Belinda McKeon - Solace

They had been down to Longford a few times since the baby was born. Always, they had stayed with Mark’s parents, but Joanne’s mother wanted to see Aoife too, and she did not feel comfortable coming to Dorvaragh, so they would go to Caldragh for an afternoon, watch Irene fuss over the baby, answer her questions about feeding and sleeping and waking. Even during short visits, Joanne would grow weary of her mother: her snippiness, her bitterness would come out with a sly comment here, a loaded question there. Mark said she was overreacting, but Joanne could hear what her mother was saying to her, and she wanted, always, to get away. Aoife, though, seemed to like Irene. She was quiet with her, she smiled at her; one day, lying in her arms, she began to make an absurd, burbling sound. The three of them had stared at her, panic-stricken for a moment, until they realized what it was. She was laughing. It was the first time. Her mother, Joanne could see, was lit up with pride. Back in Dorvaragh, Mark kept trying all that evening to get the child to laugh again, to put on a show of the ridiculous, tiny chuckling for his parents, but she would only smile. Maura said it was good enough, that she would laugh for them in her own good time. Tom, Joanne had thought, had been disappointed.

Tom had seemed to grow used to Joanne, and to the baby. He was still not talkative, but Mark told her that that was just his father’s way. Despite herself, Joanne was fond of him. Sometimes she saw him watching her and felt certain he wanted just for an easy conversation between the two of them to begin. But if she tried to start one, he would seem uncomfortable, would excuse himself saying that he needed to see to something outside, or that there was a call he needed Maura to make for him. He seemed never to make his own calls.

Christmas approached. On Grafton Street, the lights were already up in early November. Aoife was too young to notice any of the gifts they would buy her, any of the decorations they would hang in the house or point to in the streets, but there would be a first Christmas for her only once and they wanted to make something of it. Maura and Tom wanted them down home for the day, as did Joanne’s mother, but they had decided they wanted to spend it in their own home. When Maura and Irene both pleaded, Joanne and Mark decided he would take Aoife down to Longford for a couple of days before Christmas; Joanne would still be at work. They bought a tree in the square at Smithfield and draped it with tinsel and baubles from a stall on Henry Street. Mark put fairy lights over the doorway and the window in the sitting room, and Joanne bought Aoife a huge stocking in Arnotts, and even before the middle of December, they had filled it with toys. For New Year’s Eve, they planned to close out the world. They would light candles, have a fire going, roast a chicken, drink champagne. Maybe it would snow. Probably it would just piss rain. But that was OK. It would be some time away from the office. The steps of the Four Courts would be quiet, except for the odd drunk, except for the homeless people wrapped in blankets or in sleeping bags. These would be their days, hers and Mark’s and Aoife’s, to stay home, to stay inside. To stay inside and have the last hours of what had been for them such a year.

‘The shortest day,’ said Maura, as she handed Mark a mug of tea. ‘They’ll all have been out at Newgrange this past couple of hours.’

‘I’d forgotten about that.’

‘You and Nuala used to have to write about it for your homework every year at this time when you were in primary school.’ She bit from a slice of toast spread thick with butter and marmalade. The rumpled cotton of her nightdress showed beneath her dressing-gown. Around her eyes, the lines seemed scored more deeply than they had the night before.

‘They built it in alignment to the solstice,’ Mark said. ‘The sunrise today comes in through a roof box and lights up the whole passageway. They’ve people buried in there. They don’t know who.’

‘Must be some sight,’ Maura said. ‘I’d love to get in to see it some day.’

‘Only clout would get you in this morning,’ Mark said. ‘It’ll be all politicians and journalists blocking the place up for a gawk. I’m surprised any light gets in at all.’

‘Only clout would have got you in there the first time round,’ said Maura.

Mark leafed through the pages of the local newspaper he had spread on his side of the table. It was all court reports and office-party photos and advertorials; there was a whole page about the cathedral in Longford and about how busy the priests were in the run-up to Christmas. ‘During this very busy season in the hustle and bustle of Longford, be sure to drop into St Mel’s Cathedral and be confronted by serenity,’ the piece ended. Mark had long been meaning to call into the small museum at the back of the cathedral: he had heard that the nuns at the manor had donated a couple of boxes of old letters and documents from the Edgeworth family’s time. He should go in to have a look at the stuff, he knew. There might be something he could use. He would get around to it eventually.

‘She’s sleeping late,’ his mother interrupted his thoughts.

He nodded. ‘She always does, in this house. I don’t know why.’

‘Country air.’ His mother smiled. ‘You should bring her out for a walk in it later.’

Mark nodded. ‘I want to go down to see what Dad’s at in the fields. I’ll bring her in the pushchair.’

‘Well, wrap her up warm,’ his mother said. ‘I don’t want Joanne blaming me if you bring her back to Dublin with a cold.’

‘Joanne’s not going to do that,’ Mark said, glancing across the table.

‘I wish you could all be here for the day itself,’ his mother said. ‘I’d love to see her face when she gets her Santy presents.’

‘Come on, she doesn’t know Santy from Adam, Mam,’ Mark said, and he closed the newspaper and folded it away.

‘Still,’ his mother said. ‘You’ll be missed.’

It was strange being in Dorvaragh with Aoife and without Joanne. He was acutely aware, for some reason, of the child’s breathing as she lay in the cot at the foot of his bed. That was his old cot. His father — under orders from his mother — had taken it down from the attic and assembled it in Mark’s old room. Mark found himself looking at it as though he might somehow remember it, which was impossible; of course he could not remember it. Still, the worn smoothness of its wooden bars seemed familiar, somehow. That morning as he had watched Aoife sleep he had reached over and gripped one, held it tightly, the way he must have done thirty years ago when his hands were as small as Aoife’s were now. But nothing had come back to him.

An hour later he put Aoife in the pushchair and walked down the lane. From the gate to the lower fields, he could see that his father was fencing, using a sledge to hammer a paling post into the soft ground along the drain. Behind him, more posts jutted awkwardly from the transport box fixed to the tractor. Mark opened the gate and made his way over the bog, the thin frame of the pushchair jerking and rattling across the bumps. Seeing him approach, Tom stopped work. He was sweating, and one cheek was dirty with peat. He had taken his coat off and thrown it across the tractor’s front wheel.

‘These’re the sleepers?’ Mark asked, as he drew up beside him. He recognized the wood from the haul Tom had bought from the railway station in Longford a few years previously.

Tom nodded. ‘Time to be doing something with them,’ he said.

‘The ground must be hard enough, this time of year?’ Mark said, studying the spot where the last post had gone in. He pressed his foot to it. It felt nothing like bog. ‘Jesus, it’s like cement,’ he said. His father shrugged.