CIE delivery cart drawn by a high-stepping Clydesdale, and were followed for twenty yards and more by the drayman’s bellowed curses.
“You know,” Malachy said, “I used to take pride in my job of helping mothers to bring their babies into the world. Now I look at the world and I wonder if I did more harm than good.”
“You’re a fine doctor, Mal.”
“Am I?” He smiled at the windscreen. “Then why can’t I heal myself?”
They went on a little way in silence, then Quirke said, “Isn’t despair one of the big mortal sins? Or do you not believe in that kind of thing anymore?”
Malachy said nothing, only smiled again, more bleakly than ever.
They parked on Hatch Street- it took Malachy fully five minutes to maneuver into a space twice the length of the Hum ber- and Quirke, shaken after the short but harrowing drive, was wondering if he should reconsider the idea of owning a car. On the pavement he put on his hat and turned up the collar of his coat. The sun somewhere was trying to shine, its weak glow making a sallow, urinous stain on the fog. As they walked towards the showrooms on the corner Malachy said worriedly, “This fellow’s mother, the one that fell downstairs- when you did the postmortem on her, you didn’t- I mean, you wouldn’t-?”
Quirke heaved a sigh. “You never really did have much of a sense of humor, did you, Mal.”
The showroom smelled of steel and leather, fresh paintwork, clean engine oil. A number of small, gleaming cars stood about the floor, looking self-conscious at the incongruity of being indoors but all the same conveying a bright and eager impression, like puppies in a pet shop. The salesman’s name was Lockwood, and he was indeed, Mal saw, every inch the image of a Protestant, which probably meant that he was not one at all. He was tall and painfully thin- it seemed his long bones must rattle when he moved- wearing a gray, chalk-striped, double-breasted suit and brown suede shoes with arabesques of holes punched in the toe caps. He had pale, poached eyes and a mustache that might have been painted on with an extrafine water-color brush; he was young but balding already, his high forehead giving him a startled, harelike look. “Good morning, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “though it’s not very good, I suppose, with that blessed fog that it seems will never lift.”
Quirke introduced Malachy, then said without preamble, “I’m here to buy an Alvis.”
Lockwood blinked, then a slow, warm light came into his eyes. “An Alvis,” he breathed, in a hushed tone, reverently. “Why, of course.” A very special model had come in just that week, he said, oh, very special. He led the way across the showroom floor, tensely chafing his long-boned hands; Quirke guessed he was calculating the commission he would earn on the sale and unable to believe his luck. “It’s a TC 108 Super Graber Coupe, one of only three manufactured so far, by Willowbrook of Loughborough- that’s right, three only. Hermann Graber, Swiss master designer. Six-cylinder, three-liter, hundred bhp. Independent front suspension, Burman F worm and nut steering box, top speed one-ohthree, nought to sixty in thirteen point five. Look at her, gentlemen- just look at her.”
It was indeed a magnificent machine, black, gleaming, lowslung, displaying a restrained elegance in every line. Quirke, despite himself, was awed- was he really to become the possessor of this sleek, polished beast? As well take a panther home with him.
Malachy, to Quirke’s surprise, had begun to ask questions that revealed an impressive knowledge of these machines and their attributes. Who would have thought old Mal would know about such things? But here he was, gravely pacing around the car, stroking his chin and frowning, and talking about crankshafts and Girling shocks- Girling shocks?- and valve gears and pushrod overheads, with Lockwood following happily at his heels.
“Maybe you should buy it, not me,” Quirke said, trying not to sound peeved, and failing.
“I used to be interested,” Malachy said diffidently, “when I was young- don’t you remember? All those motoring magazines you used to try to steal from me.”
