Christine Falls: A Novel Read online

  “Twenty.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I will be, soon.”

  He leaned back in the low chair, studying her. He said:

  “You’re not planning to run away again, are you?”

  “I’m considering going away. I’m not a child, you know. This is the nineteen fifties, not the Dark Ages. Anyway, if I can’t marry Conor Carrington, I’ll elope with you.”

  He sat back and laughed and the little chair gave a cry of protest. “No thanks.”

  “It wouldn’t be incest—you’re only my uncle by marriage, after all.”

  Something happened in her face then, and she bit her lip and looked down and began rummaging in her handbag. In consternation he saw a tear fall on the back of her hand. He glanced quickly in the direction of the man with the monocle, who had risen to his feet and was advancing between the tables with an air of grim purpose. Phoebe found the handkerchief she had been searching for and blew her nose juicily. The monocle was almost upon them now and Quirke braced himself for a confrontation—what had he done to provoke it?—but the fellow marched past the table, displaying an equine grin and extending a hand to someone behind Quirke’s back and saying, “Trevor! I thought it was you…”

  Phoebe’s face was blotched and there was an oily black Pierrot-smear of mascara under one eye. “Oh, Nuncle,” she said, a muted wail, “I’m so unhappy.”

  Quirke ground the stub of his cigarette into the ashtray on the table. “Calm down, for heaven’s sake,” he muttered; he still had a headache.

  Phoebe scowled at him through her tears. “Don’t tell me to calm down!” she cried. “Everyone is always telling me to calm down. I’m sick of it!” She snapped her bag shut and stood up, casting vaguely to right and left, as if she had forgotten where she was. Quirke, still in his chair, told her to sit down, for the love of God, but she ignored him. People at the tables roundabout were looking at her. “I’m getting out of here,” she said, and strode away.

  Quirke paid the bill and caught up with her on the hotel steps. She was dabbing the handkerchief to her eyes again. “You’re a mess,” he said. “Go in and fix your face.”

  Docile now, she went back into the hotel. Waiting for her, he stood in the railed-off area beside the glass door and smoked another cigarette. The day was almost done, the trees in the green were throwing raked shadows along the street; it would not be long now until autumn. He was admiring the rich light on the brick façades of the houses over by Hume Street when Phoebe came out and stopped beside him and took his arm. “Take me somewhere,” she said. “Take me to some low dive.” She squeezed his arm against her side and laughed deep in her throat. “I want to be baad.”

  They strolled along the green toward Grafton Street. People were out promenading, enjoying the last of the fine day that had started so badly. Phoebe walked close against him, her arm still linked in his; he could feel the warmth of her hip, the firmness of it, and, within, the smooth articulation of the joint. Then he thought of Christine Falls, waxen and wan on her bier. “How are the studies?” he asked.

  Phoebe shrugged. “I’m going to switch,” she said. “History is boring.”

  “Oh? And what will you do instead?”

  “Medicine, maybe. Join the family tradition.” Quirke made no comment. She pressed his arm again. “I really am going to move out, you know. If they won’t let me live my life, I’m off.”

  Quirke glanced down at her and laughed. “How will you manage?” he said. “I can’t see your father financing this life of bohemian freedom you’re determined on.”

  “I’ll get a job. That’s what they do in America. I had a pen pal who was putting herself through college. That’s what she wrote, I’m putting myself through college. Imagine.”

  They turned into Grafton Street and arrived at McGonagle’s. Quirke pulled open the big door with its red-and-green stained-glass panels, and a waft of beer fumes and cigarette smoke and noise came out to meet them. Despite the early hour the place was crowded.

  “Huh,” Phoebe said, “call this low?”

  She followed after Quirke as he pushed his way through to the bar. They found two unoccupied high stools beside a square wooden column into which a narrow mirror was set. Phoebe hitched up her skirt to sit, smiling at him. Yes, Quirke told himself, she had Delia’s smile. When they were seated he found that he could see his reflection in the mirror behind her shoulder, and had her change places with him: it always made him uneasy to look himself in the eye.

  “What will you have?” he asked her, lifting a beckoning finger to the barman.

  “What can I have?”

