Even the Dead

13

Late in the afternoon Quirke took a taxi to Fitzwilliam Square. He had thought he would meet Phoebe after work and take her for a drink; that, at least, was what he told himself. It was just short of five-thirty when he got there, and he decided to wait, loitering by the railings, under the trees that to him always smelled, mysteriously, of cat piss. The latening sun on the fronts of the houses made them seem assembled out of ingots of baked gold. He still had a headache, and he fingered gingerly the place on the side of his skull under which the lesion in his brain was located. It was, he realized, exactly the same area where Leon Corless had been struck on the head. Coincidence. Quirke didn’t like coincidences; they seemed to him flaws in the fabric of the world, and, as far as he was concerned, none of them was ever happy.

At a few minutes after half past, when Phoebe appeared, Dr. Blake was with her. The two women came down the steps from the house, not speaking, but certainly together. His heart had set up a dull, slow thumping. Dr. Blake wore a white sleeveless dress with a design of crimson flowers strewn diagonally across it. The effect, at this distance, was dramatic and unsettling; the flowers looked like an untidy splash of blood.

He hung back in the gloom under the trees. Should he cross the road and speak to them, and if not, why not? They were obviously going somewhere together, down to the Shelbourne, maybe. Against the rich gold of the evening sunlight, and in contrast to the encrimsoned woman beside her, Phoebe in her neat black dress with the white collar looked more nunlike than ever.

Just when he had decided to let them go on ungreeted, Phoebe spotted him, and came towards him across the road. She peered at him, and laughed.

“What are you doing,” she said, “lurking there in the shadows? You look like somebody up to no good.”

“I was passing by,” he lied. Dr. Blake was waiting on the other side of the street. “I thought I’d stop and say hello, but I see you and the good doctor are off somewhere.”

“We’re not. She was just walking home with me. Her car is in a garage behind Herbert Place, being repaired.”

He hesitated; he didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what he wanted to do. His heart was still going at that ridiculous, rumbling pace.

“You heard what Hackett’s people had to say about the house in Rathmines?” he said.

“Yes, he called me. They found no trace of Lisa Smith. I can’t understand it.”

He went with her back across the road.

“Hello, Dr. Blake,” he said.

She said nothing, only gazed at him with that peculiar, penetrating light in her huge dark eyes.

“I was telling him,” Phoebe said, “that your car is in the garage.”

“Yes,” the woman said, “it was, it seems, very ill but now is cured.”

She didn’t smile, yet managed to show her amusement, not only at the predicament of her motorcar, but also, somehow, at the world’s absurdity in general.

“Shall we walk down together?” Phoebe said.

They set off along the square. Quirke found himself in the middle, with the women on either side of him. He felt pleasantly hemmed in. Phoebe talked, while he and Dr. Blake were silent. He thought it must be his imagination, but he seemed to sense a faint tingle in the space separating him from this strange, unruffled, heavy-footed woman in her white-and-blood-red dress. But then, when did he ever walk beside a woman and not feel the air vibrating? He noticed that she carried no handbag; it seemed to him he had never come across a woman without a handbag before. Without something to hold on her arm she walked like a man, heavily, with her fists at her sides.

Phoebe soon ran out of topics of conversation, and they went on in silence. They turned along Baggot Street and presently came to the canal, and descended the steps to the towpath. Here they had to walk in single file, Phoebe leading, then Dr. Blake, and lastly Quirke. A moorhen and her chicks sailed beside them along the glassy water, each tiny creature sending out behind it a tiny fan-shaped wake. The sedge was green; Quirke had never noticed green sedge before. The soft fragrance of cut planks wafted to them from the sawmill on the other bank. A man with his dog passed them by. The man saluted each woman in turn, and glanced at Quirke with a jocular eye. What did he see, what was it he thought he saw? A girl-woman in a thin black dress, a large grave lady with pensive eyes, and, drawing up the rear, a sheepish fellow with a shifty look to him.

“Watch out,” Phoebe called back, “there’s a dead bird here, don’t step on it.”

It was a fledgling, a featherless sack with a scrawny neck and beak agape. Harsh world, Quirke thought, in which the weakest die.

Ahead, Phoebe stopped, turned. “Well,” she said, “this is me. Good-bye, Dr. Blake, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She held Quirke briefly by the arm and kissed him on the cheek — when was the last time she had kissed him? — and smiled a thin, complicit smile into his face, then turned again and walked up to the gap in the railings and, casting one last, playful glance at her father, was gone.

“Will you go also?” Dr. Blake asked, brushing a leaf from the shoulder of her dress.

“I might walk with you,” Quirke said, “to the garage.”

“Certainly.”

She set off along the path, and he followed after her.

