Holy Orders A Quirke Novel (10 page)

Without his realizing it, his hand must have tightened on the soft flesh above Isabel’s hip, for suddenly she started awake and tried to sit up, leaning on an elbow. “What?” she said sharply. “What is it?” He touched his fingers to her face soothingly, cupped her cheek in his palm, and said it was all right. She lay down again slowly on her side, facing him now. “I was dreaming,” she murmured. She was staring into the darkness, he could see the glint of her eyes in the moonlight. “Something about my—something about my father. He was crying.” She moved forward, pressing her face against his shoulder. He reached past her and switched on the bedside lamp. Isabel whimpered in protest and clung the more tightly to him. He scrabbled for his cigarettes, found them, lit one. Isabel drew back, sighing. “Where’s my slip?” she said. “I’m perished.”

He got out of bed and picked up her clothes from where she had piled them on a chair; in the deeper folds there was still a trace of the warmth of her body. How long had they been in bed? “Give me the blouse,” Isabel said. “It’s warmer.”

She took it from him and put it on, squirming amid the clinging bedclothes. He went to the bathroom and came back wearing a dressing gown. Isabel was sitting with her back against a bank of pillows, combing her fingers ineffectually through her hair. “You shouldn’t smoke so late at night,” she said distractedly.

He sat down on the side of the bed, half turned away from her. She smiled, and lifted a hand and touched the comma of hair at the nape of his neck. “You really do look terrible, do you know that?”

He nodded dully. He was thinking of going out to the kitchen and pouring himself another whiskey, as a pick-me-up, but he knew it would only lead to more nagging.

“You are glad to have me back, aren’t you?” Isabel asked brightly, though he caught the flicker of anxiety in her voice. It was an unanswerable question, or at least a question to which there could be no answer forceful enough to sound convincing. Why did everything have to be so difficult?

“I did miss you,” he said, flinching inwardly at the inadequacy of the words, the banality.

“Tell me about Jimmy Minor,” Isabel said, changing the subject, her voice gone hard. “Tell me what happened.”

“I told you. There’s nothing more. He was beaten to death and thrown in the canal.”

“Why?”

He showed her his hands. “I don’t know.”

“What about the police? They must have some idea. That inspector friend of yours—what’s his name?”

“Hackett.”

“What does he think?”

“He doesn’t know what to think.”

Isabel was watching him, her mouth tightly set at the thought of Jimmy Minor and his violent end. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “why do you have to have such a horrible job?”

He felt sympathy for her. It could not be easy, dealing with him, trying to find a way past the barriers he had spent his life erecting and which he never ceased to tend and maintain. Why did she bother? If he were to ask, she would say it was because she loved him, and he supposed she did, but he was not sure what that meant. Other people seemed to understand love, without it being explained to them; what was the matter with him, to be so baffled? He would drive Isabel away, someday, just by being what he was, without any special effort. When that time came she would not try again to kill herself, he was sure of that. By now she had learned that such gestures, however dramatic, would do no good.

“And Phoebe?” she asked. “Is she
very
upset?”

He looked to the window. The moon was lower now, and in part hidden behind the sash. “I didn’t do a very good job of breaking it to her, either.”

“I can imagine,” Isabel said drily. “You are hopeless, Quirke, you realize that.”

He nodded. She touched the back of his neck again with her cool fingertips.

“I think he was working on something, Jimmy Minor,” he said. “Something to do with a priest.”

“Oh, yes? What priest?”

“Just a priest. Honan—Father Mick, they call him. Does good works, operates in the slums.”

“I think I’ve heard of him. Why would Jimmy have been interested in him?”

“I keep telling you—I don’t know. I ask the same questions and get no answers. Jimmy tried to interview this priest, was refused.”

“Why?”

“Why was he refused? The order wouldn’t allow it—Holy Trinity Fathers. He’s leaving for Africa, so they say. Must be very busy packing.”

“And you think it was because of him, this priest, that Jimmy was murdered?”

