She was delighted with the size of him, huge and helpless lying there, trapped between her plunging thighs. He realized how long a time it was since he had held a woman in his arms and heard her laugh. He wished he too might laugh but something held him back, not just his throbbing knee but some mysterious new access of woe and foreboding.
Next day she put on, merely for his sake, he knew, a sad but stoical face, saying she supposed he would forget her as soon as he was outside the hospital gates. She walked him down the corridor to the main exit, with a hand under his arm to support him and letting her breast brush with fond negligence against his sleeve. He asked for her address, being dutiful in his own way, but she said there was no point, that she only had a room in the nurses’ quarters at the hospital and went home at the weekends, home being somewhere still unspecified down in the deep south. He thought of other country girls, of that other nurse Brenda Ruttledge and, less willingly, of Christine Falls, poor, pale Christine who was fading steadily from his remembering, every day a little more gone of the little of her that had been there in the first place. “And anyway,” Philomena said with a sigh, “I have a fella down there.” She lowered her voice to a husky whisper. “Though he never gets what you got.”
He had told no one the date of his leaving, unable to bear the thought of finding Sarah waiting for him at the gate, bravely smiling like a war bride, or Phoebe with her new, hard-eyed manner, or even, God forbid, Mal, lugubrious in his secret torment that he wore like a penitent’s sackcloth. The anger he had not felt through all the weeks in hospital had suddenly boiled up in him, out of nowhere, so it seemed, and as he lurched along the canal path on Philomena’s father’s blackthorn stick in the eerie silence of those unseasonably sunlit afternoons, with the moorhens scuttling among the reeds in a deluded mating fever, he busied himself devising all manner of vengeful stratagems. He was surprised at the violence of these fantasies. He imagined in almost erotic detail how he would search out Mr. Punch and fat Judy one by one and hurl them down the same area steps in Mount Street where they had hurled him and beat them with his fists until their flesh burst, their bones splintered, their blood gushed from ruined mouths and punctured eardrums. He saw himself snatching off Costigan’s glasses and plucking the Pioneer pin from his lapel and plunging it into his undefended eyes, first one, then the other, feeling the fine steel spike sinking into the resistant jelly and savoring Costigan’s howls of agony. There would be others to be dealt with, the ones whose identities he could as yet only guess at, standing in a huddle behind Costigan and Mal and Punch and Judy. Oh, yes, they too, the faceless Knights, would have to be called out and skewered with their own lances. For Quirke knew by now that all that had happened, to Christine Falls and Dolly Moran and to him, was more than a matter of Mal and his poor, dead girl, that it was a wide and tangled web in which he had become enmeshed.
AND SO, ONE DAY NOT LONG AFTER LEAVING HOSPITAL, HE FOUND himself maneuvering his stiff and still strapped-up leg out of a taxi at the gates of the Mother of Mercy Laundry. The day was clammily cold with the sun shining whitely through the morning mist. It was Saturday and the front of the place was shut and silent like a clenched mouth. He started towards the entrance, intending to ring the bell and wait however long it took for it to be answered, but veered off instead and made his way around the side of the building, not knowing what it was he was hoping to find. What he found was the young woman with the shapeless red hair who on his previous visit had almost run into him in the corridor with the laundry basket. She was standing by a drain emptying a basin of soapy water. She looked different in a way that he could not make out at first. She wore the same gray smock she had worn the last time and the same hobnailed boots. He saw her thick ankles, the skin swollen tight and shiny and diamond-mottled. He could not remember her name. When she saw him she stepped back and looked at him with her head to one side, clutching the emptied basin before her in both hands like a breastplate. In the middle of that featureless face she had Philomena the nurse’s startlingly pellucid green eyes. At first he could not think what to say, what to ask, and they stood for a long moment in silent, baffled regard.
“What is your name?” he said at last.
“Maisie,” she said stoutly, as if in answer to a challenge. Her frown deepened and then cleared. “I remember you,” she said. “You’re the one that was here that day.” She looked at the walking stick, at the scars on his face. “What happened to you?”
“A fall,” he said.
“You were talking to Her Holiness, asking about the Moran one.”
Quirke felt a sort of rapid inward slide, as if he were on board a ship that had listed suddenly.
“Yes,” he said carefully. “Dolly Moran, yes. Did you know her?”
“And the old hake telling you she never heard tell of her!” She gave a short laugh that made her button nose wrinkle and lifted her upper lip. “That’s a good one, and her here every second week, collecting the babbies.”
Quirke, taking a deep breath, produced his cigarettes. Maisie eyed the packet hungrily.
“I’ll have one of them,” she said.
She held the cigarette clumsily between two fingers and a thumb and bent to the flame of the lighter that Quirke was offering. He asked carefully:
“So Dolly Moran came here, to collect babies?”
The smoke of their cigarettes was a deep, dense blue in the misty air.
“Aye,” she said, “for sending off to America.” Her look darkened. “They won’t get mine, that’s for sure.”
Of course! That was the change in her: the swollen stomach. “When are you due?” he asked.
She wrinkled her nose and her rabbit’s lip was drawn upwards again. “When am I what?”
“The baby,” he said, “when will it be born?”
“Oh.” She shrugged, glancing aside. “Not long.” Then she looked at him directly again, a sharp light dawning in those pale green eyes. “Why, what’s it to you?”
He peered beyond her down the gray length of the yard; how long could he manage to keep her here before suspicion and fear drew her away?
“Would they take your baby from you?” he said, trying to make his voice sound like the voices of the do-gooders who would occasionally turn up at Carricklea, asking about
Maisie gave another snort. “Wouldn’t they half!”
He had not succeeded in deceiving her, any more than the do-gooders had deceived him. He said:
“Tell me, how did you come to be here?”
She gave him a pitying look. “My da put me in.”
As if everyone should know that simple fact.
“Why did he do that?”
“He wanted me out of the way, like, in case I might tell on him.”
“Tell what?”
Her eyes grew purposely vague. “Ah, nothing.”
“And the baby’s father?” She shook her head quickly and he knew he had made a mistake. He hastened on. “You say you won’t let them take the baby-so what will you do?”
“I’ll run away, so I will. I have money saved.”
He noted again, with a pang of pity, the laceless boots and bare, mottled legs, her work-roughened hands with their raw knuckles. He tried to picture her making her desperate escape but all he could conjure were images out of Victorian melodrama, of a shawled, stricken-faced girl hurrying along a snowy, rutted road with her precious bundle clutched to her breast and watched by a robin on a twig. The reality would be the mailboat and a rented room down a back street in some anonymous English city. If she got that far, which he very much doubted. Most likely she would not get beyond the gates of this place.
He was about to speak again but she put up a hand to silence him and lifted her head to the side, listening. Somewhere a door creaked on its hinges and slammed shut. Hastily, with an expert flick of her thumb, she knocked the burning tip from her cigarette and hid the unsmoked half inside her smock and turned to go.
“Wait,” he said urgently. “What’s wrong? Are you frightened?”
“You’d be frightened,” she said darkly, “if you knew them crowd.”
“What crowd?” he said. “
“
He put a hand to his forehead. “Sorry, sorry-Maisie.” Again he scanned the long yard behind her. “It’s all right,” he said in desperation. “Look, there’s no one.”
But it was too late, she was already turning away. “There’s always somebody,” she said simply. The distant,
