The place was mobbed. Teenagers from the flats. Pillheads still going from the night before. The rugby fans, spilling in after the match. The weekend crowd: groups of couples gabbing at each other around big tables, and guys in short-sleeved shirts and bootcut jeans, and women with shopping bags flapping at their sides like huge broken wings.
Mark was here because he had not been able to force himself to be where he was meant to be, which was in his carrel in the college library, finishing the chapter that was due on his thesis supervisor’s desk on Monday morning. He had a chapter title — ‘Patronizing the Place’ — and he knew he wanted to do something on Edgeworth and her relationship to the local people she wrote about, but that, and a clutch of increasingly frenzied notes, was pretty much all he had. This was to be his second chapter. His introduction he had written during the first months of the PhD, in a white heat of interest he could now hardly believe he had ever achieved, and his first chapter he had wrenched out painfully, piecemeal, over the course of the following two years. Even by then he had begun to wonder about the wisdom of the idea: a thesis on Maria Edgeworth, the nineteenth-century novelist who had lived most of her life in the manor just ten minutes away from his childhood home. Even by then he had questioned his ability to see the thing through. By now he was almost in despair about the thesis, prone to moments of wishing that Edgeworth had actually thrown herself out of the upstairs window on which she had perched, at the age of five, telling the maid who pulled her back in how very unhappy she was; there were days, now, when Mark thought he knew how she had felt.
He spent his time trudging through the books on education Edgeworth had written with her father, or trying to decipher her wiry, cross-hatched handwriting on yellowed pages in the National Library. Or looking for his theories in her fiction. Scouring the novels and the tales for proof of the argument he had once so firmly believed he could make. He could see, now, only naïveté in the conviction with which he had chosen Edgeworth as his subject, in his confidence that a local connection would somehow give his research some edge, some particular authority. Because what did it add, to know Edgeworthstown as a real town, as something more than a placename in a biography? So what if he had walked its main street — its only street — a thousand times, if, as a kid, he had parked his bike against the walls of the old coach house where she had once taught; if, as a teenager, he had gone knacker drinking in the graveyard where she and her family had their tomb? So he knew how the old house looked inside: what of it? It was no longer the old house in any case, had not been for decades; the Sisters of Mercy had long since gutted it and turned it into the hospital where Mark’s mother had been a nurse before he and his sister were born, and once again when they were settled at school. They were no use to his thesis, Mark’s memories of those evenings driving up to the manor with his father to collect his mother after her shift, waiting for her in the high-ceilinged hall. And anyway, he remembered little: the phlegmy splutters of the old people doddering in the shadows; the nuns, in their thick-soled shoes, moving noiselessly across the parquet floors. The sound of a cry, sometimes, that maybe was only someone caught up in a dream.
None of this, Mark had quickly discovered, was valuable at all. It was nothing better than local gossip, and it could not help him get to the core of his central argument, if he could even remember what his central argument was. ‘Promising’: that was how his supervisor, McCarthy, had described it at first; later, ‘promising’ was downgraded to ‘interesting’, and later still ‘interesting’ became ‘tentative’, and Mark was not eager to know what McCarthy’s current assessment was. But he had to get him the chapter; without the chapter, he risked losing his funding, that complicated marriage of university, departmental and government money, which, put together, allowed him to live a little more comfortably than he suspected a graduate student in Anglo-Irish literature should. Getting it for another year depended on getting McCarthy’s signature on the renewal form — which could only happen, McCarthy had warned Mark, if the second chapter arrived before McCarthy left for his annual month in West Cork. And as Mark watched his housemate, Mossy, return from the bar with yet another round, he knew the chances of securing McCarthy’s autograph were fading fast.
Walking with Mossy was Niall Nagle. Mark had known him when they were undergrads in Trinity — he was the guy who was always sitting, yammering, on the desk of some female business student in the library — but he had barely seen him since, and he was surprised to see him now, and to hear that he and Mossy were deep in conversation about the rugby. Nagle must have just come from the match: he was wearing the polo shirt with a bank’s name plastered across the chest — a chest that was looking, these days, almost as generous as those of the girls whose desks he had haunted in the Lecky. With a paunch to match. He was telling Mossy something about backs, how hard they had to work, how much brainpower had to go into every move. ‘Contrary to popular impression,’ he said, and took a swig from his bottle of Miller. He had always been like that in college: a vocabulary like a radio pundit. How did Mossy still know this guy? How had they stayed in touch? And since when did Mossy care anything for rugby? He had always, like Mark, been contentedly indifferent to sports. It might matter to him fiercely whenever Clare reached an All-Ireland final, but everything else he ignored. Mark, meanwhile, came from a county where the teams barely lasted a month into the season, so it was a rare Sunday that Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh’s commentary — like a cattle auctioneer let loose in Croke Park — became part of the soundtrack. But now here was Mossy, talking about this match as intensely as though he had been in the dug-out in Lansdowne Road.
To Mark, it was a mystery. But then, so much about Mossy was, even after six years of sharing a place with him. The people in Mossy’s life were a mixed bag, seduced and snuck and stolen from the many lives Mossy seemed, already, to have passed through. A year ago he had been writing a master’s thesis on de Valera, quickly abandoned; a year before that he had been temping in a borrowed suit at the Stock Exchange on Anglesea Street; a few years before that, he had been backpacking in an Argentina where money was suddenly worth nothing. And now he was working in a self-proclaimed arthouse DVD store on George’s Street, shelving cases and calling in late returns and coming home with subtitled films and stories of the customers he dealt with: the widows and widowers in need of something to get them through the day; the new couples trying to impress each other; the Indian guys looking for Ben Affleck films; the porn addicts, some of them showing up twice or three times in the same day; the foreigners, looking for relief from the English language; the junkies, looking for a hidden corner.
‘I’m surprised to see you here on a day like this, Casey,’ Nagle shouted from across the table. He was smirking, lighting himself a cigarette. ‘Don’t you have hay to make or something like that?’ he said. ‘Cows to milk, turf to stack, whatever it is you do down the sticks when the summer finally cops itself the fuck on?’
This was how Nagle had always addressed him back in Trinity; the same loud amusement at the idea of someone his own age, in his own college, choosing to spend so many of his weekends on a farm. There were rugby matches to go to. Rugby bars to cram into. Rugby birds to pursue. What was Mark doing, driving tractors and testing cattle and shovelling shit-caked straw out of sheds? Nagle never understood, but he never seemed to tire of asking, either.