‘Did she waken you?’
Tom shook his head. He looked at the tiny Christmas tree with its scattered ornaments, its thin lengths of tinsel as frayed as old twine.
‘I’d be up soon anyway,’ he said, pulling at a small silver bell on the tree. It came away in his hand. He set it down on the counter beside the sugar bowl.
Mark glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. ‘You must be busy,’ he said evenly.
‘Busy enough.’
‘Six o’clock in the morning in the dead middle of winter?’ His voice was careful.
‘What needs doing needs doing.’
Mark said nothing. He held the bottle away from the child for a moment, watching as she dribbled milk on to her chin, her mouth moving as though the teat was still in it. He wiped at the white spittle with a cloth. She whined.
‘Can’t you let her suck at it when she’s hungry?’ Tom said.
Mark raised the baby high on to his shoulder and rubbed her back, the white folds of her sleepsuit sliding up and down with his hand. ‘She makes herself sick if she drinks it all at once.’
Tom watched Mark’s fingers travel over the child’s shoulders, the skin of her neck, the fluff of her hair. She burped. He lowered her back into the crook of his arm, touching her lips again with the cloth. As she started to kick and whimper, he eased the teat into her mouth. She sucked. Her eyes were wide open and locked on Mark’s.
‘When’s her mother coming down?’ Tom said.
Mark looked at him. ‘Joanne,’ he said. He did not answer the question.
‘Yiz won’t be here for the Christmas,’ Tom said, and Mark shook his head.
‘We won’t,’ he said. ‘We’ll be down again after Stephen’s Day.’
‘Yeah,’ Tom said. He handled the small bell again and placed it on a branch of the tree. As soon as he took his hand away, it fell. He caught it before it clattered to the counter, closing it in his fist. The child watched him. For a moment, he thought about offering her the bell. But she would probably just choke on it. He put it back on the counter.
‘She doesn’t see too much of the mother, I’ve noticed,’ Tom said.
Mark raised his eyebrows. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’ There was a warning in his tone.
Tom let the silence stretch out another moment before giving an answer. ‘Joanne,’ he said then, and Mark exhaled. ‘She doesn’t be up at Caldragh too often when yiz are here. Herself and the mother don’t get on, is that it?’
Mark sighed. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said, looking at the child.
Tom laughed. ‘Nothing’s complicated with Irene Lynch. Nothing was complicated with the husband either. Either they had a use for you or they didn’t.’
Mark shook his head. ‘That’s your concern, not ours,’ he said. ‘Not mine and Joanne’s. We don’t know anything about what happened between you and her parents.’
‘You don’t know?’ Tom said. ‘You know bloody well. You were here, weren’t you?’
‘I was a kid.’
Tom snorted. ‘You had eyes. You had plenty of sense.’
‘Well, Joanne doesn’t know anything about it,’ Mark said. ‘It has nothing to do with us. And it definitely has nothing to do with Aoife. So leave it. Forget about it.’
‘I haven’t much of a chance of that now,’ Tom said, and he let Mark see him looking at Aoife as he spoke.
‘Cut it out,’ Mark said, and his voice was quick, hard.
‘I’m only saying what everyone around here is saying.’
‘Fuck everyone around here.’
‘It’s easy for you to say that. We’re the ones that has to live here after you making a show of us. Your mother and me.’
Mark seemed to shiver. Then he moved forward so quickly that Tom began to raise his hands to protect himself. But Mark went past him, heading for the stairs, and Tom caught sight of himself in the window’s black mirror, his hands hanging uselessly in the air. He turned. Against Mark’s chest, the child was fumbling with her fists, moving her head from side to side. Mark pressed his lips to her hair.
‘That’s enough, now,’ Mark said quietly. ‘Don’t say any more.’
‘I’m only saying what’s the truth of things,’ Tom said, slamming a hand down on the counter.
‘You don’t know anything about truth,’ Mark said. ‘You’ve been living in your own world for years.’ He sighed. ‘I’m going back upstairs,’ he said. ‘You should go back up too.’
‘I have work to do,’ Tom said, but his heart was beating hard. He wanted to take a hold of what was happening. He wanted to turn it back. Mark’s footsteps sounded on the staircase, and then there was nothing in the room but the buzzing of the fridge and the fluorescent light overhead. Tom found that he was shaking. The light was making his eyes ache. The drip of the tap was itching his brain. He walked quickly out into the back kitchen, where the dog was awake and waiting. He thrust his feet into the cold tubes of his wellingtons and pulled on his coat and cap. Stepping outside, he blew on his hands and rubbed them together before reaching for the stick that stood in its usual place against the wall. Above him, in a sky still far off dawn, the stars glinted like shards of steel.
Chapter Fifteen
Mark brought Aoife back from Longford with a cold, and that was their Christmas, nursing her through it and catching it themselves. Joanne had only a few days off from work, and she returned to the office more exhausted than she had been leaving it on Christmas Eve. She hoped they would send her home when they saw the state of her — the red nose, the streaming eyes, the scarf muffled around her throat, the scraggy tissues tucked in her cuffs — but they did not. There was too much to do. Instead, they all caught the cold too, and blamed Joanne.
With the new term in Trinity, Mark began to teach a second class. It was on something more closely related to his thesis, something into which a couple of Edgeworth’s novels fitted, and he was glad about that. And though the pay was meagre, the extra money was good to have. While he was teaching, Mark left Aoife with Eileen, the woman who ran a dressmaker’s shop in the house next door. She refused to take any money. It was only a couple of hours, she told him, and she would be more than happy to have Aoife for the whole week if he wanted to go off and work at a proper job. Joanne had roared with laughter when Mark told her the story that evening, and he had laughed too, but in a different way. A couple of days later, he had brought up once more an idea that he had aired several times since Aoife’s birth. He thought he should look around for a second job, he said, something that would help them to be more secure. They were always talking, he reminded her, about how they needed to start up a savings account for Aoife.
Joanne shook her head. ‘Yes, but you don’t have to get a second job for us to do that. We should do that anyway. Even if we only put a tenner a week into it, we should be doing it now.’
‘But a tenner a week is going to get us nowhere.’
‘It won’t always be that little,’ she said. ‘I’m saying that the point is to save, not to wait until we might have more to save. And, anyway, we’ve talked about this before. If you work full-time too, the cost of putting her in a crèche is probably going to cost us double what you earn.’
Mark gestured to the door. ‘But Eileen says—’
‘Come on, Mark. We’re not going to leave her in a dressmaker’s shop all day. That’s not going to work. It’s probably not even safe to leave her in there as little as we do. As soon as she starts crawling, we’re going to have to find somehere else. Eileen might have reared her kids among pins and scissors and plastic bags, but we’re not going to.’