Even the Dead

15

Phoebe was surprised when Dr. Blake asked if she could accompany her to lunch. Mr. Jolly had just left at the end of his session, looking secretive and conspiratorial. He paused as he passed by Phoebe’s desk and leaned down and whispered excitedly, “Oh, I’ve been a naughty boy — a very naughty boy!” She supposed he was harmless, although Mrs. Jolly, if there was one, probably wouldn’t agree. She was clearing up her desk when Dr. Blake came out and said to her, “Oh, Phoebe, are you going to that place you told me about, that nice café in that nice cool basement? Perhaps I will come with you. You’ll permit, yes?”

They walked along Fitzwilliam Square in the sun.

“We have a key to the gate here, haven’t we?” Dr. Blake said.

“Yes. I think they’re only supposed to be for residents, but there is one in the office.”

“Good. We should bring a picnic lunch one day and have it in there, in the square. It would be so nice. This fine weather will not last, and then we will be sorry.”

Phoebe glanced at her sidelong. She seemed to be smiling to herself. She was in a strange mood today. Maybe it was the effect of her hour with Mr. Jolly, for she was somewhat as he had been, as if she had a secret and was brimming over with it.

Phoebe wondered more and more keenly what exactly it was that went on behind the consulting room’s reinforced door. Surely it would be boring, sitting for hour after hour, listening to people pouring out their troubles, their obsessions, their manias. She supposed it must be part of a psychiatrist’s training to sit very still and just listen. In her deepest heart she believed that most of Dr. Blake’s patients had nothing wrong with them at all, apart from their ordinary eccentricities — everyone was eccentric, there was no such thing as absolute normality — and that all they were suffering from, if it could be called suffering, was a kind of inverted pride, the arrogance of the self-obsessed.

In the Country Shop they sat at Phoebe’s favorite table by the window. Dr. Blake read the menu with the same calmness and deep concentration she brought to everything she did. “Yes,” she said, “I shall have a salad with some cold chicken. That will be good.”

The waitress came, and they ordered. Phoebe had her usual ham sandwich. Then Dr. Blake leaned forward at the table with her fingers entwined in front of her.

“There is something I wish to talk to you about, Phoebe,” she said. “It is something that might affect our professional relationship, and so we should speak of it, and then”—she moved her hands to the right—“put it aside. Yes?”

Phoebe felt a chill along her spine. Had she done something wrong, was her work not satisfactory? She couldn’t bear the thought of having to give up her office, her desk, her routine that already, in the short time she had been in the job, had become so important for her. She would even miss her encounters with Mr. Jolly, and the thumb sucker, and all the other patients, except maybe the mother with the uncontrollable son.

Dr. Blake was looking at her expectantly, waiting for an answer. But what had the question been?

“I hope,” Phoebe said, “I hope there isn’t anything wrong?”

“No, no,” Dr. Blake said quickly. “There is nothing wrong at all. But last evening, after we left you, I went with your father for a drink. We sat in that nice pub, the one on Baggot Street.”

“Doheny and Nesbitt’s?”

“Yes, yes, that one. We drank whiskey with soda, very nice. Then I drove him to his flat and we sat outside in my car for a long time, talking about all sorts of things, his life, his upbringing, or”—she smiled—“his sad lack of upbringing, and after that we went for a little walk. We sat on a bench by the canal, and he told me — well, he told me about someone he knows who is gravely ill. This has upset him very much, but of course, you know your father — he is aware of so very little of what goes on inside him.” She paused while the waitress set out glasses and a jug of water. “So then, after our talk by the canal, we returned to your father’s flat, and there we went to bed together.”

Phoebe blinked. At once, as if the thing itself had popped up in front of her, she saw in her mind the photograph Quirke kept on his mantelpiece, of himself and Mal, and Sarah and Delia, together long ago, in Boston.

“I see,” she said, falteringly, and then, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say.”

Dr. Blake smiled. “Are you shocked? I hope not. There was nothing shocking about it, you know. He is a very sweet man, your father, very gentle, very kind, even. Oh, I know he thinks he is a terrible person, but that’s not so at all. Surely you know this?”

