On Sunday mornings when the weather permitted Quirke bought an armful of the English newspapers and sat with them on a bench by the canal below Huband Bridge. There he read, and smoked, and tried to forget for a while the emotional complications into which over the years he had allowed himself to stumble. Today the papers were full of menacing news. It was some comfort to Quirke, but not much, that the world was in so much more of a sorry state than he was.
The morning was hot still, but at least the cloud cover of recent days had lifted and the sun was shining out of what seemed a freshly lacquered sky. On the water a moorhen paddled busily about with five chicks veering in a line behind her like feathered balls of soot, and an iridescent dragonfly was prancing among the tall shoots of sedge. Gamal Abdel Nasser had been appointed president of Egypt. Polio was still on the increase. He lit another Senior Service and leaned back and closed his eyes. Gamasser appointed pres. Egypt on the increase. Gamdel Abel Nassolio…
“Dr. Quirke-am I right?”
He emerged with a start from his doze.
Who?
Blue suit, horn-rimmed specs, oiled black hair brushed fiercely back from a pockmarked brow. He was sitting at the other end of the bench, one arm laid easily along the back of it and one knee crossed on the other. Familiar, but who was he?
There was an inch and a half of ash on Quirke’s forgotten cigarette; it detached itself now and tumbled softly to the ground.
“Costigan,” the man said, and took his arm from the back of the bench and laced his fingers together before his breast. When he smiled he bared the lower front row of his teeth; they were yellow, and overlapped. “You don’t remember me.”
“Sorry, I don’t recall…?”
“I knew your adoptive father, Judge Griffin. And Malachy Griffin, of course. And we had a drink together, once, you and I, in McGonagle’s public house, if I’m not mistaken. A drink and a chat.” Those teeth again.
Costigan. Yes, of course.
“I remember,” Quirke said.
“Do you?” Costigan looked exaggeratedly pleased.
Yes, Quirke remembered. Costigan had padded into the pub that day and delivered a warning that Quirke had ignored, and afterwards he had been attacked in the street and given a beating that had left him with a broken knee and a limp for life. He remembered, all right. Now he ground the butt of his cigarette under a heel and began gathering up the newspapers. “Nice to see you again,” he said, beginning to rise.
“Very sad,” Costigan said, “about poor Dick Jewell.” Quirke slowly sat down again. He waited. Costigan had turned his attention to the moorhen and her brood. “Lovely spot, this. You live nearby, don’t you?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Mount Street? Number thirty-nine?”
“What do you want, Costigan?”
Costigan put on a look of innocent surprise. “Want, Dr. Quirke? I was just strolling along here and saw you sitting and thought I’d stop and say a word. How are you, these days? Did you recover from that mishap you had? A fall, wasn’t it, down some steps? Very unfortunate.”
Costigan was a leading light in the Knights of St. Patrick, a shady and powerful organization of Catholic businessmen, professionals, politicians. It was the Knights, among others, that Quirke had provoked, which was why he had ended up with a smashed knee at the bottom of those steps that night-three years ago, was it, four? He said, “Why don’t you say what you have to say, Costigan?”
Costigan was nodding, as if he had come to an agreement with himself on something. “I was just thinking,” he said, “walking along here this lovely morning in the sunshine, how different things often are to the way they seem. Take the canal, there. Smooth as glass, with those ducks or whatever they are, and the reflection of that white cloud, and the midges going up and down like the bubbles in a bottle of soda water-a picture of peace and tranquillity, you’d say. But think what’s going on underneath the surface, the big fish eating the little ones, and the bugs on the bottom fighting over the bits that float down, and everything covered in slime and mud.”
He turned his bland gaze to Quirke, smiling. “You might say that’s how the world is. You might say, in fact, that there are two distinct worlds, the world where everything seems grand and straightforward and simple-that’s the world that the majority of people live in, or at least imagine they live in-and then there’s the real world, where the real things go on.”
He took out a gold cigarette case and opened it on his palm and offered it to Quirke. Quirke shook his head. “No, thanks.” He should stand up now, he knew, he should stand up and walk away from here. But he could not.
Costigan struck a match and lit his cigarette, and dropped the spent match on the ground beside Quirke’s right shoe.
“I needn’t ask which is your world,” Quirke said.
“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong, Dr. Quirke. That’s where you’re wrong. I don’t operate in either world exclusively, but somewhere in between the two. I acknowledge them both. I have, you might say, a foot in both. People must have sunshine and calm water with baby ducks on it, if they’re not to sink into despair. Deep down they know how things really are, but they pretend not to, and manage to convince themselves, or to convince themselves enough to keep the pretense going. And that’s where I come in, me, and a few others of a like mind. We move between the worlds, and it’s our job to make sure the appearances are kept up-to hide the dark stuff and emphasize the light. It’s quite a responsibility, I can tell you.”
There was silence then between them. Costigan seemed quite calm, cheerful, almost, as if he were greatly pleased with his little speech, and were thinking back over it admiringly.
“Did you know Dick Jewell?” Quirke asked.
“I did.”
