Holy Orders A Quirke Novel Page 13

  “The Inspector and I have—what shall I say? We’ve cooperated in the past.”

  “Yes. So I’m told.”

  Who had told him? Quirke wondered. And if he knew about him and Hackett already, why had he asked? And anyway, why in the first place had he contacted him and not the Inspector?

  The three priests at their table had ordered another round. The older two were drinking whiskey, the younger one a glass of Guinness. How did they come to be out together like this on a weekday night, drinking and gossiping in Flynne’s? A birthday? Some other celebration? Flynne’s was a haven for the clergy, a safe house for them in the city.

  “I don’t think I ever came across this young man, this Jimmy Minor,” the priest said reflectively. “He was a reporter, is that right?”

  “On the Clarion. Used to be with the Mail.”

  “I wonder what he wanted to talk to me about.”

  “Something to do with your work, maybe? You run clubs and so on in Sean McDermott Street, I hear.”

  “And other places.”

  The priest kept his eyes narrowed, and Quirke could see only the merest ice-gray glint between the lids. His eyelashes, like the hairs on the backs of his hands, were so pale they were almost invisible.

  “Was there something in particular you wanted to talk to me about, Father?” Quirke asked. “If not Jimmy Minor, I mean.”

  The priest opened his hands and held them far apart, palm facing palm. “I’ve heard things about you,” he said.

  “Oh? What sort of things?”

  “Just—things. You know what this city is like: everyone knows everyone else’s business, or thinks he does.” He had taken the cigarette from his mouth and now leaned forward and knocked the ash from it into the ashtray on the table with a deft flick of his wrist. “Anyway, I thought I’d take the opportunity of meeting you. I’m the same as everyone else: I like to keep abreast of what’s going on, and who’s going on with it.” He smiled again, showing a big mouthful of sallow teeth.

  Quirke was holding his whiskey glass in front of him and looking into it. “Tell me,” he said, “who it was that talked to you about me, that told you whatever the things are that you heard about me?”

  “Oh, various people,” the priest said blandly. “Joseph Costigan was one.” Quirke had gone suddenly still. The priest watched him, seeming amused. “Although I’d say now,” he said, “the good Joe wouldn’t be one of your favorite people in the world.”

  Quirke was frowning. “I couldn’t say I know him,” he said. “I’ve met him, a couple of times.” Costigan was a fixer for rich and powerful Catholics in the city, the same Costigan he had told Isabel about, the Costigan who knew how the world worked and where the real power resided.

  “He speaks very highly of you, you know,” the priest said, “very highly indeed. You doubt that, I can see, but it’s true, nevertheless.” He lowered his voice to a feathery whisper. “He knows you for an honest man, a man of principle.” He signaled to the barman to bring another round of whiskeys, and leaned back once more in his chair. “I grant you, Doctor, poor Joe would not be, shall we say, the most immediately appealing of men, in general, on a personal level. He takes himself very seriously as a dedicated warrior of the Church Militant. That kind of thing makes for a certain—what’s the word?—a certain abrasiveness.”

  The barman brought their drinks on a pewter tray. The bespectacled young priest at the other table was watching them again, and again spoke in an undertone to the other two. Quirke sat silent, his eyes fixed on the cigarette case on the table. He was trying to make out the monogram on the lid.

  “Would I be right in thinking, Doctor,” Father Honan said, tipping a little water into his whiskey from the jug the barman had brought, “that you’re not a believer?” He offered the jug to Quirke, who shook his head. “Well, to tell you the truth, neither am I.” Quirke stared, and the priest smiled back happily, pleased with the effect his words had produced. “You’re shocked, I can see.” Quirke took a drink and felt the whiskey spreading hotly through a network of branching filaments behind his breastbone; remarkable how that sensation seemed new every time. “I’d make a further guess,” the priest said, “that you’ve not had the happiest of experiences at the hands of the clergy.”

  “I was at Carricklea,” Quirke said. “I spent a long time there, when I was a child.”

  The priest turned his mouth down at the corners and slowly nodded. “Ah, yes,” he said. “I thought it would be something like that.”

