‘She doesn’t leave her in the shop the whole time.’
‘She leaves her by herself?’
‘She leaves the door open between the shop and her sitting room.’
‘We’re going to have to get someone to come here and mind her while you’re teaching,’ Joanne said. ‘Could you see if one of your students will do it for a few quid?’
Mark exhaled in loud protest. ‘I don’t want any of my bloody students poking around my own house. They look down their fucking noses at me enough as it is.’
‘What’s wrong with this house?’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ Mark said tiredly, and he shook his head. ‘I don’t want to have this conversation now. I’m too knackered after work.’
Joanne opened her mouth to respond, but she left it. There was no point. It would collapse into an argument and they would go to bed in a cloud of irritation and resentment. She did not want that. She did not want to bring that into the room they shared with Aoife. She wanted nothing to press in on her sleeping child; nothing but her dreams.
They did not argue often. Usually, in the evenings, they were almost too tired to talk. Usually they watched television until bedtime, or Joanne went online and looked at gossip sites and discussion forums, or Mark read his students’ essays and sighed and cursed and clicked his tongue as he scrawled all through their pages in indignant red pen.
Joanne tried to read. There were novels she wanted to get through. They had been sitting on her bedside table since the final months of the pregnancy. She brought one down to the sitting room occasionally and sat with it for a while, but the paragraphs seemed to dissolve as she read them; she kept needing to go back to the start. Or the television would distract her, or she would think of something she had been meaning to look up on the Internet, and she would put the book aside. She always meant to get back to it. She always took it back upstairs with her and tried to read it in bed. That lasted for about the length of time it took for her eyelids to blink once, then again, and then to close.
Mark did not fare much better, but most evenings he sat for a while with a book, looking at it, writing in its margin with a pencil. He said he could not work otherwise; that he could not absorb the information. So he scribbled, and annotated, and underlined, and while he read he frowned and squinted in a way that she told him was certain to damage his eyes.
‘No, that’s something else,’ he always joked when she said that, and she always told him he was hilarious.
One night when he had fallen asleep on the couch with a book in his lap she reached over and took it from him. It was one of Edgeworth’s, the only one Joanne had heard of. Castle Rackrent. She did not know why she had heard of it: she had not read it. It had never been assigned to her in school or in university, and she had never come across it by herself. She should read it, she thought; she should know more about Mark’s writer. Besides, it was set around Edgeworthstown. It might be interesting. It might be just the thing to help her to concentrate again.
She fought the impulse to skip the introduction; there could be something in it, she told herself, that she needed to know. She read Edgeworth’s birth date, her death date; she did the calculation in her head. Eighty-two. A great age, she thought, and realized that those were her father’s words, the words he had often used to describe someone who was old. You didn’t say they were old; you said they were a great age. And when they were dead, you said that they had lived to a great age. That was a way of saying it was no big deal that they were gone. That they’d hung on for long enough. That their family had nothing to be crying about. That crying over such a death, at such an age, was just a little bit rich. Joanne’s father had been fifty-eight when he died. That had not been a great age.
She skimmed the next paragraph; it mentioned the American revolution. It mentioned the French one. It mentioned Rousseau. Then she read the line about how Edgeworth’s father had employed her to write his business letters, to help him deal with his tenants and listen to their pleas, and she read it again, and then with Mark’s pencil she placed a little exclamation mark in the margin beside it. She skimmed on through the dates and the placenames and the titles of books, and she read a couple of lines about Scott, and she read about how Edgeworth did her writing in her sitting room with a crowd of children playing all around her. She underlined that part and gave it an exclamation mark as well. You think you have it tough, she wrote, beneath the exclamation mark, and she could not help it, she laughed to herself. She looked over to Mark where he slept, and wanted to wake him, to show him what she had done, to enjoy the joke with him there and then, but she left him sleeping. She left the joke for him to find for himself, some time when he would go back over the book, some time when he would find her writing in the margin and stare at it for a moment and then laugh. And when she would come in from work that evening, or when he would come in to her, he would ask her, in a voice pretending sternness, to guess what he had found. And she would have forgotten about it then, and they would laugh about it, and they would kiss. She thumbed forward twenty or thirty pages, into the novel itself. She wanted to leave him something else to find. She glanced at a paragraph: it was something about a house being full of people and heat and smoke, something about a man hiding in a bed. On the facing margin, Mark had left a note in pencil himself. Anecdote, he had written. Effect of the Real. Beside it, Joanne wrote, HELLO BABY. She put two X marks underneath. Jesus, she thought then, looking at the words, you’re acting like an idiot. You need to go to bed. She closed the book, left it back on the couch beside Mark, and stood up, stretched and loudly yawned. At the noise, Mark opened his eyes as though in fright.
‘It’s OK,’ Joanne said, smiling at him. ‘It’s only me.’
‘I knew it was you,’ he said.
When Mark got a text inviting him to Niall Nagle’s stag party, Joanne encouraged him to go. It would be a weekend in Glendalough in late April. He would be on a break from his classes by then, she said. It would be good for him to get away. And the case she was working on, the one with the developers, would, with any luck, be finished by then. It would be a good time for her to have a weekend alone with Aoife. ‘We can bond,’ she said, lifting Aoife from the playmat on to her lap, bouncing her up and down. ‘Isn’t that right, Aoife?’
‘I think you’re meant to have bonded with her by now,’ Mark said wryly.
‘Ah, you know what I mean,’ Joanne said. ‘A girls’ day out. And you can have a weekend with the lads. Are you seriously going to argue with me on this?’
‘No.’ Mark shook his head. ‘I’m not stupid.’
‘Good,’ Joanne said, and curled herself forward around Aoife. ‘We’ll have a great time.’
‘I don’t know why Nagle’s inviting me,’ Mark said, frowning at the screen of his phone. ‘We’re not exactly friends. I’m probably going to be the only one there who’s not on the way to CEO of some bank.’
‘Mossy will be there, won’t he?’
Mark laughed. ‘Mossy could end up running a bank yet.’
‘Just text Nagle back and tell him you’re going,’ Joanne said. ‘Before I change my mind.’
On the Friday night after Mark had gone to Glendalough, Sarah and Deirdre came around for dinner. They had accepted the invitation on condition that Joanne would not cook. They brought takeaway from the Indian on Manor Street, and two bottles of wine. They also brought a tiny birthday cake for Aoife, who would turn one in a few weeks, and who was still up when they arrived. They played with her, and fussed over her, and from her bag Sarah took a wrapped gift and placed it on the carpet in front of her. Aoife stared first at it and then at her mother. Joanne opened the gift. It was a set of board books. Bending down to Aoife, she pointed to things on the pages: a cat, a giraffe, a dog. Aoife looked at the pictures as though they were photographs of people she was expected to recognize. She took the book from her mother and chewed its spine.