“I wouldn’t have thought he was the kind of person you and your cronies would find congenial. You’re not going to tell me he was a member of the Knights, and him a Jew?”
“I didn’t say I knew him well.”
“He certainly lived in the second world, among the big fish.”
“And he was also a benefactor of many of our projects.”
“Such as St. Christopher’s?”
Costigan smiled and slowly nodded. Quirke wondered if he might be a spoiled priest, for he had a priestly manner, bland and soft but with an interior hard as stone. “Such as St. Christopher’s,” he said, “yes. Where I believe you spent a little time when you were small, and where I believe you visited again the other day. Might I ask, Dr. Quirke, what exactly it was you were after?”
“What business is it of yours?”
“Just curious, Dr. Quirke, just curious. Like yourself, I imagine. For I know you are an inquisitive man-you have that reputation.”
Quirke made himself stand up. The bundle of newspapers under his arm was the size and heft of a schoolbag, and he felt for a dizzying moment as if he were a small boy again, standing accused before the Head Brother or the Dean of Discipline. “Have you come to threaten me, like the last time?” he asked.
Costigan lifted his eyebrows and his hands in unison. “Quite the contrary, Dr. Quirke,” he said. “Like the last time, I’m giving you a friendly tip, so you can avoid getting into-what shall we say?-a threatening situation.”
“And what is it, this tip?”
Costigan was gazing up at him with what seemed a lively and sympathetic air, though stifling a smile. “Leave off this amateur detective stuff, Dr. Quirke. That’s my tip. Leave it to the real detective, to-what’s his name?-Hackett. Dick Jewell, St. Christopher’s, the Sumners-”
“The Sumners? What about the Sumners?”
“I’m telling you”-a touch of weary exasperation had come into his voice-“you’d be best advised to lay off. You’re a very inquisitive man, Dr. Quirke, very inquisitive. It got you in trouble before, and it’ll get you in trouble again. And speaking of trouble: what is it the French say- cherchez la femme? Or should I say, give up cherchez ing la femme. If you’ll take my advice. Which I hope you will, if you’re wise.”
The two men gazed at each other, Costigan calm as ever, Quirke turning pale with outrage and anger. Costigan chuckled. “As you see,” he said, “you find out a lot of things, moving between the two worlds.”
Quirke began to walk away. Behind him, Costigan called his name, and despite himself he stopped and turned. The man on the bench made an undulant swimming motion with one hand. “Remember,” he said, “the little fish, and the big fish. And the mud at the bottom.”
Dannie Jewell had known Teddy Sumner since they were children, when the Sumners and the Jewells were still friends. She did not like Teddy, really-he was not an easy person to like-but she felt something for him. They both had things to cope with: their respective families, for a start. But Teddy was peculiar, with peculiar ways. There was the fact that he had no interest in girls. Dannie often asked herself if it was just that he had no interest in her, but no, she believed it was a general indifference. This she considered a point in his favor. It was positively restful to have someone around that you did not have to watch every word with, and who, when you did say something, did not take it as significant in the way that fellows almost always did. In fact, she, for her part, had not much interest in boys. They were all right for playing tennis with, or calling up when you felt low, as she did with David Sinclair, but when they started getting soppy or, worse, when they tried something on and were rebuffed and then got angry, they were either frightening or a bore.
But she did not think Teddy was the other way inclined, either.
He was hirsute and muscular, like his father, but about two-thirds the size, a hairy little fellow with a low forehead and a square chin. He had meltingly soft brown eyes, again like his father, and a bandy gait that was oddly endearing. His temper was terrible and he was quick to take offense, which made him impossible, sometimes. He despised himself, Dannie supposed, but that hardly made him unique.
He was wicked, she knew, wicked, and probably dangerous. She indulged herself in him, as she might in some awful, secret sin. He made her feel gleeful-that was the only word-and at the same time ashamed. Even the shame, though, was enjoyable. Just to be with Teddy was already to have gone too far. He was like a child, willful and cruel, and in his company she allowed herself to be childish, too. Teddy was dirty, and she could be dirty with him.
She knew she should not have told him about the afternoon on Howth Head with David Sinclair and Phoebe Griffin. But she also knew that Teddy was fascinated by the things other people did, the simple things that make up a life, for those who are capable of living. He was like a creature from another planet, charmed and baffled by the doings of these earthlings among whom he was forced to carry on his precarious existence.
They were on an outing of their own, she and Teddy, when she described the visit to Howth to him in hilarious detail. She knew she was betraying David Sinclair by talking like this but she could not stop herself-it was a guilty pleasure, like wetting the bed when she was little.
