Is it Quirke I am remembering, really, or another, for instance that boy who was my first love? Have I mentioned him? I cannot remember his name. He lodged at our house one summer with his mother. They were English, or Welsh, maybe: I recall some oddity of accent. The mother must have been in some terrible trouble, fleeing debts, perhaps, or a brutal husband. She would spend entire days in bed, not making a sound, until my mother, unable any longer to stand the suspense, would go up to her with the excuse of a cup of tea, or a vase of roses from the garden. The boy and I were of an age, nine, I suppose, not more than ten, certainly. He was not good-looking, or striking in any particular way. He had thin, reddish hair and freckles and weak eyes, and big hands, I remember, and big, bristly, porcine knees. I adored him; I would lie in bed at night and think about him, devising adventures in which he and I joined forces against robbers and bands of Redskins. My love for him was innocent of all carnal yearnings, of course, and went undeclared; I would not even have known to call it love, would have been shocked at the word. Nor did I know if he knew what I felt for him, nor what he might feel for me, if he felt anything. One day when we were walking through the town together—I was always brimmingly proud to be seen in his company, thinking everyone was noticing and admiring us—all casually I linked my arm in his, and he stiffened and frowned, and looked away, and after a step or two, keeping up a carefully preoccupied air, withdrew his arm delicately from mine. On his last night I crept down, in a fever of sorrow already, and stood outside the door of the room he shared with his mother and tried to hear him breathing as he slept or, better still, as he lay awake, thinking of me, as it might be, and presently, to my dismay and joy, I heard from within the sound of jagged, muffled sobs, and hoarsely I whispered his name, and a moment later the door opened an inch and not his but his mother’s blotched and tear-stained face appeared in the crack. She said nothing, only looked at me, a novice in the art of sorrow, and gave a grim, shallow sigh and without a word withdrew and shut the door. Next morning they left early, and he did not come to say goodbye. I stood at my window and watched them struggling across the square with their bags, and even when they were gone from sight I could still see him, his big feet in cheap sandals, his rounded shoulders, the back of his head with its whorl of colourless hair.
We turn away from the sunlight, from the squashed slug, the dirty picture, turn back to the house, and decades flash past.
“Ever see a ghost here?” Quirke asked. “They used to say this place was haunted.”
I looked at him. He was absorbed in his cards.
“Haunted?” I said. “By what?”
He shrugged.
“Just old stories,” he said. “Old pishogues.”
“What sort of stories? “
He sat back on his chair, which gave a shriek, and squinted up into a far corner of the darkness beyond the candlelight. Now Lily was looking at him too, her mouth crookedly open a little way; I wish she would not do that, it makes her look like a retard.
“Don’t remember,” Quirke said. “Something about a child.”
“A child.”
“That died. The mother, too. Probably one of the ones that was lodging here…” He looked at me and indicated the girl and let an eyelid flicker.
“He means,” Lily said to me with ironic emphasis, “someone that got pregnant. I, of course, don’t know where babies come from.”
Quirke ignored her.
“Always queer goings-on, in an old house, like this,” he said mildly. “I’ll play the seven.”
Life, life is always a surprise. Just when you think you have got the hang of it, have learned your part to perfection, someone in the cast will take it into her head to start improvising, and the whole damned production will be thrown into disorder. Lydia turned up today, unannounced. “Well, how could I let you know I was coming,” she snapped, “since you seem to have torn the telephone out of the wall?” When she arrived I was sitting in my eyrie, scribbling away. Have I described this little room, my hidey-hole and refuge? It is at the back of the house, up three high concrete steps, and through a little arched, green-painted door that gives a queer monastic effect. I judge that the room was built on after the house was finished, as a chambre de bonne, though any maid the builder had in mind would have had to be a midget. Only in the middle of the room is there space to stand upright, for the ceiling slopes down steeply, almost to the floor at one side. It is like being in a tent, or the attic of a big doll’s house. I have a little bamboo table at which I write, and a straw-bottomed chair brought up from the scullery. At my elbow, in the end wall opposite the door, a single small square window gives on to a sunny corner of the garden. Outside, just below the window, there is a clump of old geraniums, whose blossoms when the sun is at a certain angle throw a pinkish cast across the pages of my notebook. In the mornings I clamber in here as into a diving bell and shut myself away from the Quirkes, and brood, and dream, and remember, now and then setting down a sentence or two, a stray thought, a dream. There is a distinct rhetorical cast to the tone of these jottings, inevitable, I suppose, given my actor’s training, yet often I catch myself speaking the words aloud as I write them, as if I were addressing them directly to some known and sympathetic ear. Since I found out that the Quirkes are living in the house I have been spending more and more of my time here. I am happy, or happiest, at least, in this sealed chamber, suspended in the tideless sea of myself.
My wife is a considerable person in many ways. She has been a staunch defence against whatever arrows and bomb-balls the world outside might sling into the compound of our lives together. You should have seen the first-night critics shrink when they beheld her descending on them armed with cigarette and wineglass. However, she is not at her best in emotional adversity. Daddy was too indulgent toward her, I believe, with the result that she has never lost the expectation that there will always be someone in charge who will deal with, for instance, the unanticipated eventualities of marriage and its inevitable woes. Not that she would be incapable of handling such things herself; as I say, she is far more formidable than I am when it comes to practical matters. It is just that she has the queenly conviction that she should not be compelled to spend from her store of strength, which she maintains as if for the commonweal, against the day when a real crisis shall arise, and she will be called upon to burst forth in breastplate and plumed helmet, all pennants flying. When I heard her voice today from far off beyond my little green door I experienced a moment of panic, as if I were a fugitive in hiding behind a false wall and she the head of the secret police. Venturing down from my lair I found her striding about the hall in an angry fluster. She was wearing black leggings and a bright-red, hip-length smock that gave her an ungainly and unbecomingly corpulent aspect. When she is angry a high warbling tearful note rises in her voice.