Christine Falls

25

ANDY STAFFORD FELT LIKE HE WAS ON TRIAL. THEY WERE IN SISTER Stephanus’s office, he and Claire, sitting side by side on two straight chairs in front of the big oak desk behind which Sister Stephanus was seated. At her back, standing, was the red-haired priest, Harkins, the one who had called at the house that day to spy on them. Another nun, he could not remember her name-she was a doctor, she had a stethoscope around her neck-was standing by the window looking out at the brilliant day, her face lit by the light reflected from the snow. He had explained to them, again, what had happened, how he had found the baby having a fit or something and had given her-he just managed in time to stop himself saying it-a shake to try to get her to snap out of it, and how she had died instead. It was all a misunderstanding, an accident. He had been drunk, he had not tried to deny it; that was probably part of the reason why it had happened, that the kid had died. So yes, he admitted it, it was sort of his fault, if an accident could ever be anyone’s fault. Even though she was sitting down, Sister Stephanus looked taller than everyone else in the room. At last she stirred herself, and sighed and said:

“You must try as best you can, both of you, to put this terrible thing behind you. Little Christine is with God now. It was His will.”

The other nun turned from the window and looked at Claire, who gave no response. The young woman had not moved or said a word since they had sat down. She was white-faced and hunched, as if she were cold, and her hands, the palms turned upward, lay lifeless in her lap. Her gaze was fixed on the floor in front of the desk, and she was frowning in concentration, trying to make out, it seemed, something in the pattern of the carpet.

Sister Stephanus went on:

“Andy, your task now is to help Claire. You’ve both had a loss, but hers is the greater. Do you understand?”

Andy nodded vigorously, to show how eager he was, and how determined, to try to undo what had been done. “I understand, Sister,” he said, “yes, I understand. Only…” He jerked his chin up and ran a finger around the inside of his shirt collar. He was wearing his tan checked sport jacket and dark pants, and he had even put on a tie, to make a good impression.

Sister Stephanus was watching him with her wide-open, glistening, slightly staring eyes, eyes that looked as if they had been frozen. “Only?” she said.

Andy took a heavy breath, lifting his chin again. “I was wondering if you’d talked to Mr. Crawford about a job for me. I mean a different job, one that would keep me nearer home.”

Sister Stephanus glanced over her shoulder to where the priest was standing. He lifted his eyebrows but said nothing. The nun turned back to Andy. “Mr. Crawford is very ill,” she said. “Gravely ill.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Andy said, a little too slickly, he realized. He hesitated, getting himself ready. Now was the moment. “Must be tough,” he said in his slow drawl, “Mr. Crawford being sick and all. I suppose the rest of you”-he looked from her to Harkins and back again-“have to take up the slack. Funny, a big operation like the one you have going, yet you never see anything about it in the newspapers.”

There was another silence, then the priest said in that twangy harp accent of his: “A lot of things don’t get into the newspapers, Andy. Even serious accidents aren’t reported, sometimes.”

Andy ignored him. “Trouble is, see,” he said to the nun, “I’ll have my hands full helping Claire here to get over her loss. Have to turn down those long runs up to Canada and the Lakes. There’s the overtime, I’ll lose that.”

The nun glanced at Harkins again and again all he did was raise up his eyebrows. She turned back to Andy. “All right,” she said, “we’ll see what can be done.”

“The point is, Andy,” Harkins put in, “we have to keep these matters between ourselves. We have our own way of doing things here at St. Mary’s, and often the world doesn’t understand.”

“Right,” Andy said, and allowed himself the ghost of a sneer. “Right.”

Sister Stephanus rose abruptly, the black stuff of her habit making a busy, crumpling sound. “Very well, then,” she said. “We’ll be in touch. But Andy, I want you to be clear on one thing. Claire’s welfare now is our first concern-ours, and yours.”

“Sure,” he said, deliberately offhand this time, just to show them, “sure, I understand.” He too stood up, and turned to Claire. “Come on, honey. Time to go.”

She did not respond, but continued staring at the carpet. Sister Anselm came from the window and put a hand gently on her shoulder. “Claire,” she said, “are you all right?”

Claire blinked, and with an effort lifted her head and looked at the nun, struggling to concentrate. Slowly she nodded.

“She’s fine,” Andy snapped, and could not keep an edge of menace out of his voice. “I’ll take care of her. Right, sweetheart?”

He gripped her by the elbow and made her stand. When she was on her feet it seemed for a moment that she might fall over, but he held her steady with an arm around her shoulders and turned her to the door. Sister Stephanus came from behind her desk and led them out.

When the three of them were gone, Sister Anselm said:

“That young woman is not well.”

Father Harkins eyed her worriedly. “Do you think she might…?” He let the question hang.

“I think,” the nun said with angry emphasis, “her nerves are in a bad way-a very bad way.”

Sister Stephanus came back into the room, shaking her head. “Dear Lord,” she said wearily, “what a business.” She turned to the priest. “Did the archbishop…?”

He nodded. “I spoke to his office. His people will have a word with the Commissioner-there’ll be no need for the police to get involved.”

Sister Anselm made a sound of disgust. Sister Stephanus turned her tired gaze on her. “Did you speak, Sister?”

She turned and limped out of the room. Sister Stephanus and the priest looked at each other, and then away. They said nothing.

THERE WAS ICE ON THE FRONT STEPS AND ANDY KEPT AN ARM AROUND Claire’s shoulders so she would not slip. Since the accident with the kid he had not known what to do with his wife, she was so silent and withdrawn. She spent her time sitting around the house half in a trance, or watching the kiddies’ programs on TV, Howdy Doody and Bugs Bunny and the one with the two talking crows. It gave him the creeps to hear the way she laughed at those cartoons, a sort of gurgling in her throat, just the way, he supposed, her Kraut cousins would laugh, hurgh hurgh hurgh. At night when she lay unsleeping beside him he could feel her thoughts turning and turning in her head, turning on the same damned thing that she could not let go of. She would just about answer when he spoke to her, otherwise she said nothing. One night he came home late and tired out after a run from Buffalo and the house was in darkness with not a sound to be heard. He searched the place and found her in the kid’s room, sitting by the window with the kid’s baby blanket pressed in her arms. He had shouted at her, not so much because he was sore but because of the scare she had given him, sitting there like a ghost in the weird, bluish glow that came up from the snow-covered yard. But even when he yelled she only turned her head a little way toward him, frowning, like a person who has heard someone calling from a long, long way off.

Cora had been the only good thing for him in all of this. She had calmed him down on the night of the accident and helped him get his story straight. Sometimes now during the day she came up and sat with Claire, and more than once he had arrived home to find her preparing his dinner, while Claire, wearing the housecoat that she had not changed out of since morning, red-eyed and with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, lay on her front on their bed with her feet hanging over the side. There was something about her feet, white on the instep and discolored and callused on the undersides, that gave him a nauseous feeling. Cora’s feet were long and tanned, and narrow at the heel and broad and rounded where the toes started. Cora wanted nothing from him but his hard brown body. She never asked him to tell her he loved her, or worried about the future, or what would happen if Claire found out about the two of them. Being with Cora was like being with a man, except when they were in bed, and even then she had almost a man’s brutal appetite.

They were walking down the driveway of the orphanage when they met Brenda Ruttledge coming in at the gate. She was wearing a big alpaca coat and a woollen hat and fur-trimmed boots. Andy did not remember her from when Claire had bumped into her when they were leaving the Christmas party at Josh Crawford’s place-in fact, there was not much he did remember about that afternoon-and Claire of course was too wrapped up in herself to know whether she recognized someone or not. But Brenda remembered them from the party, the pale young woman with the baby and her baby-faced little husband flushed and in a rage from having drunk too much beer. The young woman looked terrible today. She was gray-faced and gaunt, as if she were in shock, or sick with dread, or grief. Brenda watched them as they passed her by, the wife walking stiff-legged and the husband guiding her with his arm around her shoulders.

Brenda had expected America to be different from home, the people happier, more forward-looking, friendlier, but they were just the same as her own folk, just as angry and petty-minded and afflicted. Or maybe it was just Boston that was like that, with so many Irish here, still with their race memories of the Famine and the death ships. But she did not like to think of these things, of home, and her being here, and lonely.

The door was opened by the same young nun with the prominent teeth who had opened it the last time she was here, when she’d brought the baby. She thought of asking her name but did not know if it was allowed to ask such a thing; anyway it would not be her own name but that of some saint Brenda had never heard of before. She had a nice face, small and round and jolly-looking; well, they would soon knock the jollity out of her, in this place. She too, like the couple on the drive, showed no sign of remembering Brenda. But then, probably she had opened the door to hundreds of people since Brenda had last been here.

“I wonder if I could see Sister Stephanus?”

She was afraid the nun would ask her what her business was, but instead she invited her to step into the hall and said she would go and see if Mother Superior was in. When she smiled her teeth stuck out and two babyish dimples appeared in her fat little cheeks.

She was gone for what seemed a long time, then came back and said Sister Stephanus was not in at present. Brenda knew she was being lied to. Embarrassed, she avoided the young nun’s not unkindly eye.

“I just wanted to ask about-about one of the babies,” she said. “Christine is her name.”

The young nun answered nothing, only stood with her hands clasped one upon the other at her waist, smiling politely. Brenda supposed she was not the first courier-would that be the word?-to come back here to St. Mary’s inquiring after a baby. She recalled the cockney purser on the boat when she was coming over who had warned her about getting attached to the child. He had barely glanced at their papers, hers and the baby’s, then sat back in his chair behind his desk and looked at her bosom with the hint of a weaselly leer and said, “Believe me, I’ve seen it happen, time and again, girls going out, some of them hardly out of school, by the time they hit Stateside they think the baby’s their own.” But it was not that she felt an attachment, exactly, she thought now, walking back down the driveway, only she still found herself thinking about little Christine, and remembering the funny feeling in her insides when she first took the baby in her arms that evening on Dun Laoghaire pier. The couple she had met here on the drive, where was their baby today, she wondered? She saw again the woman’s shocked white face and dead eyes, and she shivered.

26

PHOEBE HAD SLEPT FOR MOST OF THE FLIGHT OVER, WHILE QUIRKE with bitter determination had got drunk on complimentary brandies liberally plied to him by a frisky-eyed stewardess. Despite the five hours they had saved flying westwards it was dark when they arrived aboard the Clipper, and Quirke was resentful of the whole day he seemed to have missed out of his life, a lost day that was nonetheless more significant now than so many others he had lived through. From the airport they took a taxi to Penn Station, slumped away from each other against their respective windows, both groggy in their own way. The train was new and sleek and fast, although it smelled much the same as an old steam train. In Boston they were met at the station by Josh’s driver, a dark, slight young man who looked more like a boy got up in a chauffeur’s uniform, a smart gray affair complete with leather leggings and a cap with a shiny peak. He smelled of hair oil and cigarettes. His name, he said, when Quirke asked, was Andy.

An icy rain was falling, and as they drove across the city Quirke peered through the murk at the lighted streets, looking for remembered landmarks and finding none. It was twenty years, and seemed a thousand, since he had last been here, he and Mal, two tyro medical men working-masquerading, more like-as interns for a year at Massachusetts General thanks to the strings that had been pulled for them by the Judge’s old pal Joshua Crawford, a freeman of this city and father of two lovely and marriageable daughters. Yes, more like a thousand years.

“Tender memories stirring?” Phoebe inquired slyly from her side of the car. He had not realized that she had been watching him. He said nothing. “What’s the matter?” she asked, in a different tone. She was fed up with his moodiness; he had been in some kind of sulk the whole way over.

Quirke turned his eyes to the window again and the shining city sliding past. “What do you mean, what’s the matter?” he said.

“You’re different. No jokes anymore. I’m the one who’s supposed to be in a mood. Is it that fall you took?”

He was silent for a time and then said:

“I wish we could…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Talk.”

“We are talking.”

“Are we?”

She shrugged, giving up on him. He could feel the driver’s eye watching him in the mirror.

THEY CROSSED SOUTH BOSTON AND HEADED OUT ONTO THE HIGHWAY. North Scituate, where Josh Crawford had his mansion, was twenty miles down the coast, and soon after Quincy they were on narrow back roads where the sea mist hung under the trees and the lighted windows of isolated houses shone yellow and mysterious in the darkness. There had been snowdrifts still in Boston but down here, on the sea’s edge, even the verges were clear. They passed by a white-steepled church standing on a rise, ghostly and somehow anguished in its empty-windowed solitude. No one spoke, and Quirke, the brandy glow now turned to an ashen burn, had again the eerie sense of detachment that came over him so often these days: it was as if the big car, wallowing effortlessly around these bends on its plush suspension, had left the road and was being borne aloft on the dense, wet darkness toward some secret place where its passengers would be lifted from it and spirited silently away without trace. He pressed a finger and thumb to his eyes. His mind was not his own, tonight.

When they turned in at the gates of Moss Manor a pack of penned dogs began to howl somewhere on the grounds. Approaching along the drive they saw that the great front door of the house was standing open and someone was in the doorway, waiting to greet them. Quirke wondered how the precise time of their arrival had been made known to the household. Perhaps the car had been heard, or its lights seen, as it rounded some bend up the road. Andy the driver rolled the big machine in a sweeping half circle on the gravel and stopped. The person in the doorway, Quirke saw, was a woman, tall and slim, wearing a sweater and slacks. Phoebe and he stepped out of the car, the driver holding the door for Phoebe. A miasma of exhaust smoke lingered in the heavy, damp night air, and from far off came the hollow moan of a foghorn. The dogs had fallen silent.

“Welcome, voyagers,” the woman called to them, in a tone of dry amusement. They walked forward and she reached out and took both of Phoebe’s hands in her own. “My,” she said, in her low, husky, southern-accented drawl, “look at you, all grown up and pretty as a picture. Have you got a kiss for your wicked step-grandmother?”

Phoebe, delighted, kissed her swiftly on the cheek. “I don’t know what to call you,” she said, laughing.

“Why, you charming girl, you must call me Rose. But I suppose I mustn’t call you a girl.”

She had deliberately delayed turning to Quirke, giving him time, he guessed, to admire her flawless profile and the swept-back wings of her auburn hair, the high, unmarred brow, the noble line of the nose, the mouth turned down at the corners in an ironically regal, lazy smile. Now at last she delivered to him languidly a slim, cool hand, a hand, he noted, that was not as youthful-seeming as the rest of her. “You must be the famous Mr. Quirke,” she said, letting her eye wander over him. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

He sketched a swift, half-serious bow. “Good things, I hope?”

She smiled her steely smile. “’Fraid not.” She turned to Phoebe again. “My dear, you must be exhausted. Was it a dreadful journey?”

“I had Mr. Cheerful here to keep my spirits up,” Phoebe said, with a grimace of comical disgust.

They moved into the wide, high hall, and Andy the driver came in behind them with their bags. Quirke looked about at the animal heads on the walls, the broad staircase of carved oak, the dark-beamed ceiling. The atmosphere in the house had a faintly tacky feel, as if many coats of varnish had been applied a long time in the past and had not quite dried yet. Twenty years ago he had been impressed by the mock-Gothic awfulness of Moss Manor; now that ghastly splendor had to his eye a certain dinginess-was it the wear and tear of time, or just his general disenchantment, that had dimmed the former grandeur of the place? No, it was the years: Josh Crawford’s house had grown old along with its owner.

A maid in a dark-blue uniform appeared; she had mousy hair and mournful Irish eyes.

“Deirdre here will show you to your rooms,” Rose Crawford said. “When you’re ready please come down, we’ll have a drink before dinner.” She laid a hand lightly on Quirke’s sleeve and said with what seemed to him a smiling sarcasm, “Josh can’t wait to see you.”

They moved to the foot of the staircase, the maid padding before them; Andy the driver had already gone ahead with their suitcases.

“How is Grandpa?” Phoebe asked.

Rose smiled at her. “Oh, dying, I’m afraid, dear.”

THE UPPER FLOORS OF THE HOUSE WERE LESS OPPRESSIVE AND SELF-CONSCIOUSLY grand than the downstairs. Up here the hand of Rose Crawford was evident in the dark-pink walls and Empire furnishings. After they had deposited Phoebe in her room the maid led Quirke to his. He recognized at once where he was, and faltered on the threshold. “My God,” he muttered. On a chest of drawers of inlaid walnut stood a silver-framed photograph of Delia Crawford as a girl of seventeen. He remembered that picture, he had made her give him a copy of it. He lifted a hand to his forehead and touched the scars there, a habit he had developed. The maid was watching with some alarm his reactions of surprise and dismay. “I’m sorry,” he said to her, “this used to be my wife’s room, when she lived here.” The photograph had been taken at some debutante ball or other and Delia wore a tiara, and the high collar of her elaborate gown was visible. She was looking into the camera with a kind of amused lasciviousness, one perfect eyebrow arched. He knew that look: all through those love-drunk Boston months it used to spark in him such extremes of desire for her that his groin would ache and his tongue would throb at the root. And how she would laugh at him, as he writhed before her in his blissful anguish. They had thought they had all the time in the world.

When the maid had gone, shutting the door soundlessly behind her, he sat down wearily on the bed, facing the chest of drawers, his hands hanging limply between his knees. The house was silent around him, though his ears were humming even yet from the relentless grinding drone of the aircraft’s engines. Delia’s sardonically tolerant eye calmly took him in, her expression seeming to say, Well, Quirke, what now? He brought out his wallet and took from it another photograph, much smaller than the one of Delia, badly creased and torn along one edge. It was of Phoebe, taken when she too was seventeen. He leaned forward and tucked it into a corner of the silver frame, and then sat back, his hands hanging as before, and gazed for a long time at the images of the two of them, the mother, and her daughter.

WHEN HE CAME DOWN HE FOLLOWED THE SOUND OF VOICES TO A vast, oak-floored room that he remembered as Josh Crawford’s library. There were high, glass-fronted bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes that no one had ever opened, and in the middle of the floor a long reading table with a top that sloped on either side, and a huge, antique globe of the world on a wooden stand. In the fireplace that was the height of a man a wood fire was blazing on a raised, black metal grating. Rose Crawford and Phoebe were sitting together on a leather-covered couch. Opposite them, on the other side of the fireplace, Josh Crawford was slumped in his wheelchair. He wore a rich silk dressing gown and a crimson cummerbund, and Oriental slippers embroidered with gold stars; a shawl of Persian blue wool was draped over his shoulders. Quirke looked at the bald, pitted skull, the shape of an inverted pear, to the sides and back of which there clung yet a few lank strands of hair, dyed a pathetic shade of youthful black; at his loosely hanging, raw, pink eyelids; at the gnarled and rope-veined hands fidgeting in his lap, and he recalled the vigorous, sleek, and dangerous man that he had known two decades before, a latter-day buccaneer who had made a rich landfall on this still piratical coast. He saw that what Rose Crawford had said was true: her husband was dying, and rapidly. Only his eyes were what they had always been, shark-blue and piercing and merrily malignant. He lifted them now and looked at Quirke and said: “Well well, if it isn’t the bad penny.”

