Holy Orders A Quirke Novel (22 page)

“Sarah?” Sally said. “That’s my name, you know.”

“Yes,” Phoebe said, lowering her eyes, “I thought it must be.”

“No one calls me by it, of course.”

“I could, if you like.”

A silence fell between them.

“I thought they were my real parents, Sarah and Malachy,” Phoebe said, “until—until my father told me the truth.”

“When did he tell you?”

“When I was nineteen.” Phoebe lowered her eyes and picked a loose fiber from the rug they were sitting on. “It doesn’t matter now. It was a shock at first, of course.”

“But why…?”

Sally’s voice trailed off and Phoebe looked at her, with a melancholy smile. “Why did Quirke give me away? I’ve never asked him.”

“But—”

“There’d be no point—he wouldn’t know the answer.”

Sally nodded slowly. “And so you’ve forgiven him.”

“Forgiven him?” Phoebe raised her eyebrows; it was as if the notion of forgiveness, of the necessity for forgiveness, had not occurred to her before. “I suppose I have. My father—Quirke, I mean—he’s not—he’s not like other people, you see.”

“In what way?”

“I sometimes think he never really grew up. He’s obsessed with the past—he was an orphan, and part of him is still that orphan. He has this look sometimes, I know it well: sort of furtive, and puzzled, as if there’s a little boy hiding inside him and looking out through adult eyes at the world, trying to understand it, and failing.” She stopped, and smiled, and bit her lip. “The fact is, I don’t know my father, not really, and I doubt I ever will.”

Sally, nursing the glass between both hands, was frowning into the flames of the fire. “It’s all so—it’s all so sad,” she said.

“Oh, no,” Phoebe said quickly. “I don’t think of it as sad. He did tell me, in the end, he did confess the truth. Now I know who I am, more or less. That was something he gave to me, something that he doesn’t have himself, something that no one can tell him. I have to think that’s a mark of generosity”—she laughed—“or of something like it, anyway.”

The storm had intensified and the wind was hurling big splashes of rain against the windows. They might have been in a boat plowing through sea spray. “It’s
so
nice, here,” Sally said. “You’re lucky.”

“Where do you live, in London?” Phoebe asked.

Sally pulled a face. “Kilburn,” she said. “I have a room over a greengrocer’s shop. The shopkeeper is Indian, with a little roly-poly wife and a dozen or so kids who fight all day and cry throughout the night.” She looked about appreciatively. “I love the big windows here, and the high ceilings.”

“Is the sofa very uncomfortable, to sleep on?”

“Oh, no,” Sally said. “It’s fine.”

It was uncanny, Phoebe reflected, how little of herself Sally had imposed on the room. In the morning when Phoebe came out from her bedroom Sally had cleared away every sign of her having slept here, the bedclothes and the pillow folded away behind the sofa and the cushions straightened and the window open at the top to clear the night’s staleness. In the bathroom, too, she kept her things all packed away in her vanity bag, including her toothbrush and toothpaste—Phoebe suspected she even had her own soap and kept that tidied away too when she was not using it. It really was a pity that Sally did not have a job in Dublin. They could get a bigger place, maybe, and live together; Sally would be the perfect flatmate. And indeed, Sally herself must have been thinking something the same, for now she said, “If I did come back, this is the kind of place I’d like to live in.” She smiled. “No screaming kids, and no smell of curry all day long.”

“But you said you wouldn’t come back, that there’s nothing here for you.”

Sally looked into her glass; it was empty, but still she nursed it between her palms. “Oh, I know,” she said, “but there are times when I think about it—coming back, I mean, coming home. London is so big, so—so impersonal. Someone could murder me in that little room and I wouldn’t be found for days—weeks, maybe.” She laughed. “The smell of Mrs. Patel’s cooking would cover up anything.”

Sally frowned. The word
murder
had fallen between them like a heavy stone. “Strange,” she said meditatively, “how you can forget even the most terrible things for a while. I keep thinking James is alive, that the phone will ring and I’ll pick it up and hear him say, ‘Hi, Sis,’ the way he always did, with that silly American accent he liked to put on. Then I remember that he’s gone, that he’ll never phone me again, and I’m shocked at myself for having forgotten, even if only for a little while.” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was low and soft, as if it were coming from a long way off. “I dream about him, you know, every night. I dream we’re children again, playing together. Last night we were in a meadow I remember from when we were small. There were always buttercups in it, in summer, and then, later, there would be dandelion clocks. We used to blow the fluff off of the dandelions, and the number of breaths it took to get rid of them all was supposed to tell you what hour of the day it was. Silly…”

A furious gust of wind made the window boom in its frame, and a fistful of rain rattled against the panes.

