“Passing Cloud,” he said, taking one. “My my, such sophistication.”
She held the lighter for him. When he leaned forward from the bank of pillows he caught from under the lifted sheet a whiff of his new, hospital smell, warm and raw, a meaty stink.
“All we need now is a little drink,” Phoebe said with brittle gaiety. “A couple of gin and tonics would be just the thing.” She twirled her cigarette with inexpert insouciance.
“How is it at home?” he asked.
“How is what at home?” Saying it, she was briefly a girl again, snappish and defiant. Then she sighed, and put the tip of her little finger between her teeth and nibbled on the nail. “Awful,” she said out of the side of her mouth. “They hardly speak to each other.”
“Why is that?”
She let her finger go and took an angry drag at her cigarette and glared at him. “How do I know? I’m not supposed to know anything, I’m a child.”
“And you,” he said, “do you talk to them?” She looked at her shoes, a slow, deep frown gathering between her eyebrows. “They might need you, you know.”
She decided not to hear that.
“I want to go away,” she said. She looked up. “I want to get away. Oh, Quirke”-in a rush now-“it’s terrible, terrible, they’re like, I don’t know what, it’s as if they hate each other, as if they were strangers trapped together in a cage. I can’t stand it, I have to get out.”
She stopped, and something dark crossed the window, the shadow of a bird, or something else, passing in the sky. She had lowered her face again and was watching him from under her eyelashes, trying to judge, he could see, how much of her distress he believed in, how much he would help her in her plan to escape. She was a simple creature, after all. He asked her:
“When do you go to Boston?”
She drew her knees tightly together and gave a shiver of annoyance. “Oh, it’s not for ages-weeks and weeks. The weather is too bad there, or something.”
“Yes, they get blizzards at this time of year.”
“Huh,” she said. “Blizzards!”
He shut his eyes and saw Delia and Sarah in snow boots and Russian-style fur hats walking arm and arm out of an ice storm toward him, an impossible sun that was shining from somewhere, making thousands of miniature rainbows around them, the rims of their nostrils pinkly translucent, like Phoebe’s now, and their perfect teeth agleam-Quirke had never before known such white, such pristine, teeth, they seemed the very promise of all that might await him in this easeful and sleekly appointed land. They were on the Common, Mal was there too. They could hear the myriads of tiny slivers of ice tinkling against one another as they fell. It was-what? 1933?-the hard times were starting to ease and the bad news from Europe seemed no more than rumors, not to be credited. How innocent they had been, the four of them, how full of eagerness and assurance, how impatient for the future. Wearily he opened his eyes: And here it is, he thought, the future we were so impatient for. Phoebe, brooding, sat hunched forward with her knees crossed and one hand under an elbow and the other under her chin. The end of her cigarette was stained with lipstick, the smoke ran up by the side of her face. She hefted the cigarette case lightly in her hand.
“That’s nice,” Quirke said.
“This?” She looked at the silver trinket. “It was a present. From him”-she dropped her voice to a comical bass boom-“my lost love.” She sketched a regretful laugh, then rose and crushed the last of her cigarette into the tin plate that was still acting as an ashtray. “I’ll go,” she said.
“So soon?”
She did not look at him. What was it really that she had come to him in need of? For he knew she had come looking for something. Whatever it was he had been unable to supply it. Perhaps she was unclear herself as to what it was.
The afternoon was waning.
“You should think of it,” she said. “You should think of coming with me, to Boston.”
Then she was gone, leaving a faint wraith of cigarette smoke on the air, the pallid blue ghost of herself.