“Hello, Josh.”

Quirke came forward to the fire and Josh noted his limp and the bunched dead patch of flesh under his left eye where one of Mr. Punch’s or fat Judy’s steel-tipped toecaps had left its mark.

“What happened to you?”

“Had a fall,” Quirke said. He was growing weary of that same old pointless lie.

“Oh?” Josh grinned on one side of his leathery face. “You should be more careful.”

“So everyone tells me.”

“So why don’t you take everyone’s advice?”

Rose, Quirke could see, was entertained by this little tussle. She had changed into a sheath of scarlet silk and matching scarlet shoes with three-inch heels. She blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling and lifted her glass and waggled it, making the ice cubes chuckle.

“Have a drink, Mr. Quirke,” she said, rising from the couch. “Whiskey?” She glanced at Phoebe. “What about you, my dear? Gin and tonic? If, that is”-turning to Quirke-“it’s permitted?”

“Why are you asking him?” Phoebe said airily, and put out the tip of her tongue at Quirke. She too had changed, into her formal, blue satin dress.

Quirke said to Rose:

“Thank you for putting me into Delia’s room.”

She looked back from the table where the drinks were, glass and bottle in hand.

“Oh, dear,” she murmured vaguely, “was that hers?” She gave a shrug of regret that was patently fake, and then frowned. “There’s no ice, again.” She went to the fireplace and pressed the button of a bell that was set into the wall.

“It’s fine,” Quirke said, “I don’t need ice.”

She handed him the whiskey and lingered a moment, standing close in front of him. “My goodness, Mr. Quirke,” she murmured so that only he could hear, “when they told me you were big they did not exaggerate.” He smiled back at her smile, and she turned away with an ironic little twitch of her hips and went to the drinks table again and poured a gin for Phoebe, and another bourbon for herself. Josh Crawford from his wheelchair greedily watched her every movement, fiercely smiling. The maid came and Rose requested her brusquely to fetch more ice. It was plain the girl was terrified of her mistress. When she had gone Rose said to Crawford:

“Honestly, Josh, these waifs and strays you make me take in.”

Crawford only laughed. “Good Catholic girls,” he said. He winced at something happening inside him, then scowled. “This damned fire’s too hot-let’s go into the glasshouse.”

Rose’s mouth tightened and she seemed about to protest, but meeting her husband’s look-the scowling jaw, those cold, fish eyes-she put her bourbon aside. “Whatever you say, darling,” she said, making her voice go soft and silky.

They progressed, the four of them, along corridors cluttered with expensive, ugly furniture-oak chairs, brass-studded trunks, rough-hewn tables that might have come over on the Mayflower and, Quirke thought, most likely had-Quirke pushing Crawford in his chair and the two women following behind.

“Well, Quirke,” Crawford asked, without turning his head, “come to see me die, have you?”

“I came with Phoebe,” Quirke said.

Crawford nodded. “Sure you did.”

They arrived at the Crystal Gallery and Rose pressed a switch and banks of fluorescent lights high above them came on with a series of faint, muffled thumps. Quirke looked up past the lamps at the weight of all that darkness pressing on the huge glass dome that was stippled now with rain. The air in here was heavy and sultry and smelled of sap and loam. He thought it strange that he did not remember this extraordinary place, yet he must have seen it, must have been in it, when he was first here with Delia. All around, polished leaves of palms and ferns and unblossoming orchids hung motionless, like so many large, intricately shaped ears attending to these intruders. Rose drew Phoebe aside and together they drifted away among the crowding greenery. Quirke pushed the wheelchair into a clearing where there was a wrought-iron bench and sat down, glad to rest his knee. The metal was clammy to the touch and almost warm. Keeping this space heated over a winter, he reflected idly, probably cost the equivalent of what he earned in a year.

“I hear you’ve been interfering with our work,” Josh Crawford said.

Quirke looked at him. The old man was watching the spot among the palms where the two women had gone from sight. “What work is that?”

Josh Crawford sniffed, making a sound that might have been a laugh. “You afraid of death, Quirke?” he asked.

Quirke reflected for a moment. “I don’t know. Yes, I suppose. Isn’t everyone?”

“Not me. The nearer I get to it, the less afraid I am.” He sighed, and Quirke heard the rattle in his chest. “The only good thing about old age is that it gives you the opportunity to even up the balance. Between the bad and the good, I mean.” He swiveled his head and looked at Quirke. “I’ve done some wicked things in my time”-a chuckle, another rattle-“even made people take falls, but I’ve done a lot of good, as well.” He paused a moment. “What they say is right, Quirke. This is the New World. Europe is finished, the war and all that followed saw to that.” He pointed the yellowed nail of a long, knobbed finger at the concrete floor. “This is the place. God’s country.” He sat nodding, his jaw working as though he were gnawing on something soft and unswallowable. “I ever tell you the history of this house? Scituate, here, this is where the Famine Irish came to, back in the black eighteen forties. The Prods, the English, the Brahmins, they’d settled the North Shore, no Irish need apply up there, so our people came south. I often imagine them, picture them in my mind”-tapping his forehead with a fingertip-“skin-and-bone wildmen and their scrawny redheaded women, trailing the coast with their litters of unkillable kids. Shit-poor the lot of them, starved at home and then starved here. This was rough country then, cliffs, rocks, salt-burned fields. Yes, I see them, clinging by their fingernails along this shore, scratching in the shallows for crabs and clams, afraid of the sea like most of us Irish, afraid of the deeps. A few fisher-families, though, had settled Second and Third Cliffs down there”-he jerked a thumb over his shoulder-“Connemara people, slick as otters, used to hard water and running the channels. At low tide they spotted it on the rocks: the red moss. They knew it from home, you see. Chondus crispus, and another kind, Gigartina mamillosa-how’s your Latin, Quirke? Carrageen moss. Red gold, it was, in those days. A thousand uses for the stuff, everything from blancmange to wallpaper size to printer’s ink. They started gathering it, out in dories at low tide with their rakes, dry it on the beach, ship it off to Boston by the cartload. Within ten years there were moss millionaires down here-oh, yes, millionaires. One of them built this house, William Martin McConnell, otherwise known as Billy the Boss, a County Mayo man. The Boss and his moss. Moss Manor-see? Then the railroad arrived, eighteen seventy-one the first trains came through. Hotels went up all along North Scituate, fancy holiday cottages at Egypt Beach, Cedar Point. Fire chiefs, police captains, the lace-curtain Irish, businessmen from over at Quincy, from as far away as Worcester, even, they all came here. Cardinal Curley had a house in…I forget where. All kinds of people, taking their bite of the country, sinking their teeth into this rich coast. The Irish Riviera, it was called, and still is. They built golf courses, country clubs-the Hatherly Beach Playground Association!” He cackled phlegmily, his frail head wobbling on its stringy stalk of a neck. He was tickled at the thought of the shit-poor Irish and their pretensions, their outrageous successes. This was his sustenance, Quirke realized, this was what was keeping him alive, a thin bitter gruel of memories and imaginings, of malice and vindictive amusement. “You can’t beat the Irish, Quirke. We’re like the rats, you’re never more than six feet away from one.” He began to cough again, and thumped a fist repeatedly, hard, into his chest, and slumped back exhausted in the chair. “I asked you, Quirke,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “why did you make this trip? And don’t say you came for the girl’s sake.”

Quirke shrugged, and moved his aching leg to ease it; the iron of the seat was growing cold under him. “I ran away,” he said.

“From what?”

“From people who do wicked things.” Josh smiled and, smiling, looked away. Quirke watched him. “What’s this business of yours I’ve been interfering in, Josh?”

Crawford lifted his eyes and scanned vaguely the tall panes of gleaming black glass all around them. In this vast place with its artificial atmosphere they might have been a hundred leagues under the ocean or a million miles out in empty space.

“Know what I am, Quirke?” Crawford said. “I’m a planter. Some people plant grain, others plant trees-me, I plant souls.”

THE WOMEN HAD PAUSED BY A TERRA-COTTA POT CONTAINING A LEAF-LESS rose bush with long, many-thorned, thin branches that reminded Phoebe of the clawing hands of a fairy-tale witch. “It’s called after me,” Rose said. “Isn’t it crazy? Josh paid a fortune to some fancy grower in England, and there it is, Rose Crawford. The flowers when they come out are a nasty shade of crimson, and have no scent.” She smiled at the girl trying dutifully to seem interested. “You don’t care for horticulture, I can see. It doesn’t matter. To be honest, neither do I, but I have to pretend, for Josh’s sake.” She touched a hand to Phoebe’s arm and they turned back the way they had come. “Will you stay here for a while?” she said.

Phoebe stared at her in surprise and faint alarm. “In Boston?” she said.

“Yes. Stay with us-with me. Josh thinks you should.”

“What would I do?”

“Whatever you like. Go to college-we can get you into Harvard, or Boston U. Or just do nothing. See things. Live-you know how to do that, don’t you?”

In fact, she suspected that was one of the things-the main thing-the girl had not yet learned how to do. Behind the lipstick-thin veneer of worldliness she was, Rose could see, a sweet little thing, untried, uncertain, hungry for experience but not sure that she was ready for it yet, and worried as to what frightening form it might take. There were so many things that Rose could teach her. She rather liked the idea of having a protégée.

Ducking under a tropical climbing plant, the entwined, shaggy tendrils of which reminded Phoebe of the legs of a giant spider, they came in sight again of Quirke and Josh Crawford.

“Look at them,” Rose said softly, pausing. “They’re talking about you.”

“About me? How do you know?”

“I know everything.” She touched the girl’s arm again. “You’ll think over what I said, yes, about staying?”

Phoebe nodded, smiling with her lips pressed tight together and her eyes shining. She felt giddy and excited. It was the same feeling that she used to have on the garden swing when she was a child. She loved it when her father pushed her higher and higher until it seemed she would go right over in a complete circle. There was an instant at the highest point of the arc when everything would stop and the reeling world would hang suspended over a huge emptiness of air and light and thrilling silence. That was how it was now, except that the instant was going on and on. She knew she should not have said yes when Rose offered her that gin-although it was only ten o’clock here it was really the middle of the night for her-but she did not care. One moment she had been sitting motionless on the swing, a good little girl, then a hand had pushed her in the small of the back and here she was, higher than she had ever been before.

They went forward to where the men were sitting. Quirke’s damaged face was swollen from the effects of travel tiredness and drink and the knotted lump of flesh under his left eye was a dead white color. Josh Crawford looked up at Phoebe and smiled broadly. “Here she is,” he said, “my favorite granddaughter!”

“That’s not much of a compliment,” Phoebe said, smiling back at him, “since I’m the only granddaughter you have.”

He took her by the wrists and drew her toward him. “Look at you,” he said, “a woman already.”

Quirke watched the two of them, marveling with bitter amusement at how quickly Phoebe had forgiven her grandfather for siding with the others against her determination to marry Conor Carrington. Rose in her turn was watching Quirke, registering the haggard sourness of his look. “Where do they go to,” she said lightly, “the years, eh, Mr. Quirke?”

Brenda Ruttledge appeared, in her nurse’s uniform and neat little hat, bearing a vial of pills and a glass of water on a silver tray. Seeing Quirke she faltered and her mouth went loosely sideways for a second. He too was faintly shocked to see her; he had forgotten that she would be at Moss Manor.

“Time for your pills, Mr. Crawford,” she said in a voice that cost her an obvious effort to hold steady.

Quirke gave her his weary smile. “Hello, Brenda,” he said.

She would not, could not meet his eye. “Mr. Quirke.” She smiled glancingly at Phoebe, and they both nodded, but no one bothered to introduce them.

Rose cast a sharp look from the nurse to Quirke and back again. Josh Crawford too caught the frisson of acknowledgment that had passed between them, and grinned, baring his side teeth. “Know each other, do you?” he said.

Quirke did not look at him. “We were colleagues, in Dublin,” he said.

There was a brief quiet as the echoes of that word, colleagues, reverberated incongruously. Crawford took the glass of water and Brenda shook three large tablets from the vial into his palm. He clapped them into his mouth, and drank, and grimaced.

Rose brought her hands soundlessly together. “Well,” she said, gently brisk, “Phoebe, Mr. Quirke, shall we have dinner…?”

LATER, QUIRKE COULD NOT SLEEP. OVER DINNER IN THE FUNEREALLY candlelit dining room, conversation had been scant. Glistening slabs of beef were served, and hickory-brown roasted potatoes and minced cabbage and heat-shriveled carrots, all seeming to be slathered over with a sticky coating of the ubiquitous household varnish. More than once Quirke had felt his mind swimming away from him into a dim, twittering place that was neither here nor elsewhere. He had stumbled on the stairs coming up, and Phoebe had put a hand under his arm and laughed at him and said he was obviously missing his beauty sleep. For a while he lay on the bed in his room, Delia’s room, without undressing-he had not unpacked yet-and even though he turned Delia’s photograph to the wall she was still unsettlingly present. Or no, not she, exactly, but a remembrance of her, rancid with resentment and old anger. He tried to keep it from his mind but could not. It was the night of the going-away party Josh Crawford had given for him and Mal, twenty years before. Delia had drawn him aside, a finger to her mischievously smiling lips, and brought him up here and lain with him on the bed in her party frock. At first she would not let him make love to her, would not let him do anything, and kept pushing away his importunately questing hands. He could still hear her laughter, soft, mocking, provocative, and her voice hoarse in his ear as she called him her big buffalo. When he was about to give up, however, she shucked off her dress, with a practiced ease the acknowledgment of which afterwards slipped like a heated knife blade into his unwilling consciousness, and lay back smiling and opened her arms and took him so deeply inside her he knew he would never quite find his way out again.

He got up from the bed now and had to stand a moment with his eyes closed, waiting for the dizziness to pass. He had drunk too much whiskey and then too much wine at dinner and had smoked too many cigarettes and the inside of his mouth seemed to be lined with a gossamer-thin integument of warm, smooth, seared meat. He put on his jacket and left the room and went down through the silent house. He had the sense that others too were awake, he seemed to feel their presence around him in the gaunt air, jadedly attending him. Cautiously he negotiated the wide, oaken staircase, carrying his walking stick under his arm and gripping his strapped and still bandaged leg in both hands and swinging it awkwardly from one step to the next. He did not know where he was going. The atmosphere was watchful, hostile even, as if the place itself and not just its inhabitants were aware of his presence, aware of him, and resentful, somehow. Doors as he opened them clicked their tongues in annoyed unwelcome and, when he was leaving, closed behind him sighingly, glad of his quittance.

He thought he was heading in the direction of the Crystal Gallery and its silent plant life, hoping the company for a while of living but insensate things might soothe his mind and drive him back to his bed and sleep at last, but try as he would he could not locate it. Instead he found himself in a space almost as lofty, housing a long, shallow swimming pool. The lights were set in hooded niches under the lip of the pool, the stealthily shifting surface of which cast wallowing reflections onto the sheer marble walls and the ceiling that was a segmented dome of pale plaster molded in the shape of the roof of a bedouin chieftain’s tent. Here too the artificially heated air was cottony and cloying, and as Quirke approached the edge of the pool he felt the sweat gathering between his shoulder blades and on his eyelids and his upper lip. There came again the blarings of distant foghorns; they sounded to him like the forlorn and hopeless calls of great wounded animals crying in pain far out at sea.

He heard himself catch his breath. There was a body in the water.

It was a woman, wearing a black bathing suit and a rubber bathing cap. She was floating on her back with her eyes closed, her knees flexed a little and her arms outspread. The rim of the tight black cap blurred her features and at first he did not know her. He thought of slipping quietly away-his heart was still thumping from the start the sudden sight of her had given him-but just then she turned onto her front and began to swim with slow breast strokes toward the edge where he was standing. Seeing him towering above her on his stick she drew back in fright with a froglike thrashing of arms and legs, making the water churn. Then she came on again, with her chin lifted, ruefully smiling. It was Brenda Ruttledge. “God almighty,” she said, grasping the sides of the metal ladder and flipping herself up out of the water with a buoyant little bound, “you gave me an awful fright.”

“You frightened me, too,” he said. “I thought you were a corpse.”

“Well,” she said, laughing, “I imagine you of all people should know the difference.”

When she stepped from the ladder they found themselves facing each other in closer proximity than either of them had expected. He could feel the watery chill emanating from her flesh and even the blood heat behind it. Around them on the walls the water lights pranced and wallowed. She pulled off the bathing cap and shook her hair. “You won’t tell, will you?” she said, half seriously. “They don’t like the staff to use the pool.”

She stepped past him and bent to pick up her towel. It struck him that he had not seen this much of her ever before. She was broad-hipped, with short, rather thick, shapely legs. A country girl, built for childbearing. He felt old suddenly. She would still have been in her cradle when he was frolicking here with the lovely Delia Crawford. One kiss, he reminded himself, that was all that was between them, him and this girl, one stolen, tipsy kiss at a party that night he had first heard the name Christine Falls. She came back with the towel, drying her shoulders. The look of a woman’s face washed of its makeup never failed to affect him. When she lifted her arm he saw the little smudge of dark wet hair underneath.

“What happened to your face?” she said. “I noticed earlier. And you’re limping.”

“Took a tumble.”

She gazed into his face; he could see her not believing him. “Oh,” she said suddenly, “I’ve a drop on my nose!”

She sniffed, and laughed, and buried her face in the towel. Quirke thought: All this has happened before somewhere.

At the pool’s edge there were two cane armchairs on either side of a low bamboo table. Brenda put on a white terry-cloth robe and they sat down. The cane crackled like a fire of thorns under Quirke’s weight. He offered Brenda a cigarette but she shook her head. The reflections from the pool, calmer now that the water had calmed, moved in dreamy arabesques on wall and ceiling, reminding him vaguely of blood cells pressed between the glass slides of a microscope. Brenda said:

“What are you doing up, anyway, at this hour?”