  Quirke looked to the window again. The rain had stopped, and the street out there glistened in the darkness between the pools of light falling from the streetlamps. He had almost forgotten why he was here, in Flynne’s Hotel, drinking whiskey and trying not to think of the past. What did this priest want with him? Why had he spoken of Costigan—why had he brought up that name, of all names? He saw yet again the canal bank in the darkness, the leaning, listening trees.

  “When I say I’m not a believer,” the priest said softly, glancing towards the trio at the other table, “I should explain what I mean. The church, Dr. Quirke, like heaven, has many mansions. There’s room in it even for the skeptic.” He chuckled, a fan of fine wrinkles opening outwards at the side of each eye. “I fear our poor old Mother Church doesn’t always act in her own best interest. It’s a broad church, of course, and has to pay heed to all sorts and varieties of belief and opinion and prejudice across the world, in America, in Africa, in Asia, even. But she has an unfortunate way—I think it’s unfortunate—of treating all her children as if they were just that, children. Look at our own benighted little country, hidebound by rules and regulations formulated in the corridors and inner chambers of the Vatican and handed down to us as if graven on tablets of stone. So when I say I’m not a believer, it’s that church—which I think of, the Lord forgive me, as the Church of the Blessed Infants—that I turn a skeptical eye towards. No: my church is the one that traces its roots back to Greece and classical Rome, not the arid deserts of Palestine and the childish people who lived there when the Bible stories were written. My church is the church that recognizes the tragic element in our lives. My church is the Mater Misericordiae, the mother of sorrows and forgiveness, who spreads her cape wide and shelters all of us, saint and sinner alike.”

  He stopped, and laughed quietly, and leaned forward again. “Forgive me, Dr. Quirke,” he murmured, “I must remember I’m not in the pulpit. In fact, I’m rarely in the pulpit, and not often in church, either, for that matter. My work is carried on in the streets, in the tenements, in the campsites of the traveling people. I don’t flatter myself that this makes me a better minister of God than the monk in his cloister or even the lowly lawgiver in the Vatican. We all have our allotted tasks, our theaters of operations.”

  One of the old ladies across the way rose and tottered to the bar, an empty glass in each hand. “Ah, Mags,” the barman said, pretending to be cross, “you should have shouted and I’d have come over to you.”

  Outside, in Abbey Street, a lone drunk passed by, singing “Mother Machree” in a high, strained, sobbing tenor voice.

  “You’re going to Africa yourself, I hear,” Quirke said.

  The priest put on an exaggeratedly doleful expression. “I am—for my sins. Nairobi first, then some godforsaken parish out in the bush that will be twice the size of Ireland, I don’t doubt.”

  “Have you been there before?”

  “Not that part. I was in Nigeria for a while, some years back. I still come down with fever in the rainy season. What about yourself? Do you ever travel?”

  “I used to go to America—worked there years ago, in Boston.”

  “Ah, Boston is a grand city.”

  The drunk could be heard from somewhere along the rain-washed street, still crooning tearfully.

  “Have you family yourself, Dr. Quirke?” the priest asked.

  “No. My wife died.”

  “But you have a daughter?”

  Quirke frowne
d. “Yes, I have,” he said. “I forget, sometimes.”

  The priest gazed at him in silence for a long moment. He seemed to be thinking of something else. “Your father was Garret Griffin,” he said, “am I right?”

  “My adoptive father, yes.”

  “A fine man, Garret.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “I came across him now and then. A great friend of the church.”

  “A great friend of your man Costigan, too.”

  The priest smiled, biting his lip. “I don’t believe Joe has friends, as such.”

  “What, then?”

  A little flurry of tension gripped the air between them, as if a dust devil had suddenly risen up in a dervish dance on the tabletop. “We’re both men of the world, Doctor,” the priest said. “And a hard and recalcitrant world it is.”

  “So there must be people like Costigan to keep it all in check.”

  “To keep some of it in check,” the priest said, and smiled, softly reproving. “But even the church’s powers are limited—even Joe Costigan can’t control everything.”

