‘You’re not teaching any more?’
‘A whole year without it now, and I don’t miss it at all.’ He gardened, he said, and he read, and he went almost every day to the Markievicz pool; it was nice and quiet in the afternoons. His children took him abroad on holiday twice a year. His grandchildren lived nearby, and they called to see him.
‘Or to see the cats.’ He smiled. ‘I’m never sure which it is.’
‘It sounds like life is good.’
‘Well, it is.’ Robinson nodded, but then he stopped, and looked out to the traffic on Manor Street. On the footpath beside them, a boy passed on a bicycle too small for him. As he pedalled, his knees were almost hitting his hands.
‘I find, though, that there are still things I wish I could do with my days. Still things I wish I had the time to do.’
Joanne hesitated. She knew it was important to look at Robinson as he spoke to her now — he seemed to need to tell her something — but, like an itch, she felt the urge to check her watch. She forced herself to smile into Robinson’s eyes instead. ‘Like what?’ she said, and he shrugged.
‘Oh, whimsies,’ he said. ‘I’ve started out on another book, if you’d believe it.’
‘That’s great,’ Joanne said, hearing in her voice a note that was too bright, too eager. ‘What’s it about?’ she said. She had tried for seriousness, but this time the words came out sounding wary.
‘About discordance,’ Robinson said, sliding a hand into his jacket pocket. ‘About how we deal with discordance, within experience, I mean. How we reshape our world of experience when things within our experience turn out not to be what we’d expected. Our lifeworlds, and how we reconstitute them when we’re in that bind. You remember all that nonsense, about lifeworlds?’
‘Lebenswelt,’ Joanne surprised herself by saying. Where had that surfaced from? She remembered hardly anything of Robinson’s philosophy classes, much as she had loved them at the time. But Lebenswelt: Lebenswelt she could remember, for some reason. Probably, she realized then, because he had said it in English five seconds ago.
‘You’re driving home, and it’s night-time, and suddenly a car comes around the corner with its headlights glaring, and you’re blinded for a second,’ said Robinson. ‘Or you drive around the corner yourself, and instead of the clear way home you were expecting, there’s a roadblock, and you have to find your way back along an unfamiliar route. Or you ingest some santonin — ever heard of that?’
Joanne shook her head.
‘Turns everything yellow. Not to be recommended. Or, say, you burn your fingertips, and suddenly nothing feels the same. And what I want to know is, how capable are we, really, of dealing with it, of taking it up and synthesizing it into a new concordance, a new idea of what’s normal? Not only on these small scales, but on much larger scales — on a global scale, if I have the guts and the longevity to get around to addressing that.’ He shrugged. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Here I am again, rattling on.’
‘No, no,’ Joanne said. ‘It does sound fascinating.’ And the way he glanced at her then, with a half-smile, and the way his eyes fell away again to the ground made her want, for a moment, to cry.
‘It’s something to do,’ he said, and he looked down to the plastic bag she was carrying, the groceries and the wine she had bought in Centra. ‘But I can see you are busy,’ he said. ‘I won’t keep you any longer from your night.’
‘It was really lovely to see you,’ Joanne said, and they shook hands, and he offered to see her as far as her door under the shelter of his umbrella, because it was raining now. But Joanne said there was no need, that it was only a drizzle, that she lived only a couple of steps away. At the house, as she opened the front door, she could hear Mark in the sitting room, talking to Sarah. She found herself impatient for the sight of him. Her heart was jumping in her chest as she came down the hall.
*
‘I thought about joining a monastery once,’ Mark said, as they had dinner. Somehow, they had got to telling each other the hymns they’d been forced to learn in primary school, and he’d made a joke about how he hadn’t expected to spend their third date talking about ‘Ave Verum’, and how maybe for their sixth they should go to Glenstal Abbey for a mass at dawn. And now this. Which was presumably another joke. But he wasn’t laughing, and he didn’t seem to be expecting Joanne to laugh. All of his concentration seemed to be focused on getting an equal amount of meat and potato and mushroom on to his fork. He chewed slowly.
‘I’m serious,’ he eventually said.
‘Fuck off,’ she said, and it came out sounding harsher than she had meant it to. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I read a piece about a monk from Glenstal in the paper, when I was an undergrad, and I thought it sounded pretty cool,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to bother with the religious side of it. I just wanted to be somewhere where nobody could reach me. Where I could just get on with doing what I wanted to do. I liked the idea of this very silent, steady routine.’
‘You wanted to be a monk? So. . are you religious?’
He shook his head. ‘Not even slightly.’
‘So you wanted to be an atheist monk.’
He shrugged. ‘I doubt all the monks in there are that cracked on religion,’ he said. ‘The guy I was reading about spends most of his time writing.’
‘Writing what?’
‘Chick-lit.’
‘Ah, come on.’ Under the table, she hit his knee with hers. ‘You’re taking the piss.’
‘No, no, no, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I mean, I am about the chick-lit. But I just liked the idea of this guy, writing away in there without anyone to bother him.’
‘Right.’
‘And then I decided I didn’t want to get up every morning two hours before dawn. And that I’d get my essays written between nights on the tear the way everyone else did.’
‘And that you wanted people to bother you.’
He laughed. The laugh of someone who hadn’t thought of it that way before. ‘I suppose,’ he said, looking at her. ‘Some people.’
They sat in silence for a moment. In the sitting room, Sarah roared with laughter at something on the television.
‘Should we bring her another glass of wine?’ Mark said. ‘Or should we go up and join her?’
‘No,’ Joanne said. Often, before, when she and Sarah had invited somebody around to the house, dinner for two had turned into drinks for three, and it had always been a laugh, but not tonight; tonight, that was not what she wanted. ‘Let’s stay here for a while.’
‘Thanks for dinner,’ he said, and she smiled at him. On his forehead, between his brows, she noticed three pock-marks. Like the skin had once been a pool of something; like it had bubbled as it dried.
‘You scratched your chicken pox,’ she said, putting her fingers to the marks.
‘Oh,’ he said, and he breathed out a laugh. ‘Yeah. My mother was raging with me. She said she’d buy me a new tape if I didn’t scratch them.’ His fingers were over hers, stroking her hand. ‘But I couldn’t resist and I scratched them when she went into town to get me the tape. By the time she got back they were gone.’
‘You brat,’ Joanne said, and she traced her fingers over his lips. ‘What was the tape?’
‘Billy Joel,’ he said. ‘She came in and took one look at me and pegged the tape at me in the bed. I listened to it for weeks.’
‘And you got holes in your head for keeps.’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Ah, well.’
She stood and gathered their empty plates, taking them to the sink as he refilled their glasses with wine.
‘You don’t have to go down home this weekend, do you?’ she said, sitting back down.