And they set off up the street towards the Maison des Chapeaux and its expectant proprietress. Above their heads, Phoebe saw, that river of cloud flowed on in joyful spate.

WHEN ROSE HAD PAID FOR HER HAT AND LEFT, STILL LOOKING fl.u.s.tered, Phoebe asked Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes if she might use the telephone. This was a daring request, for the telephone was an object of reverence and some awe to its owner, and sat enshrined in state on the desk in the cubbyhole, making Phoebe think always of a pampered, pedigreed cat. But the hat that Rose had bought was so costly that Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes had not even bothered to bring it down until Rose spotted it on a high shelf and asked to see it, and after such a lavish sale how could she refuse the girl a phone call? She was itching to know who exactly Rose was, but Phoebe offered no account of her and the moment to insist on being told seemed to have pa.s.sed. Mustering what grace she could, therefore, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes said of course, the phone was there, please feel free.

It was her father Phoebe called, inviting him to invite her to dinner. Like her employer, what could he say but yes?

15.

QUIRKE HIMSELF HAD BEEN ABOUT TO MAKE A TELEPHONE CALL, though he was not at all sure that he should. He was in his office and had been thinking of April Latimer. He had never met the young woman, had never even seen her, as far as he knew, though he might have pa.s.sed her by in a corridor of the hospital, yet the thought of her kept coming back to his mind. It was as if he had glimpsed a figure in the fog and were stumbling in pursuit of it, though it maintained a maddeningly constant distance in front of him and at times disappeared altogether amidst the deceptive, gray billowings. The recollection of that day in Bill Latimer's office with Latimer and April's mother and her brother nagged at him; it had felt unreal, like an amateur theatrical per formance put on just for him. Someone there knew something more than had been said.

Oscar Latimer answered the phone himself, on the first ring.

They had agreed to meet by the ca.n.a.l at Huband Bridge. Quirke was early and went down to the towpath and sat on the old iron bench there, huddled in his coat. The rain had stopped and it was damp and misty, with a great stillness everywhere, and when a drop fell from one of the branches of the plane tree above him and landed with a thwack on the brim of his hat it made him start. Ghosts lingered in this place, the ghost of Sarah, poor, lost Sarah, and even the ghost of himself, too, as he was then, when she was alive and they used to walk on days like this beside the water here. Today moorhens paddled among the reeds, as they had then, and that same willow trailed its finger-tips in the shallows, and a double-decker bus that might have been the prototype of all green buses went past up there at Baggot Street, lumbering over the hump-backed bridge with the ungainly grace of some large, loping creature of the forest.

He should have married Sarah when he had the chance, should not have let her turn in her disappointment of him to Mal, who was not worthy of her. Vain thoughts, vain regrets.

He lit a cigarette. The smoke that he exhaled lingered in the moist air, vague and uncertain, with not a breath of breeze to disperse it. He held the match before his eyes and watched the flame burn steadily along the wood. Should he let it scorch his fingers? In his life he craved some strong, irresistible sensation, of pain, of anguish, or of joy. It would take more than a match flame to furnish that.

Oscar Latimer arrived from the direction Quirke was not looking in, from Lower Mount Street. Quirke heard his light, rapid footsteps and turned, and stood up from the bench and threw away his half-smoked cigarette and squared his shoulders. Why should he be nervous of this dapper, pent-up little man? Perhaps it was precisely because of what it was that was pent up in him, all that indignation, that anger, that sense he gave of an insulted self raging for release and never finding it. He wore a short, herringbone tweed overcoat and a tweed cap. He kept his hands in his pockets and stood before Quirke and looked up at him with an expression of distaste and sour skepticism. "Well?" he said. "Here I am* what have you to say to me?"

"Let's walk along for a bit, shall we?" Quirke said.

Latimer shrugged, and they set off on the path. Quirke was thinking what a contrast they must make, the two of them, him so large and Latimer so little. A dun-colored duck rose up out of the gra.s.s verge and waddled ahead of them for a little way along the path and then flopped into the water.

"I haven't been here since I was a child," Oscar Latimer said. "I had an aunt who lived in Baggot Street; she used to take us over here to fish for minnows. What was it we called them? There was an Irish name, what was it?"

"Pinkeens?" Quirke said. "Or bardogs was another word."

"Bardogs? I don't remember that. We put them in jam jars. Horrible things, they were, just two big eyes with a tail attached, but we were thrilled to catch them. My aunt used to make handles for the jam jars out of string. She had a special knack; I could never see how she did it. She'd wrap the string tight under the neck of the jar and then tie a special knot that let the string loop over two or three times to form the handle." He shook his head wonderingly. "It seems so long ago. An age."