He shrugged, and the chair made another loud complaint. “Can’t sleep,” he said.

“I was like that for ages, when I first came. I thought I would go mad.”

He seemed to hear a rasping something in her voice, a sorrowing catch. “Homesick, are you?” he asked.

Again she shook her head. “I was sick of home, that’s why I left.” She gazed before her, seeing not here but there, not now but then. “No,” she went on, “it’s the place I can’t get used to. This house. Those bloody foghorns.”

“And Josh Crawford?” he said. “Have you got used to him?”

“Oh, I can handle the likes of Mr. Crawford.” She turned to him, lifting her legs and tucking her feet under her and stretching the robe over her smooth, round knees. He imagined putting his face between her thighs, his mouth finding the cold wet lips there and the burning hollow within. “I was surprised,” she said, “when I heard you were coming.”

“Were you?”

Their voices traveled out over the water and struck faint, marine echoes from the walls. She was still studying him. “You’ve changed,” she said.

“Have I?”

“You’re quieter.”

“No more jokes.” He smiled glumly. “It’s something Phoebe said.”

“She seems nice, Phoebe.”

“Yes. She is.”

They were silent, and the echoes fell. Distantly in the house a clock struck a single, silver note, and an instant later from farther off there came another chime, and yet another, farther off still, and then the silence settled again. Quirke said:

“Tell me, what do you know about this charity work that Josh does?”

“You mean the orphanage?”

He looked at her. “What orphanage,” he asked slowly, “is that?”

“St. Mary’s. It’s out in Brookline. He gives money to it.” A tremor of unease touched her like the tip of a needle. What was he after? To change the subject she said, “Mrs. Crawford has taken a shine to you.”

He raised his eyebrows. “And how do you know that?”

“I just know.”

He nodded. “Your female intuition, is it?”

She flinched at the sudden cold mockery in his tone. She stood up and pulled the robe tight around her and walked away amidst the capering, ghostly lights, dangling the black bathing cap by its strap from her finger.

“Your niece was right,” she threw back over her shoulder. “No more jokes.”

27

HEAVY WAVES, BOXY AND THICK, ROLLED IN SLOW MOTION PAST THE lighthouse on its offshore rock and broke against the beach, lacing the air with ice-white spume. The coast sloped steeply here, diving off toward Provincetown and the vast Atlantic distances beyond. Quirke and Phoebe stood side by side on the concrete slipway, looking out to the horizon. A hard wind roaring in from the sea blew spray into their faces and whipped the flaps of their overcoats against their legs. Phoebe said something but Quirke could not hear her for the wind and the slushy clatter of the shingle rolling under the waves. He cupped a hand to his ear and she leaned close and shouted again, “I feel if I put out my arms I’d fly!” How young she was; the long and tedious journey from Ireland seemed not to have affected her at all, and her eyes sparkled and her cheeks glowed. Josh Crawford’s big Buick was parked behind them at an angle on the sandy track, humped and shining, like something huge that had slithered its way up out of the sea. Andy Stafford in his chauffeur’s greatcoat stood beside it, watching them narrowly, holding his smart peaked cap at his side, his oiled black hair blowing straight back and plastered against his skull. Slight of form in field-gray outfit and polished leggings he had the look of a boy soldier facing into the wind of battle.

Quirke and Phoebe turned and set off walking along the sandy pathway in the lee of the low dunes. A few clapboard holiday homes stood some way back from the sea, their paint peeling and windows hazed over from the salt winds. Quirke on his walking stick had to go gingerly for the ground was uneven and shifting in places and the marram grass looked tough and wiry enough to wrap itself around his ankles and send him sprawling. Despite having to stump along clumsily like this he felt so giddily light in the head it seemed he too might be plucked up by the wind and whirled away into the tumultuous sky. He stopped and brought out his cigarettes but the wind was too strong and his lighter would not light. They went on.

“I used to come here with Delia,” he said, and regretted it at once, for Phoebe pounced, of course.

“What was she like, Delia?” she asked greedily, putting a hand on his arm and squeezing it. “I mean, really. I want to know, now that I’m here. I can almost feel her presence, in the house.”

“Oh, exciting, I suppose.”

Was it true? She had been wholly without scruples of any kind-her father’s daughter-and that had certainly excited him. But he had hated her, too. Curious, loving and hating, the two sides of the precious coin she had so casually handed him. Phoebe was nodding solemnly as if he had uttered a profound insight. This eagerness of hers to know what Delia had been really like-did she have some unconscious inkling of who Delia really was? She said:

“I thought Mummy was supposed to be the exciting one.”

“We were all different, then.” He sounded to himself like a fond old fool, maundering over the lost years. It occurred to him that he was sick of being Quirke, but knew there was no one else he could be. “I mean,” he said quickly, irritated, “we were all someone else, your father, Sarah, me-” He broke off. “Look, let’s go back, this wind is making my head ache.”

But it was not only the wind that was tormenting him. When Phoebe spoke Delia’s name now he felt as an adulterer might feel when his wife makes casual mention of the family friend who is his secret lover. He knew that he should tell his daughter-his daughter!-the truth, should tell her who her real parents were, but he did not know how to say it. It was too enormous to be put into words, a thing outside the commonplace run of life. It would not square, he told himself, with what they had been to each other up to now, the easy tolerance there had been between them, the freedom, the untaxing gaiety. It was absurd-how could he begin to be a father to her, after all these years, the so many years that made up the entirety of her life? Yet even as he went along here with her hand tugging at his arm he was convinced that he could feel the loss of her, the absence of her, from whatever hollow place it was in his heart that she would have filled, in those years. Since the moment in the mountains when Sarah had made her confession to him there had been gathering steadily in him, like a head of water behind a dam, something which if he released it would swamp his life and drown his peace of mind, and so he limped along, and smiled, and entertained his oblivious daughter’s chattering inquiries about the woman she did not know was her mother. Someday, he told himself, with almost a vindictive satisfaction, someday he would suffer for this laxity, this laziness of spirit, this cowardice. For that was what it was-plain funk. He might make all the excuses he wished, might talk of the tolerance there had been between them, the freedom and the gaiety that he must not put at risk, but he knew it was just an alibi he was attempting to construct, a front behind which he could go on as he had always done, in peace, being nobody’s father.

Andy Stafford had climbed into the car and was just about to light a cigarette. He put it away hastily when he saw them turn back, Quirke swiveling abruptly on his stick like some sort of huge mechanical toy man. In the rearview mirror Andy caught a glimpse of his own reflection and was startled by what he saw, the somehow grimacing face with its dark, furtive eye. He studied Phoebe through the windshield as she approached, the wind molding her coat against her form. When she had got into the car he had tried to spread the tartan lap blanket over her knees but she had taken it from him without giving him even a glance and tossed it over her shoulder into the back window space. Now he listened idly to the two of them talking behind him as the car lurched down the track away from the dunes on its voluptuously squashy suspension.

“How did you meet up,” Phoebe was asking, “the four of you?”

Quirke, his hands set atop his stick, was watching the dwindling shore through the side window.

“Your grandfather had fixed for Mal and me to work at the hospital,” he said. “Summer jobs, you know, with a view to something more permanent, if it worked out, which it didn’t, for various reasons.”

“Delia being one of them?”

He shrugged.

“I might have stayed. Big bucks, even in those days. But then…” He let it drift away. He had the feeling that he was lying even though he was not; the secret that he carried was suddenly infecting everything. “Your grandmother was there, being treated, at the hospital. Sarah came to see her. She didn’t know her mother was dying. I was the one who told her. I think she was glad-to be told, I mean. Then we were a foursome for a while, Sarah, Delia, Mal, me.”

He stopped. Big bucks. A foursome. What was it-was he hoping the momentum of mere talk would lead him to blurt out another, altogether different word, would lull him into telling her without his intending it the things he had not the nerve to utter straight out, the things it was her right to know? He saw she was no longer listening to him, but was gazing out blankly through the window on her side as the car gained the main road and turned in the direction of North Scituate. Quirke studied the back of Andy Stafford’s head, sleek as a seal’s and narrow at the neck, and pondered how unmistakable it was, the physiognomy of the poor, the low, the dispossessed. Phoebe’s voice startled him.

“Rose wants me to stay here.”

She spoke in a sort of sighing fall, pretending weary indifference.

“Here?” he said.

She glanced at him archly. With his hands folded like that on the handle of the walking stick he had the distinct look of Grandfather Griffin.

“Yes,” she said, “here. In America. In Boston.”

“Hmm.”

“What do you mean, Hmm?”

He looked again at the back of the driver’s head, uncannily motionless in the moving car. He lowered his voice but spoke with a deliberate emphasis.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“And why not?” she inquired.

He thought for a moment. What was he to say? After all, why should she not stay here? Why should she not do anything she wanted? Who was he to advise her how to live her life?

“What about home?” he said. “What about Conor Carrington?”

She made a wry face and turned to look out her window again. There was the church with the white spire they had passed by last night in the mist-hung darkness; today it looked ordinary and even a little sheepish, as if its ghostly nocturnal springing up were a prank it was ashamed to be reminded of in daylight.

“Home,” Phoebe said quietly, “feels very far away, here. I don’t mean just in miles.”

“It is far away,” Quirke said, “in miles and everything else. That’s the point.” He paused, floundering, then tried again. “I promised your-I promised Sarah I’d look after you. I don’t think she’d want you to stay here. In fact, I know she wouldn’t.”

“Oh?” she said, turning again to stare at him superciliously down her nose, and for a second he saw how she would look when she was middle-aged, a slightly less hard-eyed, less imperious Delia. “Just how do you know she wouldn’t?”

He felt a pressure inside his chest-was it anger?-and had to pause again. He was acutely aware now of the back of Andy Stafford’s head, which seemed to have become a bulbed and shiny listening device. He made his voice go lower still.

“There are things you don’t know, Phoebe,” he said. She was still fixing him with that ingenuously haughty stare.

“What things?” she said scoffingly. “What sort of things?”

“About your mother. About your parents.” He looked away. “About me.”

“Oh, you,” she said, softening suddenly, and laughed. “What’s there to know about you?”

WHEN THEY CAME INTO THE VILLAGE HE TOLD ANDY STAFFORD TO stop and levered himself on his stick out of the car, saying there was a place he wanted to find, a bar, where he used to drink when he first came here. Phoebe said she would come with him but he waggled his stick impatiently and told her no, that she should go on to the house and send the car back for him in an hour, and he slammed the door. She watched him lurch away, his long coat billowing and his hat in his hand and his hair shaking in the icy wind. Andy Stafford said nothing, letting the engine idle. The quiet in the car seemed to broaden, and something unseen began to grow up out of it and spread its indolent fronds.

“Take me somewhere,” Phoebe said crisply. “Anywhere.”

He palmed the gearshift and she felt a greased meshing as he let out the clutch and the car glided away from the curb with an almost feline stealth, purring to itself. She had turned aside to look out her window but she could feel him watching her in the mirror, and she was careful not to let her eye meet his. They whispered along the empty broad main street of the icebound village-Joe’s Diner, Ed’s Motors, Larry’s Tackle and Bait: it seemed the men owned everything here-and then they were on the coast road again, from which despite its designation she could catch only occasional glimpses of the sea, iron-blue and somehow tilted up toward the horizon. She did not like the sea, its unnatural uniform flatness, its worrisome smells. Untidy, tracklike roads led down to it, the continent petering out along this ragged eastern coastline. She experienced a sudden flush of weariness, and for a second her head nodded unstoppably and her eyelids came down like two curved, leaden flanges that had suddenly been attached to her eyes. She snapped herself upright, blinking. The driver was looking at her again in the mirror-should she tell him please to concentrate on the road? She wondered if his eyes, small and glossy brown, like a squirrel’s, she thought, and much too close together, were particularly lacking in expression, or if everybody’s eyes looked like that in isolation from the face’s other features. She leaned forward to check her own reflection but quickly sat back again, shaken by the sight of their two faces in the glass, suddenly beside each other but in different perspectives.

“So,” he said, “how do you like Boston?”

“I haven’t seen it, yet.” She had been determined to maintain a frosty distance, and was disconcerted to hear herself adding, “Maybe you’d take me there, sometime.” She faltered, and sat upright quickly, clearing her throat. “I mean, you might take Mr. Quirke and me, to see the sights, some afternoon.” She told herself: Shut up, you dope! “If my grandfather can spare you, that is.”

She could feel him being amused.

“Sure thing,” he said easily. “Anytime.” He paused, calculating how much he might risk. “Mr. Crawford don’t have much use for the car, him being sick and all, and Mrs. Crawford, well…” The very back of his head seemed to smirk. She wondered what that well might mean and thought it was probably best not to inquire. “You want to go to New York,” he said. “Now, there’s a real town.”

She asked his name. “Stafford?” she said. “That’s Irish, isn’t it?”

He shrugged a shoulder. “I guess.” He did not much care for the idea of being Irish, even though she was not like any of the Irish over here that he knew.

She asked him where he was from. “Originally, I mean. Where were you born?”

“Oh, out West,” he lied, in a voice he made purposely vague and dry, wanting to suggest sagebrush and shimmering deserts and a silent man solitary on his horse, gazing off from the rim of a mesa toward distant, rocky peaks.

They turned inland. She wondered, a little uneasily, where he was taking her. Well, it was what she had told him, to take her anywhere. And despite that eye of his in the mirror it was not unpleasant, rolling leisurely along these country roads that did not look all that much different from the roads at home.

The engine was running so smoothly he could hear the quick little hiss of nylon against nylon when she crossed her legs.

“Do you have to drive at such a slow speed?” she said. “I mean, is it the rule, here?”

“It’s standard with Mr. Crawford. But”-carefully-“I don’t always stick to it.”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m sure.”

She brought out her oval cigarettes and lit one. The smoke snaked over Andy Stafford’s shoulder and he sniffed the unfamiliar flat dry papery odor of the tobacco and asked if they were Irish cigarettes. “No,” she said, “English.” She considered offering him one but thought she had better not. She held the slim silver case lightly in her palm and with her thumb clicked the catch open and shut, open and shut. She had suddenly begun to feel the effects of the air journey, and everything seemed to her to have a beat of its own, precise, regular, yet to be part too of a general ensemble, a sort of drawn-out, untidy, complexly rhythmic chord which she could almost see in her mind, undulant, flowing, like a bundle of wires pulsing and twitching inside a pouring column of thick oil. The urge to sleep was like oil too, spreading over her mind and slowing it. She closed her eyes and felt the gathering momentum of the car as Andy Stafford increased the acceleration, gradually, or stealthily, it even seemed-was he afraid she would tell on him for breaking the Crawford limit?-but the cushioned churning of the wheels underneath her feet seemed more like something that was happening inside her, and gave her a horrible, lurching sensation and she hastily opened her eyes and made herself focus on the road again. They were going very fast now, the car bounding along effortlessly with a muted roar, seeming to exult in its own tigerish power. Andy Stafford was tensed forward at the wheel. She noted his leather driving gloves with holes punched in the backs of them; he was just the type that would wear that sort of thing, she told herself, and then felt a little ashamed for thinking it. They were on a long straight stretch of narrow road. Tall marsh grasses on either side leaned forward languorously even before the car was abreast of them, its momentum somehow reaching a yard or two ahead and folding the air inward. Phoebe stubbed out her cigarette and braced her hands flat on either side of her on the seat. The leather was stippled and warmly pliant under her palms. There was some kind of barrier in the road away in front of them, with an upright wooden pole and a white signboard with a black X painted on it. She felt rather than heard a drawn-out wail that seemed to come from far off, but a moment later there was the railroad train, bullet-nosed and enormous, hurtling forward at a diagonal to the road. Clearly, calmly, as if from high above the scene, she saw the X of the sign resolve itself into a diagram of the twin trajectories of car and train, speeding toward the level crossing. Now the upright wooden pole ahead quivered along its length and began jerkily to descend. “Stop!” she cried, and was startled-it had sounded more like a shout of glee than a cry of panic. Andy Stafford ignored her and on the car sped, seeming to sweep together all the countryside behind and whirl it with it into the funnel of its headlong rushing. She was sure they would hit the descending barrier, she could hear already the crash of metal and shattering glass and timber. In the corner of her eye she saw a snapshot, impossibly detailed and exact, of the crossing keeper standing in the doorway of his wooden hut, his long-jawed face and his mouth open to call out something, a shapeless felt hat pushed to the back of his head and one buckle missing from the bib of his dungarees. A little black car, squat and rounded like a beetle, was approaching from the other side of the crossing, and at the sight of them surging forward it veered in fright and seemed for a moment as if it would scurry off the road altogether to hide among the marsh grass. Then with a rumble they went bounding over the tracks and Phoebe turned about quickly to see the barrier fall the last few feet and stop with a bounce, and a moment later the train thundered through, sending after them a long, accusatory bellow that dwindled quickly into the distance and died. They flashed past the little black car, which sounded at them its own little bleat of protest and reproof. She realized that she was laughing, laughing and hiccuping, and her hands were clutching each other in her lap.

They went on until the road took them around a bend, and then stopped. There was a sensation of gliding, and settling, as if they had landed gently out of the air. Phoebe put three fingers over her mouth. Had she really laughed? “What did you think you were doing?” she cried. “We could have been killed.” He did not turn to her, only slid himself forward at the hips with a luxuriating sigh and rested his head on the back of the seat. He put on his chauffeur’s cap, too, and tipped it over his eyes. She sat up very straight and glared at him, at the little that she could see of him, in the almost horizontal angle he was sprawled at. “And why have you stopped?”

“Catch our breath,” he said, his voice coming up relaxed and amused from under the peak of his cap. She could think of nothing else to say. He reached up and adjusted the mirror and his eyes sprang at her again, seeming set more closely together than ever and cut across halfway by the shiny cap brim. He said in a low, insinuating sort of drawl, “Think I could try one of them English cigarettes?”

She hesitated. She could hardly refuse, but honestly-! She felt distinctly giddy still. She snapped open the silver case and offered it over the padded back of the bench seat. He reached his left hand lazily across and took a cigarette, making sure his fingertips brushed against her hand. She could have done with another cigarette herself-she was beginning to understand why people smoked-but she knew obscurely that she must not seem to be joining him in anything that smacked of intimacy. She shut the case and returned it to her handbag-or purse, she must remember to say purse, in this country-and took out her lipstick instead, and peered into the little mirror of her compact. She could see clearly the two spots of bright pink on her cheekbones and the unsuppressible, almost wild light in her eyes. Well, at least she was not sleepy anymore.

