he’s reading it now”-she looked at Quirke with a lazy, sly smile-“though I hope not.” She heaved a shivery sigh, weary and regretful. “He was a mean old buzzard, I suppose, but he was my mean old buzzard.” Her cigarette had gone out, and he rose and brought his lighter and held it for her, leaning on his stick. “Look at you,” she said. “They did beat up on you, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” he said, “they did.”
He returned to the sofa; he noticed that his glass was empty.
“But you must be happy, now,” she said, “with Sarah here?” When she spoke the name she put into her voice a huskily mocking tremor. She grinned at him. “Why don’t you tell me about her: her, and Mal, and Delia.”
He made an impatient gesture.
“That’s all old history,” he said.
“Oh, but the old stuff is always the best. Secrets are like wine, Josh used to say-they get a richer flavor, a finer bouquet, with every year that passes. I’m trying to picture the four of you here”-she waggled the stem of her glass to indicate all that she meant by
“Did he tell you that?” he asked with interest. “That he hated me?”
“I don’t know that we ever got that far in our discussions of you, Mr. Quirke.”
She was making fun of him again. She sipped her drink and watched him with faint merriment over the rim of her glass.
“Will you,” he asked, “go on payrolling this business with the babies that he was operating?”
She lifted her eyebrows and opened wide her eyes.
“Babies?” she said, then turned her head aside and shrugged. “Oh, that. He made me promise I would. It would be his ticket out of Purgatory, he said. Purgatory! Honestly! He really believed all that, you know, Heaven, Hell, redemption, angels dancing on the head of a pin-the whole caboodle. He would get furious when I laughed. But how could I not? Laugh, I mean.” She looked down. “Poor Josh.” She began to cry, making no sound. She caught a tear on a fingertip and held it out for him to inspect. “Look,” she said, “neat Tanqueray, with just the faintest hint of dry vermouth.” She lifted her head and a palm frond brushed her cheek and she swatted it away. “Goddamned things,” she said, “I’m going to have every one of them yanked up and burned.” She let her shoulders droop. She sniffed. “A gentleman,” she said in a parody of a bobby-soxer’s twitter, “would offer his handkerchief.”
He heaved himself up again and limped across to her and handed her the folded square of linen. She blew her nose loudly. He realized that he wanted to touch her, to caress her hair, to run a finger along the clean, cool line of her jaw.
“What will you do?” he said.
She wadded up the handkerchief and gave it back to him with a wryly apologetic grimace.
“Oh, who knows,” she said. “Maybe I’ll sell this dump and move to rotten old Europe. Can’t you see me, in furs, with a lapdog, the most sought-after widow in Monte Carlo? Would you make a play for me, Quirke? Accompany me to the roulette tables, travel with me on my yacht to the isles of Greece?” She laughed softly down her nose. “No. Hardly your style. You’d rather sit in the Dublin rain nursing your unrequited love for”-she let her voice sink tremulously again-“
A log shifted in the fire and a rush of sparks flew up, crackling.
“Rose,” he said, surprised at the sound of her name in his mouth, “I want you to stop supporting this thing with the children. I want you to cut off the funds.”
She tilted her head and looked at him, smiling a pursed, lopsided smile.
“Well if you do,” she said softly, “you’ll have to be nice to me.” She held out her glass. “You can start by getting me another drinkie, big boy.”
LATER, WHEN THE SNOW HAD STOPPED AND A WETTISH SUN WAS struggling to shine, he found himself in the Crystal Gallery, not knowing quite how he had got there. He had drunk too much scotch, and he was feeling dazed and unsteady. His leg seemed larger and heavier than before, and the knee had swollen inside its bandages and itched tormentingly. He sat down on the wrought-iron bench where he had sat with Josh Crawford that first night after he and Phoebe had arrived, which seemed so long ago, now. The snow had brought down upon the house a huge, muffled silence, it buzzed in his ears along with the other buzz that was the effect of the alcohol; he closed his eyes but the darkness made him feel queasy and he had to open them again. And then suddenly Sarah was there, as if she had somehow materialized out of the silence and the snow-light. She was standing a little way from him, twisting something in her fingers and looking out toward the distant, dark line of the sea. He struggled to his feet, and at the sound he made she gave a little start, as if she had not seen him, or had forgotten he was there.
“Are you all right?” she said.
He waved a hand.
“Yes, yes. Tired. My leg hurts.”
She was not listening. She was looking toward the horizon again.
“I’d forgotten,” she said, “how beautiful it could be here. I often think we should have stayed.”
He was trying to see what it was she was twisting in her hands.
“We?” he said.
“Mal and I. Things might have been different.” She saw him looking at what she was holding, and showed it to him. “Phoebe’s scarf,” she said. “There was talk of her and her grandfather going for a walk, if Rose can get someone to clear the paths.” Quirke, sweating now from the alcohol in his blood and the ache in his knee, tottered to the bench and collapsed on it again, his stick clattering against the iron of the seat. “I saw you talking,” Sarah said, “you and Mal. He has no secrets from me, you know. He thinks he has, but he hasn’t.” She walked forward a little, away from him. The palms and the tall ferns rose against her in a green, dense wall. She spoke to him over her shoulder. “We were happy here, weren’t we, in those days? Mal, you, me…”
Quirke put the heels of both hands to his bandaged knee and pressed, and felt a gratifying throb that was part pain and part a vindictive pleasure.
“And then,” he said, “then there was Delia.”
“Yes. Then there was Delia.”
He pressed his knee again, gasping a little and grimacing.
“What are you doing?” Sarah said, looking at him.
“My penance.”
He sat back, panting, on the bench. There were times when he was sure he could feel the pin in his knee, the hot steel sunk rigid in the bone.
“Delia would sleep with you, that was it, wasn’t it?” Sarah said in a new, a hardened voice, hard and sharp as the skewer in his leg. “She would sleep with you, and I wouldn’t. It was as simple as that. And then Mal saw his chance, with me.” She laughed, and the laugh had the same hardness as her voice. She was still turned partly away from him, and was craning her neck, as if in search of something on the horizon, or beyond. “Time is the opposite of space, have you noticed?” she said. “In space, everything gets more blurred the farther away you get. With time it’s different, everything becomes clear.” She paused. “What were you talking about, to Mal?” She gave up looking for whatever it was she had been seeking and turned to gaze at him. Her new thinness had sharpened the lines of her face, making her seem at once more beautiful and more troubled. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what you were talking about.”
He shook his head.
“Ask him,” he said.
“He won’t tell me.”
“Then neither will I.” He put a hand to the place beside him, inviting her to sit. She hesitated, and then came to him, looking at her feet in the way that she did, as if distrustful of the ground, or her ability to negotiate her way over it. She sat. “I want Phoebe to come back with me, to Ireland,” he said. “Will you help me to persuade her?”
She gazed before her, leaning a little forward, as if she were nursing an ache deep inside her gut.
“Yes,” she said. “On one condition.”
“What?” He knew, of course.
“That you tell her.”
A mist was unrolling along the horizon and the foghorns had started up.