Teddy had a Morgan that his parents had given him for a present on his twenty-first. It was a gorgeous little car, green like a scarab beetle, with cream-colored leather upholstery and spoked wheels. In it they would spend happy afternoons cruising the outskirts of the city with the top down, Dannie with a wind-blown silk scarf at her neck and Teddy wearing a cravat and Italian sunglasses. They favored the more characterless suburbs for these expotitions, as they called them-she was Pooh Bear and he was Eeyore-where the lower classes lived, dreary new housing estates of pebble-dashed three-ups, two-downs that were all alike, or prewar council estates struggling to become gentrified, in which the Morgan must have appeared as outlandish and expensive as a spaceship. They would point out to each other the more pathetic efforts the householders had made to add a bit of class to their properties, the fancy nameplates screwed to wrought-iron gates, with names like Dunroamin, or Lisieux, or St. Jude’s; the venetian blinds proudly displayed in every single window, no matter how tiny or narrow; the preposterous built-on porches, with leaded panes of stained glass and miniature plaster statues of the Sacred Heart or the Blessed Virgin or the Little Flower presiding in niches over the front door. And then there were the garden ornaments, the fake fountains, the plastic Bambis, the jolly, red-cheeked gnomes peeping out among the beds of hydrangeas and snapdragons and phlox. Oh, how they laughed at all this, a hand pressed over their mouths and their eyes bulging. And how soiled this made Dannie feel, how gloriously soiled.
They played amusing games. They would stop outside a house where a pensioner was mowing the lawn, and simply sit and stare at him until he took fright and fled indoors, where they would see him, a reddened old nose and one wild eye, lurking behind the lace curtains like some burrowing creature scared into its hole. Or they would fix on a housewife coming home from the shops loaded down with bags of groceries, and drive along in first gear at a walking pace a couple of yards behind her. Children they tended to leave in peace-it was not so long since they had been children themselves, and they remembered what it was like-but now and then they would pull up at a curb and Dannie would ask the way of a fat boy in bulging short pants, or a washed-out girl in pigtails, speaking to them not in English but in French, and pretending to be puzzled and offended that they did not understand her. When they tired of these games they would drive back into the city and stop for afternoon tea at the Shelbourne or the Hibernian, and Teddy would amuse himself by submerging halfpennies in the sugar bowls and the little pots of jam, or squashing out cigarette butts under the little vases of flowers that adorned the tables.
Today Teddy was agog to hear every detail of the afternoon in Howth. He knew David Sinclair slightly, and professed to think him altogether too slippery and sly, “like all the Jews,” as he said darkly; Phoebe he had not met, but he clapped his hands and crowed in delight at Dannie’s malicious description of her, the little pale pinched face and the mouse claws, the bobbed black hair, the sort of dirndl thing she had worn with the elasticated bodice and convent girl’s lace collar.
“But weren’t they on a date?” Teddy asked. “Why did Sinclair bring you along?”
Dannie paused. She did not like the dismissive way he said it. Why would David not ask her to come with him and Phoebe, even if it was a date? “It wasn’t like that,” she said sulkily. “It wasn’t a date date.”
They were driving slowly down a long road of featureless houses somewhere in Finglas, she thought it was, or Cabra, maybe, on the lookout for likely victims to follow and stare at.
“Do you think they’re-you know-doing it?” Teddy asked.
“She doesn’t seem the type. Besides, I think something happened to her, in America.”
“What sort of something?” Teddy asked. He was wearing a blue yachting blazer with brass buttons and a crest on the pocket, and fawn slacks. She had noticed that he had begun to use perfume, though she supposed he would say it was shaving lotion.
“I think she might have been…” She hesitated. This was too much, too much; she should stop now and say not another word on the subject.
“Might have been what?” Teddy demanded.
“Well”-she could not stop-“ravished, I think.”
Teddy’s brown eyes widened to the size of pennies. “Ravished?” he said, in a hoarse whisper. “Do tell.”
“Can’t,” she said. “Don’t know. It was just a remark she made, about being caught in a car with somebody when she was over there. It was years ago. As soon as she saw I was interested she changed the subject.”
Teddy pouted disappointedly. “Did you ask the Rabbi Sinclair?”
“Did I ask him what?”
“If they’re doing it or not!”
“Of course I didn’t. I suppose you would have.”
“I certainly would.”
There was nothing Teddy would not ask about, nothing he would not ferret into, no matter how private or painful. He had got her to describe to him that Sunday morning at Brooklands, the blood, and the horror. He had envied her; she had seen it in his eyes, the almost yearning expression in them.
“Oh, look,” he said now, urgently, “look at the fat lady hanging up her bloomers on the clothesline-let’s pull over and have a good gander at her.” He drew the car to the curb and stopped. The woman had not noticed them yet. She had a clutch of clothes-pegs in her mouth. “A laundry line on the front lawn,” Teddy murmured. “That’s a new one.”
Dannie was glad that he was diverted. She was feeling more and more guilty for talking as she had. She liked Phoebe; Phoebe was funny, in a clever, understated way, a way that Dannie could never be. And Phoebe was fond of David Sinclair, that was obvious, and perhaps he was fond of her, though it was always hard to tell, with David. She wanted him to be happy. She wondered if she might be a little in love with him herself. But in that case would she not be jealous of Phoebe? She knew she did not understand these things, love, and passion, and wanting someone. That had all been stopped in her, long ago, tied off, the way a doctor would tie off her tubes so as to keep her from having babies. In fact, that was a thing she was going to have done as soon as she could find somewhere to go; it would have to be in London, she supposed. She would ask Francoise; it was the kind of thing Francoise would know about.
