Holy Orders A Quirke Novel

by Benjamin Black

  There was a new nurse at Reception, pretty in a mousy sort of way, and painfully young. Often these days Quirke had the feeling that he was older than everyone around him. He realized suddenly that he was missing Isabel. He was glad she was not young, at least not young like this nurse or like the couple he had encountered in the doorway, half-grown-up children. When he smiled at the nurse she blushed and bent her head and pretended to be looking for something on the desk.

  He went down the big curving marble staircase, and as he did so he had, as always, the panicky yet not entirely unpleasant sensation of slowly submerging into some dim, soft, intangible element. He thought again of being a child at Carricklea and how when he was having his weekly bath and if there was no Christian Brother around to stop him he would let himself slide underneath the water until he was entirely submerged. He would keep his eyes open, for he liked the shiny, swaying look of things through the water, the gleaming taps and the rippling edge of the bath and the ceiling that all at once appeared immensely far off above him. Often he had stayed like that for so long it had seemed, thrillingly, that his lungs would burst. More than once, when things were bad, and things at Carricklea could be very bad indeed, he had thought of keeping himself under until he drowned, but had never been able to summon up the courage to do it. Besides, if there was a world waiting for him on the far side of death he had a strong suspicion it would be another version of Carricklea, only worse.

  At the foot of the stairs he turned left along the green-painted corridor. The walls down here had a permanent damp sheen, like sweat, and the air smelled of formaldehyde.

  Why, he wondered, did he think so much about the past? The past, after all, was where he had been most unhappy. If only he could forget Carricklea his life, he was sure, would be different, would be lighter, freer, happier. But Carricklea would not let him forget, not ever.

  Bolger, the porter, with mop and bucket, was swabbing the floor of the dissecting room. He was smoking a cigarette; it dangled from his lower lip with a good inch and a half of ash attached to it. Bolger, Quirke reflected, could smoke for Ireland in the Olympics and would win a gold medal every time. How he managed to keep the fag adhering to his lip like that, without the ash falling off, was a mystery. He was a stunted fellow with a sallow face and a big set of badly fitting dentures through which, when he spoke, tiny whistling sounds escaped, like faint background music. Quirke, as far as he could recall, had never seen him without his drab-green coat, which gave him, oddly, something of the look of a greengrocer.

  “Morning, Ambrose,” Quirke said. Everyone else called him Ambie, but Quirke always gave the name its full flourish, for the mild comedy of it.

  Bolger returned the greeting with an awful grin, showing off those outsized and unnervingly regular teeth. “Rain again,” he said with grim satisfaction.

  Quirke went into his office and sat down at his desk and lit up a Senior Service. He still had that tinny taste in his mouth. The strip of fluorescent lighting in the ceiling made a continuous fizzing. There was a slit of window high up in the wall that was level with the pavement outside, where heavy rain was still falling. Now and then a passerby was to be seen, the feet only, hurrying past, oblivious of walking over this place of the dead.

  Bolger came to the open door, mop in hand, bringing with him a whiff of stale water. “There’s a new one in,” he said. “Fished out of the canal in the small hours. Young fellow.”

  Quirke sighed. He had been looking forward to an idle morning. “Where’s Dr. Sinclair?” he asked.

  “Off today, I believe.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Bolger detached the cigarette from his lip and knocked the ash from it into his cupped palm. Quirke could see he was getting ready for a chat, and stood up quickly from the desk. “Let’s have a look at him,” he said.

  Bolger sniffed. “Hang on.” He laid his mop aside and crossed to one of the big steel sinks and dropped the cigarette ash from his palm into it, then went out and returned a moment later wheeling a trolley with a body draped in a nylon sheet. The rubber wheels of the trolley squeaked on the wet tiles, setting up a brief buzzing in Quirke’s back molars. He wondered how many years there were to go before Bolger’s retirement; the man could be any age from fifty to seventy-five.

