“So,” Quirke said, “I suppose this is about Mal?”
She looked at him searchingly. How much did he know? She wanted to ask, she dearly wanted to ask, but she could not bring herself to speak the words. What if he knew more than she did, what if he was privy to things even more terrible than she had learned of? She tried to concentrate, grasping at her scattering thoughts. What had he asked her? Yes: if it was about Mal that she had come. She decided to ignore this. She said:
“Phoebe wants to marry that young man.” She touched the handle of the mug with her fingertips; it felt slightly sticky. “It’s impossible, of course.”
Quirke frowned, and she could see him readjusting his thoughts, his strategies: Phoebe, then, not Mal. “Impossible?” he said.
She nodded. “And needless to say, there’s no talking to her.”
“Tell her to go ahead and do it,” he said. “Tell her you’re all for it. Nothing more likely to put her off the idea.”
She thought it best to disregard this also. “Would you speak to her?”
He leaned back in the chair and lifted high his head and looked at her along one shallow side of his flattened nose, nodding slowly, grimly. “I see,” he said. “You want to persuade me to persuade Phoebe to give up her inconvenient boyfriend.”
“She’s so young, Quirke.”
“So were we.”
“She has all her life before her.”
“So had we.”
“Yes,” she said, pouncing, “and look what mistakes we made!” The fierceness was gone as quickly as it had come. “Besides, it wouldn’t work. They’d make sure of that.”
Quirke raised an eyebrow. “They? You mean Mal? Would he really want to destroy her happiness?”
She was shaking her head before he had finished speaking, her eyes cast down. “You don’t understand, Quirke. There’s a whole world. You can’t win with a whole world against you, I know that.”
Quirke looked out the window. Clouds the color of watered ink were roiling on the far horizon; it would rain. He was silent a moment, studying her with narrowed eyes. She looked away. “What is it, Sarah?” he said.
“What?” She tried to be offhand and airy. “What’s what?”
He would not let go; she felt like the quarry borne down on by a single, relentless, huge hound.
“Something’s happened,” he said. “Are you and Mal-?”
“I don’t want to talk about Mal,” she said, so fast it might have been not a sentence but a single word. She put her hands on the table before her, beside her gloves, and looked at them. “Then there’s my father,” she said. He waited. She was still frowning at her hands, as if they had suddenly become an object of fascination. “He’s threatened to cut her out of his will.”
Quirke wanted to laugh. Old Crawford’s will, no less-what next? Then he had a sudden, unnervingly clear image of horse-faced Wilkins, his assistant, waiting for him in the lab-Sinclair was having one of his strategic bouts of flu-and shivered at this glimpse of the world of the dead, his world.
“What about the Judge?” he said. “Why not get him to talk to Phoebe, or to Mal-to your father, maybe, too? Surely he’d knock sense into them all and make them solve it?” She gave him a pitying look. He said, “There will have to be a solution, one way or the other, in the end. I say it again: tell her she can marry him, urge her on. I bet she’ll give Bertie Wooster the old heave-ho.”
Sarah would not smile. “I don’t want Phoebe to be tied down in an early marriage,” she said.
He laughed incredulously. “An early marriage? What’s this? I thought it was because Carrington is a Prod?”
She was shaking her head again, her eyes on the table. “Everything is changing,” she said. “It will be different in the future.”
“Oh, yes, in a hundred years’ time life will be beautiful.”
She shook her head stubbornly. “It will be different, in the future,” she said again. “Girls of Phoebe’s generation, they’ll have a chance to escape, to be themselves, to”-she laughed, embarrassed by what she was about to say-“to live!” She lifted her eyes to his and shrugged one shoulder, abashed. “I wish you’d speak to her, Quirke.”
He sat forward so abruptly her gloves on the table seemed to shrink back from him, clasping each other. How lifelike they looked, Sarah thought, a pair of black leather gloves. As if some otherwise invisible third person at the table were wringing her hands.
“Listen,” he said impatiently, “I have no time for that chinless wonder Phoebe has set her heart on, but if she’s determined to marry him, then good luck to her.” She made to protest but he held out a hand to silence her. “However, if you were to ask me to speak to her, for you-not for Mal, or your father, or anyone else, but for you-then I would.”
In the silence they heard the rattle of raindrops blown against the window. She sighed, then rose and picked up her gloves, banishing that other, invisible, anguished sharer of her troubles. As if to herself she said, ruefully, “Well, I tried.” She smiled. “Thank you for the tea.” The two mugs stood untouched, a crinkled wafer of scum floating on the faintly quaking surface of the gray liquid. “I must go.”
“Ask me,” Quirke said.
He had not risen, but sat sideways at the table, poised and tense, one hand on the back of his chair and the other flat on the smeared tabletop. How could he be so cruel, playing with her always like this?
“You know I can’t,” she said.
“Why can’t you?”
She gave a laugh of mild exasperation. “Because I’d be in your debt!”
“No.”
“Yes!” she said, as vehement as he. “Do it, Quirke. Do it for Phoebe-for her happiness.”
“No,” he said again, flatly. “For you.”
16
IT WAS SATURDAY, IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON, AND Quirke was wondering if he should find another pub to drink in. A dry October storm was sweeping through the streets and he had ducked into McGonagle’s with his coat collar up and a newspaper under his arm. The place was almost empty but he had no sooner settled himself in the snug than Davy appeared at the hatch and handed in a glass of whiskey. “Compliments of the gent in the blue suit,” he said, jerking a thumb behind him towards the bar and giving a skeptical sniff. Quirke put his head out at the door and saw him, perched on one haunch on a stool at the bar: suit of a shiny, metallic blue, horn-rimmed specs, black hair swept back from a lumpy forehead. He lifted his glass to Quirke in a wordless salute and smiled, baring his lower front teeth. He was vaguely familiar, but from where? Quirke drew in his head and sat with his hands on his knees and contemplated the whiskey as if expecting it to foam up suddenly and overflow with rancid whorls of smoke.