Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

she reached the gate in the railings she turned back, though it was not the man she looked at this time but Jenkins, and she smiled. For years afterwards, whenever he thought of the case of the body in the canal, it was that sad, wan little smile that he remembered, and he felt, every time, a mysterious pang.

2

    Quirke had an abiding dislike of rain. Every woman he had ever known had laughed at him for it. Women did not seem to mind getting wet, unless they had just got their hair done. Even when they were wearing good shoes or a new hat they would stride through the downpour and appear not to notice. He, on the other hand, would wince when he heard the first hollow taps on the brim of his hat and saw the pavement in front of him grayly sprinkled. Rain gave him gooseflesh, and he would shudder even at the thought of a drop getting under his collar and sliding down the back of his neck. He hated the way his hair went into kinks when the rain wetted it, hated too the smell of sheep his clothes gave off, which always reminded him of being at Sunday evening devotions in the chapel at Carricklea, the institution where he had spent the better—or rather the worse—part of his childhood. For as long as he could remember, rain seemed to have been falling on his life.
    He had got out of the taxi by the river because the sun was shining, but he was still not even in sight of the hospital when a shadow swept across the street and a wind out of nowhere set dust devils spinning in the gutters. Spring was not his favorite season, though for that matter he was not sure which one was. He quickened his pace, pulling his hat low on his forehead and keeping in close by the brewery wall. A tinker boy mounted bareback on a piebald pony, with a bit of rope for reins, clattered past over the cobbles. A warm and slightly nauseating smell of hops was coming over the brewery wall, from the big vats simmering away in there.
    The air about him grew darker still. He had been drinking whiskey the night before and there was a metallic taste at the back of his tongue, even though he had left McGonagle’s early and gone home to bed, alone—Isabel Galloway was off touring in A Doll’s House, which would have made him a grass widower, if he were married to her, which he emphatically was not. The thought of Isabel set going a familiar confusion of emotions inside him. He sighed. Why was it not possible to switch the mind off, to stop it thinking, remembering, regretting, even for a moment? Isabel was a good-hearted woman, kindly behind a mask of brittleness, and if she was no longer exactly young she was still good-looking. He did not deserve her. Or rather, he told himself ruefully, she, being decent, did not deserve him, and all that he was and was not.
    Sure enough, it began to rain.
    There were cranes and cement mixers in the hospital grounds, where a new extension was being built, an ugly concrete cube that was to be a recovery ward for young mothers who had suffered complications giving birth. It would be called the Griffin Wing, after the late Judge Garret Griffin, Quirke’s adoptive father, as it happened, who had left money in his will to build it. Oh, yes, Quirke thought. Conscience money.
    The rain was coming down heavily now, whipped sideways by the sudden wind, and he sprinted the last twenty yards and at last gained the shelter of the red-brick portico. He stopped, and took off his hat and tried to shake the rain from it. The legs of his trousers were cold and clammy against his calves. A young couple appeared behind him, coming out from Reception, the fellow holding the door for his wife, who seemed hardly more than a girl, drained and dazed-looking, with lank blond hair. She was carrying a baby in her arms, wrapped in a pink blanket. She smiled shyly, tentatively, at Quirke, while the young man scowled. He had an oiled quiff and long sideburns and wore drainpipe trousers and a coat-length jacket with high shoulder pads. Through the doorway the hospital breathed out its sharp, caustic smell; it was a smell Quirke had never got used to, although it was in his pores by now and must be the smell he too gave off. The teddy boy, for all his scowling, went on holding the door until Quirke, nodding at him and his drab wife, had stepped through. They must think he was a doctor; a real doctor.
    There was a new nurse at Reception, pretty in a mousy sort of way, and painfully young. Often these days Quirke had the feeling that he was older