Alone, he watched vague flakes of snow flickering down into the lighted window like moths and then spinning away quickly into the darkness. He speculated again as to what it was she had wanted of him, he could not let it go. She should have known she was wasting her time, for what had he ever given her?-what had he ever given anyone? He shifted uneasily, his huge leg tugging at him like a surly, intractable child. He began a kind of reckoning, unwillingly; it made him squirm inside himself. There was Barney Boyle, poor Barney, burnt-out and steadily drinking himself to death: what sympathy or understanding had he ever given him? Young Carrington, fearful of the damage Mal Griffin and his father the Chief Justice might do to his career, why had he mocked him, and tried to make him appear a coward and a fool in front of Phoebe? Why had he gone to the Judge and planted suspicions in his mind about the son who was already a painful disappointment to him, the son who as a child was sent to be with his mother in the kitchen while Quirke the cuckoo sat in the Judge’s den toasting his shins at the fire and sucking toffees from the brown-paper bag the Judge kept specially for him in a drawer of his desk? And Nana Griffin, what regard had he granted her, who had to invent a delicate constitution for Malachy, her son, in the hope of winning for him a little of his father’s love or even a moment of his full attention? There were so many, suddenly, so many to be reckoned with, they crowded in upon him, and he shrank from them, but in vain. Sarah, whose tender affections he played on for his amusement, Sarah with her dizzy spells and her loveless marriage; Mal, floundering in God knows what depths of trouble and sorrow; Dolly Moran, done to death for the keeping of a diary; Christine Falls and Christine Falls’s child, both lost and soon to be forgotten; all of them, all scorned by him, unvalued, ignored, betrayed even. And then there was Quirke himself, the Quirke he was taking grim measure of, Quirke dodging into McGonagle’s of an afternoon to drink his whiskey and laugh at the memorials in the Mail-what right had he to laugh, how much better was he than the joxer scratching his balls over the racing pages or the drunken poet contemplating his failures in the bottom of a glass? He was like this leg, cocooned in the solid plaster of his indifference and selfishness. Again that face with the black-rimmed glasses and the stained teeth rose before him in the darkness of the window like a malign moon, the face, he realized, that would be with him always, the face of his nemesis.
23
FEBRUARY BROUGHT A FALSE SPRING AND, ALLOWED FREE AT LAST, Quirke ventured out on walks by the canal in the pale, chill sunlight. On the day that he left the hospital the redheaded nurse, whose face was the first thing he had seen when he woke briefly after Billy Clinch had finished working on his leg, and whose name was Philomena, had given him a present of a blackthorn stick which she said had belonged to her late father-“Big brute of a thing he was, like you”-and with this stout aid he punted himself cautiously along the towpath from Huband Bridge to Baggot Street and back again, feeling ancient, his knuckles white on the knob of the stick and his lower lip gripped between his teeth, mewling in pain like an infant and swearing at every lurching step.
The walking stick was not the only gift that green-eyed Philomena had given him. The day before he was to be discharged, when she was on the afternoon shift, she had come into his room and shut the door and wedged a chair under the handle, and turned and shrugged off her uniform with dazzling ease-it unbuttoned handily down the front-to reveal a complicated armature of ribbed and boned pale-pink underwear, and approached the bed with a playful, ducking smile that gave her a double chin suggestive to Quirke’s suddenly inflamed imagination of other, nether folds, and laughed in her throat and said:
“God, Mr. Quirke, you’re a terrible man-look what you have me doing.”
She was a big girl, with strong limbs and big broad freckled shoulders, but she accommodated herself to his encased leg with tender inventiveness. She had left on her garter belt and her stockings, and when she set herself astride him, a flame-haired Godiva,
the taut nylon of the stockings chafed his flanks like fine, warm emery paper. She was delighted with the size of him, huge and helpless lying there, trapped between her plunging thighs. He realized how long a time it was since he had held a woman in his arms and heard her laugh. He wished he too might laugh but something held him back, not just his throbbing knee but some mysterious new access of woe and foreboding.
Next day she put on, merely for his sake, he knew, a sad but stoical face, saying she supposed he would forget her as soon as he was outside the hospital gates. She walked him down the corridor to the main exit, with a hand under his arm to support him and letting her breast brush with fond negligence against his sleeve. He asked for her address, being dutiful in his own way, but she said there was no point, that she only had a room in the nurses’ quarters at the hospital and went home at the weekends, home being somewhere still unspecified down in the deep south. He thought of other country girls, of that other nurse Brenda Ruttledge and, less willingly, of Christine Falls, poor, pale Christine who was fading steadily from his remembering, every day a little more gone of the little of her that had been there in the first place. “And anyway,” Philomena said with a sigh, “I have a fella down there.” She lowered her voice to a husky whisper. “Though he never gets what you got.”