  “Sarsaparilla.”

  “Gin. I’ll have gin.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, will you, now?”

  The barman was elderly and stooped and of a priestly mien.

  “The usual for me, Davy,” Quirke said, “and a gin and tonic for her ladyship here. More tonic than gin.” McGonagle’s had been one of his watering holes in the old days, the days of his serious drinking.

  Davy nodded and sniffed and shuffled off. Phoebe was looking about the smoke-dimmed room. A large, florid woman in purple, holding a glass of stout in a beringed hand, winked at her and smiled, showing a mouthful of gapped and tobacco-stained teeth; the man with her was lean as a greyhound, with colorless, flat, and somehow crusted hair.

  “Are they somebody?” Phoebe asked, out of the side of her mouth; McGonagle’s was famous as the haunt of self-appointed poets and their muses.

  “Everybody is somebody here,” he said. “Or think they are.”

  Davy the barman brought their drinks. It was strange, Quirke reflected, that he had never got to like the taste of whiskey, or of any alcohol, for that matter; even in the wild times, after Delia had died, the sour burn of the stuff had always repelled him a little, though he had still managed to pour it into himself by the jugful. He was not a natural drinker; he believed there were such, but he was not one of them. That was what had kept him from destruction, he supposed, in the long, lachrymose years of mourning for his lost wife.

  He lifted his glass and tipped it to the girl. “Here’s to liberty,” he said.

  She was gazing into her drink, watching the ice cubes writhing amid the bubbles. “You really are soft on Mummy, aren’t you?” she said. Mummy. The word stopped him for a beat. A tall man with a high, smooth forehead went past, squeezing sideways through the crush. Quirke recognized him as the one from the hotel, the Trevor that the monocled old boy had crossed the room to greet. Small world; too small. “You were sweet on her,” Phoebe said, “years ago, and still are. I know all about it.”

  “I was sweet on her sister—I married her sister.”

  “But only on the rebound. Daddy got the one you wanted, and then you married Aunt Delia.”

  “You’re speaking of the dead.”

  “I know. I’m awful, amn’t I? But it’s true, all the same. Do you miss her?”

  “Who?” She struck him sharply on the wristbone with her knuckle, and the feather in her hat bobbed and the tip of it touched him on the forehead. “It’s twenty years,” he said, and then, after a pause, “Yes, I miss her.”

  SARAH SAT DOWN ON THE PLUSH STOOL BEFORE THE DRESSING TABLE and inspected herself in the looking glass. She had put on a dress of scarlet silk but wondered now if it had been a mistake. They would study her, as they always did, pretending not to, searching for something to disapprove of, some sign of difference, some statement that she was not one of them. She had lived among them for—what? fifteen years?—but they had never accepted her, never would, the women especially. They would smile, and flatter her, and offer her tidbits of harmless chitchat, as if she were an exhibit in a zoo. When she spoke they listened with exaggerated attention, nodding and smiling encouragement, as they would to a child, or a half-wit. She would hear her voice trembling with the strain of trying to sound normal, the sentences tottering out of her mouth and falling ineffectually at their feet. And how they woul
d frown, feigning polite bafflement, when she forgot herself and used an Americanism. How interesting, they would say, that you never lost your accent, adding, never, in all the years, as if she had been brought back here by the first transatlantic buccaneers, like tobacco or the turkey. She sighed. Yes, the dress was wrong, but she had not the energy, she decided, to change it.

  Mal came in from the bathroom, tieless, in shirtsleeves and braces, showing a pair of cuff links. “Can you do up these blessèd things for me?” he said, in plaintive irritation.

  He extended his arms and Sarah rose and took the fiddly, cold links and began to insert them in the cuffs. They avoided each other’s eye, Mal with his mouth pursed averting his face and looking vacantly into a corner of the ceiling. How delicate and pale the skin was on the undersides of his wrists. It was the thing that had struck her about him when they had first met, twenty years ago, how soft he seemed, how sweetly soft all over, this tall, tender, vulnerable man.

  “Is Phoebe home?” he asked.

  “She won’t be late.”

  “She had better not be, on this of all nights.”

