Holy Orders A Quirke Novel Page 11

  Phoebe’s mind was racing, and she did not know where to begin or how to frame the questions crowding in her head. Perhaps it was just a coincidence of names. But no, Sally Minor had said she knew who Phoebe was, so there must be a connection with Jimmy.

  Phoebe was about to speak when the young woman put one hand on the edge of the table and leaned forward and said softly, “Yes—I’m his sister.”

  Phoebe nodded. She became aware that her mouth was open, and immediately she clamped it shut. True, there were many things she had not known about Jimmy, yet it was a great shock to think that he had never mentioned a sister. Sally was smiling at her still, somewhat ruefully now. “I’m the black sheep of the family,” she said. “They tend to keep quiet about me.”

  The girl brought their tea, and the plate of scones. Phoebe realized that, although she could not say why, she suddenly felt happy.

  Sally Minor told her story. She had always been in trouble, she said, right from the start. In convent school she had defied the nuns, so that they had to call in the parish priest to try to put manners on her, as the nuns said. “It didn’t work, though,” Sally said, brushing crumbs from her chin. “Their idea of manners wasn’t mine.” At sixteen she had left home and come to the city to attend a secretarial college, where she had taken a course in shorthand and typing. She had never had any intention of being a secretary, however. Jimmy—or James, as she called him—was already a cub reporter on the Evening Mail and she had hoped he might get her a job there. “Then I met Davy,” she said, and laughed, and threw her eyes upwards.

  Davy had come to work as an instructor at the secretarial college. The job was only a stopgap, he said, for he had plans to go to England and get a position with one of the big agencies there. “‘Oh, Sally, me dear, me darling,’ he would say to me, opening wide those big brown eyes of his, ‘won’t you come too, and we’ll make our fortune over there together.’”

  “And did you go?”

  “Oh, I went, of course. The original girl who can’t say no, that’s me.”

  Though she greatly doubted it was so, Phoebe was amused. “And what happened?” she asked.

  “Davy got a job at a place in High Holborn, very upper-crust, where only the most genteel young ladies were taken on, so he assured me. Young they may have been, but ladylike they were not. They took one look at Davy’s curls and those googly eyes of his and were all over him. I’ve never seen anything like it—they were shameless. And that, of course, was me out in the cold.”

  “Did you have to come home?”

  “Certainly not! Come home and spend my life thinning beets and mucking out pigsties? No fear. I hung around the pubs in Fleet Street and got picked up by an old boy who worked, if that’s the word, for the Daily Sketch. Godfrey was his name, a terrible boozer and a lecher into the bargain, but he made me laugh, and, more than that, he got me temping jobs on the paper. The features editor was one of those Fleet Street women, tough as old boots and able to drink the likes of Godfrey under the table. She took a shine to me and let me write the odd par for her—you know, the latest coffee bar that’s ‘in,’ and what they’re wearing this year at the Chelsea Flower Show. My big breakthrough was a story I did on a mink farm in Henley-on-Thames, lots of color and a few jokes. The piece was noticed, and the following week I was offered a staff job.”

  Phoebe’s tea had gone cold without her noticing. “But now you’re back,” she said.

  Sally laughed dismissively. “Oh, no,” she said. “No I’m not. I came over because of James. I had two weeks’ holidays due, and here I am.”

  “Have you seen—have you seen your family?”

  “They don’t know I’m in Dublin. I’m sure they’re convinced the newspaper job is a fiction and that really I’m working in a whorehouse over there. My brother—have you come across my brother?” Phoebe shook her head, and Sally grimaced. “You haven’t missed anything.”

  The clear patch she had made on the window had misted over again, and again she cleared it and peered out at the street.

  “Are you expecting someone?” Phoebe asked.

  “What? No. No, I’m just—” She frowned, and looked into her cup. She was silent for a time. “Do you see the oily skin that’s on the surface of the tea?” she said, pointing into the cup. “I complained about that once to a waiter, in the Savoy, of all places—Madge the features editor was treating. It wasn’t tea I was drinking, in fact, but a glass of wine. The waiter gave a disdainful little smile and leaned over, very confidential, and said, ‘It is caused by your lipstick, Modom.’ I was mortified, of course. But that’s London for you.”

