“Children are resilient,” Quirke said, aware how lumpish and banal it sounded. “They get over things that would kill us.”
She went on staring wide-eyed into the grate, then came back to herself with a start and turned to him. “Do they?” she said.
He faltered. “So I’m told.”
“You have no children?”
“No-I mean yes. I had-I have a daughter. She’s grown up. I didn’t really know her when she was a child.”
She began to weep, without preamble, without fuss, making no sound, her shoulders shaking. He did not hesitate, but crossed to where she stood and took her in his arms. She was so thin and, suddenly, so frail, a tall, bereft bird. Through the satin stuff of her dress he could feel the twin sharp flanges of her shoulder blades; her sobs made them twitch like tensely folded wings. At his approach she had pressed her fists against each other with the handkerchief between them and held them to her breast, and now they were against his breast, too, though they were not a barrier, he felt, but on the contrary a sign of need, a gesture of supplication. Somehow he found her mouth, and tasted her tears, hot and sharp. He kissed her, but she did not kiss him back, only suffered his lips on hers, unwilling, it seemed, or perhaps even unnoticing. She might have been a sleepwalker, bumping up against him in the dark and not waking. She detached herself from his embrace and took a step back.
“I’m sorry,” he said, although he was not.
She blinked; he could see her making herself concentrate. “No, no,” she said, “please, do not keep apologizing. I’m glad. It was”-she smiled with an effort, the tears still shining on her cheeks-“inevitable.”
Strange, how for him all the uncertainty and doubt, all that feeling of adolescent fumbling, how it was all gone, rid of in an instant, replaced by something deeper, darker, of far more weight, as if that kiss had been the culmination of a ceremony he had not been aware of as it unfolded, and that had ended by their sealing, there by the cold hearth, a solemn pact of dependence and fraught collaboration, and it was not the nearness of the fireplace, he knew, that was giving to his mouth a bitter taste of ashes.
6
When the hospital receptionist called to say he had a visitor, Quirke at first did not recognize the name. Then he remembered. “Tell her I’ll come up,” he said, and slowly replaced the receiver.
It was usually cool down here in his basement office, but the heat of this day reached even to these depths. He took a last quick couple of puffs at his cigarette and crushed the stub in the glass ashtray on his desk and stood up. He had not been wearing his white coat but now he put it on; it was as good as a mask, that coat, lending anonymity and authority. He walked along the curving green-painted corridor, then climbed the outlandishly grand marble staircase that led up to the entrance lobby of the hospital-the place had been built to house government offices in a past century, when governments could still afford that kind of thing.
She was waiting by the reception desk, looking nervous and a little lost.
“Mrs. Maguire,” he said. “How are you?”
She wore an ugly little hat held at an angle on the left side of her head with a pearl pin. On her arm she carried a caramel-colored leather handbag. Quirke noted the cheap sandals.
She spoke in a rush. “Dr. Quirke, I hope you don’t mind me coming here like this, only I wanted to talk to you about-”
“It’s all right,” he said quietly, touching a fingertip to Sarah Maguire’s elbow to move her out of earshot of the two receptionists, who were eyeing her with frank speculation. He had intended to bring her to the canteen but now decided it would be better to get her away from the building altogether-there was a touch of hysteria to her manner, and he did not relish the prospect of a scene. He took off and folded his white coat and asked one of the receptionists to look after it until his return. “Come along,” he said to Mrs. Maguire. “You look like a person who could do with a cup of tea.”
He walked her out into the noise and heat of midafternoon. The air had a blue tint to it and felt leaden and barely breathable. Buses brayed and the humped black roofs of cars gave off a molten sheen. They stopped at the Kylemore cafe on the corner. There were few customers at that hour, women, mostly, taking a break from shopping and looking hot and cross. Quirke led the way to a table in a shaded corner. He had a cigarette going before they were seated. The waitress in her chocolate-brown uniform came and he ordered a pot of tea with biscuits and a glass of soda water for himself. Mrs. Maguire in her chair shrank back into the corner, looking much like a mouse crouching in the dim entrance to its hole. There was a cold sore at one corner of her mouth. Her eyes were so pale it would have been hard to say what color they were; Quirke thought of those marbles made of milky glass that were much prized when he was a boy.
“So,” he said, “tell me what it is you want to talk to me about.”
As if he did not know.
“It’s about William, my husband. He-”
Suddenly, when she said the name, Quirke remembered. How was it he had forgotten, when Jimmy Minor told him of Maguire having served a sentence in Mountjoy, that he had given medical evidence at the trial? Billy Maguire-of course. Ten years ago, it was-more, fifteen. A cattle dealer killed in a brawl after a fair day in Monasterevin. Blow of a fist to the throat, the carotid artery crushed, and then as if that were not enough the fellow had fallen back and smashed his skull on a curbstone. Billy Maguire had not known his own strength or, it seemed, his uncontrollable temper. The court had pitied him, this desolate and frightened young man slumped in the box day after day in his Sunday suit, trying to follow the proceedings of the trial like the slowest child in the classroom. Five years he got, three, as it turned out, with good behavior. Had Dick Jewell known of the conviction when he hired him to run the yard at Brooklands? Quirke thought not. Jewell the social philanthropist was largely a skillfully got up figment of the imaginations of the Clarion ’s color writers.
“-But that’s no reason to be casting slurs on him now,” Maguire’s wife was saying, leaning forward intently with her thin defenseless neck thrust out. “William is a good man, and all that is past history, isn’t it, Dr. Quirke?”
“Slurs?” Quirke said. “What slurs?”
She cast a quick bitter glance to one side. “Oh, in the town, of course, they’re saying Mr. Jewell didn’t do away with himself at all, that it was only made to look like that by someone who was there that day. But it was suicide, wasn’t it, Doctor?”
Quirke made his smile as kindly as he could manage. “You haven’t touched your tea,” he said. “Take some, it’ll calm your nerves.”
“Oh, my nerves!” she said, with a harsh little laugh. “My nerves are long past calming.”
Quirke sipped his soda water, the bubbles going up his nose and popping tinily, making him want to sneeze. “What is it you think I can do, Mrs. Maguire?”
“You could maybe talk to him, tell him to stand up for himself and not be heeding all them in the town prattling behind his back. He remembers you from the-from the trial, how sympathetic you seemed.”
He looked away from her, from the awful imploring gaze that to his shame was setting his teeth on edge. “And what does he think happened that day?” he asked.
She drew her head back and sank her chin into her throat and stared. “What do you mean?”
“Your husband-does he think Richard Jewell killed himself?”
The stare wavered and slid aside. “He doesn’t know what happened, any more than anyone else”-she turned back to him and now her eyes narrowed-“any more than the Guards themselves know, when you read between the lines in what the newspapers say, even the Clarion.” Again that rasping little laugh. “Especially the Clarion. ”
He poured more tea. She watched his hands as if he were performing an exotic and immensely delicate maneuver.
“How long have you been at Brooklands,” he asked, “you and your husband?”
