IT WAS STILL THERE, THAT FACE, WHEN HE CAME TO THE FIRST TIME. The darkness was different now, softer, more diffuse, and it was not raining. Everything, in fact, was different. He did not understand where he was. It was Mal who was leaning over him, frowning and intent. But how had Mal known where to find him? Someone seemed to be holding his hand, but when he turned his head to see who it was a wave of nausea rose in him and he hastily shut his eyes. When he opened them, no more than a moment later, so it seemed to him, Mal was gone, and the darkness had changed again, was no longer darkness, indeed, but a grayish mistiness with something throbbing slowly and hugely at the heart of it-it was he, he was what was throbbing, in dull, vast, hardly believable pain. Cautiously this time he turned his eyes to the side and saw that it was Phoebe who was holding his hand, and for a moment in his drugged, half-dreaming state he thought she was his dead wife, Delia. She was sitting beside him, on the area steps, was it? Something like fog lay between them, or a bank of cloud, but solid enough for his hand in hers to rest on. For a giddy moment he was afraid he was going to burst into tears. It was not fog, but a white sheet with a blanket under it.
Sleep, he must sleep.
When he next awoke it was daylight, and Mal was there again, and Sarah was sitting beside the bed where Phoebe had sat, and off behind her there were other people, moving, speaking, and someone laughed. There were colored paper shapes strung across the ceiling.
“Quirke,” Sarah said. “You’ve come back.” She smiled. It seemed to cost her an effort, as if she, too, were in some pain.
Mal, standing, took a deep breath grimly in through his nostrils. “You’re in the Mater,” he said.
Quirke shifted, and his left knee buzzed like a beehive. “How bad is it?” he asked, surprised to find that his voice worked.
Mal shrugged. “You’ll live.”
“I meant my leg,” Quirke said. “My knee.”
“Not so bad. They put a pin in it.”
“Who did it?”
Mal’s eyes skittered off to the side. “The Guards don’t know,” he said, mumbling. “They’re assuming it was an attempted robbery.”
Quirke’s aching ribs would not allow him to laugh. “The pin, Mal,” he said. “Who put in the pin?”
“Oh.” Mal looked sheepish. “Billy Clinch.”
“Billy the butcher?” The sheepish look turned cold.
“He was on a skiing holiday. We got him to come back specially.”
“Thanks.” A big red-headed nurse approached.
“There you are,” she said to Quirke in a broad accent-Cork, was it, or Kerry? “We thought you were never going to wake up at all.”
She took his pulse and went away, her departure leaving the three of them somehow more at a loss than they had been before. Mal screwed up his lips and put his hands into the pockets of his tightly buttoned jacket with his thumbs outside and studied the toe caps of his shoes. He had not looked at Sarah once, nor she at him. Mal’s suit was light blue, and he wore a yellow bow tie. How incongruous on him they looked, Quirke thought, these festive glad rags.
“You’ll come to us, of course, when they let you out?” Sarah said.
But they both knew she did not mean it.
THE JUDGE VISITED HIM THE NEXT AFTERNOON. BY THEN HE HAD BEEN moved from the accident ward to a private room. The redheaded nurse ushered the old man in, impressed and excited by the coming of so eminent a visitor. She took his overcoat and hat and offered him tea, which he declined, and she said she would leave them in peace, so, but added, addressing the Judge, that if he, meaning Quirke, got in any way obstreperous, Your Honor had only to give a call and she would be here in a tick. “Thank you, nurse,” the Judge said, with his crinkliest smile, and she beamed at them both and departed. The old man looked at Quirke and arched an eyebrow. “Is that the way it is?” he said. “It’s true what they say, a doctor can’t afford to get sick.” He sat down on a chair beside the bed. Behind him a tall window looked out on a confusion of roofs and smoking chimneys and a sky filled with the flying debris of snow clouds. “Merciful God, Quirke,” he said, “what happened to you at all?”
Quirke, propped against a bank of pillows, gave a ruefully apologetic grimace. “Fell down a set of steps,” he said.
Outlined under the bedclothes his left leg, encased in plaster, was the size of a log.
“They must have been steep, the same steps,” the Judge said. In the window behind his shoulder a flock of small, black birds spurted raggedly from behind the rooftops and twirled about the tattered sky and then fell back in ones and pairs to wherever it was they had come from. “Are you all right?” The old man shifted awkwardly on the chair, chafing his squarish, liver-spotted hands. “I mean, is there anything you need?”
Quirke said no, and added that the Judge was good to come. At the top of his nose and between his eyes he had again that tremulous, hollow sensation of incipient weeping, an effect, he assumed, of delayed shock-his system, after all, would be in turmoil still, working desperately to fix itself, and why would he not want to weep?
“Mal and Sarah were here,” he said. “Phoebe, too, at some stage, when I was still half comatose.”
The Judge nodded. “Phoebe is a good girl,” he said, with a faint note of insistence, as if to forestall an objection. He molded his hands against each other again in a washing motion. “She’s going to America, did she tell you?”
Quirke felt a breathless, lifting sensation in the region of his heart. He said nothing and the Judge went on: “Yes, to Boston, to her Grandfather Crawford’s.” He was looking everywhere except at Quirke. “A holiday, only. Or vacation, as I believe they say out there.”
He fished in the pocket of his jacket and brought out his tobacco pipe and pouch and busied himself with them, plugging the damp dark strands into the bowl with the discolored ball of his thumb. Quirke watched him from the bed. The afternoon light was failing fast in the room. The old man struck a match and put it to the pipe and smoke and sparks flew up. Quirke said:
“So the boyfriend has been given his final marching orders, has he?”
The Judge was looking about for an ashtray in which to deposit the spent match. Quirke made no attempt to help, but lay and watched him, unblinking.
“These mixed marriages,” the Judge said, trying to sound unconcerned, “they never work.” He leaned forward and placed the match carefully on a corner of the wooden locker beside the bed. “Besides, she’s…what is she?”
“Twenty, in the new year.”
At last the Judge looked at him, the glimmer from the window making his faded blue eyes seem paler still. He said:
“A life is easily ruined, at that young age.”
Without lifting his head from the pillows Quirke put down a hand beside the bed and tried gropingly to open the locker, but in the end the Judge had to help him, and found his cigarettes for him and gave him one and struck a match. Then Quirke rang the nurse’s bell and the nurse came and he told her to fetch an ashtray. She said he should not be smoking but he ignored her, and she turned to the Judge and threw her eyes to heaven and asked him if he did not think Quirke was a holy terror, but went back into the corridor and a moment later returned with a tinfoil pie plate and said that would have to do them for it was all she could find. When she had gone they smoked in silence for a while. The old man’s pipe had fouled the air and Quirke’s cigarette tasted to him of burning cardboard. The last of the daylight was dying away into the shadowed corners of the room but neither man made a move to switch on the lamp beside the bed.