  Quirke stood up and went to the bar and asked for two more whiskeys. There was a constriction in his chest and his heart was doing its muffled, trapped-bird thrashings. Was this, he wondered in alarm, the preliminary to another bout of alienation and fantasy, like the one he had undergone at Trinity Manor? He had been in the presence of a priest on that occasion, too. Maybe he was developing an allergy to men of the cloth. Or maybe he was just angry at the thought of Costigan and his endless machinations.

  He turned now, while the barman was preparing the drinks, and saw that Father Honan had risen from his chair and was standing by the table where the trio of clerics was seated, his hands in his pockets, saying something and laughing. The three men sat looking up at him with awed expressions. He would be a star in their firmament, of course, the famous Father Mick, champion of the poor and the downtrodden, the kiddies’ friend, the tamer of drunken fathers and lawless tinkers.

  Quirke carried the drinks to the table. Father Honan, with a parting quip that left his three admirers shaking their heads and chuckling, came back and sat down. “My Lord, Doctor,” he said, picking up his glass and admiring the whiskey’s amber glow, “you’ll have me under the table.”

  “You didn’t know Jimmy Minor, then,” Quirke said.

  The priest looked from the glass to him and back again. He took his time before answering. “I think I said, didn’t I, that I’d never met the poor chap?”

  “Yet he must have known of you, or something about you.”

  The gray eyes narrowed again, glinting. “Something about me?” the priest said, very softly. When he spoke like this, so quietly, he seemed to caress the words, and Quirke thought of a hand with fine pale hairs on the back of it caressing a cheek, fresh, smooth, unblemished.

  “He wrote to you,” Quirke said. “He asked to interview you.”

  “Apparently he did. But I don’t know what it could have been that he wanted to talk to me about. Do you?”

  “I’ll say again—something about your work, maybe.”

  “Maybe so, maybe so. We’ll never know, now, will we.”

  They watched each other, sitting very still, hunched forward a little in their chairs. One of the turf logs in the fireplace collapsed softly, throwing sparks onto the hearth and rolling another ball of smoke out across the floor. Quirke picked up the cigarette case. “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the monogram on the lid.

  “Fleur-de-lis,” the priest said. “A woman had it done for me, years ago.” He smiled at Quirke’s raised eyebrow. “Oh, yes, Doctor, I too was loved, once.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. She was married, and I was young. She came to me for confession, invited me home to meet her husband. He was a builder—or an architect, was it? I can’t remember. Well-to-do people, anyway. She knitted socks for me, and gave me that”—pointing to the cigarette case—“and nothing, Dr. Quirke, nothing happened. I suppose you can’t imagine a love like that?”

  Quirke gazed at the cigarette case where it lay on his palm. “Why did you telephone me, Father?” he said. “Why did you want to talk to me?”

  The priest threw up his hands, laughing softly. “Such questions, Doctor, and you ask them over and over! I already said, people told me things about you. I was curious to see what you were like. And now I’ve seen you, and I think you are a very angry man. Oh, yes—I can see it in your eyes. That place—Carricklea, was it?—marked you for life, that’s plain.”

  “Are you going to tell me now to forgive and forget?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. Your pain is your own, Doctor. No man has a right to tell you what to do with it.” He smiled his glinting smile, then suddenly sat upright and clapped his hands on his knees. “And now,” he said, “I must love you and leave you, for the hour is late and Desperate Dan will be fretting that I’m gallivanting about the town and neglecting my priestly duties.” He stood up, and held out a hand. “I’m very glad to have met you, Doctor. I hope our paths will cross again. Good night to you, sir.”

  He made a brisk bow from the shoulders, and walked away. Quirke had not spoken, had uttered no farewell. He sat gazing into his glass, in the depths of which the glow from the fire had set a ruby light burning. It reminded him of the light of the sanctuary lamp behind that stained-glass wall he had come up against so disconcertingly at Trinity Manor.

