‘Not for another while.’
‘They don’t mind?’
‘They mind but they’ll manage.’
In the pub the night before he had talked to her about the farm and about his father. It was a story she recognized. It was her brothers’ story, her cousins’ story, the story of every son with a father who owned meadows and animals and haysheds. It was hers, too, if she substituted her father’s practice for his hundred and forty acres, his clients for his cattle and sheep. She’d said that to Mark, and he’d seemed glad that she understood, grateful, but he had not asked any questions, had not shown an interest in hearing any more. It seemed strange to her, but it made sense, too. He had just returned from two days of dealing with his father, of working with him, of fighting with him. He probably hadn’t wanted to talk about family — anybody’s family — or about home.
But she found herself wanting to talk about those things now, for some reason, and she had said it before she could stop herself. That she had not been home herself in several months. That she didn’t miss it. That it would probably be months before she visited again; probably Christmas.
‘Which is the biggest fucking nightmare you can imagine,’ she said, feeling how the wine massaged her into fuller sentences, bigger descriptions, than would normally occur to her. She was glad to have them. She was glad to be telling him this. ‘My brother Frankie spends the day on the couch reading old issues of the Sunday World, and my other brothers bring their awful wives and their awful children, and my mother acts like she’s run off her feet trying to look after everybody when actually she’s in the kitchen topping up her gin and bitching at me not to ruin the turkey. What do I know about turkey?’
‘Who knows anything about turkey?’ he said, and she laughed.
‘Exactly. So that’s Christmas, and I come back here as soon as I can, and then every April I go down as well. Every April, I should say, I get guilted into going down.’ She paused. It seemed suddenly very important to find the right tone. But whatever that tone was, it seemed out of her range. ‘For my father’s mass,’ she said, and it came out in a blurt. ‘I can’t stand going down there, but I can’t not be there for that. That just wouldn’t look right. You know?’
He nodded, but he did not say anything; he did not ask her to go on. She looked at him. She wanted, she realized, for him to ask about her mother, to ask what it was about her mother that bothered her so much. She wanted him to draw her out, to let her tell him things, to let her vent — to let her get upset, even, if it came to that. She wanted his eyes on her, she wanted his hands on her, stroking her, giving her the attention he had given her a minute ago, giving her more of it, pulling her close. She wanted to say, My mother, I don’t think she ever actually loved me. It sounded like something a teenager would say. She wanted to say, My mother, she saw me as a nuisance, as a rival, as a drain on her money and her nerves. She wanted to tell him how her mother had always sided with her father. How she had told Joanne she was only a stuck-up little bitch for throwing everything back in his face. You’ve always thought you were better than us, her mother had said to her, the night Joanne had announced that she wouldn’t work for her father any more. But she’d never thought that. She’d just thought, for a long time, that something was missing in her, or that something was wrong with her, because she felt so different from them all.
‘I’m sorry about your father,’ Mark said, and he touched her hand, but not like she had wanted him to; too briefly, too lightly, his hand already back in his lap. ‘That must have been hard.’
‘It was hard because it was sudden. I didn’t think I’d miss him.’
‘Of course you miss him,’ Mark said, and the smile he gave her had something unsettled in it, something awkward. Of course it has, she thought, here you are, trying to talk about emotions with an Irish man. It doesn’t matter that he’s an Irish man who writes about books. It matters even less that those books were written by a woman. He’s still an Irish man. So change the record. Change the mood, if you want to keep him in this house with you, if you don’t want to ruin the entire night. She shook her head, vigorously, as though shaking something away from herself.
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘Nobody wants to talk about that old stuff.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Mark. ‘Talk about anything you want to talk about.’
‘Well, I don’t want to talk about my father, really,’ she said, and she heard how unconvincing the words were. ‘I don’t know where that came from.’
‘I don’t remember much about him,’ Mark said, and he was looking not at her, but at the table, at the crumbs scattered where his plate had been. ‘He and your mother used to call up to our house sometimes at Christmas, but that was when I was very young.’
‘My father always fancied himself as some kind of local politician,’ she said, and Mark glanced up at her; he looked as though he might laugh. But he did not. ‘Except he wouldn’t have been able to play politics half as well if he’d been on the inside of it instead of fiddling it from the outside. So he probably did do that kind of thing. He probably did go around bringing Christmas boxes to his constituents. Kissing babies.’ She poked Mark in the side. ‘Kissing you.’
‘Jesus,’ Mark said, and as she leaned in towards him, he looked startled for a moment, but then all the watchfulness went out of his eyes, and he met her mouth with his own.
*
Upstairs, he looked at her very steadily. As he kissed her, he touched her ass and her thighs, her belly and her breasts. Her dress was light cotton, hardly more than a sundress. He threw it to the floor. She could feel him against her, that shape against denim that had drifted through her mind when she was meant to be thinking of other things. His mouth was against her, wetter now, and harder. He seemed, as he pushed against her, to want to lift her, and in turn she pushed against him, trying to keep her feet on the ground. He lowered one bra strap, kissing her shoulder, and then the other, and he reached behind her to unfasten the clasp. She pulled away from him and sat on the bed; she watched his face and watched his eyes. His hands came for her, and she caught them, and held them, and felt the strength of them, and he let her guide them, let her show him how to touch her so lightly that he must hardly have felt her, must hardly have realized the warmth and the dampness of her skin. He wanted more. His breath fought her. His body tried to press on her. With his hands, he traced her all over, traced circles on her breasts and lines on her throat and a feather-stroke up inside each thigh. And when his eyes said enough, she felt how the sweat had pooled at the base of his spine, and she drew him to her, and she let herself be drawn.
When she woke again near dawn it was to the sound of his voice beside her; he was mumbling to himself in his sleep. She tried to make it out, but it was nonsense, just noises, not even words. She shook him and he woke, gasping. His breath was stale on her face as he asked her the time.
‘Time to be asleep,’ she said, and she curled her body back into his.
Chapter Nine
And time for work was three hours later. Mona was already in the office when Joanne got there, standing by the coffee machine, clicking a stiletto heel on the tile floor. Her shoes had red soles that glinted like nail polish.
‘Yes,’ she said, when she saw Joanne glance at them.
‘Yes what?’ Joanne said, as she slumped into her chair.
‘Yes, they are.’ Mona made a face of mock alarm.
Joanne nodded. She knew what this meant. It meant that the shoes were new, that they had cost a fortune, and that there was something about the red soles that she was meant to understand. It was a moment, she knew, when energetic admiration was expected of her, but she felt too exhausted even to lift her gaze from the floor back to her computer screen. Two bottles of wine in the middle of the week was something she could no longer do without suffering the consequences. A sharp arc of pain was strung between her temples, and Mona’s perfume, hanging on the air like pesticide, was not helping. Neither was Mona’s excitable presence, as she darted now from one filing cabinet to another, pulling out folders and slapping them on to her desk. She sat down to her computer. She stood up again. She went over to the bookcase by the window and took up a thick hardback. She leafed quickly through it, consulted a page, slammed it shut. She picked up her phone. She put it down.