Holy Orders A Quirke Novel Page 21
In the end it was Rose herself who opened the door to him. She was wearing slacks and a short jacket with enormous sleeves—a kind of kimono, was it? The light of the hall at her back made a haloed blaze in her dyed blond hair, reminding Quirke of the dandelion heads of the streetlamps.
“Quirke!” Rose exclaimed, sounding surprised and, it seemed, not entirely pleased.
Quirke took off his hat and shook raindrops like a scattering of jewels from the crown. “I phoned Mal this morning.”
“Yes, you did,” Rose said drily, in her slowest southern drawl. “But he forgot to tell me you were coming round. He forgets everything, these days. Come on in. You don’t look good.”
She took his hat and coat and hung them on a coat rack, and led him along the broad high hall, with its gleaming parquet and gilt chairs and massively framed ugly dark brown portraits of bewigged, puce-faced worthies of an age or ages long gone. The mansion had been the embassy of some minuscule European principality—Quirke could not remember which one—and when for some reason the mission had been abruptly withdrawn, Rose and Malachy had bought it as it stood, furnished, carpeted, complete with chandeliers and all manner of quaint and curiously lifeless bijouterie. Quirke could not think why they had wanted it. It would never be a home.
He watched Rose’s slim rear end as she walked ahead of him. She was still a handsome woman. He had gone to bed with her, once, a long time ago. Did Mal know about that? Would Rose have told him? But Rose and Mal, now—that was a conundrum Quirke knew he could never hope to crack.
“Have you had dinner?” Rose asked over her shoulder.
“Yes, I ate something,” Quirke said, though it was a lie.
“We just finished supper, Mal and I. These days, our evenings draw to a gentle close earlier and earlier. I think eventually we’ll find ourselves retiring for the night sometime around midafternoon.” She glanced back at him with an eyebrow lifted. “You do look terrible, Quirke.”
“I think I’m getting a cold.”
“Sure seems it’s going to be an awful bad one.”
They went through a green baize door and down three steps into a much narrower hallway. This had been formerly the servants’ quarters. “We’re living modestly, these days,” Rose said, and rolled her eyes.
She opened the door into what must have been the servants’ parlor, a low-ceilinged room of a brownish aspect, with a big oak table in the middle of the floor and framed and faded hunting prints on the walls. There was a single window, four square blank panes holding back the darkness. In a tiny grate in one corner a coal fire was burning. The air in the room was so warmly heavy that Quirke at once felt a headache starting up. The only light was that of a standing lamp beside the fireplace. Mal was sitting under the lamp in a ragged old green-upholstered armchair that sagged so low he seemed almost to be reclining on the floor. Now he put aside his newspaper and rose from the depths of the chair, uncoiling his long, angular frame—Quirke was reminded of the outsized wooden calipers that some Christian Brother in some institution long ago used to beat him with—and came forward, smiling, and fumbling with his rimless spectacles, which seemed to have got entangled somehow in his hair. “Quirke,” he said in greeting, “you’re looking well!”
Quirke and Rose exchanged a glance.
“How are you, Mal?” Quirke asked.
Direct and simple questions always seemed to confuse Malachy. He had got his glasses off at last and stood blinking, still vaguely smiling. He wore a checked shirt and a dark red bow tie and a fawn cardigan with leather buttons in the shape of some kind of nut. Quirke glanced down and was surprised to see that his brother was wearing shoes, not slippers; over the years Mal had become definitively a carpet-slipper man.
“How about a drink, boys?” Rose asked, setting a hand on her hip. “Quirke—what will you have?”
“Brandy, if you’ve got it.”
She gave him a wry look. “It’s the Dry Gulch Saloon here, Doc—you can get anything you want.”
She went out, and the two men stood facing each other in a suddenly discomforted silence, which Mal at last broke. “You said on the phone you—” he began, but Quirke lifted a hand to stop him, saying, “Let’s wait till I’ve had my drink.” He looked about at the brown walls with their sporting prints dimly illumined by the lamp with its skin-colored shade. He felt a sudden sinking of the heart. What help would there be for him here? And yet he heard himself say, “I think I’m sick, Mal.”
