Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

faintly familiar about her—was she someone she had been at school with, maybe?
    The young woman walked on, but had to stop at the traffic lights at the corner where the bank was, so that Phoebe, who had furled the recalcitrant umbrella, caught up with her. Standing side by side, they smiled at each other again. Phoebe felt shy, suddenly, and was surprised to hear herself say, “I’m sorry, but have we met before?” The young woman glanced away. The lights had turned red and the traffic had stopped yet they did not cross, but remained standing on the edge of the pavement.
    “No,” the young woman said. She was still looking away. “But I know who you are.”
    * * *

    They went to a café a few doors up from Searson’s. The window was steamed over, and when they sat down at a table beside it the young woman rubbed a clear circle in the mist and looked out, leaning back and forth to see both ways along the street. Her name was Sally. “Sally Minor,” she said, and smiled.
    The waitress came to take their order, but for a moment all Phoebe could do was stare at the young woman before her. Sally Minor ordered a pot of tea and a plate of scones. How peculiar it sounded to Phoebe when she said it— a plate of scones —as if she had asked for a serving of consecrated hosts.
    Phoebe’s mind was racing, and she did not know where to begin or how to frame the questions crowding in her head. Perhaps it was just a coincidence of names. But no, Sally Minor had said she knew who Phoebe was, so there must be a connection with Jimmy.
    Phoebe was about to speak when the young woman put one hand on the edge of the table and leaned forward and said softly, “Yes—I’m his sister.”
    Phoebe nodded. She became aware that her mouth was open, and immediately she clamped it shut. True, there were many things she had not known about Jimmy, yet it was a great shock to think that he had never mentioned a sister. Sally was smiling at her still, somewhat ruefully now. “I’m the black sheep of the family,” she said. “They tend to keep quiet about me.”
    The girl brought their tea, and the plate of scones. Phoebe realized that, although she could not say why, she suddenly felt happy.
    Sally Minor told her story. She had always been in trouble, she said, right from the start. In convent school she had defied the nuns, so that they had to call in the parish priest to try to put manners on her, as the nuns said. “It didn’t work, though,” Sally said, brushing crumbs from her chin. “Their idea of manners wasn’t mine.” At sixteen she had left home and come to the city to attend a secretarial college, where she had taken a course in shorthand and typing. She had never had any intention of being a secretary, however. Jimmy—or James, as she called him—was already a cub reporter on the Evening Mail and she had hoped he might get her a job there. “Then I met Davy,” she said, and laughed, and threw her eyes upwards.
    Davy had come to work as an instructor at the secretarial college. The job was only a stopgap, he said, for he had plans to go to England and get a position with one of the big agencies there. “‘Oh, Sally, me dear, me darling,’ he would say to me, opening wide those big brown eyes of his, ‘won’t you come too, and we’ll make our fortune over there together.’”
    “And did you go?”
    “Oh, I went, of course. The original girl who can’t say no, that’s me.”
    Though she greatly doubted it was so, Phoebe was amused. “And what happened?” she asked.
    “Davy got a job at a place in High Holborn, very upper-crust, where only the most genteel young ladies were taken on, so he assured me. Y oung they may have been, but ladylike they were not. They took one look at Davy’s curls and those googly eyes of his and were all over him. I’ve never seen anything like it—they were shameless. And that, of course, was me out in the cold.”
    “Did you have to come home?”
    “Certainly not! Come home and spend my life thinning beets and mucking out pigsties? No fear. I hung around the pubs in Fleet Street and got picked up by an old boy who worked, if that’s the word, for the Daily Sketch . Godfrey was his name, a terrible boozer and a lecher into the bargain, but he made me laugh, and, more than that, he got me temping jobs on the paper. The features editor was one of those Fleet Street women, tough as old boots and able to drink the likes of Godfrey under the table. She took a shine to