But when she had fixed her lips and put the lipstick and the compact away there seemed nothing else to do except sit with her hands in her lap and try not to look prim. The invisible thing that had sprouted earlier out of the silence between the two of them was turning rank now. Abruptly Andy Stafford stirred himself and rolled his window down a little way and threw out the unsmoked three-quarters of the cigarette.

“Tastes like rawhide,” he said.

He settled down as before, with his arms folded and his cap tipped over his eyes.

“Are you intending to stay here all day?” Phoebe demanded.

He waited a moment, and then said, putting on now the lazy, good-old-boy version of his drawl:

“Why don’t you come and sit up here in front, with me?”

She gave a little gasp.

“I think,” she said, with all the weight and command she could muster, “that you should take me home.”

It was peculiar, talking to him like this, ridiculous, really, since all she could see of him was the crown of his cap. He snickered and said:

“Home? That’s a long way, even for a car as fancy as this one.”

“You know very well what I mean,” she snapped. “Come on, drive-and not as if we’re in a race.”

He straightened, taking his time, and started up the engine. At the next crossroads he steered them back in the direction of the coast. They did not speak now, but she could sense how pleased he was with himself. Had he really said that, about her coming into the front seat with him? Yet for all the indignation she was forcing herself to feel she was aware of another, altogether involuntary feeling, a sort of buzzing, burning sensation at the front of her mind that was uncomfortable and yet not entirely unpleasant, and her cheeks stung as if she had been slapped in a hard yet playful, provocative way. And when they arrived at the house and he made a little prancing leap out of the car in order to open the door for her before she had even begun to reach for the handle he gave her a look that was at once mocking, intimate, and inquiring, and she knew he was asking her wordlessly if she intended to tell the others-Quirke, Rose, his employer-of all that had taken place in this past, fraught hour-but what was it, exactly, that had taken place?-and try not to as she might she responded to his silent query with a silent reply of her own. No, she would not tell, and they both knew it. Blushing, her forehead and cheeks fairly on fire by now, she brushed past him, not daring to look into his eyes again, saying only, and trying to make it sound brusque and offhand, that he had better go back to the village and collect Mr. Quirke.

THE MAN WAS WAITING FOR HIM ON A CORNER OF THE VILLAGE’S MAIN street. He looked like a big old storm-tossed crow, leaning there on his stick with his black coat blowing out sideways in the wind and his black hat tilted down over his face. Andy got out and made to open the passenger door, hoping Quirke would sit beside him, but Quirke had already opened a rear door and was climbing into the back seat. There was something about Quirke that Andy liked, or that at least he respected-he guessed that was the word. Maybe it was just Quirke’s size-Andy’s father had been a big man-and they had hardly got under way again when he started to tell him about his plan for Stafford Limos. As he talked, the plan came to seem more and more possible, more and more real, so that after a while it was almost as if Stafford Limos was already in operation. Quirke did not say much, but that was all right since Andy, as Andy realized, was really talking to himself.

He was about to turn off the road and head for Moss Manor when Quirke interrupted him-he had got up to the Porsche that he was going to buy with his first six months’ profits from the limo scheme-and said that he wanted to go to Brookline.

“A place called St. Mary’s,” Quirke said. “It’s an orphanage.”

Andy said nothing, only turned the car. He felt a trickling sensation down his spine. He did not have to be told; he knew where and what St. Mary’s was. He had thought he would never again find himself anywhere near the place and now here was this guy wanting to be taken there. Why? Was he one of the Knights of Whatever-it-was, over from Ireland to do some checking up on the facilities, see how the kids were being cared for, if the nuns were behaving themselves? And was he going to go there without telling Mr. Crawford? Andy began to relax. That must be it: Quirke was a snoop. That was fine. He even liked the idea of Quirke getting the goods on old man Crawford and that bitch Stephanus-what kind of a name was that anyway?-and the harp priest Harkins. There was a thing or two Andy himself could have told Quirke, if it was not for the business with the kid. Again he felt that trickle along his backbone. What if Quirke found out about the kid dying? What if-but no. How would he find out, and who would tell him? Not Stephanus or the priest, and old Crawford probably knew nothing about the accident, and had probably even forgotten about the kid itself, since there were so many at St. Mary’s and at the other places all over the state. For everyone, little Christine was history, and her name was likely never going to be mentioned again. Still, it was a pity he could not let Quirke know just what sort of a joint St. Mary’s was-unless, of course, he knew already.

28

QUIRKE HAD NOT EXPECTED A RECEPTION PARTY. HE HAD TELEPHONED St. Mary’s from a bar in the village. He had been kept waiting on the line for a long time, feeding dimes into the phone and listening to his own breathing making sounds like the sea in the mouthpiece, before he was put through to the Mother Superior. In a crisply cold voice she had tried to establish who exactly he was and what his business with her might be. He told her his name, and said that he was staying at Josh Crawford’s house, and asked for ten minutes of her time, adding that the matter was a delicate one and that he would prefer not to speak of it over the phone. When she heard who he was he fancied he heard a quick indrawing of her breath. The more evasive he became the more suspicious she sounded, but in the end, and with lingering reluctance, she agreed that he might come to Brookline. He put down the phone and ordered another scotch: it was a little early in the day, but he needed to fortify himself.

WHEN HE STEPPED INSIDE THE HIGH, ARCHED DOORWAY OF ST. Mary’s he caught at once the unmistakable smell of the past and the years fell away like the leaves of a calendar and he was an orphan again. He stood in the silent hallway and looked at the statues in their niches of Mary and Jesus and Joseph-gentle Joe held what seemed to be a wood plane in his improbably pale hands and looked both resentful and resigned-until a young nun with front teeth so prominent they seemed almost prehensile led him along soundless corridors and stopped at a door and knocked softly and a voice spoke from within.

The Mother Superior, when she stood up behind her desk, was tall and gaunt and grimly handsome. It was the priest with her, however, who spoke first. He was potato-pale with pale-red hair and green eyes that were sharp yet muddy; Quirke knew the type, remembered it, from Carricklea days, and nights. The cleric came forward, smiling unctuously with his mouth only, a hand outstretched.

“Mr. Quirke,” he said. “I’m Father Harkins, chaplain here at St. Mary’s.” His eyelashes, Quirke saw with almost a shiver, were almost white. He took Quirke’s hand but instead of shaking it he drew him by it gently forward to the desk. “And this is Sister Stephanus. And Sister Anselm.”

Quirke had not noticed the other nun, standing off to his right, beside a vast, empty fireplace of marble and polished brick. She was short and broad, with a skeptical yet not, he thought, unsympathetic look. The two nuns nodded to him. Father Harkins, who seemed to have taken it on himself to be the spokesman, said:

“You’re Mr. Crawford’s son-in-law? Mr. Crawford is a great friend of ours-a great friend of St. Mary’s.”

Quirke was conscious of Sister Stephanus’s keen eye scanning him, like that of a fencing opponent, searching out his weak spots. The priest was about to speak again but the nun said:

“What can we do for you, Mr. Quirke?”

Hers was the voice of authority, and its tone told him who was really in charge here. Still she gazed at him, cool, candid, and even, it might be, a little amused. He fumbled his cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. Sister Stephanus, who had taken her seat again, pushed a large crystal ashtray to the front edge of the desk where he might more easily reach it. He asked about the child, saying her name would probably be Christine and that if she had a surname it was likely to be Falls. “I think she was brought here from Ireland,” he said. “I have reason to believe she came to St. Mary’s.”

The silence that fell in the room was more eloquent than any words. Sister Stephanus touched lightly in succession a number of objects set out before her on the desk-a fountain pen, a paper knife, one of two telephones-taking care not to move any of them from their places. This time when she spoke she did not look at him.

“What was it you wanted to know about this child, Mr. Quirke?”

This child.

“It is,” he said, “a personal matter.”

“Ah.”

There was another silence. The priest looked from the nun to Quirke and back again but had no word to offer. Suddenly, from where she stood by the fireplace, the other nun, Sister Anselm, coughed and said:

“She died.”

Father Harkins whirled on her with a look of panic, drawing a hand up sharply as if he might run forward and strike her, but Sister Stephanus did not flinch, and continued to regard Quirke with that cool, measuring gaze, as if she had heard nothing. The priest looked at her and licked his lips, and with an effort resumed his bland smile.

“Ah, yes,” the priest said. “Little Christine. Yes, now I…” His tongue snaked over his lips again, his colorless eyelashes beating rapidly. “There was an accident, I’m afraid. She was with a family. Very unfortunate. Very sad.”

This left yet another, trailing silence, into which Quirke said:

“What family?” Father Harkins lifted his eyebrows. “The family that the child was with-who were they?”

The priest gave a breathy laugh and this time lifted both his hands as if to catch an invisible, tricky ball that Quirke had lobbed at him.

“Oh now, Mr. Quirke,” he said in a rush, “we couldn’t be giving out information of that nature. These situations call for great discretion, as I’m sure you’ll-”

“I’d like to find out who she was,” Quirke said. “I mean, where she came from. Her history.”

The priest was about to speak again but Sister Stephanus drew in a slow breath through her nostrils and he glanced at her uncertainly and was silent. The nun’s smile deepened. She said softly:

“Don’t you know, Mr. Quirke?”

He saw at once that he had blundered. If he knew nothing, they need not tell him anything. What did he have, other than a name? Abruptly Sister Stephanus rose from her chair with the brisk finality of a judge delivering a verdict.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Quirke, that we cannot help you,” she said. “As Father Harkins says, these matters are delicate. Information of the kind you ask for must be kept in the strictest confidence. It is our covenant, here at St. Mary’s. I know you’ll understand.” She must have pressed a bell under the desk for Quirke heard the door behind him open, and she looked past him and said, “Sister Anne, please show Mr. Quirke out.” She held out a hand to him and he had no choice but to rise too and take it. “Good-bye, Mr. Quirke. So nice to have met you. Please give our kind regards to Mr. Crawford. We hear he’s not in the best of health.”

Quirke, irritated by her queenly plurals, had to admire the deftness with which she had brought the encounter to a close. As he turned away he glanced at Sister Anselm, but she was gazing grim-faced into a far corner of the ceiling and would not return his look. Father Harkins stepped forward, glistening with relief, and walked with him to the door. He seemed about to put a friendly hand on his shoulder but thought better of it. He said:

“You’re not one of the Order yourself, I take it, Mr. Quirke?” Quirke looked at him. “The Knights, I mean? Of St. Patrick? Mr. Crawford is a lifelong member, I believe. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, a founding member.”

“No,” Quirke said drily, “I’m sure you’re not mistaken.”

The bucktoothed nurse opened the door for him, and swinging himself forward on his stick he yanked himself from the room, like an angry parent dragging away a stubbornly recalcitrant child.

Seeing him come stumping down the steps Andy Stafford took his knees from the dashboard of the Buick and sat up hastily and donned his chauffeur’s cap. Quirke got into the car without a word, refusing his help. He seemed mad. Andy did not know what to think about that. What had happened in there? He could not get the suspicion out of his head that Quirke’s coming here had something to do with the kid. It was crazy, he knew, but there was still that feeling in his spine, like something cold rolling down inside it.

They were on the driveway when Quirke tapped him on the shoulder and told him to stop. He had been looking back and had seen through the bare trees Sister Anselm come out by a side door of the orphanage. “Wait here,” he said, and got himself out of the car, grunting.

Andy watched him poling himself back up the drive on his stick, and the nun stopping to wait for him, and the two of them turning and setting off along a path under the trees, the two of them limping.

AT FIRST THE NUN WOULD TELL QUIRKE NOTHING, YET HE WAS SURE she had not appeared from that doorway by chance. They walked along together in silence, their breaths misting in the winter air. They had acknowledged, with no words but only from each of them simultaneously an ironic, diagonally directed glance, the melancholy comedy of their like conditions, his smashed knee, her twisted hip. There were ragged patches of snow under the trees. The path was paved with wood chips. The sharp, resinous odor of the chips reminded him of the pine woods behind the big stone house at Carricklea. All around them quick brown birds, seemingly unfrightenable, were pecking busily among the dead leaves. Grackles, were they? Choughs? He knew so little about this country, not even the names of its commonest birds. The sky among the tracery of branches was the color of dulled steel. His knee had begun to ache. The nun wore no coat over her habit. “Are you not cold, Sister?” he asked. She shook her head; she had her hands folded before her, using the broad sleeves of her habit as a muff. He tried to guess her age. Fiftyish, he thought. Her limp was not so much a limp as a toppling, sideways heave at every other step, as if the pivot that held her upright had suffered a corkscrew twist halfway along its length.

“Please,” he said, “tell me about the child. I’ve no intention of doing anything. I simply want to hear what happened.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

“You’re a doctor, right? Were you involved in the birth?”

“No. That is, not directly. I’m a pathologist.”

“I see.”

He doubted that she did. He scuffed at the wood chips with the tip of his blackthorn stick. Out of nowhere a picture came to him of Philomena the nurse astride him in the wan light of a Dublin afternoon. To have been there, and then here; these things, he thought, that seem so straightforward and are not.

“Tell me at least who the family was,” he said, “the family that adopted her.”

The nun snorted.

“Adopted!” she said. “We don’t bother with such legal niceties here at St. Mary’s.” She stopped on the path and turned to face him. Her lips were blue from the cold and her angry eyes were red-rimmed and teary. “How much do you know of what goes on here, Mr. Quirke?” she asked. “I mean here, and where you come from, too-the whole thing.”

He braced the walking stick at an angle to the ground and gazed at it.

“I know,” he said measuredly, “that Joshua Crawford finances a scheme for children from Ireland to be brought out here. I suspect Christine was one of them.”

They walked on.

“A scheme, yes,” she said. “A scheme that has been going on for twenty years-did you know that? Yes, twenty years. Can you imagine how many children that is? How many babies taken over here and handed out like…like…” She could find no word sufficiently encompassing. “They call it charity, but that’s not what it is. It’s power, just naked power.”

Somewhere behind them a bell began to clang with a hectic urgency.

“Power?” Quirke said. “What kind of power?”

“Power over people. Over their souls.”

Souls. The word had a ring to it, urgent and dark like the peals of the bell. A planter of souls, Josh Crawford had said.

They did not speak for the space of half a dozen paces. Then the nun said:

“They care nothing for the children. Oh, they think they do, but they don’t. Their only interest is to see them grow up and take their place in the structure they’ve devised.” She paused, and gave a meager laugh. “St. Mary’s, Mr. Quirke, is a forcing house for the religious. The children are delivered to us, some no more than a few weeks old. We make sure they’re healthy-that’s my job, by the way, I’m a physician”-again she laughed thinly-“and then they’re…distributed.” The bell had stopped. The birds, at some sound in the aftermath of the pealing that only they could hear, flew up in a flock, their wings whirring, then quickly settled again. “We hand them out to good Catholic homes, people we can trust-the respectable poor. Then when the children are old enough they are taken back and put into seminaries and convents-whether they want to be or not. It’s a machine for making priests, for making nuns. Do you see?”

She looked at him sidelong. He was frowning.

“Yes,” he said, “I see. Only…”

She nodded. “But it doesn’t seem so bad, right? Taking in orphans, finding them good homes-”

“I was an orphan, Sister. I was glad to get out of the orphanage.”

“Ah,” she said, and nodded once more. They had come again in sight of the Buick; the engine was going, and pallid wisps of smoke were trailing from the exhaust pipe. They stopped. “But you see, it’s unnatural, this thing, Mr. Quirke,” the nun said. “That’s the point. When bad folk take it on themselves to do what are supposed to be good works it makes a sulfurous smell. I think you’ve had a whiff of it, that smell.”

“Tell me about the child,” he said. “Tell me about Christine Falls.”

“No. I’ve told you too much already.”

He thought: Just like Dolly Moran did.

“Please,” he said. “Things have happened, wicked things.” She cast a glance inquiringly at the walking stick. “Yes, this,” he said, “but worse, too. Far worse.”

She looked down. “It’s cold, I have to go back.” Yet still she stood, gazing at him thoughtfully. Then she came to a decision. “What you should do, Mr. Quirke,” she said, “is ask the nurse, the one who looks after Mr. Crawford.”

“Brenda?” He stared. “Brenda Ruttledge?”

“Yes, if that’s her name. She knows about the child, about little Christine. She can tell you, some of it, anyway. And listen, Mr. Quirke.” She was looking past him to where the Buick waited on the drive. “Watch out for yourself. There are people-there are people who are not what they seem, who are more than they seem.” She smiled at him, this huge man standing stooped before her, asking his awkward questions. Yes, she thought: an orphan. “Good-bye, Mr. Quirke,” she said. “I wish you well. From the little I’ve seen of you, I think you’re a good man, if only you knew it.”

29

MOSS MANOR WHEN QUIRKE GOT BACK TO IT GAVE THE IMPRESSION OF having been flung wide open, like a door. There was an ambulance outside and a pair of automobiles, and in the entranceway two grave, sober-suited men were engaged in a hushed conversation; they paused and looked at him with curiosity as he entered but he ignored them and went through into the house and lurched from room to room. He was angry again, he was not sure why, exactly, for what he had learned from Sister Anselm had not been news to him, not really. He had begun to consider the possibility that this unfocused anger would be the condition of his life from now on, that he would have to keep bouncing along before it helplessly forever, like a piece of litter buffeted by an unceasing wind. In the main drawing room he came upon the mousy maid, he could not remember her name, arranging dried flowers in a vase on the lid of the grand piano on which he was certain no one had ever played a note. A great fire of logs was burning in the fireplace. The maid quailed before him. He asked her where Miss Ruttledge was. She looked blank. “The nurse,” he said, beginning to shout, and thumping his stick on the floor, “Mr. Crawford’s nurse!” She told him Brenda was with Mr. Crawford now, and that Mr. Crawford was very poorly, and her lower lip trembled. He turned from her and hauled himself up the staircase, cursing the dead weight of his leg. At what he knew to be Josh Crawford’s room he knocked perfunctorily and pushed open the door.

