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.
8
St. Christopher’s was a gaunt, gray, mock-Gothic pile standing on a rocky promontory that looked across to Lambay Island. The more sophisticated among the priests of the Redemptorist Order who administered the place referred to it jocularly as the Chateau d’If, though the inmates called it something else. It was an orphanage, exclusively for boys. Those who passed through it remembered most vividly of all the particular smell of the place, a complex blend of damp stone, wet wool, stale urine, boiled cabbage, and another odor, thin and sharp and acidic, that seemed to the survivors of St. Christopher’s the stink of misery itself. The institution had a formidable reputation throughout the land. Mothers threatened their miscreant sons that they would be sent there-for not all the inmates were orphans, not by any means. St. Christopher’s welcomed all comers, and the mite of state subsidy that each one brought. Overcrowding was never a problem, for boys are small, and St. Christopher’s boys tended to be smaller than most, thanks to the frugal diet they enjoyed. Passengers on the Belfast train were offered the best view of the great house standing upon its rock, with its sheer granite walls, its louring turrets, its bristling chimneys dribbling meager plumes of coal smoke. Few going past looked on it for long, however, but turned their eyes uneasily aside, and shuddered.
Quirke traveled by train to Balbriggan and at the station hired a hackney car that drove him down along the coast to Baytown, a huddle of cottages abutting St. Christopher’s and looking like so many lumps of weathered masonry left over after the construction of the house had been completed. The day, though heavily overcast, was hot, and had a sulky look to it, determined as it was on withholding the rain that the fat clouds were full of and that the parched fields so sorely craved. At the tall gates Quirke pulled the bell chain and presently an old man came out of the gate lodge bearing a great iron key and let him in. Yes, Quirke said, he was expected. The old man eyed his well-cut suit and expensive shoes and sniffed.
The driveway Quirke remembered as much longer, and much wider, a great curved sweep leading majestically up to the house, but in fact it was hardly more than an unfenced track with a ditch on either side, dry now. He supposed this would be the general tenor of his visit this afternoon, everything misrecalled and jumbled up and out of proportion. He had spent less than a year here, on his way to Carricklea, the industrial school, so called, in the far west, where he had been sent because no one could think what else to do with him. He had not been very unhappy at St. Christopher’s, not if his unhappiness were measured against the scale of the things he had experienced up to then in his short life, and certainly not if measured against what awaited him at Carricklea. One or two of the priests at St. Christopher’s had been kind, or at least had shown an intermittent mildness, and not all of the bigger boys had beaten him. Yet it gave him an awesome shiver to be walking up this dusty way, in this sullenly radiant light, and at every step his feet and his legs seemed to sink deeper into the ground before him.
A lanky boy with cropped blond hair, a trusty of the place, led him along a soundless corridor to a high dim room with an oak dining table that had probably never been dined on and three windows that were enormous and yet seemed to let in only a trickle of light from outdoors. When he was here he had not known of the existence of such a room, so grand, as it would have seemed to him, so richly appointed. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out blankly-a bit of lawn, a graveled path, a far patch of sea-and listening to the faint and seemingly apprehensive poppings and pingings deep in his gut. His lunch was not sitting well with him.
Father Ambrose was tall and thin and grizzled, like one of those pared-down selfless priests who till the mission fields or care for lepers. “Good afternoon, Dr. Quirk,” he said, in the strained and reedy voice of an ascetic. “St. Christopher’s is always glad to see old boys.” A fan of fine wrinkles opened at the outer corner of each eye when he smiled. His hand was a bundle of thin dry twigs in a wrapping of greaseproof paper. He gave off a faint aroma of candle wax. He was an implausibly perfect specimen of what a priest should look and sound and even smell like, and Quirke wondered if he was kept in a cell somewhere and brought out and pressed into service whenever a visitor called.
“I wanted to inquire,” Quirke said, “about a girl-a young woman-called Marie Bergin.” He spelled the surname. “It seems she worked here, for a time, some years ago.”
Father Ambrose, still absently holding the hand that Quirke had given him to shake, stood very close to him and was examining his features minutely, running his eyes rapidly here and there, and Quirke had the eerie sensation of being not looked at but rather of being palped, softly, delicately, as if a blind man were feeling all over his face with his fingertips.
“Come, Dr. Quirke,” he said in his breathily confidential voice, “come and sit down.”
They sat at a corner of the dining table, on two of the high-backed chairs that were ranged around it like