  They laughed, both of them; then Sally was silent again. At last, without looking up, she said, “What happened to James? Do you know? I mean, do you know the details?”

  Phoebe suddenly found herself longing for a cigarette. She had given up smoking years ago, and was surprised by the force of this unexpected craving. If she were to smoke now it would probably make her sick. It was so strange to be sitting here with Jimmy’s sister. It should be a sad occasion, but somehow it was not. It was impossible not to be charmed by the young woman’s stories, her dry manner of speaking, her laughter. She was the kind of person Phoebe would have liked to have as a friend. What a pity that she lived in London. Thinking this, Phoebe found herself wondering, as she often did, at her own decision to stay here, in this grim little city, working for Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes and dining with her father once a week in the sepulchral gloom of the restaurant in the Russell Hotel, pretending not to notice how anxiously Quirke watched her glass, worried she would drink more than her share and leave him short. That was her life. There was David Sinclair, of course, but as much as she liked him—perhaps loved him, even—he was Quirke’s assistant and therefore a part of Quirke’s world. She did not often admit to herself how lonely she was, but now she did. This made her feel sorry for herself, not in the way that, she suspected, most people felt sorry for themselves, but at a remove, dispassionately, almost. Right now, for instance, she was able to look at herself quite coldly, at her drab coat, her black dress with the bit of white lace at the collar, her sensible shoes, the ruler-straight seams of her stockings. Phoebe Griffin, lonely, needy, and sad. Yet it was that Phoebe who was all these things; she herself, this other Phoebe, was over here, standing to one side, looking on. This gift of impersonality, if gift it was, she had inherited from her father, she knew that.

  “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  Sally shrugged. “Oh, a few days,” she said. This was followed by another silence, and then she laughed. “All right,” she said, “I know you’re too polite to ask, but I admit it: I have been following you.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to see what you were like. From the way James talked about you, I expected a cross between Joan of Arc and what’s-her-name, Clark Kent’s girlfriend.”

  Phoebe was astonished. “Did Jimmy talk about me?”

  “‘Jimmy’—of course, that’s what you call him. It sounds so odd, as if it’s someone else. Did he talk about you? My dear, he never stopped. He wrote about you in his letters, and then he used to phone me from the office, late at night, when the copy takers had gone home and there was no one around to know he was making trunk calls. Phoebe this and Phoebe that—you must have wondered why your ears were burning all the time.”

  Phoebe’s mouth had gone dry. She felt like a scientist, a naturalist, say, or an anthropologist, who after years of studying a particular species makes an unlooked-for discovery about it that means all previous assumptions must be revised and adjusted. Jimmy had been her friend, but not what she would have considered a close friend; however, from what his sister was saying it seemed that Jimmy had thought otherwise. Now Phoebe had to go back over all the years she had known him and reexamine everything. Was it possible—she had to ask herself the question—was it possible he had been in love with her? She could not credit it. In all the times they had met and spoken, he had never once shown he
r anything more than the commonplace tokens of friendship. In fact, she had always taken it for granted that he despised her a little, in his self-important way, considering her a spoiled daughter of the bourgeoisie—Jimmy liked to pretend he had read Marx—who knew nothing of the harsh realities of the world. And then there was the fact—and it was a fact, though she hated to acknowledge it—that in her heart she had always assumed that Jimmy had not been interested in girls, that he had not been that way inclined at all. “So,” she said now, with a show of nonchalance that she did not feel, “you must know everything about me that there is to know.”

  “Well,” Sally said, “I knew where you lived, for a start.”

  “Oh,” Phoebe said. “Yes.” She was picturing herself standing in the dark by the window in her flat, peering down into the street, searching the shadows for a lurking form. It was a thought she did not care to dwell on.

  Sally must have sensed her discomfort, for now she leaned forward and said, “I’m sorry for spying on you, really, I am. I didn’t mean to— I mean, I didn’t think of it as spying. Only—”

  A man opened the door of the café but did not come in. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking about from table to table. He wore a brown sheepskin jacket with a zip, and a peaked cap pulled far down on his eyes. His shaded glance settled first on Sally, then on Phoebe. Having registered them both, he withdrew. Sally rubbed yet again at the misted window beside her and craned her neck to look after him as he walked off along the street.