He had told no one the date of his leaving, unable to bear the thought of finding Sarah waiting for him at the gate, bravely smiling like a war bride, or Phoebe with her new, hard-eyed manner, or even, God forbid, Mal, lugubrious in his secret torment that he wore like a penitent’s sackcloth. The anger he had not felt through all the weeks in hospital had suddenly boiled up in him, out of nowhere, so it seemed, and as he lurched along the canal path on Philomena’s father’s blackthorn stick in the eerie silence of those unseasonably sunlit afternoons, with the moorhens scuttling among the reeds in a deluded mating fever, he busied himself devising all manner of vengeful stratagems. He was surprised at the violence of these fantasies. He imagined in almost erotic detail how he would search out Mr. Punch and fat Judy one by one and hurl them down the same area steps in Mount Street where they had hurled him and beat them with his fists until their flesh burst, their bones splintered, their blood gushed from ruined mouths and punctured eardrums. He saw himself snatching off Costigan’s glasses and plucking the Pioneer pin from his lapel and plunging it into his undefended eyes, first one, then the other, feeling the fine steel spike sinking into the resistant jelly and savoring Costigan’s howls of agony. There would be others to be dealt with, the ones whose identities he could as yet only guess at, standing in a huddle behind Costigan and Mal and Punch and Judy. Oh, yes, they too, the faceless Knights, would have to be called out and skewered with their own lances. For Quirke knew by now that all that had happened, to Christine Falls and Dolly Moran and to him, was more than a matter of Mal and his poor, dead girl, that it was a wide and tangled web in which he had become enmeshed.
AND SO, ONE DAY NOT LONG AFTER LEAVING HOSPITAL, HE FOUND himself maneuvering his stiff and still strapped-up leg out of a taxi at the gates of the Mother of Mercy Laundry. The day was clammily cold with the sun shining whitely through the morning mist. It was Saturday and the front of the place was shut and silent like a clenched mouth. He started towards the entrance, intending to ring the bell and wait however long it took for it to be answered, but veered off instead and made his way around the side of the building, not knowing what it was he was hoping to find. What he found was the young woman with the shapeless red hair who on his previous visit had almost run into him in the corridor with the laundry basket. She was standing by a drain emptying a basin of soapy water. She looked different in a way that he could not make out at first. She wore the same gray smock she had worn the last time and the same hobnailed boots. He saw her thick ankles, the skin swollen tight and shiny and diamond-mottled. He could not remember her name. When she saw him she stepped back and looked at him with her head to one side, clutching the emptied basin before her in both hands like a breastplate. In the middle of that featureless face she had Philomena the nurse’s startlingly pellucid green eyes. At first he could not think what to say, what to ask, and they stood for a long moment in silent, baffled regard.
“What is your name?” he said at last.
“Maisie,” she said stoutly, as if in answer to a challenge. Her frown deepened and then cleared. “I remember you,” she said. “You’re the one that was here that day.” She looked at the walking stick, at the scars on his face. “What happened to you?”
“A fall,” he said.
“You were talking to Her Holiness, asking about the Moran one.”
Quirke felt a sort of rapid inward slide, as if he were on board a ship that had listed suddenly. The Moran one.
“Yes,” he said carefully. “Dolly Moran, yes. Did you know her?”
“And the old hake telling you she never heard tell of her!” She gave a short laugh that made her button nose wrinkle and lifted her upper lip. “That’s a good one, and her here every second week, collecting the babbies.”
Quirke, taking a deep breath, produced his cigarettes. Maisie eyed the packet hungrily.
“I’ll have one of them,” she said.
She held the cigarette clumsily between two fingers and a thumb and bent to the flame of the lighter that Quirke was offering. He asked carefully:
“So Dolly Moran came here, to collect babies?”
The smoke of their cigarettes was a deep, dense blue in the misty air.
“Aye,” she said, “for sending off to America.” Her look darkened. “They won’t get mine, that’s for sure.”
Of course! That was the change in her: the swollen stomach. “When are you due?” he asked.
She wrinkled her nose and her rabbit’s lip was drawn upwards again. “When am I what?”
