Phoebe’s tea had gone cold without her noticing. “But now you’re back,” she said.
Sally laughed dismissively. “Oh, no,” she said. “No I’m not. I came over because of James. I had two weeks’ holidays due, and here I am.”
“Have you seen — have you seen your family?”
“They don’t know I’m in Dublin. I’m sure they’re convinced the newspaper job is a fiction and that really I’m working in a whorehouse over there. My brother — have you come across my brother?” Phoebe shook her head, and Sally grimaced. “You haven’t missed anything.”
The clear patch she had made on the window had misted over again, and again she cleared it and peered out at the street.
“Are you expecting someone?” Phoebe asked.
“What? No. No, I’m just—” She frowned, and looked into her cup. She was silent for a time. “Do you see the oily skin that’s on the surface of the tea?” she said, pointing into the cup. “I complained about that once to a waiter, in the Savoy, of all places — Madge the features editor was treating. It wasn’t tea I was drinking, in fact, but a glass of wine. The waiter gave a disdainful little smile and leaned over, very confidential, and said, ‘It is caused by your lipstick, Modom.’ I was mortified, of course. But that’s London for you.”
They laughed, both of them; then Sally was silent again. At last, without looking up, she said, “What happened to James? Do you know? I mean, do you know the details?”
Phoebe suddenly found herself longing for a cigarette. She had given up smoking years ago, and was surprised by the force of this unexpected craving. If she were to smoke now it would probably make her sick. It was so strange to be sitting here with Jimmy’s sister. It should be a sad occasion, but somehow it was not. It was impossible not to be charmed by the young woman’s stories, her dry manner of speaking, her laughter. She was the kind of person Phoebe would have liked to have as a friend. What a pity that she lived in London. Thinking this, Phoebe found herself wondering, as she often did, at her own decision to stay here, in this grim little city, working for Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes and dining with her father once a week in the sepulchral gloom of the restaurant in the Russell Hotel, pretending not to notice how anxiously Quirke watched her glass, worried she would drink more than her share and leave him short. That was her life. There was David Sinclair, of course, but as much as she liked him — perhaps loved him, even — he was Quirke’s assistant and therefore a part of Quirke’s world. She did not often admit to herself how lonely she was, but now she did. This made her feel sorry for herself, not in the way that, she suspected, most people felt sorry for themselves, but at a remove, dispassionately, almost. Right now, for instance, she was able to look at herself quite coldly, at her drab coat, her black dress with the bit of white lace at the collar, her sensible shoes, the ruler-straight seams of her stockings. Phoebe Griffin, lonely, needy, and sad. Yet it was that Phoebe who was all these things; she herself, this other Phoebe, was over here, standing to one side, looking on. This gift of impersonality, if gift it was, she had inherited from her father, she knew that.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
Sally shrugged. “Oh, a few days,” she said. This was followed by another silence, and then she laughed. “All right,” she said, “I know you’re too polite to ask, but I admit it: I have been following you.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to see what you were like. From the way James talked about you, I expected a cross between Joan of Arc and what’s-her-name, Clark Kent’s girlfriend.”
Phoebe was astonished. “Did Jimmy talk about me?”
“‘Jimmy’—of course, that’s what you call him. It sounds so odd, as if it’s someone else. Did he talk about you? My dear, he never stopped. He wrote about you in his letters, and then he used to phone me from the office, late at night, when the copy takers had gone home and there was no one around to know he was making trunk calls. Phoebe this and Phoebe that — you must have wondered why your ears were burning all the time.”
Phoebe’s mouth had gone dry. She felt like a scientist, a naturalist, say, or an anthropologist, who after years of studying a particular species makes an unlooked-for discovery about it that means all previous assumptions must be revised and adjusted. Jimmy had been her friend, but not what she would have considered a close friend; however, from what his sister was saying it seemed that Jimmy had thought otherwise. Now Phoebe had to go back over all the years she had known him and reexamine everything. Was it possible — she had to ask herself the question — was it possible he had been in love with her? She could not credit it. In all the times they had met and spoken, he had never once shown her anything more than the commonplace tokens of friendship. In fact, she had always taken it for granted that he despised her a little, in his self-important way, considering her a spoiled daughter of the bourgeoisie — Jimmy liked to pretend he had read Marx — who knew nothing of the harsh realities of the world. And then there was the fact — and it was a fact, though she hated to acknowledge it — that in her heart she had always assumed that Jimmy had not been interested in girls, that he had not been that way inclined at all. “So,” she said now, with a show of nonchalance that she did not feel, “you must know everything about me that there is to know.”
“Well,” Sally said, “I knew where you lived, for a start.”
“Oh,” Phoebe said. “Yes.” She was picturing herself standing in the dark by the window in her flat, peering down into the street, searching the shadows for a lurking form. It was a thought she did not care to dwell on.
Sally must have sensed her discomfort, for now she leaned forward and said, “I’m sorry for spying on you, really, I am. I didn’t mean to— I mean, I didn’t think of it as spying. Only—”
A man opened the door of the café but did not come in. He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking about from table to table. He wore a brown sheepskin jacket with a zip, and a peaked cap pulled far down on his eyes. His shaded glance settled first on Sally, then on Phoebe. Having registered them both, he withdrew. Sally rubbed yet again at the misted window beside her and craned her neck to look after him as he walked off along the street.
“Only what?” Phoebe said. Sally looked at her blankly. “You were saying,” Phoebe said, smiling, “that you didn’t mean to spy on me. And?”
Sally opened her handbag and fumbled in it, frowning. She brought out a packet of Craven A’s. Phoebe saw how unsteady her hands were. She offered the cigarettes across the table but Phoebe, despite her earlier sudden desire to smoke, shook her head. The match trembled in Sally’s fingers, the flame quivering. “Your father is a detective, isn’t he?” she said.
Phoebe laughed. “No, no. I think he sometimes thinks he is, but he’s not. He’s a pathologist.”
“Oh. But James said—”
“He has a friend, he’s a detective. Hackett is his name, Detective Inspector Hackett. Jimmy probably mentioned him too, did he? Hackett often gets my — my father to help him. They’re sort of a team, I suppose you could say.”
“Has he — your father — has he any idea what happened to James — to Jimmy?”
Sally’s brightness of a minute ago was gone now, and she looked tense and worried. Had she recognized the man in the doorway? The line of smoke from her cigarette trembled as it rose.
“I don’t think anyone knows what happened to him,” Phoebe said. She had an urge to reach out and touch the back of Sally’s unsteady hand. “It must be awful for you that there’s no explanation, no — no reason.” She bit her lip, not wanting to go on. She felt a flush rising to her throat. It was impossible, of course, but she was afraid that Sally would somehow sense her suspicions about Jimmy. It embarrassed her even to entertain the thought that he might have been — well, that he might have been “one of those,” as people said.