The fat woman was a disappointment; when she had finished hanging up the laundry she merely threw them a look and chuckled and waddled off into the house.
“Cow,” Teddy said in disgust, and drove them away.
They did not go for tea that day, but went to the Phoenix Park instead. Teddy parked the car by the Wellington Monument and they strolled over the grass, under the trees. The sunlight seemed vague somehow and diffused, as if it were weary after so many hours of shining without stint. A herd of deer grazing in a cloud of pale dust stopped at their approach and lifted their heads, their nostrils twitching and stumpy ears waggling. Stupid animals, Dannie thought, and only pretty from a distance; up close they were shabby, and their coats looked like lichen.
“You know,” she said, “they’re saying now that Richard was murdered.”
Teddy did not seem surprised, or even much interested, and she was sorry she had spoken. It was when she was bored that she blurted things out. She remembered how when she was a child, at Brooklands, she would squat by the pond at the bottom of the Long Field and poke a stick into the muddy shallows and watch the water bugs swimming and scurrying frantically away. How nice it was the way the mud would swirl up in chocolaty spirals, and then spread itself out until all the water was the color of tea, or turf, or dead leaves, and nothing more was to be seen of all that life down there, all that squirming, desperate life.
“Who did it?” Teddy inquired casually. “Do they know?”
He seemed so calm, indifferent, almost. Had he known about Richard, what he was like, the things he did? Perhaps everyone knew. She felt a little thrill of terror. She remembered at school those curious periods of suspended waiting, after she had done something bad and before it was found out. They gave her the same kind of thrill, those breathless intervals, and she would feel as if she were floating weightlessly in some medium lighter even than air and yet wonderfully sustaining. But what, now, had she done, that she was waiting to be discovered? And how would they punish her, since she was not guilty, not really?
“No,” she said, “they don’t know who killed him. At least no one has said, if they do.” She giggled; it was a real giggle; it startled her. “Francoise is trying to make them think it was your father.”
Teddy stopped and bent to detach a twig from the leg of his slacks. “Trying to make who think?”
“The police. And that doctor fellow, Quirke, that David works with.”
“Quirke.”
“Yes. He’s Phoebe’s father, as a matter of fact.”
He straightened. “Didn’t you say her name was Griffin?”
“She was adopted or something, I don’t know.”
“He’s a doctor?”
“A pathologist. He came down with the Guards, that day.”
“But why would your sister-in-law be trying to convince him of anything?”
Dannie stopped and made him stop with her, and they stood facing each other.
“Teddy Sumner,” she said, “tell me why you aren’t shocked that Francoise should be trying to make people think your father murdered my brother?”
“Were you trying to shock me?”
“Yes-of course.”
He smiled his sly smile. “You should know by now that I’m unshockable.”
“Your father didn’t, by the way-do it.”
“Well, I hardly thought he had.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He might have. They were always fighting, Richard and your father.”
But Teddy was thinking of something else. “Do you talk about all this to Sinclair?”
“A little. Not much. He doesn’t ask.”
“But you do talk to him about it.” She walked on and he trotted after her. “You do tell him secrets, I’m sure you do.”
“I don’t. I don’t tell anyone my secrets.”
“Even me?”
“Especially you.” They stopped on a rise from where there was a view over the roofs of the city sweltering in the quivering heat haze. “I wish this weather would break,” Dannie said.
“You know I knew your brother quite well,” Teddy said, in a tone of studied diffidence.
“Did you? How?”
“There’s a sort of club we were in-I mean, that he was in, and that I’m still in, I suppose.”
“What club?”
“It doesn’t matter. More a sort of an organization. He got me in, Richard did. He said it would be”-he gave a bleak little laugh-“just the thing for me.”
“And was it-is it?”
He kicked moodily at the grass with the toe of his two-toned shoe. “I don’t know. I feel a bit out of my depth, to tell the truth.”
“What do they do, in this club?”
“Nothing much. They visit places…”
“Like, abroad?”
“No, no. It’s a charity thing. Schools.” He whistled briefly, softly, squinting out over the city. “Orphanages.”
“Yes?” She felt herself grow pale. What did he mean? “I wouldn’t have thought that was quite you, Teddy,” she said, forcing a light tone, “visiting schools and being nice to orphans.”
“It isn’t me,” he said. “At least, I didn’t think it was. Until your brother convinced me.”
She could not go on looking at him, and turned her face towards the city. “When did you join this club?” she asked, her voice wobbly.
“When I left college. I was at a loose end, and Richard-Richard encouraged me. And I joined up.”
“And started visiting places.”
“Yes.”
He turned to her, and there was something in his look, a kind of anguish, and suddenly she understood, and now she did not want him to say any more, not another word. She turned on her heel and set off back in the direction of the car. There were those deer again, in their moth-eaten pelts, with those disgusting black channels at their eyes as if since birth they had been weeping, weeping, weeping.
“Pooh Bear,” Teddy called after her softly, pleadingly, in his Eeyore voice, “oh, Winnie!” But she went on, and did not look back.
