The Country Shop was crowded. The customers were mainly women who had stopped in to drink a restorative cup of tea after a day’s shopping. They found a table at the back, near the service door. Phoebe with a sudden pang recalled that this was one of the places where she used to meet Jimmy Minor, in what already had come to seem to her the old days. David was offering a Gold Flake to Sally, but she smiled and shook her head. “I only smoke these,” she said, taking out her packet of Craven A. “I’m a craven creature.”
David, lighting up, only nodded distractedly. Phoebe watched him. What was he thinking about, that the notch between his eyebrows should have deepened so? He held out the flame of his lighter, and as she leaned down to it Sally for the briefest instant touched a finger to the back of his hand. Phoebe quickly looked away. Sally’s presence was making Phoebe see David with a new eye. How little she knew about him, after all. At once the question rose again in her mind: Do I love him?
“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said now to Sally. He rotated the glowing tip of his cigarette against the edge of the ashtray before him on the table. “I didn’t know him very well. He was Phoebe’s friend, really.”
Sally frowned and looked off to one side. “I don’t think anyone knew him very well,” she said. “He wasn’t the kind of person who revealed things about himself — not the important things.”
“Yes,” David said. “I had that impression.”
Despite herself, Phoebe was a little shocked by this brief exchange. So much more seemed expressed in it than the words would warrant. Or was she imagining it? “We used to meet here often, Jimmy and I,” she heard herself saying. She gave a little laugh. “He always looked so out of place, among the housewives and the men in tweed suits.”
For some reason this made the other two go silent again; it was as if now she were the one who had said something inappropriate, something indiscreet. She let fall a soundless sigh. Why did everything have to be so awkward and difficult? It could not only be because she had not told David about Sally staying at the flat — that could not be it. Or was it that kiss again, spreading its heat over everything?
At last, as if he had bethought himself, David began to make small talk, asking Sally where she lived, and what she worked at, and how life was in London nowadays — were the people there at last beginning to get over the war? “Oh,” Sally said, “everyone is cheerful and keeping busy — you know what Londoners are like.”
David nodded, but Phoebe was thinking to herself that she did not know what Londoners were like, that in fact she had been to London only once, when she was young and her parents, her supposed parents, had brought her there for a weekend. What she remembered, and only vaguely, were the big department stores, Harrods, and Selfridges in Oxford Street, and the bomb craters everywhere, with pools of stagnant water standing in them. She seemed to recall the city smelling still of cordite and domestic gas and broken mortar and death. She thought now of Jimmy’s body floating in the canal, in the darkness, like—the words had formed themselves in her mind before she could stop them—like a dog. She wondered if David had seen the body when it was brought into the hospital. She had not asked him, nor would she. She seemed to remember her father saying David had been off that day. A week ago exactly that had been — only a week, yet it seemed so much longer.
“I lived there, for a while,” he was saying, “in London. Hammersmith.”
“That must have been nice,” Sally said. “I’m in Kilburn.” She smiled. “That’s not so nice.”
The waitress came and they ordered things, though a moment afterwards Phoebe had forgotten what things they were.
“Sally thinks,” she said, “that Jimmy was killed by tinkers.”
The blurted words had come unbidden, and they fell on the table like something falling in a dream, slowly, with a silent crash. David, his head lowered, gave Sally an upward glance. “Why do you think that?” he asked. Phoebe he ignored, as if it were not she who had said it, as if the words had somehow spoken themselves.
“I’m not sure that I do think that,” Sally said. She smiled uncertainly, and glanced at Phoebe. “I’m not sure what I think. No one seems to know what really happened.”
Someone murdered him, Phoebe wanted to say, someone beat him to death and threw him like a dog into the canal. Why not tinkers — it’s as good an explanation as any. But she knew, of course, that it was not an explanation. What was the matter with her, she wondered, why was she feeling so upset? David was looking at her now, thoughtfully, leaning his face away from the smoke of his cigarette. “What does your father think?” he asked.
Phoebe shrugged. “He doesn’t know what happened.” She felt an involuntary shiver, of anger, so it seemed to her — but why was she angry? “No one knows.”
They were silent again, all three, their eyes fixed on the table. Phoebe had the impression of something happening, some slow unfolding, from which she was excluded. David looked up at Sally again. “It must be very painful for you.”
Sally pressed her lips together and nodded. “Yes,” she said, “it is. I loved him.”
“They were twins,” Phoebe said. Yet again she regretted having spoken, having blurted out more awkward words. It was not her business to say these things.
She was glad when at that moment the waitress came with their tea.
David was speaking to Sally again. “You were twins,” he said. “I see. That must make it even harder for you.”
Sally took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said, “yes, it does.”
Tea. Bread. Little sandwiches. Biscuits. Phoebe ate, and drank, and tasted nothing. A wave of misery was welling up in her, unaccountably. Something was being lost — that was how it seemed: not that she was losing something, but that something was losing itself. What was it? She felt as if one whole side of her life were shearing off and toppling slowly into the sea.
She watched Sally’s small hands, slightly chafed and reddened, with their square-cut fingernails and milk-blue veins.
She remembered a lesson from her school days: amo, amas, amat. Love, yes. Amo, I love. But whom did she love?
David was leaning across the table to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray, and now he glanced back at her, sidelong, inquiringly, as if she had said something. Had she, without realizing it?
Lifting her cup to her lips, Sally smiled to herself, as if at some private remembrance. Phoebe studied her, her delicate, freckled skin, her hair the color of autumn leaves under water, those darkly luminous eyes. What had she and David been doing when Phoebe was in the bedroom, fetching her coat? What had passed between them, that the silence should seem so strange when Phoebe returned and they were standing there, David at the window with his back to the room and Sally in front of the mirror above the fireplace? Had they kissed, as she and Sally had kissed, in front of the gas fire, that night when the lightning struck?
Amo, amas, amat.
Amamus. We love.
18
The heavy evening rain had turned to mist, fine and light as cobweb, that did not so much fall as drift vaguely this way and that through the dense and glossy darkness. On Ailesbury Road each streetlight had its own penumbra, a large soft bright ball of filaments streaming outwards in all directions, and the lit windows of the houses were set in frames of the same muted yet luminous gray radiance. Quirke had told the taxi driver to drop him at the corner of Merrion Road, he was not sure why, and from there he had set off to walk up to the house, his hat pulled low on his forehead and the collar of his overcoat drawn tight around his neck. He had a scratchy sensation at the back of his throat. Was it the lingering effect of the poteen, or was it that malaise that had been threatening for days? The possibility that he was starting a cold or a dose of flu struck him as grimly comic. If he was dying, it seemed now that he would die sneezing.