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at all. He would be thrown out. He
would be disgraced in the eyes of Dublin. And the eyes of Dublin would be nothing compared to the eyes of home.
    Mark knew that his PhD work, and any mention of it, held a power over both his parents; a power that was often very convenient for him. In the face of what his father insisted on calling
Mark’s ‘studies’, they became as quiet and uneasy as though they had opened a solicitor’s letter or answered the door to a guard. It was to them something alien,
unfathomable, something utterly intimidating, a degree beyond a degree, an essay that would take years of their son’s life, that would turn him, at the end of all, into something just as
alien and unfathomable: a university lecturer, a writer of books without storylines, papers without news.
    The fact of his mother’s having nursed at the manor house had formed a thread of delighted connection between them, for a while. That first year of his thesis work, when he was still in
love with the idea of writing about Edgeworth, his mother had talked to him about the old house every weekend he came home; she had taken him to see the place, arranged for the caretaker to show
him the parts that had been least changed since the Edgeworths had sold it in the thirties. But there were hardly any such parts left, in truth. A surviving cornice, high in the men’s ward,
high over the hooped backs and the spittled mouths. A section of tiles in a little washroom off the maternity ward where, for years, the local women had screamed their babies into being. In the
room that had once been the library, the high columns still remained, but nothing else bore any resemblance to the old drawings of the room; it was now where the patients watched television,
gathered around the screen in their dressing-gowns.
    Mark was disturbed by how thoroughly the traces of the Edgeworths had been knocked out of the place. Edgeworth had written all her books there; she had collaborated with her father there on all
their projects; she had helped, there, to raise and to educate her twenty-one siblings; she had learned, there, to get along with each of her father’s four wives. Walter Scott had come to
stay there, taking Edgeworth off with him on a tour of Killarney, and a few years later, Wordsworth had come to visit, in all his ‘slow, slimy, circumspect tiresome lengthiness ’,
as Edgeworth had written in a letter to her aunt. It had been that place, and now it was just one more maze of wards and stairwells and hallways humming with the unmistakable smells of a hospital
run by a religious order: disinfectant and candlewax, gravy and soap and starch.
    For a while, he kept telling his mother how his thesis was going, and sharing with her any stories he had managed to turn up about the old house, and in these even his father took an interest,
but eventually Mark ran out of such stories. Eventually, it was just him and Edgeworth’s writing and the theories he needed, now, to apply to it, and when his parents asked him whether he had
found out anything new about the house or the history of the town, he had replied regretfully at first, and eventually irritably, until, it seemed, they learned no longer to ask.
    He did not need to be around Edgeworthstown any more to do his research. He needed to be in the library; he needed to be in his carrel. And his carrel was a long way from Edgeworthstown, and
from his father’s farm.
    Mark’s father did not expect him to come and live at home. He did not expect him to gradually take over the running of the farm. In the first place, his father had no intention of handing
control of the farm to anybody – it was his life, and its daily rituals and its daily difficulties were like oxygen to him, much as he might complain of them. Nor, Mark knew, did his father
honestly think that farming offered any kind of future. Especially on the small scale on which he farmed, it was impossible to make a living from it. Yet