“Will I give you a hand?” the old fellow said, speaking with measured distinctness, as if he were addressing a child. Quirke had an image of himself being hauled to his feet and of the two of them tottering together down the steps hand in hand, both of them bent over, with limbs akimbo, like a pair of chimps, the old one leading the younger and hooting soft encouragements. “No no,” he said, “no, I’m fine.”
At last he got himself up and stood swaying. His knees seemed to be all right, after all. The old man squinted up at him, that tawny side tooth bared again. “Come inside and we’ll get you a cup of tea,” he said.
They made their way through the house again, the old man going ahead, hobbling along crablike at a surprisingly rapid pace, paddling the air beside him as before with a long and seemingly boneless hand. The pounding in Quirke’s chest had subsided, though he was weak all over, as if he had come to the end of some extended and inhumanly demanding task. Yet he was certain now that he would survive. This knowledge afforded him curiously little comfort. On the contrary, he had a vexed sense of having been let down, by someone, or something. There had been a moment, out there on the front step, while he had watched the questing blackbird, when everything had seemed on the point of a grand, final resolution. It was not death he had been cheated of, he thought, for even death was incidental to whatever it was that had been coming and had not come, that had been withheld from him, at the last instant.
“How are you doing there?” the old man asked, twisting round and glancing back at him. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Quirke said, “yes, I am, I’m all right.”
It came to him suddenly: Nike. It was Nike, the memory of him, that had sent him stumbling in a panic out of Father Dangerfield’s room. Nike, with his thin smile, an eyebrow permanently cocked, a cigarette smoldering in his slender fingers. Nike the Inevitable.
The kitchen to which the old man led him was an enormous room with grayish-white tiled walls and a long refectory table of scrubbed deal, and two big twin stone sinks with old-fashioned copper taps stained with verdigris. There was a mighty stove, too, the top of it black and the sides the color of porridge, and there were ranks of pots and pans, venerable and battered, hanging on hooks about the walls. A big metal-framed window looked out on a concrete yard where dustbins loitered, their lids askew, like mendicants waiting in hope of scraps. All this was somehow familiar.
“Sit yourself down there now,” the old man said, and went to fill a kettle at one of the sinks.
Quirke sat. It seemed to him that he was suspended inside himself, intricate and frail, like a ship in a bottle.
The dissecting room, that was what this kitchen looked like. The light was the same, stark white and shadowless, and there was a sense of chill numbness, as if the very air had been anesthetised.
The old man, still holding the kettle under the running tap, gave him a sly, backwards glance. “Or maybe you’d prefer something a bit stronger?” he said, and winked.
Quirke said nothing, but the old man nodded knowingly and put the kettle aside. He went out through a narrow door into what must have been the scullery, whence there came a clink of glass, and he reappeared cradling in both hands, like a baby, a bottle of Powers Gold Label. “Would you ever,” he said, “get yourself down one of them tumblers off of that shelf.”
Nike, at Carricklea. Dean of Discipline; the title had always struck Quirke as absurdly grand. His name was Gallagher, Father Aloysius Gallagher. No one knew why he had been called after a Greek goddess, for the nickname had been conferred on him immemorially. He was tall and thin, like Father Dangerfield, had the same scraped-looking dry jaw, and wore the same kind of wire-framed spectacles. He had sour breath and his soutane always smelled of stale tobacco. He chain-smoked, holding the cigarette in a curious fashion, not between the first and middle but between the middle and third fingers of his left hand, even though he was right-handed. Sitting at his desk, with his bony knees crossed under his soutane and that hand held upright with the fag in it, like the hand of the Sacred Heart statue lifted in benediction, he had indeed the look of some celestial figure seated in judgment. Or no, no, what he was like was someone pretending, pretending to be a judge, playing the part of one, for a joke, but a joke that no one would dare laugh at, and that would end with whoever it was who was on trial being found guilty, and sent away red-faced and sobbing, with bruised and swollen palms clamped under his armpits and his bare knees knocking. Nike affected a little cough, it was hardly more than a dry clearing of the throat, which in the corridors of Carricklea the boys had learned to listen out for, since it was the only warning they would have of his approach, for he moved with wraithlike quiet, seeming not to walk but glide, on soundless soles.
In his years at Carricklea Quirke had not been beaten very often by Nike, and, even if he had, that would not have been the thing that frightened him the most. It was a special kind of fear that Nike instilled, intimate, warm and clammy, and faintly indecent. When the figure of the Dean broke in on Quirke’s thoughts, especially at night, as he lay in bed in the murmurous dark, he would experience a jolt in his chest, like the jolt that would come from suddenly calling to mind some serious instance of wrongdoing, or an unconfessed mortal sin. Even now, thinking of those days, he felt again that same hot qualm of oppressive, objectless guilt.
He looked at the tumbler before him on the table. It was empty. He had no recollection of drinking the whiskey, yet he must have drunk it, for all that was left was a single, amber drop glistening in the bottom of the glass. The old man was saying something. “What?” Quirke said. “Sorry?”
“Ah, nothing, nothing,” the old man said, smiling. “You were miles away.” He came to the table and seated himself opposite Quirke. It was an effort for him to maneuver his twisted body up onto the chair. He sighed hoarsely. “Are you feeling any better?” he asked.
“Yes. Yes, I’m fine now.”
“It was the nerves that were at you, I’d say. Nerves can be a terrible thing. Thady is the name, by the way. Thaddeus, that is, but Thady I’m called.”
Quirke brought out his cigarette case, opened it on his palm, and offered it across the table. He noticed the tremor in his hand, very faint, as if an electric current were passing along the nerves. The old man was gazing greedily at the row of cigarettes laid out invitingly before him. “I’m not supposed to,” he said, “due to the bronicals.” He took one, however, and leaned to the flame of Quirke’s proffered lighter. When he drew in the first mouthful of smoke he was at once convulsed by a bout of coughing that caused his wasted frame almost to close on itself, as if there were a hinge at his waist. When the seizure had passed he sat gasping, a baby-pink spot glowing on each cheekbone and his mouth a quivering oval. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he croaked, “they’ll do for me yet, the fags.”
He poured another go of whiskey into the tumbler on the table. In the aftermath of the coughing fit his hand, too, like Quirke’s, had the shakes, and the bottle rattled against the rim of the glass.
They talked. The old man had been here, at Trinity Manor, for more than sixty years. “The fathers took me in, you know, doing odd jobs. I was only a youngster at the time, eleven, I was, or twelve, I can’t remember.” The place had been an orphanage then, he said. He gave Quirke a quick glance from under his leaning brow. “And you?”
“Me?”
“You have the look about you — the look of places like this place used to be.”
“Yes,” Quirke said after a moment. “Yes, I suppose I must have. I was at Carricklea.” It sounded strange, when he said it like that, as if he were speaking of his old school, the alma mater where he had played cricket, and worn the school tie, and had been surrounded by lots of jolly chums; where he had been happy. “Have you heard of it?”