“Did I ever tell you,” he said now, “about a fellow by the name of Costigan?”
“No, I don’t think so. Who is he?”
“Just someone I knew. In fact, I didn’t know him, he made himself known to me. One of the Knights of St. Patrick, teetotaler, Pioneer pin in his lapel, the usual. He explained to me once that there are two worlds, the one that we — you and me and all the other poor idiots — think we live in, and the real one, behind the illusion, where people like him are in charge. He was honest about this other world, I’ll give him that. A tough place, he admitted, a nasty place, in many ways, but the real thing, nevertheless, where the real decisions are made, where the necessary actions are taken. Without people like him, he said, people prepared to face reality and do the dirty work, the rest of us wouldn’t be able to live our comfortable, deluded lives. We’d be in the muck too, up to our necks.”
He paused, smoking the last of his cigarette. “I was impressed, I have to admit it. It’s not that he was telling me something I didn’t know — every mouthful of meat has a tang of the slaughterhouse — but the way he told it was impressive, the matter-of-factness of it. There are Costigans everywhere, behind the scenes, running things, controlling things, keeping the meat grinder going.” He paused, almost smiling. “Yes, I remember Mr. Costigan. I remember him well.”
Isabel, in the lamplight, gazed at him. She had folded her arms around herself, as if for protection. “But you live in that world,” she said, “the world he talked about.”
He considered. “No, I don’t. I wouldn’t have the stomach for it, wouldn’t have the courage. But I have one foot in it, that’s true.”
“You should have done something else — some other job, I mean.”
“Such as?”
He knew what she would say.
“You could have been a doctor — I mean a doctor for the living.”
He gave a faint laugh. “Ah, the living,” he said. “I don’t know much about them, that’s the trouble.”
She rose up suddenly, scrambled to her knees, and put her arms around him. “I hate to hear you say things like that,” she said, her mouth once more against his ear. “You say them too complacently, too comfortably. I sometimes think you love your wounds.”
He laughed again, leaning his forehead against her hair. “Yes,” he said, “like the leper with his begging bowl, who has to love his stumps.”
She took his face in her hands and turned it towards her own and kissed him on the mouth, then drew back and looked solemnly into his eyes. He tried not to shy from her gaze. “You could be happy, you know,” she said. “It’s not impossible. Other people have done it, people with more awfulness in their lives than you have.”
He nodded, but at last had to look away. She was right, of course, everything she said was right; he just wished she would not insist on saying it, repeatedly. Perhaps he did not want to be happy. He had little talent for it, that was certain. Besides, happiness was another of those words, like love, the meaning of which he could never quite grasp. He wanted to tell her about his vision of the canal bank in the dark, how all evening since she had arrived he had kept seeing it, and how it filled him with mysterious longing. He wanted to make her understand, too, what a danger he was, what a menace, to those who came near him, who tried to come near him. But then surely she knew that. She had tried, however halfheartedly, to kill herself, for love of him; things that he touched tended to droop and die.
“I’m sorry,” he said. It was a thing he often found himself saying, although he was never sure what he was apologizing for. Everything, he supposed, everything that he was and did. It was a wearisome business, being himself. He would have liked a break from it, a holiday away from being who he was.
* * *
In the morning, a cobweb-colored sky cleared suddenly and the sun came out, spiking in at the side of the window where last night he had watched the moon. He had wakened with a start of nameless dread, the sun in his eyes and his heart thudding. Now he lay breathing, shallowly and slowly, righting himself. It was like this every morning, the waking into fright, then the relief to find that he was not at Carricklea but in his own bed, no longer a child, safe and unmolested. Isabel was up already; she would be in the kitchen, making breakfast. He stretched luxuriantly, yawning so hard the hinges of his jaws crackled. He would take the day off, perhaps, and they would go to lunch somewhere, the Russell, maybe, or—
“What’s this?” She was standing in the bedroom doorway, wearing his dressing gown, with a hand on her hip, holding up some brightly colored thing for him to see. An item of scanty underwear, perhaps, that she had bought to please him?
He sat up, rubbing his eyes and peering. What she had in her hand was a blue bow tie. She had given it to him as a going-away present when she left on tour. “I found it in the kitchen,” she said icily. “In the rubbish bin.”
9
Sergeant Jenkins drove them out to Rathfarnham. Quirke and Inspector Hackett sat in the back seat of the unmarked squad car, each looking out the window beside him. It rained at first and then abruptly stopped, and the sun came out and shone on the wet road and made a blinding glare on the roof of the car.
Quirke felt distinctly peculiar. It was as if he had a hangover, even though he had drunk no more than a few whiskeys the night before, first with Hackett and afterwards with Isabel. He wondered if he might be in for a dose of flu. His head seemed packed tight with cotton wool, and he had a sensation of being somehow separate from himself. He found himself welcoming the prospect of being ill — he would be glad of a day or two in bed, with a book and a bottle of Jameson. Isabel, however, would insist on taking care of him. He thought of her doing her Florence Nightingale act, making hot drinks for him and plumping up his pillows. He liked to be alone when he was sick. It was an opportunity to think, to assemble his thoughts, to reassess his life. He grinned briefly at his faint reflection in the window, showing his teeth. His life; ah, yes, his life.
“Funny about the garden,” Hackett said.
Quirke turned to him. “What?”
“The garden that Jimmy Minor had going, behind where he lived. I wouldn’t have thought of him with a spade in his hands. You never know people, do you.”
“I find that’s generally true, yes,” Quirke said drily.
The detective nodded, not listening. “I remember one of the instructors when I was at Templemore, the Garda training college there. ‘Lads,’ he used to say, ‘never jump to conclusions about a person until you know all the facts about him — and the fact is, you’ll never know all the facts.’”
“Words of wisdom,” Quirke said.
Hackett glanced at him sidelong, and said no more. He had long ago got used to Quirke and his unpredictable moods. He fixed his gaze on the back of Jenkins’s head and his translucent jug ears. He could not get the thought of Jimmy Minor’s scrap of a garden out of his head, the raised potato beds, the neat lines of seedlings, the cane tripods. It would be let run wild now, of course. In a year, two at the most, there would be hardly a sign of it left. It would be gone to wrack and dust, like the young man himself. He thought of time and its depredations and felt an inward shiver.