Belinda McKeon - Solace

‘I’m sorry about your father,’ Mark said, and he touched her hand, but not like she had wanted him to; too briefly, too lightly, his hand already back in his lap. ‘That must have been hard.’

‘It was hard because it was sudden. I didn’t think I’d miss him.’

‘Of course you miss him,’ Mark said, and the smile he gave her had something unsettled in it, something awkward. Of course it has, she thought, here you are, trying to talk about emotions with an Irish man. It doesn’t matter that he’s an Irish man who writes about books. It matters even less that those books were written by a woman. He’s still an Irish man. So change the record. Change the mood, if you want to keep him in this house with you, if you don’t want to ruin the entire night. She shook her head, vigorously, as though shaking something away from herself.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Nobody wants to talk about that old stuff.’

‘I don’t mind,’ said Mark. ‘Talk about anything you want to talk about.’

‘Well, I don’t want to talk about my father, really,’ she said, and she heard how unconvincing the words were. ‘I don’t know where that came from.’

‘I don’t remember much about him,’ Mark said, and he was looking not at her, but at the table, at the crumbs scattered where his plate had been. ‘He and your mother used to call up to our house sometimes at Christmas, but that was when I was very young.’

‘My father always fancied himself as some kind of local politician,’ she said, and Mark glanced up at her; he looked as though he might laugh. But he did not. ‘Except he wouldn’t have been able to play politics half as well if he’d been on the inside of it instead of fiddling it from the outside. So he probably did do that kind of thing. He probably did go around bringing Christmas boxes to his constituents. Kissing babies.’ She poked Mark in the side. ‘Kissing you.’

‘Jesus,’ Mark said, and as she leaned in towards him, he looked startled for a moment, but then all the watchfulness went out of his eyes, and he met her mouth with his own.

*

Upstairs, he looked at her very steadily. As he kissed her, he touched her ass and her thighs, her belly and her breasts. Her dress was light cotton, hardly more than a sundress. He threw it to the floor. She could feel him against her, that shape against denim that had drifted through her mind when she was meant to be thinking of other things. His mouth was against her, wetter now, and harder. He seemed, as he pushed against her, to want to lift her, and in turn she pushed against him, trying to keep her feet on the ground. He lowered one bra strap, kissing her shoulder, and then the other, and he reached behind her to unfasten the clasp. She pulled away from him and sat on the bed; she watched his face and watched his eyes. His hands came for her, and she caught them, and held them, and felt the strength of them, and he let her guide them, let her show him how to touch her so lightly that he must hardly have felt her, must hardly have realized the warmth and the dampness of her skin. He wanted more. His breath fought her. His body tried to press on her. With his hands, he traced her all over, traced circles on her breasts and lines on her throat and a feather-stroke up inside each thigh. And when his eyes said enough, she felt how the sweat had pooled at the base of his spine, and she drew him to her, and she let herself be drawn.

When she woke again near dawn it was to the sound of his voice beside her; he was mumbling to himself in his sleep. She tried to make it out, but it was nonsense, just noises, not even words. She shook him and he woke, gasping. His breath was stale on her face as he asked her the time.

‘Time to be asleep,’ she said, and she curled her body back into his.

And time for work was three hours later. Mona was already in the office when Joanne got there, standing by the coffee machine, clicking a stiletto heel on the tile floor. Her shoes had red soles that glinted like nail polish.

‘Yes,’ she said, when she saw Joanne glance at them.

‘Yes what?’ Joanne said, as she slumped into her chair.

‘Yes, they are.’ Mona made a face of mock alarm.

Joanne nodded. She knew what this meant. It meant that the shoes were new, that they had cost a fortune, and that there was something about the red soles that she was meant to understand. It was a moment, she knew, when energetic admiration was expected of her, but she felt too exhausted even to lift her gaze from the floor back to her computer screen. Two bottles of wine in the middle of the week was something she could no longer do without suffering the consequences. A sharp arc of pain was strung between her temples, and Mona’s perfume, hanging on the air like pesticide, was not helping. Neither was Mona’s excitable presence, as she darted now from one filing cabinet to another, pulling out folders and slapping them on to her desk. She sat down to her computer. She stood up again. She went over to the bookcase by the window and took up a thick hardback. She leafed quickly through it, consulted a page, slammed it shut. She picked up her phone. She put it down.

‘You’re busy,’ Joanne said carefully.

‘Oh, God, I’m run off my bloody feet,’ Mona said, and then she laughed, and looked back at her shoes. ‘I really shouldn’t have bought these. But I couldn’t resist.’

Joanne nodded. ‘What are you working on?’

‘Oh, everything,’ Mona said. ‘I have to get a full day’s work done in half a day today. I have a lunch meeting with Rupert.’

‘So you’re taking a half-day?’

Mona looked to her screen. ‘Eoin sanctioned it. He said it’s important that we give Rupert the time he needs. Even if it’s in an informal setting. There’s still a lot of background we have to make sense of.’

‘Don’t we have all the background we need in the case notes by now?’ Joanne said, but Mona kept her eyes on her screen.

‘Don’t ask me, ask Eoin,’ she said. ‘I’m just doing what I was told.’

Joanne sighed. What this meant was that Mona’s workload for the day would end up being hers. She had too much to do as it was. But she would have to agree. Mona had been there longer than Joanne. She claimed seniority — as long as it was understood that seniority, in this instance, was not a matter of age.

‘You’re not going to walk all the way to the restaurant in those heels, surely,’ Joanne said. ‘It’s a fair trot to Fitzwilliam Square.’

Mona looked at her as though she were mad. ‘I’m not meeting Rupert at his restaurant,’ she said, in an incredulous tone. ‘Rupert can’t be seen at his restaurants at the moment. The paparazzi are staking them out. Didn’t you know?’

‘I have to say, I didn’t.’

‘Well, yes, they are,’ Mona said, turning fully around in her chair now. ‘That creep over at the Herald has a total vendetta against Rupert.’

Joanne felt the beginnings of a smirk. She turned it into a cough. One photograph of Rupert Lefroy had, indeed, been taken outside his sushi restaurant and carried alongside coverage of the case in an evening newspaper, but the coincidence of a high-profile American actress having eaten there on the same evening could hardly be ignored. Neither did Joanne imagine that a scattering of bored newspaper photographers, fitting the job between an ad shoot and a football match, could be described as paparazzi.

‘I’m sure Rupert is well able for them,’ she said, and Mona nodded.

‘Well, yes, he’s used to this sort of thing,’ she said. ‘But, still, I hope they’re not waiting for us at the Shelbourne.’

‘The Shelbourne’s hardly out of the way.’

Mona ignored this. ‘So I’ll need you to step in on some stuff for me,’ she said, pulling her chair back up to her desk. ‘There’s a big section of the transcript that I haven’t even looked at yet, and Eoin wants notes on it by this evening. It’s that old bat again, Rupert’s mother. I’m sorry to land you with more of her ramblings.’