“Here,” Phoebe said, “give me your glass.”

She had risen to her knees, and discovered now, too late, that her left leg had gone to sleep, and as she reached out for the glass she felt herself beginning to topple over. Sally, realizing what was happening, put out a hand to steady her, but Phoebe kept falling sideways awkwardly, and suddenly they found themselves in a sort of embrace, Sally with her back arched and Phoebe leaning heavily against her. Their faces were very close together; they could each feel the warmth of the other’s breath.

Later, Phoebe could not remember if it was she who had kissed Sally or if Sally had kissed her. Their lips met so lightly, so fleetingly, that it might have happened by accident. But it was not an accident. At once they drew back, and both of them began to speak at the same time, and stopped, flustered and half laughing. Then something happened in the air between them. It was as if lightning had struck. They were not laughing at all now. Slowly they leaned forward again, and again their lips met, deliberately this time, drily, warmly, exerting a soft, tentative pressure. Phoebe was aware of her heart beating, of the blood pulsing in her veins. They had both kept their eyes open, gazing at each other in surprised, wordless inquiry. Then they disengaged, and Phoebe sat back on her heels. Sally’s face was below hers, tilted upwards; there was a faint flush on her cheeks and forehead and her umber eyes were lustrously damp.

“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said. “I don’t…” Words failed her. She did not know what it was she had begun to say. It seemed to her all at once that she knew nothing, and that, gloriously, there was nothing she needed to know.

Sally was shaking her head. “No no,” she said, her voice congested, “there’s no need…” But she too fell silent.

They looked away from each other in a sort of giddy desperation. Phoebe’s heart was making an awful, dull thudding, so loud that she thought Sally must be able to hear it. She struggled to her feet, shedding involuntary little moans of distress—that ridiculous leg of hers had pins and needles in it now—and limped off to the kitchen and stood at the window there with a hand to her mouth, gazing out unseeing at the rain. She was trembling all over, though not violently; she imagined this must be how a tuning fork would feel when it had been softly struck. She realized she was listening intently and almost fearfully for any sound from the other room. She did not know what she would do if Sally were to follow her out here. What would they say to each other. What would they do? She had never kissed a girl before, never in her life, nor had she felt the urge to, so far as she knew. She caught her lower lip between her teeth.
So far as she knew
—what did that mean?

Still she strained to listen, but still there was no sound from the living room, or from anywhere else—the world seemed to have fallen into a shocked silence. She imagined Sally still sitting as she had left her, on the rug, with her legs folded under her, as confused and full of wonderment as she was.

What was she to do, what was she to think?

Maybe Sally would leave; maybe she would fetch her vanity bag and pack her things into her suitcase and hurry from the flat and out of the house, without a word of good-bye, and be gone. At the thought, Phoebe felt something inside her drop suddenly, like something falling soundlessly in a vacuum.

She looked down. In one hand she was holding the lemonade glass, while the other was locked into itself in a fist, white-knuckled, quivering. The rain at the window seemed to be trying to say something to her, a slurred, secret phrase. Her heart was still struggling in her breast like a trapped animal. She turned up her clenched fist and opened it slowly. Pressed into an indent in her palm was what at first she took to be a small white pill with holes pierced through its center. She gazed at it in bewilderment. Then she realized what it was. It was not a pill, but a button, a button she must have ripped from Sally’s blouse.

