“She won’t be late.”
“She had better not be, on this of all nights.”
“You’re too hard on her, Mal.”
He drew his lips tighter still. “You’d better go and see if my father has arrived,” he said. “You know what a stickler he is.”
When was it, she wondered, that they had begun to speak to each other in this stilted, testy way, like two strangers trapped in a lift?
She went downstairs, the silk of her dress making a scratching sound against her knees, like a muffled cackling. Really, she should have changed into something less dramatic, less-less declamatory. She smiled wanly, liking the word. It was not her habit to declaim.
Maggie the maid was in the dining room, laying spoons out on the table.
“Is everything ready, Maggie?”
The maid gave her a quick, frowning look, seeming for a moment not to recognize her. Then she nodded. There was a stain on the hem of her uniform at the back that Sarah hoped was gravy. Maggie was well past retirement age but Sarah had not the heart to let her go, as she had let go that other poor girl. There was a knocking at the front door.
“I’ll get it,” Sarah said. Maggie did not look at her and only nodded again, squinting at the spoons.
When Sarah opened the door to him, Garret Griffin thrust a bunch of flowers into her arms.
“Garret,” she said warmly. “Come in.”
The old man stepped into the hall and there was the usual moment of helplessness as she wondered how to greet him, for the Griffins, even Garret, were not people who accepted kisses easily. He indicated the flowers where she held them against her; they were strikingly ugly. “I hope they’re all right,” he said. “I’m no good at that kind of thing.”
“They’re lovely,” she said, taking a cautious sniff of the blossoms; the Michaelmas daisies smelled of dirty socks. She smiled; the daisies did not matter, she was happy to see him. “Lovely,” she said again.
He took off his overcoat and hung it on the rack behind the door. “Am I the first?” he asked, turning back to her and chafing his hands.
“Everyone else is late.”
“Oh, Lord,” he moaned, “I’m always the same-always too early!”
“We’ll have a chance to chat, before the others come and monopolize you.”
He smiled, looking down in that cumbersomely shy way he had. She thought again, with faint surprise-but why surprise?-how fond of him she was. Mal appeared on the stairs, solemn and stately in his dark suit and sober tie. Garret glanced up at him without enthusiasm. “There you are,” he said.
Father and son stood before each other in silence. Sarah stepped towards them impulsively, and as she did so had the sense as of an invisible, brittle casing shattering soundlessly around her. “Look what Garret brought!” she said, holding out the hideous flowers. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
QUIRKE WAS ON HIS THIRD DRINK. HE SAT SIDEWAYS AT THE BAR, LEANING on an elbow, one eye shut against the smoke of his cigarette, half listening to Phoebe rehearsing her plans for the future. He had let her have a second gin, and her eyes glittered and her brow was flushed. As she talked, the feather in her little hat trembled in time to the beat of her excited chattering. The man next to them with the crusty hair kept shooting furtive glances at her, to the annoyance of his fat companion, though Phoebe appeared not to notice the fellow’s fishy eye. Quirke smiled to himself, feeling only a little foolish to be so pleased at being here with her, in her summer dress, bright and young. The noise in the place was a steady roar by now, and even when he tried he could hardly hear what she was saying. Then there was a shout behind him: “Jesus Christ in gaiters, if it isn’t Dr. Death!”
Barney Boyle stood there, flagrant, drunk, and menacingly jovial. Quirke turned, assuming a smile. Barney was a dangerous acquaintance: Quirke and he had got drunk together often, in the old days. “Hello, Barney,” he said warily.
Barney was in his drinking clothes: black suit crumpled and stained, striped tie for a belt, and a shirt, which had once been white agape at the collar and looking as if it had been yanked open in a scuffle. Phoebe was thrilled, for this was the famous Barney Boyle. He was, she saw-she almost laughed-a scaled-down version of Quirke, a full head shorter but with the same barrel chest and broken nose and the same ridiculously dainty feet. He grabbed her hand and planted on it a lubricious kiss. His own hands, she noticed, were small and soft and endearingly chubby.
