Even the Dead (8 page)

She tried to picture it in her head, the park in darkness and at the center of the darkness a pool of fire, under a tree, the flames shooting up into the leaves and scorching them, and behind the windscreen a figure slumped over the steering wheel. What was that line in the Bible, about the burning fiery furnace? She couldn’t remember. She felt an edge of fear herself, now. Had she been mad to listen to this desperate young woman? What if Lisa had made up all this, what if she was delusional? She could be anything—she could be an escapee from an asylum. Darkness was pressing against the windows, like something that was trying to get in.

Lisa hadn’t touched the brandy. She was crying, tears running down her cheeks, though her expression was still blank.

“I’m so frightened,” she said, in a strange, crooning tone. “And I’m going to have a baby.”

6

Latterly, dinner at the Griffins’ had turned into a solemn procedure, less a meal than a sort of ceremonial, hallowed and ponderous. It wasn’t clear how it had come to be that way, and no one seemed to know what to do about it. Rose believed it was all the fault of the house, which she had begun to refer to, out of Mal’s hearing, as “the barn,” or even “the tomb.” It was an enormous place, a mansion, with gilded reception rooms and grand, sweeping staircases that might have been designed by M. C. Escher, leading up to silent landings and gaunt, brocaded chambers meant not for sleeping in, it seemed, but for some other kinds of repose, such as lyings in state, enchanted comas, vampiric dozings.

“I do
hate
the place,” Rose would sigh, “and yet I get a real kick out of it, too. I’m perverse, I know.”

Rose’s American origins were obscure. Her southern drawl suggested levees, and black servants in frock coats and powdered wigs, and acre upon acre of cotton fields, but she had once admitted to Quirke that at some stage in her past life she had worked in a dry cleaner’s.

Quirke too enjoyed the house’s awfulness, in a masochistic way. Somehow it suited the state he was in, neither sick nor well, not really alive, floating half-submerged in his own self-absorption. The household had its diversions. There was, for instance, a certain mournful comedy to be derived from Mal’s proliferating eccentricities. The garden was his latest enthusiasm. The long spell of fine weather, with fresh, sunny days and brief, soft nights, had him as excited as a bumblebee, and he spent long and happy hours out among his rosebushes and herbaceous borders. Most of the work was done by the gardener, Casey, a gnarled old party with a kerne’s glittering eye—he was a terror with the billhook and the shears—but he allowed Mr. Malachy, as he called the master of the house, in a tone of high irony, to pose as the begetter and cultivator in chief of the season’s great abundance.

Mal’s particular pride were his sweet peas, and every night for the past week the centerpiece of the dinner table had been a cut-glass bowl of these delicate and, to Quirke’s eye, indecently gaudy blossoms. Tonight their drowsy perfume was adding a peculiar, extra savor to the grilled trout and salad that Maisie the maid was serving out to the three diners sitting about the big, polished oak table, like life-sized waxworks.

“Thank you, Maisie,” Rose said. “You can leave the salad. We’ll help ourselves.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Maisie said.

Maisie had been an inmate—it was the only word—of the Mother of Mercy Laundry, to which she had been sent by her family when her own father had made her pregnant. The laundry was one of many such institutions that had been set up and funded by Mal’s father, Judge Griffin, in partnership with Rose’s late husband, Josh Crawford, to accommodate, and hide from view, dozens of girls and young women like Maisie. It was Mal, with Quirke’s encouragement, who got Maisie out of the laundry and brought her into the house to work as cook, housekeeper, and general maid. Her grand passion was for tobacco, and Rose regularly had to send her off to the bathroom to scrub the nicotine stains from her fingers with a pumice stone.

The meal dragged on. Mal, in a low drone, rhapsodized about his sweet peas, mildly complaining all the while of Casey’s supposed shiftlessness. Rose tried to interest Quirke with an account of a book she was reading, but he couldn’t concentrate, and the topic soon lapsed. Outside in the garden, a blackbird whistled on and on, sounding as tense and florid as the male lead in an opera. The grilled trout was dry, the white wine tepid.

“That particular one,” Mal said, “is called Winston Churchill.”

Rose turned to gaze at him in perplexity. “What?”

