‘We didn’t want to put you on the spot,’ Sarah said again.
‘You’re so good. Thanks.’
‘So,’ Sarah said, after she had refilled their wine glasses.
‘So.’
‘You’re back in the land—’ She stopped suddenly, shaking her head, her eyes wide. ‘Jesus, Mark. Sorry. I mean. .’
‘I know what you mean, it’s all right.’
‘Back among us.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Does that feel better?’
He shrugged. He could see that Deirdre was watching Sarah, willing her to stop asking questions, to stop pushing in this direction. She, meanwhile, was pushing just as hard in the opposite direction, changing the subject every time Sarah tried to ask him how he was. Neither tactic helped. To be too much pitied, or to be too carefully respected. Though he could tell that the food was very good, he did not want to eat. The wine seemed to him as bitter as cough syrup, yet Sarah had already commented on how delicious it was. He drank it anyway. Deirdre refilled his glass.
When he and Joanne had been thinking about godparents for Aoife, they had considered Sarah and Deirdre, had wondered if that would work. But while they were talking about godparents, they had realized that they were talking about a christening, and they had remembered that they did not believe in any god, and so there had been no christening. But Sarah and Deirdre had meant enough to them for it to have seemed right to ask them.
And now he wondered why they were friends. But he had wondered it about everyone who was left. Even Mossy. Mossy who came to see him every day, Mossy who fed him in the evenings sometimes, even though Mossy, unlike Deirdre, could not cook. It was true, it had taken Sarah and Deirdre until now to invite him to dinner, but he knew why that was, too. They had been afraid. In the first weeks, it was too soon. In the next weeks, everyone thought he wanted to be left by himself to get used to things, to cry his tears, to climb his walls. And then it was inching into being too late, and people started thinking that they had missed the boat, that they should have contacted him weeks ago, and now they were too embarrassed to get in touch. But that was not fair on Sarah and Deirdre. They had been in touch. They had called around. Sarah had always been crying so much that it had been an irritant more than anything to have them in the house. But they had made the effort. They had let him know that they were there.
Still, he could see it in them. It was something he had noticed in other couples too. He had seen it, even, in his sister and the way she looked at him, and then looked at Denis, her husband. Unsuspecting Denis, unaware that he was suddenly being surveyed as something precious, something almost unreal.
Sarah and Deirdre were doing exactly the same thing. In quiet moments during the lull in a conversation — or even during a conversation — he would see one of them watching the other. One of them staring at the other, with a kind of melancholy. The first few times he had noticed people doing this, he had thought there must be something wrong in these relationships, that there had just been some row or difficult conversation, being carried now into the rest of the evening, into interactions outside the privacy which was just their own. But it kept happening. He kept catching it. And eventually he realized what it was. One half of the couple was looking at the other, thinking that one day the other would die. That they themselves would be left without them, that they themselves would be left, the way Mark was left. And what would it be like, they were thinking, how would they cope? What would this house be like with only one person in it? What would the dinner table be like when there were visitors, with only one of them to carry the conversation through the night? What would it be like, that world outside, knowing that this other person was not in it, not out there doing their usual things? That door, if the other person were never again to walk through it, would it look different? These rooms, this furniture, what would they mean?
He felt suddenly very tired. He had had trouble sleeping since the day of the accident, but now he thought he could lie down on the couch across from the dinner table and pass out for hours, for the whole night, for days. It exhausted him to listen to the conversation, to take part in it, and at the same time, to take part in the unspoken conversation, to watch and know and understand what was happening in the spaces in between.
‘Are you all right?’
It was Sarah. She looked, Mark noticed with a twinge of alarm, close to tears again. ‘Are you feeling bad?’ she said, and reached out for his hand.
‘I’m fine,’ Mark said, feeling guilty at having allowed his face to give so much away. He squeezed her hand. ‘I’m just a bit tired.’ It was tiring in itself, this swinging between being sick of someone and being fond of them.
‘Of course you’re tired,’ Deirdre said, and she gestured to the couch. ‘Why don’t you sit down? We can have dessert over there.’
‘Thanks,’ said Mark, and as he rose from the table he could see that more glances were being exchanged between the two women. There was, he realized, something in the air, something other than the awkwardness he had felt all evening: an agitation, a restlessness, almost a panic. Was it that they wanted him to be gone? That they could not take it any longer, this sadness he must be trailing around with him — this grief he was forcing them, by his presence, to see and to feel?
‘I won’t stay late,’ he started to say, but as he glanced at them he could see that he had got it all wrong. They were smiling at each other, almost glowing, sharing some secret, some private joy, and in the instant before they became aware that he was watching them, he realized that there were always new ways to feel it, the loneliness. It was not just bottomless, or endless, it was also inventive. It was smart, self-generating; it was various. The drunkenness of things being various: a line from a poem came into his head, and he blinked at it, dismissed it. Was it that they wanted to be alone? But he had only just arrived. They were still, technically, in the middle of dinner. That was rude, he thought, and then thought, You’re such a fucking moron. He could not be sure, actually, that he had not said it aloud. They were both staring at him. He was standing in the middle of the room.
‘We have something to ask you,’ said Deirdre, at exactly the same time as Sarah said, ‘We have news.’
‘Really?’ Mark said, and he stammered.
‘Yeah,’ said Deirdre, with a laugh.
‘Oh, right,’ said Mark.
They stood in silence for a moment.
‘I hope you’re not going to ask me to help you have a kid or something,’ Mark said, and he tried to laugh. It was meant to be a joke. He had wanted to say something that made him sound less nervous, made him feel more in control. But as soon as he had said it, he knew it was the wrong thing. At first, they both looked stricken, and then Sarah’s face moved into deeper upset and Deirdre’s into what he knew to be annoyance, though they both moved very quickly to cover these expressions. His face burned.
‘You’re not. .?’ he said, and felt stupider still as he saw how absolutely they refused his suggestion. They shook their heads as though he had confused them with two entirely different people. So it was not that he had blurted out precisely what they wanted from him, not that he had trodden on their announcement in that way: it was worse. He had crossed some line of propriety, of correctness; he had exposed himself as the narrow-minded boor who was still, in some part of himself, unused to the idea of them — two women in a relationship, two women sharing a bed. He was still a gawking schoolboy, ready at any moment to be found out, likely at any moment to make a comment that would give him away. And now he had done it, and they were looking at him so strangely. They were seeing him. They were judging him.