Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

’s. He could think of no reasonable means of putting her off. Good, she said, she would jump in a taxi right now. He put down the phone and gazed unseeing at the book lying open in his lap. It always annoyed him, that way she had of saying Bye-ee! with another theatrical trill.
    Yet when she arrived and at the front door flew into his arms and kissed him, breathing hotly into his ear, his heart gave a familiar gulp. She was a warm, happy, grown-up woman, after all, and she loved him, so she said, and to prove it she had tried to kill herself for his sake. He held her now, at once desiring her and wishing she had not come. What did he want from her? he asked himself, for the thousandth time. The self-canceling answer was everything and nothing, and therefore it was all impossible. Cringing with guilt he pressed her all the more tightly to him, while in his mind, suddenly, longingly, he had a vision of the towpath by the dark canal, and how it would be there, the hushed trees bending low, the moon shimmering in the water and the dry reeds whispering together, and not a soul anywhere about.
    “Did you miss me?” she whispered, grazing his neck with her lips. “Tell me you did, even if you didn’t.”
    “Of course I missed you,” he said, making his voice go thick as if with emotion. “How can you ask?”
    When they were in the flat she looked about with lively interest, as if she had been away for years. She took off her head scarf and shook out her dark-bronze hair. She was wearing the short fur coat that he had bought her for her birthday, over a dark blue silk suit with a narrow skirt that accentuated the curve of her bottom. When she had taken the coat off she turned her head back sharply and glanced down to check the seams of her stockings, and seeing her do it, as she did so often, he felt himself smile. He had missed her, he told himself; it was not entirely untrue.
    “Can you light a fire or something?” she asked. “It’s bloody freezing in here.”
    He squatted in front of the fireplace and put a match to the gas fire, and the gas ignited with its usual soft whomp! That was another thing that irritated him about Isabel, that she seemed always to be cold.
    He made coffee for them both and laced it with whiskey. He asked if she was hungry, and offered to make an omelette for her, but she said no, that she had been forced to endure enough boardinghouse meals in the past six weeks to cure her of wanting to eat anything ever again. “Do you think I’ve put on weight?” She surveyed herself critically in the big and incongruously ornate mirror behind the sideboard. “I think I have. God!”
    Quirke was admiring the way the hem of her buttoned-up short jacket flared out over her slim hips. “ Y ou look wonderful,” he said, and was relieved to realize that he meant it.
    “Do I?” She turned from the mirror and looked at him, measuring him up and down with an arched eyebrow. “I wish I could say the same for you. I suppose you’ve been boozing nonstop since I left.”
    “Oh, nonstop,” he said. “Blotto every night.”
    “ Y ou should let me marry you,” she said.
    “Should I?”
    “Yes, you should. I’d see to it that you were set straight. Cook proper meals for you, iron your shirts, put you to bed at night with a warm flannel on your chest to ward off the chill. And if you came home late I’d be standing behind the door with a rolling pin, to teach you the error of your ways. Can’t you see it?”
    “I can. Andy Capp and Flo.”
    “Who?”
    “Andy Capp and his battle-axe missus—cartoon characters in the paper.”
    She put her head to one side, smiling thinly. “A cartoon strip,” she said, in a voice suddenly turned brittle, “is that how you see us? Give me a cigarette.”
    She sat on the arm of the armchair by the fireplace and crossed her legs, while he went to the mantelpiece and took two cigarettes from the silver box there, lit both, and gave one to her. She was leaning across to look at the book he had left lying open on the chair’s other arm. “Belisarius,” she read. “Who’s he when he’s at home?”
    “Byzantine general. They say the emperor Justinian had his eyes put out and left him to beg in the streets.”
    “Why?”
    “Too successful in the wars, a threat to the throne.”
    “Typical.”
    “Of what?”
    “Men.”
    “Who was the typical one, Belisarius or the emperor?” She gave him a scathing glance. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s only a