“Yes,” she said, pouncing, “and look what mistakes we made!” The fierceness was gone as quickly as it had come. “Besides, it wouldn’t work. They’d make sure of that.”
Quirke raised an eyebrow. “They? You mean Mal? Would he really want to destroy her happiness?”
She was shaking her head before he had finished speaking, her eyes cast down. “You don’t understand, Quirke. There’s a whole world. You can’t win with a whole world against you, I know that.”
Quirke looked out the window. Clouds the color of watered ink were roiling on the far horizon; it would rain. He was silent a moment, studying her with narrowed eyes. She looked away. “What is it, Sarah?” he said.
“What?” She tried to be offhand and airy. “What’s what?”
He would not let go; she felt like the quarry borne down on by a single, relentless, huge hound.
“Something’s happened,” he said. “Are you and Mal-?”
“I don’t want to talk about Mal,” she said, so fast it might have been not a sentence but a single word. She put her hands on the table before her, beside her gloves, and looked at them. “Then there’s my father,” she said. He waited. She was still frowning at her hands, as if they had suddenly become an object of fascination. “He’s threatened to cut her out of his will.”
Quirke wanted to laugh. Old Crawford’s will, no less-what next? Then he had a sudden, unnervingly clear image of horse-faced Wilkins, his assistant, waiting for him in the lab-Sinclair was having one of his strategic bouts of flu- and shivered at this glimpse of the world of the dead, his world.
“What about the Judge?” he said. “Why not get him to talk to Phoebe, or to Mal-to your father, maybe, too? Surely he’d knock sense into them all and make them solve it?” She gave him a pitying look. He said, “There will have to be a solution, one way or the other, in the end. I say it again: tell her she can marry him, urge her on. I bet she’ll give Bertie Wooster the old heave-ho.”
Sarah would not smile. “I don’t want Phoebe to be tied down in an early marriage,” she said.
He laughed incredulously. “An early marriage? What’s this? I thought it was because Carrington is a Prod?”
She was shaking her head again, her eyes on the table. “Everything is changing,” she said. “It will be different in the future.”
“Oh, yes, in a hundred years’ time life will be beautiful.”
She shook her head stubbornly. “It will be different, in the future,” she said again. “Girls of Phoebe’s generation, they’ll have a chance to escape, to be themselves, to”-she laughed, embarrassed by what she was about to say-“to live!” She lifted her eyes to his and shrugged one shoulder, abashed. “I wish you’d speak to her, Quirke.”
He sat forward so abruptly her gloves on the table seemed to shrink back from him, clasping each other. How lifelike they looked, Sarah thought, a pair of black leather gloves. As if some otherwise invisible third person at the table were wringing her hands.
“Listen,” he said impatiently, “I have no time for that chinless wonder Phoebe has set her heart on, but if she’s determined to marry him, then good luck to her.” She made to protest but he held out a hand to silence her. “However, if you were to ask me to speak to her, for you-not for Mal, or your father, or anyone else, but for you- then I would.”
In the silence they heard the rattle of raindrops blown against the window. She sighed, then rose and picked up her gloves, banishing that other, invisible, anguished sharer of her troubles. As if to herself she said, ruefully, “Well, I tried.” She smiled. “Thank you for the tea.” The two mugs stood untouched, a crinkled wafer of scum floating on the faintly quaking surface of the gray liquid. “I must go.”
He had not risen, but sat sideways at the table, poised and tense, one hand on the back of his chair and the other flat on the smeared tabletop. How could he be so cruel, playing with her always like this?
“You know I can’t,” she said.
“Why can’t you?”
She gave a laugh of mild exasperation. “Because I’d be in your debt!”
“No.”
“Yes!” she said, as vehement as he. “Do it, Quirke. Do it for Phoebe-for her happiness.”
“No,” he said again, flatly. “For you.”
16
IT WAS SATURDAY, IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON, AND Quirke was wondering if he should find another pub to drink in. A dry October storm was sweeping through the streets and he had ducked into McGonagle’s with his coat collar up and a newspaper under his arm. The place was almost empty but he had no sooner settled himself in the snug than Davy appeared at the hatch and handed in a glass of whiskey. “Compliments of the gent in the blue suit,” he said, jerking a thumb behind him towards the bar and giving a skeptical sniff. Quirke put his head out at the door and saw him, perched on one haunch on a stool at the bar: suit of a shiny, metallic blue, horn- rimmed specs, black hair swept back from a lumpy forehead. He lifted his glass to Quirke in a wordless salute and smiled, baring his lower front teeth. He was vaguely familiar, but from where? Quirke drew in his head and sat with his hands on his knees and contemplated the whiskey as if expecting it to foam up suddenly and overflow with rancid whorls of smoke.
After a moment the blue suit appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Quirke,” he said, holding out a hand. “Costigan.” Quirke gingerly shook the proffered hand, which was square, blunt-fingered, and slightly damp. “We met at the Griffins’, the day of the party for the Chief Justice. The day the honor from the Pope was announced?” He pointed to the place beside Quirke. “May I?”
A coincidence, of a sort: Quirke had been thinking about Sarah, her face like Ophelia’s floating up pale but insistent out of the newspaper pages and their quag of reported grim goings-on-the Yanks testing a bigger and better bomb, the Reds rattling their rusty sabers, as usual. He was wondering still why she had come to him at the hospital and what it was exactly that she wanted of him. People seemed forever to be asking him for things, and always just the things he could not give them. He was not the man they took him for, Sarah, and Phoebe, even poor Dolly Moran; he had no help for them.
He often recalled the first unsupervised postmortem he had performed. He was working in those days with Thorndyke, the State Pathologist, who was already going gaga, and Quirke that day had been called on at short notice to stand in for the old boy. The cadaver was that of a large, silver-haired, antiquated gentleman who had died when the car in which he had been a passenger had skidded on a patch of ice and toppled into a ditch. His daughter had been bringing him back after a day out from the old folks’ home where he was living; she was elderly herself, the daughter, and had been driving cautiously because of the freezing conditions, but had lost all control of the machine when it began its sedate slide across the ice. She had escaped without injury, and the car was hardly damaged, but the old boy had died, instantly, as the newspapers liked to put it-who could say, he often asked himself, how long that instant might seem to the one who was doing the dying?-of simple heart failure, as Quirke was able quickly to establish. When the dissecting-room assistant had begun to undress the corpse with the usual, rough adroitness, there had slipped out of the fob of the waistcoat an old and beautiful pocket watch, an Elgin, with Roman numerals and a second hand in an inset dial. It had stopped at five twenty-three exactly, the moment, Quirke was certain, when the old man’s heartbeat too had stopped, heart and watch giving up the ghost together in sympathetic unison. So it had been with him, he believed, when Delia died: an instrument that he carried at his breast, one that had been keeping him aligned and synchronized with the rest of the world, had stopped suddenly and never started up again.
“A lovely day, that was,” Costigan was saying. “We were all so happy for the Judge, happy and proud. A papal knighthood, that’s a rare honor. I’m a knight myself”-he pointed to a pin in his lapel, in the form of a little gold staff twined about by a gold letter
Quirke said nothing. He found himself fascinated, almost hypnotized, by the steady, omnivorous regard of Costigan’s magnified eyes, suspended like two deep-sea creatures in the fishbowl lenses of his spectacles.
“Lovely people, the Griffins,” Costigan went on, undeterred by Quirke’s wordless and resistant stare. “Of
