‘And then?’ Maura had said, and through the crack in her voice there escaped the sourest of laughs. ‘And after the first year is done, what the hell do you propose to do?’
Mark looked stricken. The girl would still not meet her eye. ‘We’ll manage,’ he had said. ‘We’re just trying to work out how to get through the first part for now. It’s all. . it’s all very new.’
‘The first part,’ said Maura, shaking her head. ‘Jesus tonight.’
‘Mam,’ Mark said quietly. ‘Please.’
She had looked at him, standing beside the girl at the range. They were both too awkward, too nervous, to sit down, and Maura was not in the humour, now, to try to make them more comfortable. The girl was still early enough along not to need to be petted, anyway, not to need to get off her feet. She was younger than Mark. She looked like Irene: the strong bones at her cheeks, the high forehead, the freckled skin. But she was like her father in the eyes.
Tom would take this badly. How would she get this story under control by the time he returned? And then, she had realized with a sickening lurch, there was no way to get this under control, no way to manage it. No way to turn it into something other than what it was.
‘And what does your mother think of this, Joanne?’ Maura had asked, and she saw how the girl started.
‘She doesn’t know yet,’ the girl had said.
‘She’ll get a right land, I’m sure, like myself,’ Maura said, and she sighed.
‘I know that.’ For a moment, Maura had thought the girl was going to cry — in fact, Maura had thought the girl should cry — but the tears did not come. What had come instead was the sound of Tom’s jeep on the drive.
The hours afterwards were not something Maura liked to remember. Tom had looked at Maura suspiciously as soon as he walked in. Joanne had been introduced, and there had been for Maura the pain of watching confusion spread over his face, of watching fear set in. When Mark had told him about the pregnancy, all he had said was ‘What? What?’ over and over again, and he had looked to Maura, the way he always did when he wanted something fixed or something righted or something arranged; he had looked to her, waiting for her to make it go away. And then he had gone very quiet, and very still, and he had looked first to Mark and then to the girl. ‘You’d better sit down, so,’ he had told her.
When she had sat, she had sat in Tom’s seat, the one beside the range, but that had hardly mattered any more.
The call had come to the house before seven o’clock that morning. Maura had answered it, her heart pounding. It was Mark. A baby girl, he said, just over seven pounds. A little mite, Maura had answered, shocked to find herself in tears.
He didn’t think she had felt like a mite to Joanne, Mark had said in return, and Maura could hear the shock still in his voice. He had been in there with her. Of course: that was how it was done now. Well, he had seen something that he would never forget. Maura was seized with a longing to comfort him but then she was surprised to find herself thinking, instead, of Joanne. She would see them at the hospital in a couple of hours, she said.
She had got there by noon. She had brought a bag filled with the things she knew Joanne would need — not just Babygros and nightgowns, but sanitary pads, and nipple pads, and creams, and a few new pairs of underwear. It had been a short enough labour, seven hours, but one of the nurses had told Maura that it had gone very hard on Joanne. ‘And on Dad too,’ she had added, for a moment confusing Maura, who had thought of Tom, and of how she had gone back up to the bedroom that morning to give him the news, and of how he had just turned away from her in the bed.
He would come around. He would come here. She was sure of it. She would see to it. Joanne would be here for another night at least, and when Maura came back the next afternoon, she would have Tom with her if it killed her. This was his granddaughter. He would just have to get used to it. His son had a daughter now, and that was a great thing, at the end of the day, and she wanted desperately, she realized — again surprising herself — to see her husband looking on as their son held his child. She wanted it so badly, so strongly, that she knew it must be some instinct. And so Tom would be here. He would manage. Whether Irene Lynch would also be here was irrelevant. They would manage that as well. In a small metal cot by a hospital bed, their granddaughter was sleeping and crying and staring. Tom would be meeting her. He would be here.
*
Tom planned to be out on the land all day. There was work to be done. The fields needed to be dragged and rolled, the rushes cut from out of the thickening grass, the ground spread with fertilizer and readied for the haymaking months ahead. It was work that he could not easily do alone, but it would have to be done alone. As he was dragging the chain harrow out of the ditch where it had been left after the work of the previous spring, Maura came out to the yard to tell him she was leaving for Dublin. She asked him again if he was sure that he would not go with her.
‘Of course I’m sure,’ he said. ‘Who else do you think will do these jobs? Am I meant to go up to Lynches’ and ask one of the sons to roll these fields for me so I can go up to Dublin to gawk at a child?’
‘She’s your granddaughter, Tom,’ Maura said, but she was already leaving, closing her jacket and checking for something in her bag.
‘I’m sure she’s very lonesome for me,’ Tom called, as she opened the door of the car. ‘Or for you. I’m sure she’ll thank you for taking the trouble to go up and see her.’
Maura turned. ‘Mark might thank me,’ she said, and she looked at him with some question in her eyes. ‘Do you have any message for him at all?’
‘No message,’ Tom said, and turned back to the machine. The chain harrow was tangled and seized. It would take an hour or more of careful work to set it right. As he fixed his pliers around the first link, he heard Maura’s engine cough itself up to a rev, and then she was gone. He stood up and stretched, noticing how clear and blue the sky was, what a warm day it was shaping up to be. It was a May morning, and he had the place to himself. It was peaceful. There were far worse places you could find yourself.