  Bolger had reinserted the butt of his cigarette into the left side of his mouth and had one eye screwed shut against the smoke. He drew back the sheet. Red hair in a widow’s peak plastered to a skull small enough to be that of a schoolboy. Bruises on the face, purple, mud blue, yellow ocher.

  “Right,” Quirke said, “get him on the table, will you?” He began to move towards the sinks to scrub up, then stopped, turned, stared at the corpse. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I know him.”

  3

  Grafton Street was redolent of rain on sun-warmed concrete. Another shower had passed and the sun had come out and already the roadway was steaming. Quirke stopped at a flower stall and bought a bunch of violets. Violets were his daughter’s favorite flowers; to Quirke they smelled a little like dead flesh. The stallkeeper, a jolly, raw-faced woman, gave him his change and said she hoped the rain would keep off. He said he hoped so too. They both looked at the sky and the great bundle of icy-white cloud boiling above the rooftops—Quirke thought again of the corpse on the trolley—and the woman laughed skeptically and shook her head. He tried to think of something more to say; he was not eager to get to where he was going. He had a difficult task ahead of him, and he did not relish the prospect of it.

  He moved on at last, but still he dawdled, watching vans being unloaded, the second post being delivered, and stopping at every other shop to stare vacantly into the window. He was like a schoolboy, he thought, with homework undone, trying not to get to school. He considered going into Bewley’s for coffee and a bun. What he really needed was a stiff drink, of course, but that, as he resentfully acknowledged, was out of the question, at this hour of the day, for it was not long past noon and he was supposed to have sworn off midday drinking.

  Here was the shop, the Maison des Chapeaux. He crossed to the other side of the street and made for the purple shadow under the awning outside Lipton’s. The one-way street was busy with pedestrians and motorcars and the odd dray, and he had only an intermittent view of the window of the hat shop. He could see, dimly behind the glass, his daughter attending to a customer, taking down boxes and lifting out the hats and turning them this way and that for inspection. He could not understand how she put up with the work. Phoebe had a good brain and at one time had wanted to be a doctor, but nothing had come of it. Things had gone wrong in her life, and bad things had happened to her. Maybe this mindless job was part of the long process of recuperation, of healing. As he watched her, with people and cars flashing past, he experienced a sudden, swooping sensation in his chest, as if his heart had come loose for a second and dropped and bounced, like a ball attached to an elastic. He had long ago given up hope of being able to tell her how much he cared for her. After all, he was one of the bad things that had happened to her—for the first two decades of her life he had kept her in ignorance of the fact that he was her father. What right had he to tell her he loved her, even if he could manage to get the words out? Yet his longing to be allowed to look after her somehow, to protect her from the world’s awfulness, was a constant, hollow, and unassuageable ache at the center of his being.

  None of the hats was to the customer’s liking, it seemed, and she left from the shop, while, inside, Phoebe set about putting the silly concoctions back in their nests of tissue paper and stowing the boxes away on the shelves. Quirke waited for a bus to pass by, then crossed the street and pushed open the shop door.

  Phoebe turned in surprise. “Oh, hello,” she said.

  A faint flush spread upwards quickly from her throat, making her pale cheeks glow. He had startled her, walking in from the street unannounced like that, and she did not like to be startled, he knew that. She glanced behind herself, in the direction of the made-over
broom cupboard at the back of the shop that the proprietor, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes, liked to call her office.

  “I was passing,” Quirke said, keeping his voice low. “I thought I might take you to lunch.” She looked at her watch. “Oh, come on,” he said cajolingly. “It’s past noon.”

  At that moment Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes appeared. She looked at Quirke sharply and frowned—men seldom entered the shop, certainly not men on their own—but then recovered herself and smiled. She was a large florid woman with brassy hair and an extensive smearing of rouge. She had prominent, bright eyes and a crooked little rosebud mouth. In her voluminous dress of shiny green silk, with her big bosom and short legs, she bore, Quirke thought, not for the first time, a strong resemblance to Queen Victoria in her late heyday.

  Phoebe moved forward quickly, as if her employer could be expected to charge and must be headed off. “This is my father,” she said.