  “Only what?” Phoebe said. Sally looked at her blankly. “You were saying,” Phoebe said, smiling, “that you didn’t mean to spy on me. And?”

  Sally opened her handbag and fumbled in it, frowning. She brought out a packet of Craven A’s. Phoebe saw how unsteady her hands were. She offered the cigarettes across the table but Phoebe, despite her earlier sudden desire to smoke, shook her head. The match trembled in Sally’s fingers, the flame quivering. “Your father is a detective, isn’t he?” she said.

  Phoebe laughed. “No, no. I think he sometimes thinks he is, but he’s not. He’s a pathologist.”

  “Oh. But James said—”

  “He has a friend, he’s a detective. Hackett is his name, Detective Inspector Hackett. Jimmy probably mentioned him too, did he? Hackett often gets my—my father to help him. They’re sort of a team, I suppose you could say.”

  “Has he—your father—has he any idea what happened to James—to Jimmy?”

  Sally’s brightness of a minute ago was gone now, and she looked tense and worried. Had she recognized the man in the doorway? The line of smoke from her cigarette trembled as it rose.

  “I don’t think anyone knows what happened to him,” Phoebe said. She had an urge to reach out and touch the back of Sally’s unsteady hand. “It must be awful for you that there’s no explanation, no—no reason.” She bit her lip, not wanting to go on. She felt a flush rising to her throat. It was impossible, of course, but she was afraid that Sally would somehow sense her suspicions about Jimmy. It embarrassed her even to entertain the thought that he might have been—well, that he might have been “one of those,” as people said.

  Although she had taken no more than three or four puffs from her cigarette, Sally abruptly crushed it out and gathered up her handbag and her woolen cap. “I should be going,” she murmured as she stood up.

  Phoebe put out a hand. “Wait,” she said. Sally looked at her, and then at her fingers, which were resting lightly on her wrist. Phoebe did not take her hand away. Sally sat down again, slowly. “You seem nervous,” Phoebe said. “You seem—I don’t know—you seem afraid.”

  Sally pressed her lips together, and a frown made a knot between her eyebrows. She looked suddenly young and vulnerable. “The last time I spoke to James—it was a couple of nights before the night when he was—when he was killed—he said something strange.” She paused, her eyes fixed on the tabletop. “I wish I could remember what it was, exactly.” She looked up. “It wasn’t even what he said, it was the way he said it.”

  “What was it about? What did he say?” Phoebe asked.

  Again Sally eyed the table, as if some word or image might appear there that would help her to remember. “He was talking about tinkers. I wasn’t really listening—it was late, he was calling from the office and had woken me up and my mind was in a daze. He was saying something about a campsite somewhere, I can’t remember where.”

  “Was that the story he was working on, something about tinkers?”

  “I don’t know—it was ‘something big,’ he said. It was his tone that struck me, though. He sounded excited, you know—well, you do know, if you knew him at all. He had that sort of shake in his voice that he got when he thought he was onto a scoop. But there was something else, too, something in the sound of his voice, the inflection. I’ve thought and thought about it, trying to recall exactly how he sounded. He was excited, but I think he was—I think he was afraid, too. Oh, I know”—she held up a hand, although Phoebe had not spoken—“I know you’ll think I’m just saying this out of hindsight, because of what happened to him. But I remember, that night, after he’d hung up and I lay down again, I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing his voice in my head, and thinking how he sounded the way he used to sound when he was little and had done something that was going to get him into trouble. There was excitement, but, yes, he was frightened, too.”

  She stopped, and Phoebe saw that there were tears in her eyes, and now they overflowed, one from each eye, two glassy beads rolling down her cheeks. Phoebe touched her wrist again with her fingertips. “Where are you staying?” she asked.

  Sally was fumbling in her bag again, for a handkerchief this time. “At a place in Gardiner Street,” she said. She laughed mournfully. “It’s an awful hole, but it’s all I can afford.”

