She lifted her head. “You did the postmortem?”
“There was no one else.”
“Doesn’t it”—her gaze drifted back to the fire—“doesn’t it trouble you, doing that to someone you know?”
“I couldn’t do my job if I let it trouble me.”
She gave her head a dismissive toss. “Yes yes, of course. You always say that, and I always forget you’re going to say it.”
He looked at a framed photograph beside his elbow. There were four people in the picture, and two of them, his wife and her sister, were dead. He had loved them both. “A corpse is a corpse,” he said, sounding harsher than he had intended. “There’s no one there anymore. Hard to care for flesh when the soul is gone.”
She laughed, a soft snort. “I thought you didn’t believe in the soul.”
“I don’t.”
“Then what is it that’s alive, what is it that goes when the body dies?”
“I’ve no idea.” He was tired.
She looked at him and smiled sadly. “You’ve lived too long among the dead, Quirke,” she said.
He nodded. “Yes, I suppose I have.” She was not the first one to have told him that, and she would not be the last.
* * *
He liked the coolness of her bare flank under his hand, when she lay on her side like this, turned away from him, lightly sleeping. The bed was not really wide enough to accommodate their two recumbent bodies. His right arm, trapped under her, had gone to sleep, but he left it there for fear of waking her. He had turned off the bedside lamp, and the moon was in a high-up corner of the window, a fat indifferent eye watching over the world. In his thoughts he was seeing yet again the dark canal, the silent towpath. What was out there in the night that he was longing for? Rest, quiet, escape. Death, maybe. But what kind of death? Isabel was right, he had seen too many corpses, had sectioned them out and delved into their innards, to entertain any illusions about what the priests used to call our final going forth. Dying, he was convinced, was no more than an ending.
No, what he yearned for in his deepest heart was not death, not the grand and terrible thing that priests and poets spoke of, but rather a state of nonexistence, of simply not being here. Yet that state was unthinkable, for in it there would be no being — it would not be him, inexistent, but not-him. It would not be a state at all. It would be nothing, and nothing is inconceivable. All his life, for as long as he could remember, he had wrestled with this conundrum. Was that why he had become a pathologist, in hope of penetrating nearer to the heart of the mystery? If so, it had been in vain. The dead did not give up their secrets, for they had none; they had nothing, were nothing, only a parcel of blood and bones, gone cold.
Without his realizing it, his hand must have tightened on the soft flesh above Isabel’s hip, for suddenly she started awake and tried to sit up, leaning on an elbow. “What?” she said sharply. “What is it?” He touched his fingers to her face soothingly, cupped her cheek in his palm, and said it was all right. She lay down again slowly on her side, facing him now. “I was dreaming,” she murmured. She was staring into the darkness, he could see the glint of her eyes in the moonlight. “Something about my — something about my father. He was crying.” She moved forward, pressing her face against his shoulder. He reached past her and switched on the bedside lamp. Isabel whimpered in protest and clung the more tightly to him. He scrabbled for his cigarettes, found them, lit one. Isabel drew back, sighing. “Where’s my slip?” she said. “I’m perished.”
He got out of bed and picked up her clothes from where she had piled them on a chair; in the deeper folds there was still a trace of the warmth of her body. How long had they been in bed? “Give me the blouse,” Isabel said. “It’s warmer.”
She took it from him and put it on, squirming amid the clinging bedclothes. He went to the bathroom and came back wearing a dressing gown. Isabel was sitting with her back against a bank of pillows, combing her fingers ineffectually through her hair. “You shouldn’t smoke so late at night,” she said distractedly.
He sat down on the side of the bed, half turned away from her. She smiled, and lifted a hand and touched the comma of hair at the nape of his neck. “You really do look terrible, do you know that?”
He nodded dully. He was thinking of going out to the kitchen and pouring himself another whiskey, as a pick-me-up, but he knew it would only lead to more nagging.
“You are glad to have me back, aren’t you?” Isabel asked brightly, though he caught the flicker of anxiety in her voice. It was an unanswerable question, or at least a question to which there could be no answer forceful enough to sound convincing. Why did everything have to be so difficult?
“I did miss you,” he said, flinching inwardly at the inadequacy of the words, the banality.
“Tell me about Jimmy Minor,” Isabel said, changing the subject, her voice gone hard. “Tell me what happened.”
“I told you. There’s nothing more. He was beaten to death and thrown in the canal.”
“Why?”
He showed her his hands. “I don’t know.”
“What about the police? They must have some idea. That inspector friend of yours — what’s his name?”
“Hackett.”
“What does he think?”
“He doesn’t know what to think.”
Isabel was watching him, her mouth tightly set at the thought of Jimmy Minor and his violent end. “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “why do you have to have such a horrible job?”
He felt sympathy for her. It could not be easy, dealing with him, trying to find a way past the barriers he had spent his life erecting and which he never ceased to tend and maintain. Why did she bother? If he were to ask, she would say it was because she loved him, and he supposed she did, but he was not sure what that meant. Other people seemed to understand love, without it being explained to them; what was the matter with him, to be so baffled? He would drive Isabel away, someday, just by being what he was, without any special effort. When that time came she would not try again to kill herself, he was sure of that. By now she had learned that such gestures, however dramatic, would do no good.
“And Phoebe?” she asked. “Is she very upset?”
He looked to the window. The moon was lower now, and in part hidden behind the sash. “I didn’t do a very good job of breaking it to her, either.”
“I can imagine,” Isabel said drily. “You are hopeless, Quirke, you realize that.”
He nodded. She touched the back of his neck again with her cool fingertips.
“I think he was working on something, Jimmy Minor,” he said. “Something to do with a priest.”
“Oh, yes? What priest?”
“Just a priest. Honan — Father Mick, they call him. Does good works, operates in the slums.”
“I think I’ve heard of him. Why would Jimmy have been interested in him?”
“I keep telling you — I don’t know. I ask the same questions and get no answers. Jimmy tried to interview this priest, was refused.”
“Why?”
“Why was he refused? The order wouldn’t allow it — Holy Trinity Fathers. He’s leaving for Africa, so they say. Must be very busy packing.”
“And you think it was because of him, this priest, that Jimmy was murdered?”
Quirke did not reply. He was still watching the moon. Half cut off by the edge of the window as it was, it seemed to be tipping him an awful wink. He knew what Isabel was not saying. As a child Quirke had been abused, body and soul, by priests and brothers, at Carricklea, and other places before that. When it came to the clergy he could not be expected to think calmly or clearly. Isabel had once said that he saw a priest under every bed. She had meant it lightheartedly, but the look he had given her had made her draw back and swallow hard. With Quirke, some things were not to be joked about.