back.”
And he? Was he glad, really? He made himself smile at her. He felt as if he had been sheltering under a stone and now the stone had been lifted, exposing him to the sudden glare of the sun. He did not deserve such kindness, if kindness it was. He had let nearly a year go past without ringing Isabel even once, if only to ask how she was faring. Was he to be forgiven this easily? It seemed to him almost a scandal.
The chip shop was a box of harsh white light behind a big square plate-glass window. The metal counter was chest-high-why were chip shop counters always high like that? Quirke wondered-and the owner, a dour fellow with a paunch and a lazy eye, had the look of a former boxer. His wife, thin as a whippet, kept to the background, tending the cauldrons of seething fat. Quirke and Isabel were the only customers. They stood at the counter waiting for their order to be prepared. Despite the late hour and the dinginess of the surroundings there was for some reason a sense of comedy in the situation, and Isabel kept giving off waves of muffled hilarity, so that Quirke, conscious of the shopman’s drooping and suspicious eye, had to work hard at maintaining an expression of stern solemnity. When the food was ready they took it to eat in the car, and sat with all four windows wound fully down to let out the fatty fumes. “My God,” Isabel said happily, “this rissole really is revolting, isn’t it?” She grinned at him. There was a smear of grease on her chin. “You see, Quirke?” she said. “Being happy for the odd moment now and then isn’t so difficult.”
Having eaten their food, they drove out to Sandymount and walked along the front to calm their queasy stomachs. The night air was still, and a vast and slightly crazy-looking moon hung at what seemed a crooked angle above the horizon, laying a thick trail of gold across the water. “Look at that,” Isabel said, “like a road you could walk on.” Quirke was thinking of her in her hospital bed a year ago, with her face turned to the wall, and him standing helpless in the room, not knowing what to say. “Don’t brood,” she said, as if she had read his thoughts. She linked her arm in his and pressed herself against him and shivered.
“It’s chilly,” she said. “Let’s go home. I mean, let’s go back.”
When they got to the house Isabel sent Quirke to sit on the sofa while she was in the kitchen preparing tea. The rissole, a glistening lozenge of grayish meat mixed with grain, had left a coating of slime on the roof of his mouth that would not be dislodged. He smoked a cigarette but even that would not take away the taste. There was what sounded like a party going on somewhere nearby-he could hear talk and laughter and the tinny wail of a record player.
“Tell me about what’s-his-name,” Isabel called from the kitchen. “Delahaye.”
He rose and went to the kitchen doorway and stood with his hands in his pockets. He had taken off his shoes again and the floor was pleasantly cool under his stockinged feet. Isabel, who had changed into her silk gown, was measuring spoonfuls of tea into a willow-pattern pot. “What do you want me to tell you?” he asked.
“Tell me why you think there’s something funny going on-because you do, I know you do. I know that look.”
He pondered, gazing at the floor. “Well, from what I know of Victor Delahaye, he wasn’t the kind of person to kill himself.”
“Is there that kind of person?”
She carried the teapot past him and set it on a cork mat on the little table in front of the sofa. He watched her, admiring the glimmer of a pale breast in the opening of her gown, the full curve of her thigh pressing against the silk. She was a handsome woman, russet-haired, long-limbed, and slim. He wished… He did not know what he wished.
“He took his partner’s son with him, in the boat,” he said.
He went and sat on the sofa again. Isabel handed him his tea and offered the milk jug. “What age is he-the son?” she asked, settling herself beside him.
“I don’t know. A young twenty-five?”
“Were they close, him and Delahaye?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then why did he choose him to take with him?”
“That’s what everyone wants to know.” He sipped his tea. It seemed only to add another coating of scum to his mouth. “I suppose he wanted a witness.”
Isabel was gazing before herself with narrowed eyes, holding the cup and saucer close under her chin. “People usually don’t want other people watching at a time like that,” she said quietly. She gave a faint laugh. “A private moment, if ever there was one.”
Quirke thought it best to let this pass. He waited for a beat, watching the curl of steam above his cup. “Delahaye was a vain man,” he said.
“And yet he shot himself. In front of his partner’s son.”
“So it seems.”
They sat in silence. From where the party was there came a woman’s screams of laughter, and a new song started up.
“There is something fishy, isn’t there,” Isabel said. “Even I can sense it.”
Quirke was lighting a cigarette. “Yes,” he said, “there is.”
“Did the young man do it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then he did kill himself.”
“Yes. But what I want to know is why. He was vain and pompous and full of his own importance. He had to have been driven to it.”
Down the street, the record twanged and wailed.
She took the cigarette from his fingers, drew on it, gave it back, slightly stained with lipstick. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m trying to give up. They’re saying now they cause cancer.”
“Life causes cancer.”
She refilled his cup and her own and leaned back on the sofa, balancing the saucer against her bosom. She studied him, smiling a little. “Well, Dr. Quirke,” she said. “What’s next, for us?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.” It was the truth.
“What about your French amour? Is she gone for good?”
Francoise d’Aubigny. He said the name to himself and felt a click of pain, as if a tiny bone in his breast had snapped. He had loved Francoise, despite all she had done, despite all that she had turned out to be. “Gone, yes,” he said, tonelessly. “Gone for good.”
“And you’re back.”
She was still smiling but the smile had a flaw in it, like a crack across a mirror.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m back.”
What else could he say?
7
Inspector Hackett spotted Quirke before Quirke spotted him. They were among the crowd outside St. John’s, milling on the gravel in the sunshine in front of the church doors. Smell of warm dust, of hot metal from the parked cars, of the women’s face powder and the men’s cigarettes. Faint smell of death, too, of clay and lilies and the varnished wood of the coffin. Hackett was thinking what curious occasions they were, funerals, or this bit of them, anyway, the interval after the church service and before the burial, when no one seemed to know exactly what to do or how to behave, trying to keep a solemn demeanor yet feeling guiltily relieved, and almost lighthearted. They talked about all kinds of things, politics, the weather, who was going to win the match, but no one at this stage of the proceedings ever spoke of the person who was dead; it was as though a dispensation had been given for these few minutes, and everyone had been let off mentioning the one and only reason they were gathered here.
Hackett had arrived a minute or two before the service ended, having wanted to avoid going inside the church. When he was a lad the priests used to say that any Catholic who went into a Protestant church was committing a sin, and although he no longer believed in such things he still instinctively obeyed. Anyhow, it was not as if he was one of the family, or even a family friend.
