Quirke 06 - Holy Orders

lowered, gave Sally an upward glance. “Why do you think that?” he asked. Phoebe he ignored, as if it were not she who had said it, as if the words had somehow spoken themselves.
    “I’m not sure that I do think that,” Sally said. She smiled uncertainly, and glanced at Phoebe. “I’m not sure what I think. No one seems to know what really happened.”
    Someone murdered him, Phoebe wanted to say, someone beat him to death and threw him like a dog into the canal. Why not tinkers—it’s as good an explanation as any. But she knew, of course, that it was not an explanation. What was the matter with her, she wondered, why was she feeling so upset? David was looking at her now, thoughtfully, leaning his face away from the smoke of his cigarette. “What does your father think?” he asked.
    Phoebe shrugged. “He doesn’t know what happened.” She felt an involuntary shiver, of anger, so it seemed to her—but why was she angry? “No one knows.”
    They were silent again, all three, their eyes fixed on the table. Phoebe had the impression of something happening, some slow unfolding, from which she was excluded. David looked up at Sally again. “It must be very painful for you.”
    Sally pressed her lips together and nodded. “Yes,” she said, “it is. I loved him.”
    “They were twins,” Phoebe said. Yet again she regretted having spoken, having blurted out more awkward words. It was not her business to say these things.
    She was glad when at that moment the waitress came with their tea.
    David was speaking to Sally again. “ Y ou were twins,” he said. “I see. That must make it even harder for you.”
    Sally took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said, “yes, it does.”
    Tea. Bread. Little sandwiches. Biscuits. Phoebe ate, and drank, and tasted nothing. A wave of misery was welling up in her, unaccountably. Something was being lost—that was how it seemed: not that she was losing something, but that something was losing itself. What was it? She felt as if one whole side of her life were shearing off and toppling slowly into the sea.
    She watched Sally’s small hands, slightly chafed and reddened, with their square-cut fingernails and milk-blue veins.
    She remembered a lesson from her school days: amo, amas, amat . Love, yes. Amo, I love. But whom did she love?
    David was leaning across the table to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray, and now he glanced back at her, sidelong, inquiringly, as if she had said something. Had she, without realizing it?
    Lifting her cup to her lips, Sally smiled to herself, as if at some private remembrance. Phoebe studied her, her delicate, freckled skin, her hair the color of autumn leaves under water, those darkly luminous eyes. What had she and David been doing when Phoebe was in the bedroom, fetching her coat? What had passed between them, that the silence should seem so strange when Phoebe returned and they were standing there, David at the window with his back to the room and Sally in front of the mirror above the fireplace? Had they kissed, as she and Sally had kissed, in front of the gas fire, that night when the lightning struck?
    Amo, amas, amat.
    Amamus . We love.

18

    The heavy evening rain had turned to mist, fine and light as cobweb, that did not so much fall as drift vaguely this way and that through the dense and glossy darkness. On Ailesbury Road each streetlight had its own penumbra, a large soft bright ball of filaments streaming outwards in all directions, and the lit windows of the houses were set in frames of the same muted yet luminous gray radiance. Quirke had told the taxi driver to drop him at the corner of Merrion Road, he was not sure why, and from there he had set off to walk up to the house, his hat pulled low on his forehead and the collar of his overcoat drawn tight around his neck. He had a scratchy sensation at the back of his throat. Was it the lingering effect of the poteen, or was it that malaise that had been threatening for days? The possibility that he was starting a cold or a dose of flu struck him as grimly comic. If he was dying, it seemed now that he would die sneezing.
    He kept his eye warily on those streetlights with their furry halos. Over the past couple of days he had developed a new symptom of whatever it was that ailed him. It was not a matter of hallucinations, like the one he had experienced with the garrulous old majordomo at Trinity Manor, or when he had thought he had seen the lupine dog under the tinker’s