The fellow could be no more than thirty-five, Quirke was thinking. "Yes," he said, "the past wastes no time becoming the past, all right."

Latimer was not listening. "We were happy, April and I, here, with our fishing nets. Life was suddenly* simple, for a few hours."

A workman in shiny black waders was standing hip-deep in the ca.n.a.l, cutting reeds with a knife. They paused a moment to watch. The knife had a long, thin, hooked blade. The man eyed them warily. "That's a dirty old day," he said. Quirke wondered if he was a Council worker or if he was gathering the reeds for himself, to fashion something from them. But what? Baskets? Mats? He made the cutting of the stiff, dry stalks seem effortless. Quirke felt a twinge of envy. How would it be, to live so simple a life?

They walked on.

"Where's your daughter today?" Latimer asked. "I presume it's again about April you wanted to speak to me, yes?"

"And I suppose you're going to tell me again that it's none of my business."

Latimer gave a brief, dismissive laugh. "Do I need to?"

They came to Baggot Street bridge and climbed the steps to the street. Across the way, the poet Kavanagh, in overcoat and cap, was sitting in the window of Parsons Bookshop, among the books laid out there, with his elbows on his knees and the holes in the soles of his cracked shoes on display, intently reading. Pa.s.sersby took no heed of him, being accustomed to the sight.

"Have you had lunch?" Latimer asked. "We might get a sandwich somewhere." He looked doubtfully in the direction of the Crookit Bawbee.

"There's Searsons, down the way," Quirke said.

The place was crowded with lunchtime drinkers, but they found two stools by the bar at the back. Quirke ordered a cheese sandwich, fearing the worst, and Latimer asked for a ham salad and a half-pint of Guinness. Quirke said he would take a gla.s.s of water. The barman knew him, and gave him a quizzical look.

The sandwich was all that Quirke had expected; he opened it up and slathered Colman's Mustard on the shiny slice of bright-orange, processed cheese. "You know about the blood on the floor beside April's bed," he said, "don't you?"

When he was at school at St. Aidan's there was a boy, he could not remember his name, that he used to beat up regularly, an odd, fey little creature with slicked-down, dandruffy hair and an overlapping front tooth. Quirke had nothing in particular against him. It was just that nothing, not even repeated punchings, could ruffle the little twerp's composure and air of self-possession. He almost seemed to like being hit; it seemed, infuriatingly, to amuse him. Latimer was like that, detached and slyly smiling and mysteriously untouchable. For a time now he went on calmly eating and might not have heard what Quirke had said. Then he spoke. "I don't find it appropriate to discuss this kind of thing with you, Quirke. It's a family matter, and you're not even a policeman."

"That's true," Quirke said, "I'm not. Only the police, too, have been told that your sister's disappearance is a family matter. And frankly, Mr. Latimer, I don't think it is."

Latimer was smiling thinly to himself. He put a forkful of moist, pale-pink ham into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully for a minute, then took a delicate sip of his stout. "You keep saying she has disappeared. How do you know that?"

Quirke had bitten into his sandwich, and now he put it back on the plate and pushed the plate aside and drank a deep draught of water from his gla.s.s; the water tasted faintly of tar. "Your sister hasn't been seen in three weeks," he said. "I'd say disappeared disappeared is the right word." is the right word."

"By whom?"

"What?"

"She hasn't been seen by whom in three weeks?" He spoke as if to a child, or to one of his patients, s.p.a.cing the words deliberately, giving each one an equal emphasis.

"Have you you seen her?" Quirke asked. "Have seen her?" Quirke asked. "Have you you heard from her?" heard from her?"

Latimer touched a finger to his stubbly, spa.r.s.e mustache and again smiled faintly. He ate his food and drank his drink, with a contented air. His hands, freckled on the back, were tiny, pale, and deft. He wiped his lips on a paper napkin and turned on the stool, putting an elbow on the bar, and gazed at Quirke for a long moment, as if measuring him. "I've asked around about you," he said. "About your background, where you come from."

"And what did you find out?"

"You come from nowhere, apparently. Some orphanage here in the city, then an industrial school over in the west, from where you were sprung* I think that's the right word?* by Judge Garret Griffin, who brought you up in his home as if you were his own son. You and Malachy Griffin, like brothers. All very colorful, I must say." He chuckled. "Like something you'd read in a cheap novelette."

