‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ Irene said, and her tone was now much softer, but still matter-of-fact. ‘I’m the one who should be sorry. No matter what happened between us, I never loved her a tiny bit less, Mark. I only loved her more, the more difficult things became. You’ll know what that’s like when Aoife’s that age. I hope you won’t, but chances are you will. And if you have any sense, you’ll tell your daughter how you feel about her. You won’t sit around and let things fall to pieces between the two of you without doing anything to mend it, without saying anything to put it right.’
‘Joanne never talked badly of you,’ Mark said. ‘She never did.’
Irene smiled thinly. ‘It makes me feel no better to think that she couldn’t talk about these things,’ she said. ‘That she couldn’t even talk about them with you.’
Mark said nothing. It was not true, what he had said to Irene. Joanne had told him about her mother. She had talked to him about her even on the first night they had met. Sometimes it had seemed that her mother was all that Joanne wanted to talk about, that she had needed to talk her mother out of her system, to give utterance to everything she knew about her, everything she did not understand about her. But Mark did not think it would be wise, or useful, now, to share this detail with Irene.
‘I’d just love to know how she’s getting along,’ Irene said then.
Mark looked at her, startled. ‘Who?’ he said, and the words came out sounding almost hostile. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Who do you mean?’
Irene regarded him for a moment before answering. ‘I mean Aoife, Mark,’ she said slowly, putting a hand to her collarbone. ‘I’m just saying again that I’d love to see more of Aoife. To hear more about her. You’d be surprised the small little things that would be of interest to me. That would mean the world to me.’
Mark felt embarrassed, and he felt guilty. He knew that Irene had spotted his confusion. He knew that she had seen him thinking for an astounded moment that it was Joanne she wanted to know about, not Aoife. She had seen him thinking her crazy, thinking her unhinged. She had seen it, and she had absorbed it, and she had corrected it, and he was the one who had come out of it looking crazy. He was the one who must seem unhinged.
‘She’s walking a couple of months now,’ he said eagerly. ‘Aoife. And she’s got a good few words. The thing she’s most interested in walking on is the stairs. And the footpath alongside the house in Stoneybatter. The narrowest bloody footpath in Dublin.’
With an effort, he laughed, and Irene laughed too. ‘Hands full,’ she said, and smiled at him.
Say it, Mark said to himself then. Get around to the reason you came here. Ask for him. Ask where he is. But then Irene took a deep breath, and he knew that she was going to say something it would be unkind to interrupt. He knew that she was going to come out with something that was important to her.
‘This thing is supposed to have — what do you call it? — peaked, by now,’ she said, stretching a hand out towards the fire. ‘I don’t find that. Do you?’
Mark stared at her. What was she talking about? Was she talking about the fire? He looked to it. Flames puttered and curled. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said to Irene. ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘Oh,’ said Irene, shaking her head as though she were airing a foolish indulgence, something that scarcely deserved to be heard. ‘This. Grief, I mean. They say it hits some sort of height around the sixth month and grows more manageable after that. Evens out, you know. A plateau. I suppose I did find it to be something like that after my husband died. But it hasn’t happened for me this time, not yet.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, very quietly.
If she cried, he would not know what to do with her, Mark thought in a panic, but she showed no sign of breaking down. She was smiling into the fire, that same thin smile.
‘I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the whole thing, you see,’ she said. ‘There are a lot of books about it. I imagined that maybe you might be reading about it too.’
Mark shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. He knew he should say more than this, but he did not know where to begin.
‘I don’t know why I thought that,’ Irene said. ‘With your studies, I suppose. I don’t know.’
‘It’s different for everyone, I think,’ said Mark. He hoped that this statement might somehow bring the matter to a close.
‘One book said that it’s like magic in a way,’ said Irene, and her eyes had the same brightness that had been in his father’s an hour earlier. ‘Grief, I mean,’ she said, leaning towards him. ‘That there’s somehow something magical about what you go through.’
‘They say all sorts of things,’ said Mark, weakly. ‘I suppose it’s different for everyone,’ he tried again. He could not believe this was happening; that he was getting some sort of primer on self-help from Joanne’s mother. What had happened with his father in the hayshed, in the kitchen, earlier seemed almost reasonable compared with this. He wondered if it would be wrong to ask for a glass of water. He felt clammy. He wondered if it would be wrong to say that, after all, he wanted a drink. But Irene would only see that as an invitation to go deeper into her theories. Even as it was, he could see, she was warming to her theme.
‘Not magic in a good way, of course,’ she said, folding her hands in her lap. ‘More that you’re under a spell. Hypnotized, or. . What would you call it?’ She searched for the word. ‘Hexed. That you believe, really believe, that the person is going to come back some day. Any day. That all of this will end, and that you’ll have them back again.’ She looked at him. Her gaze was perfectly still. ‘This has happened to me, Mark. I catch myself thinking like this. I realize how foolish it is, but I still think it. And I still believe it. That Joanne might walk in that door. I mean, for Christ’s sake.’ She shook her head. ‘Even as it was, Joanne hardly ever came in that door.’
Mark inhaled. Words seemed to slide behind walls and into formations, wrong formations, far away from him. He felt the heat of the fire furious against one cheek, against one whole side of his head, and he tried to lean away from it, but there was only so far he could lean. Worse still was that he found himself unwilling — unable — to look towards the door.
‘Don’t you ever think that, Mark?’ Irene said, and she leaned forward suddenly and reached a hand out to him. ‘Don’t you find yourself thinking that she’s going to come home?’
Mark stared at her hand. Something about it was familiar; something about it was wrong. It took him a moment, and then he saw it. The ring on her fourth finger. It was the ring he had given Joanne for Christmas, the first year. The silver ring, with the green stone; he had bought it from an antiques stall upstairs in the Westbury Mall. Joanne’s fingers had been swollen, from the pregnancy; she had not been able to wear it for a while, had not tried to wear it until after Aoife was born. Then she had worn it often; not every day, but often. She had been wearing it that day in the car. It must have been on her hand when she had been brought into the hospital; it must have been in her things afterwards. Her things, which had gone to her mother. Not to him. They had not been married. That was not how it was done.
‘Mark,’ Irene said, and stretched her hand closer to him. He took it. He did not squeeze it; he held it briefly with one hand, patted it with the other. Then he let it go. He stood. She looked at him in surprise, her eyes moist.
‘Is Frankie around?’ he said quickly.
Irene frowned. She sat back; she folded her hands in her lap again. ‘Frankie?’ she said, as though he had asked after someone she did not know.