What age was she? he wondered. Younger than he was, but not by much. Her arms, he saw, thanks to the sleeveless dress, were firm and shapely. The upper parts of women’s arms, so plumply vulnerable, he always found affecting, the elbows too, those little wizened whorls.

“What was wrong with your car?” he asked, to be asking something.

“I have no idea,” she said, without turning her head or slowing her step. “I know nothing about cars. Indeed, there are many things I know nothing of.” This seemed to amuse her. “And you, Dr. Quirke, are you — what do you say? — mechanically minded?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

It was strange, speaking to the back of her head like this.

“Like me, then. That’s good.”

Why, he wondered, was it good?

She was wearing gilded sandals, like the ones Rose Griffin had worn yesterday. The skin over her Achilles tendons was wrinkled and a little chafed, like her elbows. He imagined holding her foot in his hand; he imagined holding both of them — her feet, in his hands. He thought: How strange life is, sometimes!

They came to Huband Bridge and crossed the road to the Pepper Canister Church and turned left into Herbert Lane. He knew, with a dreamlike certainty, what their destination was to be. He had kept a car here once, an Alvis, a beautiful machine, in a rented lock-up garage that David Sinclair had somehow inherited and now kept his Morris Minor in. It was up the lane a little way from Perry Otway’s repair shop, and sure enough, here was Perry himself, Perry of the soiled blond hair and rolling gait, in his putty-colored boilersuit, coming out of his workshop, wiping his hands on an oily rag.

“Dr. Quirke!” he exclaimed, in his plummy accent. “And Dr. Blake, too! My, my, it’s a small world.”

Dr. Blake’s car was a Volkswagen; it lurked in the narrow recess of the workshop, shiny black and somehow menacing, like a giant scarab. Perry explained at some length what the trouble had been and how he had fixed it. Dr. Blake listened gravely, her head bent forward a little, her eyes fixed on Perry’s broad, bland face. Quirke noticed her upper lip, babyish, heavy, shaped like a child’s stylized drawing of a seagull, with a plump little bleb of almost transparent flesh in the middle of it.

Perry, his surgical report done with, handed over the key, holding it daintily between the tips of an oily finger and thumb and dropping it into Dr. Blake’s palm.

“You will send me a bill,” she said, “yes?”

Perry, wiping his hands with the rag again, turned to Quirke. “Ah, that motor of yours,” he said, shaking his head, “she was a beauty.” He turned back to the woman, who was edging her way between the flank of the car and the greasy workshop wall. “An Alvis, it was,” he said to her. “And not just any old Alvis — a TC 108 Super Graber Coupe. Magnificent beast!”

Quirke wished Perry would shut up. Quirke had crashed the Alvis and let it topple over the side of a cliff into the sea. It was not a happy memory.

Dr. Blake had managed to get the door open and slide in behind the wheel at last. She started the engine, and the two men stood aside to allow her room to maneuver out of the narrow space in which it seemed the little car had been wedged. She rolled down the window and said to Quirke, “Can I bring you somewhere?”

“No, no,” he said, “thank you. I live round the corner here.”

“Ah. I see.”

Still she sat there, her hands on the wheel, looking up at him. He noted again the way she had of concentrating her gaze, on an object or a person, so that it seemed as if everything else around had fallen away, into a fog of insignificance. Quirke felt himself almost blushing; he was not accustomed to being looked at like that, with such calm intensity.

“Nevertheless,” she said, “let me give you a lift. Get in.”

He walked around to the passenger side, and she leaned across and unlocked the door for him. Perry, ignored now, waved the filthy rag in farewell, and disappeared into the garage’s oily gloom.

They drove along the lane, turned right and right again, onto Herbert Street.

“I’m round the corner, as I say,” Quirke said.

“I know, yes. But I think I don’t want to go home yet. Will you come with me for a drink, perhaps?”

“Yes,” Quirke said.

Yes.

* * *

She parked on Merrion Street and they walked up to Doheny & Nesbitt. They drank a whiskey and soda each. Afterwards he couldn’t remember what they had talked about. This was strange, for they had talked for a long time, intensely, about many things. He wondered uneasily if she might have managed somehow to hypnotize him in some mild way — wasn’t that what psychiatrists did to their patients sometimes? — to ensure that he would forget all that had been said. A mad notion, of course. Why would she want him to forget?

There were to be things about that evening he would not forget, things he would never forget, but they weren’t things to be expressed in words.

After their drink she drove him to Upper Mount Street, to his flat, but when they reached the house they sat outside in the car for a long time and had another conversation, and this one too he couldn’t recall afterwards. Late sunlight in the street was like a gold river flowing around them.