She was glad he did not try to catch up with her. She hurried down the hill to the park gates and crossed the river and got a taxi outside the railway station. Her mind was blank, or rather it was a jumble of things-like an attic in an earthquake, was how she thought of it. For she knew this state well, the state that she always got into when one of her anxiety attacks, or whatever they were, was coming on.
She must get back now to her own place, and be among her own things.
So hot, the evening, so hot and close, she could hardly breathe.
The taxi man had bad breath; she could smell it from the back seat. He was talking to her about something over his shoulder but she was not listening.
Orphanages.
When she got to the flat in Pembroke Street she filled a tepid bath and lay in it for a long time, trying to calm her racing mind. There were pigeons on the sill outside the window, she could hear them, cooing in that soft secretive way that they did, as if they were exclaiming over some amazing piece of scandal that was being told to them.
After her bath she sat in her dressing gown at the kitchen table and drank coffee, cup after cup of it. She knew it was bad for her, that the caffeine would make her thoughts race all the faster, but she could not stop.
She went into the living room and lay on the sofa. She felt cooler now, after bathing in the cool water. She wished she had something to hold on to, to hug. Phoebe Griffin had confessed she still had her teddy bear from childhood. Something like that would be good-but what? She had nothing like that; she had never had anything like that.
Thinking of Phoebe’s bear made her think of Teddy Sumner, even though she did not want to. Silly name, Teddy. And yet somehow it suited him, even though he was nothing like a teddy bear.
In the end she called David Sinclair. She knew it was not fair, calling him when she was like this. It was not as if she were anything more to him than a friend. David was kind-what other man would come and take care of her, as he did, without getting something in return?
He was not at home, so she looked up the number of the hospital where he worked and phoned him there. When he heard who it was he said nothing for a moment or two, and she was afraid he might hang up. She could hear him breathing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can never think who else to call.”
He arrived at the flat an hour later, and sat with her and held her hand. He gave her the old lecture about “seeing” someone, about “talking” to someone, but what good would seeing or talking do? The damage had been started so long ago, and the marks of it were scored so deeply into her that she pictured them like jagged grooves gouged in some kind of stone-marble or what was that other one, alabaster? Yes, alabaster. She liked the sound of it. Her alabaster skin. For she was beautiful, she knew it, everyone had always told her she was. Not that it helped her, being beautiful. A doll could be beautiful, a doll that people could do anything with, love or cuddle or beat or-or anything. But David was so good to her, so patient, so kind. He prided himself on being a tough guy, she knew, but he was not tough, not really. Guarded, that was what he was, wary of showing what he felt, but behind the hard front that he put up he had a soft heart. Someday she would tell him all the things that had happened to her, that had made her as she was, this shivering creature huddled on a sofa with the curtains pulled while everyone else was outside enjoying the summer evening. Yes, someday she would tell him.
He stayed, as he always did, until she was asleep. She did not take long to drop off-he was her sedative, he ruefully told himself-and it was still early, not yet nine, when he slipped out of the house and turned left and walked up towards Fitzwilliam Square. The car that had been parked on the other side of the road when he arrived-a green Morgan, with the top up and someone inside it, a shadow behind the wheel-was no longer there. He walked on.
There was a hazy green glow over the square and mist on the grass behind the black railings. The whores were out, four or five of them, two of them keeping each other company, both skinny and dressed in black and starkly pale as the harpies in Dracula’s castle. They gave him a look as he passed by but made no overture; maybe they thought he was a plainclothes man out to trap them. One of them had a limp-the clap, most likely. One day, not so far in the future, he might fold back the corner of a sheet and find her before him on the slab, that thin face, the bluish eyelids closed, her lip still swollen. He wondered, as he often wondered, if he should leave this city, try his luck somewhere else, London, New York, even. Quirke would never retire, or by the time he did it would be too late to be his successor; something that was in him now would have been used up, a vital force would be gone.
He had walked up this way, rather than going down to Baggot Street, to avoid being tempted to call on Phoebe. He did not know why he was reluctant to see her. She was probably not at home, anyway, he thought; he remembered Quirke saying he would be taking her to dinner tonight. It struck him that he had no friends. He did not mind this. There were people he knew, of course, from college days, from work, but he rarely saw any of them. He preferred his own company. He did not suffer fools gladly and the world was full of fools. But that was not what was keeping him from Phoebe, for Phoebe was certainly no fool.
Poor Dannie. Was there to be no help for her? Something had happened in her life that she would not speak about, something unspeakable, then.
He walked around two sides of the square and turned up towards Leeson Street. Maybe he would call into Hartigan’s and drink a beer; he liked to sit on a stool in the corner and watch the life of the pub going on, what people took to be life. As he was passing by Kingram Place a fellow in a windcheater stepped out, waggling a cigarette at him. “Got a match, pal?” He was reaching for his lighter in his jacket pocket when he heard a rapid step behind him, and then there was a crash of some kind, and a burst of light, and after that, nothing but blackness.
