‘So everything’s saved?’
Shit, he thought. This one he couldn’t just nod and guffaw his way through. ‘How do you mean?’ he said apologetically.
She laughed. ‘Some farmer you are. The hay, obviously. That’s what you went down to do, isn’t it? You saved the hay?’
‘Oh. Right. Yeah. All in safe and sound.’ And that’s the last thing I plan to say about hay for at least another twelve months, he added silently. ‘Drink?’ he said, and she said yes.
‘Don’t go away,’ he said, as he turned.
As the booze kicked in, he started to lean back into the evening properly, to watch her as she talked, to take pleasure in the sight and nearness of her, instead of trying to think of the right thing to say. She was talking, now, about the case she was working on — something about feuding Ascendancy throwbacks, as far as he could tell — and she was gesturing like crazy, which gave him an excuse to look at all of her. He looked at her arms, trailed by freckles, a mole nestled in the shadowy veins of her inner elbow. He looked at her throat, smooth and lightly tanned, and at the top two buttons of her blouse, how they were undone, and how, intermittently, an arc of dark lace at her left breast revealed itself, hid itself, hinted at itself. She had a small nose, and she was wearing lipstick, but it seemed to be the same shade as her lips — or was that the point of all lipstick? The green of her eyes was flecked with copper. As she talked, she turned her palms upward, spread them wide, stiffened them as though to catch something falling from above.
‘She’s unbelievable,’ she said — he raced backwards through the last couple of things he’d heard, and worked out that she was talking about her colleague.
He nodded. ‘She sounds it.’
She jiggled the ice in her glass. ‘So, how about you?’ she said, glancing at him. ‘What have you been up to?’
What had he been up to? Tugs of war with his father over every little thing. Tense encounters with his mother as she tried, like always, to encourage him to do two contradictory things: go back to Dublin as soon as he wanted and yet stick around in Dorvaragh for another few days. And there’d been the night in Keogh’s, and a conversation with Sammy Stewart from over the road about baler pins, and a conversation with another neighbour about what the neighbour referred to as ‘global warning’, and there’d been farcical attempts to read.
‘I got a bit of writing done,’ he said.
‘Oh, you got your chapter finished?’ Joanne said. ‘You were talking about it the other night.’
‘Which night?’
‘Both of them,’ she said, laughing, and Mark groaned.
‘Sorry to have inflicted that on you,’ he said.
‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘I actually found it really interesting. I don’t know anything about Maria Edgeworth.’
‘It’s pronounced Mur-eye-a, actually,’ he said. ‘Like pariah.’
She looked at him for a moment, and he wanted to kick himself. It was an automatic thing by now, correcting people when they said the name wrong — almost everybody did — but he wished he could have held back, just this once. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Force of habit.’
‘That’s OK,’ she said, and sipped her drink.
‘And nobody knows much about her. I don’t know much about her myself.’ He attempted a laugh. She returned it.
‘It’s gas to think someone like her lived in Edgeworthstown, though. I mean, from what you were saying the other night, it sounded like she was a pretty big deal.’
‘Yeah, she was, then,’ Mark said, and he knew what was coming next.
‘I mean, you were saying that she was good friends with Jane Austen? And that she had a thing with, what do you call him, William Scott?’
‘Walter Scott.’ Mark winced, but not at the mistake, which was kind of hilarious, and something he would have enjoyed if he hadn’t been seething at himself over the drivel about his research that he had obviously, once again, been spouting. It happened every time he talked about it with a few drinks on him: he homed in on the most obvious claims to fame in Edgeworth’s biography and blew them up to be much more significant than they actually were. Look, this woman from up the road knew Wordsworth! And Austen! And Erasmus Darwin! And Virginia Woolf, for Christ’s sake, and Turgenev! And she had an affair with Walter Scott!
When, in fact, all there had been with Wordsworth was one very boring-sounding afternoon in 1829 when he had swung by Edgeworthstown House unannounced, as part of his tour of Ireland, and afterwards Edgeworth had written to her aunt complaining that he was too fond of the sound of his own voice. As for Austen, that had been no friendship, either, even though Austen herself had sent Edgeworth a copy of Emma; Edgeworth had dumped it on a friend because she could find no story in it, nothing close to life, and because it had in it some unconvincing detail about soup. As for Darwin, he was just part of her father’s crazy circle of friends and, anyway, he wasn’t the right Darwin, just his grandfather, and yes, what Turgenev said about Edgeworth’s novels had been impressive — that if she hadn’t written about ‘the poor Irish of the co. Longford and the squires and squireens’, he might never have written the Russian equivalent — but then, there was reason to believe that Turgenev might not have said that at all, that someone writing an obituary had just made it up. And while Edgeworth had definitely been close to Scott, the theory about their actually having slept together was just a rumour Mark had heard at a conference or, more accurately, in the pub after the conference. Anyway, the point was, he got excited about all the wrong things in Edgeworth: not the novels, not the tales, not the innovations in realism and autobiography about which he kept prattling on to McCarthy. Instead, he found himself getting fixated on the fact of all the famous people Edgeworth had known. It was pathetic. It was just another aspect of the stupid provincialism with which he’d chosen the subject in the first place. It was as though he was writing some kind of nineteenth-century version of a celebrity magazine as his thesis.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I tend to talk a lot of crap about it when I have a few jars in me. I’m a bit bogged down in it all at the moment.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ she said brightly. ‘That’s another thing you were telling me about. How her father was obsessed with the bog. How he went digging in it for dinosaur skeletons or something. Or did I imagine that?’
‘Oh, God,’ said Mark, his hands over his face, and she laughed.
‘Well, it all sounds pretty interesting,’ she said, with a magnanimous little shrug that made him want to kiss her, and he realized that he could, that there was nothing to stop him, and so he did, putting his lips gently to hers, not taking too many liberties with his tongue, which was probably closing the gate after the horse had bolted, given what he remembered of Saturday night, and when he pulled back again she touched his cheek, and said she was going in to get them another round.
*
He was coming around for dinner, and she was nowhere near ready. She was just in from work, she had nothing in the house. It had been a stupid idea, inviting him to come around this evening; it had been a drunken idea, something that had made sense while she was sitting with him on the footpath outside the pub the night before, watching the sky change colour with the sunset, talking to him and kissing him and noticing the way his eyes kept flickering down to where her bra showed. But it was not an idea that made sense now. For a start, she was not a cook. She sat heavily on the couch in the sitting room and moaned in Sarah’s direction. Sarah ignored her. Her attention was fixed on the television screen.