When the two toughs materialized behind him out of the fog that autumn evening he knew at once that they were from that other world, the world that up to now he had only read about in the papers. They had an air of jaunty relentlessness; they would stick at nothing, these two. Early rage or hurt or unlovedness had hardened for them into a kind of indifference, a kind of tolerance, almost, and they would beat or maim or blind or kill without rancor, going about their workaday task methodically, thinking of something else. They had a smell, flat, sweetish yet stale, which was familiar to Quirke but which for the moment he could not place. He had stopped on the corner of Fitzwilliam Street to light a cigarette and suddenly they were there, on either side of him, the thin, red-faced one on his left, on his right the fat one with the large head. The thin one grinned and touched a finger to his forehead in a sort of salute. He looked uncannily like Mr. Punch, with those chafed red cheeks and a nose so hooked the sharp tip of it almost touched his lower lip.
“Evening, Captain,” he said.
Quirke glanced from one of them to the other and without a word set off swiftly across the road. The two came with him, still to right and left, keeping pace effortlessly, even the fat one, whose globular head was prodigiously huge and set with tiny eyes like glass beads; his coarse hair hung about his face like the strings of a mop; he was Judy to the other’s Mr. Punch. Quirke commanded himself not to hurry, and to walk as normal-but what was normal? In a conversational tone the red-faced one said:
“We know you.”
His fat friend agreed. “That’s right, we do.”
Gaining the corner of Mount Street Quirke halted. Office workers were passing by, hunched against the misty air-witnesses, Quirke thought, innocent bystanders-but Punch and Judy seemed oblivious of them.
“Look,” Quirke said, “what do you want? I have no money on me.”
This seemed to amuse Mr. Punch greatly. He leaned his head forward to look past Quirke at fat Judy.
“He thinks we’re beggars,” he said.
Fat Judy laughed and shook his huge head incredulously.
Quirke thought it necessary to maintain an air merely of irritation and exasperated bafflement; after all, he was a citizen returning home from work, and this impudent pair were keeping him from the blameless pleasures of the evening. He looked about. The twilight was much farther advanced than it had been a minute ago, and the fog was much more dense.
“Who are you?” he demanded. He had aimed for righteous indignation but it came out sounding merely peevish.
“We’re a caution,” Mr. Punch said, “that’s what we are,” and he laughed again, pleased with himself; pleased as Punch.
Quirke gave an angry grunt and threw away his cigarette-he had forgotten about it, and it had gone out-and strode off along the pavement in the direction of his flat. It was like the moment in McGonagle’s that day after he had realized the true import of what Costigan had said to him: he was not exactly frightened, being in a public place and so near to home and shelter, but he had a sense of something being about to shift enormously and send him sprawling. All efforts at flight seemed unavailing, as in a dream, for no matter how he hastened, still Punch and Judy easily kept pace with him.
“We’ve seen you, hanging around,” Mr. Punch said. “Not advisable, in this sort of weather.”
“You could get a cold,” the fat one said.
Punch nodded, his hooked nose going up and down like a sickle.
“You could catch your death,” he said. He glanced past Quirke at his companion again. “Couldn’t he?”
“You’re right,” fat Judy said. “Catch his death, definitely.”
They came to the house and Quirke halted; only with an effort did he keep himself from scampering up the steps.
“This your gaff?” Mr. Punch asked him. “Nice.”
Quirke wondered wildly if the two intended to come inside with him, to climb the stairs and elbow their way through the door into the flat and…and what? By now he really was afraid, but his fear was a kind of lethargy, hampering all thought. What should he do? Should he turn and run, should he burst into the hall and shout for Mr. Poole to call the police? At that moment the two at last moved away from him, stepping backwards, and the red-faced Mr. Punch made that salute again, tipping a finger to his forehead, and said, “So long, then, Captain, we’ll be seeing you,” and suddenly they were gone, into the gloom and the fog, leaving behind only the faintest trace of their smell, which Quirke at last identified. It was the smell-stale, flat, spicily sweet-of old blood.