Quirke had been to dinner, but not with Phoebe. Francoise had invited him to the house on St. Stephen’s Green. She had said that she would be alone and that she would cook dinner for them both, but when he arrived Giselle was there, which surprised and irritated him. It was not that he felt any particular antipathy towards the child-she was nine years old, what was there to take against?-but he found her uncanniness hard to deal with. She made him think of a royal pet, so much indulged and pampered that it would no longer be acknowledged or even recognized by its own kind. He had, too, when she was about, the sense of being sidled up against, somehow, in a most disconcerting way.
Francoise did not seem to think anything of the child’s presence, and if she noticed his annoyance she did not remark it. This evening she wore a scarlet silk blouse and a black skirt, and no jewelry, as usual. He noticed how she kept her hands out of sight as much as possible; women of a certain age, he knew, were sensitive of their hands. But surely she could be no more than-what, thirty-eight? forty? Isabel Galloway was younger, but not by much. The thought of Isabel brought a further darkening of his mood.
They ate asparagus, which someone at the French embassy had sent round; it had come in from Paris that morning in the diplomatic bag. Quirke did not care for the stuff, but did not say so; later on his pee would smell of boiled cabbage. They ate in a little annex to the overly grand dining room, a small square wood-paneled space with a canopy-shaped ceiling and windows on two sides looking onto the Japanese garden. The calm gray air, tinted by reflections from the gravel outside, burnished the cutlery and made the single tall candle in its pewter sconce seem to shed not light but a sort of pale fine haze. Giselle sat with them, eating a bowl of mess made from bread and sugar and hot milk. She was in her pajamas. Her braids were wound in tight coils and pinned at either side of her head like a pair of large black earphones. The lenses of her spectacles were opaque in the light from the windows and only now and then and for a second did her eyes flash out, large, quick, intently watchful. Quirke wondered wistfully when it would be her bedtime. She talked about school, and about a girl in her class called Rosemary, who was her friend, and gave her sweets. Francoise attended to her with an expression of grave interest, nodding or smiling or frowning when required. She had, Quirke could not keep himself from thinking, the air of one playing a part that had been so long and diligently rehearsed that it had become automatic, had become, indeed, natural.
His mind drifted. He had been wrestling anew, for some days now, with the old problem of love. There should be nothing to it, love: people fell in and out of it all the time. Countless poems had been written about it, countless songs had been sung in its praise. It made the world go round, so it was said. He imagined them, the hordes of enraptured lovers down the ages, millions upon millions of them, lashing at the poor old globe with the flails of their passion, keeping it awhirl on its wobbly axis like a spinning top. The love that people spoke of so much seemed a kind of miasmic cloud, a kind of ether teeming with bacilli, through which we moved as we moved through the ordinary air, immune to infection for most of the time but destined to succumb sooner or later, somewhere or other, struck down to writhe upon our beds in tender torment.
With Isabel Galloway it had not been difficult. She and Quirke had both known what they wanted, more or less: a little pleasure, a little company, someone to admire and be admired by. It was a different matter with Francoise d’Aubigny. The heat that Quirke and she generated together gave off a whiff of brimstone. He knew the kind of fire he was playing with, the damage it could do. Isabel had been the first victim; who would be next? Him? Francoise? Giselle? For she was in it too, he was sure of it, lodged between them like a swaddled bundle even in their most intimate moments together.
He caught himself up-Isabel the first victim? Ah, no.
The child now had finished her pap and Francoise rose from the table and took her by the hand. “Say good night to Dr. Quirke,” she said, and the child gave him a narrow look.
When they had left the room, Quirke pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. The dying light of evening had taken on a gray-brown tinge. He was uneasy. He had not reckoned on the child being in the house-though where else would she be?-and he was not sure what to expect of Francoise, or what she would expect of him. He imagined the child lying in that narrow white bed in that ghostly white room, sleepless and vigilant for hours, listening intently for every smallest sound around her. He had not slept with Francoise in this house, and thought it unlikely that he would, this night, anyway. Yet he could not be sure. He was not sure of anything, with Francoise. Maybe she had only slept with him at his flat that one time in a moment of weakness, because she had needed a body to hold on to for a little while, in an effort to warm herself back to life. For when her husband died she must have felt something in herself die, along with him. How could she not? Thinking about these things, Quirke would frequently experience a sort of violent start, like the sensation of missing a step in sleep and being jerked into wakefulness, breathless and shocked-shocked at himself, at Francoise d’Aubigny, at what they were doing together. How, in such circumstances, he would ask himself, how could he imagine himself in love? And again he would seem to catch that sulfurous whiff rising up out of the depths.
What would he do now, tonight, if she asked him to stay? Along with Giselle there was another presence in this house, a listening ghost as vigilant as the living child would be.
He had finished his cigarette and started another when Francoise came back and took her place opposite him again-he always found stirring the way that women had of sweeping a hand under their bottoms to smooth their skirts when they sat down-and smiled at him and said that there were two escalopes of veal in the kitchen that she should go and cook.
“Sit for a minute,” Quirke said. “I’m not very hungry.”
He offered her a cigarette and then the flame of his lighter. She said, “I can see you disapprove of Giselle being allowed to stay up so late.”
“Not at all. You’re her mother. It’s not my business.”