  “Right,” Phoebe said briskly, rising to her feet. “Let’s go.”

  Sally gazed up at her, damp-eyed. “Go where?”

  “To collect your things. You are going to come and stay with me.”

  * * *

  The hotel was called the Belmont. It was a converted three-story house in a grimy terrace on Gardiner Street. There was a dusty fern in each of the two downstairs windows. When the front door opened a bell rang, as in a shop. Worn, dark red carpet, cheap prints of views of Dublin, cheaply framed, a plywood reception desk with a chipped Formica top. The manager, who Phoebe guessed was also the owner, was a spivvish type with oiled hair and a thin black mustache that ran along the rim of his upper lip as if it had been traced there in ink. He insisted on talking to Phoebe, as if it were she who was the guest and not Sally. “The young lady,” which was how he kept referring to Sally, had checked in for two weeks, and if she was going to leave early she would have to pay for the room for the full period, that was the law. Phoebe, surprising herself by her firmness, said this was nonsense, that there was no such law, as she knew very well, since her family had been in the hotel business for generations and she herself worked for a solicitor. These were good lies, she thought, really quite convincing, and she was pleased with herself for her quickness in thinking them up.

  They went up to the room, she and Sally, and Sally packed her suitcase and the vanity bag in which she kept her toilet things, and then they returned downstairs. The manager was in a cold fury by now. He took Sally’s money for the three nights she had stayed, and said there would be a surcharge of two pounds—“For the inconvenience,” he said, and gave Phoebe a glare of baleful defiance.

  When they came out into the street, with the tinny reverberations of the bell still in their ears, they stopped on the pavement and burst into laughter. Phoebe glanced back and saw the manager in the window, fingering his mustache and watching them narrowly from behind the drooping fronds of a potted fern. Doubt, like a wave of dizziness, made her feel light-headed for a moment. What had she done? What had she let herself in for? But then she looked at Sally, with her dark red hair and her beautiful soft brown eyes, and she took the valise from her a
nd said, come on, they would get her settled in, and then they would go together and see Quirke.

  11

  Isabel had a rehearsal, and suggested to Quirke that they should meet afterwards in the Shakespeare. When she came in he was there already, sitting on a high stool at the bar reading the Mail, with a glass of whiskey at his elbow. She paused in the doorway for a moment. She knew by the look of him that the whiskey was not his first drink of the day. Not that he seemed drunk—Quirke never looked drunk, to the naked eye. But there was a certain heaviness in the way he was sitting there, a certain plantedness, that she had come to know well. She went forward and tapped a finger on his knee, and was startled by the look of alarm he gave her and by the momentary panic in his eyes. She said nothing, though, only kissed him quickly on the cheek and perched herself on the stool next to his, taking off her gloves finger by finger.

  “I think, William,” she said to the barman, whom everyone else called Bill, “I think I might risk a G and T—to bathe the vocal cords, you know.” She smiled at Quirke. “That’s a nice shirt,” she said. “Blue does suit you.” She had forgiven him in the matter of the discarded bow tie, or said she had, at least. Now she looked about. “Good to be back,” she said. “The old haunts have their attractions.” The tour had not been a success; rural Ireland, she had observed wryly, did not seem ready yet for Ibsen.

  Quirke had folded his paper and put it aside. “What news of the world?” Isabel asked. He did not answer, and she peered at him more closely. “What’s the matter?”

  He glanced away. “What do you mean, what’s the matter?” he growled.

  “You look—I don’t know. Odd.” She was wondering how long he had been here and just how many whiskeys he had drunk.

  “I’m all right,” he said shortly.

  She went on studying him, tilting her head to one side, as if she were measuring him up for a portrait. Strange, but it was when he was in his lowest spirits or at his most distressed that he seemed most beautiful to her. She supposed beautiful was not the appropriate word, for a man so troubled and dour, yet it was the one she used, to herself. His gray eyes had a greenish gleam that made her think of the sea at evening, aglow and deceptively calm. He had delicate hands, too, for his size, and then of course there were those absurd feet, dainty as a ballet dancer’s, although a dancer’s feet, she reflected, in reality would be anything but dainty.