Joanne told you,’ she said, when she sat back into her chair.

Mark swallowed. He shifted his legs uneasily. ‘What Joanne told me about—’

Irene interrupted, frowning as though asking him not to pretend. ‘About me, I mean. Obviously about me. I don’t know what she said about me.’

‘She didn’t say anything,’ Mark shook his head, but Irene held a hand up to stop him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, without knowing why.

‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ Irene said, and her tone was now much softer, but still matter-of-fact. ‘I’m the one who should be sorry. No matter what happened
between us, I never loved her a tiny bit less, Mark. I only loved her more, the more difficult things became. You’ll know what that’s like when Aoife’s that age. I hope you
won’t, but chances are you will. And if you have any sense, you’ll tell your daughter how you feel about her. You won’t sit around and let things fall to pieces between the two of
you without doing anything to mend it, without saying anything to put it right.’

‘Joanne never talked badly of you,’ Mark said. ‘She never did.’

Irene smiled thinly. ‘It makes me feel no better to think that she couldn’t talk about these things,’ she said. ‘That she couldn’t even talk about them with
you.’

Mark said nothing. It was not true, what he had said to Irene. Joanne had told him about her mother. She had talked to him about her even on the first night they had met. Sometimes it had seemed
that her mother was all that Joanne wanted to talk about, that she had needed to talk her mother out of her system, to give utterance to everything she knew about her, everything she did not
understand about her. But Mark did not think it would be wise, or useful, now, to share this detail with Irene.

‘I’d just love to know how she’s getting along,’ Irene said then.

Mark looked at her, startled. ‘Who?’ he said, and the words came out sounding almost hostile. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Who do you
mean?’

Irene regarded him for a moment before answering. ‘I mean Aoife, Mark,’ she said slowly, putting a hand to her collarbone. ‘I’m just saying again that I’d love to
see more of Aoife. To hear more about her. You’d be surprised the small little things that would be of interest to me. That would mean the world to me.’

Mark felt embarrassed, and he felt guilty. He knew that Irene had spotted his confusion. He knew that she had seen him thinking for an astounded moment that it was Joanne she wanted to know
about, not Aoife. She had seen him thinking her crazy, thinking her unhinged. She had seen it, and she had absorbed it, and she had corrected it, and he was the one who had come out of it looking
crazy. He was the one who must seem unhinged.

‘She’s walking a couple of months now,’ he said eagerly. ‘Aoife. And she’s got a good few words. The thing she’s most interested in walking on is the stairs.
And the footpath alongside the house in Stoneybatter. The narrowest bloody footpath in Dublin.’

With an effort, he laughed, and Irene laughed too. ‘Hands full,’ she said, and smiled at him.

Say it, Mark said to himself then. Get around to the reason you came here. Ask for him. Ask where he is. But then Irene took a deep breath, and he knew that she was going to say something it
would be unkind to interrupt. He knew that she was going to come out with something that was important to her.

‘This thing is supposed to have – what do you call it? – peaked, by now,’ she said, stretching a hand out towards the fire. ‘I don’t find that. Do
you?’

Mark stared at her. What was she talking about? Was she talking about the fire? He looked to it. Flames puttered and curled. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said to Irene. ‘I’m
not sure what you mean.’

‘Oh,’ said Irene, shaking her head as though she were airing a foolish indulgence, something that scarcely deserved to be heard. ‘This. Grief, I mean. They say it hits some
sort of height around the sixth month and grows more manageable after that. Evens out, you know. A plateau. I suppose I did find it to be something like that after my husband died. But it
hasn’t happened for me this time, not yet.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, very quietly.

If she cried, he would not know what to do with her, Mark thought in a panic, but she showed no sign of breaking down. She was smiling into the fire, that same thin smile.

‘I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the whole thing, you see,’ she said. ‘There are a lot of books about it. I imagined that maybe you might be reading about it
too.’

Mark shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. He knew he should say more than this, but he did not know where to begin.

‘I don’t know why I thought that,’ Irene said. ‘With your studies, I suppose. I don’t know.’