“It is that she has bad dreams, you see.”
He nodded. “And you?”
“Me?”
“What are your dreams like?”
She laughed a little, looking down. “Oh, I do not dream. Or if I do, I do not remember what I dreamed about.”
There was a pause, and then he asked, “What are we doing, here, you and I?”
“Here, tonight?” Her black eyes had widened. “We are having dinner, I think, yes?”
Quirke leaned back in his chair. “Tell me about Marie Bergin,” he said.
She started, as if at a pinprick. “Marie? How do you know Marie?”
“I went to see Carlton Sumner, as you recommended. Inspector Hackett and I went out to Roundwood.”
“I see.” She was looking at the burning tip of her cigarette. “And you spoke to him-to Carlton.”
“Yes.”
She waited. “And?”
Quirke looked through the window behind her to the sky’s darkening blue over Iveagh Gardens. “He said you and your husband used to be friends with him and his wife. That they stayed with you, at your place in the south of France.”
She made a quick, sweeping gesture with her left hand. “That was not a successful occasion.”
“Something about towels.”
“Towels? What do you mean, towels? Carl Sumner tried to make love to me. Now I am going to cook our food.”
She stood up and walked from the alcove and quickly across the dining room and out, shutting the door behind her. She had left her cigarette half smoked in the ashtray. A lipstick stain on a cigarette: that was another thing that excited him, every time, whatever the circumstances. He thought of Carlton Sumner’s bristling mustache, the sweat stains at the armpits of his gold-colored shirt. He rose from the table and went to the door through which Francoise had gone. Silence hung in the hallway like a drape. He remembered coming through the kitchen the day of the memorial party, and set off again in that direction.
She was standing by the sink, holding a glass of white wine with the fingers of both hands wrapped around the stem. The veal was on a plate by the stove, and there were carrots and broccoli on a wooden chopping board, waiting to be prepared. She did not turn when he came in. Blue-black night was in the window now. “I do not know what we are doing,” she said, still without turning.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was a stupid thing to say, to ask.” He went and stood beside her and looked at her in profile. There were tears on her face. He touched her hands holding the glass and she flinched away from him. “Forgive me,” he said.
She took a sharp breath and wiped at the tears with the heel of a hand. At last she turned. He saw that she was angry. “You know nothing,” she said, “nothing.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “I know a great deal. That’s why I’m here.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I. But I am here.”
She put down the wine glass and took a step towards him and he held her in his arms and kissed her, tasting the wine on her breath. She moved her face aside and leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “I do not know what to do,” she said.
He did not know, either. With Isabel he had been free, or as free as it was possible to be with anyone; but now, here, what had seemed silk cords had turned out to be the rigid bars of a cage in which he was a captive.
He led her to a small plastic-topped table and they sat down, he on one side and she on the other, their hands entwined in the middle. “Tell me about Sumner,” he said.
“Oh, what is there to tell. He tries his luck with every woman he meets.”
“But you were friends, you and Richard and he.”
She laughed. “You think that would make a difference, to a man like Carlton Sumner?”
“Did Richard know about this pass that Sumner made at you?”
“I told him, of course.”
“And what did he do?”
“He asked them to leave.”
“And they left.”
“Yes. I don’t know what Carl told Gloria, how he explained the sudden departure. I imagine she guessed.”
“Could this be the cause of the fight your husband had with Sumner at that business meeting?”
She gazed at him for a moment, then suddenly laughed. “Ah, cheri, ” she said, “you are so quaint and old-fashioned. Richard would not care about such a thing. When I told him, he was amused. The truth is, he was glad of a reason to ask them to leave, for he was bored with their company. I suspect, by the way, that Gloria had made a pass, as you say, at him. They were, they are, that kind of people, the Sumners.” She took her hands from his, and he brought out his cigarettes. “What did he say to you, when you spoke to him?” she asked. “You tell me the policeman was there too? Carlton would have enjoyed that, a visit from the police.”
“He said very little. That he had made your husband an offer of a partnership that day, and that your husband walked out.”
“A partnership? That is a lie. He wanted-he wants -to take over the business entirely. He wanted Richard out, with some silly title-executive director or something; that was his idea of a partnership.” She turned and gestured vaguely towards the food on the counter. “We should eat…”
“I told you, I’m not hungry.”
“I think you live on cigarettes.”
“Don’t forget alcohol-that, too.”
They left the kitchen and went back to the nook in the dining room. The night was pressing its glossy back against the window. The candle had burned halfway, and a knobbly trail of wax had dripped down the side and onto the table. Quirke lifted the bottle of Bordeaux. “You were drinking white, in the kitchen…?”
“Red will do, it doesn’t matter-I never notice what I am drinking.” She watched him pour. “Why did you ask about Marie Bergin? Did you see her at the Sumners’? Did you speak to her?”
“I saw her, yes. I didn’t speak to her. She doesn’t seem to say much. She looked frightened, to me.”
“Frightened of what?”
“I don’t know. Sumner, maybe. Why did you let her go?”
“Oh, you know what servants are like-”
“No, I don’t.”
