“Did you miss me?” she whispered, grazing his neck with her lips. “Tell me you did, even if you didn’t.”
“Of course I missed you,” he said, making his voice go thick as if with emotion. “How can you ask?”
When they were in the flat she looked about with lively interest, as if she had been away for years. She took off her head scarf and shook out her dark-bronze hair. She was wearing the short fur coat that he had bought her for her birthday, over a dark blue silk suit with a narrow skirt that accentuated the curve of her bottom. When she had taken the coat off she turned her head back sharply and glanced down to check the seams of her stockings, and seeing her do it, as she did so often, he felt himself smile. He had missed her, he told himself; it was not entirely untrue.
“Can you light a fire or something?” she asked. “It’s bloody freezing in here.”
He squatted in front of the fireplace and put a match to the gas fire, and the gas ignited with its usual soft whomp! That was another thing that irritated him about Isabel, that she seemed always to be cold.
He made coffee for them both and laced it with whiskey. He asked if she was hungry, and offered to make an omelette for her, but she said no, that she had been forced to endure enough boardinghouse meals in the past six weeks to cure her of wanting to eat anything ever again. “Do you think I’ve put on weight?” She surveyed herself critically in the big and incongruously ornate mirror behind the sideboard. “I think I have. God!”
Quirke was admiring the way the hem of her buttoned-up short jacket flared out over her slim hips. “You look wonderful,” he said, and was relieved to realize that he meant it.
“Do I?” She turned from the mirror and looked at him, measuring him up and down with an arched eyebrow. “I wish I could say the same for you. I suppose you’ve been boozing nonstop since I left.”
“Oh, nonstop,” he said. “Blotto every night.”
“You should let me marry you,” she said.
“Should I?”
“Yes, you should. I’d see to it that you were set straight. Cook proper meals for you, iron your shirts, put you to bed at night with a warm flannel on your chest to ward off the chill. And if you came home late I’d be standing behind the door with a rolling pin, to teach you the error of your ways. Can’t you see it?”
“I can. Andy Capp and Flo.”
“Who?”
“Andy Capp and his battle-axe missus — cartoon characters in the paper.”
She put her head to one side, smiling thinly. “A cartoon strip,” she said, in a voice suddenly turned brittle, “is that how you see us? Give me a cigarette.”
She sat on the arm of the armchair by the fireplace and crossed her legs, while he went to the mantelpiece and took two cigarettes from the silver box there, lit both, and gave one to her. She was leaning across to look at the book he had left lying open on the chair’s other arm. “Belisarius,” she read. “Who’s he when he’s at home?”
“Byzantine general. They say the emperor Justinian had his eyes put out and left him to beg in the streets.”
“Why?”
“Too successful in the wars, a threat to the throne.”
“Typical.”
“Of what?”
“Men.”
“Who was the typical one, Belisarius or the emperor?” She gave him a scathing glance. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s only a legend.”
“Like all history.”
He smiled at her blankly, nodding. Something dangerous had come into the atmosphere, a sense of rancor. He did not want a fight.
“So,” she said, “tell me what’s been happening. It feels as if I’ve been away forever.”
He saw again fleetingly, but with startling clearness, that image of the canal bank, the soft darkness over the water, the leaning, stealthy trees. “Jimmy Minor was killed,” he said.
Still perched on the chair arm, with her shapely legs crossed, she had forgotten about the book and was examining idly the toe of one of her shoes. Now she frowned, and seemed to give herself a tiny shake. “What?”
Quirke added another drop of whiskey to the cold dregs of coffee in his cup and drank. The bitter taste made him wince. “Jimmy Minor,” he said. “You met him, didn’t you? Reporter on the—”
“I know who he was,” she said sharply, turning to look at him. “That friend of Phoebe’s. Killed, you say?”
“Murdered. Someone, or someones, beat him to death. He was found in the canal below Leeson Street Bridge.”
She was gazing at him now in what seemed a kind of wonderment. “When?”
“Couple of days ago.”
“My God,” she said tonelessly. She rose and walked to the fireplace and put one hand on the mantelpiece and stood there, facing the mirror, her eyes hooded. She was silent for a time, then spoke in an oddly faraway voice. “Don’t you ever feel anything?”
He looked at the pale back of her neck. “How do you mean?”
“You just — you just announce these things, as if…” She stopped. She was shaking her head. Now she turned. She was pale, and her mouth quivered. “Don’t you even care?”
“About what? About Jimmy Minor being killed? Of course I care—”
“You don’t!” she cried. “You couldn’t, and speak of it in that — that offhand way.”
He sighed. “I care,” he said, “of course I care. But what good does caring do? Caring is only another way of feeling sorry for yourself.”
She was looking at him with such intensity that her eyes seemed to have developed a slight cast. “What a monster you are, Quirke,” she said softly, almost in a murmur.
He turned away from her, suddenly furious. It was always the same, there was always someone telling him how awful he was, how cold, how cruel, when as far as he could see he was only being honest.
“What about Phoebe?” Isabel asked behind him. “Is she all right?”
“She’s fine. She was upset when she heard, but now she’s fine.” He wanted to say, She’s my daughter, isn’t she? And the Quirkes don’t care. But he was remembering Phoebe in the hotel that day, after he had told her, her ashen face, her trembling hands. Perhaps she was not fine; perhaps she was not fine at all. “You might ring her up,” he said.
He still had his back turned to her, afraid she would see the bloodshot anger in his eyes. But then, suddenly, in an instant, the anger drained away, and he just felt tired.
He returned to the mantelpiece and took another cigarette and lit it. Isabel had sat down again, in the armchair this time, and was staring into the pulsing grid of the gas fire. “Give me some more whiskey, will you?” she asked. “In a glass. I don’t suppose you have any gin?” She frowned distractedly. “I should buy a bottle, keep it here”—she gave a cold laugh—“for emergencies.”
He fetched a tumbler from the kitchen and poured a measure of whiskey and handed it to her, his fingers brushing hers; her skin felt cold and slightly moist. He had an urge to take her by the arm and drag her behind him into the bedroom and strip her of her clothes and lie down with her and clasp her against him, the chill, long length of her, and smell her hair and her perfumed throat, and put his lips to hers and forget, forget everything, if only for a few minutes. He wondered why he was so upset. Perhaps after all he did care about Jimmy Minor, perhaps he cared more than he knew or dared acknowledge. He was a mystery to himself, always had been, always would be.
“Tell me what happened,” she said.
He leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece. He realized that he was glad of the heat of the fire; he too must have been cold, without knowing even that. “A courting couple spotted the body,” he said. “It was naked, in the water—” It. He glanced at her, expecting her to pounce on the word and begin berating him again, but she said nothing. “He was beaten to death, as I say. Kicked, and so on. I hardly recognized him, when they brought him in.”