Even as it was occurring to Sinclair the idea seemed crazy, and yet it had a peculiar and a nagging appeal. He had gone out a third time with Phoebe, on what he afterwards supposed must have been their first real date, for although she did not invite him in, the evening had ended with a prolonged and serious, indeed, a solemn, kiss on her doorstep, and now he found that the thought of her was never far from his mind. He had come to see her unconventional prettiness-it was in the delicacy of her slim hands, in the slightly feline angle of her jaw, in the almost transparent paleness of her skin. Also he had begun to appreciate her humor, the amused and subtle mockery in her attitude to things, him included, perhaps him especially. She had a bright mind; he wondered how she had ended up working in a hat shop. He could not stop himself imagining her without her clothes, reclining on a bed and turning towards him on the pivot of one braced arm, a lock of hair across her cheek, all her bared flesh agleam like a knife blade. Yes, all that was on his mind, and more. But now the wild thought had occurred to him that he would introduce her to Dannie Jewell, he did not know why. Perhaps he wanted to see what the two of them would make of each other. Or perhaps, a sly voice said in his head, you want to make mischief.
They had arranged a Sunday afternoon outing, Phoebe and he, to go and see the rhododendrons on the slopes behind Howth Castle. They would take a picnic, and a bottle of wine. As the day approached he dithered as to whether he dared ask if Dannie might come with them, and more than once he dialed the number of the telephone in the hallway of the house where Phoebe had her bedsit, but hung up before anyone answered. The idea was crazy, surely. What was it supposed to achieve, what purpose was it supposed to serve? Phoebe would most likely resent Dannie’s presence, and Dannie would not much care to be a gooseberry. Probably Dannie would not come, anyway, even if Phoebe were to say that she could. Finally he worked up the courage and telephoned them both, Phoebe first, then Dannie. They both said yes. And straightaway of course he regretted the whole thing, and cursed himself for his foolishness.
He called for Dannie first, and they walked together to Phoebe’s place. The morning was sunny and hot but a faint fresh breeze was coming down from the mountains and the air had lost some of the heaviness that had weighed on it in recent days. Dannie was hardly recognizable as the girl he had last seen curled forlornly on her bed in a drugged sleep that night after her brother had died and she had phoned him for help. Today she wore a white dress that the breeze made balloon around her, and a light cashmere sweater was draped over her shoulders with the sleeves knotted loosely in front. She had put on lipstick, and wore perfume. When she had answered the door to him she had seen the anxiousness in his eyes and had put a hand reassuringly on his arm and said, “Don’t worry, I’m all right, I won’t break down or anything.” Now they stopped outside the front door of the house where Phoebe lived, and stood smiling at each other vaguely as they waited for her to come down, and the plane trees on the other side of the street rustled their leaves excitedly as if they were discussing these two young people standing there in the midst of a Sunday morning in summer.
To his surprise, they got on together from the start, Phoebe and Dannie. As he was introducing them he saw how alike they were. Not that they looked alike, but there was something definite that they shared, though he could not say exactly what it was-a quality of things endured, perhaps, of troubles not surmounted but absorbed, with grit and determination, painfully.
They took the bus to Sutton and then mounted the little tram that whirred and rattled its way up the long slope of Howth Head. Phoebe had packed the picnic, ham sandwiches on brown bread with lettuce and sliced tomatoes, and a cucumber cut in four lengthways, and pickles in a jar, and a fancy tin of biscuits from Smyths on the Green. Sinclair and Dannie had each brought a bottle of wine, and Dannie had a basket with three glasses wrapped in napkins. They kept meeting each other’s eyes and smiling, a little bashfully, for they felt suddenly childish and exposed, to be on an outing, like ordinary people, and ordinarily happy. Seagulls were circling above them in the blue, and far in the distance the sun sparkled on the sea, and no one mentioned Richard Jewell.
They got off near the summit and walked down the road, but no one knew the way to the castle, and for a while they got lost, and in the end gave up on the rhododendrons and sat down at the corner of a field and unwrapped their sandwiches and opened the wine. Sinclair’s bottle of liebfraumilch had lost its chill but they did not mind; they drank it first and then drank the much grander Bordeaux Dannie had brought. When the wine was finished the girls went off to find a secluded place to pee, and Sinclair lay back in the soft lush grass and shielded his eyes with his arm and briefly dozed, and had a sort of dream in which Phoebe and Dannie, merged into a single person, came to him and touched his face and confided to him some profound piece of knowledge that he forgot the moment the voices of the real girls woke him. He sat up and watched them picking their way towards him through the grass. They had found the wood with the rhododendrons in it; it was just across the next field. “The blossoms are nearly finished, though,” Phoebe said, sitting down beside him, and smiling at him with a particular intent that he could not fathom, and he thought again of his strange little dream.
