Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

and went through, into the living room.
    The darkness was heavier here than in the bedroom—she had closed the heavy curtains earlier, and only the glow from the streetlight outside penetrated them. She moved to the sofa. Sally had gone silent, like an animal surprised in its lair. When Phoebe put out her hand she misjudged the distance, and her fingers touched the girl’s hair, and it was as if she had touched a gathered bundle of fine electric wires. “Sally,” she whispered, “are you all right?”
    Sally’s dim form on the sofa stirred, and she lifted her face from the pillow and turned onto her side. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice blurry. “Did I wake you?”
    “No, no. I was awake. I wasn’t sure if I— Maybe I should have—”
    “It’s all right,” Sally said, and sat up. “ Y ou’re kind, to worry about me.”
    “Can I get you something—?”
    Sally had lifted her knees under the sheet and now she pressed her forehead to them. “We were twins, you know,” she said.
    For a second Phoebe, leaning in the darkness, did not understand. “What? Y ou mean—?”
    “Twins. James and I.”
    “But you said he was older.”
    Sally gave a mournful little laugh. “So he was—by two minutes.”
    Now Phoebe knelt beside the sofa. “Why didn’t you say, before?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. It was something I always felt strange about—so did James. We thought we were—freaks, in a way. Silly, I know.” She laughed and then snuffled. “I wonder if you have a hankie? I don’t know where my handbag is.”
    “Shall I put on the light—?”
    “No!” Sally cried. “I’m sure I look a mess. My nose turns into a Belisha beacon when I cry. That’s the trouble with being a redhead—one of the troubles.”
    “There’s no need to be embarrassed. Y ou’ve been through an awful experience.”
    Phoebe hurried into the bedroom and found a clean and folded linen handkerchief in one of the drawers in the tallboy and brought it back and gave it to Sally.
    “I promised myself I wouldn’t blubber,” Sally said ruefully. “And now look at me, waking up the house!”
    “Let me switch on a lamp—we can’t keep whispering in the dark like this.”
    “No, don’t please. I’m tired, I want to sleep. Can I keep the hankie?”
    “Of course.”
    With a last, loud snuffle Sally lay back and sank her head onto the pillow, sighing. Phoebe hovered over her, feeling there was something more she should do, something more she should say. But what? She never knew the right thing to do at moments of crisis and emotional turmoil, and words seemed always to fail her. It was, she suspected, another of the ways in which she resembled her father. They were both cripples of a kind. Or no, that was not true, not of her, anyway. In her heart she could sympathize, and when something affected her she could put herself in another’s place. It was just that she could not find the means to express this fellow feeling, and that failure made her mute.
    Sally’s breathing was calm now, and she was either asleep or pretending to be. Phoebe turned away and crossed the room to the bedroom door and went through. She could still feel in the pads of her fingers the tingling afterglow of that shock she had experienced when she had touched Sally’s hair in the dark. It was going to be a long and sleepless night.

14

    Quirke woke in a panic. His blood was pounding in his ears and he felt he was suffocating. He lay on his back, panting and drenched with sweat, pressing his fists down hard on his heaving chest, like those new defibrillator paddles that were being used nowadays to deliver electric shocks to people suffering a heart attack. This was not the usual morning onslaught of dread and dismay; this was something altogether different. It was as if a huge, malign creature had got hold of him and wrapped its immense arms around his ribs, squeezing the breath of life itself out of him.
    He told himself to be calm, but the voice in his head that was telling him so seemed to belong not to him but to some disinterested other, someone who had been passing by and, seeing him in distress, had stopped to tend him, more out of curiosity than concern. He struggled to sit up. The sheet was a constricting tangle and he churned his legs, a fallen cyclist. He was in his undershirt and shorts. He felt at once ridiculous and horribly frightened. Rain was fingering the window and yet the sun was shining. Absurd season, he thought, and was