“The baby,” he said, “when will it be born?”
“Oh.” She shrugged, glancing aside. “Not long.” Then she looked at him directly again, a sharp light dawning in those pale green eyes. “Why, what’s it to you?”
He peered beyond her down the gray length of the yard; how long could he manage to keep her here before suspicion and fear drew her away?
“Would they take your baby from you?” he said, trying to make his voice sound like the voices of the do-gooders who would occasionally turn up at Carricklea, asking about diet, and exercise, and how often the boys received the sacraments.
Maisie gave another snort. “Wouldn’t they half!”
He had not succeeded in deceiving her, any more than the do-gooders had deceived him. He said:
“Tell me, how did you come to be here?”
She gave him a pitying look. “My da put me in.”
As if everyone should know that simple fact.
“Why did he do that?”
“He wanted me out of the way, like, in case I might tell on him.”
“Tell what?”
Her eyes grew purposely vague. “Ah, nothing.”
“And the baby’s father?” She shook her head quickly and he knew he had made a mistake. He hastened on. “You say you won’t let them take the baby-so what will you do?”
“I’ll run away, so I will. I have money saved.”
He noted again, with a pang of pity, the laceless boots and bare, mottled legs, her work-roughened hands with their raw knuckles. He tried to picture her making her desperate escape but all he could conjure were images out of Victorian melodrama, of a shawled, stricken-faced girl hurrying along a snowy, rutted road with her precious bundle clutched to her breast and watched by a robin on a twig. The reality would be the mailboat and a rented room down a back street in some anonymous English city. If she got that far, which he very much doubted. Most likely she would not get beyond the gates of this place.
He was about to speak again but she put up a hand to silence him and lifted her head to the side, listening. Somewhere a door creaked on its hinges and slammed shut. Hastily, with an expert flick of her thumb, she knocked the burning tip fr
om her cigarette and hid the unsmoked half inside her smock and turned to go.
“Wait,” he said urgently. “What’s wrong? Are you frightened?”
“You’d be frightened,” she said darkly, “if you knew them crowd.”
“What crowd?” he said. “What crowd, Mary?”
“Maisie.” Her eyes were chips of glass now.
He put a hand to his forehead. “Sorry, sorry-Maisie.” Again he scanned the long yard behind her. “It’s all right,” he said in desperation. “Look, there’s no one.”
But it was too late, she was already turning away. “There’s always somebody,” she said simply. The distant, unseen door opened again, creaking. Hearing it, she crouched in stillness, a sprinter on the blocks. He fumbled the packet of cigarettes from his pocket and held it out to her. She threw him a look, cold and bleak and almost contemptuous, and snatched the cigarettes from his hand and stowed them in the pocket of her smock and was gone.
24
HE WANTED TO GO TO THE MOUNTAINS. EVERY DAY ON HIS WALKS HE looked longingly at them, they seemed to be just beyond the bridge at Leeson Street, snow-clad and as if afloat, like mountains in a dream. It was Sarah who offered to drive him there, and arrived at his door one afternoon in Mal’s leather-upholstered Jaguar. To Quirke’s nose the car inside had what he was sure must be its owner’s smell, thin, sharp, and medicinal. Sarah drove with nervous intensity, pressing her back against the seat and holding the steering wheel at arm’s length, her hands clamped close together on the top quadrant; on left turns she leaned so far to the side that Quirke felt stray tendrils of her hair touch his cheek like filaments of charged electric wire. She was quiet, and he could sense her brooding on something, and he was conscious of a stirring of his own unease. She had said on the telephone that she wanted to talk to him. Was she going to tell him what she knew about Mal? For by now Quirke was certain that she did know, that she had somehow found Mal out. Or perhaps he had broken down and confessed all to her. But whatever all was, Quirke did not want her to tell it to him, did not want to hear those things, in her mouth, did not want to have to sympathize, did not want to take her hand and look into her eyes and tell her how much he cared for her; that was gone, now, there would be no more hand-holding, no more soulful gazing in her eyes, no more of anything. He had gone beyond Sarah, into another, darker place, a place of his own behind another doorway like the doorway through which often in the past she had invited him, in vain, to enter with her.
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