  “You’re too hard on her, Mal.”

  He drew his lips tighter still. “You’d better go and see if my father has arrived,” he said. “You know what a stickler he is.”

  When was it, she wondered, that they had begun to speak to each other in this stilted, testy way, like two strangers trapped in a lift?

  She went downstairs, the silk of her dress making a scratching sound against her knees, like a muffled cackling. Really, she should have changed into something less dramatic, less—less declamatory. She smiled wanly, liking the word. It was not her habit to declaim.

  Maggie the maid was in the dining room, laying spoons out on the table.

  “Is everything ready, Maggie?”

  The maid gave her a quick, frowning look, seeming for a moment not to recognize her. Then she nodded. There was a stain on the hem of her uniform at the back that Sarah hoped was gravy. Maggie was well past retirement age but Sarah had not the heart to let her go, as she had let go that other poor girl. There was a knocking at the front door.

  “I’ll get it,” Sarah said. Maggie did not look at her and only nodded again, squinting at the spoons.

  When Sarah opened the door to him, Garret Griffin thrust a bunch of flowers into her arms.

  “Garret,” she said warmly. “Come in.”

  The old man stepped into the hall and there was the usual moment of helplessness as she wondered how to greet him, for the Griffins, even Garret, were not people who accepted kisses easily. He indicated the flowers where she held them against her; they were strikingly ugly. “I hope they’re all right,” he said. “I’m no good at that kind of thing.”

  “They’re lovely,” she said, taking a cautious sniff of the blossoms; the Michaelmas daisies smelled of dirty socks. She smiled; the daisies did not matter, she was happy to see him. “Lovely,” she said again.

  He took off his overcoat and hung it on the rack behind the door. “Am I the first?” he asked, turning back to her and chafing his hands.

  “Everyone else is late.”

  “Oh, Lord,” he moaned, “I’m always the same—always too early!”

  “We’ll have a chance to chat, before the others come and monopolize you.”

  He smiled, looking down in that cumbersomely shy way he had. She thought again, with faint surprise—but why surprise?—how fond of him she was. Mal appeared on the stairs, solemn and stately in his dark suit and sober tie. Garret glanced up at him without enthusiasm. “There you are,” he said.

  Father and son stood before each other in silence. Sarah stepped towards them impulsively, and as she did so had the sense as of an invisible, brittle casing shattering soundlessly around her. “Look what Garret brought!” she said, holding out the hideous flowers. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  QUIRKE WAS ON HIS THIRD DRINK. HE SAT SIDEWAYS AT THE BAR, LEANING on an elbow, one eye shut against the smoke of his cigarette, half listening to Phoebe rehearsing her plans for the future. He had let her have a second gin, and her eyes glittered and her brow was flushed. As she talked, the feather in her little hat trembled in time to the beat of her excited chattering. The man next to them with the crusty hair kept shooting furtive glances at her, to the annoyance of his fat companion, though Phoebe appeared not to notice the fellow’s fishy eye. Quirke smiled to himself, feeling only a little foolish to be so pleased at being here with her, in her summer dress, bright and young. The noise in the place was a steady roar by now, and even when he tried he could hardly hear what she was saying. Then there was a shout behind him: “Jesus Christ in gaiters, if it isn’t Dr. Death!”

  Barney Boyle stood there, flagrant, drunk, and menacingly jovial. Quirke turned, assuming a smile. Barney was a dangerous acquaintance: Quirke and he had got drunk together often, in the old days. “Hello, Barney,” he said warily.

  Barney was in his drinking clothes: black suit crumpled and stained, striped tie for a belt, and a shirt, which had once been white agape at the collar and looking as if it had been yanked open in a scuffle. Phoebe was thrilled, for this was the famous Barney Boyle. He was, she saw—she almost laughed—a scaled-down version of Quirke, a full head shorter but with the same barrel chest and broken nose and the same ridiculously dainty feet. He grabbed her hand and planted on it a lubricious kiss. His own hands, she noticed, were small and soft and endearingly chubby.

  “Your niece, is it?” he said to Quirke. “By God, Doc, they’re making nieces nicer every day—and that, my darling”—he turned his shiny grin on Phoebe again—“is not an easy thing to get your tongue around, with a feed of porter on you.”

