Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

height against an anvil-shaped, lead-blue cloud hanging over Merrion Square. They walked along, she and David, with Sally in the middle. The silence between the other two seemed to Phoebe peculiar. Strangers when they meet always chatter at first, to cover the awkwardness of being new to each other. David and Sally, however, seemed to have nothing to say and, more, seemed not to feel the need of saying anything.
    The Country Shop was crowded. The customers were mainly women who had stopped in to drink a restorative cup of tea after a day’s shopping. They found a table at the back, near the service door. Phoebe with a sudden pang recalled that this was one of the places where she used to meet Jimmy Minor, in what already had come to seem to her the old days. David was offering a Gold Flake to Sally, but she smiled and shook her head. “I only smoke these,” she said, taking out her packet of Craven A. “I’m a craven creature.”
    David, lighting up, only nodded distractedly. Phoebe watched him. What was he thinking about, that the notch between his eyebrows should have deepened so? He held out the flame of his lighter, and as she leaned down to it Sally for the briefest instant touched a finger to the back of his hand. Phoebe quickly looked away. Sally’s presence was making Phoebe see David with a new eye. How little she knew about him, after all. At once the question rose again in her mind: Do I love him?
    “I’m sorry about your brother,” he said now to Sally. He rotated the glowing tip of his cigarette against the edge of the ashtray before him on the table. “I didn’t know him very well. He was Phoebe’s friend, really.”
    Sally frowned and looked off to one side. “I don’t think anyone knew him very well,” she said. “He wasn’t the kind of person who revealed things about himself—not the important things.”
    “Yes,” David said. “I had that impression.”
    Despite herself, Phoebe was a little shocked by this brief exchange. So much more seemed expressed in it than the words would warrant. Or was she imagining it? “We used to meet here often, Jimmy and I,” she heard herself saying. She gave a little laugh. “He always looked so out of place, among the housewives and the men in tweed suits.”
    For some reason this made the other two go silent again; it was as if now she were the one who had said something inappropriate, something indiscreet. She let fall a soundless sigh. Why did everything have to be so awkward and difficult? It could not only be because she had not told David about Sally staying at the flat—that could not be it. Or was it that kiss again, spreading its heat over everything?
    At last, as if he had bethought himself, David began to make small talk, asking Sally where she lived, and what she worked at, and how life was in London nowadays—were the people there at last beginning to get over the war? “Oh,” Sally said, “everyone is cheerful and keeping busy—you know what Londoners are like.”
    David nodded, but Phoebe was thinking to herself that she did not know what Londoners were like, that in fact she had been to London only once, when she was young and her parents, her supposed parents, had brought her there for a weekend. What she remembered, and only vaguely, were the big department stores, Harrods, and Selfridges in Oxford Street, and the bomb craters everywhere, with pools of stagnant water standing in them. She seemed to recall the city smelling still of cordite and domestic gas and broken mortar and death. She thought now of Jimmy’s body floating in the canal, in the darkness, like —the words had formed themselves in her mind before she could stop them— like a dog . She wondered if David had seen the body when it was brought into the hospital. She had not asked him, nor would she. She seemed to remember her father saying David had been off that day. A week ago exactly that had been—only a week, yet it seemed so much longer.
    “I lived there, for a while,” he was saying, “in London. Hammersmith.”
    “That must have been nice,” Sally said. “I’m in Kilburn.” She smiled. “That’s not so nice.”
    The waitress came and they ordered things, though a moment afterwards Phoebe had forgotten what things they were.
    “Sally thinks,” she said, “that Jimmy was killed by tinkers.”
    The blurted words had come unbidden, and they fell on the table like something falling in a dream, slowly, with a silent crash. David, his head