Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

old doorman, who said his name was Thady, took me into the kitchen and gave me Powers whiskey to drink, and told me about this other priest that Hackett wanted to see, and where he was.”
    Isabel was listening intently. “What was strange about that?” she asked.
    Quirke shook his head and gave a sort of laugh. “That wasn’t the strange part,” he said. “The strange part was when I left the kitchen. Suddenly I was—” He stopped, and signaled to the barman.
    “ Y ou haven’t drunk the one you have,” Isabel said, pointing to his glass and the whiskey in it.
    “What?” He stared at the whiskey, and frowned, a look of confusion in his eyes. “Yes. Right.”
    Bill the barman came, and Isabel said she would have another gin and tonic, even though her glass, too, was still half full. “And the good doctor here,” she added drily, “will have another Jameson, in case you might suddenly run out of the stuff.”
    A customer came in, and between the opening and the shutting of the door Isabel glimpsed the pale yellow April sunlight on the pavement outside and the slanted, damp purplish shadows there. At the party in Mullingar, Jack Fenton, who had been playing Torvald to her Nora, had made a pass at her. It was a surprise—she had vaguely assumed he was queer—and rather flattering. She had considered taking him up on his offer, but then had thought better of it. She wondered if she should tell Quirke about him, about how he had put his hand on her bum and smiled his lopsided, cajoling smile. Quirke might be amused, and of course, although he would not admit it, he would be secretly gratified—all men loved to hear of their rivals being spurned. But no, she thought; Quirke was hardly in the mood this evening for romantic banter.
    “The strange thing is,” he said, his eyes fixed on a point in space in front of him, “after I left the kitchen I must have had a kind of blackout, because the next thing I knew I was in a lavatory, standing by an open window with the rain blowing in my face.” He shook his head again, like an animal trying to shake off a cloud of flies. “Then I found Hackett waiting for me in the hall, and it seems only five minutes or so had elapsed, even though I thought I’d been with the old man in the kitchen for—I don’t know, half an hour, at least. And then…”
    There was a side to Quirke, the uncertain, baffled side, that frightened Isabel, a little. She had thought about this in Mullingar, after the party, lying sleepless and a bit drunk in a lumpy hotel bed. A girl had to consider the future, especially a girl in her uncertain profession, and at her age, unmarried and childless. She did not think she had it in her to devote her life to looking after a weak man. She was weak herself, and needed strong people around her, to lean on. But what could she do? Love was love, and always demanded more than a lover was capable of giving. All the same, maybe she should not have shaken off Jack Fenton’s hand quite so brusquely.
    “And then,” Quirke resumed, “the old man appeared, to see us out, but when I called him Thady he said that wasn’t his name.”
    “So what was he called?” Isabel said, trying to keep the note of impatience out of her voice.
    “I don’t know. Richie or something. But not Thady, anyway. And from his demeanor, the way he looked at me, and spoke, it seemed he had forgotten our talk in the kitchen. In fact, he behaved as if I hadn’t been with him in the kitchen at all.”
    Isabel took a drink from her glass, playing for time. Now, affected by what Quirke was telling her, and the tone in which he told it, she too felt unsettled. “Well,” she said, “yes, I see what you mean about it being peculiar.” There was a brief silence. “So did you imagine it all, do you think? How could that be?”
    “I don’t know,” Quirke said. “I must have blacked out somehow and dreamed the whole thing. But it wasn’t like a dream—it felt completely real.”
    He was still staring before him, frowning hard. Isabel had the image of a man trapped in a dark maze, groping his way along leaf-strewn paths, helplessly. “Had you been drinking?” she asked.
    “No, no—I told you, it was morning.”
    She allowed herself a wry smile. “That wouldn’t necessarily mean you were stone-cold sober. Anyway, you probably had a hangover, like every other morning.”
    He gave her a dark and louring look. “ Y ou don’t understand,” he said. “It wasn’t that