Solace by Belinda McKeon Page A

everybody got up to and
there were things you knew it wasn’t permitted to do, and that night in the Abbey Hotel had been her first time, Tom her first man, and what people Mark’s age did with each other now
she regarded with a mixture of envy and exhaustion.
    Mark’s hands were freckled, already growing brown, though the summer had only just begun to suggest itself, and there was a bony strength to them, a gnarled, awkward kind of strength. For
a moment Maura tried to imagine herself as a girl, looking at those hands; tried to think would she be drawn to them, would she look at them and feel herself feeling a certain way, and for that
moment she thought she would, and then she realized that Mark was aware of her eyes on him.
    ‘Mossy,’ he said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Mossy, texting to know if I wanted to go to a gig this evening.’
    ‘Did you not tell him you were coming down here?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ Mark said, and it was exactly as he had tried to lie to her when he was a child.
    Mossy had a real name. She tried to think of it. Thomas, it must be. Or more than likely Tomás, the Irish, with the end of it sounding so much like moss . He was a nice lad,
friendly, but watchful, from what she imagined as a wild sort of family down in Kerry or somewhere. Wild partly because Mossy had huge tumbles of curls, and a face too craggy for his age, and
partly because there were a lot of them in Mossy’s family, as far as she could remember, eight or nine of them, she thought. And it wasn’t even that Mossy was the youngest, that he came
from parents of that generation, from a mother who would do nothing to stop herself falling pregnant every twelve months; Mossy was nearly the eldest, and the youngest few were still in primary
school, and Mark said they all looked alike, hair like that and hard little faces like that, all running around speaking Irish and not giving a damn. As far as Maura could gather, it wasn’t
religion that had had Mossy’s mother going around pregnant so often: it was the enjoyment of it, of every bit of it, the bit with her husband and the bit with the child in her and the bit on
her back in the hospital, even, and the bit with a whole straggle of youngsters traipsing around under her feet.
    Maura would have had more. But more hadn’t been possible for Maura, and that was what she had had to get used to. She was thankful, at least, that there had been one of each.
    Meaning she was thankful that one of them, at least, had been a son. For Tom’s sake. But for her own sake, as well. She had wanted a son. She had cried tears of real gratitude when he had
arrived.
    They were nearing home now. Mark glanced at each house as they passed; habit. Tom always did more than glance: Tom always stared, and from her own kitchen window she had seen others do the same
to her porch, her shrubs, her freshly tarmacadamed drive. She saw them taking note of what was new, what was changing, what was theirs to mull over or to mock as they drove on. She herself glanced
now at the last few houses before the lane: Bradys, with the trampoline at the back of the house for the grandchildren; Healys, with the pebbledash and the tiny windows; Murtaghs, with the
beautiful curve of flowers all along the path to the door. As she turned into their own lane she knew that Mark was tensing; knew that Tom was likely to be at a gate or in a shed door now,
listening for the sound of the car, readying himself to look busy and unbothered as it passed him by. All weekend he had been needling her with questions about when Mark was coming, when she had
last called him, what it was that could have been keeping him away this long. He asked the same questions over and over, twice a day the same questions, maybe three times. That was habit, too, a
habit she should have tried to get him out of a long time beforehand; if he asked about something often enough, it would happen. She would take steps, behind the scenes, to make it happen,