They couldn’t part, they didn’t know how, and Dr. Blake — Evelyn — suggested they go for a walk. They left the car and went past the Pepper Canister again, in the opposite direction this time, and across to the canal, and sat on the metal bench by the bridge where Quirke liked to spend his Sunday mornings. He told her about the boys who came here on the weekends to swim, diving from the lock and even from the bridge itself. He told her how Rose Griffin had come and invited him to lunch, and how he had talked to Mal in the garden and Mal had told him he was dying. After that they went back to his flat.

* * *

Dense light of evening in the big window above the bed, and a small round cloud seemingly motionless in the western sky. “So funny,” Evelyn said, lying beside him, propped on an elbow, “so funny, the way we had to walk.”

“What?” he said. “Where?”

“By the canal, with Phoebe. Her, me, you, like Indians on the trail of something.”

“On the trail of ourselves.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, smiling. “That’s it, we were tracking ourselves. I could feel you looking at me, from behind. Did I look nice?”

“Very nice.”

“My big bottom.”

“Your wonderful big bottom.”

Undressing her had been a delightful operation, like peeling a large smooth pale egg. She watched him as he did it, fiddling with zips, buttons, clasps. She laughed and said he looked like a little boy, eager and clumsy. When they kissed she kept her eyes open, and so did he.

“Are we not too old for this?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, smiling, “much too old.”

When she lay down on her back her breasts splayed out over her rib cage, wobbling. There were stretch marks on her belly. “I had a son,” she said. “He died.” He leaned his head down and traced the marks with the tip of his tongue; they were pearly and smooth and slightly brittle, like dried snail trails.

“How lovely you are,” he said.

“Oh, no.”

“You are.”

“All right, then.”

She paid attention to everything he did, as if she had never made love before and were memorizing how it was done. She wrapped herself around him, her arms, her legs. “I want to swallow you,” she whispered, “I want to swallow you, all of you, into me.”

She was Austrian. “Salzburg,” she said, and made a face. “A Nazi town, always, and still. I will not go back there.” Her maiden name was Nussbaum. “Nut tree,” she said. “Isn’t that nice?” Her family — parents, two sisters, and a brother — had died in the camps. She put a finger to his lips. “Ssh,” she said. “Not to be spoken of. Not speakable.”

He asked her about the young man who had been at dinner with her in the Russell. “Paul,” she said. “Paul Viertel. The son of my sister, the oldest one.”

“Was she—?”

“Yes, yes. Theresienstadt. Tuberculosis, and so one of the lucky ones, you could say.”

She made him close his eyes so she could kiss the lids. “Like kissing a moth,” she said.

They sat up, with the sheet over their knees, and shared a cigarette, passing it back and forth between them. “I can taste you on the paper,” she said. “My taste, too, from your lips. Both of us.” She laughed. “I had a boyfriend, when I was young, thirteen, fourteen. Very innocent. He had to go away, with his family. We wrote each other letters. I used to try to lift up the — what do you call it? the flap? — I used to try to lift it up and lick where he had licked.” She sighed, smiling. “He was such a nice boy. Not a Jew. He said it didn’t matter that I was, but it did, I think, in the end. Best, perhaps, that he went away.”

They got up, and put on some clothes, and sat at the kitchen table. The light in the sky was fading fast now. The gloaming, he told her, was another name for twilight. “Gloaming,” she said. “I will remember that.”

She was wearing his dressing gown. She hadn’t pulled it fully closed and he could see the slopes of her breasts; they gleamed, and in the cleft between them they were the color of a knife blade. When he was speaking, she had a way of lowering her head with her chin tucked in and gazing at him from under her gray-streaked fringe. Her plump upper lip was plumper still from his kisses.

He asked her what Paul did, Paul Viertel, her dead sister’s son. She told him he was studying to be a doctor. “A proper one,” she said, smiling, “not like you, not a body snatcher.”

He laughed. “Is that what I am?”

“Or do I mean a sawbones? I don’t know.”

They spoke of Phoebe. “Your daughter is unhappy,” she said.

“Is she? Are you sure? What is she unhappy about?”

“Many things. Herself. You.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. She loves you very much.”

“She does?”

“You don’t believe it because you can’t see it.”

He made a mock bow. “Jawohl, Herr Doktor,” he said.

“Frau Doktor, please! Do I seem so mannish to you?”

Each time a car went past in the street, its headlights turned the dusk a little darker.

“Unhappiness is not so bad,” Evelyn said. “Once a woman came to Freud who was very sick, very sick in the head, you know, and asked him if he could cure her. ‘I cannot cure you,’ Freud said, ‘but I can perhaps make you be ordinarily unhappy.’ That was so wise, don’t you think? Ordinarily unhappy, like everyone else.”

He asked her about her husband. “Oh, Richard,” she said, “he was more than unhappy.”

“I didn’t really know him,” Quirke said. “What was his trouble?”

“Everything. Including me, I think. He had, one might say, a talent for unhappiness, poor man. And of course, he drank — you knew that?”

