Christine Falls

“I’m pleading with you, Quirke,” she said, appalled at herself, at the abjectness she was reduced to. “I’m begging you. Talk to him.”

“And I’m asking you: what about?”

“Anything. Phoebe-talk about Phoebe. He listens to you, even though you think he doesn’t.”

The swan again made its peculiar hoot, calling to her querulously.

“Must be the female,” Quirke said. Sarah, baffled, frowned. He pointed to the birds behind her. “They mate for life, so it’s said. She must be the female.” He smiled his crooked smile. “Or the male.”

She shrugged aside the irrelevance.

“He’s under a great deal of strain,” she said.

“What sort of strain?”

He was, she realized, becoming bored, she could hear it in his voice. Patience, tolerance, indulgence, these had never been among Quirke’s anyway not numerous virtues.

“Mal doesn’t confide in me,” she said. “He hasn’t, for a long time.”

Again she had pushed at that door into the darkness, again he declined her invitation to enter with her.

“You think he’d confide in me?” he said, with intended harshness.

“He’s a good man, Quirke.” She lifted her hands to him in a gesture of pained supplication. “Please-he needs to talk to someone.”

He in turn lifted his great shoulders, let them fall again. There were moments, such as when he flexed his great broad frame like this, that he seemed made not of flesh and bone but of some more dense material, hewn and carved.

“All right, Sarah,” he said in a voice cavernous with weary impatience. The swans, discouraged at last, turned and glided serenely, disdainfully, away. “All right,” he said, a deeper fall. “All right.”

HE INVITED MAL TO LUNCH AT JAMMET’S. THE CHOICE, HE WAS WELL aware, was a mild piece of mischief on his part, since fine food was not among the rich things that Mal coveted, and he was uncomfortable amidst the restaurant’s down-at-heel splendeurs. He sat vigilantly on a chair that was as spindly as his own frame, with his long neck protruding from his white shirt collar and the fingers of both hands-a strangler’s delicate, shapely hands, Quirke always thought-clamped on the table edge as if he might leap up at any moment and hurry out of the place. He wore his habitual pinstripes and bow tie. Despite the elegant cut of his clothes he never seemed quite squared up in them; it was as if someone else had dressed him with fussy care, as a mother would dress her unwilling son in his Confirmation suit. The maitre d’ descended on them flutteringly and offered M’sieur Kweerk and his guest an aperitif, and Mal sighed heavily and looked at his watch. Quirke enjoyed seeing him trapped like this; it was part of the payment, part of the recompense, that he exacted from his brother-in-law-his almost-brother-for the advantages he enjoyed, although what those advantages were, had he been challenged, Quirke could not have said, exactly, except that there was the obvious one, which was, of course, Sarah.

Quirke chose an expensive claret and made an ostentatious show of swirling a splash of it in his glass, sniffing, and tasting, and frowning in approval to the wine waiter, while Mal looked away, controlling his impatience. He would not take even a glass of the wine, saying he had work to do in the afternoon. “Fine,” Quirke snapped. “All the more for me, then.” The elderly waiter in his shiny black tailcoat tended them with the unctuous solemnity of an usher at a funeral service. After Quirke had ordered salmon in aspic and a roasted grouse Mal asked for chicken soup and a plain omelette. “For God’s sake, Mal,” Quirke said under his breath.

Their conversation was even more strained than usual. Only a couple of other tables in the place were occupied and everything above a murmur could be heard halfway across the room. They talked desultorily of hospital matters. Quirke’s jaws ached from the effort of not yawning, and presently his mind too began to ache. He was both impressed and irritated by Mal’s capacity to be engrossed, or at least to give a convincing impression of being engrossed, in the minutiae of the administration of the Holy Family Hospital, even the name of which, in all its bathos, always provoked in Quirke a shudder of embarrassment and loathing. Listening to Mal stolidly expounding on what he kept referring to as the hospital’s overall financial position, he asked himself if he were lacking in an essential seriousness: but he knew, of course, that by asking this he was really only congratulating himself for not being dull and dogged like his brother-in-law. He found Mal to be a continuing mystery, but not thereby impressive. Mal was for Quirke a version of the Sphinx: high, unavoidable, and monumentally ridiculous.