“They come and they go. They always think they are being treated badly, and that things will be so very much better elsewhere.” She was leaning forward with her hands clasped on the table before her and as she spoke her breath made the candle flame waver, and phantom shadows leapt up the walls around them. “Marie was nice, but a silly girl. I don’t know why you are interested in her.”
He too leaned forward into the wavering cone of candlelight. “I’m trying to understand,” he said, “why your husband was killed.”
It struck him that each of them rarely spoke the other’s name.
“But what has this servant girl to do with it?” Francoise demanded.
“I don’t know. But there has to be a reason why he died.” To that she said nothing. The prancing shadows around them grew still. “I think,” he said, “I should go home.”
His hand was resting on the table; she touched the back of it with her fingertips. “I hoped you would stay.”
He thought of that sprite lying in her white room, staring into the darkness, attending.
“I think it’s better that I go,” he said.
She pressed her nails lightly into his skin. “I love you,” she said, as matter-of-factly as if she were telling him the time.
His footsteps echoed on the granite pavement as he walked along by the side of the Green. Behind the railings the trees were still; they stood in the light of the streetlamps, these vast living things, seeming to lean down as if watchful of his passing. What was he to do? His mind was a swirl of doubts and confusion. He did not know himself, he never had; he did not know how to live, not properly. He put a hand to his face and caught a trace of her perfume on his fingers, or was he imagining it? He could not get the woman out of his head, that was the simple fact of the matter; the thought of her had infected him, like a worm lodged in his brain. If only he could shake free of her, if somehow she were to cease to exist for him, even for a minute or two, he would be able to think clearly, but he was at the middle of a maze, and whichever way his thoughts turned her image was there before him, blocking all paths. What was he to do?
The Shelbourne was lit up like an ocean liner. He walked along Merrion Row past Doheny amp; Nesbitt’s, and at Baggot Street turned into the broad sweep of Merrion Street and passed by the Government Buildings. His city, and yet not. No matter how many years he might live here there would always be a part of him that was alien. Was there anywhere that he truly belonged? He thought of the far west, where he had been an orphan child, that land of bare rock and crackling heather and stunted, wind-tormented trees. The trees, yes, they all leaned inland, frozen in perpetual flight, their thin bare branches clawing to be gone from this fearsome place. That was his west. They were trying to sell it now to the Americans as the land of trout streams and honeybees and Paul Henry skies. Any day now they would drive all the orphans and the miscreants out of Carricklea and turn it into a luxury hotel. Carricklea, Carricklea. The name tolled in him like the dark tolling of a distant bell.
Mount Street was deserted. At No. 39 there was something white tied to the door knocker. It was an envelope, crumpled and stained, with a bit of string through one corner and tied in a neat bow to the knocker. His name was on it. He shrank from it, he did not want to touch it, but how could he not? He reached out and tugged with squeamish delicacy at the loose ends of the bow, and the loops of string slipped apart slackly, as if they had been dipped in oil. There was something in the envelope, a thing-could it be?-of flesh and bone, by the feel of it.
He went back down the steps to the pavement and stood under the light of the streetlamp. His name, lacking the final e, had been scrawled in shapeless block capitals, as if by a child. He ripped open the flap. The thing inside was wrapped in what, from the smell that floated up, he recognized as a torn-off scrap of a chip bag. When he saw the thing inside he instinctively threw it into the gutter. He squatted, peering, and twisted the torn envelope into a baton and poked at it. He saw with relief that it was not what he had first thought it to be. It was a finger, cheese-pale, crooked a little, as if beckoning. It had been cut off at the point where it joined the hand, and there was blood, and the white glint of bone. He unrolled the torn envelope again and looked inside. No message, nothing. He straightened up. He was aware of his heartbeat, a heavy dull slogging, and for a moment he felt light-headed and was afraid he might fall over. He looked up and down the street in the darkness, and saw no one. A car went past, but the driver did not give him a glance. He bent again and picked up the finger from the gutter and dropped it into the torn half of the envelope, folded it quickly, and put it in his pocket.
In the flat he went into the kitchen and put the envelope in the sink. He supposed he should not feel so shaken, given that he dealt with dead flesh every day in work. It was a man’s finger, which was a relief-when he had first seen it he had thought at once of Phoebe, whom he had led so many times unwittingly into harm’s way. Back in the living room he picked up the telephone receiver, and only half knowing what he was doing dialed the number of Hackett’s office. He had still not switched on the light. Why would Hackett be there, at this hour? But he was. The familiar voice seemed to rise out of a hole in the darkness.
“Dr. Quirke,” he said, “I was trying to call you myself.”
Quirke could not grasp this. He was calling Hackett-why would Hackett be calling him? He stared into the receiver. “When?” he asked dully. “When were you calling me?”
“The past hour. It’s your chap Sinclair. He was attacked.”
“Attacked? What do you mean?”
“He’s in the hospital.”
Quirke closed his eyes and pressed a thumb and two fingers to the bridge of his nose. “I don’t understand-what happened?”
“He’s all right. He took a going over, but he’s not bad. Only”-Hackett paused, and his voice sank a tone-“he lost a finger.”