Mal nodded, as if this were not news at all. “In what way?” he asked.
“I don’t know. My mind, my brain—I think there’s something wrong with it.”
“Have you been drinking?”
“For Christ’s sake, Mal!”
“I don’t mean now, I mean have you been drinking lately? Have you been on a binge?”
Quirke shook his head. “It’s not the drink.”
“That’s what everyone says,” Mal said, with a faint smile.
“Well, in my case it’s true,” Quirke snapped. “I know what it’s like, I’ve had the DTs. This is different.”
Mal was gazing at him myopically, smiling with an almost mournful tenderness. “Yes,” he said “I can see you’re in distress. Tell me what I can do.”
Quirke gave a sort of laugh. “I was hoping you’d tell me that.”
Rose came back then, carrying a silver tray with glasses, a brandy snifter, and a decanter and various bottles. “Here’s your medicine, Doctor,” she said to Quirke. She put the tray down on the table and picked up the decanter and began to pour. “Say when.”
After she had distributed the drinks—Quirke’s goblet of brandy, a thimble of sherry for Mal, rye whiskey for herself, on the rocks—they sat down in front of the fire, she and Quirke on a small sofa covered in crimson velvet with bald patches and Mal reclining again in the green armchair with his long legs stretched out almost horizontally in front of him. The chair reminded Quirke of some aquatic animal, a denizen of moss-hung everglades.
He fixed his eye on the heart of the fire, a tremulous white-hot hollow. “I’ve begun to see things,” he said. “I’m having hallucinations.” He sensed Rose and Malachy looking quickly at each other and away. He leaned forward heavily, nursing the brandy glass in both hands. Beside him Rose exhaled a breath and moved back on the sofa. He looked sidelong at the whiskey glass she was balancing on her knee. She would despise him, he knew, for what he was confessing. Rose did not believe in infirmities of the mind, put all that down to weakness and sickly self-indulgence.
“What are these hallucinations?” Mal asked. He was running a fingertip around the rim of his sherry glass. If the glass were to produce the high-pitched note that glasses did when they were stroked like that, Quirke thought, he would scream.
“They’re just—hallucinations,” he said, lifting a hand. “I see things, things that usually only happen in dreams, but I’m not asleep, I’m there, walking through them, being part of them.” He described his visit to Trinity Manor and what had happened in the kitchen with the old serving man, whatever his name was—what had happened, or what he had imagined had happened. “Other things, too,” he said. “I see animals, weird animals that I know are not there, and yet I see them. And then there’s this light…”
He stopped. In the fire a coal fell and a drop of molten tar ran out of it, hissing in the flames. “What light?” Mal asked after a moment.
Quirke could smell the tar boiling in the fire. He shut his eyes. Childhood again, and him as a boy prizing lumps of tar from cracks in a metaled roadway. Arrows, their heads made from six-inch nails hammered flat and pushed into the cleft of a stick and lashed tight with twine that in turn was smeared with tar. The feathering, how was that done? He could not remember. Bows and arrows, the harsh cries of boys pretending to be red Indians, and someone making the sound of a ricocheting bullet. He opened his eyes and looked again into the white heart of the fire. He felt dizzy. “What?” he said.
“You were talking about a
light,” Mal prompted.
“Yes. I don’t see it. I just know it’s there”—he waved a hand again—“off to the side, but when I try to look directly at it, it moves out of range.”
Mal nodded slowly. His puzzlement was obvious, though he was trying not to show it. “I could have a look at your eyes—I think there’s a ’scope somewhere in the house.”
“No no no,” Quirke said with weary impatience. “It’s not my eyes, my eyes are all right. It’s my head—my mind. My brain.”
Mal coughed, and drew himself forward in the armchair, linking his fingers together. “Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps you need to see a specialist? There’s a good one in St. John’s, they say he studied in Vienna—”
Rose stirred and with a faint grunt got to her feet. She stood a moment looking down at Quirke. A melting ice cube in her whiskey glass gave a submerged, agonized crack. “I think,” she said, “I’ll leave you two to get on with this. I have some needlepoint that needs attending.”