“That one, there”—pointing with his knife at a blossom in the bowl, richly red as heart’s blood—“it’s called after Churchill.”

“Fascinating,” Rose said, and turned her attention back to her plate.

Quirke watched the two of them, his adoptive brother, prim and fussy and prematurely aged, and Rose, handsome, impatient, dissatisfied. He didn’t think they were unhappy together, but neither were they happy. Once again he pondered in vain the mystery of their life together.

“I’m going back to work,” he said.

Both Mal and Rose stopped chewing and stared at him, their knives and forks suspended in midair.

“You are?” Rose said.

He nodded. “Yes. I think it’s time I began to do something with myself again, something useful. I’m starting to atrophy.”

Rose smiled skeptically. “I suppose this is because of that young man coming for you today.”

“What young man?” Mal asked, looking from one of them to the other.

“His assistant, at the hospital,” Rose said.

Mal turned to Quirke. “Sinclair? He was here?”

“Yes,” Quirke said. “He wanted me to have a look at something.”

“You went into the Holy Family?”

Quirke put down his knife and fork. The fish, the texture of wadded cotton wool, seemed to have lodged in a lump behind his breastbone. “Yes,” he said, “I went in. Peculiar feeling. Like one of those dreams you have of being sent back to school even though you’re an adult.”

Rose snorted. “And that’s what made you decide to return to work? How you do love to suffer, Quirke.”

Quirke leaned back in his chair. “I’m going back to the flat, too,” he said. “I’ve already stretched your hospitality beyond all bounds. You’ll be glad to have the place to yourselves again.”

A patch of skin between Rose’s eyebrows had tightened and turned pale, and her smile was steely. “This is all very sudden,” she said in a bright, brittle tone. “You might have given some notice, some warning.”

Mal was looking at his plate—Rose when she was angry made all eyes drop. But why was she angry? Quirke wondered, regarding her with a quizzical eye. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to spring it on you. As a matter of fact, I just decided myself, just this moment.”

He wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. His presence here these past months could hardly have been a source of unalloyed joy for the household. He had never quite decided what Rose felt for him, or what he felt for her. That one time they had gone to bed together, years before, surely that couldn’t have meant so much to her? Yet now he recalled how that morning she had spoken of him kissing her, or of her kissing him—he couldn’t remember which. He had paid little attention, assuming it was one of Rose’s teasing jokes—but what if he was wrong? He couldn’t imagine himself desiring Rose now, as he had once desired her, briefly. She was merely Mal’s wife now, however anachronistic a match it might appear to be.

Rose had gone back to her food and was eating, or going through the motions of eating, with fast, angry little movements.

“I’m sorry,” Quirke said again. “I’ve been clumsy, as usual. I’m very grateful to you both for putting me up for so long, but now it’s time for me to move on.”

Rose didn’t even look up, as if she hadn’t heard, while Mal peered at him out of what these days seemed a permanent haze of puzzlement, the lenses of his wire-framed spectacles gleaming.

“You don’t
have
to go,” he said. “You know, of course, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

Quirke folded his napkin and set it down beside his plate and put both of his hands flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet. Mal was still gazing at him, anxious and bewildered. Rose still would not lift her head. He turned stiffly and left the room. He felt as if he had been given some precious thing to hold and admire, instead of which he had let it slip from his grasp and it had smashed to smithereens at his feet.

Why did everything, always, have to be so difficult?

*   *   *

He went up to the big chilly bedroom: suddenly he saw it as nothing less than a jail cell, cunningly disguised, where for a long time, too long, he had been in voluntary confinement. He packed quickly—he had few things—and carried his suitcase downstairs. Half an hour ago he had seen himself as a part of the place, as fixed as an item of furniture; now he couldn’t wait to get away. The house was silent. He knew he should go and find Rose and make his peace with her. Instead he crept along the hall and opened the front door as quietly as he could and slipped out into the sunlit evening.

The shadows on the road were sharply slanted. As he walked, an occasional car went past, none of them a taxi. He didn’t mind; he was no longer in a hurry. He had a new sense of freedom, even of lightness. He was an escapee.

