“I used to come here with Delia,” he said, and regretted it at once, for Phoebe pounced, of course.
“What was she like, Delia?” she asked greedily, putting a hand on his arm and squeezing it. “I mean, really. I want to know, now that I’m here. I can almost feel her presence, in the house.”
“Oh, exciting, I suppose.”
Was it true? She had been wholly without scruples of any kind-her father’s daughter-and that had certainly excited him. But he had hated her, too. Curious, loving and hating, the two sides of the precious coin she had so casually handed him. Phoebe was nodding solemnly as if he had uttered a profound insight. This eagerness of hers to know what Delia had been really like-did she have some unconscious inkling of who Delia really was? She said:
“I thought Mummy was supposed to be the exciting one.”
“We were all different, then.” He sounded to himself like a fond old fool, maundering over the lost years. It occurred to him that he was sick of being Quirke, but knew there was no one else he could be. “I mean,” he said quickly, irritated, “we were all someone else, your father, Sarah, me-” He broke off. “Look, let’s go back, this wind is making my head ache.”
But it was not only the wind that was tormenting him. When Phoebe spoke Delia’s name now he felt as an adulterer might feel when his wife makes casual mention of the family friend who is his secret lover. He knew that he should tell his daughter-his daughter!-the truth, should tell her who her real parents were, but he did not know how to say it. It was too enormous to be put into words, a thing outside the commonplace run of life. It would not square, he told himself, with what they had been to each other up to now, the easy tolerance there had been between them, the freedom, the untaxing gaiety. It was absurd-how could he begin to be a father to her, after all these years, the so many years that made up the entirety of her life? Yet even as he went along here with her hand tugging at his arm he was convinced that he could feel the loss of her, the absence of her, from whatever hollow place it was in his heart that she would have filled, in those years. Since the moment in the mountains when Sarah had made her confession to him there had been gathering steadily in him, like a head of water behind a dam, something which if he released it would swamp his life and drown his peace of mind, and so he limped along, and smiled, and entertained his oblivious daughter’s chattering inquiries about the woman she did not know was her mother. Someday, he told himself, with almost a vindictive satisfaction, someday he would suffer for this laxity, this laziness of spirit, this cowardice. For that was what it was-plain funk. He might make all the excuses he wished, might talk of the tolerance there had been between them, the freedom and the gaiety that he must not put at risk, but he knew it was just an alibi he was attempting to construct, a front behind which he could go on as he had always done, in peace, being nobody’s father.
Andy Stafford had climbed into the car and was just about to light a cigarette. He put it away hastily when he saw them turn back, Quirke swiveling abruptly on his stick like some sort of huge mechanical toy man. In the rearview mirror Andy caught a glimpse of his own reflection and was startled by what he saw, the somehow grimacing face with its dark, furtive eye. He studied Phoebe through the windshield as she approached, the wind molding her coat against her form. When she had got into the car he had tried to spread the tartan lap blanket over her knees but she had taken it from him without giving him even a glance and tossed it over her shoulder into the back window space. Now he listened idly to the two of them talking behind him as the car lurched down the track away from the dunes on its voluptuously squashy suspension.
“How did you meet up,” Phoebe was asking, “the four of you?”
Quirke, his hands set atop his stick, was watching the dwindling shore through the side window.
“Your grandfather had fixed for Mal and me to work at the hospital,” he said. “Summer jobs, you know, with a view to something more permanent, if it worked out, which it didn’t, for various reasons.”
“Delia being one of them?”
He shrugged.
“I might have stayed. Big bucks, even in those days. But then…” He let it drift away. He had the feeling that he was lying even though he was not; the secret that he carried was suddenly infecting everything. “Your grandmother was there, being treated, at the hospital. Sarah came to see her. She didn’t know her mother was dying. I was the one who told her. I think she was glad-to be told, I mean. Then we were a foursome for a while, Sarah, Delia, Mal, me.”
He stopped. Big bucks. A foursome. What was it-was he hoping the momentum of mere talk would lead him to blurt out another, altogether different word, would lull him into telling her without his intending it the things he had not the nerve to utter straight out, the things it was her right to know? He saw she was no longer listening to him, but was gazing out blankly through the window on her side as the car gained the main road and turned in the direction of North Scituate. Quirke studied the back of Andy Stafford’s head, sleek as a seal’s and narrow at the neck, and pondered how unmistakable it was, the physiognomy of the poor, the low, the dispossessed. Phoebe’s voice startled him.
“Rose wants me to stay here.”
She spoke in a sort of sighing fall, pretending weary indifference.
“Here?” he said.
She glanced at him archly. With his hands folded like that on the handle of the walking stick he had the distinct look of Grandfather Griffin.
“Yes,” she said, “here. In America. In Boston.”
“Hmm.”
“What do you mean, Hmm?”
He looked again at the back of the driver’s head, uncannily motionless in the moving car. He lowered his voice but spoke with a deliberate emphasis.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“And why not?” she inquired.
He thought for a moment. What was he to say? After all, why should she not stay here? Why should she not do anything she wanted? Who was he to advise her how to live her life?
“What about home?” he said. “What about Conor Carrington?”
She made a wry face and turned to look out her window again. There was the church with the white spire they had passed by last night in the mist-hung darkness; today it looked ordinary and even a little sheepish, as if its ghostly nocturnal springing up were a prank it was ashamed to be reminded of in daylight.
“Home,” Phoebe said quietly, “feels very far away, here. I don’t mean just in miles.”
“It is far away,” Quirke said, “in miles and everything else. That’s the point.” He paused, floundering, then tried again. “I promised your-I promised Sarah I’d look after you. I don’t think she’d want you to stay here. In fact, I know she wouldn’t.”
“Oh?” she said, turning again to stare at him superciliously down her nose, and for a second he saw how she would look when she was middle-aged, a slightly less hard-eyed, less imperious Delia. “Just how do you know she wouldn’t?”
He felt a pressure inside his chest-was it anger?-and had to pause again. He was acutely aware now of the back of Andy Stafford’s head, which seemed to have become a bulbed and shiny listening device. He made his voice go lower still.
“There are things you don’t know, Phoebe,” he said. She was still fixing him with that ingenuously haughty stare.