Quirke rotated the water gla.s.s on its base, round and round, as if he were trying to screw it into the wood of the counter. "That about sums it up," he said. "As a matter of interest, who were your informants?"

"Oh, various people. You know what this town is like; everyone knows everyone else's business."

Malachy, Quirke was thinking* would Malachy have spoken to this vehement little man? What if he had? None of what Latimer had said was a secret. He gazed along the length of the bar. The light indoors was brownish, dim, and outside it was gray. He felt he was in a cave, far at the back, crouched and watching.

"I mention all this," Latimer said, "to make the point that you can't possibly know anything about families. How could you? There are ties you wouldn't feel* blood ties."

"Blood ties? I thought we dispensed with stuff like that when we left the caves."

"Ah, but there, you see? The very fact that you say that shows your ignorance, your lack of experience in these things. The family is the unit of society and has been since the very beginning, when we were still going on all fours* you know that much, at least, surely. Blood is blood. It binds"* he clenched one of those little hands into a fist and held it up before Quirke's face*"it holds holds."

Quirke signaled to the barman and asked for a whiskey* Bushmills Black Label* slurring the words as if to pretend he was not really speaking them. The barman gave him another look, more knowing than the first one, more complicit.

Latimer was picking up crumbs from his plate rapidly with the wetted tip of a finger and putting them into his mouth. His head was small, too small even for that neat little body. A tomt.i.t, Quirke thought, that is what he is like, a tomt.i.t bird, quick, bright, hungry, watchful.

"Tell me the truth," Quirke said quietly. "Tell me where April is."

Latimer widened his eyes, putting on a look of large, mild innocence. "What makes you think I know?"

The barman brought the whiskey, and Quirke drank off half of it in one swallow. The feeling of it spreading through his chest made him think of a small, many-branched tree bursting slowly into hot, bright flames.

"Your sister disappears, vanishes without trace," he said, shifting his weight on the stool. "There's blood on the floor beside her bed that someone has cleaned up. It's a very particular type of blood. Her family's reaction is to hush up the whole thing*"

"Hush up!" Latimer said, with an ugly laugh. "You make us sound like the Borgias."

Quirke said nothing to that. "I think you know where she is," he said in a harsh undertone. "I think you all know* you, your mother, your uncle."

"They don't."

"What?" Quirke turned to look at him. "What do you mean, they they don't? Does that mean that you do? Tell me." don't? Does that mean that you do? Tell me."

Latimer calmly drank the last of his drink, then wiped a fringe of foam from his silly mustache with a busy finger, more like a cat now than a bird. "I mean," he said, "that none of us knows." He chuckled again, shaking his head as if at something childish. "You're quite wrong about all this, you know, Quirke. It's what I said earlier, you don't understand families, and especially you don't understand a family such as ours." Quirke too had finished his drink, and Latimer signaled to the barman to bring him another one. "Tell me, what, really, do you know about the Latimers, Dr. Quirke?"

Quirke was watching the barman reaching for the Bushmills. "I only know," he said, "what everyone else does." There is, he was thinking, something special about the way light congregates inside a whiskey bottle, the way it glows there, tawny and dense, as it does nowhere else; something almost sacramental.

"To belong to a family like mine," Latimer said, tapping the tip of an index finger on the bar for emphasis, "is like being a member of a secret society* no, a secret tribe, one that has accepted all that's demanded of it by the invading mercenaries and missionaries but on the quiet still keeps to its own ways, its own customs, its own G.o.ds* especially its own G.o.ds. Outside, in the world, we look like everyone else, we talk like everyone else, we might be be everyone else* in other words, we blend in. But among ourselves we're a breed apart. It comes, I suppose, from being obsessed with ourselves* I mean with each other." He paused. Quirke's whiskey arrived. He had determined he would not touch it until a full minute had gone by. He looked at the blood-red second hand of his watch making its round, steadily and, so it seemed to him, smugly. "My father," Latimer said, "was a very proud man. Everybody knew him for a h.e.l.l-raiser and all that, but it was only a front. Inside the house he was nothing like the image the world had of him." everyone else* in other words, we blend in. But among ourselves we're a breed apart. It comes, I suppose, from being obsessed with ourselves* I mean with each other." He paused. Quirke's whiskey arrived. He had determined he would not touch it until a full minute had gone by. He looked at the blood-red second hand of his watch making its round, steadily and, so it seemed to him, smugly. "My father," Latimer said, "was a very proud man. Everybody knew him for a h.e.l.l-raiser and all that, but it was only a front. Inside the house he was nothing like the image the world had of him."