The scene within had the unreally dramatic composition of a painting, a genre scene of a deathbed with attendant mourners. Josh Crawford lay on his back as on a high, white catafalque, his arms resting by his sides over the covers, the jacket of his pajamas thrown open to reveal his huge, heaving chest all furred over with steel-gray hair. An oxygen mask was strapped to his face, and his breaths came in long, laborious rattlings, as if he were hauling on a chain inside him, link by painful link. Phoebe sat on a chair by the bed, leaning forward and holding one of her grandfather’s hands in both of hers. Brenda Ruttledge stood close behind her, stylized in her white outfit and her jaunty little hat, the painter’s very model of a nurse. On the other side of the bed Rose Crawford stood with one arm folded and a hand lifted to her chin, another stylized figure, representing something certainly unsuitable to her, such as patience, or fidelity, or wifely calm. Hearing him at the door Brenda Ruttledge turned, and with a jerk of his head he signaled to her to come out into the corridor. She did so, and closed the door softly behind her. She was about to speak but he cut her off with a chopping gesture of his hand and demanded:

“Was it you who brought the child?” She frowned, and there came into her face a sliver of guilty fear. “Come on,” he said harshly, “tell me.”

“What child?”

“What child, what child! Christine, her name was. Did they make you bring her over here with you?”

She stared at him, shaking her head.

“I don’t know what-”

The door opened and Phoebe leaned out, ignoring Quirke.

“Quick,” she said to Brenda, “you’re needed.”

She stepped back inside the room and Brenda hurried after her. Before the door was shut, however, Rose Crawford slipped out in her place.

“Come on,” she said to Quirke in a deadened voice, “I need a cigarette.”

He followed her downstairs, to the drawing room. He expected to find the maid still loitering there, but she was gone. Rose walked to the fireplace and took two cigarettes from a lacquered box on the mantelpiece and lit both of them and handed one to Quirke.

“Lipstick,” she said. “Sorry.”

He went and stood at the window. Outside, scant snow was falling in soft, flabby flakes. From here he could see a flank of the Crystal Gallery, a cliff of glass rising sheer against the leaden sky.

“I’m sorry,” Quirke said. She looked at him inquiringly. “It can’t be easy for you,” he said, “waiting for the end.”

He was trying to remember what it was called, that labored breathing of the dying; there was, he knew, a technical name for it. He had forgotten so many things.

Rose shrugged.

“Yes. Well.” She touched a log in the fire with the tip of her shoe. “Phoebe has been very good with him,” she said. “I would not have thought she had it in her. She’s in his will, you know.”

“Oh?” He turned from her to the window, a sort of flinching. It was not news to him and yet it rankled to hear her say it; Quirke had made no will for anyone to be in.

“Yes. He’s left her a lot of money.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

She threw up her head and laughed without sound.

“Oh, I feel fine,” she said. “Don’t worry, I get the bulk of the dough, if that’s what you mean-and God knows there’s plenty of it. But she’ll be a rich girl, will Phoebe.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Why-don’t you want her to be an heiress?”

“I want her to have an ordinary life.”

She gave him a sardonic, sideways glance. He looked out at the snow again; half of the flakes seemed to be falling upward.

“Is there such a thing as an ordinary life?” she asked.

“There could be, for her.”

“If?”

“If you don’t try to hold on to her.”

She laughed again, a soundless protest.

“‘Hold on to her’! Why, Mr. Quirke, the things you do say!”

He studied the burning tip of his cigarette.

“She told me,” he said, “that you asked her to stay here, in Boston.”

“And you don’t think she should?”

He walked to the fireplace and flicked the remains of the cigarette into the flames. She took a step forward and suddenly they were standing close together, face-to-face. There was a tiny flaw in the iris of her left eye, he saw, a splinter of white piercing the lustrous black.

“Look, Mrs. Crawford-”

“Rose.”

He drew a breath.

“I came here, to Boston, because Sarah asked me to come. She asked me to look after Phoebe.”

She tilted her head to the side and squinted up at him from under her eyelashes.

“Ah,” she said, “Sarah, of course-Sarah who hates me.” He blinked. He had never thought to wonder what Sarah might feel about this woman, hardly older than she was, who had married her father and who was therefore, absurdly, her stepmother. She moved even closer to him, gazing directly, big-eyed now, into his face. “Mr. Quirke,” Rose said in her soft drawl, “you may disapprove of me, and frankly I don’t care that you do, but at least you’ll grant I’m not a hypocrite.”

Behind her the log that she had touched with her foot made its delayed, ashy collapse. She was studying him as if she were committing his face to memory. They heard her name called urgently, but for fully half a dozen seconds she made no move to answer the summons. Then, as she turned, he caught the smell of her perfumed skin, the faint, thrilling rankness of it.

IT WAS EVENING WHEN JOSH CRAWFORD DIED. THE HOUSE WENT silent. The ambulance departed, unneeded, followed by the two somber men, each in his own automobile. Quirke had not learned the identity of this pair; perhaps they were Rose’s lawyers, there to authenticate her husband’s demise-he would not put it past her. Dinner was served but there was no one to eat it; Rose and Phoebe closeted themselves in Rose’s room, and Quirke found Brenda Ruttledge and brought her again to the swimming pool. She sat in one of the cane chairs, staring into the water. Something seemed poised above them in the swaying air, among the echoes, a large, liquid vagueness. Quirke offered her a cigarette and this time she took it. He saw the inexpert way she held it tilted between stiff fingers, the way she swigged the smoke and blew it out again in puffs, unswallowed. Someone else smoked like that-was it Phoebe? When she moved her feet the rubber soles of her nurse’s white shoes squeaked on the tiles. Quirke asked her:

“Who arranged it?”

She pouted, pushing out her lower lip, and for a moment was a stubborn child. Then she shrugged.

“Matron.”

“At the hospital-at the Holy Family?”

“She knew Mr. Griffin had fixed up the job for me here, looking after Mr. Crawford. She said there was a favor I could do in return. She said I’d be paid. I thought, what harm, to take care of the poor little thing?” She looked at the cigarette she was holding in her fingers and frowned. “What am I doing?” she murmured to herself. “I don’t even smoke.”

“Did she tell you whose the child was-I mean, who the parents were, who the father was?”

She bent and placed the half-smoked cigarette on the tiles between her feet and trod it carefully under the sole of her shoe, then picked up the flattened stub and hid it away carefully in a pocket of her uniform, and Quirke briefly thought of red-haired Maisie whose child was probably born by now, and perhaps taken away from her, too, for all he knew.

“She said I didn’t need to know any of that, that it would be better if I didn’t know. I thought the father must be someone…you know, someone big, someone important.”

“Such as?”

She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked herself forward and back in the chair.

“I’m telling you,” she said, “I don’t know!”

“But you have a suspicion.”

Now she unwrapped her arms and banged her fists on her knees and glared at him.

“What do you want me to say?” she cried. “I don’t know who the father was. I don’t know!”

He sat back in the chair, expelling a long breath, and a ripple of creaks and crackles ran through the woven canes. He said:

“When did Mr. Griffin arrange the job for you?”

She looked away.

“Early last summer.”

“Six months ago? More? And you didn’t tell me.”

Again she glared at him.

“Well, you didn’t ask, did you.”

He shook his head.

“All these secrets, Brenda. I’d never have thought it of you.”

She had stopped listening to him. She looked into the water, its surreptitious slap and sway.

“I did my best for him,” she said. For a second he did not know who it was she meant. She lifted her eyes from the surface of the pool and looked at him almost pleadingly. “Do you think Mr. Crawford was a bad man?”

Quirke turned up his empty palms and showed them to her.

“He was a man, Brenda,” he said. “That’s all. And now he’s gone.”

30

SISTER ANSELM WAS SURPRISED, NOT BY THE THING ITSELF BUT BY THE suddenness of it, the finality. Yet when the summons had come for her to go immediately-immediately!-to Mother Superior’s office she had known what to expect. She stood before the wide expanse of Sister Stephanus’s desk and felt like a novice again. All kinds of unexpected, stray things went through her head, scraps of prayers, lines from old medical texts, snatches of songs she had not heard in forty years. And memories, too, of Sumner Street, the games they played, the skipping ropes and spinning tops, the chalk marks on the pavements. Her father singing and then shouting. Her mother with her freckled arms plunged to the elbows in a tub of suds, her lower lip jutting out as she blew away from her face the strands of hair that had come loose from the bun she always wore. After her father had knocked her down the stairs she came back from the hospital with her leg in an iron brace and the kids on the block were first in awe of her but soon they were calling her names, Peg-leg, of course, or Peggy’s Leg after the candy stick, or Hopalong Farrell. The convent had been an escape, a sanctuary; she told herself, with bitter amusement, that everyone was crippled there and she would not be noticed among them. She had no vocation for the religious life, but the nuns would educate her, and an education was what she had set her heart on, since there would be nothing else for her. They sent her to college, and to medical school. They were proud of her. One of them got an uncle who worked at the Globe to put in a paragraph about her-South Boston Girl’s Medical First. Yes, the Order had been good to her. So what right had she to complain now?

“I’m sorry,” Sister Stephanus said. She was doing that thing she did, her checklist, touching with her fingertips the lamp, the blotter, the telephone. She would not look up. “I got the call this morning from Mother House. They want you to leave right away.”

Sister Anselm nodded. “Vancouver,” she said tonelessly.

“St. James’s needs a doctor.”

“You need a doctor here.”

Sister Stephanus chose to misunderstand.

“Yes,” she said, “they’re sending someone. She’s quite young. Just qualified, I believe.”

“Well, that’s grand.”

The room was cold; Stephanus was mean about things like that, the heating in the place, hot water for baths, the novices’ linen. Sister Anselm shifted her weight from her aching hip. Stephanus had invited her to sit but she preferred to stand. Like that brave patriot-who was it? someone in an opera?-refusing the blindfold when he faced the firing squad. Oh, yes, lame Peggy Farrell, the last of the heroes.

“I’m sorry,” Sister Stephanus said again. “There really is nothing I can do. You know as well as I, you haven’t been happy here for some time now.”

“That’s right: I haven’t been happy with the way things are going here, if that’s what you mean.”

Sister Stephanus made a fist and struck the knuckle of her index finger sharply on the leather desktop.

“These matters are not for us to judge! We have our vows. Obedience, Sister. Obedience to the Lord’s will.”

Sister Anselm gave a low, dry laugh.

“And you’re confident you know what the Lord’s will is, are you?”

Sister Stephanus sighed angrily. She looked drawn, and when she bunched up her lips like that it made the gray bristles on her upper lip stand out. She was getting old, old and ugly, Sister Anselm thought, she who was once known as the loveliest girl in South Boston, Monica Lacey the shyster lawyer’s daughter whose family beggared themselves to send her to Bryn Mawr, no less, from where she came back a lady and promptly broke her father’s heart by declaring she had heard God’s call and wanted to be a nun. “Our bride of Christ, by Christ!” Louis Lacey cried bitterly and washed his hands of her. Now she looked up.

“You wear your conscience on your sleeve, Sister,” she said. “Others of us must live in the real world, and manage as best we can. It’s not easy. Now, I have work to do, and you’ll need to be packing your things.”

The silence drew out between them. Sister Anselm looked up at the window beside her and the winter sky beyond. What life did they get, in the end, either of them?

“Ah, Monica Lacey,” she said softly, “that it should have come to this.”

31

THE MORNING OF JOSH CRAWFORD’S FUNERAL DAWNED WHITE AND cold, and more snow was forecast. The burial had been delayed to await the arrival from Ireland of Sarah and Mal Griffin and the Judge. At the graveside Sarah in her black veil looked to Quirke more like a widow than a daughter. The Judge was rheum-eyed and vague. Mal in his dark suit and dark silk tie and gleaming white shirt had the air of an officiating presence, not the undertaker himself, perhaps, but the undertaker’s man, there to represent the professional side of death and its rituals, and Quirke pondered again the irony that such a funereal figure should in his true profession be an usher at the gates of life.

It was a day of solemn celebration for the Boston Irish. The Mayor was there, of course, and the Governor, and the Archbishop officiated at High Mass and later at the cemetery said the prayers over the coffin. The Cardinal had been expected, but at the last minute had sent his regrets only, confirming the rumor that he and Josh Crawford had got into a fight over the awarding of a state haulage contract the previous year. Old men, as some wag at the funeral remarked in a stage whisper, do not forget. The Archbishop, tall and silver-haired and handsome, every inch the Hollywood image of a prelate, intoned the service of the dead in a sonorous singsong, and when he finished a single snowflake appeared out of nowhere and hovered over the mouth of the grave, like the manifestation of a blessing from above being reluctantly bestowed. When the prayers were done there came the little ceremony of the scattering of the clay, which never failed to catch Quirke’s morbid fancy. A miniature silver shovel was produced and Sarah was the first to take it. The earth fell on the coffin with a hollow rattle. When the shovel was offered to the Judge he shook his head and turned away.

The Archbishop put a hand on the old man’s sleeve and spoke to him, inclining his film star’s fine, silvered head.

“Garret, it’s good to see you, even on such a sad occasion.”

“We did our old friend proud today, I think, William.”

“Yes, indeed. A very great man, and a loyal son of the church.”

Sarah and Quirke walked together toward the cars. She was thinner than when he had last seen her, and there was a vehemence in her look that he did not recognize. She asked him if he had talked to Phoebe, and when he looked blank she clicked her tongue at him angrily.

“Did you tell her what I told you?” she said. “For God’s sake, Quirke, you can’t have forgotten!”

“No,” he said, “no, I didn’t forget.”

“Well?”

What could he say? Behind her veil Sarah’s lips tightened to a bitter chevron, and she quickened her pace and walked on, leaving him struggling on his stick in her wake.

AT THE HOUSE THE FAMILY LINGERED IN THE ENTRANCE HALL IN AN uncertain cluster, awaiting the rest of the mourners. Phoebe’s face was blotched from weeping and the Judge looked about him as if he did not know where he was. Sarah and Mal held apart from each other. Sarah took off her hat and stood fingering the veil; she would not look at Quirke. Rose Crawford took his arm and drew him aside.

“You don’t seem the most popular family member today,” she murmured. The cars were arriving in the drive. She sighed. “Will you keep me company, Quirke? It’s going to be a long day.”

But at once she was separated from him as first the Archbishop made his stately entrance and she went forward to greet him. Then the others came in behind him, the clerics and the politicians and the businessmen and their wives, ashen-faced, blue-lipped, muttering to each other of the cold and looking about with covert eagerness, wanting drink and food and warm fires. The red-haired priest from St. Mary’s was there, and Costigan, in his shiny suit and horn-rimmed spectacles, and there were others whom Quirke recognized from the party for the Judge that night at Mal and Sarah’s house. He watched them gathering, and followed them into the drawing room, where the funeral meats were set out, and as he listened to the hubbub of their mingled and clashing voices, a sense almost of physical revulsion welled up in him. These were the people who had killed Christine Falls and her child, who had sent the torturers after Dolly Moran, who had ordered that he be thrown down those slimed steps and kicked and beaten to within an inch of his life. Oh, not all of them; no doubt there were those among them who were innocent, innocent of these particular crimes, at least. And he, how innocent was he? What right did he have to stand upon a height and look down on them, he who had not even found the courage to tell his daughter the truth of who her parents were?

He went to where Mal was standing by one of the tall windows, his hands in the pockets of his buttoned-up suit jacket, looking out at the garden and the gathering snow.

“You should take a drink, Mal,” he said. “It helps.”

Mal turned his head and gave him that look that he had, frog-eyed and blank, then went back to contemplating the garden.

“I don’t recall it helping you much,” he said mildly.

The wind blew a billow of snow against the window; it made a wet, soft sound. Quirke said:

“I know about the child.”

Mal’s features registered the faintest frown but he did not turn. He pushed his hands deeper into his jacket pockets and jingled something there, keys, or coins, or the dog tags of the dead.

“Oh?” he said. “What child is that?”

“The child that Christine Falls was carrying. The one that wasn’t stillborn. Christine was her name, too.”

Mal sighed. For a long moment he was silent, and then said:

“Funny, I don’t remember snow when we were here, all those years ago.” He turned his glance and looked into Quirke’s face in search of something. “Do you, Quirke? Do you remember snow?”

“Yes, there was snow,” Quirke said. “A whole winter of it.”

“So it was.” Mal, facing the window again, was nodding slowly, as if at word of some far-off wonder. He lifted a finger and tapped it on the bridge of his glasses. “I had forgotten that.” The light from the garden was dead white against his face. He cracked his knuckles pensively.

“She was yours, wasn’t she?” Quirke said. “Your child.”

Now Mal dropped his eyes and smiled.

“Oh, Quirke,” he said, as if almost with fondness, “you know nothing, I’ve told you that before.”

Quirke said:

“I know that the child is dead.”

There was another silence. Mal was frowning again, and glancing here and there distractedly, from the garden to the folds of the roped-back drapes to the floor at his feet, as if there were a thing he had lost that might be found anywhere, in any of these places.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said absently. Then of a sudden he turned fully toward Quirke and laid a hand on his shoulder. Quirke looked at the hand; when last had either of them touched the other? “All this business,” Mal said, “why can’t you let it go, Quirke?”

“It won’t let me go.”

Mal considered this for a moment, pursing his lips judiciously. He let his hand fall from Quirke’s shoulder.

“It’s not like you, Quirke,” he said, “this stubbornness to see a thing through.”

“No,” Quirke said, “I suppose it’s not.”

And then all at once he saw it, the entire thing, and how wrong he had been all along, wrong about Mal, and so much else. Mal had turned his head and was watching him again, and when Quirke met his eye he saw what Quirke had suddenly seen, and he nodded once, faintly.

QUIRKE WANDERED THROUGH THE HOUSE. IN JOSH CRAWFORD’S library the fire of pine logs was burning as usual and the light from the window gleamed on the upper cheek of the globe of the world. He went to the table where the drinks were and poured himself half a tumblerful of scotch. Behind him Rose Crawford said, “Goodness, Mr. Quirke, you do look grim.” He turned quickly. She was stretched in an armchair under a tall, potted palm. Her tight black dress was rucked at the hips and she had kicked off one of her shoes. She had a cigarette in one hand and an empty martini glass in the other, tilted at an angle. She was, he could see, a little tipsy. “Do you think,” she said, proffering the glass, “you could fix me another one of these painkillers?”

He went to her and took the glass and returned to the table.

“How are you?” he said.

“How am I?” She considered. “Sad. I miss him already.” He brought her the drink and handed it to her. She fished out the olive with her fingers and munched it ruminatively. “He was funny, you know,” she said, “in his awful way. I mean humorous. He made me laugh.” She spat the olive stone delicately into her fist. “Even in these last days, when he was so ill, we were still laughing. Means a lot to a girl, the occasional chuckle.” She squinted up at him. “I guess you wouldn’t have appreciated his jokes, Mr. Quirke.” She put out her fist and he opened his palm and she dropped the olive stone into it. “Thanks.” She frowned. “Sit down, will you? I hate to be loomed over.”

