Darkness had fallen without their noticing it, yet even still a faint mauve glimmer lingered in the air. She invited him in, and he sat in the only chair while she made coffee on the little stove that stood on a Formica-topped cupboard in one corner, beside the sink. Most of her things, which were not many, were still in cardboard boxes stacked on the floor at the foot of the narrow bed. The only light was from an unshaded sixty-watt bulb dangling from the center of the ceiling like something that had been hanged. “Yes, I know,” Phoebe said, glancing up at it. “I’m going to buy a floor lamp.” She brought him his demitasse of coffee. “Don’t look so disapproving. The next time you come here you won’t recognize the place. I have plans.”
She sat on the floor beside his chair, her legs folded under her and her own cup cradled in her lap. She was wearing her black dress with the white lace collar and her hair was pinned back severely behind her ears. Quirke felt he should tell her she was making herself look more and more like a nun, but he had not the heart; he had hurt her enough, in the past-he could keep his mouth shut now.
“So, obviously,” she said, “you think Richard Jewell’s death had something to do with the fight he had with Carlton Sumner.”
“Did I say that?” He did not think he had; he realized he was a little drunk.
She smiled. “You don’t have to say it; I can guess.”
“Yes, you’re getting good at this death business.”
Now they both frowned, and looked aside. People that Phoebe had known, one of them a friend, had died violently; it was her grim joke that she would be called the Black Widow except that she had never been married. Quirke drank off the last bitter mouthful of coffee and rose and carried the cup to the sink. He rinsed it and set it upside down on the draining board.
“Something felt wrong in that house,” he said, drying his hands on a tea towel. “Brooklands, I mean.”
“Well, since someone had just committed suicide, or been murdered, or whatever-”
“No, apart from that,” he said.
He was lighting a cigarette. She watched him from where she was sitting. There was a way in which he would always be a stranger to her, an intimate stranger, this father who for the first two decades of her life had pretended she was not his daughter. And now, suddenly, it came to her, watching him there, the great bulk of him in his too-tight black suit, dwarfing her little room, that without quite realizing it she had forgiven him at last, forgiven the lies and subterfuge, the years of cruel abnegation, all that. He was too sad, too sad and wounded in his soul, for her to go on resenting him.
“Tell me more about it,” she said, shivering a little. She made herself smile. “Tell me about the widow, and the girl that tried to kill herself. Tell me everything.”
David Sinclair felt confused. He was resentful of Quirke for that clumsy attempt tonight to pair him off with his daughter, and resentful of Phoebe, too, for going along with it. And that ghastly restaurant had reminded him of nothing so much as the dissecting room, with plate succeeding plate of pale dank carcasses. He could still taste the sole at the back of his throat, a salty buttery slime. Why had he accepted the invitation in the first place? He could have made some excuse. He had always known it would be a mistake to let Quirke get any closer than professional etiquette required. What would be next? Outings to the pictures? Sunday morning at-homes? Afternoons at the seaside, with flasks of tea and sandy sandwiches, him and the girl running hand in hand into the waves while Quirke with the legs of his trousers rolled and a knotted hankie on his head sat watching from the beach with a smug paternal smile? No, no, he would have to put a stop to this before it started. Whatever it was.
And yet, there was the girl. She looked like nothing much, with that stark little face and the hair clawed back as if it were a punishment that had been imposed on her for an infringement of some religious rule. She was a study in black-and-white-the pale face and raked hair, the jet stuff of her dress and its starched lace collar-like the negative of a photograph of herself. And the air she had of knowing something that no one else knew, something droll and faintly ridiculous-it was unnerving. Yes, that was the right word: unnerving. He had tried to remember the story about Quirke and her, something about Quirke pretending for years that she was not his daughter but the daughter of his brother-in-law, Malachy Griffin, the outgoing consultant obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family. He had paid no attention to the gossip-what was it to him if Quirke chose to reject a whole household of unwanted offspring?
But Phoebe, now, Phoebe; despite everything, he could not get her out of his head, and it annoyed him.
He heard the telephone as soon as he came into the hall. His flat was two flights up and he took the stairs two at a time, heaving himself hand over hand up the slightly sticky banister. He was convinced it was Quirke calling him, as he had called two days ago, not summoning him to work this time but to something else-what? Another tryst with him and his daughter, already? Surely not. He gained the second-floor landing, out of breath and slightly dizzy, and still the phone was going. Determined, whoever the caller was. He burst into the flat and fumbled the receiver to his ear-why was he in such a state? But he knew, of course; improbable as it was, he was certain it was Quirke calling to talk to him about Phoebe.
In his confusion he did not at first recognize the voice, and when he did he had to stop himself from groaning. “Oh, Dannie,” he said. “Are you all right?” Knowing that of course she was not.
He let the taxi go at the bottom of Pembroke Street, not wanting to have to get out directly in front of her door, he was not sure why. She was in her dressing gown when she let him in. She had not bothered to turn on the light on the stairs coming down and they climbed to her flat in the dark. A fanlight on the return held a single star, stiletto-shaped and shimmering. Dannie had not yet said a word. He was filled with foreboding; he could almost feel it sloshing about inside him like some awful oily liquid. Why had he answered the damned phone, anyway? Now he was trapped. Dannie would make a night of it. He had been through this before, the floods of words, the tears, the soft wailing, the pleas for understanding, tenderness, pity. Now they reached the open door of the flat, and when she trailed in ahead of him he hesitated for a second on the threshold, wondering if he had the courage just to turn on his heel and go running off down those stairs as fast as he had run up the stairs at home to answer her anguished call for help.
Her flat had the familiar smell, brownish and dull, that it took on when Dannie was in one of her lows; it was like the smell of hair left long unwashed, or perhaps that was indeed what it was. Dannie had two modes, wholly distinct. For most of the time she was a coolly self-contained daughter of the middle class, fond of her pleasures, a little bored, somewhat spoiled. Then something would happen, some blend of chemicals in her brain would tip the wrong way, and she would sink into what seemed a limitless depth of sorrow and bitter distress. Her friends had learned to dread these lapses, and at the first sign of them would discover convenient excuses to be unavailable. Sinclair, however, was unable to refuse her when she was like this, so sad and helpless. She was infuriating, too, of course. Her relentlessness was hard to bear, and after hours of her hammering on at him he would have the urge to seize her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth chattered.
Afterwards, when the depression had lifted and she had regained her equilibrium, she would be full of apologies, ducking her head in that childish way she did and doing her mortified laugh. Although they never remarked it outright, it was acknowledged between them how much she appreciated the fact that he had never taken advantage of her when she was at her weakest, for when she was like that she would do anything to win even a crumb of sympathy. More than once he had been tempted, when she fell into his arms and clung to him, but always he called to mind the wise but cruel watchword from his student days: never screw a nut. Anyway, he suspected she had not much interest in that kind of thing. She had the air of a debauched virgin, if such a thing were possible. Poor Dannie, so beautiful, so damaged, so pitiful.
In the front room they sat on the bench seat in the bay of the big window that looked down on the deserted street. Though it was almost midnight a bluish glow still lingered in the air, and the streetlights glimmered wanly.
“I’m sorry,” Sinclair said, “about your brother.” He did not know what else to say.
“Are you?” she said listlessly. “I don’t think I am. Isn’t that strange?” She was looking down into the street. She seemed calm except for her hands, clasped together in her lap and swarming over each other in a convulsive washing movement. “Or maybe it’s not strange,” she said, “maybe no one is ever really sad when someone dies,
