Free Solace by Belinda McKeon

definitely past the point of professional objectivity, flirting with him on his visits
to the office, joking with him on the phone. It was nothing new: any guy with a whiff of power seemed to get her going. It was something, maybe, that Joanne should have a word with her about
– a friendly word, a word to prevent Mona from making herself look unprofessional in front of Imelda and Eoin – but, then, Joanne and Mona were not friends. If they were friends, Joanne
would surely not have been doing, in her head, what she had been doing at some level all morning: mentally retelling the story to Mark. Picking out the moments, mimicking the sentences, ramping up
the details, so that in her mind she saw him laugh, or exclaim, or shake his head in wonder or enjoyment or incredulity; saw him watch her as she told him the story, saw him like her for it, all
the more. ‘She sounds like a dose,’ she imagined Mark saying of Mona, and she saw herself smiling, and eating another forkful of the dinner they would be having together, and taking a
sip from her glass of wine.
    ‘Rupert’s huge into sushi,’ Mona said then, and Joanne imagined the mileage she and Mark would get out of this statement, and how much he would appreciate that she could
make that kind of joke, and then he would make a joke of his own about it in return. Though, on second thoughts, that might be awkward.
    ‘Have you been to the other restaurant?’ she asked Mona, because she wanted, somehow, to shake all of these images – Rupert, Mona, sushi, Mark’s jokes about sushi –
out of her head. Then, as an afterthought, more to herself than to Mona, she said, ‘It’s not a sushi restaurant as well, I hope.’
    ‘Nope,’ Mona said. ‘It’s fusion. And it’s gorgeous . I mean, it’s obvious he did the right thing with the place. I can’t imagine how that old
witch thinks she has a ghost of a chance to win.’
    Rupert Lefroy had lived in his mother’s mews all the way through his time at Trinity, and for a couple of years afterwards, while he tried to make a name for himself writing on politics
for one of the Sunday newspapers. But he lacked discipline – he had admitted as much himself, in his first meeting with Eoin – and soon even the friends of his father who had been
putting work his way tired of his disregard for deadlines, and of the signs, which displayed themselves more and more blatantly with every piece he wrote, that his grasp of politics, not to mention
political history, was extremely selective. He moved to London and, with the bulk of his inheritance from his father, opened a restaurant in Knightsbridge, which within five years had made him
‘moderately wealthy’, he told Eoin. He had married a model – a catalogue model, actually: Joanne had googled her – bought a Jaguar (no googling required) and built a country
house that had involved some complicated and very expensive levelling work on a field in the Cotswolds. Within another five years he was divorced, almost bankrupt, and hatching plans for a return
to Dublin, which was then in the first flush of the boom.
    Joanne had read both sides of the rest of the story, from the court transcripts, but it was Elizabeth’s version that had stuck in her mind: delighted to see Rupert home, she had agreed
readily when he explained that, for tax reasons, it would be of enormous benefit to him to be able to claim the mews as his own. He would be living in it, he had promised her, and he would not be
using it for anything else; certainly for nothing commercial. The lease he had had his own solicitor draw up had included this condition, he assured her. She had trusted him, and she had not felt
the need to read through the final draft of the lease, and shortly after signing it, she had woken one morning to find a demolition crew setting up in her yard and roaring at her, when she ventured
out her door, to get back into the house. When the new restaurant opened a few months later,