*   *   *

They sat opposite each other at the kitchen table and talked for what seemed an age, holding themselves very straight, with their fists set down in front of them on the table, as if they were engaged in some contest, some trial of skill and endurance. Afterwards Phoebe would not be able to recall a single thing they had said; all she knew for certain was that the kiss had not been mentioned. How could it have been? For some things there were no words; she knew that. What she did remember was the urgency in their voices, or in her voice, anyway, the excitement, and the fear. She thought she had never known such a jumble of emotions before. There had been crushes at school, of course, but they had meant nothing. She recalled too the night one Christmastime in that pub—Neary’s, was it, or Searson’s?—when a narrow-faced woman with thin lips painted crimson had kept staring at her and at closing time had come up to her and offered her a lift home, which she had refused. That was the extent of her experience of—of what was she to call it? She did not know. Whatever it was that had occurred between her and Sally as they sat on the rug in front of the gas fire was a new thing in Phoebe’s life, unexpected, unlooked-for, and frightening, but also, although she was not yet prepared to admit it, exciting, too—oh, exciting beyond words.

On they talked, on and on, with Sally smoking cigarette after cigarette, and gradually the sky outside cleared and the sun came out, angling sharp spikes of light down into the street. Sally said, in a very casual-seeming tone, that she would get her things together and leave—she would go back to the Belmont—but Phoebe would not hear of such a thing. “I won’t let you go,” she said, though of course it did not come out as she had meant it to, and she felt herself blushing. “I mean,” she added hastily, “there’s no need for you to go, and anyway the Belmont is a dreadful place, I won’t think of you going back there.”

“You’ve been very kind,” Sally said, the words sounding stilted and formal. “But I feel I should go and leave you to get back to normal.”

“Oh, no,” Phoebe said quickly, and it sounded in her own ears like a wail, “you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. I’m—I’m glad of your company. Honestly, I am,” she added, almost in desperation.

“I know,” Sally said. “And I’m glad to be here. But…”

In the silence that followed this exchange they had to look away from each other, clearing their throats. Phoebe knew that Sally was right, that she should leave the flat and go back to the hotel, but she knew too that she did not want her to go, not yet, not with everything unresolved between them. But how was anything to be resolved? The fact of that kiss, speak of it or not as they might, was a taut silken cord, invisible but all too tangible, by which they were held fast to each other now. Phoebe knew, and she wondered if Sally knew it too, that they should snap the cord at once, this moment, without delay. But would they?

Sally was gazing pensively into the street. “Everything is so confused,” she said, in a faraway voice. “I feel—I don’t know what I feel. Strange. Lost. When James—Jimmy, I mean, I may as well call him that, since everyone else does—when Jimmy died part of me died, too. That sounds like something someone would say in the movies, I know, but it’s true. You can’t imagine what it’s like, being a twin. You’re never just yourself—there’s always an extra part, or a part missing. I can’t explain. You know, when people have an arm or a leg amputated they say they can still feel it, this phantom limb, that sometimes they can even feel pain in it. That’s how I am now. Whoever killed Jimmy killed a bit of me, too, but the bit that’s dead is still there, somehow.”

Phoebe wanted to take Sally’s hand in hers, to hold it tightly, yet she knew she must not, must absolutely not. She stood up from the table; it was a relief to be on her feet. “Let’s go out and get some things for lunch,” she said.

Sally shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”

“You will be,” Phoebe said. “Come on, we can go to the Q and L.”

“The Q and L? What’s that?”

“It’s my local grocer’s. Wait till you see Mr. Q and L, in his checked suit and his canary waistcoat. He looks the image of Mr. Toad.”

“Is that his name?” Sally said incredulously. “Queue-and-ell?”

“Of course not. That’s the name of the shop. I don’t know what he’s called. He’s sort of mad. Don’t be surprised if he serenades you with a bit of opera, or does a pirouette.”

Sally stood up. “Well,” she said, “he certainly sounds different from my Mr. Patel.”

“Mr. Patel doesn’t sing or do ballet steps?”

“No. I’m afraid Mr. Patel is a grouch.”

They smiled at each other. Was it getting easier? Were they beginning to relax? It was as if, Phoebe thought, they had been walking for a long time at the very edge of a steep precipice, with the wind pulling at them, trying to drag them over, and now they had at last stepped away from the brink, and she felt shaky with relief but also with a faint regret for the danger that had passed.

They put on their coats and walked up to Baggot Street. The sun made puddles of molten gold on the rain-wet pavements, and above them small white puffs of cloud were gliding across the sky like upside-down toy sailboats. Phoebe would have liked to link her arm in Sally’s but knew she could not. Was this how it would be from now on, with even the most innocent token of friendship become suddenly suspect?