Holy Orders A Quirke Novel Read online

  “No,” Quirke said, “but he talked to me.”

  Phoebe was startled. “How did that come about?” she asked.

  “He phoned me up. We met in Flynne’s Hotel.”

  This time it was Sally who spoke. “And?” she asked.

  “And nothing. He said he knew nothing about Jimmy, had never met him or spoken to him.”

  “And what about the other one, the tinker, what’s-his-name?”

  “Packie Joyce? A detective I know is going out to Tallaght to talk to him. He’s asked me to come along.”

  His wine glass was empty. He turned again in his chair, lifting a hand to summon the waitress.

  * * *

  The rainstorm was thrilling. In Baggot Street the trees shivered and shook like racehorses waiting for the off, and fresh green leaves torn from their boughs whipped in wild flight down the middle of the road or plastered themselves to the pavements as if hiding their faces in terror. The two young women had to fight their way along, the gale ripping at their clothes and handfuls of rain spattering in their faces. When they tried to speak the wind filled up their mouths, and they had to turn and walk backwards with their arms linked, leaning close against each other so that their temples almost touched.

  Sally thanked Phoebe for introducing her to her father and remarked how good-looking he was. Phoebe did not reply to this. Yes, it was true, she supposed, Quirke was handsome; it was a thing she did not notice anymore. For some time, though, when she still believed he was her uncle, she had been soft on him. It was silly, of course, and would have been even if he had not turned out to be her father. To recall now how she had felt for him in those days made her suddenly frightened, as if she were poised on the very tip of some aerial, intricate structure, the Eiffel Tower, say, or one of the arms of some great bridge, and the force of the feeling surprised her, and shocked her, too. She began to ask herself, as she had done so often in the past, how Quirke could have left her in ignorance for all those years, how he could have been so coldhearted, but then she stopped. It was no good, asking such questions. The past was the past.

  They reached the house on Herbert Place in a flurry of wind and raindrops, and ran up the stairs and burst into the flat, laughing breathlessly and shaking the rain from their hair. “My feet are sopping!” Sally cried happily. “Your floor will be ruined.”

  They kicked off their shoes and struggled out of their wet coats, and Phoebe knelt and lit the gas fire, then said she would make something hot for them to drink, tea or coffee, or spiced lemonade, maybe, and went off into the kitchen. When after a little while she came back, carrying a tray with a jug and two glasses on it, Sally was standing in rippling rainlight by the side of the window, looking down into the street. Her mood had changed, had darkened. She was frowning, and gnawing at the side of her thumb.

  “What’s the matter?” Phoebe asked.

  Sally started, and turned to her with a strange look, wild and distracted, then made the effort to smile. “I was thinking about James,” she said, “thrown into the water, like some poor beast.” She looked down into the street again. “Who could be so cruel?”

  “I made us some hot lemonade,” Phoebe said, conscious of how feeble it sounded. “I put cloves and honey in it. Come and sit by the fire and get warm.”

  Sally seemed not to have heard her. The rainlight made her face into a silver mask, solemn and burnished. “I feel so strange, just to think of it,” she said. “And yet I can’t let it go, I have to know what happened—I have to find out.”

  Phoebe went and set the tray on a low table by the fireplace and sat down on the rug there, folding her legs under herself. After a moment Sally came and joined her. “I’m sorry,” Sally said. “You’re probably tired of hearing me going on and on like this.”

  “Of course I’m not,” Phoebe said, pouring the lemonade into the glasses from a glass jug. “Jimmy was my friend.”

  They sipped their steaming drinks. “It’s funny,” Sally said, “how you all call him Jimmy. When he was at home he would never let anyone call him anything but James. He said it was bad enough being so small without having to be called by a little boy’s name.”

  “I don’t think I ever heard anyone calling him James, before I met you.”

  Sally was watching the soft blue flames playing over the ashy filaments of the gas fire. “I suppose he wanted to be someone else, up here.” She smiled. “I think he was a bit ashamed of the rest of us, so boring and ordinary. ‘Little people,’ he used to say, ‘that’s what we are—little people.’ He had such dreams, such ambitions. ‘You’ll see, sister mine, you’ll see what I make of myself, someday.’”

  She shifted her legs under herself, making herself more comfortable. The spiced drink had given a glow to her cheeks, and the light of the fire set a reflected gleam in her eyes. “When I first went off to London he wouldn’t speak to me, you know—wouldn’t write, didn’t telephone, nothing. I was annoyed, annoyed and hurt, thinking he had taken my brother’s side against me. Then, after a month or so, a long letter arrived from him out of the blue, telling me all the news and asking me how I was liking London. I think he had been jealous of me, at first, and angry at me for being the one who got away, out of Ireland altogether, while he was stuck here. That was supposed to have been him. He was the one who was supposed to be living in London and working in Fleet Street. But poor James, he couldn’t hold a grudge for long. In that first letter he wrote I could read between the lines how envious he was of me, though he wasn’t cross anymore.”

  The rain was heavier now, and beat like sea spray against the window. Sally sighed. “It’s cozy, here,” she said. “I feel protected.” She smiled at Phoebe. “Thanks for taking me in. To tell you the truth, I hated that hotel, and was getting ready to go back to London, until you spoke to me in the street. I knew straight off we’d be friends.”

  To Phoebe’s surprise she felt sudden tears pricking her eyes; only with an effort did she manage to hold them back. It was strange, to be so moved, to suffer such a sudden rush of tenderness, and for a moment she felt dizzy again.

  “Has it occurred to you, Sally,” she heard herself say, “that what my father said might be true, that you may never find out what exactly happened to Jimmy—to James?”

  Sally frowned. “Do you think it’s true?”

  “Things happen here that never get explained, never get accounted for,” Phoebe said. “Ask my father—he can tell you.”

  Now Sally laughed. “Don’t forget, I grew up here—I know what this place is like, the secretiveness, the hidden things.” Phoebe said nothing, and they looked away from each other. After a silence Sally said, “But they wouldn’t—Dr. Quirke, the Guards—they wouldn’t let James—I mean, they wouldn’t let his death go unsolved, would they? Your father wouldn’t let that happen—I know he wouldn’t.”

  Again Phoebe was silent. Sally’s words seemed to jangle for a moment in the air between them.

  Sally took a sip from her glass. “This is lovely,” she said. “Lovely and spicy, and warm.”

  “Yes,” Phoebe said. “My mother used to make it for me, when I was little. The woman I thought was my mother, that is.” Sally looked at her inquiringly and she shrugged. “Oh, it’s complicated,” she said.

  “Yes, but tell me.”

  “My mother died when I was born, and my father—my father gave me away, to his brother, Malachy—his adoptive brother, really—and Malachy’s wife, my father’s sister-in-law.” A small knot had formed between Sally’s eyebrows, and Phoebe smiled sympathetically. “I told you it was complicated. My father and Malachy Griffin married two sisters. My father married Delia, who died, and Mal married Sarah, who brought me up.”

  “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 b
ag 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.