“You could pretend to be shocked.”
She had stopped crying, and gave a great sniff. She had not expected much from him in the way of support but she had thought he would at least be sympathetic. She studied him with an indignant eye. He looked even more remote than usual from the things around him. He had lived in this flat for as long as she could remember-when she was a child her mother used to bring her with her on visits here, as a chaperone, she had suspected even then-but he seemed no more at home in it now than he had in those days. Padding barefoot about the floor, all shoulders and little feet and big, broad back, he had the look of some wild animal, a bear, maybe, or an impossibly beautiful, blond gorilla that had been captured a long time ago but still had not come to understand that it was in a cage.
She went and stood beside him, facing the fireplace, with her elbows resting on the high mantelpiece, which he was leaning back against. She was not drunk anymore-she had not really been drunk, in the first place, but had wanted him to think she was-only sleepy, and sad. She studied the framed photographs on the mantelpiece.
“Aunt Delia was so lovely,” she said. “Were you there when…?” Quirke shook his head. He did not look at her. His profile, she thought, was like the profile of an emperor on an old coin. “Tell me,” she urged, softly.
“We had a fight,” he said, flat and matter-of-fact and a touch impatient. “I went out and got drunk. Then I was in the hospital, holding her hand, and she was dead. She was dead, and I was still drunk.”
She went back to studying the photographs in their expensive, silver frames. She touched the one of the foursome in their tennis whites, tracing their faces with a fingertip: her father, and Sarah, and Quirke, and poor, dead Delia, all of them so young, smiling, and fearless-seeming. She said:
“They looked really alike, didn’t they, even for sisters, Mummy and Aunt Delia? Your two lost loves.” To that he would say nothing, and she shrugged, tossing her head, and walked to the sideboard and picked up the newspaper and pretended to read it. “Of course,” she said, “you don’t care that they won’t let me marry him, do you?”
She threw down the paper and crossed to the sofa and sat down and folded her arms angrily. He came and knelt on one knee and poured the coffee for her. “I meant a real drink,” she said, and turned her face away from him in childish refusal. He replaced the coffeepot on the tray and went and took another cigarette and then tore another spill from the newspaper-tore the theater advertisement itself, this time-and leaned down and touched it to the gas flame.
“Do you remember Christine Falls?” he said.
“Who?”
She made it into a rebuff. She still would not look at him.
“She worked for your mother for a while.”
“You mean Chrissie the maid? The one who died?”
“Do you remember her?”
“Yes,” shrugging. “I think Daddy was soft on her. She was pretty, in a washed-out sort of way. Why do you ask?”
“Do you know what she died of?” She shook her head. “A pulmonary embolism. Know what that is?”
Things were stirring in him like mud at the bottom of a well. Who had sent those two thugs to frighten him?
“Something to do with the lungs?” Phoebe said. Her voice was growing drowsy. “Did she have TB?”
She drew up her legs beside her on the sofa and lay down and leaned her cheek on a cushion. She sighed.
“No,” Quirke said. “It’s when a blood clot finds its way into the heart.”
“Mnn.”
“Saw a remarkable case of it only the other day. Old chap, bedridden for years. We opened him up, sliced along the pulmonary artery, and there it was, thick as your thumb and a good nine inches long, a huge great rope of solid blood.” He paused, and glanced at her, and saw that she had fallen asleep, with the curtness of youth. How frail and vulnerable she looked, in his ragged pullover and corduroy bags. He took a throw that was folded on the back of the armchair by the fireplace and draped it over her carefully. Without opening her eyes she drew in a quivery breath and rubbed a finger vigorously under her nose and mumbled something and settled down again, snuggling into the warmth of the throw. Quirke returned to the fireplace and stood with his back against the mantelpiece again and contemplated her. Although he tried to resist it, the thought of Christine Falls and her lost child entered his mind like a knife blade being forced between a door frame and a locked door. Christine Falls, and Mal, and Costigan, and Punch and Judy…“Mind you,” he said softly to the sleeping girl, “that’s not what poor Chrissie died of at all, a pulmonary embolism. That’s only what your daddy, who was soft on her, wrote in her file.”