Yet what was he to make of this business of Christine Falls? It could not be, he had decided, a question of professional negligence-Mal was never negligent. But what, then? Quirke would have had no doubt of the answer to that question had the man involved been anyone other than Malachy Griffin. Girls like Chrissie Falls were traps for the unwary, but Mal was the wariest man that Quirke had ever known. And yet, watching him now, plying his soup spoon with finical little swoops and lifts-those hands again, slow and somewhat clumsy despite their slender lines; in the delivery room he had a reputation for being too quick to reach for the forceps-Quirke wondered if throughout all these years he might have been underestimating his brother-in-law, or perhaps overestimating would be the better word. What went on behind that bony, coffin-shaped face, those prominent, washed-blue eyes: what illicit hungers lurked there? No sooner had he begun to think this thought than his mind turned aside from it queasily. No: he did not want to speculate on Mal’s secret predilections. The girl had died and he had covered up the sordid circumstances-surely that was all there was to it. These things happened, more often than was imagined. Quirke thought of Sarah standing on the canal bank, looking at the swans and not seeing them, her eyes brimming with troubles. He’s under a great deal of strain, she had said; was the strain all to do with Christine Falls, and if so, did Sarah know about her? And what did she know? He had done, he told himself, the right thing: the registry file was safely rewritten, and that coward Mulligan would keep his mouth shut. The girl was dead-what else was of consequence? And besides, he had an advantage on his brother-in-law now. He did not think he would ever need or want to use it, but it gratified him to know that it was there, available to him, even though, knowing it, he felt the faintest twinge of shame.

The salmon was tasteless and faintly slimy in texture, and the grouse when it came was dry. A youngish, plump woman at the table nearest to them was looking at Mal and saying something about him to her companion; a patient, no doubt, another matron the great Mr. Griffin would have had a hand in. Quirke grinned covertly, and then before he could stop himself he heard himself say:

“Sarah asked me to do this, you know.”

Mal, who had got on to the subject of budgets for the coming fiscal year, fell silent and sat quite still, gazing at the last forkful of omelette on his plate, his head inclined sideways a little as if he were hard of hearing or had water trapped in an ear.

“What?” he said, tonelessly.

Quirke was lighting a cigarette and had to speak out of the side of his mouth. “She asked me if I would talk to you,” he said, blowing an accidental but perfect smoke ring. “Frankly, it’s the only reason I’m here.”

Mal laid aside his knife and fork with slow deliberation and again put his hands palm down on the table on either side of his plate in that way that made it seem he might be about to push himself violently to his feet. “You’ve refused Sarah before now,” he said.

Quirke sighed. It had always been like this between them, this childish tussling, Mal dourly dogged and Quirke wanting to be offhand and gay but annoyed instead and blurting things.

“She thinks you’re in trouble,” Quirke said shortly. He twiddled the cigarette irritably in his fingers.

“Did she say that?” Mal asked. He sounded genuinely curious to hear if it was so.

Quirke shrugged. “Not in so many words.” He sighed again angrily, then leaned forward, lowering his voice for effect. “Listen, Mal, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s about that girl, Christine Falls. I got her back from the morgue and did a P.M. on her.”

Mal exhaled a long, silent breath, as if he were a large balloon that had been pricked by a tiny pin. The woman at the other table looked his way again and, seeing his expression, stopped chewing. “Why did you do that?” he inquired mildly.

“Because you lied to me,” Quirke said. “She wasn’t down the country. She was lodging in a house in Stoney Batter-Dolly Moran’s house. And she didn’t die of a pulmonary embolism.” He shook his head and almost laughed. “Honestly, Mal-a pulmonary embolism! Could you not have thought of something more plausible?”

Mal nodded slowly and turned his head aside again and, catching the eye of the woman at the next table, mechanically assumed for a second his blandest smile, the smile, it struck Quirke, more of an undertaker than that