Quirke did not remember, or did not care to. He looked at the car again and felt alarmed and giddy- what was he letting himself in for?- as if he had been enticed out on a tightrope and had frozen in fright midway across. Yet there was no going back. He wrote out the check, holding his breath as he filled in all those naughts, but managed all the same to hand it over with something of a flourish. Lockwood tried to maintain his salesman’s professional smoothness, but little smiles kept breaking out on his long face, and when Quirke made a weak joke about
Quirke, who had not admitted to Lockwood that he did not know how to drive, was relieved to hear that the car would not be ready for the road until it had been given a “thorough looksee under her skirts,” as Lockwood put it, by the company’s engineers. Quirke had a vision of these men, advancing like a troop of surgeons, white-coated and wearing rubber gloves, each one carrying a clipboard and gripping a brand-new, shiny spanner. He could collect the car the following day, Lockwood said. The fog was pressed like lint against the showroom’s broad, plateglass windows.
“Tomorrow, right,” Quirke said. “Right.” But tomorrow he would not be any more capable of driving than he was today.
PEREGRINE OTWAY WAS A SON OF THE MANSE. HE SAID IT OF himself, frequently, with a comical and self-mocking shrug. He seemed to consider it the most pertinent fact there was to know about him. If he made a blunder, forgot to change the sump oil or left a broken windscreen wiper unfixed, he would say, “What else can you expect, from a son of the manse?” and then would do his fat, gurgling laugh. His parents had sent him to one of the minor English public schools, and he had retained the accent: “Very useful, when you’re running a backstreet garage- everyone thinks you’re a duke in disguise, slumming it.” His premises, in a mews off Mount Street Crescent beside the Pepper Canister Church, round the corner from Quirke’s flat, consisted of a low, cavelike space, reeking of oil and old exhaust smoke, barely big enough for a car and room to work on it; he had excavated a hole in the floor the length and depth of a grave, that afforded what he called “underbody access,” a formulation from which he derived much innocent glee. At the front there was a single petrol pump, which he locked with a giant padlock at night. He was large and soft and fresh-faced, with a shock of dirty-blond hair and babyishly candid eyes of a remarkable shade of palest green. Quirke had never seen him in anything other than a boilersuit caked with immemorial oil and rubbed to a high, putty-colored shine, shapeless and roomy yet painfully tight-fitting under the arms.
Wondering how on earth the new car was to be collected, Quirke had thought at last of Perry Otway, and on his return from the showrooms, when Malachy had departed, he went round to see him.
“An Alvis?” Perry said, and gave a long, expiring whistle.
Quirke sighed. He had begun to feel like a plain man married to a famously beautiful wife; the purchase of the car was thrilling at first and conducive to quiet pride, but the owning of it was already, before he had even driven it, becoming a burden and a worry. “Yes,” he said, with an attempt at airiness, “a TC 108 Super- ehm-Super-” He had forgotten what the damned thing was called.
“Not a Graber?” Perry said breathlessly, with a look almost of anguish. “A Graber Super Coupe?”
“You know the model, then.”
Perry did his other laugh, the one that sounded like an attack of hiccups. “I know
“-three of them in the world, yes, I know that, and I’ve just bought one of them. Anyway, the thing is, I need someone to collect it for me, from the showrooms”- Quirke could see Perry getting ready to ask the obvious question and went on hur-riedly-”since I haven’t renewed my license. And then I need somewhere to keep it.” He looked doubtfully past Perry’s shoulder into the interior of the workshop, which was lit by a single naked bulb suspended on a tangled flex from the ceiling.
“I have a couple of garages along here,” Perry said, pointing up the lane with his thumb. “I’ll do you a good price on the rent, of course. We can’t leave an Alvis sitting out on the street to be ogled and pawed at by any Tom, Dick, or Harry, can we, now.”
“Then I’ll phone them and say you’ll be up to fetch it. When?”
Perry took an oil-soaked rag from the kangaroo pouch at the front of his boilersuit and wiped his hands. “Right now, old man,” he said, laughing. “Right now!”
“No, no- the fellow up there said they’d have to check it over and so on, and let me have it tomorrow.”
“That’s rot. I’ll toddle up and get it- they know me at Crawford’s.”
Quirke did not go with him, certain that if he did he would be shown up this time for the fraud that he was.