The minute was up. In Quirke's breast another small tree flared and flamed.

"What was was he like, then?" Quirke asked, taking a second sip of whiskey and holding it in his mouth, savoring the scald of it. he like, then?" Quirke asked, taking a second sip of whiskey and holding it in his mouth, savoring the scald of it.

"He was a monster," Latimer said, without emphasis. "Oh, not in the conventional sense. A monster of pride and determination and* and dauntlessness dauntlessness. Do you know what I mean? No, you don't, of course. How I loved him, how we all did. I suppose I should have hated him. He was a big man, with a big heart, handsome, dashing, brave* all the things that I'm not."

He paused, gazing into the creamy dregs of his gla.s.s. Quirke's whiskey gla.s.s was almost empty again, and he was measuring off another minute on his watch. "You've made a success of your life," he said. "Look at the reputation you have, at* what age are you?"

"Anyone can become a physician," Latimer said dismissively, "but you have to be born a hero." He turned to Quirke again. "I suppose my uncle told you how he and my father fought side by side in the General Post office in 1916? My father fought, all right, but Uncle Bill did nothing more than carry a few messages and was nowhere near the GPO that week. That didn't stop him getting elected on the patriotic ticket. My father despised him. Little Willie Little Willie, he used to call him, the man in the gap the man in the gap."

The minute had fled, and Quirke was gazing pensively at his reemptied gla.s.s. "How did he and April get on?"

Latimer laughed. "You just won't let the subject of poor April alone, will you?" He shrugged. "She loved him as I did, of course. His death was a disaster in both our lives. It's as I say, Quirke, you wouldn't understand that kind of closeness. And then my mother erected the monument to her beloved, lost husband. It was more like a totem pole, but carved out of the living tree and set solidly in the middle of the living room floor. It kept growing all the time, sending its branches along the hall and up the stairs into the bedrooms, and under its shade we clung to each other. The leaves never fell off those limbs."

His voice had grown husky, and Quirke wondered uneasily if he were going to weep.

"Yes," Quirke said, "I suppose it would be hard, living in the shadow of a man like your father."

Latimer sat quiet for a long moment, then, suddenly gone pale, he turned on Quirke a look of deep and furious scorn. "I don't want your pity, Quirke," he said. "Don't you dare."

Quirke said nothing, only signaled for another drink.

16.

THE EARLY DARK HAD FALLEN BY THE TIME HE GOT BACK TO the hospital. He descended with careful steps the grand marble staircase that led to nothing but the dim lower regions of the building. The pathology department was empty* Sinclair must have decided to let himself go home early. He went into his office and sat down in his overcoat at his desk and lit a cigarette, encountering a difficulty in aligning the tip of it with the match flame. He could hear the heavy sound of his own breathing. He scowled. He could not remember what it was he was supposed to be thinking about. It might be best, he thought, to lie down for a while. He took off his coat* was there rain, had he been walking in it?* and curled up on the old b.u.t.toned-down green leather sofa in the corner and at once pitched headlong into riotous sleep, in which he dreamt of being lured along endless, dark, and winding corridors by something he could not see but only sense, a catlike, purring presence retreating ahead of him, always around the next corner, and then the next. He woke with a m.u.f.fled cry and did not know where he was. He had dribbled in his sleep, and his spit had dried and made his cheek stick to the leather of the sofa. He sat up, gouging the heels of his hands into his eyes. His mouth felt as if it had been reamed of two or three layers of protective membrane. His innards, too, were burning. Insult Insult* the word came to him, reverberant*a gross insult to the system. It was a judgment he had handed down himself on many a cadaver.

He fumbled with his sleeve, squinting at the face of his watch that refused to stay steady, but kept flicking sideways in a dizzy-making fashion. He had suddenly remembered his dinner date with Phoebe. He lowered his head, a throbbing gourd, into his cupped hands, and groaned.

THEY WENT TO THE RUSSELL. THE PLACE WAS SOMBER AND SILENT as it always was. After lunching with him here one day Rose Crawford had refused to return, saying the dining room reminded her of a funeral parlor. The waiter who showed him to his table was fascinatingly ugly, with a square, blue jaw and deeply sunken eyes under a jutting brow. Quirke remembered that his name, improbably, was Rodney. He saw with relief that Phoebe had not arrived; he had forgotten what time they had agreed to meet, and he had a.s.sumed he would be late. While Rodney was drawing back his chair for him he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the gilt-framed looking-gla.s.s on the wall behind the table. Tousled and wild of eye, he was a dead ringer for the escaped convict in a Hollywood prison picture. "Now, sir," the waiter said, p.r.o.nouncing it surr surr. Quirke sat down, turning his back on the mirror.