  Father Honan, heading towards the door and passing by the three priests at their table, sketched a sort of swift, ironical blessing over their heads. One of them rose hastily to speak to him, but Father Honan did not stop, only put a finger to his lips and shook his head smilingly, and passed on out, through the doorway. A moment later he was back, however, and crossed swiftly to where Quirke sat. “A thing I meant to say to you, Doctor: a great theologian—which of them I can’t for the moment recall—once asked, ‘What kind of a self-respecting God would concern himself with the poor likes of us?’ Or words to that effect. I don’t know what the answer might be, but the question, I find, affords me comfort, especially in times of anguish and loss of certainty. You might think on it, yourself. It lends a little bit of perspective, I find, to the grand scheme of things.”

  He nodded, and turned, and was gone again. This time he did not come back.

  13

  Phoebe had moved the previous winter from a bed–sitting room in Baggot Street to a flat in Herbert Place. She had hesitated over moving there, since that was where her friend April Latimer had lived before her disappearance. But Phoebe was not superstitious, and anyway the flat was at the other end of the street from where April’s had been. And it was a lovely flat; she was lucky to have found it. She had two big rooms on the first floor, the front one overlooking the canal and Huband Bridge and the willow tree that grew there. The back room, the bedroom, was a bit gaunt, with heavy mahogany furniture—a vast wardrobe, two chests of drawers, and a tallboy—but it had a big square-shaped window that was always full of light, particularly in the morning, and quite a few of its many small panes seemed to be the original glass, and gave a wonderful rippling effect, especially when rain was streaming down them. Strange to think of the generations of people, long gone now, who had stood here, looking out on the gardens and the mews and, beyond them, the roofs of the houses on Herbert Street. She did not mind that her father lived just round the corner, in Mount Street; she knew there would be no question of his dropping in on her. The very notion of Quirke dropping in on anyone was laughable.

  She had offered Sally the bedroom, but Sally had taken one look at the four-poster double bed with its absurdly squat legs and said she would be fine on the sofa in the front room. There were spare sheets and a pillow, but for bedclothes she had to make do with a wool throw from the back of one of the armchairs, with her own overcoat on top. When they had done assembling the makeshift bed they stood back to admire it, with their hands on their hips, and smiled at each other in compli
citous fashion; friends already, Phoebe thought, and something thickened for a moment at the back of her throat.

  Phoebe made cocoa for both of them and with their mugs they sat on the floor in front of the gas fire in the lamplight, listening to the sound of the rain falling outside. Phoebe was reminded of being at boarding school, that time one Easter when she was fifteen, and she and another girl had stayed on when everyone else had gone home for the holidays. Phoebe’s parents had been away in America, visiting her grandfather, who was ill. She could not remember what the reason was for the other girl staying behind. Her name, Phoebe remembered, was Monique, which seemed very exotic, like the name of someone in a foreign film. It had been exciting, in a queer, cozy sort of way, being there together, just the two of them, in the almost deserted school, with only the head nun, Sister Aloysius, and a couple of young novices to look after them. They had scoffed clandestine midnight feasts—not at midnight, of course, but long after bedtime, all the same—and in the afternoons they had lounged in armchairs in the library with their shoes off and their feet folded under them, reading and, more often, talking. Monique had smuggled in a packet of cigarettes, and they stood and smoked by an open window in the senior girls’ bathroom, feeling very grown-up and scandalous. They even planned to sneak out one night and take the bus into town and go to the pictures, but their nerve failed them. Monique had a secret boyfriend at home—she lived in Belfast—who was older than she was, and whom she allowed to do things to her, so she said, that Phoebe at the time could not imagine being done to her.

  “It’s very kind of you,” Sally said, “to take me in like this.”

  “I haven’t ‘taken you in’!” Phoebe cried, laughing. “You make it sound as if you were a stray cat or something.”

  They sipped their cocoa, watching the silky blue flames throbbing along the bars of the gas fire. Phoebe liked the sensation of her shins being hot while the backs of her legs were cool. She had thought of changing into her dressing gown but felt it would not be quite the thing to do, in the circumstances. She was not used to having someone staying with her; in fact, no one had ever stayed here overnight, or in the bed-sit in Baggot Street, either, not even David—especially not David.