He went and sat on the sofa that was set back from the fireplace. The snow outside was falling fast now, he fancied he could hear the huge, busy whisper of it as it swamped the air and settled on the already blanketed lawn and on the invisible terraces and stone steps and graveled walkways. He thought of the sea out there beyond the garden, the waves a dark, muddy mauve, swallowing the endless fallings of frail flakes. Rose too was looking toward the windows and the slanted, moving whiteness beyond.

“Coincidence,” she said. “I just realized, he died on our wedding anniversary. Trust him.” She laughed. “He probably planned it. He had powers, you know. It’s true, you think I’m making it up-he could read my mind. Maybe he’s reading it now”-she looked at Quirke with a lazy, sly smile-“though I hope not.” She heaved a shivery sigh, weary and regretful. “He was a mean old buzzard, I suppose, but he was my mean old buzzard.” Her cigarette had gone out, and he rose and brought his lighter and held it for her, leaning on his stick. “Look at you,” she said. “They did beat up on you, didn’t they?”

“Yes,” he said, “they did.”

He returned to the sofa; he noticed that his glass was empty.

“But you must be happy, now,” she said, “with Sarah here?” When she spoke the name she put into her voice a huskily mocking tremor. She grinned at him. “Why don’t you tell me about her: her, and Mal, and Delia.”

He made an impatient gesture.

“That’s all old history,” he said.

“Oh, but the old stuff is always the best. Secrets are like wine, Josh used to say-they get a richer flavor, a finer bouquet, with every year that passes. I’m trying to picture the four of you here”-she waggled the stem of her glass to indicate all that she meant by here-“happy and gay. Parties, tennis on the lawn, all that. The two beautiful sisters, the two dashing medical men. How Josh must have hated you.”

“Did he tell you that?” he asked with interest. “That he hated me?”

“I don’t know that we ever got that far in our discussions of you, Mr. Quirke.”

She was making fun of him again. She sipped her drink and watched him with faint merriment over the rim of her glass.

“Will you,” he asked, “go on payrolling this business with the babies that he was operating?”

She lifted her eyebrows and opened wide her eyes.

“Babies?” she said, then turned her head aside and shrugged. “Oh, that. He made me promise I would. It would be his ticket out of Purgatory, he said. Purgatory! Honestly! He really believed all that, you know, Heaven, Hell, redemption, angels dancing on the head of a pin-the whole caboodle. He would get furious when I laughed. But how could I not? Laugh, I mean.” She looked down. “Poor Josh.” She began to cry, making no sound. She caught a tear on a fingertip and held it out for him to inspect. “Look,” she said, “neat Tanqueray, with just the faintest hint of dry vermouth.” She lifted her head and a palm frond brushed her cheek and she swatted it away. “Goddamned things,” she said, “I’m going to have every one of them yanked up and burned.” She let her shoulders droop. She sniffed. “A gentleman,” she said in a parody of a bobby-soxer’s twitter, “would offer his handkerchief.”

He heaved himself up again and limped across to her and handed her the folded square of linen. She blew her nose loudly. He realized that he wanted to touch her, to caress her hair, to run a finger along the clean, cool line of her jaw.

“What will you do?” he said.

She wadded up the handkerchief and gave it back to him with a wryly apologetic grimace.

“Oh, who knows,” she said. “Maybe I’ll sell this dump and move to rotten old Europe. Can’t you see me, in furs, with a lapdog, the most sought-after widow in Monte Carlo? Would you make a play for me, Quirke? Accompany me to the roulette tables, travel with me on my yacht to the isles of Greece?” She laughed softly down her nose. “No. Hardly your style. You’d rather sit in the Dublin rain nursing your unrequited love for”-she let her voice sink tremulously again-“Saarrah!”

A log shifted in the fire and a rush of sparks flew up, crackling.

“Rose,” he said, surprised at the sound of her name in his mouth, “I want you to stop supporting this thing with the children. I want you to cut off the funds.”

She tilted her head and looked at him, smiling a pursed, lopsided smile.

“Well if you do,” she said softly, “you’ll have to be nice to me.” She held out her glass. “You can start by getting me another drinkie, big boy.”

LATER, WHEN THE SNOW HAD STOPPED AND A WETTISH SUN WAS struggling to shine, he found himself in the Crystal Gallery, not knowing quite how he had got there. He had drunk too much scotch, and he was feeling dazed and unsteady. His leg seemed larger and heavier than before, and the knee had swollen inside its bandages and itched tormentingly. He sat down on the wrought-iron bench where he had sat with Josh Crawford that first night after he and Phoebe had arrived, which seemed so long ago, now. The snow had brought down upon the house a huge, muffled silence, it buzzed in his ears along with the other buzz that was the effect of the alcohol; he closed his eyes but the darkness made him feel queasy and he had to open them again. And then suddenly Sarah was there, as if she had somehow materialized out of the silence and the snow-light. She was standing a little way from him, twisting something in her fingers and looking out toward the distant, dark line of the sea. He struggled to his feet, and at the sound he made she gave a little start, as if she had not seen him, or had forgotten he was there.

“Are you all right?” she said.

He waved a hand.

“Yes, yes. Tired. My leg hurts.”

She was not listening. She was looking toward the horizon again.

“I’d forgotten,” she said, “how beautiful it could be here. I often think we should have stayed.”

He was trying to see what it was she was twisting in her hands.

“We?” he said.

“Mal and I. Things might have been different.” She saw him looking at what she was holding, and showed it to him. “Phoebe’s scarf,” she said. “There was talk of her and her grandfather going for a walk, if Rose can get someone to clear the paths.” Quirke, sweating now from the alcohol in his blood and the ache in his knee, tottered to the bench and collapsed on it again, his stick clattering against the iron of the seat. “I saw you talking,” Sarah said, “you and Mal. He has no secrets from me, you know. He thinks he has, but he hasn’t.” She walked forward a little, away from him. The palms and the tall ferns rose against her in a green, dense wall. She spoke to him over her shoulder. “We were happy here, weren’t we, in those days? Mal, you, me…”

Quirke put the heels of both hands to his bandaged knee and pressed, and felt a gratifying throb that was part pain and part a vindictive pleasure.

“And then,” he said, “then there was Delia.”

“Yes. Then there was Delia.”

He pressed his knee again, gasping a little and grimacing.

“What are you doing?” Sarah said, looking at him.

“My penance.”

He sat back, panting, on the bench. There were times when he was sure he could feel the pin in his knee, the hot steel sunk rigid in the bone.

“Delia would sleep with you, that was it, wasn’t it?” Sarah said in a new, a hardened voice, hard and sharp as the skewer in his leg. “She would sleep with you, and I wouldn’t. It was as simple as that. And then Mal saw his chance, with me.” She laughed, and the laugh had the same hardness as her voice. She was still turned partly away from him, and was craning her neck, as if in search of something on the horizon, or beyond. “Time is the opposite of space, have you noticed?” she said. “In space, everything gets more blurred the farther away you get. With time it’s different, everything becomes clear.” She paused. “What were you talking about, to Mal?” She gave up looking for whatever it was she had been seeking and turned to gaze at him. Her new thinness had sharpened the lines of her face, making her seem at once more beautiful and more troubled. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what you were talking about.”

He shook his head.

“Ask him,” he said.

“He won’t tell me.”

“Then neither will I.” He put a hand to the place beside him, inviting her to sit. She hesitated, and then came to him, looking at her feet in the way that she did, as if distrustful of the ground, or her ability to negotiate her way over it. She sat. “I want Phoebe to come back with me, to Ireland,” he said. “Will you help me to persuade her?”

She gazed before her, leaning a little forward, as if she were nursing an ache deep inside her gut.

“Yes,” she said. “On one condition.”

“What?” He knew, of course.

“That you tell her.”

A mist was unrolling along the horizon and the foghorns had started up.

“All right,” he said grimly, almost angrily. “All right. I’ll do it now, this minute.”

HE FOUND HER IN THE HIGH, ECHOING ENTRANCE HALL. SHE WAS SITTING on a chair beside an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand, pulling on a pair of black gum boots. She was already wearing a big, padded coat with a hood. She said she was going for a walk, that she was trying to persuade Granddad to go with her, and asked Quirke if he would like to come, too. He knew that he would remember forever, or for however long his forever would be, the look of her sitting awkwardly there with one foot raised and her face turned up to him, smiling. He spoke without preamble, watching her smile as it dismantled itself in slow, distinct stages, first leaving her eyes, then the planes beside her eyes, and last of all her lips. She said she did not understand. He told her again, speaking more slowly, more distinctly. “I’m sorry,” he said when he had finished. She set down the gum boot and lowered her stockinged foot to the floor, her movements careful and tentative, as if the air around her had turned brittle and she was afraid of shattering it. Then she shook her head and made a curious, feathery sound that he realized was a sort of laugh. He wished that she would stand up, for then he might be able to find a way of touching her, of taking her in his arms, even, and embracing her, but he knew it was not going to be possible, knew that it would not be possible even if she were to stand. She let her hands fall limply by the sides of the chair and looked about her, frowning, at this new world that she did not know and in which she had suddenly found herself a stranger; in which she had suddenly lost herself.

32

BY NOON THE FUNERAL GUESTS HAD BEGUN TO LEAVE, LED BY THE Archbishop and his attendant clerics. Costigan and the others who had come from Ireland, his fellow Knights, had lingered on in hope of a conference with Rose Crawford, but Rose had gone to her room to rest, taking her martini glass with her. A subdued sense of crisis made its way like a gas into the house. In the drawing room Quirke came upon Costigan and the priest from St. Mary’s on the sofa deep in conversation and Mal standing by the fire, one hand in a jacket pocket and an elbow on the mantelpiece, as if he were posing for his portrait. Seeing Quirke in the doorway the two fell silent instantly, and Costigan did his snarling smile and asked Quirke how were his injuries, and was he recovering from his fall. Mal looked at him calmly and said nothing. Quirke made no answer to Costigan’s inquiries and walked out of the room. His head was pounding. He went upstairs slowly to his bedroom. And it was there that Brenda Ruttledge found him, sitting slumped on the side of the bed in his shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette and gazing at the photographs on the walnut chest of drawers of Delia Quirke née Crawford and her daughter, Phoebe.

He had seen Brenda on so few occasions not wearing her nurse’s uniform that for a moment he hardly knew who she was. She had knocked softly and he had turned to the door in a mixture of relief and dread, thinking it must be Phoebe who had relented and come to talk to him. Brenda entered quickly and shut the door behind her and stood with her back to it looking everywhere but at him. She wore a plain gray dress and low-heeled shoes, and had put on no makeup. He asked her what was the matter but she shook her head, still with eyes on the floor, not knowing where to begin. He stood up, stifling a gasp-his knee was very bad today, despite all the alcohol he had so far consumed-and walked around the bed and stood before her.

“I think,” she said, “I think I know who they gave the baby to.” It was as if she were talking to herself. He touched her elbow and walked with her to the bed and they sat down side by side. “I saw them here, at the Christmas party. They had a baby with them. I didn’t take much notice. Then I saw them again, at the orphanage. She had no child with her that time, and she looked-oh, she looked terrible.” She stared at her hands as if they belonged to someone else. A foghorn boomed, and she turned to the window in vague fright. Outside were fields of snow under a lowering sky of faint, soiled pink. She was thinking distractedly of home, of the year of the big snow when she was seven or eight, and her brothers made a toboggan and let her ride with them, whooping, down the side of the long meadow. She should never have come here, to this place, should never have let herself be among these people, who were too much for her, too clever and well-off and wicked. Quirke was asking her something. “The Staffords,” she said, almost impatiently. He did not know who it was she meant. “Andy Stafford, Mr. Crawford’s driver-him and his wife. That’s who they gave the baby to, I’m sure of it.”

Quirke saw again the back of the young man’s sleek, small head and his glossy dark eye in the driving mirror. He reached forward and turned the two photographs to face the wall again.

IT TOOK A LONG TIME FOR A TAXI TO COME FROM BOSTON. THERE WERE more snow flurries and the driver, a miniature Mexican whose forehead was just about level with the steering wheel, kept up a low, querulous moaning as he negotiated the winding roads out of North Scituate under an ever-darkening sky. Quirke and Brenda Ruttledge sat facing away from each other in the back seat. An odd constraint, a kind of embarrassment, almost, had settled between them, and they did not speak. Brenda wore a black coat with a hood that gave her, incongruously, the look of a nun. South Boston was deserted. Skirls of snow swept over the pavements, and in the roadway the tracks of cars were lined with brownish slush. On Fulton Street the frame houses seemed crouched against the cold and the blown snow. Quirke had got the address, not without difficulty, from Deirdre, Rose Crawford’s mousy maid.

A narrow-faced woman in a brown apron came to the door of the house and looked them up and down distrustingly, this ill-matched couple, taking in Quirke’s walking stick and Brenda’s habitlike greatcoat. Quirke said they had come from Mr. Crawford’s house. “He died, didn’t he?” the woman said. Her face at the side of her nose bore a recent, angry gray and purple bruise. She told them the Staffords lived upstairs but that Andy Stafford was not there. “Far as I know he’s out at Scituate,” she said, sounding suspicious. She did not like any of this, these two coming to her door, and asking after Andy, and looking like they knew something bad about him. Quirke asked if Mrs. Stafford was at home and she shrugged and made a dismissive grimace, baring an eyetooth. “I guess. She never goes out, hardly.”

Despite the snow on the ground she followed them around the side of the house and stood under the shelter of the eaves with her arms folded and watched them climb the wooden steps. Quirke knocked with his knuckle on the glass of the French door. No answering sound came from within. “Probably open,” the woman called up. Quirke tried the handle; it turned without resistance. They stepped, he and Brenda, into the narrow hallway.

They found Claire Stafford sitting on a spindle-backed chair at a table in the kitchenette. She wore a pink housecoat, and was barefoot. She was sitting sideways, motionless, with one hand in her lap and the other resting on the plastic tabletop. Her pale hair looked damp and hung lankly in strings on either side of her stark white face. Her eyes were rimmed with pink, and there was no color in her lips.

“Mrs. Stafford?” Brenda said softly. Still Claire gave no response. “Mrs. Stafford, my name is Ruttledge, I’m-I was Mr. Crawford’s nurse. Mr. Crawford, Andy’s-Andy’s boss. He died-Mr. Crawford died-did you know that?”

Claire stirred, as if at some faint, far-off sound, and blinked, and turned her head at last and looked at them. She showed no surprise or curiosity. Quirke came and stood opposite her at the table, his hand on the back of a chair for support.

“Do you mind if I sit down, Mrs. Stafford?” he asked.

She moved her head a fraction from side to side. He pulled out the chair from the table and sat, and motioned Brenda Ruttledge to come forward, and she too sat.

“We want to talk to you,” Brenda said, “about the baby-about what happened. Will you tell us?”

A look of something, of faint protest and denial, had come into Claire’s almost colorless eyes. She frowned.

“He didn’t mean to,” she said. “I know he didn’t. It was an accident.”

Quirke and Brenda Ruttledge looked at each other.

“How did it happen, Mrs. Stafford?” Quirke said. “Will you tell us how the accident happened?”

Brenda reached out and put her hand over Claire’s hand where it lay on the table. Claire looked at her and at their two hands. When she spoke it was Brenda alone that she addressed.

“He was trying to make her stop crying. He hated it when she cried. He shook her. That’s all-he just shook her.” Her frown now was a frown of bewilderment and vague wonder. “Her head was heavy,” she said, “and so warm-hot, nearly.” She turned up the palm of the hand in her lap and cupped in it the recollection of the child’s head. “So heavy.”

“What did you do then?” Brenda said. “What did Andy do?”

“He telephoned, to St. Mary’s. He was a long time away, I don’t know…Father Harkins arrived. I told him about the accident. Then Andy came back.”

“And Father Harkins,” Quirke asked, “did he call the police?”

She drew her eyes away from Brenda’s face and looked at him.

“Oh, no,” she said simply. She turned to Brenda again, appealing to another woman, to her good sense. “Why would he do that? It was an accident.”

“Where is she, Mrs. Stafford,” Quirke said, “where’s the baby?”

“Father Harkins took her. I didn’t want to see her anymore.” Again she appealed to Brenda. “Was that bad of me?”

“No,” Brenda said soothingly, “no, of course not.”

Claire looked again into her cupped palm.

“I could still feel her head in my hand. I can still feel it.”

The silence in the room grew heavy. Quirke had a sense of something coming into the house, wafting in, soft and soundless like the snow outside. He was suddenly tired, with a tiredness he had never known before. He felt as if he had come to the end of a road on which he had been traveling for so long his trudging on it had begun to seem a state of rest, a rest however which afforded him no respite but made his bones ache and his heart labor and his mind go dull. Somewhere along that difficult way he seemed to have got lost.

33

ANDY KNEW WHAT THE GIRL WAS AFTER WHEN HE CAME INTO THE garage and found her sitting in the back seat of the Buick, just sitting there, in a big coat, staring in front of her, pale and sort of shocked-looking. She said nothing, and neither did he, only buttoned up his jacket and got in behind the wheel and started up the engine. He just drove, without thinking, which was what she seemed to want-Take me anywhere, she had said that first time, after they had left the big guy in the village. The snow was coming down now, it was not bad, but it meant the roads were empty. They went up along the coast again. He asked her if she had any of them English cigarettes with her today but she did not even answer, only shook her head at him in the mirror. She had that look-scared and sort of paralyzed but frantic underneath-that girls got when they could think of only the one thing. It was a look that told him it would be her first time.

He knew where to go, and stopped on the headland. There was no one around, and there would be no one. The wind was so strong up there it rocked the big car on its springs, and the snow straightaway started piling up under the wipers and around the rims of the windows. At first he had a little trouble with the girl. She pretended not to know what was going on, or what he wanted-which was what she wanted, too, if only she would admit it-and although he had hoped he would not have to, in the end he brought out the blade that he kept clipped to a couple of magnets he had fixed under the dash. She started to cry when she saw the knife but he told her to quit it. It was funny, but it really got him going when he ordered her to take off those weird rubber boots she was wearing, and because there was so little space between the seats she had to twist up her leg and he got his first glimpse of her garter belt and the white inner sides of her leg right up to the seams of those lace pants she was wearing.

