On the record, Sinatra’s voice had a sad little sob in it.
Someone kicked the door from outside and it flew open and an old man in a wheelchair, with a mane of gray hair, propelled himself over the threshold. He glared at the dancing couples and his face darkened with fury, and there was a sort of rumbling sound in his chest as the words gathered there, and he made a fist of his right hand and smashed it down on the arm of the wheelchair. “This is a house of mourning!” he bellowed, in the thundering tones of a hellfire preacher.
The dancers halted. Phoebe swayed on her feet. Mona’s arm was still encircling her waist. She seemed to be laughing, very softly.
“Hello, Grandad,” Jonas said brightly. “Care for a snorter?”
The man in the wheelchair looked at him, his head trembling and his eyes blazing. “You young whelp!” he said, half choking on the words.
Everything in front of Phoebe had begun to swim. Her head felt so heavy, so heavy. She took a step forward and leaned her forehead on Mona’s shoulder. “I think,” she said, and her voice was so thick now she could hardly make it out herself, “I think I’m going to…”
Isabel was late, as so often. Quirke did not mind. He was in McGonagle’s, in the back snug, known for some reason as the Casbah, where only the most regular of regulars were allowed to enter. He had the Evening Mail before him on the table, quarter-folded, which was the way he liked to read a newspaper, and a large whiskey at his elbow. The Casbah, cramped and cozy, struck a faintly nautical note. It might have been the cabin of a trawler. There was a lot of dark brown wood that somehow was always faintly and stickily damp to the touch, and the head-high wooden partition that separated it from the rest of the pub had a row of small low-set frosted-glass windows that were reminiscent of portholes. The air was shadowed and smoky, but a chink of evening sunlight from somewhere had set a glowing jewel in the bottom of the whiskey glass.
He was reading a story about a case of criminal conversation, in which a man had sued his business partner for having an affair with his wife. “Criminal conversation.” Who thought up these terms? Maybe it was a direct translation from the Latin. The case was a nasty one, with evidence not only from the three people involved but also from hotel clerks and chambermaids and even from one of the conductors on the Howth tram. What must the woman feel? Perhaps he might ask Isabel.
He knew very well he should not be drinking whiskey so early in the evening. In fact, he should not be drinking spirits at all. He had promised Phoebe he would keep to wine only, and that even wine he would take in moderation, yet here he was, breaking that promise. It was a familiar sensation, this slight buzz of shame at the back of his mind.
There were certain conditions, most of them bad, that had become ingrained in him over the years, so that now he could not imagine his life without them. First and foremost of these conditions was dislike of himself, a mild but irresolvable distaste for what he did and what he was. In his better moments, his rare self-absolving moments, he regarded this permanent state of self-deprecation as, paradoxically, a sign of some virtue. For if he disapproved of himself, must there not be a finer side to him, however firmly it was turned away, that was doing the disapproving? Surely the truly wicked ones thought nothing of their wickedness, were not even aware of it, or if they were they gloried in it, like Iago or Milton’s Satan. Of course, by maintaining a low regard for himself he was giving himself the excuse to carry on as he wished to, with no thought for anyone else. Being bad, as he was, and as he acknowledged he was, lifted a weight of responsibility from his soul. I do as I do and can do no other. That was a motto a man could live with.
Isabel arrived at last, a vision of summer itself in a loose white linen dress and red slingback shoes with high heels. She plonked her leather handbag down on the folded Mail and began to scrabble about in it.
“Here,” Quirke said, offering her his packet of Senior Service, “have one of mine.”
“Thanks,” she said, taking a cigarette and leaning down to the flame of his lighter. “And for Christ’s sake get me a drink, will you? Vodka and ice. I feel as if my head is about to burst.”
She sat down opposite him on the low stool, exhaling an angry cone of cigarette smoke. She was having trouble with the director of the play she was rehearsing. Quirke braced himself for a tirade, and went to the hatch and signaled to the barman. When he sat down again Isabel suddenly laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t start, I promise.” She took another long drag on her cigarette. “But that bastard, honestly-that little bastard!”
“What’s he done now?”
She opened her mouth to speak but shut it again, and again laughed. “No,” she said, “I said I wouldn’t, and I won’t. It’s a lovely evening outside, I’m going to have one drink with you, then we’re going to take a taxi home and you’re going to-well, you know what you’re going to do, being the gentleman that you are and ever ready to lay a cool hand on a hot girl’s brow. I mean a girl’s hot brow. Or do I?”
She leaned across the table and kissed him. The barman, his big moonface looming at the hatch, cleared his throat pointedly.
They drank their drinks, the little fingers of their free left hands entwined on the table between them. Quirke admired the way the glowing spot of gold reappeared in the bottom of his glass each time he set it down. Where was the light coming from? He could not see. He did not care. Maybe Isabel was the one who would save him. From what? From himself, first.
To keep herself from complaining about the director, Isabel complained about the play instead. “Talk about kitchen sink, my God!” she said, throwing her eyes to the ceiling and putting on what he thought of as her comical El Greco face. “Sink, tin bathtub, chamber pot, and all. Can life really be like that?”
“Mostly it is,” Quirke said.
“And the jokes! All of them seem to be about cows-the thing is set in the bog somewhere. Is that how country people are?”
He laughed. “How do you mean?”
“Oh, you know-stupid and comical.”
“We’re all like that.”
“I’m not!” she said indignantly. “You’re not. Well”-her lips trembled on a laugh-“I’m not, anyway. You know I play the mother? The one playing the daughter, so called, is forty if she’s a day. And my husband is about eighteen, and has spots.”
Quirke squeezed her finger more tightly. He liked to listen to these rants of hers; they amused and soothed him. He watched her long pale animated face. She was a handsome woman, still. She worried that she might be too old to have children, she had told him so one night over an after-show dinner in the Trocadero, tears shining in her eyes and her mouth slack. She had been a bit drunk. He wondered if she remembered. They both worried about babies, but his worry was of a different order to hers.
He tried to imagine himself bouncing a damp and odiferous infant on his knee. “Have another drink,” he said.
Isabel stood up. “No-I said just the one. Come on. I have to be at the Gate at half nine-I’m in the second act.”
They had left the snug and were making their way towards the door among the dim forms of the early drinkers when the barman spoke Quirke’s name. “Call for you, Doctor,” he said, holding up the receiver of the phone that stood beside the cash register. Quirke frowned. Who would be calling him here? Who would have known where to find him?
He took the receiver and crouched over it at the bar. Isabel waited, tapping her foot. She was uneasy, feeling eyes on her from the shadows, trying to see through her clothes. She had wanted Quirke to meet her in the Gresham but of course he had insisted on McGonagle’s. She could not think what he saw in the place. She imagined him sitting here like these other ones, lurking in the dimness with his drink and his cigarette, eyeing someone else’s woman. She banished the image. She tapped her foot. At last Quirke handed the receiver back to the barman and turned and took her by the elbow and steered her to the door.
“Sinclair,” he said. “Something about Phoebe.”
He put her into a taxi in the rank at the corner of the Green. Her face at the side window was white with anger. She had wanted to know what the “something about Phoebe” was, but he had said he did not know, that it was confused, that the line had been bad and he had not been able to hear Sinclair properly and what he had heard he had found hard to understand.
