Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

moment in the air between them.
    Sally took a sip from her glass. “This is lovely,” she said. “Lovely and spicy, and warm.”
    “Yes,” Phoebe said. “My mother used to make it for me, when I was little. The woman I thought was my mother, that is.” Sally looked at her inquiringly and she shrugged. “Oh, it’s complicated,” she said.
    “Yes, but tell me.”
    “My mother died when I was born, and my father—my father gave me away, to his brother, Malachy—his adoptive brother, really—and Malachy’s wife, my father’s sister-in-law.” A small knot had formed between Sally’s eyebrows, and Phoebe smiled sympathetically. “I told you it was complicated. My father and Malachy Griffin married two sisters. My father married Delia, who died, and Mal married Sarah, who brought me up.”
    “Sarah?” Sally said. “That’s my name, you know.”
    “Yes,” Phoebe said, lowering her eyes, “I thought it must be.”
    “No one calls me by it, of course.”
    “I could, if you like.”
    A silence fell between them.
    “I thought they were my real parents, Sarah and Malachy,” Phoebe said, “until—until my father told me the truth.”
    “When did he tell you?”
    “When I was nineteen.” Phoebe lowered her eyes and picked a loose fiber from the rug they were sitting on. “It doesn’t matter now. It was a shock at first, of course.”
    “But why…?”
    Sally’s voice trailed off and Phoebe looked at her, with a melancholy smile. “Why did Quirke give me away? I’ve never asked him.”
    “But—”
    “There’d be no point—he wouldn’t know the answer.”
    Sally nodded slowly. “And so you’ve forgiven him.”
    “Forgiven him?” Phoebe raised her eyebrows; it was as if the notion of forgiveness, of the necessity for forgiveness, had not occurred to her before. “I suppose I have. My father—Quirke, I mean—he’s not—he’s not like other people, you see.”
    “In what way?”
    “I sometimes think he never really grew up. He’s obsessed with the past—he was an orphan, and part of him is still that orphan. He has this look sometimes, I know it well: sort of furtive, and puzzled, as if there’s a little boy hiding inside him and looking out through adult eyes at the world, trying to understand it, and failing.” She stopped, and smiled, and bit her lip. “The fact is, I don’t know my father, not really, and I doubt I ever will.”
    Sally, nursing the glass between both hands, was frowning into the flames of the fire. “It’s all so—it’s all so sad,” she said.
    “Oh, no,” Phoebe said quickly. “I don’t think of it as sad. He did tell me, in the end, he did confess the truth. Now I know who I am, more or less. That was something he gave to me, something that he doesn’t have himself, something that no one can tell him. I have to think that’s a mark of generosity”—she laughed—“or of something like it, anyway.”
    The storm had intensified and the wind was hurling big splashes of rain against the windows. They might have been in a boat plowing through sea spray. “It’s so nice, here,” Sally said. “ Y ou’re lucky.”
    “Where do you live, in London?” Phoebe asked.
    Sally pulled a face. “Kilburn,” she said. “I have a room over a greengrocer’s shop. The shopkeeper is Indian, with a little roly-poly wife and a dozen or so kids who fight all day and cry throughout the night.” She looked about appreciatively. “I love the big windows here, and the high ceilings.”
    “Is the sofa very uncomfortable, to sleep on?”
    “Oh, no,” Sally said. “It’s fine.”
    It was uncanny, Phoebe reflected, how little of herself Sally had imposed on the room. In the morning when Phoebe came out from her bedroom Sally had cleared away every sign of her having slept here, the bedclothes and the pillow folded away behind the sofa and the cushions straightened and the window open at the top to clear the night’s staleness. In the bathroom, too, she kept her things all packed away in her vanity bag, including her toothbrush and toothpaste—Phoebe suspected she even had her own soap and kept that tidied away too when she was not using it. It really was a pity that Sally did not have a job in Dublin. They could get a bigger place, maybe, and live together; Sally would be the perfect flatmate. And indeed, Sally herself must have been thinking something the same, for now she said, “If I did come back, this is the kind of place I’d like to live