‘Yes.’ Robinson nodded. ‘I think for a huge sum. You know how much those houses are selling for these days.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Joanne said, almost stammering.
‘I imagine the legal fees would have been significant,’ Robinson said. He glanced her way. Joanne felt prodded on to the defensive.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘hardly to the tune of that kind of amount.’
‘I expect there would have been some profit,’ Robinson said mildly, glancing to the lawn. ‘But then again, I imagine that the woman just wanted to get away. In light of what had happened, I imagine she could no longer be happy in that house.’
‘No longer quite at home.’
Robinson looked to her. ‘I’m sorry?’
Joanne shook her head. ‘Something from her testimony. I remember noticing it at the time. Sorry,’ she said, as though she had interrupted him.
‘Yes, that is a nice phrase,’ Robinson said, his hands laid flat on his thighs. How thin his legs were. ‘A very nice way of putting it indeed. And true too, I imagine. True too.’
‘It was all very sad, what happened,’ Joanne said, and he looked at her kindly.
‘Oh, it was far from your fault, my dear,’ he said, patting her hand. ‘When you get to your family law, there’ll be time enough for it to be your fault.’ He smiled, showing his slightly browned teeth. ‘So you go easy on yourself until then.’
Aoife was asleep now in the pushchair. Joanne tried to see her through Robinson’s eyes. The red hair, that was from way back on her side, she imagined telling him. The full lips: those were Mark’s. The nose was Joanne’s, and the pale skin too. The striped tights and the purple suede booties and the corduroy dress with the green cat stitched into it somehow suggested a more colourful life, a life of more treats and more excitement than was actually the case; they were all gifts from friends, and Aoife had never worn them before. Joanne had chosen them in the bedroom that morning, for their big day out. And the way she had thrown her head back in sleep, the way she had flopped her hands forward, that was the absolute surrender that made Joanne want to pick her up and carry her everywhere for the rest of her life. That was the ability to trust that she must have inherited from somewhere deep inside her father, because it was not anywhere on her father’s surface, and it was not anywhere in her mother at all. And that’s my daughter, Joanne imagined herself saying to Robinson, but he was not even looking at the child now: he was staring over to the arts block, to its cement terraces blotched with the varying darknesses of age and wear. And it was time to go home, with the green cat, and the purple booties, and the little hands thrown down like rejected toys. Beside her, Clive Robinson looked ready to fall asleep himself, to doze off right there, and to stay until someone came and found him, until with a nudge someone woke him — what would they call him? Professor? Darling? Dad? — and took him home.
‘We’d better go,’ Joanne said, calling him nothing at all.
‘Of course you must,’ said Clive Robinson, and he stood with her and kissed her cheek, and on his breath she smelt the thing she had imagined to be happening to his mind. And though she wished he would sit down again, and not tire himself, he stood and watched and waved as she walked away, until she had gone around the corner of the old library and out of his sight.
She searched her bookshelves for it that evening after she had put Aoife to bed for the night. She had loved it in college; she had read it several times. She found it on the bottom shelf, hidden under an old photo album. She poured herself the last of the wine that Deirdre and Sarah had brought the previous evening, and she curled up on the couch. Her phone beeped and she read the new message from Mark, Having good time. How is Aoife?, and she texted back to say that Aoife was asleep and that she was reading. Xx, he texted back, and she thought of the note she had written on his Edgeworth book, and wondered if he had found it yet. She put the phone down. She opened Robinson’s book. She turned to the first line. Never are the philosophical problems of identity and difference so poignantly formulated as when they bear on the dimensions of social life, she read, and she saw how she had underlined the sentence several times, in different colours; how she had pushed at its meaning for herself again and again. What does it mean to belong to a family, to a group of friends, to an organization? she read. How is it possible to say ‘we’? Who counts as a stranger? What is it to be truly conscious of ourselves, let alone of someone else?
Joanne looked at the words, and she looked at the traces of herself as she had been years previously, reading them, noting them, needing them. She needed them now, she felt; she needed them once again, but she did not know how. She did not know why. She read on, but the rest of the paragraph pulled her into territory that she was no longer certain how to traverse. As they always did now, the words began to slip from their moorings. The sentences began to slide off a ledge. She went back to those first lines and used them to steady her grip. She let them lead her on. After a couple of pages, as she had known they would, her eyes began to close. She went upstairs, taking the book with her. In the room, Aoife’s nightlight was throwing coloured stars to the ceiling, like confetti to a summer sky. She left it on. Some time during the hours to come, it would turn itself off.
Chapter Sixteen
It was on the following Saturday afternoon that Maura’s car met with an overtaking van on the Longford road. Joanne and Mark had come down to Dorvaragh that morning. Maura intended to throw Aoife a birthday party; there was a cake in Longford that she wanted to pick up. As she had been getting ready to leave the house, Aoife had woken up from her nap. ‘Sure come with me for the drive,’ Maura had said to Joanne. ‘There must be a few things you need to get in town.’
The miracle, everyone said afterwards, was that Aoife had escaped without so much as a bang on the head. Everyone talked about the new child seats, how sophisticated and modern they were, and quite a few people talked about mercy, and about how at least the little girl had been spared. But the truth was that Aoife had simply been lucky. That she had, purely by chance, been sitting at exactly the right distance from both sides of the car to stay shy of the inward crumpling. That she had been tiny enough not to have her neck broken by the car roof as it was thrown sideways against the wall. Mark pictured it for a long time afterwards, what the police and the firemen had told him about lifting this little red-haired thing clean and clear out of the wreckage — although it wasn’t that clean, he knew. They would have had to cut through the crushed metal of the roof before they had got that far, hoping to Jesus she would not die of some unseen wound or bleeding before then. But they described it to him as though it had been a sort of religious experience for them, getting this pale, quiet baby into their arms, not crying, not calling for her mother — and they told him this, he knew, so that he would think she had not suffered, that she had not seen anything, that she had not been hysterical with fear and incomprehension at anything she had seen. He thought, afterwards, about the use of that word ‘clean’ — because they had used it, more than one of them, the priest who had been there, too — and what it was meant to signify. That she had no blood on her. That she had no wounds. But also that she had not been touched by the blood of her mother. The blood of his mother. And at this he stopped himself. At this he knew he had gone far enough. This was more than they had told him. More than they had given him. What they had given him was this child, lying now in this pine cot, sleeping now, impossibly soundly, beneath a knitted blanket and a flannel sheet. Her cheeks were fiery red. Her forehead was damp. But it was normal, he told himself. She was teething.