Quirke did not reply. He was still watching the moon. Half cut off by the edge of the window as it was, it seemed to be tipping him an awful wink. He knew what Isabel was not saying. As a child Quirke had been abused, body and soul, by priests and brothers, at Carricklea, and other places before that. When it came to the clergy he could not be expected to think calmly or clearly. Isabel had once said that he saw a priest under every bed. She had meant it lightheartedly, but the look he had given her had made her draw back and swallow hard. With Quirke, some things were not to be joked about.

“Did I ever tell you,” he said now, “about a fellow by the name of Costigan?”

“No, I don’t think so. Who is he?”

“Just someone I knew. In fact, I didn’t know him, he made himself known to me. One of the Knights of St. Patrick, teetotaler, Pioneer pin in his lapel, the usual. He explained to me once that there are two worlds, the one that we—you and me and all the other poor idiots—think we live in, and the real one, behind the illusion, where people like him are in charge. He was honest about this other world, I’ll give him that. A tough place, he admitted, a nasty place, in many ways, but the real thing, nevertheless, where the real decisions are made, where the necessary actions are taken. Without people like him, he said, people prepared to face reality and do the dirty work, the rest of us wouldn’t be able to live our comfortable, deluded lives. We’d be in the muck too, up to our necks.”

He paused, smoking the last of his cigarette. “I was impressed, I have to admit it. It’s not that he was telling me something I didn’t know—every mouthful of meat has a tang of the slaughterhouse—but the way he told it was impressive, the matter-of-factness of it. There are Costigans everywhere, behind the scenes, running things, controlling things, keeping the meat grinder going.” He paused, almost smiling. “Yes, I remember Mr. Costigan. I remember him well.”

Isabel, in the lamplight, gazed at him. She had folded her arms around herself, as if for protection. “But
you
live in that world,” she said, “the world he talked about.”

He considered. “No, I don’t. I wouldn’t have the stomach for it, wouldn’t have the courage. But I have one foot in it, that’s true.”

“You should have done something else—some other job, I mean.”

“Such as?”

He knew what she would say.

“You could have been a doctor—I mean a doctor for the living.”

He gave a faint laugh. “Ah, the living,” he said. “I don’t know much about them, that’s the trouble.”

She rose up suddenly, scrambled to her knees, and put her arms around him. “I hate to hear you say things like that,” she said, her mouth once more against his ear. “You say them too complacently, too comfortably. I sometimes think you love your wounds.”

He laughed again, leaning his forehead against her hair. “Yes,” he said, “like the leper with his begging bowl, who has to love his stumps.”

She took his face in her hands and turned it towards her own and kissed him on the mouth, then drew back and looked solemnly into his eyes. He tried not to shy from her gaze. “You could be happy, you know,” she said. “It’s not impossible. Other people have done it, people with more awfulness in their lives than you have.”

He nodded, but at last had to look away. She was right, of course, everything she said was right; he just wished she would not insist on saying it, repeatedly. Perhaps he did not want to be happy. He had little talent for it, that was certain. Besides,
happiness
was another of those words, like
love,
the meaning of which he could never quite grasp. He wanted to tell her about his vision of the canal bank in the dark, how all evening since she had arrived he had kept seeing it, and how it filled him with mysterious longing. He wanted to make her understand, too, what a danger he was, what a menace, to those who came near him, who tried to come near him. But then surely she knew that. She had tried, however halfheartedly, to kill herself, for love of him; things that he touched tended to droop and die.

“I’m sorry,” he said. It was a thing he often found himself saying, although he was never sure what he was apologizing for. Everything, he supposed, everything that he was and did. It was a wearisome business, being himself. He would have liked a break from it, a holiday away from being who he was.

*   *   *

In the morning, a cobweb-colored sky cleared suddenly and the sun came out, spiking in at the side of the window where last night he had watched the moon. He had wakened with a start of nameless dread, the sun in his eyes and his heart thudding. Now he lay breathing, shallowly and slowly, righting himself. It was like this every morning, the waking into fright, then the relief to find that he was not at Carricklea but in his own bed, no longer a child, safe and unmolested. Isabel was up already; she would be in the kitchen, making breakfast. He stretched luxuriantly, yawning so hard the hinges of his jaws crackled. He would take the day off, perhaps, and they would go to lunch somewhere, the Russell, maybe, or—

“What’s this?” She was standing in the bedroom doorway, wearing his dressing gown, with a hand on her hip, holding up some brightly colored thing for him to see. An item of scanty underwear, perhaps, that she had bought to please him?