‘It’s different for everyone, I think,’ said Mark. He hoped that this statement might somehow bring the matter to a close.

‘One book said that it’s like magic in a way,’ said Irene, and her eyes had the same brightness that had been in his father’s an hour earlier. ‘Grief, I
mean,’ she said, leaning towards him. ‘That there’s somehow something magical about what you go through.’

‘They say all sorts of things,’ said Mark, weakly. ‘I suppose it’s different for everyone,’ he tried again. He could not believe this was happening; that he was
getting some sort of primer on self-help from Joanne’s mother. What had happened with his father in the hayshed, in the kitchen, earlier seemed almost reasonable compared with this. He
wondered if it would be wrong to ask for a glass of water. He felt clammy. He wondered if it would be wrong to say that, after all, he wanted a drink. But Irene would only see that as an invitation
to go deeper into her theories. Even as it was, he could see, she was warming to her theme.

‘Not magic in a good way, of course,’ she said, folding her hands in her lap. ‘More that you’re under a spell. Hypnotized, or . . . What would you call it?’ She
searched for the word. ‘Hexed. That you believe, really believe, that the person is going to come back some day. Any day. That all of this will end, and that you’ll have them back
again.’ She looked at him. Her gaze was perfectly still. ‘This has happened to me, Mark. I catch myself thinking like this. I realize how foolish it is, but I still think it. And I
still believe it. That Joanne might walk in that door. I mean, for Christ’s sake.’ She shook her head. ‘Even as it was, Joanne hardly ever came in that door.’

Mark inhaled. Words seemed to slide behind walls and into formations, wrong formations, far away from him. He felt the heat of the fire furious against one cheek, against one whole side of his
head, and he tried to lean away from it, but there was only so far he could lean. Worse still was that he found himself unwilling – unable – to look towards the door.

‘Don’t you ever think that, Mark?’ Irene said, and she leaned forward suddenly and reached a hand out to him. ‘Don’t you find yourself thinking that she’s
going to come home?’

Mark stared at her hand. Something about it was familiar; something about it was wrong. It took him a moment, and then he saw it. The ring on her fourth finger. It was the ring he had given
Joanne for Christmas, the first year. The silver ring, with the green stone; he had bought it from an antiques stall upstairs in the Westbury Mall. Joanne’s fingers had been swollen, from the
pregnancy; she had not been able to wear it for a while, had not tried to wear it until after Aoife was born. Then she had worn it often; not every day, but often. She had been wearing it that day
in the car. It must have been on her hand when she had been brought into the hospital; it must have been in her things afterwards. Her things, which had gone to her mother. Not to him. They had not
been married. That was not how it was done.

‘Mark,’ Irene said, and stretched her hand closer to him. He took it. He did not squeeze it; he held it briefly with one hand, patted it with the other. Then he let it go. He stood.
She looked at him in surprise, her eyes moist.

‘Is Frankie around?’ he said quickly.

Irene frowned. She sat back; she folded her hands in her lap again. ‘Frankie?’ she said, as though he had asked after someone she did not know.

‘I thought he might be in.’

Irene shook her head slowly, as if in sympathy at such a misguided notion. ‘No, Mark. Frankie has his own house now. I thought you knew that.’

‘No,’ Mark said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I thought your father might have told you.’

‘No,’ Mark said again.

‘Well, Frankie built a house for himself on the farm over your lane,’ Irene went on. ‘Was he not building that when—’ She paused. ‘He must have been. I
suppose you wouldn’t have noticed. I suppose you had enough on your mind.’

‘The farm over the lane?’ Mark said. ‘Tommy Burke’s old farm?’

‘Yes,’ Irene said, with a sigh. ‘Tommy’s old troublemaker. Frankie and his girlfriend have a new house on it now. They finished it over the summer. They’ve been
living in it since September.’

‘And he’s farming it?’

‘Oh, yes, somehow,’ said Irene. ‘He’s stocking it himself. I don’t ask too many questions. And his girlfriend is pregnant. I don’t ask too many questions
about that, either.’

‘You’ll have another grandchild,’ was all Mark could think of saying.