“He must have had some dealings with her in the course of his days, but he says he can’t remember. You know Mal- she would need to sprout feathers and a tail before he noticed her.”
“Oh, yes, Malachy,” she said. “How is he?”
Quirke’s glass of Chablis seemed somehow to have become empty all by itself, without his noticing. He would not have another, no matter how loudly his blood clamored for it; no, he would not. “He says he’s going to retire.”
“Retire? But he’s so young.”
“That’s what I said.”
“He should marry again, before it’s too late.”
“Who would he marry?”
“Isn’t this country supposed to be thronged with women looking for a man?”
He called the waiter and asked for another glass of wine. Rose lifted an eyebrow but made no remark.
“By the way,” he said, “I bought a car.”
“Well, you devil, you!”
“It was very expensive.”
“I should hope so. I can’t see you in a cheap jalopy.”
When they finished their lunch he suggested they should go for a drive. Rose gave the Alvis barely a glance- Rose was not easily impressed, and when she was impressed she was careful not to show it-and when they had got in she would not let him drive off until he had put on the tie with the painted blonde on it. He laughed and said that if they were stopped by the Guards he would be arrested for causing a disturbance of the peace. “Add the fact that I have no driving license, and I’ll probably end up in jail.” His brain was fizzing pleasantly from the effects of the champagne and the two glasses of Chablis, and he felt almost skittish. He pulled down the mirror so he could see to knot the ridiculous tie. Rose sat sideways in the seat, watching him.
“You’d like that,” she said.
“What would I like?”
“Being in jail. I can see you there, in your suit with the arrows on it, contentedly sewing mailbags and writing your memoirs in the evenings before lights-out.”
He laughed. “You know me too well.” He smoothed the tie and readjusted the mirror and started up the engine. “I’m glad you’ve come back,” he said. “I missed you.”
Now it was her turn to laugh. “No, you didn’t. But it’s nice of you to say so.”
They went out by Rathfarnham and set off up into the mountains.
“You didn’t drive, before,” Rose said, “did you?”
“No. Mal taught me. It wasn’t difficult to get the hang of it.”
“And you’ve bought yourself a brand-new, shiny car.” She patted the polished dashboard. “Very smart. I imagine it impresses the girls?”
He did not answer that. The sunlight of earlier was gone now, and the day had turned iron-gray. Between them, too, unaccountably, something had darkened a little, and for a number of miles they did not speak at all. The mountainsides, burnt by frost, were ocher-colored, and there was ice at the sides of the road and patches of snow lay in the lee of rocks and in the long, straight furrows where turf had been cut. Below, to their right, a circular volcanic lake appeared, the water black and motionless, unreal-seeming. Winding higher and higher on the narrow road they felt the air growing steadily thinner and colder, and Quirke turned the heater on full. At Glencree there was a sudden squall of sleet, and the windscreen wipers had a hard time coping with it.
“I used to come up here with Sarah,” Quirke said. “It was here one day, somewhere around here, that she told me Phoebe was my daughter, mine and Delia’s, not hers and Mal’s.”
“But you knew that already.”
“Yes. I’d always known and never told her I knew. God knows why. Cowardice, of course, there’s always cowardice.”
Rose laughed again, softly. “Secrets and lies, Quirke, secrets and lies.”
He gave her an account of his meeting that morning with the Latimers. She was fascinated. “He called you all together in his office, where the government is, this man- what’s his name?”
“Bill Latimer. Minister of Health.”
“Bizarre. What did he want you to do?”
“Me? Nothing.”
“You mean, nothing nothing?”
“Exactly. He wants the fact of his niece’s disappearance kept under wraps, at least for the time being, so he says. He’s afraid of a scandal.”
“Does he think he can keep it a secret forever? What if she’s dead?”
“You can do anything in this country, if you’re powerful enough. You know that.”
She nodded in grim amusement. “Secrets and lies,” she said again, softly, in her southern drawl, almost singing it.
The sleet shower passed, and they drove down into a long, shallow valley. Distantly the sea was visible, a line of indelible-pencil-blue on the horizon. There were blackish green clumps of gorse, and thornbushes raked by the wind into agonized, clawlike shapes; tatters of sheep’s wool fluttered on the barbed wire by the side of the road. “My God, Quirke,” Rose said suddenly, “this is a terrible place you’ve brought me to.”
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Up here? Terrible?”
“So barren. If there’s a Hell, this is how I imagine it will be. No flames and all that, just ice and emptiness. Let’s go back. I like to be around people. I’m no cowgirl; the wide-open spaces frighten me.”
He turned the car in a gateway, and they set off back towards the city.
They were out of the mountains before Rose spoke again. “Maybe I should marry Malachy,” she said. “It could be my mission in life, to cheer him up.” She looked sideways at Quirke. “Aren’t you lonely?” she asked.
“Yes, of course,” he said simply. “Isn’t everyone?”
She did not answer for a moment and then chuckled. “You’re nothing if not predictable, Quirke.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s not bad or good. It’s just you.”
“A hopeless case, is that it?”
“Hopeless. Maybe Malachy isn’t the one I should marry.”
“Who, then?” Quirke asked lightly; then the lightness drained from him, and he frowned, and kept his eyes on the windscreen.
Rose laughed. “Oh, Quirke,” she said. “You look like a little boy who’s been told he may have to go and live with his grandma for the rest of his life. By the way,” she said, turning her head quickly to look back-”aren’t you supposed to stop when someone steps out on one of those- what do you call them?- those zebra crossings?”
He delivered her to the Shelbourne. She said she still had to unpack and then rest awhile. She suggested that he and Phoebe might join her for dinner. He was back in his flat before he realized that he was still wearing the lewd tie she had given him. He looked at himself in the mirror. There were shadows under his eyes. He wished he had not drunk that glass of champagne; he could taste its sourness still. He took off the tie and went into the kitchen and threw it in the waste bin with the kitchen slops.
12
PHOEBE LAY RIGID, STARING INTO THE DARKNESS. IT WAS OFTEN like this; she would go to sleep and then after an hour or two would start awake from a nightmare not a single detail of which had stayed with her. Somehow this was what was most terrifying, the way the dream just vanished, like an animal scuttling down a hole and leaving nothing behind but an aura of horror and filth. So many dreadful things had happened in her life and surely they were what she dreamed of, yet how was it she forgot everything as soon as she woke? Were the visions in her dreams so terrible that her mind, feeling itself about to wake, whipped them away and hid them from her? If so, she was not glad of it; she would rather know than not know. She had woken lying on her back with her fists clenched
