Belinda McKeon - Solace

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.’