‘I’ll be down next weekend,’ he said. ‘I promise.’
‘I’ll call you again later on,’ his father said, and he did, but Mark did not answer the phone.
*
Clive Robinson’s house was third in a neat red-brick terrace. The path to the front door was narrow and short; four steps did it, and then Mark was looking at the doorbell, and at the brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. He chose the doorbelclass="underline" it seemed less intrusive — until it rang, sounding like church bells at close range. After a moment, a shadow moved behind the stained glass of the door panel, and came quickly closer. There was the click and scrabble of the latch being turned.
His first thought was that he had known Robinson all this time, and had somehow forgotten it; he must have met him somewhere with Joanne. The familiarity of the face with its grey beard set his mind rifling through the possibilities: had there been a walk through college, a lunchtime sitting on the lawn when this man had stopped to talk to Joanne, when she had introduced him to Mark?
‘Yes?’ said Robinson, in a tone of careful surprise.
‘Hello,’ said Mark, and nodded, though he did not know at what.
‘From the swimming-pool, yes?’ said Robinson, and then Mark remembered where he had seen him before. He almost laughed at the coincidence, until he saw that Robinson was not similarly amused. In fact, he looked frightened.
‘How did you get my address?’ said Robinson. In an attempt to reassure him, Mark held up his hands, but this seemed to further alarm Robinson, who moved to shut the door.
‘I’m Mark Casey,’ Mark blurted loudly, and after a moment, that seemed frozen, he watched the plates of Robinson’s face shift and resettle. ‘Thanks for your card,’ he added, talking too quickly, running the words into each other. ‘The one about Joanne.’
Robinson stared. ‘Come in,’ he said eventually, and gestured, in a dazed sort of way, into the hall. ‘Come in,’ he said again, and as he stepped back, there was a howl and a sudden flash of black at his feet: a cat, bolting away up a staircase now, stopping to survey them both with a resentful glare.
‘Castor,’ Robinson said apologetically. ‘Named by my wife. She liked all that French lot.’
He showed Mark into a small sitting room. Leather armchairs faced a delicately tiled fireplace, and to one side of it, an old writing bureau. The mantelpiece was cluttered with cards for a birthday, two of them homemade by children. Wild flowers stood in a painted clay vase. Where there must once have been double doors, the room gave through to a large kitchen, another cat sleeping in the sunlight on a table piled with papers and books.
‘Please sit,’ said Robinson, and took a newspaper from one of the leather armchairs. ‘There’s coffee, just made,’ he said, ‘and also, of course, tea. Would either interest you?’
‘Coffee would be good,’ Mark said, and he watched as Robinson moved around the kitchen, taking down mugs and pouring in the coffee and the milk.
‘I really should have thought to ask whether you take milk before I put it in,’ he said, as he came back into the smaller room. ‘But, as you’ll no doubt have noticed, it’s something of a surprise to see you. To meet you. Even though, of course, I’m delighted you’ve come.’
Mark nodded. He should say something about the swimming-pool, he thought. He should say that he had never lost his temper like that with Aoife before, that he did not intend to lose it again. That he had never before done something like that to her — whatever it was he had done, shaking her or snapping at her or being rough with her, whatever it was that Robinson had seen, that Robinson had watched.
‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ he said instead.
‘Not at all,’ Robinson said, lowering himself into the second leather armchair. ‘I’m just so surprised that we’ve met before. Without even realizing.’ He attempted a smile. ‘And your daughter, whom, of course, I had met on an earlier occasion, but, well, babies.’ He shook his head. ‘They change so rapidly.’
‘She’s grown a lot since April,’ Mark said.
‘April?’ Robinson looked confused.
‘You said in your letter that it was April when you bumped into Joanne.’
‘Did I?’ said Robinson, looking no more certain.
‘You said in your letter it was April,’ Mark said again.
‘Well, yes, I suppose it must have been.’
‘You said, too, that you and Joanne had a conversation,’ Mark said, and he took a deep breath before going on. ‘What did you talk about, do you remember?’ This time, while he waited for Robinson to respond, he found himself holding his breath. He sat perfectly still. He did not want to miss a word that Robinson might say about Joanne. He did not want to miss the slightest twitch of expression on his face as he thought about her, as he talked about her. Anything that was about her, that was to do with her, he wanted to see it, he wanted to know it. He wanted to hear about her; he wanted news of her. It did not matter if that news could only be of the past; just for a moment, it would come to him as something new, something living, and he wanted it more than he wanted air.
‘April, yes,’ said Robinson, thoughtfully. ‘They were taking a walk around Fellows’ Square. It was a Saturday, a cold day. The little one’s cheeks were bright red.’ He looked at Mark as though he had suddenly remembered something. ‘What is it, your daughter’s name?’
‘Aoife.’
‘That’s right.’ Robinson nodded. ‘Aoife, from the Children of Lir.’
‘No,’ Mark began to say, but he stopped himself. He found that he did not want to admit to Robinson that he and Joanne had not taken Aoife’s name from any myth or legend, that they had chosen it only because they both liked it. He did not want Robinson to think less of Joanne for this. But, it struck him, what if Joanne had, indeed, told Robinson that they had chosen the name for some such reason? Would she have done that? Was Robinson someone she had so desperately wanted to impress? The vision of him sodden and dripping in the shower stall came to Mark: the withered skin at his elbows, the hard, stark bulbs of his knees. Or, he thought then, could Aoife’s name have held some meaning for Joanne, a meaning she had never shared with Mark, a meaning she had for some reason kept to herself? What else did Robinson know about her? What else had she told him that she had never told Mark?
‘It struck me that day,’ said Robinson, looking to the empty fireplace, ‘that she was very content, your Joanne. Richly content, I would say. She seemed very different from the young woman I’d met, oh, I suppose, two years previously.’ He frowned. ‘I think it was about that. Since I’d seen her.’
Out of the questions that spilled into Mark’s mind then, he could not choose just one to ask. Where had she been that day? What had she talked about with Robinson? Where had she been going when she saw him? What had she been doing — what had been going on in her life? Had he met her yet, had they been seeing each other? He calculated; no, two years back from April she would still have been innocent of him, still clear of everything to do with him — every connection, every moment afterwards that would lead to Aoife, and to all that went with Aoife, and to being in a car with his mother on the Longford road on a Saturday afternoon in April. Two Aprils ago, she had been free, Joanne. She had had a chance. But Robinson was saying she was different then — that she was not so happy, was that what he had said? How could he tell that she was happier the second time? Mark tried to picture her, walking with the pushchair through campus: what had she been doing there? Taking a break from shopping? Sitting on a bench to eat lunch, or read the newspaper, or throw crumbs to the pigeons on the lawn while Aoife reached out for them and squealed? He stared at Robinson as though the folds of his clothes, the curl of his beard, the grip of his fingers on the coffee mug would give the answers. Joanne, alive and content, on a Saturday in April. Which Saturday, of the few that had been left to her? What had she been thinking that day? What had she been planning? And where had Mark been while she was doing it?