“Your niece, is it?” he said to Quirke. “By God, Doc, they’re making nieces nicer every day-and that, my darling”-he turned his shiny grin on Phoebe again-“is not an easy thing to get your tongue around, with a feed of porter on you.”
He called for drinks, insisting against Quirke’s protests that Phoebe too must have another. Barney preened under the girl’s eager gaze, rolling from heel to toe and back again, a pint glass in one hand and a sodden cigarette in the other. Phoebe asked if he was writing a new play and he swept the air with a deprecating arm. “I am not!” he roared. “I’ll write no more plays.” He struck a histrionic pose and spoke as if addressing an audience: “The Abbey Theatre from this day forth must make do without the fruits of my genius!” He took a violent draught of his drink, throwing back his head and opening his mouth wide, the cords of his throat pulsing as he swallowed. “I’m writing poetry again,” he said, wiping his bulbous red lips with the back of his hand. “In Irish, that lovely language that I learned in jail, the university of the working classes.”
Quirke could feel his smile slowly, helplessly congealing. There had been nights when he and Barney had stood here happily like this until closing time and long after, toe to toe, drink for drink, barging their pumped-up personalities at each other like a pair of boys fighting with balloons. Well, those days were long gone. When Barney attempted to order another round Quirke lifted a staying hand and said no, that they must be going.
“Sorry, Barney,” he said, stepping down from the stool and ignoring Phoebe’s indignant glare. “Another time.”
Barney measured him with a soiled eye, chewing his mouth at the side. For the second time that evening Quirke anticipated an assault, and wondered how best to avoid it-Barney, for all his diminutiveness, knew how to fight-but then Barney shifted his glare to Phoebe. “Griffin, now,” he said, screwing up one eye. “Are you anything, by any chance, to Judge Garret Griffin, the Chief Justice and Great Panjandrum himself?”
Quirke was still trying to make Phoebe get down from the stool, tugging her by the elbow and at the same time gathering up his raincoat and his hat. “Different family altogether,” he said. Barney ignored him. “Because,” Barney said to Phoebe, “that’s the boyo that put me away for fighting for the freedom of my country. Oh, yes, I was with the squad that set off them firecrackers in Coventry in ’thirty-nine. You didn’t know that, did you now, Miss Griffin? The bomb, I can tell you, is mightier than the pen.” His forehead had taken on a hot sheen and his eyes seemed to be sinking back into his skull. “And when I came home, instead of getting the hero’s welcome I deserved, I was sent to the boys’ jail for three years by Mr. Justice Griffin,
Quirke had begun determinedly to move away, trying to draw a still unwilling Phoebe after him. The man with the bad hair, who had been listening to Barney with interest, now leaned forward, a finger lifted.
“
“You fuck off,” Barney said, without looking at him.
“Fuck off yourself,” the woman in purple told him stoutly, “you and your friend and your friend’s tart.”
Phoebe giggled tipsily, and Quirke gave her a last, violent tug and she toppled forward from the stool and would have fallen but for his steadying hand under her arm.
“And now, I’m told,” Barney bellowed, loud enough for half the bar to hear, “he’s after being made a papal count. At least”-more loudly still-“I think
THERE WAS A LOW BUZZ OF TALK IN THE DRAWING ROOM. THE GUESTS, a score or so, stood about in clusters, the men all alike in dark suits, the women bird-bright and twittering. Sarah moved among them, brushing a hand here, touching an elbow there, trying to keep her smile from slipping. She felt guilty for not being able to like these people, Mal’s friends, mostly, or the Judge’s. Apart from the priests-always so many priests!-they were businesspeople, or people in the law, or in medicine, well-heeled, watchful of their privileges, of their place in the city’s society, such as it was. She had acknowledged to herself a long time ago that she was a little afraid of them, all of them, not just the frightening ones, like that fellow Costigan. They were not the sort she would have expected Mal or his father to have for friends. But then, was there any other sort, here? The world in which they moved was