  The woman reinstated her frown; she had heard of Quirke. He nodded, trying to appear pleasant and affable. “I was just saying,” he said, “that maybe I could take Phoebe to lunch.”

  Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes sniffed. “Oh, yes?” Both Quirke and Phoebe could see her dithering. Quirke might be disreputable in certain ways, but he was a medical man, a consultant at that, and his well-cut suit was of Harris tweed and his shoes were handmade. She forced herself to smile again, managing at the same time to keep those tight little lips pursed. “I’m sure that will be all right.” She glanced at Phoebe. “It’s nearly lunchtime, after all.”

  * * *

  They went round the corner to the Hibernian. The restaurant was not busy and they were shown to a table under a potted plant at the big window that looked out on Dawson Street, where the lemon sunlight glared on the roofs of passing cars.

  “What’s the occasion for this unexpected treat?” Phoebe, smiling, asked.

  “I told you,” Quirke said, “I was passing by.”

  She put her head to one side and gave him an arch look. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “you know you’re never just ‘passing by.’”

  He nodded towards the sunlit street. “It’s spring,” he said. “That’s worth celebrating, isn’t it?”

  She was still regarding him suspiciously, and he buried his face in the menu. She could never quite decide what to think about her father—what to feel about him, or for him, was beyond speculation—but today she could see that something was the matter. She knew well that assumed air of bonhomie, the forced and slightly queasy smile, the furtive eye and fidgeting hands. Maybe he had broken up with Isabel Galloway again and was trying to screw up sufficient courage to tell her. Phoebe and Isabel were friends, sort of, although in fact there had been a marked coolness between them ever since Isabel had taken up with Phoebe’s father. And then there had been Isabel’s suicide attempt after Quirke had left her the last time …

  Quirke was talking to the waiter now, consulting him about the Chablis. Phoebe studied him, trying to guess what it could be he had to tell her—there must be a reason for him to take her to the Hibernian at lunchtime on an ordinary weekday. It was not to do with Isabel, she decided; Quirke would not be so agitated over a woman.

  “I thought you weren’t going to drink during the day anymore,” she said when the waiter had left.

  He gave her his wide-eyed look. “I’m not drinking.”

  “You just ordered a bottle of wine.”

  “Yes, but white wine.”

  “Which has just as much alcohol as red.”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “No no no—that’s only what the producers put on the label to make you think you’re getting your money’s worth.”

  She laughed. “Quirke, you’re incorrigible.”

  “Eat your prawn cocktail,” he said. “Go on.”

  She cast a glance at his plate. He had pushed his own portion of prawns around in their pink sauce but as yet had not taken a bite of a single one. He must have a hangover, she decided; he never ate when he was hungover. She thought of delivering the standard lecture on his drinking, but what good would it do?

  “How’s that boyfriend of yours?” he asked.

  “David?”

  He gave her a wry look. “How many boyfriends have you got?”

  She had wanted to see if he would follow her in saying David’s name, but of course he would not. To Quirke, his assistant was always just Sinclair. “He’s very well,” she said. “Don’t you see him?”

  “Not in the way you do. He’s not my beau.”

  “My beau!” She gave a hoot of laughter. “I doubt he thinks of himself as anybody’s beau.”

  The waiter came with the wine and Quirke went through the ritual of sipping and tasting. It was pathetic, Phoebe thought, the way he tried to pretend he was not dying for a drink. Next their fish was brought, and Quirke tucked his napkin into his shirt collar and took up his knife and fork with a show of enthusiasm, but it was again obvious that he had no stomach for food.

  “Any sign of a ring?” he asked, not looking at her but poking at the sole with his fork.

  “What kind of a ring would that be?” Phoebe inquired innocently, putting on a puzzled frown. “A Claddagh ring, do you mean? A signet?”

  Quirke ignored this. “The two of you have been going together for how long now?” he asked. “About time he declared his intentions, I’d have thought.”

  She laughed again. “My ‘beau,’” she cried, “‘declaring his intentions’—honestly, Quirke!”