It was good. She tried to fight him and he liked that. He made sure to keep her lying on her overcoat because he did not want stuff getting on the upholstery-or not lying, really, but sort of wedged in a half-sitting position, so he had to do some fancy contortions before he could get himself inside her finally. She made a funny little squeaking sound in his ear and he was so fond of her in that moment that he eased off a bit, and leaned up, and looked out through the snowy window and saw away out at the harbor mouth the sea boiling up somehow, he guessed the tide was turning or something, and a big head of blue-black water with a flying white fringe along the top of it was surging in between the two prongs of the harbor, and although he had only started he could not hold himself back, and he arched himself between her shaking legs and plunged into her and felt the shudder begin deep in the root of his groin, and he bit into her neck at the side and made her scream.

AFTERWARD, THERE WAS THE PROBLEM OF WHAT TO DO WITH HER. HE could not bring her back to the house. He had no intention of returning to Moss Manor, ever again; with the old man dead, he knew his time there was at an end. That bitch who had suddenly become a rich widow would waste no time in selling-he had seen the way she used to look around the place, twisting up her mouth in disgust, when she thought no one was watching-and move to somewhere more to her la-di-da taste. He had his plans made, and now this thing with the girl had made his decision for him: it was time, and there was no time to lose. He had talked to a guy he knew, a dealer in antique cars, who had moved to New Mexico and settled in Roswell to look for little green men and who had agreed to work on the Buick and make it anonymous and find a buyer for it. But time, yes, time was the thing. He could start by getting rid of the girl. She was lying curled up on the back seat when he drove into North Scituate. The snow was coming down heavy now, and the streets were deserted-not that they were ever exactly crowded, in this one-horse dump-and he stopped at the corner where he had picked up Quirke the other day, and went around and opened the door for her and told her to get out. It was cold, but she had her coat and those boots, and he figured she would be all right-he even made sure she had a handful of dimes for the telephone. She got herself out, moving like one of the living dead, her face all smeared, somehow, and her eyes blurred-looking as if her sight had gone bad. As he drove away he took his last look at her in the rearview mirror, standing in the snow on the street corner in her tepee-shaped coat, like some squaw that had got lost when the tribe moved on.

HE KNEW HE WAS IN TROUBLE, MAYBE THE WORST TROUBLE HE HAD ever been in-it was the knife, he should not have brought out the knife-but he did not care. He was exultant. He had made his mark, had shown what he was capable of. His lap felt wet still but the sweat on his back and on the insides of his arms had cooled and was like oil, like-what was the word?-like balm. He wished that Cora Bennett could have seen him in the Buick with the girl out there on the headland, he wished Cora could have been there, and forced to watch. Cora, Claire, the big Irishman, Rose Crawford, Joe Lanigan and his sidekick that looked like Lou Costello, he imagined them all standing around the car, looking in the windows at him, shouting at him to stop and him just laughing at them.

Cora Bennett had laughed at him that night when her blood got all over him and he rolled away from her and felt it on his thighs, the hot stickiness of it. “Why, hell,” she had said, laughing, “it’s only blood!” There had been blood with the girl, too, but not much. If Cora had been there he would have smeared it on her face, and laughed, and said, Why, Cora, it’s only blood! When she had seen how mad he was she had said she was sorry, though she was still sort of grinning. When she came back from the bathroom she sat down on the side of the bed where he was lying and rubbed her hand along his back and said again she was sorry, that it was not at him she had been laughing, but only that she was relieved because she had been kind of worrying, seeing she was two weeks late and she was never late, and that was why she had begun to wonder if what Claire had told her might not be the case, might just be one of crazy Claire’s crazy fantasies. He had sat up on the bed then, all his nerves alert, and asked her what she meant, and what it was that Claire had told her. “Why, that you shoot blanks, Tex,” she said, with that grin again, and put up her hand and mussed his hair. “Hence no little Andys or little Claires, or little Christines, either, of your own.”

He could hardly believe she was saying what she was saying. At first he did not understand-Claire had told her it was him and not her who could not make a kid? But when she had come home from the doctor’s that day after she got the results of the tests that they had both taken she had said to him that the doctor had told her it was she who was the dud, that there was something wrong with her insides and that she could never have a baby, no matter how hard she tried. Cora, who was beginning to look like she was sorry she had started to tell him all this, said, well, Claire had told her it was the other way around, one day when he was at work and she had gone up to see if Claire maybe needed a cup of coffee or something. Claire was real upset, Cora said, crying and talking about the kid and the accident, and then she had told Cora about what the doctor had really said and how she had lied about it to Andy. As Cora was speaking, Andy’s leg had begun to shake that way that it did when he was worried or mad. Why, he wanted to know, why would Claire say it was her if it was really him that could not, could not…? “Oh, honey,” Cora had said soothingly, not grinning now but all serious, seeing clearly the damage she had done, “maybe it’s just what she told you, a little lie, you know, so you wouldn’t feel bad?” That was when he had smacked Cora. He knew he should not have done it, but she should not have said what she said, either. He had smacked her pretty hard, across the face and his knuckles caught her across the bridge of her nose. There was more blood then, but she just sat there on the bed, leaning away from him with a hand to her face and the blood running down out of her nose and her eyes cold and sharp as needles. That was the end, of course, for them. Cora would probably have kept it on, once she got over being sore at him for smacking her, but the truth was he was tired of her, of that slack belly of hers and her flat-fronted boobs and her ass that was already starting to get puckers in it. Now the laugh was on her.

BY THE TIME HE HAD LEFT THE GIRL AND GOT BACK TO THE HOUSE HE had decided to take Claire with him. The decision surprised him, but it pleased him, too. It must be that he loved her, despite everything, despite even the things she had told Cora Bennett about him. He parked the car a couple of houses down, not because he did not want the neighbors noticing the fancy car-they had seen him in the Buick before this-but he wanted to get into the house without Cora Bennett coming out and pestering him. He slipped across the yard and went up the outside stairs three at a time, thankful for the snow that muffled the sound of his boot heels on the wood.

Claire in her housecoat was slumped on the couch in front of the television on which some dumb quiz show was playing-who gives a fuck what the capital of North Dakota is?-and he paused in passing by her and gave her shoulders a shake and told her to get up and start packing. She did not move, of course, and he had to come back and put his fist in front of her nose and shout at her. He was in the bedroom, throwing shirts into the old carpet bag that had once belonged to his daddy, when he felt her behind him-he had developed a sixth sense, and could feel her presence without looking, as if she was a ghost already-and turned to find her leaning in the doorway in that tired-out, drooping way that she did, the housecoat pulled shut and her arms folded so tight it was like this was the only way she had of holding herself together.

“There were people here today,” she said.

“Oh, yeah? What people?” He had not realized he had so many shirts and coats and pairs of jeans-where did it come from, all this stuff?

“They were asking about the baby,” Claire said.

He went still suddenly, and turned slowly to look at her. “What?” he said softly. He was holding in his hand a belt with a buckle shaped like a steer’s head with horns.

She told him, in that wispy voice she had developed lately, that sounded as if it was wearing out and would soon be just a sort of sighing, a sort of breathing, with no words. It was the Irish guy and the nurse. They had asked her about little Christine, and the accident, and what had happened. As she spoke she paused now and then to pick at stray bits of lint on the housecoat. She might have been talking about the weather. Once she stopped altogether and he had to give her a push to get her started up again. Christ, a clockwork ghost, that was what she was turning into! He would have gone at her with the belt except that she looked so strange, sort of not here, but lost somewhere inside herself.

He paced the room, gnawing on a knuckle. They would have to go tonight-they would have to go now! As if she sensed what he was thinking, Claire took note for the first time of the bag on the bed, the gaping drawers, and the closet doors standing open.

“Are you leaving me?” she said, sounding as if it would not much matter to her if he was.

“No,” he said, stopping in front of her with his hands on his hips and speaking slow so she would understand him, “I’m not leaving you, baby. You’re coming with me. We’re going west. Will Dakes is out there, he’s in Roswell, he’ll help us, help me find a job, maybe.” He moved closer to her and touched her face. “We can start a new life,” he said softly. “You could get another kid, another little Christine. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He was surprised how little, really, he minded her saying that to Cora about the doctor’s test, or telling the Irish guy about the accident-surprised, in fact, at how little he cared about any of that. The Irish guy, Rose Crawford, that nun and the priest, they were the past now. But he knew they would be coming for him, and soon, and that the two of them had to get away. Claire’s cheek was cold under his hand, as if there was no blood at all under the skin. Claire; his Claire. He had never felt so tenderly toward her as he did at that moment, there in the doorway, with the snow coming down outside and the light failing and the walnut tree in the window holding up its bare arms, and everything ending for them here.

HE WAS DRIVING TOO FAST. THE ROADS WERE SLICK UNDER THE SOFT new snow. Every time a cop car passed by heading into the city he expected it to swing around on two wheels and come bumping over the central divide after them with its blue light flashing and its siren going. The girl would be back at the house by now and would have told them her story, and he knew, of course, what a story it would be. He did not care. In two days they would be in New Mexico, and Will Dakes would file off the engine number and whatever else needed to be done, and the car would be sold and he and Claire would take the money and travel on, to Texas, maybe, or maybe they would go north, to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming. The wide world was before them. Out there, under those skies, Claire would forget the kid and would be her old self again, and they would begin to live, like they had never lived before. He saw through the swirls of snow the red light flashing ahead, at the crossing. It reminded him of the girl, of Phoebe, and he smiled to himself, feeling good remembering her sprawled under him on the back seat of the car, and he put his foot down. Yes, life was just starting, his real life, out where he belonged, in those wide-open spaces, on those plains, in that sweet air. The barrier was coming down, but they would make it. They would flash under it and on the other side there would be a new place, a new world, and they would be new people in it. He glanced at Claire beside him. She was feeling the same excitement, the same wild expectancy, he could see it in her face, in the way she was leaning forward with her neck thrust out and her eyes wide, and then they were on the tracks, and suddenly-what was she doing?-she reached out a hand sideways and snatched the wheel and wrenched it out of his grip, and the big car screeched and spun on the snow and the shiny steel rails and stopped, and the engine stopped, and everything stopped, except the train that was rushing toward them, its single eye glaring, and which at the last moment seemed to raise itself up as if it would take to the black air, shrieking and flaming, and fly, and fly.

34

PHOEBE HAD DISLIKED THIS ROOM FROM THE FIRST TIME SHE SAW IT. She knew Rose had meant well, putting her here, but it was more like a child’s nursery than a bedroom for a grown-up. She was tired-she was exhausted!-but she could not sleep. They had thought she would want them to stay with her, to sit by the bed holding her hand and looking down at her with their sorrowing, pitying eyes, and in the end she had pretended to be asleep so they would all go away and let her be by herself. Since Quirke had spoken to her in the hall she had wanted only to be alone, so she could think, and sort things out in her head. That was why she had gone to the garage to sit in the Buick, as she used to do when she was a child, hiding herself away in Daddy’s car.

Daddy.

SHE HAD HARDLY NOTICED ANDY STAFFORD WHEN HE CAME INTO THE garage. He was just the driver-why should she notice him? She thought he had probably come to polish the car, or check the oil or inflate the tires, or whatever it was that drivers did when they were not driving. She had not been afraid when he got behind the wheel and drove her away, or even when he turned the car off the road and went along the track to the edge of the dunes where the wind was blowing and she could hardly see anything through the snow. She should have spoken, should have said something, should have ordered him to turn back; he might have done as he was told, since that was what she presumed he had been trained to do. But she had said nothing, and then they had stopped and he was climbing into the back seat after her, and there was the knife…

WHEN HE LEFT HER IN THE VILLAGE SHE HAD NOT TELEPHONED THE house. There were many reasons why she would not, but the main one was simply that she would not have known what to say. There were no words she could think of to account for what had happened. So she had set off walking, down the main street and out of the village and along the road, despite the cold and the snow and the soreness between her legs. At the house it was Rose who had come to the door, pushing Deirdre the maid aside and taking her by the arm and leading her upstairs. Rose had needed only the simplest words-car, driver, dunes, knife-and at once she understood. She had made her drink a mouthful of brandy, and had told the maid to run a bath, and only when Phoebe was in the bath had she gone off to summon Sarah, and Mal, and Quirke, who was not there, who was never there.

Then there had been the fussing, the tiptoed comings and goings, the cups of tea and bowls of soup, the whispered consultations in the doorway, the bumbling white-haired doctor with his bag and his minty breath, the police detective clearing his throat and twiddling the brim of his brown hat, embarrassed by the things he was having to ask her. There was that strange exchange with her mother-with Sarah-it had sounded as if they were talking not about her but about someone else they had both known in another life. Which, she reflected, was true. Before, she had been certain of who she was; now she was no one. “You’re still my Phoebe,” Sarah had said, trying not to cry, but Phoebe had answered nothing to that, having nothing to say. Mal was his usual totem pole. Yet of the two of them, these two who until a few hours ago had been her father and her mother, it was Mal whom she most loved, if love, any longer, was the word.

The worst of it now was the bite mark on her neck, where Andy Stafford had sunk his teeth in her. That was the real violation. She could not explain, she did not understand it, but it was so.

She would not speak of Andy Stafford. He was the unspeakable, not because of the knife, or what he had done to her, or not solely for these reasons, but because there were no words that would, for her, accommodate him. When the police telephoned Rose to tell her Andy and his wife were dead, killed when the Buick stalled on a level crossing, Phoebe was the only one who was not shocked, or even surprised. There was a neatness to their dying, a tidiness, as at the end of a fairy tale she might have been told as a child, first to frighten her and then, with all resolved and the wicked trolls slain, so that she might be satisfied and go to sleep. Toward Andy himself she felt nothing, neither anger nor revulsion. He had been a steel edge at her throat and a hard body pounding down on hers, that was all.

Quirke, arrived at last, came and stood at the foot of the bed, leaning awkwardly on his stick. He asked her to come back with him, to Ireland. She refused.

“I’m staying here for a while,” she said. “And then I’ll see.” He looked as if he would plead with her, but she made her face hard, lying there against the pillows, and he lowered his head like a wounded ox. “Tell me,” she said, “there’s one thing I want to know-who named me?”

He raised his eyes, frowning.

“What do you mean?”

“Who gave me the name Phoebe?”

He looked down again.

“They called you after Sarah’s grandmother, Josh’s mother.”

She was silent for a long moment, turning it over in her head, then “I see,” she said, and without looking at her again Quirke turned and limped out of the room.

SARAH AND MAL SAT TOGETHER ON A LITTLE GILT SOFA ON THE WIDE landing at the top of the great oak staircase. The last of the day’s stealthy light was drifting down from the big curved windows above them. Like Quirke, Sarah too felt that she had been struggling all day through mire and ice, over frozen wastes, along treacherous roads, and now had come to some kind of a stopping place at last. The skin on her hands and on her arms was gray and grainy and seemed to be cringing, somehow, like her mind. The look of the broad expanse of carpet on the landing, like a nubbled, pale-pink ice floe, made her feel slightly ill; the carpet, like so much else in the house, had been installed at Rose’s command, Rose, who no doubt knew everything, too, that there was to know.

She said:

“Well-what do we do now?”

“We live,” Mal answered, “as best we can. Phoebe will need our help.”

He seemed so calm, so resigned. What goes on in his mind? she wondered. It struck her, not for the first time, how little, really, she knew of this man with whom she had already spent a large part of her life.

“You should have told me,” she said.

He stirred, but did not turn to look at her.

“Told you what?” he murmured.

“About Christine Falls. About the child. Everything.”

He expelled a long, weary breath; it was like listening to a part of his self leaking out of him.

“About Christine Falls,” he said, echoing her. “How did you find out-did Quirke tell you?”

“No. What does it matter how I found out? You should have told me. You owed it to me. I would have listened. I would have tried to understand.”

“I had my duty.”

“My God,” she said, with a violent, shaking laugh, “what a hypocrite you are.”

“I had my duty,” he said again stubbornly, “to all of us. I had to keep it together, under control. There was no one else. Everything would have been destroyed.”

She looked at the carpet and again her insides quailed. She closed her eyes, and out of that darkness said:

“You still have time.”

Now he looked at her.

“Time?”

“To redeem yourself.”

He made a strange, soft sound in his throat which it took her a moment to identify-he was laughing.

“Ah, my dear Sarah,” he said-how seldom he spoke her name!-“it’s too late for that, I think.”

A clock struck in the house, and then another, and yet another-so many! As if time here were a multiple thing, different at all levels, in every room.

“I told Quirke about Phoebe,” she said. “I told him the whole thing.”

“Oh, yes?” He did his faint laugh again. “That must have been an interesting conversation.”

“I should have told him years ago. I should have told him about Phoebe, and you should have told me about Christine Falls.”

He crossed his legs and fussily hitched up the knee of his trousers.

“You wouldn’t have needed to tell him about Phoebe,” he said mildly. “He knew already.”

What was it she was hearing-could it be the tiny echoes of the clock chimes, still beating faintly in the air? She held her breath, afraid of what might come out of her mouth. At last she said:

“What do you mean?”

He was looking at the ceiling high above, studying it, as if there might be something up there, some sign, some hieroglyph.

“Who do you think got my father to phone me here in Boston the night Delia died?” he asked, as if he were not addressing her but interrogating that something which only he could see in the shadows under the ceiling. “Who was in such torment that he couldn’t bear the thought of having the child around, to remind him of his tragic loss, and was prepared to give her to us instead?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head, “no, it’s not true.”

But she knew it was, of course. Oh, Quirke. She had known it all along, she realized now, had known it and denied it to herself. She felt no anger, no resentment, only sadness.

She would not tell Phoebe; Phoebe must not know that her father had willingly given her away.

A minute passed. She said:

“I think I’m sick.”

He went still; she could feel it, like something in him stopping, some animal version of him, stopping with all its senses on alert.

“Why do you think that?”

“There’s something wrong with my head. This dizziness, it’s getting worse.”

He reached sideways and took her hand, cold and limp, in his.

“I need you,” he said calmly, without emphasis. “I can’t do it, any of it, without you.”

“Then put an end to this thing,” she said with sudden fierceness, “this thing of Christine Falls and her child.” She turned the hand he was holding and gripped his fingers. “Will you?” Now it was his hand that went limp. He shook his head once, the barest movement. She heard the foghorns, their forlorn calling. She released his hand and stood up. His duty, he had said-his duty to lie, to pretend, to protect. His duty, that had blighted their lives. “You knew about Quirke and Phoebe,” she said. “And you knew about Christine Falls. You knew-you all knew-and you didn’t tell me. All these years, all these lies. How could you, Mal?”