He had walked from the hospital in his still-damp, heavy overcoat and his droop-brimmed hat. The whiskey he had drunk with Oscar Latimer had left him with a hollowed-out, ashen sensation, and lingering fumes of alcohol swirled in a hot fog in his head. That sleep on the couch had not helped, either, and he was groggy. Would he drink a gla.s.s of wine with Phoebe* should he?

Phoebe when she arrived was wearing a dark-blue silk dress and a blue silk stole. As she walked across the room, making her way between the tables in Rodney's wake, she looked so like her mother that Quirke felt a catch in his heart. She had tied her hair back in that complicated way that Delia used to do, and carried a small black purse pressed against her breast, and that, too, was Delia to the life.

"I'm sorry," she said, seating herself quickly, "have you been here long?"

"No, no, just arrived. You look very nice."

She set the velvet purse beside her plate. "Do I?" she said. Quirke was normally not one for compliments.

"Is that a new dress?"

"Oh, Quirke." She made a smiling grimace. "You've seen me in it a dozen times."

"Well, it looks different on you this time. You You look different." look different."

She did. Her face glowed, ivory with the faintest tinge of pink, and her eyes shone. Had she met someone? Was she in love? He longed for her to be happy; it would release him from so much.

"That waiter," she said in a whisper, indicating Rodney, where he stood just inside the door, blank-faced as a statue, with a napkin draped over his wrist, off in some idle dream of his own. "He's a dead ringer for d.i.c.k Tracy in the comics."

Quirke laughed. "You're right, he is."

They ate sole fried in b.u.t.ter. "Has it ever struck you," Phoebe said, "that you and I always order the same thing?"

"It's simple. I wait to see what you're having and then ask for the same."

"Do you really?"

"Yes."

She gazed at him, and something happened to her smile, a sort of crimpling at the edges of it, and her eyes grew liquid. He lowered his gaze hastily to the tablecloth.

The wine waiter arrived. Quirke had ordered a bottle of Chablis. It was good they were having fish, since white wine was hardly a drink at all, and so he would be safe. The waiter, a sleek-haired, acned youth, poured out a sip for Quirke to taste and while he waited let his pale eye wander appreciatively over Phoebe, all ivory glow in her night-blue frock. She smiled up at him. She was happy; she had been absurdly happy all afternoon, since that moment with Rose Crawford outside the American Express office. She had read somewhere that there are insects that travel from continent to continent suspended individually in tiny bubbles of ice borne along by air currents at an immense height; that was how she had been, sailing aloft in a frozen coc.o.o.n, and now the ice was melting, and soon she would come sailing down happily to earth. Quirke and Rose; Mr. and Mrs. Quirke; the Quirkes. She saw them, the three of them, standing at the rail of a white ship cleaving its way through waters as blue as summer, the sea wind soft in their faces, on their way to a new world.

What age was Rose? she wondered. Older than Quirke, certainly; it would not matter; nothing would matter.

"Tell me about Delia," she said.

Quirke looked at her over the rim of his wine gla.s.s in startlement and alarm. "Delia?" he said, and licked his lips. "What* what do you want me to tell you?"

"Anything. What she was like. What you did together. I know so little about her. You've never told me anything, really." She was smiling. "Was she very beautiful?"

In panic he fingered his napkin. The steaming fish lay almost menacingly on the plate before him. His headache was suddenly worse. "Yes," he said, hesitantly, "she was* she was very beautiful. She looked like you." Phoebe blushed and dipped her head. "Elegant, of course," Quirke went on, desperately. "She could have been a model, everybody said so."

"Yes, but what was she like like? I mean as a person."

What she was like? How was he to tell her that? "She was kind," he said, casting down his gaze again and fixing anew on the napkin, somehow accusing in its whiteness, its mundane purity. "She took care of me." She was not kind, he was thinking; she did not take care of me. Yet he had loved her. "We were young," he said, "or at least I was."

"And did you hate me," she asked, "did you hate me when she died?"

"Oh, no," he said. He forced himself to smile; his cheeks felt as if they were made of gla.s.s. "Why would I hate you?"

"Because I was born and Delia died, and you gave me to Sarah."

She was still smiling. He sat and gazed at her helplessly, clutching his knife and fork, not knowing what to say. She reached across the table and touched his hand. "I don't blame you anymore," she said. "I don't know that I ever did, only I felt I should. I was angry at you. I'm not now."