HE WOKE WITH A SHOCK TO THE SHRILLING OF THE DOORBELL. HE HAD fallen asleep in an armchair beside the gas fire. He had dreamed of being pursued through a version of the city he had never seen before, down broad, busy avenues and under stone arcades, through sunlit pleasure gardens with statues and fish ponds and crazily elaborate topiary. He did not see his pursuers but knew that he knew them, and that they were relentless and would not stop until they had run him down. When he woke he was sprawled in the chair with his head askew and his mouth open. He had kicked off his shoes and peeled off his socks. A spill of rain clattered against the window. He squinted at his watch and was surprised to find that it was not yet midnight. The bell rang again, two sustained, angry bursts. He could hear not only the sound of the bell but the electric whirring of the little clapper as it vibrated, beating on the metal dome. Why arcades? Why topiary? Widening his eyes and blinking he got himself up and went to the window and drew up the sash and put his head out into the tempestuous night. The fog was gone and all was wind and rain now. Below, Phoebe stood in the middle of the road, clutching herself about the shoulders. She was wearing no coat.
“Let me in!” she cried up at him. “I’m drowning!”
He fetched a key from a bowl on the mantelpiece and dropped it down to her. It spun through the darkness, flashing, and rang on the roadway with a money sound, and she had to scramble to retrieve it. He shut the window and went and stood in the doorway of the flat and waited for her, not willing to go down and risk an encounter with the unsleeping Mr. Poole. The yoke of his shirt had got wet when he leaned out of the window and was damp across his shoulders. It made a pleasant coolness, and his bare feet too were cool. He heard the front door open and a moment later a faint breath of the night came up the stairs and wafted against his face. He always found affecting the air’s little movements, drafts, breezes, the soughing of wind in trees; he was, he realized, still half in a dream. There were voices briefly below-that would be Poole accosting Phoebe-then the sound of her uneven footsteps ascending. He went down to the return to meet her. He watched her rise towards him, a Medusa head of wet hair and a pair of naked, glistening shoulders; she was barefoot, like him, and carried a shoe dangling from each hand, hooked by a back strap on an index finger, and had her purse under her arm. She wore a frock of midnight-blue satin. She was very wet. “For God’s sake,” Quirke said.
She had been to a party. A taxi had brought her here. She thought she must have left her coat behind. “The fact is,” she said, molding her lips with difficulty around the words, “I’m a bit drunk.”
He walked her to the sofa, the satin of her dress rustling wetly, and made her sit. She looked about, smiling inanely.
“For God’s sake, Phoebe,” he said again, wondering how he might get rid of her, and how soon.
He went down to the bathroom on the return and fetched a towel and came back and dropped it in her lap. She was still gazing about her blearily. “I’m seeing two of everything!” she said, in proud delight.
“Dry your hair,” he said. “You’re ruining the furniture.”
She spoke with her head inside the towel. “I’m only wet because you left me standing out there so long. Plus the fact that I got out of the cab in Lower Mount Street by mistake.”
He went into the bedroom in search of something for her to wear. When he returned to the living room she had dropped the towel to the floor, and sat blinking and frowning, more of a gorgon tha
n ever, with her toweled hair standing on end.
“Who was that man downstairs?” she said.
“That would be Mr. Poole.”
“He was wearing a bow tie.”
“He does.”
“He asked me did I know where I was going. I said you were my uncle. I think he didn’t believe me.” She snickered. “Ooh,” she said, “I have a drip,” and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Then she asked for a drink.
He went into the kitchen and filled the coffee machine and put it on the gas to brew. He laid out a tray with cup, sugar, milk jug. “Where was this party?” he called to her.
Her answer came back muffled. “None of your business.”
He went and glanced through the crack of the kitchen door into the living room but drew back when he saw her standing in her underwear with her arms lifted, pulling the blue frock over her head. She had the slightly thick waist of the Crawford girls, her mother and her aunt, and their long, shapely legs. The coffee was rumbling in the pot but he delayed a while before he brought it in, waiting for her to be finished changing.
