‘I’ll get on with things,’ Elizabeth said, and Joanne was struck by how much like her daughter she sounded. ‘And as I’ve said, my dear, I think you should do the same.’
She nodded again, by way of goodbye, and then she stood and left the courtroom. Joanne packed her notes into her briefcase and followed the same way. By the time she reached the outer hall, she could see that the press, television cameras and all, had descended on Elizabeth. At the main door, she squeezed past, and stood on the steps below to watch the jostling and the shouting. What she had forced herself to push out of her mind since earlier that day was now crashing back in. It was demanding her attention. You don’t have anything to worry about, she told herself again. But she did. She knew she did.
It was while she had been getting ready to leave the office that morning that she had thought of it. She had forgotten it; she had forgotten to watch for it, forgotten to notice that it had not come. She had been too overwhelmed by too many other things. She had been searching for something in the bottom drawer of her desk. Whatever she was looking for was not in the drawer, but the box of tampons was there, and when she saw it, she understood with a shock that almost forced her from her standing. It had been too long. It had been, she thought, her mind reeling backwards over the weeks, almost a whole two months. She took it up, the half-empty box, and stuffed it into her handbag, telling herself that she would need it, that it had just been the workload and the exhaustion. That, now the Lefroy case was ending, the cramps and the bleeding would come. But at the same time as Imelda called to her to hurry she was counting backwards again, counting the times, counting the possibilities. They had always used condoms. She had not got around to going back on the pill; she had meant to go to her doctor about it, but she had been too busy, there had never been the time. And she thought that they had always been careful, but she knew the truth of it was that she could not be sure. There could have been an accident. They might have been too drunk to notice. There might have been a night when he had taken too much of a risk, staying too long in the luxury of her, not pulling out in time to put the condom on. You were not supposed to do it — she had known that since she was a teenager — but surely everybody did.
‘You’re making us late, Joanne,’ Imelda snapped, and they were gone.
Rupert was treating them to celebratory drinks in the Shelbourne, and afterwards he was taking them to dinner in the restaurant where the mews house had been. He was in exuberant humour, and so were Mona and Eoin and Imelda. Joanne watched, laughed when she had to, and drank three glasses of red wine. There was no reason not to, she told herself; there was no reason why she could not have as much wine as she pleased. Still, after the third glass, she made her excuses; she was sorry, she said, but she had someone to meet, she had already made plans. Rupert had his arm draped easily over the back of Mona’s chair as she left.
At the chemist on the corner, Joanne bought what she needed, and when she got home, she dumped her things in the sitting room. She went upstairs without a word in response to Sarah’s greeting. She had taken pregnancy tests before. They had always been accurate — that is, they had always been negative. This time, as she stood in her best suit in the upstairs bathroom, the two pink lines were as clear and as definite as the tracks of two tyres through a fresh fall of snow.
From downstairs, she heard Sarah shouting her name. She walked to the bathroom door without feeling that she had the use of her legs.
‘What?’ she shouted downstairs, and her voice did not sound like her own.
‘You’re all on the six o’clock news!’ Sarah shouted back up to her. ‘You, and Mona Manolo, and yer man she’s shagging, and his mother, and you all! Come down and look at yourself! You’ve made it, my girl! You’re the news!’
Chapter Twelve
The baby was born in May. It was a girl with nobody’s eyes and nobody’s shock of fine red hair. There had been red hair way back on the Lynch side once, Joanne said, but none of them that Maura remembered had ever had that colouring.
Of course, that would be another doubt in Tom’s mind, she thought, as soon as she laid eyes on the baby. That would be another reason for him to refuse to have anything to do with his grandchild. She was a lovely little thing, really, as lovely as a newborn could be. She still looked battered and bewildered from the fright of being born, and naturally Joanne looked like a frightened child herself, propped up against the hospital pillows, the gown hanging off her, her cheeks blotched almost purple. By the bed, Mark sat trying, Maura could see, to appear calm, but his eyes were jumping out of his head. He was talking too much, talking nonsense; she could see he was bothering Joanne, crowding her with questions about the child’s scalp and the child’s feet and the plastic bracelet around the child’s wrist, and about Joanne’s pillows and whether they were hard enough, or soft enough, and about whether the child would need to be fed again soon, or whether they should wait until they heard her cry.
‘She’s grand, Mark,’ Maura said, and the two of them looked to her anxiously, imploringly. You, both their stares seemed to say. You know what to do with one of these. You had one. You had two. You know the rules. Show us. Tell us. Make this thing possible for us to do.
But then, just as quickly, they looked away, to the child again, and they were focused tight in on her as though on a button they were trying to unfasten; pulling the white cap back down over her head, taking the little hands and hiding them under white cotton cuffs, touching the tiny, crumpled face and willing it to smooth into contentment. And at that kind of willing, that kind of wishing, they would spend, probably, most of the rest of their days. She would be back in a couple of minutes, Maura told them, and she stepped out into the narrow, nurse-bustling hall.
Maura had worked in a hospital with mothers and babies for nearly half her life. When they had taken children out of women with forceps, or when they had broken women’s pelvic bones, or when they had taken stillborns away in tin buckets, thrown them out with the slops, she had not thought of any of it as inhuman, as horrific. It had merely been the way. Still, when her own time had come, with Nuala and then with Mark, she had gone not to the manor in Edgeworthstown but to the big hospital in Mullingar, where everything was new and the doctors were young and the maternity wards were like something out of a film. But still it had felt like a slaughtering to bring each of them into the world. Still there had been the forceps, and the blade to make room for Nuala’s head to come, and still there would have been a bucket, or something like it, if anything had gone wrong. She had lost one, but that had been before she had gone her full term; for that, she had been alone. That had been a boy, and he had been given his father’s name.
In the hall she tried to call home again. Tom never picked up the house phone anyway, so she did not know why she was hoping for anything different today, but she let it ring, let it ring until the climb and trill of it started to sound shrill, hysterical, unreal. He could be out on the land or in the yard, or he could be away in the jeep or on the tractor, but he could just as well be there, in the sitting room, staring at the phone as it rang itself out. He would fight her to the last on this, she knew. He would stand his ground. But she would stand hers, and though it was always important to give him the appearance of having got what he wanted, the truth of it was that she always won.
He had not reacted well to the news of the pregnancy. Neither of them had. She was not proud of how she had behaved, of what she had said to Mark, of what she had said about Joanne. But she had apologized, and quickly, and that had been the important thing. She had meant none of it. Mark turning up like that one Saturday in November, with the girl she knew only as the Lynch daughter in tow: it had been too much of a shock. Tom had been at the mart in Granard, and all she had been able to think about, at first, was how she had to get Mark and the girl out of the house before Tom returned, so that she could break the news of their involvement to him in her own way, in her own time. But there was more to it, she had known from their faces, almost as soon as they had walked in the door; she had known right inside herself what it was. So when Mark had told her, it was no surprise, not really, not after she had seen the paleness of the girl’s face as she stood by the range and looked at the floor. Maura had imagined this conversation, or some version of it, all through Mark’s teenage years. Once he was in his twenties she had not worried about it in the same way, and now he was heading for thirty, it should not have been a problem at all, not really, but there was the matter of the girl. And so, Mark had told her that the girl was pregnant, and well pregnant, and that they were moving together into her house in Stoneybatter and making it into something of a home. That the girl was a solicitor, or training to be a solicitor, and had worked it out with her employers: they would keep her on, on condition that she worked right up to the birth and went back again very soon afterwards. And Mark had his grant, and the money he was making from teaching, and that, along with Joanne’s pay from the solicitors, should be enough to get them through the first year.