Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

of a ring?” he asked, not looking at her but poking at the sole with his fork.
    “What kind of a ring would that be?” Phoebe inquired innocently, putting on a puzzled frown. “A Claddagh ring, do you mean? A signet?”
    Quirke ignored this. “The two of you have been going together for how long now?” he asked. “About time he declared his intentions, I’d have thought.”
    She laughed again. “My ‘beau,’” she cried, “‘declaring his intentions’—honestly, Quirke!”
    “In my day—”
    “Oh, in your day! In your day a gentleman had side-whiskers and wore a frock coat and gaiters and before proposing had to ask a damsel’s father for her hand in marriage, don’t you know.”
    Quirke only smiled, and went on toying with his fish. “Wouldn’t you like to marry, settle down?” he asked mildly.
    “Married is one thing, ‘settling down’ is quite another.”
    “I see. Y ou’re going to be the independent type, wear trousers and smoke cigarettes and run for parliament. Good luck.”
    Phoebe gazed at him, where he sat with his head bent over his plate. His tone had suddenly taken on a sharper edge.
    “Maybe I will do something like that,” she said, sitting up very straight, “go into politics, or whatever. Y ou don’t think I’m capable of it.”
    He was silent for a moment, looking sideways now into the sunlit street. “I think you’d be a success at whatever you set your mind to,” he said. He turned his eyes to hers. “I only want you to be happy.”
    “Yes,” she said. “But is being married the only kind of happiness you can imagine?”
    She saw him wanting to say more but holding back. She supposed she was a disappointment to him, working in a hat shop and having his assistant for a boyfriend. How ironic, she thought, considering all the years he had gone along with the pretense that she was his sister-in-law’s daughter and not his. Yet she could not be angry with him. He had suffered so much. The woman he’d loved had married someone else and then the woman he did marry had died. What right had she to pass judgment on him—what right had she to pass judgment on anyone?
    They talked for a while of other things, her work at the shop, the crassness of customers, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes’s bullying ways. She mentioned a trip to Spain that she was considering going on. She waited for him to ask if David would go with her, but he did not, and the unspoken question hovered above the table like a heat haze, warping the atmosphere between them. This was delicate territory. She knew Quirke wanted to know if she and David were sleeping together, but she knew too that he would never have the nerve to ask.
    “Tell me,” he said, “how is that friend of yours?—what’s his name?”
    “Which friend?”
    “That chap who works for the Clarion .”
    “Jimmy Minor?”
    “Yes. That’s him.” He was, she saw, avoiding her eye again.
    “What about him?”
    With an index finger he pushed his plate carefully to one side. “Have you seen him recently?”
    “Not for a week or two. Y ou haven’t touched your fish.”
    “No appetite.”
    He was frowning, and now he took a long swallow of wine. She watched him closely, feeling the first inkling of alarm. Jimmy: it was Jimmy he had brought her here to talk about. Oh, God, what kind of hot water had her friend got himself into this time, she wondered.
    “I saw him this morning,” Quirke said. He sucked his teeth. He would look at anything except her.
    “Oh? Where?”
    He reached inside his jacket and brought out his cigarette case, flicked it open, offered it across the table. She shook her head. “I forgot, yes,” he said. “ Y ou gave up. Good idea. Wish I could.”
    He lit his cigarette, blew smoke towards the ceiling. Then he looked directly at her, for the first time, it seemed to her, since they had sat down, and smiled peculiarly, with a woeful, apologetic slant. “I saw him at the hospital,” he said. “I did a postmortem on him.”
    * * *

    Afterwards, when it was too late, he realized how clumsy he had been, how badly he had managed it. At the time he had felt that by mentioning the postmortem first he would be sparing her the shock of being told straight out that Minor was dead. But of course his words had the opposite effect. To him the term “postmortem” carried no weight, was entirely neutral, while to Phoebe, he supposed, it conjured up an image of her friend laid out on a slab with his sternum cut open and