Belinda McKeon - Solace

The summer passed. It was only a clutch of weeks, seeming longer and more beautiful before it began. Soon what sunshine came was not warm but autumnal, and the light lasted each evening for a shorter and shorter time.

Joanne had been back at work since early July. The hours were long, as she had known they would be, and as winter began to draw in, she woke up every morning wishing it was night and that she was walking up Arbour Hill, looking at the crooked number 4 on their front door, coming into the house to the smell of food and to the light on in the hall and to the fire lit in the sitting room. There was so much that she wanted to do with this house now. It had hardly been a home at all before Mark and the baby. It had been somewhere she inhabited, like a student flat. Now she saw it differently. She wanted to paint the hall a bright colour and to put down new floorboards. To rip up the ugly old carpet in the sitting room. A room had to be made for Aoife; the whole house needed light and air and space. For years before she had moved in, her father had rented the place to students, and it still had that look to it. She had not had the money to do it up when she inherited it, and she did not know where that money would come from now. But she would find it. She would have to. Soon, Aoife would be old enough to see this place with her own eyes. Joanne did not want her to see it the way it was now.

If she got home before seven, Aoife would still be up. She was a joy at that hour, cheerful, affectionate, loving the sight of her mother come home. She smiled in huge gales of happiness and grasped at the strands of Joanne’s hair. In a corner by the sofa they had laid a soft mat on the floor and scattered soft toys and other things around. She was still too young to play with them, but she seemed to like being surrounded by them, seemed to like being there on her back, taking slow account of them.

Joanne liked to be there to bathe her before bed; to sit her into the soapy water and watch her pleasure at the warmth of it, to watch her squirm and kick and stare as she relaxed her way towards sleep. She would carry her, wrapped in a towel, into the room where she and Mark slept, and she would change her into a clean nappy and a Babygro. Then she would lay her down under a pink crochet blanket. It had been Joanne’s when she was a baby; her mother had kept it all these years, had brought it into the hospital to them on that very first day. They had a nightlight of gently turning sheep and moons and stars. The baby’s eyes followed the twirling reflections on the walls and the ceiling, like the ticking hands of a clock. Joanne watched her, often, as her eyes closed. As the child slept, she clutched with one hand the top of the blanket. The other hand was always thrown wide. Often as she watched her sleep or drift into sleep Joanne felt again the dread she had felt during the pregnancy, during the labour, in the impossible first weeks. How would she do for this person all that needed to be done?

She still could not think of herself as a mother. Six months on, it was still too strange. She had expected the change to be monumental. In other women, it seemed to have been. She had no close friends with babies, but she had talked online to women who were giving birth around the same time as her, and their emotion seemed to be so much more intense than Joanne’s. She worried from time to time about this. But what she felt for her baby, felt, at the same time, right; felt normal. She loved her. She would have killed for her. She found it painful to look at her sometimes, she was so beautiful; she found it painful to realize how transient this beauty was. It would grow into another kind of beauty, she knew, but the baby face, the baby smell, the body that could be bundled and carried in the crook of her arm — already that body was no longer light enough to be spirited around as in the first days and weeks. Already she was growing heavy.

Joanne felt that somehow she must be getting it wrong. None of the mothers online seemed afraid of their babies, as she sometimes was. They seemed hysterical with pride and obsessive interest, and with worry and anxiety when the child was ill or not sleeping, but they never seemed less than sure of who they were: mothers to these new boys and girls. They displayed photographs of their babies on the forum; they displayed names and dates under the comments and questions and answers they wrote. They advised one another, congratulated one another, backed one another up. Joanne rarely posted anything on the forum now but when she did it was short, a request for advice on some specific thing.

She found herself longing, sometimes, for a neighbour. Someone she could have coffee with in the mornings. It was madness. She had neighbours, and she never spoke to them, except sometimes to the old woman who ran the sewing business next door. She did not want to have coffee with that woman; she did not want to answer her questions, take her advice. The woman had some huge number of grandchildren; she was too full of information, she irritated Joanne. And even if there had been a neighbour she wanted to talk to, she was never at home. At least, not at an hour when she would drink coffee. At that hour, and most hours, she was in the office, doing three times as much work as she had done before the birth, working on a case involving two property developers who were accusing each other of fraud. It was boring work, and it was distasteful, and it seemed endless. She despised each of the developers equally.

‘You’re not always going to have someone to feel sorry for, you know,’ Mark said one evening, as she complained about the case.

‘I know that,’ she said irritably.

‘Anyway, it’ll be over soon. That case. Won’t it?’

She shrugged. ‘They’re running circles around each other in court. It could drag on and on. Our guy is lying just as much as the other fella.’

‘You’re not helping the other fella to lie this time?’

‘No.’ Joanne smiled.

‘No secrets from Imelda? You haven’t found out that the other developer has signed everything over to his second family and just neglected to mention it?’

‘Come on.’

‘Come on yourself. I can’t believe you got away with that stuff last time. It’s amazing what you lot get up to. Corrupt,’ he said, and he laughed.

‘That’s not true,’ Joanne said, and Mark raised an eyebrow at her.

‘It’s not,’ she said again.

‘No, you’re right, of course it’s not,’ he said, standing. ‘I’m knackered. I have to go up. Are you coming?’

‘I’ll be up in a minute,’ she said, but more than a minute passed before she followed.

*

After the birth they did not have sex, not properly, for months. There were stitches, there was soreness, there was blood and, besides, bed had become a place to collapse into, already asleep, and nothing else. But one evening as she stood over the cot watching the baby drift into sleep, he came into the room behind her and put his arms around her, and she felt him, and she turned. She worried at first that the noise would wake the baby, but she soon forgot that anxiety and they moved on each other like they had before there was any of this, any house together, any baby, anything besides their separate selves making pleasure for each other and for themselves. Her breasts were still bigger. She was as turned on by this as he was. She was hungrier for him, she realized. The hormones must still have been at work. She wanted him on her. She wanted him to make noise with her, to make her make noise, however much the baby heard. He was beautiful to her again as he had been that first night, those first weeks. His dark eyes. His calm face with the fine bones. His lean body, his sallow arms. The hard knuckles of his hands.

*