‘How am I?’ he said, and he made a face at the baby. ‘I’m seventy.’ He shook his head. ‘This is what seventy looks like.’ He turned to her. ‘I’ve seen better years, but I’m here. And you? Are you well?’
‘I’m fine,’ Joanne smiled. ‘This is Aoife.’
‘Aoife,’ he said, and he looked at the baby as though seeing her for the first time. ‘Which one was Aoife, again?’
Joanne hesitated. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘In the myths. Aoife was in the Children of Lir, am I right? Isn’t that where you find her name?’
‘Oh.’ Joanne nodded as though in agreement. ‘Right.’ In fact, she and Mark had not even considered the meaning of the name when they chose it. It had been one of the few they could agree on. But she wasn’t going to let Robinson know that, she decided. The legend was a better story. ‘We did wonder whether we’d have to give her three brothers,’ she laughed.
Robinson looked at her for a moment, and she knew she had said something wrong. ‘But Aoife was the wicked stepmother in that story, wasn’t she?’ he said, with the apologetic half-smile she remembered from whenever she had made a fool of herself in class. ‘Fionnuala was the girl, if I remember. And Fiachra, Conn and Aodh were the sons. Poor creatures. Nine hundred years as swans. Imagine their loneliness.’
Joanne searched for a response. ‘It can’t have been fun,’ she said, eventually, and she blushed at how inane it sounded. But what was she supposed to say? He was talking about a fairy story. He was feeling sympathy for people who had never lived. She looked around the square. ‘It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?’ she blurted.
Robinson leaned back into the green slats of the bench. ‘Spring again,’ he said.
Joanne felt relieved. They were back on some kind of normal track. She could manage this. ‘Are you busy, these days?’ she asked, and Robinson smiled and shook his head.
‘I’m doing very little,’ he said. ‘Doctor’s orders.’
‘I see,’ she said, trying to sound at once discreet and surprised. What was the etiquette in this situation? Were you meant to ask outright?
‘It is cancer,’ Robinson said, as though answering a very specific question. ‘But it seems the doctors got to it in time, and that I’m off the hook for now.’ He glanced at her. ‘Though I’m aware that it doesn’t look that way.’
‘Oh, no, no,’ Joanne said, in a rush. ‘I mean, you look thinner than before, maybe, but,’ she nodded vigorously, ‘you look good.’
‘There was radiation therapy, there was chemotherapy, and there have been drugs,’ Robinson said lightly. ‘The drugs have not been allowing me to sleep so well, I find. But that’s not a bad price to pay for life, is it?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Which you, more than any of us, should know,’ he said, looking at her almost mischievously.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, though it was clear that she did not know his meaning.
‘New motherhood.’ He put a hand to the pushchair. Aoife was leaning out of it, staring at the passing pigeons. ‘New life, in exchange for an end to nights of any sleep worthy of the name. Isn’t that how it goes?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Joanne said, with altogether more certainty. ‘Yes, it definitely is.’
‘I remember those nights. Of course, my wife did most of the work — that was the way then — but still, I remember.’ He laughed. ‘My God, the stamina these little creatures have for their own discontent.’ He leaned to look at Aoife again. ‘It’s remarkable, when you think about it. We spend our first years in this world furiously refusing the luxury of what we’ll spend the rest of it longing to do.’ He sat back on the bench. ‘Sleep, that is.’
‘Her father helps out a lot, though,’ Joanne said, after a long moment of silence. ‘I mean, her father actually looks after her most of the time. I’m at work.’
‘That’s admirable,’ said Robinson.
‘He’s doing a PhD in the English department here, actually,’ Joanne said, and she pointed to the arts block, as though Robinson needed the illustration. ‘On Maria Edge-worth and Walter Scott.’ She thought for a moment. What was it about those writers, exactly, that Mark was working on, again? Robinson was sure to ask her. ‘Their novels,’ she added pointlessly.
‘I see,’ said Robinson, but he did not ask for any more details. He seemed to have no interest. And she wanted him to be interested, Joanne realized. She wanted Robinson to ask about the man she had met, the man she had made a child with. But he just sat beside her and lifted his face to the sun. He closed his eyes. From her pushchair, Aoife called out.
‘We’re going in a minute now,’ Joanne said to her, and Robinson stirred beside her.
‘I don’t want to hold you up, my dear,’ he said quietly. ‘You go on ahead. I’m just going to catch my breath here.’
‘Oh, no, there’s no rush,’ said Joanne. ‘I was talking to the child.’
Robinson opened his eyes and peered at Aoife. ‘Do you have good conversations, the two of you?’ he said, and Joanne wondered which of them he was addressing. ‘And you have an interesting case to work on now?’ he said then, and this time he was looking directly at her.
Joanne shrugged. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘A lot of the work is very dull.’
‘Ah,’ he said.
‘Of course, I’ll be done with my traineeship soon,’ she said. ‘I’m hoping then to get into a firm that works more directly in the areas that interest me.’
She expected him to ask what those areas were, but he did not. His interest in things seemed as thinned as his body was. She felt suddenly intensely sorry for him. There was no way he could not realize how much he had changed in himself, how diluted the energies of his mind had become. As though the shelves of a library had been ransacked. It’s not fair, she thought, and for a moment she thought she might even say this to him, but it was out of the question. It would not help in any way. It would embarrass them both, and he would look at her. . he would look at her, she thought, much as he was looking at her right now. Was she imagining it? That he was looking at her so knowingly, with something so much like tolerance? As though he could hear or read what had been going through her mind? He had always seemed capable of that. She told herself to snap out of it, to stop wallowing in this nonsense, and she found that he was still regarding her, and smiling at her, in exactly the same way.
‘You’re interested in family law, I recall,’ he said, and she was taken aback. He had remembered. So his memory was not the wreck she had imagined; he was not the poor senile old dear she had been picturing and so energetically pitying. He was just as sharp, just as good on the small details of other people’s lives as he had ever been, even if he had shown no interest in the man who had fathered her baby. Maybe he simply had good manners, she told herself. Maybe he just knew when to keep his nose out of things that were none of his concern.
‘And now here you are,’ he said then. ‘Here you are with a family all your own. Isn’t it strange? After all?’
She waited for something, some nub of wisdom, to follow in the wake of this, but there was nothing. He looked now as though he might be growing sleepy in the sun. But then he shook himself and sat up.
‘You heard, of course, that the woman on Fitzwilliam Square sold up?’ he said, in a much more strident tone.
Joanne considered pretending not to know who he meant. But it was obvious. ‘Elizabeth Lefroy sold the house?’ she said.