Belinda McKeon - Solace

‘I could make time,’ Mark said evenly.

‘Would we not do it when we were bringing the tractors up to your man?’

‘That’d be this weekend,’ Mark said. ‘I can’t be away from here this weekend. Besides, that’d be too much messing. Let him put in the work to see the tractors if he wants them. We can take my car up whenever suits us.’

‘I suppose that’s better, all right,’ said his father. ‘Whenever suits yourselves.’

‘Right,’ Mark said, skimming through the first paragraph of the essay on top of the pile. It was appalling. He leafed through some of the others. Worse. He had a long night ahead with a red pen.

‘Would we go up for the morning when the sun comes in?’ his father said then.

Mark laughed. ‘You must be joking. Do you know how hard it is to get near the place that morning?’

‘No.’

‘You have to be on a list.’

‘Ah, fuck them,’ his father said, sounding disgusted.

‘Anyway, that was last month. And it’d be far too early for Aoife.’

‘You’re bringing Aoife?’

‘What else am I going to do with her?’

‘Yeah,’ his father said. All of the enthusiasm had fallen out of his tone. ‘Ah, sure, if the sunrise is over we may as well leave it. Sure there’s no point in going to see it if you can’t see what goes on with the sun. Sure that’s the whole point of it.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Ah, leave it to hell,’ he said.

Mark sighed. ‘You don’t have to see the sunrise. They do a simulation of it for you.’

‘They do what with it?’

‘They imitate the sunrise. The light. When you’re inside the passage, they switch off the lights and they shine in another light to show you what it’s like on the solstice. It’s exactly the same.’

‘Ah, it’s not the same,’ his father said crossly.

‘It’s as near as. It’s as good as you’re going to get.’

‘Ah, sure, if it’s not the real thing, what’s the point?’

Mark sat down on the floor beside Aoife. With a pencil, she was swirling dark trails through the clouds of yellow and purple she had shaded all over the page. She was talking to herself; she was singing. ‘Good, Daddy,’ she said, when she saw him looking at her, and she gave him the smile she had started using, lately, for the camera: a slightly unnerving squint of dimples and clenched teeth. ‘Good, Daddy!’ she shouted again, and threw the pencil in the direction of his head.

‘Good girl,’ he said to her, knowing that this, certainly, was not the right thing to say, but not knowing how else to respond. She laughed at him, a spit-mouthed splutter. He gave her back the pencil, which was probably not the right thing to do either. ‘Don’t stick that in your eye,’ he said.

‘Or what do you think?’ his father was saying.

‘I think,’ Mark said, ‘that you’re never going to get to see the real thing anyway. Hardly any of us are. And if you want to see what it looks like, then this is your best chance.’

‘So you think we should do it?’

Mark said nothing.

‘Ah, I suppose it’ll be something to do,’ his father said.

‘That’s settled then,’ Mark said. He needed to get off the phone: it was close to Aoife’s nap-time. As though she had read his mind, she shook her head vigorously and stood, scattering her drawing materials to the floor. Mark told his father he would talk to him later, but already his father was saying something else.

‘What?’ Mark said.

‘Do they always work?’

‘Do what always work?’

‘The lights,’ his father said. ‘The way they do the lights in the place of the sunrise. Do they always work? Do they always come on?’

‘Yes, they always work,’ Mark said, watching, with an eye-roll that nobody would see, as Aoife started to waddle her way to the sitting-room door. ‘They always come on.’

‘That’s good enough, so,’ his father said.

Aoife rounded the door. Mark let her go. He would follow.

I am grateful to Colm Tóibín; to my agent, Peter Straus; to my editors, Nan Graham at Scribner in New York and Paul Baggaley at Picador in London; to Paul Whitlatch, Kate Harvey, Kris Doyle and Jenny Hewson; to John O’Halloran, Amanda Glancy, Jane Hughes, Philip Coleman and Ciarán MacGonigal, and to those who were my teachers and classmates at the Writing Division in Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where much of this novel was written. Sections were also written at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig in Co. Monaghan, Ireland; thanks to Sheila Pratschke and Pat Donlon for their hospitality there.

I wish to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts Council of Ireland and the Bank of Ireland Millennium Trust.

I found the following works on Maria Edgeworth useful: Marilyn Butler’s Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (1972), Maria Edgeworth and Romance by Sharon Murphy (2004); Maria Edgeworth: Women, Enlightenment and Nation by Clíona Ó Gallchoir (2005), and the articles ‘Autobiographical Interpolation in Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington ’ by Emily Hodgson Anderson (2009) and ‘Maria Edgeworth and the Romance of Real Life’ by Michael Gamer (2001). Anthony Steinbock’s Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology Beyond Husserl (1995) is the inspiration for Clive Robinson’s fictitious book.

Thanks most of all to my parents, Oliver and Angela McKeon, to my siblings, and to the Woods family, including my late father-in-law, Shane. This novel is dedicated, with love and thanks, to my husband.