Imelda raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you sure this woman is actually related to the other two?’
Joanne forced a laugh. ‘I know. It’s funny, isn’t it?’
‘What’s funny?’
‘Just. . how different they are.’
Imelda sighed. ‘She’s different enough from Rupert to cause us some serious problems if Paddy Glackin gets his hands on this. I can’t understand why the mother’s solicitors haven’t been on to her. I can’t believe they wouldn’t chase her up. We should have chased her up ourselves weeks ago.’
‘But she’s not going to be of any use to us,’ Joanne said, her hands and her armpits clammy. What was she doing? Whatever it was, she had to go on with it now. She had to see it through. ‘She says they haven’t been on to her, her mother’s solicitors, I mean,’ she said. ‘She was just as surprised as we were. But that has to be good for us, right?’
‘Does it?’ Imelda said, warily, looking at Joanne. ‘Go on.’
‘It just means they don’t have a clue what they’re doing, really.’ Joanne tried to laugh, but it came out as a gasp. ‘I mean, doesn’t it?’ she said, and in her voice she could hear the plea. She forced herself to look Imelda in the eye. She forced herself to look sure. She forced herself not to faint, because that was what she felt like doing, as Imelda eyeballed her, seemed to assess her, seemed to make a decision on whether she could be trusted or whether she needed to be fired.
‘I think you’re right,’ Imelda said eventually, slowly, and Joanne exhaled.
‘You don’t think we need her?’
‘I know we don’t need her. I know that Elizabeth’s solicitors do. But, as you say, they don’t have the intelligence to look for her. So why should we help them?’ She picked up the transcript from Joanne’s desk; it was open at the page on which Joanne had written Check. ‘Check what?’ she said.
‘Check the daughter,’ Joanne said. ‘Check Antonia. That was what made me realize it was something I had to do.’
‘Good job,’ Imelda said, after a pause. ‘But now it’s your job to forget you ever spoke to Antonia Lefroy. If Glackin and his all-stars dig her up, we’ll deal with that bridge when we have to cross it. But we’re bypassing it now. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes,’ Joanne said, and Imelda nodded.
‘That’s the girl,’ she said, and turned towards her office. ‘Now, would you ever make me a cup of tea?’
Chapter Ten
Mark checked his watch again. Joanne had said the judgment was likely to be given by four. She was nervous as hell; he had asked her to text him and tell him how things went. He hadn’t heard from her all day, which didn’t worry him, because over the last few weeks, work had become so busy for her that she hardly ever had time even to send him a text. One of her bosses, the woman, had decided she liked her, or trusted her or something, after the incident with the phone call to the woman in New York, and had given her a whole load of new responsibilities, with the consequence that Joanne was knackered all the time. She went into the office every morning practically at the crack of dawn, and she stayed every night until nine or ten. She had worked three Saturdays in a row now, and last Sunday as well. She had said it would definitely ease off when this case was over, and he hoped so: he didn’t think he could stand it much longer.
They had not even been seeing each other for two months yet. It was way too soon for this kind of stress; her snapping at him out of exhaustion, him getting resentful because she was never around. He was being as understanding as he could, was trying to fit himself into her schedule as much as he could — was trying to look after her a bit, walking her home, or cooking her dinner, or getting her DVDs from Mossy, even though she was too shattered even to open them. He listened to her talk about her work, not just before they went up to bed, but in bed; the deadlines she was worried about, the research she had to do, the notes she had to write up. And, over and over, the case that was in the High Court, the old woman and her son, the feuding Anglos. They might as well have been squashed in beside him in the bed. He couldn’t escape them. But now he was going to escape them; he was determined. When the judgment came through, whatever it was, whether it was in favour of Joanne’s firm or not, he would go to the wine shop on Dawson Street, the one closest to Trinity, and buy a bottle of champagne. He didn’t exactly have the money to be spending on champagne at the moment but he didn’t care. He wanted to celebrate. He wanted to turn up on Joanne’s doorstep and bring her flowers and drink the champagne with her and take her to bed. And take her out somewhere the next night, and the next. He wanted to do what people did with their girlfriends, or with the girls they were seeing; not just the sex — though he was ready to get back to that as well — but the other stuff, the dinners, the films, the dates. He looked at his watch again. Half an hour to go.
He hoped the case would go the way she wanted. Not that he was entirely certain which way that was. She’d told him about the phone call to the old woman’s daughter, and about how she’d given a different version of their conversation to her boss; he’d been impressed by her gumption, but also more than a little uneasy about the whole thing. It wasn’t that Joanne wanted to protect the mother from the daughter, he thought, but that she wanted to protect the mother from herself, somehow. She’d been a dominating old shrew, and Joanne saw that, saw the madness in how the mother had behaved, trying to turn her daughter into some kind of Miss Havisham, or worse. She agreed that the mother was completely in the wrong. And yet she felt sorry for her. So she had hidden the things the daughter had told her and spun them into something else. She didn’t know why she had done it, she told him; it had just felt like the right thing to do. And he felt nervous about it. He’d felt nervous about it for the past month. He couldn’t see how it could possibly benefit her to conceal evidence like that — not just to conceal it, but to manipulate it — and he worried that it was going to backfire on her drastically, that her bosses would discover that she’d essentially tricked them out of calling a witness who sounded like she could be very valuable to them, with everything she had to say about the old woman; that he’d soon be seeing Joanne in bits, sacked, disgraced, shit-scared about her future. But nothing like that happened. It went completely the other way. Yes, she was in bits, after a week or so of the new workload, but she was in bits in the way that, according to her, was actually good for your career. If you were drained and pale and hollow-eyed, if you were all skin and bones, then you were doing something right as a trainee solicitor, it seemed; you’d go far.
It had to be to do with her own mother, he knew, all this stuff with the old woman and her daughter. A first-year psychology student could have worked that out. Mark didn’t ask her about her mother. He knew that he should. He knew that, whatever it was, the problem between them, the estrangement, it was painful — probably much more painful than whatever was going on between the other pair. He knew that if things got serious, they would have to talk about all of that stuff, but for now he just wanted them to get to know each other, to enjoy each other, without having to drag their families into it, without having to look at each other in terms of who their parents were, and what their parents had said and done.
And he knew he was being naïve. He knew he was procrastinating, as usual. Because the fact was, things were already beginning to feel serious between them. He found himself, constantly, thinking of things he wanted to tell her about, places he wanted to show her, things he wanted them to share. Even slogging through his thesis chapter over the last few weeks, he’d been thinking about her; wanting to talk to her about what he was finding in Harrington, about what Edgeworth was doing with form there, about what she was doing with the line between the real and the fabricated. Joanne was always too worn out, obviously, for him to inflict on her an excited monologue about Edgeworth and self-reflexivity and autobiographical interpolation, and about how she used these things to play with what people expected fiction to be, but he wanted to tell her anyway. He wanted to tell her about what he was working on now, as he waited for her to text, about what he was trying to concentrate on — about why Edgeworth’s irony in Castle Rackrent had backfired, about how everyone thought she was giving just a straight account of mad old peasants and ruined old estates, when in fact she was doing anything but. When, in fact, she was writing something so batshit insane, in technique and voice, that she barely even wanted it to be read as a novel at all. But Joanne would have other things on her mind. And, if he was honest with himself, he had other things on his mind. Though it was not yet four, he packed up his books and his notes.