  He called for drinks, insisting against Quirke’s protests that Phoebe too must have another. Barney preened under the girl’s eager gaze, rolling from heel to toe and back again, a pint glass in one hand and a sodden cigarette in the other. Phoebe asked if he was writing a new play and he swept the air with a deprecating arm. “I am not!” he roared. “I’ll write no more plays.” He struck a histrionic pose and spoke as if addressing an audience: “The Abbey Theatre from this day forth must make do without the fruits of my genius!” He took a violent draught of his drink, throwing back his head and opening his mouth wide, the cords of his throat pulsing as he swallowed. “I’m writing poetry again,” he said, wiping his bulbous red lips with the back of his hand. “In Irish, that lovely language that I learned in jail, the university of the working classes.”

  Quirke could feel his smile slowly, helplessly congealing. There had been nights when he and Barney had stood here happily like this until closing time and long after, toe to toe, drink for drink, barging their pumped-up personalities at each other like a pair of boys fighting with balloons. Well, those days were long gone. When Barney attempted to order another round Quirke lifted a staying hand and said no, that they must be going.

  “Sorry, Barney,” he said, stepping down from the stool and ignoring Phoebe’s indignant glare. “Another time.”

  Barney measured him with a soiled eye, chewing his mouth at the side. For the second time that evening Quirke anticipated an assault, and wondered how best to avoid it—Barney, for all his diminutiveness, knew how to fight—but then Barney shifted his glare to Phoebe. “Griffin, now,” he said, screwing up one eye. “Are you anything, by any chance, to Judge Garret Griffin, the Chief Justice and Great Panjandrum himself?”

  Quirke was still trying to make Phoebe get down from the stool, tugging her by the elbow and at the same time gathering up his raincoat and his hat. “Different family altogether,” he said. Barney ignored him. “Because,” Barney said to Phoebe, “that’s the boyo that put me away for fighting for the freedom of my country. Oh, yes, I was with the squad that set off them firecrackers in Coventry in ’thirty-nine. You didn’t know that, did you now, Miss Griffin? The bomb, I can tell you, is mightier than the pen.” His forehead had taken on a hot sheen and his eyes seemed to be sinking back into his skull.
“And when I came home, instead of getting the hero’s welcome I deserved, I was sent to the boys’ jail for three years by Mr. Justice Griffin, to cool your heels, as he put it, provoking laughter in the court. I was sixteen years old. What do you think of that, Miss Griffin?”

  Quirke had begun determinedly to move away, trying to draw a still unwilling Phoebe after him. The man with the bad hair, who had been listening to Barney with interest, now leaned forward, a finger lifted.

  “I think—” he began.

  “You fuck off,” Barney said, without looking at him.

  “Fuck off yourself,” the woman in purple told him stoutly, “you and your friend and your friend’s tart.”

  Phoebe giggled tipsily, and Quirke gave her a last, violent tug and she toppled forward from the stool and would have fallen but for his steadying hand under her arm.

  “And now, I’m told,” Barney bellowed, loud enough for half the bar to hear, “he’s after being made a papal count. At least”—more loudly still—“I think count is the word.”

  THERE WAS A LOW BUZZ OF TALK IN THE DRAWING ROOM. THE GUESTS, a score or so, stood about in clusters, the men all alike in dark suits, the women bird-bright and twittering. Sarah moved among them, brushing a hand here, touching an elbow there, trying to keep her smile from slipping. She felt guilty for not being able to like these people, Mal’s friends, mostly, or the Judge’s. Apart from the priests—always so many priests!—they were businesspeople, or people in the law, or in medicine, well-heeled, watchful of their privileges, of their place in the city’s society, such as it was. She had acknowledged to herself a long time ago that she was a little afraid of them, all of them, not just the frightening ones, like that fellow Costigan. They were not the sort she would have expected Mal or his father to have for friends. But then, was there any other sort, here? The world in which they moved was small. It was not her world. She was in it, but not of it, that was what she told herself. She must not let anyone else know what she was thinking. Smile, she told herself, keep smiling!