He carried the tray into the living room. Phoebe, wearing the pullover and clownishly outsized slacks he had given her, was fiddling with the wooden mannequin.
“Stop that,” he said sharply. She let her hands fall from the doll but did not turn, and stood with her head bowed and her arms hanging at her side, herself a slack-stringed marionette. “Come on,” he said, less sharply, “here’s your coffee.” She turned then and he saw the big, childish tears sliding down her cheeks. He sighed, and put the tray on the floor in front of the sofa and went and took her, gingerly, in his arms. Limply she allowed herself to be held, and put her face against his shoulder and said something. “What?” he said, trying to keep the harsh edge from his voice-how was it that women, all women, wept so much? “I can’t hear you.”
She drew away from him and spoke through burbling sobs. “They won’t let me marry him! They won’t let me marry Conor Carrington!”
He turned from her and crossed to the fireplace and took a cigarette from the antique silver box on the mantelpiece. The box had been a wedding present from Sarah and Mal.
“They say I can’t marry him because he’s a Protestant!” Phoebe cried. “They say I’m not to see him anymore!”
His lighter was empty of fuel; he patted his pockets; he had used his last match to light the gas fire. He went to the marble-topped sideboard, where there was a copy of yesterday’s Evening Mail, and tore a strip from the bottom of a page, revealing a theater advertisement on the page underneath. He returned and lit the slip from the gas flame. His hands were quite steady, quite steady. The cigarette tasted stale; he must remember to put fresh ones in the box.
“Well?” Phoebe said behind him in consternation, indignantly. “Are you not going to say anything?”
Punch and Judy, the advertisement had said, the new hit comedy!-last three performances! Oh, Mr. Punch, what have you done?
“Tell me what you’d like me to say,” he said.
“You could pretend to be shocked.”
She had stopped crying, and gave a great sniff. She had not expected much from him in the way of support but she had thought he would at least be sympathetic. She studied him with an indignant eye. He looked even more remote than usual from the things around him. He had lived in this flat for as long as she could remember-when she was a child her mother used to bring her with her on visits here, as a chaperone, she had suspected even then-but he seemed no more at home in it now than he had in those days. Padding barefoot about the floor, all shoulders and little feet and big, broad back, he had the look of some wild animal, a bear, maybe, or an impossibly beautiful, blond gorilla that had been captured a long time ago but still had not come to understand that it was in a cage.
She went and stood beside him, facing the fireplace, with her elbows resting on the high mantelpiece, which he was leaning back against. She was not drunk anymore-she had not really been drunk, in the first place, but had wanted him to think she was-only sleepy, and sad. She studied the framed photographs on the mantelpiece.
“Aunt Delia was so lovely,” she said. “Were you there when…?” Quirke shook his head. He did not look at her. His profile, she thought, was like the profile of an emperor on an old coin. “Tell me,” she urged, softly.
“We had a fight,” he said, flat and matter-of-fact and a touch impatient. “I went out and got drunk. Then I was in the hospital, holding her hand, and she was dead. She was dead, and I was still drunk.”
She went back to studying the photographs in their expensive, silver frames. She touched the one of the foursome in their tennis whites, tracing their faces with a fingertip: her father, and Sarah, and Quirke, and poor, dead Delia, all of them so young, smiling, and fearless-seeming. She said:
“They looked really alike, didn’t they, even for sisters, Mummy and Aunt Delia? Your two lost loves.” To that he would say nothing, and she shrugged, tossing her head, and walked to the sideboard and picked up the newspaper and pretended to read it. “Of course,” she said, “you don’t care that they won’t let me marry him, do you?”
She threw down the paper and crossed to the sofa and sat down and folded her arms angrily. He came and knelt on one knee and poured the coffee for her. “I meant a real drink,” she said, and turned her face away from him in childish refusal. He replaced the coffeepot on the tray and went and took another cigarette and then tore another spill from the newspaper-tore the theater advertisement itself, this time-and leaned down and touched it to the gas flame.
“Do you remember Christine Falls?” he said.
“Who?”
She made it into a rebuff. She still would not look at him.