She left the room, humming to herself. The two men sat in silence, gazing into the fire. There was a faint, urgent sound—a bush outside the window was tapping one of its twigs against the glass. “I don’t need to see anyone at St. John’s,” Quirke said wearily. He had been there already, more than once, to be dried out; he did not want to see those grim interiors ever again. “I need an X-ray. I need”—he gave a short laugh—“I need my head examined.”
“I see,” Mal said, and unclasped his fingers and put the tips together and steepled them under his chin. “You should see Philbin, in the Mater. He’s still the best there is.” It was Philbin, Quirke remembered, who had treated Mal’s first wife, Sarah. She used to say that too, I need my head examined, making a joke of it. And then she had died. “I could call him in the morning for you, if you like,” Mal said.
“I can call him myself.”
“Yes, I know you can.” Mal did his melancholy smile. “But let me do it for you.”
“All right. Thanks.”
Mal rose from the depths of the armchair and picked up a pair of metal tongs and began to put coals on the fire, scrutinizing each lump as if he were measuring it for size and quality. Quirke watched him with grudging fondness. Mal had helped him before, in the past, but he had done him disservices, too.
“What are you up to, these days?” Mal asked.
Quirke was lighting a cigarette, it was the fourth or fifth since he had sat down, and the inside of his mouth was raw and his throat felt scratchier than ever. “You remember Jimmy Minor, Phoebe’s friend?”
“Yes, I read about him in the papers. A tragic business.” Holding a lump of coal aloft in the claws of the iron tongs, he glanced back at Quirke with an almost mischievous glint. “I suppose you’re investigating his death, you and your friend Hackett.”
“Investigating is a strong word. We’re not exactly Holmes and Watson.”
“You’re quite the pair of sleuths, though.”
He put away the tongs and sat down again. The fire hissed and crackled, sending up a snaking column of dense, yellowish-white smoke. “Could that be what’s troubling you?” he said. “I mean this young man’s death? It seems to have been very violent, from what I read in the papers.”
Quirke rose and went to the table and the tray with the decanter on it. He poured himself another brandy, a good inch of it. “No,” he said, returning slowly to the fire. “My troubles are all my own work.”
“Yes,” Mal said, groping for his sherry glass where he had set it on the floor beside his chair. “I think you’re overwhelmed, Quirke.”
“Overwhelmed?”
Mal blushed a little. “Yes. By yourself, by your life. You must do something about it.”
“Such as?”
Mal hesitated for only a second. “You have to forgive yourself,” he said.
“Forgive myself?” Quirke stared. “For what?”
“For whatever it is that’s burdening you.” Mal located his glass and fished it up, but it was empty. He turned it in his long pale fingers, looking through it from the side. “The things that happened to you when you were a child, they were no fault of yours.”
Silence fell like a blade, and the already dim light in the room seemed to darken further for a moment. The twig tap-tapped at the window. Quirke was thinking how Mal’s father, Judge Garret Griffin, had played a role in the things that had happened to him in his childhood.
“Tell me, Mal, do you think Garret was my father?”
Again the light in the room seemed to dim. This was the question that had stood unasked between them since they were boys together, growing up in Judge Griffin’s house. There had been a young woman, Dolly Moran, who worked years ago in that house and who might have had a child and been forced to give it up for adoption. The facts were unclear, buried, deliberately so, in the murk of time. If there had been a child, was Garret Griffin the father of it?—of him? Quirke had been taken from an orphanage and given a new life by the Judge and his wife. By then Dolly Moran was gone. So many mysteries, Quirke thought, so many questions, unasked and unanswered.
Mal took a slow breath. “I don’t know,” he said. “My father never talked about it—he never talked about any of those things.”
“You protected him, when those things were threatening to come out.”
“Yes, I did,” Mal said, lifting his chin defiantly. “I did what I could.” He lowered the sherry glass and looked hard at Quirke. “He was my father.”
