Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

caught her lower lip between her teeth. So far as she knew —what did that mean?
    Still she strained to listen, but still there was no sound from the living room, or from anywhere else—the world seemed to have fallen into a shocked silence. She imagined Sally still sitting as she had left her, on the rug, with her legs folded under her, as confused and full of wonderment as she was.
    What was she to do, what was she to think?
    Maybe Sally would leave; maybe she would fetch her vanity bag and pack her things into her suitcase and hurry from the flat and out of the house, without a word of good-bye, and be gone. At the thought, Phoebe felt something inside her drop suddenly, like something falling soundlessly in a vacuum.
    She looked down. In one hand she was holding the lemonade glass, while the other was locked into itself in a fist, white-knuckled, quivering. The rain at the window seemed to be trying to say something to her, a slurred, secret phrase. Her heart was still struggling in her breast like a trapped animal. She turned up her clenched fist and opened it slowly. Pressed into an indent in her palm was what at first she took to be a small white pill with holes pierced through its center. She gazed at it in bewilderment. Then she realized what it was. It was not a pill, but a button, a button she must have ripped from Sally’s blouse.
    * * *

    They sat opposite each other at the kitchen table and talked for what seemed an age, holding themselves very straight, with their fists set down in front of them on the table, as if they were engaged in some contest, some trial of skill and endurance. Afterwards Phoebe would not be able to recall a single thing they had said; all she knew for certain was that the kiss had not been mentioned. How could it have been? For some things there were no words; she knew that. What she did remember was the urgency in their voices, or in her voice, anyway, the excitement, and the fear. She thought she had never known such a jumble of emotions before. There had been crushes at school, of course, but they had meant nothing. She recalled too the night one Christmastime in that pub—Neary’s, was it, or Searson’s?—when a narrow-faced woman with thin lips painted crimson had kept staring at her and at closing time had come up to her and offered her a lift home, which she had refused. That was the extent of her experience of—of what was she to call it? She did not know. Whatever it was that had occurred between her and Sally as they sat on the rug in front of the gas fire was a new thing in Phoebe’s life, unexpected, unlooked-for, and frightening, but also, although she was not yet prepared to admit it, exciting, too—oh, exciting beyond words.
    On they talked, on and on, with Sally smoking cigarette after cigarette, and gradually the sky outside cleared and the sun came out, angling sharp spikes of light down into the street. Sally said, in a very casual-seeming tone, that she would get her things together and leave—she would go back to the Belmont—but Phoebe would not hear of such a thing. “I won’t let you go,” she said, though of course it did not come out as she had meant it to, and she felt herself blushing. “I mean,” she added hastily, “there’s no need for you to go, and anyway the Belmont is a dreadful place, I won’t think of you going back there.”
    “ Y ou’ve been very kind,” Sally said, the words sounding stilted and formal. “But I feel I should go and leave you to get back to normal.”
    “Oh, no,” Phoebe said quickly, and it sounded in her own ears like a wail, “you’re welcome to stay as long as you like. I’m—I’m glad of your company. Honestly, I am,” she added, almost in desperation.
    “I know,” Sally said. “And I’m glad to be here. But…”
    In the silence that followed this exchange they had to look away from each other, clearing their throats. Phoebe knew that Sally was right, that she should leave the flat and go back to the hotel, but she knew too that she did not want her to go, not yet, not with everything unresolved between them. But how was anything to be resolved? The fact of that kiss, speak of it or not as they might, was a taut silken cord, invisible but all too tangible, by which they were held fast to each other now. Phoebe knew, and she wondered if Sally knew it too, that they should snap the cord at once, this moment, without delay. But would they?
    Sally was gazing pensively into the street.