He gazed up at her from where he sat; all he looked was tired. He said:

“Perhaps for the same reason you didn’t tell Quirke, from the start, that Phoebe was his daughter, when you thought he didn’t know.” He smiled wanly. “We all have our own kinds of sin.”

35

QUIRKE KNEW IT WAS TIME TO GO. THERE WAS NOTHING HERE FOR him any longer, if there ever had been anything, except confusion, mistakes, damage. In the bedroom he turned Delia’s and Phoebe’s photographs once more to face the room; he did not fear his dead wife anymore; she had been exorcised, somehow. He began to pack his bag. The daylight was at an end, and beyond the windows the vague snow-shapes were merging into shadow. He felt unwell. The central heating made the air in the house dense and oppressive, and it seemed to him he had been suffering from a headache, more or less, since the night he had arrived. He did not know what to think, about Phoebe, Mal, Sarah, about Andy Stafford-about any of them. He was tired of trying to know what he should think. His anger at everything had subsided to a background hum. He was conscious too of a faint, simmering sense of desperation; it was like that feeling that would threaten to overwhelm him at the start of certain days in childhood when there was nothing in prospect, nothing of interest, nothing to do. Is that how his life would be from now on-a sort of living afterlife, a wandering in a limbo among other souls who, like him, were neither saved nor lost?

When Rose Crawford came into the room he knew at once what would happen. She was wearing a black blouse and black slacks. “I think mourning becomes me,” she said, “don’t you?” He went back to his packing. She stood in the middle of the floor with her hands in the pockets of her slacks, watching him. He had a shirt in his hands; she took it from him and laid it out on the bed and began expertly to fold it. “I used to work in a dry cleaners,” she said, and glanced at him over her shoulder. “That surprises you, I bet.”

Now it was he who stood watching her. He lit a cigarette.

“Two things I want from you,” he said.

She laid the folded shirt in his suitcase and took up another and began to fold it too.

“Oh, yes?” she said. “And what things would they be?”

“I want you to promise me to stop the funds for this business with the babies. And I want you to let Phoebe come home with me.”

She shook her head briefly, concentrating on the shirt.

“Phoebe is going to stay here,” she said.

“No.” He was quite calm; he spoke softly. “Let her go.”

She put the second shirt on top of the first in the suitcase and came and took the cigarette from his fingers and drew on it and gave it back to him.

“Oops,” she said, “sorry-lipstick again.” She measured him with a smiling look, her head tilted to one side. “It’s too late, Quirke. You’ve lost her.”

“You know she’s my daughter.”

She nodded, still smiling.

“Of course. Josh, after all, was in on your little exchange, and Josh and I had no secrets from each other. It was one of the nicer things about us.”

It was as if something had swooped down on him suddenly from above-he saw its darkness against his eyes and seemed to feel the beating of its wings about his head. He had taken her by the shoulders and was shaking her furiously. The cigarette flew from his fingers.

“You selfish, evil bitch!” he said between clenched teeth, that winged thing still flapping and screeching around him.

She stepped back, deftly disengaging herself from his grasp, and went and picked up the burning cigarette from the carpet and carried it across the room and dropped it into the empty fireplace.

“You should be careful, Quirke,” she said, “you could set the house on fire.” She kneaded her shoulder. “What a grip you have-really, you don’t know your own strength.”

He saw that she was trying not to laugh. He launched himself forward on his resistant leg, crossing the space between them as if it were not a walk he was doing but a sort of upright falling. He did not know what he might do when he reached her, whether he would slap her, or knock her to the floor. What he did was take her in his arms. She was of a surprising lightness, and he could plainly feel the bones beneath her flesh. When he kissed her he crushed his mouth on hers and tasted blood, whose, hers or his, he was not sure.

THE NIGHT, GLOSSY AND DENSELY DARK, PRESSED ITSELF AGAINST THE windows on opposite sides of the room. Rose said, “You could both stay, you know, you and Phoebe. Let the rest of them go back to Mother Ireland. We might make it work, the three of us. You’re like me, Quirke, admit it. You’re more like me than you’re like your precious Sarah. A cold heart and a hot soul, that’s you and me.” He began to speak but she touched a fingertip quickly to his lips. “No, no, don’t say anything. Silly of me to ask.” She twisted away from him and sat on the side of the bed with her back turned. She smiled wryly at him over her shoulder. “Don’t you love me even a little? You could lie, you know. I wouldn’t mind. You’re good at lying.”

He said nothing, only rolled onto his back, the pain in his knee flaring, and gazed up at the ceiling. Rose nodded, and searched in the pockets of his jacket for his cigarettes, and lit one, and leaned over him and put it into his lips.

“Poor Quirke,” she said softly. “You’re in such trouble, aren’t you. I wish I could help.” She went and stood in front of the mirror, frowning, and combing her fingers through her hair. Behind her he sat up on the bed; she saw him in the glass, a great, pale bear. He reached for the ashtray on the bedside table. “It’s probably not a help,” she said, “but there’s one thing I can tell you. You’re wrong about Mal and that girl, the girl with the baby-I can’t remember her name.” He looked up and met her eyes in the mirror. She shook her head at him almost pityingly. “Believe me, Quirke, you got it all wrong.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I know I did.”

HE WAS AT ST. MARY’S EARLY. HE ASKED TO SPEAK TO SISTER STEPHANUS. The nun with the buckteeth, wringing her hands, insisted there was no one who could see him at that hour or, her look implied, at any other hour, for that matter. He asked for Sister Anselm. Sister Anselm, the nun said, was gone away-she was in another convent now, in Canada. Quirke did not believe her. He sat down on a chair in the lobby and put his hat on his lap and said he would wait until there was someone who would talk to him. The young nun went away, and presently Father Harkins appeared, his jawline rawly aflame from the morning razor and his right eye twitching. He came forward with his smile. Quirke pushed himself to his feet on his stick. He ignored the hand the priest was offering him. He said he wanted to see the child’s grave. Harkins goggled at him.

“The grave?”

“Yes. I know she’s buried here. I want to see whose name is on the gravestone.”

The priest began to bluster but Quirke would have none of it. He hefted the heavy black stick menacingly in his hand.

“I could call the police, you know,” Harkins said.

“Oh, sure,” Quirke said with a dry laugh, “sure you could.”

The priest was growing increasingly agitated.

“Listen,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper, “Mr. Griffin is there-he’s there now, visiting, before he leaves.”

“I don’t care,” Quirke said, “if the Pope is there. I want to see that gravestone.”

The priest insisted on his coat and his galoshes. The young nun brought them. She glanced at Quirke and could not suppress a glint of renewed interest and even admiration-evidently she was unused to seeing Father Harkins made to do what he was told.

The morning was raw, with low, rolling clouds and a wet wind driving flecks of sleet before it. Quirke and the priest went around by the side of the building, through a kitchen garden patched with snow and down a graveled pathway to a low wooden gate, where the priest stopped, and turned.

“Mr. Quirke,” he said, “please, take my advice. Go from here. Go home to Ireland. Forget all this. If you walk through this gate, you’ll regret it.”

Quirke said nothing, only lifted his stick and pointed it at the gate, and the priest with a sigh undid the latch and stood back.

THE CEMETERY WAS SMALLER THAN HE EXPECTED, JUST A BIT OF FIELD, really, sloped at one corner, with a view of the city’s towers to the east, huddled in a winter mist. There were no headstones, only small wooden crosses, leaning at all angles. The size of the graves was a shock, each one no more than a couple of feet long. Quirke walked down a straggling pathway toward where a figure in overcoat and hat was crouched on one knee. All Quirke could see of the man was his bowed back, and while he was still some way off he stopped and spoke. It was Mal’s look, hunched and tense; but it was not Mal.

Even when Quirke spoke the figure did not turn, and Quirke walked forward. He could hear his uneven footsteps crunching the gravel, interspersed with the small thud of his stick on the stony path. A gust of wind threatened to take his hat and he had to put up a hand quickly to keep it from flying. He drew level with the kneeling man, who looked up at him now.

“Well, Quirke?” the Judge said, slipping a set of Rosary beads into his pocket, not before he had kissed the crucifix, and took up the handkerchief he had been kneeling on and rose with an effort. “Are you satisfied now?”

THEY WALKED THREE TIMES AROUND THE PERIMETER OF THE LITTLE graveyard, the bitter cold wind blowing in their faces, the old man’s cheeks turning blotchy and blue and Quirke’s knee keeping up a steady growl of pain. To Quirke it seemed that he had been trudging here like this all his life, that this was what all his life had been, a slow march around the realm of the dead.

“I’m going to get her out of this place,” the Judge said, “little Christine. I’m going to get her into a proper cemetery. I might even bring her home to Ireland, and bury her beside her mother.”

“Would you not have some trouble explaining her to the customs people,” Quirke said, “or could you fix that, too?”

The old man gave a sort of grin, showing his teeth.

“Her mother was a grand girl, full of fun,” he said. “That was what I noticed about her first, when I saw her at Malachy’s house, the way she could laugh at things.”

“I suppose,” Quirke said, “you’re going to tell me you couldn’t help yourself.”

Again that sideways grin, lion-fierce. “Hold off on the bitterness, Quirke. You’re not the injured party here. If I have apologies to make it’s not to you I have to make them. Yes, I’ve sinned, and God will punish me for it-has already punished me, taking Chrissie from me, and then the child, too.” He paused. “What were you being punished for, would you say, Quirke, when you lost Delia?”

Quirke would not look at him.

“I envy your view of the world, Garret,” he said. “Sin and punishment-it must be fine to have everything so simple.”

The Judge disdained to answer that. He was squinting off in the direction of the misty towers.

“What they say is true,” he said. “History repeats itself. You losing Delia, and Phoebe being sent out here, and then me with Chrissie, and Chrissie dying. As if it was all destined.”

“I was married to Delia. She wasn’t a maid in my son’s house. She wasn’t young enough to be my daughter-to be my granddaughter.”

“Ah, Quirke, you’re a young man still, you don’t know what it’s like to watch your powers failing. You look at the back of your hand, the skin turning to paper, the bones showing through, and it gives you the shivers. Then a girl like Christine comes along and you feel like you’re twenty years old again.” He walked on a few paces in silence, musing. “Your daughter is living, Quirke, while mine is dead, thanks to that murdering little bastard-what’s his name? Stafford. Aye: Stafford.”

Quirke could see Harkins lurking by the gate; what was he waiting for? He said:

“I honored you, Garret-I revered you. For me you were the one good man in a bad world.”

The Judge shrugged.

“Maybe I am,” he said, “maybe I am of some good. The Lord pours grace into the weakest vessels.”

That passionate tremor that came into the old man’s voice, that tone of the Old Testament prophet, why had he not noticed it before now? Quirke wondered.

“You’re mad,” he said, in the mildly wondering tone of one who has made a small, sudden and surprising discovery.

The Judge chuckled.

“And you’re a coldhearted bastard, Quirke. You always were. But at least you were honest about things, with certain notable exceptions. Don’t go spoiling your bad reputation now by turning into a hypocrite. Give over this I revered you business. You never gave a second thought in your life to anyone but yourself.”

“The orphans,” Quirke said after a moment, “Costigan, that crowd-was that you, too? Were you running the whole thing, you and Josh?” The old man did not deign to answer. “And Dolly Moran,” Quirke said, “what about her?”

The Judge stopped, holding up a hand.

“That was Costigan,” he said. “He sent those fellows to look for something she had. They weren’t supposed to hurt her.”

They walked on.

“And me?” Quirke asked. “Who sent those fellows after me?”

“Have a heart, Quirke-would I want to see you hurt the way you’ve been hurt, you, that were a son to me?”

But Quirke was thinking, putting it together.

“Dolly told me about the diary,” he said, “I told Mal, he told you, you told Costigan, and Costigan sent his thugs to get it from her.” Out in the harbor a tugboat hooted. Quirke thought he could see from here a section of the river, a blue-gray line humped under scudding cloud. “This Costigan,” he said, “who is he?”

The Judge could not resist an amused, malicious snort.

“Nobody,” he said. “What they call over here the paid help-true believers are scarce. There’s a lot that are in it for the money, Quirke-Josh’s money, as it was.”

“And no more.”

“Oh?”

“There’ll be no more funds. I made Rose promise.”

“Rose, is it? Aye-and I wonder, now, how you went about extracting a promise of that order from that particular lady?” He glanced at Quirke. “Cat got your tongue, eh? Anyway, Rose’s funds or no, we’ll manage. God will provide.” He laughed suddenly. “You know, Quirke, you should be proud-the whole thing started with you. Oh, aye, it’s true. Phoebe was the first, it was her that gave Josh Crawford the idea. He telephoned me, in the middle of the bloody night, it was, wanting to know what happened in Ireland these days to children like Phoebe, children that weren’t wanted. I told him, I said, Josh, the country is overflowing with them. Is that so? said he. Well, send them over here to us, he said, we’ll find homes for them soon enough. In no time we were dispatching them by the dozen-by the hundreds!”

“So many orphans.”

The Judge was swift.

“Phoebe wasn’t an orphan, was she?” His face darkened, the blue blotches turning to purple. “Some people are not meant to have children. Some people haven’t the right.”

“And who decides?”

“We do!” the old man cried harshly. “We decide! Women in the tenements of Dublin and Cork bearing seventeen, eighteen children in as many years. What sort of a life would those youngsters face? Aren’t they better off out here, with families that can take care of them, cherish them? Answer me that.”

“So you’re the judge and jury,” Quirke said wearily. “You’re God Himself.”

“How dare you, you of all people! What right have you to question me? Look to the mote in your own eye, boyo.”

“And Mal? Is he another judge, or just the court clerk?”

“Pah. Mal is a fixer, that’s all-he couldn’t even be trusted to keep the unfortunate girl alive when she had her baby. No, Quirke, you were the son I wanted.”

A gust of wind swooped down on them, throwing a handful of sleet like slivers of glass in their faces.

“I’m taking Phoebe home with me,” Quirke said. “I want her away from here. Away from you, too.”

“You think you can start being a father to her now?”

“I can try.”

“Aye,” the old man said with high sarcasm, “you can try.”

“I want you to tell me about Dolly Moran.”

“And just what is it you want me to tell you?”

“Did you know,” Quirke said, looking off again toward that line of lead-blue water that was the river, “that she used to go up to the orphanage every day, for years, and stand outside the playground, looking to see if she could spot her child, her boy, among all the others.”

The Judge’s look turned vague.

“What sort of a thing was that for her to be doing?” he muttered.

“Tell me,” Quirke said, “you were on the board of visitors-did you ever really know what Carricklea was like, the things that went on there?”

“You got out, didn’t you?” the old man snarled. “I got you out.”

“You did-but who was it put me in?” The Judge glowered and said something under his breath, and set off determinedly in the direction of the gate, where Harkins in his coat and his galoshes was still waiting “Look around you, Garret,” Quirke called after him. “Look at your achievement.”

The Judge paused and turned back.

“These are only the dead,” he said “You don’t see the living. It’s God’s work we’re doing, Quirke. In twenty years’, thirty years’ time, how many young people will be willing to give their lives to the ministry? We’ll be sending back missionaries from here to Ireland-to Europe. God’s work. You won’t stop it. And by Christ, Quirke, you better not try.”

TO THE END QUIRKE WAS SURE THAT PHOEBE WOULD COME TO SAY good-bye to him. He waited on the gravel outside Moss Manor, scanning the windows of the house for a sign of her, while the taxi driver was stowing his bags. It was a day of bleak sunshine, and a cutting wind was blowing in from the sea. In the end it was not Phoebe who came, but Sarah. Wearing no coat, she appeared in the doorway and after a moment’s hesitation walked across the gravel with her arms folded and a cardigan pulled tight around her. She asked him what time his flight was. She said she hoped the journey would not be too dreadful, in this winter weather that seemed set never to end. He drew close to her, canted on his stick, and made to speak, but she stopped him.

“Don’t, Quirke, please,” she said, “don’t say you’re sorry. I couldn’t bear it.”

“I begged her to come home with me. She refused.”

She shook her head wearily.

“It’s too late,” she said. “You know that.”

“What will you do?”

“Oh, I’ll stay, for a little while, at least.” She laughed unsteadily. “Mal wants me to go into the Mayo Clinic-to have my head examined!” She tried to laugh again but failed. She looked off, frowning, in the direction of the sea. “Perhaps Phoebe and I can become”-she smiled miserably-“perhaps we can become friends. Besides, someone has to keep her out of Rose’s clutches. Rose wants to take her to Europe and make her into a Henry James heroine.” She paused, and looked down; she was never as dear to him as when she looked at her feet like that, scanning the ground frowningly for something that was never there. “Did you sleep with her,” she asked mildly, “with Rose?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said, without rancor.

She took a deep breath of the icy air and then, glancing over her shoulder toward the house, she brought from under her cardigan a rolled-up paper scroll and pressed it into his hand.

“Here,” she said. “You’ll know what to do with this.” It was a school jotter, with a dog-eared orange cover. He made to pull off the rubber band that was holding it rolled but she put her hand over his and said, “No-read it on the plane.”

“How did you get it?”

“She sent it to me, the Moran woman, that poor creature. God knows why-I hadn’t seen her since Phoebe was a baby.”

He nodded.

“She remembered you,” he said. “She asked after you. Said you had been good to her.” He put the jotter, still rolled, into the pocket of his overcoat. “What do you want me to do with it?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Whatever is necessary.”

“You’ve read it?”

“Enough of it-as much as I could bear.”

“I see. Then you know.”

She nodded.

“Yes, I know.”

He took a breath, feeling the cold clutch of air on his lungs.

“If I do with this what I think I should do with it,” he said, measuring his words, “you know what the effect will be?”

“No. Do you?”

“I know it will be bad. What about Mal?”

“Oh,” she said, “Mal will survive. He was the least of it, after all.”

“I thought-”

He stopped.

“You thought Mal was the father of that unfortunate young woman’s child. Yes, I knew you did. It’s why I wanted you to talk to him-I thought he would tell you how things really were. But he wouldn’t have, of course. He’s very loyal-to a father who never loved him. Isn’t it ironic?”

They were silent then. He thought that he should kiss her, but knew it was impossible.

“Good-bye, Sarah,” he said.

“Good-bye, Quirke.” She was looking into his face with a faint, quizzical smile. “You were loved, you know,” she said. “Or that’s the point, I suppose-you didn’t.”