He went to the window on which it was his habit never to draw the curtains. The rain had stopped; when he put his face close to the glass he could see a speeding moon and the livid undersides of clouds lit by the lights of the city. He glanced again at Phoebe, and went and opened the sequined purse she had left on the table and found in it the calf-bound red address book he had given her on her last birthday and riffled through the pages; then he went to the telephone and picked up the receiver and dialed.
HE WAS STILL AT THE WINDOW WHEN CONOR CARRINGTON ARRIVED, and he opened the window and dropped the key down to him, too, before he could ring the bell, for even from three floors away Mr. Poole, unlike his wife, had the hearing of a bat. Phoebe, on the couch, was still asleep. He had draped her things, her frock, her slip, her stockings, on a chair in front of the gas fire to dry. He had to shake her hard by the shoulder before she would wake up, and when she did she looked at him hare-eyed in terror and seemed as if she would leap from under the throw and take to her heels.
“It’s all right,” he said brusquely. “Young Lochinvar has come to rescue you.”
He gathered her clothes from the chair while she got herself upright and sat a moment with her head hanging and then rose shakily to her feet. Licking her lips, which were dry from sleep, she took the bundle of clothes in her arms and let him steer her towards the bedroom.
Conor Carrington was, Quirke noted, the kind of person who enters sideways through a doorway, slipping rather than stepping in. He was tall and sinuous with a long, pale face and the hands, slender and pliant and white, of the phthisic heroine of one of the more mournfully romantic novels of the Victorian era. Or at least that was the view of him Quirke took in his jaundiced fashion. In reality, Quirke had to admit, Carrington was a good-looking if somewhat meager young man. In his turn Carrington obviously disapproved of Quirke, but he was, too, Quirke could see, not a little nervous of him. He wore a shortie tweed overcoat over a dark, pin-striped suit that would have been worthy of the man who was not now, it seemed, likely to be his father-in-law, and carried a trilby hat, holding it by the curled brim in the fingers of both hands: he had the look, Quirke thought, of a man arriving unwillingly at the wake of someone with whom he had been barely acquainted. He handed the door key to Quirke, who also took the trilby from him, noting the hesitancy with which the young man relinquished it, as if he feared he might not get it back.
Entering the living room, on the bias, again, Carrington glanced about inquiringly, and Quirke said:
“She’ll be ready in a minute.”
Carrington nodded, pursing lips that were unexpectedly full and rosy-tinted; a hand-reared boy. “What happened?” he asked.
“She was at a party, not with you, evidently. You should keep a closer eye on her.” Quirke pointed to the tray on the floor. “Cup of coffee? No? Just as well-it’ll be cold by now. Cigarette?” Again the young man shook his head. “No vices at all, eh, Mr. Carrington? Or may I call you Conor? And you can call me Mr. Quirke.”
Carrington would not take off his coat. “Why did she come here?” he said peevishly. “She should have phoned me. I waited up all evening.”
Quirke turned aside to hide his curled lip; what time was the fellow usually in the habit of going to bed at? He said: “She tells me they won’t let her marry you.” Carrington stared at him. They appeared to be of almost equal height, the broad man and the slim, but that was only, Quirke thought with satisfaction, because he was barefoot. “They don’t like your crowd, I’m afraid,” he said.
Carrington’s brow had taken on a pinkish sheen. “My crowd?” he said, and delicately cleared his throat.
Quirke shrugged; he saw no profit in continuing along that line. He said:
“Have you actually popped the question?”
Again Carrington had to cough softly into his fist. “I don’t think we should be having this conversation, Mr. Quirke.”
Quirke shrugged. “You’re probably right,” he said.
Phoebe came in from the bedroom. At the sight of her, Conor Carrington raised his eyebrows and then frowned. Her hair was still kinked from the rain, and the skirts of her frock clung damply to her legs. In one hand she carried