“Yes, I suppose I do,” Phoebe said. “But—”

“But? Yes?”

Phoebe groped for words. She felt so helpless. She was trying to picture Quirke in bed with this large, plain woman, with her baby’s fat upper lip and her cropped, graying hair, her huge, calm, dark eyes. But it was impossible.

“Will you — will you see him again?” she said. “I mean, are you—?”

“Will we be together for some time, is that what you want to ask? That I cannot answer. Certainly, yes, I will see him, it would be strange if I did not, and no doubt I will go to his flat again, and he may come to my house, too.” She paused. “I think I made him a little happy, last night. Oh, it was not just sex, you know, that’s not important, despite what everyone says, even Dr. Freud.” She smiled what for her was a mischievous smile.

“What, then?” Phoebe asked. By now she was genuinely curious — indeed, by now she was in a fever of curiosity.

“Well,” Dr. Blake said, “of that I am not sure. That is, I am not sure why I would have been able to make him happy, and why he would allow himself to be happy with me.” She looked aside, frowning. “That will be for me to consider. Yes, I shall have to think about that.”

My God, Phoebe thought, will Quirke become a case study, to be mulled over, analyzed, maybe even written up one day? The possibility was either appalling or comic; perhaps it was both.

The waitress brought their food. Phoebe didn’t know how she was going to manage to eat it, in this world turned upside down.

“I hope,” Dr. Blake said, “what I have told you will not affect how we are together in the office. Mmm, this chicken is very good. What is this sauce on the salad, though?”

“It comes out of a bottle,” Phoebe said.

“Ah. It does not taste of very much except — what is it? Vinegar?”

“Dr. Blake,” Phoebe said suddenly, “has Mr. Jolly really got a wife?”

The doctor did not lift her eyes from her plate.

“Why do you ask this?”

“Well, he talks to me about her all the time. He always comes early for his session, a half hour, forty-five minutes, and just sits there, talking, while you’re with another patient.”

Dr. Blake smiled at her plate. “Perhaps you should charge him a fee.” She looked up. “What does one drink here? That man has a glass of milk, look. And he is eating stew. There are many things in this country that are still a mystery to me.”

Phoebe toyed miserably with her sandwich. “I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice, “I shouldn’t have asked about Mr. Jolly.”

“Why not? It is natural to be curious.”

“But it’s unprofessional. And that’s what I want to be, I want to be professional. I want”—she couldn’t stop herself—“I want to be like you.”

“Do you? This is interesting. Why, do you think?”

“Because you’re — because you’re admirable.”

“Am I? In what way?”

“I don’t know. I want to be calm, like you.”

“Calm,” the doctor said, seeming to turn the word over and examine it from all sides. “I suppose that is a good quality. But not very — what shall I say? — not very positive.”

“Oh, but it is!” Phoebe said quickly. “You’ve been through so much, you’ve seen so many terrible things, and yet you look at the world in such a tranquil way.”

“Calm. Tranquil. This is a very interesting view you have of me.” She ate some more of her food. “This salad sauce really is rather unpleasant,” she said. She moved her plate aside and set her elbows on the table. “Yes, Mr. Jolly has a wife, I can tell you that. I can also tell you she is a very aggressive woman.”

“Aggressive? But he tells me that he beats her, all the time.”

Dr. Blake produced an an old little hiccuping sound; it took Phoebe a moment to recognize it as laughter.

“Ah, Mr. Jolly! He is so well named. Such a funny man — funny, and quite sick. Now, I would like a coffee. Is the coffee good here? I suppose not.”

Phoebe saw the manageress making her way between the tables, carrying a bulky parcel wrapped neatly in brown paper and tied with string. She stopped at their table. She was a small, bossy woman with a bad perm that made her hair look like a tightly packed mass of steel shavings. “Are you Miss Griffin?” she asked coldly, consulting the label on the parcel. “Miss Phoebe Griffin? This was left in for you. It’s laundry, I believe.”

“Laundry?” Phoebe said weakly, baffled.