He came to Merrion Road and turned left, in the direction of the city. A Garda squad car came up behind him and slowed. The Garda in the passenger seat peered out at him suspiciously. He supposed he did look odd, a man in a dark suit and a dark hat, with a suitcase, strolling aimlessly. The car went on. Then a taxi approached, going in the opposite direction. He hailed it, and it did a U-turn. He got into the back seat. The driver was a countryman with a large round head and red ears.

“Upper Mount Street,” Quirke said.

Home, he thought. It wasn’t a term he often brought to mind, not when he was thinking of himself, anyway.

*   *   *

And still the day refused to end. At ten-thirty the sky was an inverted bowl of bruised blue radiance, except in the west, where the sunset looked like a firefight at sea, a motionless Trafalgar. He stood at the open window of the flat, craning to see, up past the tall houses opposite, a single pale star suspended above the rooftops, a dagger of shimmering light. It was a long time since he had felt so calm, so untroubled.
Serene:
the word came to him unbidden. He felt serene. Why had he stayed so long at the Griffins’? Why in the first place had he let them take him into their arid lives, in that cold house?

The flat smelled slightly musty, but it didn’t matter. Yes, he was home.

He wondered what to do, how to pass this endless night. It was such a luxurious sensation, having again no one to please or even think about except himself. He couldn’t go to bed; he wouldn’t be able to sleep—who could sleep in these white nights? In the old days he would have gone round to the 47 on Haddington Road, or up to the Shelbourne, where he would have been bound to find someone to drink with him. But he couldn’t go back to that old life. If he started drinking now, he’d never stop. He had fallen off the wagon too many times and had the bruises to show for it, the permanent lacerations.

He took his hat and went down to the street.

The whores were out, half a dozen of them, the elderly one with the walking stick who had been in business for as long as he had lived here, and a couple of youngish ones, too, dressed in black and stark as crows, who must be new on the game since he hadn’t encountered them before. He often wondered about their lives, where they came from, how they had ended up on the streets. He might have talked to them, asked them about themselves, but he could never work up the courage. He had been brought up in a male world, a world first of priests and Christian Brothers, then of medical students, then doctors, like himself. He had known women too, of course, but it had always been a special kind of knowing, one that stopped just below the surface or, in most cases, just above it. Would things have been different for him if there had been a mother to take care of him, to teach him things, to let him in on the secrets that only mothers were privy to? He would never know. But he supposed he was exaggerating the preciousness of all the things he had not known.

It was a sweet, secret luxury, to feel sorry for himself now and then, to lament his losses and his woes.

Sometimes it seemed to him that all his life he had been standing with his back to a high wall, on the other side of which an endless circus show was going on. Now and then there would come to him on the breeze the sound of a drumroll, or a snatch of brassy music, a gasp of wonderment or a surge of raucous laughter from the crowd. Why could he not scale the wall, haul himself up the side of it, even if his hands bled, his fingernails splintered, and jump down and run to the flap of the big top and peer in? Just to see what the performance looked like, even if he didn’t go inside, even if he were only to have that one, hindered glimpse of the dingy, sequined magic—that would be something.

He walked along Merrion Square. The greenery behind the railings was giving off its nocturnal scents. He met no one. The whores didn’t come down this far, for some reason, but stayed around Mount Street and the canal, Fitzwilliam Square, Hatch Street. He was aware of a pleasantly melancholy sensation around his heart, as soft and pervasive as the fragrance of the trees and the plants. He was alive. It seemed an amazing fact, the unlikeliness of it, this mysterious and seemingly aimless project that was his life.

He turned up Merrion Street. There was lamplight in a few of the windows of Government Buildings. He thought of the poor drudges in there, ordered by their ministers to stay on and finish that report, draw up this schedule, frame those parliamentary questions. He wondered if Leon Corless had sat up at one of those windows, late into the night, doing—doing what?

For a while, before he started on his medical studies, Quirke had thought of going for the Civil Service. He had done well in his final school examinations, came out among the top fifty in the country; a career awaited him as a bureaucrat, a mandarin. Strange to think that he might have been behind one of those windows himself now, hunched over his desk, his fountain pen scratching away, covering sheet after sheet of foolscap, as the long day faded into the half-night of midsummer. Strange to think.