“What is your name?” he said at last.
“Maisie,” she said stoutly, as if in answer to a challenge. Her frown deepened and then cleared. “I remember you,” she said. “You’re the one that was here that day.” She looked at the walking stick, at the scars on his face. “What happened to you?”
“A fall,” he said.
“You were talking to Her Holiness, asking about the Moran one.”
Quirke felt a sort of rapid inward slide, as if he were on board a ship that had listed suddenly. The Moran one.
“Yes,” he said carefully. “Dolly Moran, yes. Did you know her?”
“And the old hake telling you she never heard tell of her!” She gave a short laugh that made her button nose wrinkle and lifted her upper lip. “That’s a good one, and her here every second week, collecting the babbies.”
Quirke, taking a deep breath, produced his cigarettes. Maisie eyed the packet hungrily.
“I’ll have one of them,” she said.
She held the cigarette clumsily between two fingers and a thumb and bent to the flame of the lighter that Quirke was offering. He asked carefully:
“So Dolly Moran came here, to collect babies?”
The smoke of their cigarettes was a deep, dense blue in the misty air.
“Aye,” she said, “for sending off to America.” Her look darkened. “They won’t get mine, that’s for sure.”
Of course! That was the change in her: the swollen stomach. “When are you due?” he asked.
She wrinkled her nose and her rabbit’s lip was drawn upwards again. “When am I what?”
“The baby,” he said, “when will it be born?”
“Oh.” She shrugged, glancing aside. “Not long.” Then she looked at him directly again, a sharp light dawning in those pale green eyes. “Why, what’s it to you?”
He peered beyond her down the gray length of the yard; how long could he manage to keep her here before suspicion and fear drew her away?
“Would they take your baby from you?” he said, trying to make his voice sound like the voices of the do-gooders who would occasionally turn up at Carricklea, asking about diet, and exercise, and how often the boys received the sacraments.
Maisie gave another snort. “Wouldn’t they half!”
He had not succeeded in deceiving her, any more than the do-gooders had deceived him. He said:
“Tell me, how did you come to be here?”
She gave him a pitying look. “My da put me in.”
As if everyone should know that simple fact.
“Why did he do that?”
“He wanted me out of the way, like, in case I might tell on him.”
“Tell what?”
Her eyes grew purposely vague. “Ah, nothing.”
“And the baby’s father?” She shook her head quickly and he knew he had made a mistake. He hastened on. “You say you won’t let them take the baby-so what will you do?”
“I’ll run away, so I will. I have money saved.”
He noted again, with a pang of pity, the laceless boots and bare, mottled legs, her work-roughened hands with their raw knuckles. He tried to picture her making her desperate escape but all he could conjure were images out of Victorian melodrama, of a shawled, stricken-faced girl hurrying along a snowy, rutted road with her precious bundle clutched to her breast and watched by a robin on a twig. The reality would be the mailboat and a rented room down a back street in some anonymous English city. If she got that far, which he very much doubted. Most likely she would not get beyond the gates of this place.
He was about to speak again but she put up a hand to silence him and lifted her head to the side, listening. Somewhere a door creaked on its hinges and slammed shut. Hastily, with an expert flick of her thumb, she knocked the burning tip from her cigarette and hid the unsmoked half inside her smock and turned to go.
“Wait,” he said urgently. “What’s wrong? Are you frightened?”
“You’d be frightened,” she said darkly, “if you knew them crowd.”
“What crowd?” he said. “What crowd, Mary?”
“Maisie.” Her eyes were chips of glass now.
He put a hand to his forehead. “Sorry, sorry-Maisie.” Again he scanned the long yard behind her. “It’s all right,” he said in desperation. “Look, there’s no one.”
But it was too late, she was already turning away. “There’s always somebody,” she said simply. The distant, unseen door opened again, creaking. Hearing it, she crouched in stillness, a sprinter on the blocks. He fumbled the packet of cigarettes from his pocket and held it out to her. She threw him a look, cold and bleak and almost contemptuous, and snatched the cigarettes from his hand and stowed them in the pocket of her smock and was gone.
24
HE WANTED TO GO TO THE MOUNTAINS. EVERY DAY ON HIS WALKS HE looked longingly at them, they seemed to be just beyond the bridge at Leeson Street, snow-clad and as if afloat, like mountains in a dream. It was Sarah who offered to drive him there, and arrived at his door one afternoon in Mal’s leather-upholstered Jaguar. To Quirke’s nose the car inside had what he was sure must be its owner’s smell, thin, sharp, and medicinal. Sarah drove with nervous intensity, pressing her back against the seat and holding the steering wheel at arm’s length, her hands clamped close together on the top quadrant; on left turns she leaned so far to the side that Quirke felt stray tendrils of her hair touch his cheek like filaments of charged electric wire. She was quiet, and he could sense her brooding on something, and he was conscious of a stirring of his own unease. She had said on the telephone that she wanted to talk to him. Was she going to tell him what she knew about Mal? For by now Quirke was certain that she did know, that she had somehow found Mal out. Or perhaps he had broken down and confessed all to her. But whatever all was, Quirke did not want her to tell it to him, did not want to hear those things, in her mouth, did not want to have to sympathize, did not want to take her hand and look into her eyes and tell her how much he cared for her; that was gone, now, there would be no more hand-holding, no more soulful gazing in her eyes, no more of anything. He had gone beyond Sarah, into another, darker place, a place of his own behind another doorway like the doorway through which often in the past she had invited him, in vain, to enter with her.
THEY WENT BY WAY OF ENNISKERRY AND GLENCREE. THE HIGH BOGS were hidden under snow but already there were newborn lambs on the slopes, spindly, dazed-looking scraps of white and black with stumpy, clockwork tails; even through the rubber-sealed windows of the car their plaintive bleatings could be thinly heard. The mountain roads had been cleared but there were patches of black ice, and on a steep bend approaching a narrow stone bridge the back end of the big car slewed sideways and with cowlike stubbornness refused to straighten until they were across the bridge, the parapet of which the left mudguard missed by what Quirke, wildly looking back, saw had been no more than an inch or two. Sarah steered the machine to the side of the road and stopped, and closed her eyes and leaned her forehead in the space between her hands on the rim of the steering wheel.
“Did we hit anything?” she murmured.
“No,” Quirke said. “We would have known, if we had.”
She gave a low, groaning laugh. “Thank God,” she said. “His precious car.”
She switched off the ignition and they sat for a while listening to the cooling engine ticking and plinking. Gradually the wind, too, made itself heard, faint and fitful, whistling in the car’s front grille and thrumming in the limp strands of rusted barbed wire beside the road. Sarah lifted her head from the wheel and leaned it on the seat-back, still with her eyes closed. Her face was drawn and paper-pale, as if the blood had all drained out of it; this could not be solely the effect of the near miss on the bridge. Quirke’s unease deepened. His leg, too, began to ache, because of the thinned air up here, he supposed, or the cold that was seeping into the car now that the heater was off, or perhaps just because of the cramped position he had been forced to hold it in during the journey up from the city. He suggested that they should get out and walk a little, and she asked if he would be able, and he said impatiently that of course he would, and was already opening the door and lowering his leg with grunts and curses to the ground.