Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

should be having a word.”
    Outside, a cloud shifted and sunlight bloomed damply on the frosted window. They could hear the sound of traffic on the quay, and even, faintly, the voices of gulls. Quirke caught himself thinking how strange it was to be here; how strange to be anywhere.
    Hackett was toying with his empty glass. “What do you think?” he said. “Will we risk another?” He called towards the door, “Jamesey!” then looked thoughtfully at his hat on the bar. “Aye,” he said. “A word in the ear of Packie the Pike might be the thing, all right.”

15

    Phoebe had slept badly and woke in the morning feeling fatigued and headachy. She got up and opened the curtains but then climbed back under the covers again and pulled them over her head. She would telephone the shop and say she was sick. Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes would grumble, of course, but she did not care. She lay on her side with a hand under her cheek and looked out the window, watching scraps of cloud scud across a china-blue sky. The wind must be high today.
    She was restless, as if a storm were blowing through her, too, yet at the same time a strange torpidity of mind weighed on her. She was sharply aware of the presence of Sally Minor, sleeping in the next room. Or maybe she was not asleep; maybe she, too, was awake and watching the sky and feeling this same sense of hindered agitation. What must it be like for her, coming to consciousness each morning and remembering yet again her brother’s death and the cruel circumstances in which he had died? Would grief for a brother be the same as grief for a parent, or for a lover? She did not think so. Yet who was she to say? She had no siblings to lose. She was not sure that she had a lover, either.
    She realized that since she had woken she had been listening for sounds from the other room. Eventually they would both have to get up and begin coping with the day. What would they say to each other, what would they find to talk about? Would they have breakfast together? Phoebe was not sure that there was anything to eat. She was not very good at keeping house; she had no interest in it. She rarely ate more than one meal a day, and that she ate out, in the Country Shop if it was lunchtime or, at nighttime, at that place in Baggot Street, on the other side of the bridge, where they served Italian food, or what passed for it, anyway …
    She caught herself up. She knew what she was doing: she was putting off the moment when she would have to face Sally. She should hop out of bed now and put on her dressing gown and go out to the front room and say to her—what? What would she say? The very thought of Sally made her fingers tighten on the edge of the sheet as if it were the sail of a capsized boat and she had nothing else to cling to.
    In the end, however, it was all simple and perfectly natural. She had crept down to the bathroom—it was one flight down, on the return—and made herself lie in the tub for a quarter of an hour, and in the heat and the hazed air her mind had grown calm and her nerves had stopped twitching. What was there to be agitated about, after all? When she had dressed she went into the kitchen and Sally was there, sitting at the table by the window, hunched over a mug of tea. Her face was puffy from weeping, the shine of her hair was dulled, and there was a speck of sleep at the inner corner of her left eye. She was just a girl after all, ordinary, and ordinarily vulnerable, and certainly not the momentous presence she had seemed when Phoebe had approached her in the darkness last night and touched the copper filaments of her hair and felt the electric current coursing through them.
    “Good morning!” Phoebe said. “How are you? Did you get to sleep in the end?” Her tone sounded callously bright to her own ear, and she tried to amend it. “Would you like some breakfast?”
    “Thanks,” Sally said. “I’m not hungry.”
    “Oh, do have something.”
    Phoebe searched through the cupboards and the fridge, and was surprised to find that there was half a Procea loaf, nearly fresh, and milk and sugar, too, and even a pot of marmalade that she could not remember buying but that looked all right. She put all this on the table, but Sally only looked at it wanly and turned her face away. It was raining outside now, and the brownish light falling in at the window gave a grainy cast to her skin. “ Y ou should eat,” Phoebe said. “Will I make some toast for you?”
    Sally had been