He sat up, rubbing his eyes and peering. What she had in her hand was a blue bow tie. She had given it to him as a going-away present when she left on tour. “I found it in the kitchen,” she said icily. “In the rubbish bin.”

9

Sergeant Jenkins drove them out to Rathfarnham. Quirke and Inspector Hackett sat in the back seat of the unmarked squad car, each looking out the window beside him. It rained at first and then abruptly stopped, and the sun came out and shone on the wet road and made a blinding glare on the roof of the car.

Quirke felt distinctly peculiar. It was as if he had a hangover, even though he had drunk no more than a few whiskeys the night before, first with Hackett and afterwards with Isabel. He wondered if he might be in for a dose of flu. His head seemed packed tight with cotton wool, and he had a sensation of being somehow separate from himself. He found himself welcoming the prospect of being ill—he would be glad of a day or two in bed, with a book and a bottle of Jameson. Isabel, however, would insist on taking care of him. He thought of her doing her Florence Nightingale act, making hot drinks for him and plumping up his pillows. He liked to be alone when he was sick. It was an opportunity to think, to assemble his thoughts, to reassess his life. He grinned briefly at his faint reflection in the window, showing his teeth. His life; ah, yes, his life.

“Funny about the garden,” Hackett said.

Quirke turned to him. “What?”

“The garden that Jimmy Minor had going, behind where he lived. I wouldn’t have thought of him with a spade in his hands. You never know people, do you.”

“I find that’s generally true, yes,” Quirke said drily.

The detective nodded, not listening. “I remember one of the instructors when I was at Templemore, the Garda training college there. ‘Lads,’ he used to say, ‘never jump to conclusions about a person until you know all the facts about him—and the fact is, you’ll never know all the facts.’”

“Words of wisdom,” Quirke said.

Hackett glanced at him sidelong, and said no more. He had long ago got used to Quirke and his unpredictable moods. He fixed his gaze on the back of Jenkins’s head and his translucent jug ears. He could not get the thought of Jimmy Minor’s scrap of a garden out of his head, the raised potato beds, the neat lines of seedlings, the cane tripods. It would be let run wild now, of course. In a year, two at the most, there would be hardly a sign of it left. It would be gone to wrack and dust, like the young man himself. He thought of time and its depredations and felt an inward shiver.

There was a metalwork arch above the gates of Trinity Manor, with a big wrought-iron medallion in the middle holding a blue-painted metal cross, and a legend underneath in Latin that he could not make out, except the word
Trinitas
. The house, away off at the end of a curving drive, amid flat expanses of lawn, was massive and gray. The trees, sycamores and beeches and the odd oak, were bare still, their branches etched in stark black against a sky of bird’s-egg blue and big pilings of silver-white cloud; looking more closely, though, with a countryman’s eye, Hackett spied the dusting of spring’s new shoots, soft green against the black bark. Contemplating all this, he felt nostalgic for the landscapes of his youth, the rolling fields, the river meadows, the wild woods. No: in all the years he had lived in the city he had never quite reconciled himself to it.

They pulled up on the gravel in front of the house. The blinds were half drawn on the big windows. There was a set of granite steps and a broad door painted navy blue, with a brass knocker. The house in the old days had been the residence of some British dignitary—the lord lieutenant, was it? No, his place was in the Phoenix Park. Somebody like that, anyway. How quick the priests had been, after the English went, to seize the best of what they had left behind. Hackett had not much time for the church, but he had to admire its relentless way of getting power and, having got it, the tenacity with which it held on to it.

Jenkins was told to wait in the car and the two men climbed the steps to the front door. Hackett glanced at his companion; had Quirke’s grayish pallor turned grayer? No doubt the very sight of a place such as this brought back harsh memories of his childhood and the institutions he had spent it in.