Quirke nodded. “Where did you meet?”

Smiling, she shook her head slowly. “You must understand,” she said, “there are things I will not speak of. Not because they are so terrible, like what happened to my family, or so private, like Robert’s uncurable sorrow, or our son who died.”

“Why, then?”

She looked up at the window and the darkening blue air outside.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that each one of us has a store of things that are — I don’t know what the word is. I am like a ship carrying a precious cargo through a great storm. All the sailors are telling the captain he must throw the cargo overboard or the ship will sink and all of them will be lost to the sea. But no, the captain tells them, no, if I do as you say, the loss will be greater than the risk of death — not the loss to the merchants who own the cargo, and who can always get more, but to ourselves. We shall arrive in harbor and be less than we were when we set out.” She laid a hand on his. “Do you see?”

He was frowning. “No,” he said, “I don’t understand. Isn’t that the point of what you do, isn’t it your job to get people to talk about things, especially things that are painful, or private?”

“Ah yes,” she said, “and that is why I am a doctor, and not a patient.”

They went into the bedroom to finish dressing. With their clothes on, they found they were suddenly shy of each other. He walked her down the stairs to the street. That single star, stiletto-shaped, glimmered low in the sky above the roofstops.

“Look at this,” Evelyn said, gesturing disgustedly at the Volkswagen. “My little Hitler car. I should be ashamed.”

She unlocked the car door. He felt a sudden rush of panic. “Will you see me again?” he said, touching her on the elbow.

She was getting into the car, and paused now and glanced back at him over her shoulder. “Why, of course,” she said. “Why would I not?”

“Yes, but—” He didn’t know what he wanted to say. “I mean — I mean like this. Will you see me again like this?”

She sat behind the wheel.

“I don’t know,” she said. She was facing the windscreen, frowning, and didn’t look up at him. “I think so. It was very nice, between us.”

He leaned down and put his head in through the low doorway and kissed her awkwardly. She caught him by his shirt collar and held him captive, crouching, half in and half out of the car, barely keeping his balance.

“My dear,” she said, “look at you, so silly. You think perhaps we can be unhappy together, ordinarily unhappy?”

“Like everyone else?”

“Yes. Like everyone else.”

She let go of him, and he stood back and swung the door shut. She didn’t roll down the window, but pressed the ignition, and switched on the headlights, and drove away.

* * *

Half an hour later, his telephone rang. It was Evelyn. He carried the phone to the window with the receiver to his ear and stood looking out at that star glistening tremulously above the roofs. He wondered what it was called. Sirius, was it, the Dog Star? Were these the dog days? He didn’t know.

“I just wanted to say good night,” Evelyn said.

“I’m glad you called.”

“Are you?”

All her questions, he noticed, no matter how inconsequential they might seem, were real questions, demanding real answers.

“Yes,” he said. “I am. I was thinking about you.”

“Good.” She was silent for a time. “It’s so strange,” she said, “I have something of you inside me still. Just now I put my finger there and tasted it.”

“Did you? What does it taste like?”

“Bread.”

“That’s good.”

“Bread and pearls.”

“Pearls don’t taste of anything.”

“How do you know? Anyway, it sounds nice, yes?”

“Yes, it does.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “Will you tell Phoebe about tonight, about us?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought.”

“Then I shall.”

“You’ll tell her?”

“Yes. Why not? She’ll be glad, I think. She worries about you, that you are lonely.”

He felt a tiny stab of misgiving. Did she too think of him as lonely, was that why she had let him take her clothes off and make love to her?

“I can hear you thinking,” Evelyn said. “You mustn’t think sad thoughts. You are loved — this is true, what I’m telling you. Even if you and I were never to see each other again, you would have been loved, by me. And always you have your daughter.” She paused. “Be kind to yourself, my dear. Try to be.”

He was silent.

“Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here,” he said. “I don’t know what to say to you.”

“Say nothing, then. Keep your cargo, throw none of it overboard.”

“You know what I’m thinking anyway.”

She gave a low laugh. “Of course I do. I am the witch doctor, of course. I have a patient who tells me that after every session with me he feels empty, as if I have put a spell on him and drained his blood.”

“Is that good or bad? It sounds bad.”

“It is neither. It is just a part of the process.”

“Part of the cure?”

“There is no cure. I told you this. Only the process.”

“I think I’m in love with you, Evelyn.”

“Yes, yes, I know you do.” She spoke softly, as if to soothe a child.

“You know I love you, or you know I only think I love you, which?”

“Both, maybe. But I am tired now, and I must go to sleep. I will not wash my hands or brush my teeth. I want to wake up in the night and smell and taste you.” She sighed. “I am being ridiculous.”

“We both are. It doesn’t matter.”

“No,” she said, “it doesn’t.”