She still could not think of herself as a mother. Six months on, it was still too strange. She had expected the change to be monumental. In other women, it seemed to have been. She had no close friends with babies, but she had talked online to women who were giving birth around the same time as her, and their emotion seemed to be so much more intense than Joanne’s. She worried from time to time about this. But what she felt for her baby, felt, at the same time, right; felt normal. She loved her. She would have killed for her. She found it painful to look at her sometimes, she was so beautiful; she found it painful to realize how transient this beauty was. It would grow into another kind of beauty, she knew, but the baby face, the baby smell, the body that could be bundled and carried in the crook of her arm — already that body was no longer light enough to be spirited around as in the first days and weeks. Already she was growing heavy.
Joanne felt that somehow she must be getting it wrong. None of the mothers online seemed afraid of their babies, as she sometimes was. They seemed hysterical with pride and obsessive interest, and with worry and anxiety when the child was ill or not sleeping, but they never seemed less than sure of who they were: mothers to these new boys and girls. They displayed photographs of their babies on the forum; they displayed names and dates under the comments and questions and answers they wrote. They advised one another, congratulated one another, backed one another up. Joanne rarely posted anything on the forum now but when she did it was short, a request for advice on some specific thing.
She found herself longing, sometimes, for a neighbour. Someone she could have coffee with in the mornings. It was madness. She had neighbours, and she never spoke to them, except sometimes to the old woman who ran the sewing business next door. She did not want to have coffee with that woman; she did not want to answer her questions, take her advice. The woman had some huge number of grandchildren; she was too full of information, she irritated Joanne. And even if there had been a neighbour she wanted to talk to, she was never at home. At least, not at an hour when she would drink coffee. At that hour, and most hours, she was in the office, doing three times as much work as she had done before the birth, working on a case involving two property developers who were accusing each other of fraud. It was boring work, and it was distasteful, and it seemed endless. She despised each of the developers equally.
‘You’re not always going to have someone to feel sorry for, you know,’ Mark said one evening, as she complained about the case.
‘I know that,’ she said irritably.
‘Anyway, it’ll be over soon. That case. Won’t it?’
She shrugged. ‘They’re running circles around each other in court. It could drag on and on. Our guy is lying just as much as the other fella.’
‘You’re not helping the other fella to lie this time?’
‘No.’ Joanne smiled.
‘No secrets from Imelda? You haven’t found out that the other developer has signed everything over to his second family and just neglected to mention it?’
‘Come on.’
‘Come on yourself. I can’t believe you got away with that stuff last time. It’s amazing what you lot get up to. Corrupt,’ he said, and he laughed.
‘That’s not true,’ Joanne said, and Mark raised an eyebrow at her.
‘It’s not,’ she said again.
‘No, you’re right, of course it’s not,’ he said, standing. ‘I’m knackered. I have to go up. Are you coming?’
‘I’ll be up in a minute,’ she said, but more than a minute passed before she followed.
*
After the birth they did not have sex, not properly, for months. There were stitches, there was soreness, there was blood and, besides, bed had become a place to collapse into, already asleep, and nothing else. But one evening as she stood over the cot watching the baby drift into sleep, he came into the room behind her and put his arms around her, and she felt him, and she turned. She worried at first that the noise would wake the baby, but she soon forgot that anxiety and they moved on each other like they had before there was any of this, any house together, any baby, anything besides their separate selves making pleasure for each other and for themselves. Her breasts were still bigger. She was as turned on by this as he was. She was hungrier for him, she realized. The hormones must still have been at work. She wanted him on her. She wanted him to make noise with her, to make her make noise, however much the baby heard. He was beautiful to her again as he had been that first night, those first weeks. His dark eyes. His calm face with the fine bones. His lean body, his sallow arms. The hard knuckles of his hands.
*
They had been down to Longford a few times since the baby was born. Always, they had stayed with Mark’s parents, but Joanne’s mother wanted to see Aoife too, and she did not feel comfortable coming to Dorvaragh, so they would go to Caldragh for an afternoon, watch Irene fuss over the baby, answer her questions about feeding and sleeping and waking. Even during short visits, Joanne would grow weary of her mother: her snippiness, her bitterness would come out with a sly comment here, a loaded question there. Mark said she was overreacting, but Joanne could hear what her mother was saying to her, and she wanted, always, to get away. Aoife, though, seemed to like Irene. She was quiet with her, she smiled at her; one day, lying in her arms, she began to make an absurd, burbling sound. The three of them had stared at her, panic-stricken for a moment, until they realized what it was. She was laughing. It was the first time. Her mother, Joanne could see, was lit up with pride. Back in Dorvaragh, Mark kept trying all that evening to get the child to laugh again, to put on a show of the ridiculous, tiny chuckling for his parents, but she would only smile. Maura said it was good enough, that she would laugh for them in her own good time. Tom, Joanne had thought, had been disappointed.
Tom had seemed to grow used to Joanne, and to the baby. He was still not talkative, but Mark told her that that was just his father’s way. Despite herself, Joanne was fond of him. Sometimes she saw him watching her and felt certain he wanted just for an easy conversation between the two of them to begin. But if she tried to start one, he would seem uncomfortable, would excuse himself saying that he needed to see to something outside, or that there was a call he needed Maura to make for him. He seemed never to make his own calls.
Christmas approached. On Grafton Street, the lights were already up in early November. Aoife was too young to notice any of the gifts they would buy her, any of the decorations they would hang in the house or point to in the streets, but there would be a first Christmas for her only once and they wanted to make something of it. Maura and Tom wanted them down home for the day, as did Joanne’s mother, but they had decided they wanted to spend it in their own home. When Maura and Irene both pleaded, Joanne and Mark decided he would take Aoife down to Longford for a couple of days before Christmas; Joanne would still be at work. They bought a tree in the square at Smithfield and draped it with tinsel and baubles from a stall on Henry Street. Mark put fairy lights over the doorway and the window in the sitting room, and Joanne bought Aoife a huge stocking in Arnotts, and even before the middle of December, they had filled it with toys. For New Year’s Eve, they planned to close out the world. They would light candles, have a fire going, roast a chicken, drink champagne. Maybe it would snow. Probably it would just piss rain. But that was OK. It would be some time away from the office. The steps of the Four Courts would be quiet, except for the odd drunk, except for the homeless people wrapped in blankets or in sleeping bags. These would be their days, hers and Mark’s and Aoife’s, to stay home, to stay inside. To stay inside and have the last hours of what had been for them such a year.