“Yes. This is a restaurant, you know, not a collection depot.” She pronounced it DEEP-oh. “Kindly direct deliveries to your home in future.”

She dropped the parcel on the table with a thud and turned on her heel and marched away.

“Thank you,” Phoebe said weakly to her departing back, and was ignored.

The two women gazed at the parcel.

“I don’t know what this is,” Phoebe said. “I never asked for laundry to be delivered here.”

“How very strange,” Dr. Blake said. “You really know nothing about it? Jung has some interesting things to say on this kind of phenomenon. Otherwise, of course, he is a charlatan.”

They ordered coffee, which, when it came, Dr. Blake, without rancor, pronounced undrinkable. “I’d like to smoke a cigarette,” she said. “Do you permit?”

“Yes, of course. Have one of mine.”

“Thank you. What are they called? Let me see the packet. Gold Flake! What a beautiful name. Are they very exclusive?”

“No, no, they’re just — ordinary.”

“Gold Flake. This I must remember.”

I know what it’s like, Phoebe suddenly thought, being here with her: it’s like Alice in Wonderland. It’s all completely logical, and completely mad.

“What is funny?” Dr. Blake asked.

“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking about you and my father, and how — how wonderful it is.”

“You think so? I am glad.” She had a peculiar way of holding her cigarette, between her middle fingers and resting on her thumb, as if it were a chopstick. And she didn’t inhale, but drew the smoke barely past her lips and quickly expelled it again. “My father gave me my first cigarette to smoke when I was ten years old,” she said. “My mother argued with him, but he said, no, children must be allowed to experience everything as soon as they are ready — sooner, indeed.”

Phoebe wondered, somewhat uneasily, what Herr Nussbaum’s notion of “everything” might have encompassed.

After a few puffs, the doctor stubbed out the cigarette. “Now we shall go back to work, I think,” she said. “Who have we this afternoon?”

“Mr. Doherty is first. You know, I always suspect he’s a priest.”

“Do you? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does he give off — what do you call it? — the odor of sanctity?”

“No. It’s the white socks, I think.”

Dr. Blake did her hiccupy laugh again, and stood up. “Let me pay for this,” she said. “You hardly ate any of your food. Was it not good? Perhaps what I told you about your father and me, perhaps that took away your appetite. So difficult, when one is young, to believe that older people also make love. Inconceivable, I should say. Ha! What a word to use. You see? Language is never innocent.” She had produced a tiny leather purse from the pocket of her dress and was counting out coins. “What do you call this one?”

“A half crown.”

“Yes, that’s right. How many years have I been living here and I still do not understand the money. My husband tried to teach me, but he would always get so angry. Now I go into a shop and I say, ‘How much is that?’ and the answer is ‘One pound, nineteen, and eleven pence ha’penny.’ I am baffled. So always I hand over notes, and my purse fills up with coins. You should see, at home, I have jars filled with florins and sixpences — what is this one?”

“That’s a threepenny bit.”

“Ah,” Dr. Blake said, with a look of mock despair, “I shall never learn.”

Phoebe’s eyes wandered uneasily to the paper parcel at her elbow. It was a large, solid cube, expertly packed. She thought of pretending to forget it and leaving it behind, but she knew the manageress would come running after her with it and make her take it. She picked it up. It did feel like laundry. She turned it over in her hands. Certainly that was her name on the label: “Miss Phoebe Griffin, c/o The Country Shop, Stephen’s Green.” She couldn’t understand it.

“It is a package from Dr. Jung, perhaps,” Dr. Blake said. “If it were from Freud, of course, it would be dirty laundry.” She beamed, pleased with her joke. “Come now,” she said, leading the way towards the door, “let us go and deal with the holy man in the white socks.”

* * *

When they got back to the office, Phoebe put the parcel under her desk, at her feet, and tried to forget about it. She could have taken it into the lavatory on the ground floor and opened it there, but she felt an almost superstitious unwillingness to know what was in it. Was someone playing a prank at her expense? That was the kind of thing her friend Jimmy Minor would have done, sending her a package of rags wrapped up in brown paper and tied neatly with string, just for a joke, but Jimmy was gone, and she knew no one else who had his peculiar sense of humor. Could it be a gift from Quirke, a new dress or something? But why would he send it to her at the Country Shop? Quirke certainly didn’t go in for jokes or surprises.