He lit a cigarette and offered the packet around, but Dannie shook her head, and Phoebe reminded him that she had given up smoking.
There were cows at the other side of the field, black and white, some standing and some lying down. A black bird, rook or crow, flew across in a ragged sort of way, cawing.
“Look,” Phoebe said, “those boats are in a race.” They shaded their eyes to peer down to where the yachts were plying their way against the wind, and sure enough there came to them up the length of the hillside, delayed by distance, the boom of the starting signal. “Such white sails,” Phoebe murmured. “Like wings, look.”
Dannie had lain down on her front in the grass with her chin propped on her hands. She was chewing a blade of grass. Three flies circled above her head, round and round, tracing the ghostly outline of a black halo. Sinclair saw again how beautiful she was, with that broad face and delicate chin, more beautiful than Phoebe, though not half so fascinating, he told himself.
“Isn’t it strange to think,” Dannie said, “that people who are old now were young once, like us? I meet an old woman in the street and I tell myself that seventy years ago she was a baby in her mother’s arms. How can they be the same person, her as she is now and the baby as it was then? It’s like-what do they say?-the headless axe without a handle. Something that’s there and yet impossible.”
Sinclair had the impression of a tiny speck of darkness, a beam of black light, piercing the sunlit air, infinitesimally fine but thickening, thickening.
Orphans. The word came to his mind unbidden. Those poor orphans, she had said. But what orphans? He would not ask, not now.
Quirke that same Sunday afternoon was in bed with Francoise d’Aubigny. She had telephoned first and then come to his flat. Giselle was at Brooklands, being looked after by Sarah Maguire. There were no preliminaries. He let her in at the front door and they climbed the stairs in silence and once inside the flat she turned to him and lifted up her mouth to be kissed. Their lovemaking at first was not a success. Quirke was uncertain and Francoise seemed preoccupied-it was as if she were conducting an experiment, or an investigation, of him, of herself, of the possibilities of what they might be to each other. Afterwards they sat up in bed in the hot, shadowed room, not speaking, but forgiving of each other. Quirke smoked a cigarette and Francoise took it from his fingers now and then and drew on it, and when he offered her one of her own she shook her head and said no, she wanted to share this one, because it tasted of him.
“When did you know this was going to happen?” he asked.
She gave a soft laugh. “Oh, the day we met, I suppose. And you?”
“Not so quickly. Women always know long before men.”
Her breasts were like pale apples, her ribs plainly visible under their sheath of silky skin. She was, he realized with a kind of happy dismay, not his kind of woman at all-at least Isabel Galloway had some flesh on her bones.
“You have someone already?” she asked. She had that gift of reading his thoughts.
“Yes,” he said. “Sort of.”
“Who is she?”
“An actress.”
“A famous one? Would I know her?”
“I doubt it. She works mostly at the Gate.”
“Tell me her name.”
“Isabel.”
“And do you feel very guilty about her, now?”
“Yes.”
“Ah. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be-I’m not.”
She took the cigarette again and put it to her lips, shutting one eye against the smoke. “Shall we continue together, you and I, do you think?” she asked mildly. “Will there be more times like this?” She smiled, and gave him back the cigarette. “Or will you be”-she put a theatrical quiver into her voice-“overcome by your guilt?”
“There will be more times. There’ll be all the time in the world.”
“Alors,” she said, “is that what they call a declaration?”
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
She turned and put her arms around him. He crushed the last of the cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table. His eye fell on the telephone there, hunched, black and gleaming, a reminder of all that was outside this room: the world, and Isabel Galloway.
Two days after his outing with Phoebe and Dannie, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary morning, Sinclair received a telephone call at the hospital. This was unusual; hardly anyone phoned him at work. The nurse who put the call through from reception sounded odd, she seemed to be trying not to laugh, and then the voice that came on was strangely muffled, as if the speaker were speaking through a handkerchief.
“Listen, Jewboy,” the voice said, “you keep sticking that big fat nose of yours into places where it’s not wanted and you’ll get it lopped off. Then your prick and your Jew face will be a nice match.” This was followed by a cackle of laughter and then the line went dead.
