Christine Falls

arching back. She could hardly feel him, she was so tired and distracted, but even so she started to slip and slide along with him, and had that familiar, faintly panicky sensation, as if she were sinking slowly, languorously, underwater.

“Honey,” he whispered in her ear, in a hoarse, distressed, lost voice that made her hold him more tightly to her, “oh, honey.”

She heard it before he did, the baby winding out into the dark like a party streamer her thin, demanding, unignorable cry. Andy went still, and lay on her, rigid, his head lifted.

“Jesus,” he said again, and smacked a fist hard into the pillow beside where her head was. “Jesus H. Christ!”

And then, just as she was becoming afraid, he began to laugh.

IN THE MORNING HE WAS STILL IN A FUNNY MOOD. SHE WAS HANGING sheets on the clothesline he had rigged up temporarily for her between a thick branch of the walnut tree and the newel post at the top of the wooden staircase-Mrs. Bennett had said nothing yet about this arrangement; she had some kind of a newfangled electric dryer herself-when he came creeping up behind her and grabbed her around the waist with a whoop and lifted her high off her feet and swung her in a circle. She would have been glad to see him happy but she was not sure this was happiness. He had kind of a wild look in his eye, as if he had been running real hard and had just now come to a stop. When he set her down she was out of breath herself. With the fingers of one hand he pushed aside the collar of her shirt. “Hey,” he said softly, “what’s this here?” There was a hickey the size of a silver dollar on the side of her neck. “Now, where did that come from?”

“Oh,” she said, turning away from him to hang another sheet, “some big old brute came sneaking into my bed sometime around dawn-didn’t you hear him?”

“Why, no. I slept like a baby. You know me, honey.” He put his arms around her again from behind and ground his hips slowly against her. His arms were like two hot steel cables. “Tell me,” he whispered, his mouth hot too against her ear, “what else he do to you, this big old brute?”

She turned, laughing in her throat, and he slipped his arms higher and put his hands on her shoulder blades and pulled her hard against his chest, and she put her open mouth to his and he drank her sweet breath and their tongues touched. A breeze came from somewhere, maybe the faraway Rockies again, and caught the wet sheet on the clothesline and wrapped it briefly around them. Kissing, they did not see, in a downstairs window of the house, a thin-lipped face and a pair of cold eyes, watching them.

13

THE AUTUMN NIGHT WAS CLOSING IN AS QUIRKE WALKED UP RAGLAN Road. There were halos of fog around the streetlamps and smoke was rolling down from the chimneys high above him and he could taste coal grit on his lips. He was rehearsing in his mind the conversation-the word confrontation hovered worryingly-that he was already sorry he had sought. He could avoid it, even yet, if he wanted. What was to stop him from turning on his heel and walking away, as he had walked away from so many things in his life-what made this one any different? He could find a telephone-in his head he heard Dolly Moran saying, I had to go three or four streets to the phone box-and call and make some excuse, say that the matter he had wanted to talk over had solved itself. But even as he was thinking these thoughts his legs carried him on, and then he was at the gate of the Judge’s house. In the dark the autumn garden gave off a rank, wet smell. He climbed the worn steps to the front door. There was a dim light in the transom but none in the tall windows on either side and he found himself hoping the old man might have forgotten their appointment and gone out to the Stephen’s Green Club for the evening, as was his habit. He worked the bellpull and heard the bell jangle echoingly within and his hopes rose further, but then there came the unmistakable sound of Miss Flint’s footsteps approaching along the hall. He prepared his face, forcing onto it the makings of a smile: Miss Flint and he were old adversaries. When she opened the door he had the impression that she was barely keeping in check a smirk of distaste. She was small and sharp-faced and wore her coarse ungraying hair in a helmet shape that made it look like a wig, which it might be, for all Quirke knew.

“Mr. Quirke,” she said, in her driest voice and with the barest hint of an unwelcoming exclamation mark. She was scrupulously, vengefully polite.

“Evening, Miss Flint. Is the Judge in?”

She stepped back, opening wider the door. “He’s expecting you.”

The air in the hall was dead and there was a trace even here of an old man’s musty smell. The bulb in the light fixture dangling from the high ceiling was sixty watts or less, and the shade resembled what he imagined dried skin would look like. His heart contracted. He had been happy here, when Nana Griffin was alive. Shouts in this hall, and Mal on the stairs dodging the rugby ball that Quirke was punting at him, the two of them in short trousers and school ties, their shirttails hanging out. Yes, happy.

Miss Flint took his hat and coat and led him off into the heart of the house, the thick rubber soles of her prison warder’s shoes squeaking on parquet and tile. As so often, Quirke found himself wondering what things she might know, what family secrets. Did she watch Mal, too, with that searching, lopsided stare, on his rare visits to his father’s house?

The Judge had heard the bell and had come to the door of what he called his den. When Quirke saw him standing there in his slippers and his old gray cardigan, nearly as tall as Quirke but stooped a little now, peering anxiously out of the shadows, it occurred to him that the day could not be far off when he would knock at the front door and be met by Miss Flint with a mourning band on her arm and her eyes red-rimmed. He stepped forward briskly, once again making himself smile.

“Get in here, man,” the Judge said from the doorway of the room, making shooing motions with his arm, “this hall is like a refrigerator.”

“Will you be wanting tea?” Miss Flint asked, and the Judge said, “No!” shortly and put a hand on Quirke’s shoulder and drew him into the room.

“Tea!” he said, shutting the door behind them with a thud. “I declare to God, that woman…” He led Quirke to the fireplace and an armchair beside it. “Sit down there and thaw yourself out, and we’ll have a drop of something stronger than tea.”

He went to the sideboard and busied himself with glasses and the whiskey bottle. Quirke looked about him at familiar things, the old leather-covered chaise, the antique writing desk, the Sean O’Sullivan portrait of Nana Griffin as a young wife, calmly smiling, marcel-waved. Quirke had been one of the few people the Judge would permit to enter this room. Even as a boy, half wild still from the years at Carricklea, he was allowed the run of the Judge’s den, and often of a winter afternoon, before he and Mal went off to board at St. Aidan’s, he would perch here, in this same chair, beside a banked coke fire that might have been this one, doing his sums and his Latin prep, while the Judge, still a barrister then, sat at his desk working on a brief. Mal, meanwhile, did his homework at the white deal table in the kitchen, where Nana Griffin fed him wholemeal biscuits and warm milk and quizzed him about his bowels, for Mal was considered to be delicate.

The Judge brought their whiskeys and handed Quirke his and sat down opposite him. “Have you had your dinner?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?” He peered at Quirke closely. Age had not dulled the old man’s keen ear, and he had heard the discomforted note in Quirke’s voice when he had telephoned and asked if he could come and talk to him. They drank in silence for a minute, Quirke frowning into the fire while the Judge watched him. The coke fumes, sharp as the smell of cat piss, were stinging Quirke’s nostrils.

“So,” the Judge said at last, large-voiced and forcedly hearty, “what’s this urgent matter you need to discuss? You’re not in trouble, are you?” Quirke shook his head.

“There was this girl…” he began, and stopped.

The Judge laughed. “Uh-oh!” he said.

Quirke smiled faintly and again shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that.” He looked into the shivering red heart of the fire. Get it over with. “Her name was Christine Falls,” he said. “She was going to have a child, but she died. She was being looked after by a woman called Moran. After Christine Falls’s