Mr. Doherty arrived then, with that expression of bland blamelessness she believed he put on specially for her, though he still looked furtive. She noticed he was wearing gray socks today, and wondered if it meant his mental condition, whatever it might be, was improving.

She was conscious of the parcel at her feet, so innocent-looking, yet to her it was like a time bomb, ticking away.

At the end of his hour Mr. Doherty sidled out of the consulting room, smiled at her with his thin pale lips — his eyes were otherwise occupied, gazing at horrors, so it seemed — and hurried away. Next in should be Mrs. Francis and her feral son, but they were late, as usual.

Of all the people who passed through the office, Mrs. Francis seemed to Phoebe the saddest, which was ironic, since she wasn’t the patient. In other circumstances she would probably have been a nice woman, easygoing and kind, but Derek, the son, who was obviously ruining her life, had made her into a wild-eyed harridan. The little boy — little devil, more like — would sit on one of the straight-backed chairs with his legs dangling and stare at Phoebe with relentless, heavy-lidded intensity, smiling to himself. His mother talked to him nonstop, asking him bright little questions — was his tummy all right now? would he like to have a look at this nice magazine with the colored pictures in it? — but he ignored her with a contempt so vast and comprehensive that Phoebe, despite herself, had to admire him for it. She supposed there must be something genuinely the matter with him, for surely Dr. Blake wouldn’t be seeing him twice a week if there weren’t, yet she couldn’t get it out of her head that what he really needed was a good smack. But then, she supposed, that was why she was sitting out here at the reception desk while it was Dr. Blake who was in the consulting room.

After a while she stopped worrying about the parcel. Indeed, she had almost forgotten about it when at half past five she put the cover on her typewriter and locked away the appointments book and the folder she kept the patients’ accounts in and was preparing to go home. As she stood up from the desk, however, her foot touched it; she sighed and picked it up.

It occurred to her how dissimilar things were from people. People would take on a different aspect depending on how you thought about them — seeming fearsome if you were afraid of them or harmless if you weren’t — but objects were always obstinately themselves. Or no, not obstinately; that was the wrong word. Indifferently, that was what she meant. She recalled what her father had said to her once, long ago, in the days before she knew he was her father. The thing to remember, Phoebe, he had said, is that the world is indifferent to us and what we do. He’d been a little drunk, of course — he was almost always a little drunk, then — but she had never forgotten him saying it.

The parcel was an awkward shape to hold, and she felt conspicuous with it under her arm. She tried carrying it by the string, but it soon bit into her skin and cut off the blood supply to the tips of her fingers. In the end she hailed a taxi. The taxi driver was annoyed at her because the journey was so short and the fare was only one and sixpence. She ignored his accusing glare in the rearview mirror, and looked out the window at the sunlit shopfronts of Baggot Street going by. The parcel was on the seat beside her. She knew it was foolish, but she couldn’t get rid of the feeling that it was staring at her, just like Derek Francis, the feral boy.

In the flat she put the parcel on the table and deliberately left it there while she went to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of wine. She hardly ever drank by herself. The wine, a bottle of Liebfraumilch, had been open for some time in the fridge, and tasted peculiar, but she drank it anyway. Then at last she took up the dressmaker’s scissors she kept in the drawer beside the cooker and advanced determinedly on the parcel and severed the string.

There were articles of table linens — napkins, an embroidered tablecloth — along with sheets and pillowcases, all ironed and neatly folded. She lifted them up one by one and shook them out. They gave off a strong smell of starch. There were no identifying tags or initials, only the usual pink laundry slips held in place with tiny safety pins. Then, when she was halfway through the pile, a sheet of paper slithered out. It was a laundry list, headed “Mother of Mercy Laundry Ltd.” What was written out on it was not a list, however, but a hastily scrawled message, addressed, like the parcel itself, to her.