of a man whose profession it was to guide new life into the world.
“You’ve kept this to yourself,” Mal murmured, barely moving his lips, still looking not at Quirke but at the room.
“I told you,” Quirke said, “I bear you no ill will. I don’t forget that you did me a favor, once, and kept it to yourself.”
The funereal waiter-all was death today-came and removed the remains of their lunch. When he offered coffee neither man responded and he glided away. Mal sat sideways on the little chair with one leg crossed on the other, drumming his fingers again absently on the tablecloth.
“Tell me about the girl,” Quirke said.
Mal shrugged. “There’s precious little to tell,” he said. “She was going out with some fellow and”-he lifted a hand and let it fall again-“the usual. We had to let her go, of course.”
There was the sense between them on the table of something slowly falling, as Mal’s hand had fallen, listlessly, ineffectually.
“And the baby?” Mal’s only reply was a faint shake of the head. There was a pause. “You weren’t tampering with Christine Falls’s file that night,” Quirke said with sudden certainty. “You were
Mal uncrossed his legs and turned back to the table with a low, weary grunt.
“Look-” he said, and stopped, and sighed. He had the jaded air of one compelled to explain something that should have been perfectly obvious. “The fact is, I did it for the family.”
“What family?”
“The girl’s. Bad enough they should lose a daughter, without having to know of the baby as well.”
“And what about the father?” Mal peered at him, perplexed. “Her boyfriend,” Quirke said impatiently, “the child’s father.”
Mal cast about him, looking at the floor to one side of the table and then the other, as if the identity of Christine’s missing seducer might somehow be written there, plain for all to see. “Some fellow,” he said, shrugging again. “We didn’t even know his name.”
“Why should I believe you?”
Mal laughed coldly. “Why should I care whether you believe me or not?”
“And the child?”
“What about her?”
Quirke gazed at him for a moment in stillness.
Mal would not meet his eye.
“Where is she?”
“Gone,” Mal said. “Stillborn.”
There seemed nothing more to say after that. Quirke, disconcerted and feeling obscurely confounded, finished the inch of claret in his glass and called for the bill. His head was buzzing from the wine.
In Nassau Street a pale sun was shining and the air was mild. Quirke’s palate recalled the salmon with a qualm. Mal was buttoning his overcoat. He had an absent look, his mind already at the hospital, donning stethoscope and chivvying his students. Quirke was irritated all over again. He said:
“By the way, Dolly Moran has it all written down, you know. Christine Falls, the child, who the father was, God knows what else.”
A bus trundled past in the street, swaying. Mal had gone very still, and his fingers paused in the act of doing up the last button of his coat. “How do you know that?” he said, sounding, again, as if all this were a matter of only the mildest interest.
“She told me,” Quirke said. “I went to see her and she told me. It seems she kept some sort of journal. Not her kind of thing at all, I would have thought, but there you are.”
Mal nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “And what’s she going to do with it, this journal?”
“She didn’t say.”
Mal was still nodding, still thinking. “I wish her well of it,” he said.
They parted then, and Quirke walked along to Dawson Street and turned up towards St. Stephen’s Green, glad of the sun’s faint warmth on his face. There was work waiting for him, too, but he told himself a stroll would clear his head. In his mind he went back over the conversation with Mal, recalling it now in almost a skittish light, thanks, he supposed, to the continuing effect of the wine. What a wonder it would be if old Mal had got a girl in the family way! Quirke had suffered through some scares himself in that quarter, and on one occasion had been forced to call on the services of an old medical school pal who was working at a dodgy clinic in London; that had been a bad business, and the girl had never spoken to Quirke again. But he could not believe the same thing would have happened to Mal. Would he really have walked, as Quirke to his continuing discomfiture had done, into a trap that any first-year medical student would have known how to avoid? Yet the startling fact remained that Mal had falsified the records of a postpartum death. What was Christine Falls’s family to him that he would take such a risk-had he destroyed the original death cert, too, if there had ever been one?-to spare them the pain of a scandal no one but he and they were ever likely to know about? No, it must be himself Mal was saving, from something or other. Christine Falls must have been his patient-not his mistress, surely not!-and the mistake he had made must have been a medical one, despite all his professional diligence and care.
At the top of Dawson Street Quirke crossed the road and went through the side gate into the green. Smells of leaves, grass, damp earth assailed him. He thought of his dead wife, so long gone under the ground and yet so vividly remembered. Strange. Perhaps he had cared for her more than he knew, had cared for what she was, that is, and not just for what she had been to him. He frowned: in his befuddlement he did not understand what he meant by that, but it seemed to mean something.
He would go and see Dolly Moran again. He would ask her once more what had become of the child, and this time he would force the truth out of her. He slowed his steps as he approached the gates of the university. Phoebe came out, among a band of students. Her coat was open, and she wore ankle socks and flat pumps and a tartan skirt fastened at the side with a giant safety pin; her dark, lustrous hair-her mother’s hair-was tied back in a ponytail. Not seeing him, she moved away from her companions, smiling back over her shoulder, then turned and set off swiftly across the road, head down, her books pressed to her breast. He was about to call out her name when he spotted on the opposite pavement a tall, slim young man in a dark suit and a Crombie overcoat stepping forward to meet her. Arriving, she nudged against him, catlike and shy-seeming, pressing the side of her cheek down into the hollow of his shoulder. Then they turned, arm in arm, and set off in the direction of Hatch Street, and Quirke, having watched them for a moment, turned too, in the opposite direction, and walked away.
6
DOLLY MORAN KNEW STRAIGHT OFF WHO THEY WERE. SHE HAD SEEN them before. She had heard tell of them, too, around the neighborhood, and knew what they did. She was sure, although she could not say why, that she was the reason they were there, standing at the corner of the street, pretending to be doing nothing. Were they waiting for it to be dark? She spotted them first when she started to go out for milk and the evening paper. She had her coat and hat on but stopped on the step when she saw them. One was thin, with dirty black hair coming down in a widow’s peak on his forehead; his cheeks were a peculiar, high shade of red, and he had a huge hooked nose. The other one was fat, with a big chest and a bigger belly and a head the size of a football; a rough mop of hair hung down to his shoulders in rats’ tails. It was the one with the hooked nose that frightened her most. They deliberately did not look in her direction, although there was not another soul to be seen in the street. She stood there, frozen, holding the door partway open behind her. She did not know what to do. Should she shut the door and just walk down past them, not giving them a glance, showing them she was not afraid? But she was, she was afraid. She would retreat back inside-in her mind she saw herself, as if she were doing it already, slamming the door shut and locking it-and wait to see if they would go away.
