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.”