  “In my day—”

  “Oh, in your day! In your day a gentleman had side-whiskers and wore a frock coat and gaiters and before proposing had to ask a damsel’s father for her hand in marriage, don’t you know.”

  Quirke only smiled, and went on toying with his fish. “Wouldn’t you like to marry, settle down?” he asked mildly.

  “Married is one thing, ‘settling down’ is quite another.”

  “I see. You’re going to be the independent type, wear trousers and smoke cigarettes and run for parliament. Good luck.”

  Phoebe gazed at him, where he sat with his head bent over his plate. His tone had suddenly taken on a sharper edge.

  “Maybe I will do something like that,” she said, sitting up very straight, “go into politics, or whatever. You don’t think I’m capable of it.”

  He was silent for a moment, looking sideways now into the sunlit street. “I think you’d be a success at whatever you set your mind to,” he said. He turned his eyes to hers. “I only want you to be happy.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But is being married the only kind of happiness you can imagine?”

  She saw him wanting to say more but holding back. She supposed she was a disappointment to him, working in a hat shop and having his assistant for a boyfriend. How ironic, she thought, considering all the years he had gone along with the pretense that she was his sister-in-law’s daughter and not his. Yet she could not be angry with him. He had suffered so much. The woman he’d loved had married someone else and then the woman he did marry had died. What right had she to pass judgment on him—what right had she to pass judgment on anyone?

  They talked for a while of other things, her work at the shop, the crassness of customers, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes’s bullying ways. She mentioned a trip to Spain that she was considering going on. She waited for him to ask if David would go with her, but he did not, and the unspoken question hovered above the table like a heat haze, warping the atmosphere between them. This was delicate territory. She knew Quirke wanted to know if she and David were sleeping together, but she knew too that he would never have the nerve to ask.

  “Tell me,” he said, “how is that friend of yours?—what’s his name?”

  “Which friend?”

  “That chap who works for the Clarion.”

  “Jimmy Minor?”

  “Yes. That’s him.” He was, she saw, avoiding her eye again.

  “What about him?”

  With an index finger he pushed his plate carefully to one side. “Have you seen him rec
ently?”

  “Not for a week or two. You haven’t touched your fish.”

  “No appetite.”

  He was frowning, and now he took a long swallow of wine. She watched him closely, feeling the first inkling of alarm. Jimmy: it was Jimmy he had brought her here to talk about. Oh, God, what kind of hot water had her friend got himself into this time, she wondered.

  “I saw him this morning,” Quirke said. He sucked his teeth. He would look at anything except her.

  “Oh? Where?”

  He reached inside his jacket and brought out his cigarette case, flicked it open, offered it across the table. She shook her head. “I forgot, yes,” he said. “You gave up. Good idea. Wish I could.”

  He lit his cigarette, blew smoke towards the ceiling. Then he looked directly at her, for the first time, it seemed to her, since they had sat down, and smiled peculiarly, with a woeful, apologetic slant. “I saw him at the hospital,” he said. “I did a postmortem on him.”

  * * *

  Afterwards, when it was too late, he realized how clumsy he had been, how badly he had managed it. At the time he had felt that by mentioning the postmortem first he would be sparing her the shock of being told straight out that Minor was dead. But of course his words had the opposite effect. To him the term “postmortem” carried no weight, was entirely neutral, while to Phoebe, he supposed, it conjured up an image of her friend laid out on a slab with his sternum cut open and all his glistening innards on show.

  In the moments after he had made his faux pas she had sat very still, gazing at him blankly, then had stood up so quickly her chair had fallen over backwards, as if in a dead faint, and she had hurried from the room with her napkin pressed to her mouth. Now he waited, in consternation, furious at himself. He splashed out the last of the wine from the bottle and drank it off in one go. Putting down the glass he noticed a stately matron at the next table glaring at him accusingly. Probably she thought him a drunken roué whose indecent suggestions had caused the young woman he was treating to lunch to flee from the table. He glared back, and she turned away with a toss of her head.