Sinclair stood looking at the receiver. He thought it must be a prank, some so-called friend from college days, maybe-it had been a young man’s voice, he was sure of that-doing it for a bet, or out of some long-remembered grudge, or even just for a moment’s amusement. Despite himself he was shocked. He had never experienced this kind of thing before, certainly not since school days, but then it had been a matter of malicious teasing, not abuse like this, not hatred. The effect was first of all physical, as if he had been punched in the pit of the stomach; then the rage came, like a transparent crimson curtain falling behind his eyes. He had an urge, too, to tell someone, anyone. Quirke was in his office, he could be seen through the glass panel in the door; he was doing paperwork and smoking a cigarette in the ill-tempered way that he did, blowing the smoke out swiftly sideways as if he could not bear the stink of it. Sinclair knocked on the door and walked in. Quirke looked at him and lifted his eyebrows. “Christ,” he said, “what’s the matter with you? One of the stiffs come back to life?”
Suddenly, to his intense surprise and puzzlement, Sinclair was overcome by shyness. Yes, shyness; it was the only word.
“I had a-I had a call,” he said.
“Oh? Who from?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No. A man.”
Quirke leaned back in his chair. “A man phoned you and didn’t give his name. What did he say?”
Sinclair pushed back the wings of his white coat and shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He stared through the long window that gave onto the dissecting room, garishly lit under the big white fluorescent lamps in the ceiling. “It was just…” He touched a finger to his forehead. “Just abuse.”
“I see. Personal or professional?”
“Personal. But it could have been professional, I don’t know.”
Quirke rotated the open packet of Senior Service on his desk until the cigarettes, arrayed like the pipes of an organ, were facing in Sinclair’s direction; Sinclair took one, and lit it with his Zippo.
“I’ve had those calls,” Quirke said. “No point in telling you not to mind, they’re always a shock.” He stubbed out his own cigarette and took a fresh one, and leaned back farther. “Phoebe tells me you and she went to Howth. Nice, out there?”
Sinclair thought about being indignant-did she tell Quirke everything she did? did she tell him about that kiss, too?-but the anger was not there sufficiently. “Dannie Jewell came with us,” he said.
Quirke looked surprised. “Did she? Phoebe didn’t say. Do they know each other?”
“No, they hadn’t met before. I thought it would be good for Dannie.”
“And was it?”
Sinclair looked at him. The cold light that had come into Quirke’s eye, what was that? Was he worried Phoebe would be affected by Dannie and her troubles? Sinclair suspected Quirke did not know very much about his daughter. “She’s doing well, Dannie. She’s coping.”
“With her grief.”
“That’s right.”
Something had tightened between them, as if the atmosphere had developed a kink.
“Good,” Quirke said briskly. He was rolling the tip of his cigarette back and forth in the ashtray, sharpening it like the point of a red pencil. “You’re aware that Phoebe, too, like Dannie Jewell, has things to cope with, things that happened, in the past.”
Sinclair nodded. “She doesn’t talk about it-at least she hasn’t so far, to me.”
“She’s seen more than her share of violence. And in America she was-she was attacked.”
Sinclair had heard all this; it was talked about in the hospital, a fact he hoped Quirke was not aware of.
“If you’re telling me to be careful,” Sinclair said, “you needn’t. I like Phoebe. I think she likes me. That’s as far as we’ve got.” He wanted to say, And besides, you’re the one who put us together, but did not.
Quirke’s cigarette was spent already; he crushed it in the ashtray among the remains of a dozen others. The subject of Phoebe, Sinclair could see, was closed.
“This fellow on the phone,” Quirke said, “did he mention names?”
Sinclair had walked to the window and was leaning against it, one foot lifted behind him and the sole of his shoe pressed against the wall. “How do you mean, names?”
“Sometimes when they’re bereaved they call up mad with grief and complain about their loved ones being cut up. God knows why the switch puts them through.”
“No, no, nothing like that. He told me I’d get my Jew nose cut off if I stuck it in other people’s business.”
“Your Jew nose.”
They both smiled.
“All right,” Sinclair said. “I’ll forget about it.”
He came forward and stubbed out his cigarette in the crowded ashtray and made for the door. Behind him Quirke said, “Phoebe and I are having dinner tonight. It’s our weekly treat. It used to be Thursday, now it’s Tuesdays. You want to join us?”
Sinclair stopped, turned. “Thanks,” he said, “no. I have a thing to do. Maybe another time.” He set off again towards the door.
“Sinclair.”
Again he stopped. “Yes?”
“I’m glad that you and Phoebe are-are friends,” Quirke said. “And I appreciate your-your concern for her.” He suddenly looked vulnerable there, wedged in the chair that was too small for him, his big hands resting palms upwards on the desk as if in supplication.
Sinclair nodded, and went out.