Quirke drank his brandy. He felt strangely calm, remote, almost. It was a shock to discover how little he seemed to care, suddenly, about all this, where he had come from, who his parents were, what his real name might be—these patches of darkness in his past had seemed deep pools in the depths of which he might someday finally be lost to himself. Now, all at once, they were what they were, mere gaps, mere absences. He should have asked that question of Mal a long time ago. He should have asked it of Garret Griffin.
He studied the amber lights in his glass. The brandy held an image of the fire, tiny and exact. “Time to go,” he said.
Mal did not answer—perhaps he had not heard? He seemed sunk in himself, lost perhaps in the shadows of his own past. Quirke tossed back the last of the brandy and stood up. He had drunk too much, again, and felt light-headed. He put a hand to the back of the sofa to steady himself. Mal rose slowly. “I’m glad you came to me,” he said. “It means something.”
“Does it?”
“Yes.” He laid a hand on Quirke’s shoulder. “I’ll call Philbin first thing—he’ll get you in for an X-ray straightaway.”
Quirke nodded, looking at the floor. “Right. Thanks.”
Mal still had his hand on his shoulder; then slowly he took it away and let it fall to his side. “Look after yourself, Quirke,” he said.
* * *
Quirke walked along the hall, his shoes squeaking on the parquet. Mal had not offered to see him to the door, and he was glad of it, for by now he was regretting having come here, to ask help of his quasi-brother and let him see how weak he was, how defenseless. On an ormolu table below one of the antique portraits there was a bell jar with, inside it, a stuffed parrot, of all things, perched on a marble stand. Quirke wondered idly as to its provenance. What eccentric diplomat, what homesick third secretary, from Liechtenstein or Baden-Württemberg, had brought it here, a memento of home, perhaps, of a happy childhood tinted with the colors of bright plumage and loud with the harsh cries of Fritzl or Lou-Lou here, the magical talking bird? The past, the past—everyone tried to hold on to it, this thing that had gone, festooning its immateriality with beads and baubles, with bits of themselves.
Rose must have heard him approach, for now she appeared out of one of the absurdly grand reception rooms that lined the hallway. “Did you have a nice heart-to-heart?” she asked sarcastically, leaning in the doorway.
“Hardly,” Quirke said. “I don’t think Mal is any better at locating that particular organ than I am. The heart, I mean.”
“What’s the difference?”
“All the difference in the world.”
She smiled, glancing down, then stepped forward and kissed him on the mouth, pressing her body lightly against his. Her breath tasted of whiskey and cigarette smoke. He put his arms around her. She was so slender, and almost weightless; soon she would begin to get old. He bent his head and laid his forehead on her shoulder. She moved back, and he lifted his head, looking at her inquiringly. She gave a shrug. “Old times,” she said.
“Rose, I—”
“Ssh.” She reached out and put a fingertip to his lips and smiled. “Don’t give up, Quirke,” she said. “Live. It’s all we have.”
He nodded. She took his coat and hat from the stand and gave them to him. When she opened the door the night surged forward into the hall, smelling of rain and the wet garden and, beyond that, of the road, of trees, and city, and world. He stepped out into the darkness.
On Merrion Road he stopped and waited for a passing taxi. He saw himself standing there, hunched under the night, like an old bull standing in the rain. When at last a taxi arrived the driver leaned over and peered up at him suspiciously, this solitary figure in his big black coat and his drenched hat. Quirke climbed into the back seat.
“Tallaght,” he said.
* * *
When they had finished their tea at the Country Shop, Phoebe and David took Sally Minor to the pictures. It was Phoebe’s idea. She wanted to be able to sit in the dark for an hour or two, not speaking, not thinking, even, just watching these enormous, soot-and-silver creatures flit across the screen, making make-believe trouble for themselves and anyone else who was unwise enough to wander into their circle of light. Sally had been to the Carlton the previous night, so tonight they went to the Savoy, across the road. At the start of the film Bette Davis was seen shooting her lover and then being sent for trial for murder. After that, Phoebe’s mind wandered, and when she tried to concentrate again she could not catch up with what was going on. She did not care. Her own life at the moment seemed far more tangled and difficult than the plot being acted out before her with such large gestures, such overblown emotions.