Christine Falls

He sat back and laughed and the little chair gave a cry of protest. “No thanks.”

“It wouldn’t be incest-you’re only my uncle by marriage, after all.”

Something happened in her face then, and she bit her lip and looked down and began rummaging in her handbag. In consternation he saw a tear fall on the back of her hand. He glanced quickly in the direction of the man with the monocle, who had risen to his feet and was advancing between the tables with an air of grim purpose. Phoebe found the handkerchief she had been searching for and blew her nose juicily. The monocle was almost upon them now and Quirke braced himself for a confrontation-what had he done to provoke it?-but the fellow marched past the table, displaying an equine grin and extending a hand to someone behind Quirke’s back and saying, “Trevor! I thought it was you…”

Phoebe’s face was blotched and there was an oily black Pierrot-smear of mascara under one eye. “Oh, Nuncle,” she said, a muted wail, “I’m so unhappy.”

Quirke ground the stub of his cigarette into the ashtray on the table. “Calm down, for heaven’s sake,” he muttered; he still had a headache.

Phoebe scowled at him through her tears. “Don’t tell me to calm down!” she cried. “Everyone is always telling me to calm down. I’m sick of it!” She snapped her bag shut and stood up, casting vaguely to right and left, as if she had forgotten where she was. Quirke, still in his chair, told her to sit down, for the love of God, but she ignored him. People at the tables roundabout were looking at her. “I’m getting out of here,” she said, and strode away.

Quirke paid the bill and caught up with her on the hotel steps. She was dabbing the handkerchief to her eyes again. “You’re a mess,” he said. “Go in and fix your face.”

Docile now, she went back into the hotel. Waiting for her, he stood in the railed-off area beside the glass door and smoked another cigarette. The day was almost done, the trees in the green were throwing raked shadows along the street; it would not be long now until autumn. He was admiring the rich light on the brick facades of the houses over by Hume Street when Phoebe came out and stopped beside him and took his arm. “Take me somewhere,” she said. “Take me to some low dive.” She squeezed his arm against her side and laughed deep in her throat. “I want to be baad.”

They strolled along the green toward Grafton Street. People were out promenading, enjoying the last of the fine day that had started so badly. Phoebe walked close against him, her arm still linked in his; he could feel the warmth of her hip, the firmness of it, and, within, the smooth articulation of the joint. Then he thought of Christine Falls, waxen and wan on her bier. “How are the studies?” he asked.

Phoebe shrugged. “I’m going to switch,” she said. “History is boring.”

“Oh? And what will you do instead?”

“Medicine, maybe. Join the family tradition.” Quirke made no comment. She pressed his arm again. “I really am going to move out, you know. If they won’t let me live my life, I’m off.”

Quirke glanced down at her and laughed. “How will you manage?” he said. “I can’t see your father financing this life of bohemian freedom you’re determined on.”

“I’ll get a job. That’s what they do in America. I had a pen pal who was putting herself through college. That’s what she wrote, I’m putting myself through college. Imagine.”

They turned into Grafton Street and arrived at McGonagle’s. Quirke pulled open the big door with its red-and- green stained-glass panels, and a waft of beer fumes and cigarette smoke and noise came out to meet them. Despite the early hour the place was crowded.

“Huh,” Phoebe said, “call this low?”

She followed after Quirke as he pushed his way through to the bar. They found two unoccupied high stools beside a square wooden column into which a narrow mirror was set. Phoebe hitched up her skirt to sit, smiling at him. Yes, Quirke told himself, she had Delia’s smile. When they were seated he found that he could see his reflection in the mirror behind her shoulder, and had her change places with him: it always made him uneasy to look himself in the eye.

“What will you have?” he asked her, lifting a beckoning finger to the barman.

“What can I have?”

“Sarsaparilla.”

“Gin. I’ll have gin.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, will you, now?”

The barman was elderly and stooped and of a priestly mien.

“The usual for me, Davy,” Quirke said, “and a gin and tonic for her ladyship here. More tonic than gin.” McGonagle’s had been one of his watering holes in the old days, the days of his serious drinking.

Davy nodded and sniffed and shuffled off. Phoebe was looking about the smoke-dimmed room. A large, florid woman in purple, holding a glass of stout in a beringed hand, winked at her and smiled, showing a mouthful of gapped and tobacco-stained teeth; the man with her was lean as a greyhound, with colorless, flat, and somehow crusted hair.

“Are they somebody?” Phoebe asked, out of the side of her mouth; McGonagle’s was famous as the haunt of self-appointed poets and their muses.

“Everybody is somebody here,” he said. “Or think they are.”

Davy the barman brought their drinks. It was strange, Quirke reflected, that he had never got to like the taste of whiskey, or of any alcohol, for that matter; even in the wild times, after Delia had died, the sour burn of the stuff had always repelled him a little, though he had still managed to pour it into himself by the jugful. He was not a natural drinker; he believed there were such, but he was not one of them. That was what had kept him from destruction, he supposed, in the long, lachrymose years of mourning for his lost wife.

He lifted his glass and tipped it to the girl. “Here’s to liberty,” he said.

She was gazing into her drink, watching the ice cubes writhing amid the bubbles. “You really are soft on Mummy, aren’t you?” she said. Mummy. The word stopped him for a beat. A tall man with a high, smooth forehead went past, squeezing sideways through the crush. Quirke recognized him as the one from the hotel, the Trevor that the monocled old boy had crossed the room to greet. Small world; too small. “You were sweet on her,” Phoebe said, “years ago, and still are. I know all about it.”

“I was sweet on her sister-I married her sister.”

“But only on the rebound. Daddy got the one you wanted, and then you married Aunt Delia.”

“You’re speaking of the dead.”

“I know. I’m awful, amn’t I? But it’s true, all the same. Do you miss her?”

“Who?” She struck him sharply on the wristbone with her knuckle, and the feather in her hat bobbed and the tip of it touched him on the forehead. “It’s twenty years,” he said, and then, after a pause, “Yes, I miss her.”

SARAH SAT DOWN ON THE PLUSH STOOL BEFORE THE DRESSING TABLE and inspected herself in the looking glass. She had put on a dress of scarlet silk but wondered now if it had been a mistake. They would study her, as they always did, pretending not to, searching for something to disapprove of, some sign of difference, some statement that she was not one of them. She had lived among them for-what? fifteen years?-but they had never accepted her, never would, the women especially. They would smile, and flatter her, and offer her tidbits of harmless chitchat, as if she were an exhibit in a zoo. When she spoke they listened with exaggerated attention, nodding and smiling encouragement, as they would to a child, or a half-wit. She would hear her voice trembling with the strain of trying to sound normal, the sentences tottering out of her mouth and falling ineffectually at their feet. And how they would frown, feigning polite bafflement, when she forgot herself and used an Americanism. How interesting, they would say, that you never lost your accent, adding, never, in all the years, as if she had been brought back here by the first transatlantic buccaneers, like tobacco or the turkey. She sighed. Yes, the dress was wrong, but she had not the energy, she decided, to change it.

Mal came in from the bathroom, tieless, in shirtsleeves and braces, showing a pair of cuff links. “Can you do up these blessed things for me?” he said, in plaintive irritation.

He extended his arms and Sarah rose and took the fiddly, cold links and began to insert them in the cuffs. They avoided each other’s eye, Mal with his mouth pursed averting his face and looking vacantly into a corner of the ceiling. How delicate and pale the skin was on the undersides of his wrists. It was the thing that had struck her about him when they had first met, twenty years ago, how soft he seemed, how sweetly soft all over, this tall, tender, vulnerable man.

“Is Phoebe home?” he asked.