“She worked for your mother for a while.”
“You mean Chrissie the maid? The one who died?”
“Do you remember her?”
“Yes,” shrugging. “I think Daddy was soft on her. She was pretty, in a washed-out sort of way. Why do you ask?”
“Do you know what she died of?” She shook her head. “A pulmonary embolism. Know what that is?”
Things were stirring in him like mud at the bottom of a well. Who had sent those two thugs to frighten him? We’re a caution, that’s what we are.
“Something to do with the lungs?” Phoebe said. Her voice was growing drowsy. “Did she have TB?”
She drew up her legs beside her on the sofa and lay down and leaned her cheek on a cushion. She sighed.
“No,” Quirke said. “It’s when a blood clot finds its way into the heart.”
“Mnn.”
“Saw a remarkable case of it only the other day. Old chap, bedridden for years. We opened him up, sliced along the pulmonary artery, and there it was, thick as your thumb and a good nine inches long, a huge great rope of solid blood.” He paused, and glanced at her, and saw that she had fallen asleep, with the curtness of youth. How frail and vulnerable she looked, in his ragged pullover and corduroy bags. He took a throw that was folded on the back of the armchair by the fireplace and draped it over her carefully. Without opening her eyes she drew in a quivery breath and rubbed a finger vigorously under her nose and mumbled something and settled down again, snuggling into the warmth of the throw. Quirke returned to the fireplace and stood with his back against the mantelpiece again and contemplated her. Although he tried to resist it, the thought of Christine Falls and her lost child entered his mind like a knife blade being forced between a door frame and a locked door. Christine Falls, and Mal, and Costigan, and Punch and Judy…“Mind you,” he said softly to the sleeping girl, “that’s not what poor Chrissie died of at all, a pulmonary embolism. That’s only what your daddy, who was soft on her, wrote in her file.”
He went to the window on which it was his habit never to draw the curtains. The rain had stopped; when he put his face close to the glass he could see a speeding moon and the livid undersides of clouds lit by the lights of the city. He glanced again at Phoebe, and went and o
pened the sequined purse she had left on the table and found in it the calf-bound red address book he had given her on her last birthday and riffled through the pages; then he went to the telephone and picked up the receiver and dialed.
HE WAS STILL AT THE WINDOW WHEN CONOR CARRINGTON ARRIVED, and he opened the window and dropped the key down to him, too, before he could ring the bell, for even from three floors away Mr. Poole, unlike his wife, had the hearing of a bat. Phoebe, on the couch, was still asleep. He had draped her things, her frock, her slip, her stockings, on a chair in front of the gas fire to dry. He had to shake her hard by the shoulder before she would wake up, and when she did she looked at him hare-eyed in terror and seemed as if she would leap from under the throw and take to her heels.
“It’s all right,” he said brusquely. “Young Lochinvar has come to rescue you.”
He gathered her clothes from the chair while she got herself upright and sat a moment with her head hanging and then rose shakily to her feet. Licking her lips, which were dry from sleep, she took the bundle of clothes in her arms and let him steer her towards the bedroom.
Conor Carrington was, Quirke noted, the kind of person who enters sideways through a doorway, slipping rather than stepping in. He was tall and sinuous with a long, pale face and the hands, slender and pliant and white, of the phthisic heroine of one of the more mournfully romantic novels of the Victorian era. Or at least that was the view of him Quirke took in his jaundiced fashion. In reality, Quirke had to admit, Carrington was a good-looking if somewhat meager young man. In his turn Carrington obviously disapproved of Quirke, but he was, too, Quirke could see, not a little nervous of him. He wore a shortie tweed overcoat over a dark, pin-striped suit that would have been worthy of the man who was not now, it seemed, likely to be his father-in-law, and carried a trilby hat, holding it by the curled brim in the fingers of both hands: he had the look, Quirke thought, of a man arriving unwillingly at the wake of someone with whom he had been barely acquainted. He handed the door key to Quirke, who also took the trilby from him, noting the hesitancy with which the young man relinquished it, as if he feared he might not get it back.
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