‘What I think is this,’ said Quillan. ‘The face is the face of a woman who tried to steal me out of my pram one day when the aunt left the pram outside Pasley’s grocer’s shop. A childless woman heard about the tragedy and said to herself that she’d take the child and be a mother to it.’
‘Did a woman do that?’ cried Miss Ticher, and Miss Grimshaw looked at her in amusement.
‘They’d never bother to tell me,’ said Quillan. ‘I have only the instinct to go on. Hi,’ he shouted to the waiter who was hovering at the distant end of the terrace. ‘Encore, encore! Trois verres, s’il vous plait.’
‘Oh no,’ murmured Miss Ticher.
Miss Grimshaw laughed.
‘An unmarried woman like yourselves,’ said Quillan, ‘who wanted a child. I would be a different man today if she had succeeded in doing what she wanted to do. She would have taken me away to another town, maybe to Cork, or up to Dublin. I would have different memories now. D’you understand me, Miss Grimshaw?’
The waiter came with the drinks. He took away the used glasses.
‘If I close my eyes,’ said Quillan, ‘I can see the whole episode: the woman bent over the pram and her hands going out to the orphan child. And then the aunt comes out of Pasley’s and asks her what she thinks she’s doing. I remember one time the aunt beating me on the legs with a bramble stick. I used eat things from the kitchen cupboard. I used bite into Chivers’ jellies, I well remember that.’ He paused. He said: ‘If ever you’re down that way, go into Youghal. It’s a great place for fresh fish.’
Miss Grimshaw heard voices and looked past Miss Ticher and saw a man and a woman leaving the hotel. They stood for a moment beside the waiter at the far end of the terrace. The woman laughed. The waiter went away.
‘That’s the pair,’ said Quillan. ‘They’re checking out.’
He tilted his glass, draining a quantity of whisky into his mouth.
The man, wearing dark glasses and dressed in red trousers and a black leather jacket, lit his companion’s cigarette. His arm was on the woman’s shoulder. The waiter brought them each a drink.
‘Are they looking this way, Miss Grimshaw?’
He crouched in the deck-chair, anxious not to be observed. Miss Grimshaw said the man and the woman seemed to be absorbed in one another.
‘A right couple to be following around,’ Quillan said with sarcasm and a hint of bitterness. ‘A right vicious couple.’
Suddenly and to Miss Grimshaw’s discomfiture, Miss Ticher stretched out an arm and touched with the tips of her fingers the back of the detective’s large hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ Miss Ticher said quietly. ‘I’m sorry your parents were drowned. I’m sorry you don’t like the work you do.’
He shrugged away the sympathy, although he seemed not surprised to have received it. He said again that if his parents had not drowned he would not be the man they saw in front of them. He was obsessed by that idea, Miss Grimshaw considered. If the woman had succeeded in taking him from the pram he would not be the man he was either, he said: he’d had no luck in his childhood. ‘It’s a nice little seaside resort and yet I can never think of it without a shiver because of the bad luck that was there for me. When I think of the black iron gate and the uncle sweating in the Ford car I think of everything else as well. The woman wanted a child, Miss Ticher. A child needs love.’
‘A woman too,’ whispered Miss Ticher.
‘But the woman’s a figment of Mr Quillan’s imagination,’ Miss Grimshaw said with a laugh. ‘He made up the story to suit some face in his mind. Couldn’t it be, Mr Quillan, that the woman’s face was the face of any woman at all?’
‘Ah, of course, of course,’ agreed Quillan, glancing surreptitiously at the couple he was employed to glance at. ‘You can never know certainly about a business like that.’
The couple, having finished their two drinks, descended a flight of stone steps that led from the terrace to the terrace below, and then went on down to the courtyard of the hotel. The waiter followed them, carrying their luggage. Quillan stood up.
Miss Ticher imagined ironing his blazer. She imagined his face as a child. For a moment, affected as she afterwards thought by the red aperitif, it seemed that Miss Grimshaw was the stranger: Miss Grimshaw was a round woman, unknown to either of them, who had materialized suddenly, looking for a chat. Having no one’s blazer to iron herself, Miss Grimshaw was jealous, for in her life she had known only friendship.
‘In 1934,’ said Miss Ticher, ‘when you were five months old, Mr Quillan, I was still hopeful of marriage. A few years later I would have understood the woman who wished to take you from your pram.’
Miss Ticher’s face was crimson as she spoke those words. She saw Miss Grimshaw looking at it. She saw her looking at her as she clambered to her feet and held a hand out to the detective. ‘Goodbye,’ Miss Ticher said. ‘It was nice to hear your childhood memories.’
He went away in his abrupt manner. They watched him walking the length of the terrace. Miss Ticher watched his descent to the courtyard.
‘My dear,’ said Miss Grimshaw with her laugh, ‘he bowled you over.’ The story for the common-room was even better now. ‘A fat man,’ Miss Grimshaw heard herself saying on the first evening of term, ‘who talked to Agnes about his childhood memories in a place called Youghal. He had fantasies as well, about some woman pilfering him from his pram, as though a woman would. In her tipsiness Agnes entered into all of it. I thought she’d cry.’
Miss Ticher sat down and sipped the drink the man had bought her. Miss Grimshaw said:
‘Thank heavens he’s not staying here.’
‘You shouldn’t have said he made up that story.’
‘Why ever not?’
You hurt him.’
‘Hurt him?’ cried Miss Grimshaw.
‘He’s the victim of his wretched childhood –’
‘You’re tipsy, Agnes.’
Miss Ticher drank the last of her red aperitif, and Miss Grimshaw glared through her shining spectacles, thinking that her friend looked as if she’d just put down a cheap romantic novel.
‘It’s time for lunch,’ announced Miss Grimshaw snappishly, rising to her feet. ‘Come on now.’
Miss Ticher shook her head. ‘Near the lighthouse there’s a shop,’ she said, ‘that sold in those days Rainbow Toffees. A woman like you or me might have seen there a child who ran away from loneliness.’
‘Lunch, dear,’ said Miss Grimshaw.
‘How very cruel the world is.’
Miss Grimshaw, who in reply had been about to say with asperity that no one must let emotional nonsense play tricks on the imagination, instead said nothing at all. Three unnamed drinks and the conversation of a grubby detective had taken an absurd toll of Agnes Ticher in the broad light of day. Miss Grimshaw no longer wished to think about the matter; she did not wish to recall the words that Agnes Ticher in her tipsiness had spoken, nor ever now to retail the episode in the common-room; it was better not to dwell on any of it. They were, after all, friends and there could remain unspoken secrets between them.
‘It is all second best,’ said the voice of Agnes Ticher, but when Miss Grimshaw looked at her friend she knew that Miss Ticher had not spoken. Miss Grimshaw went away, jangling the shells in the yellow plastic bag and screening from her mind the thoughts that were attempting to invade it. There was a smell of garlic on the air, and from the kitchen came the rich odour of the local bouillabaisse, the favourite dish of both of them.
The Table
In a public library, looking through the appropriate columns in a businesslike way, Mr Jeffs came across the Hammonds’ advertisement in The Times. It contained a telephone number which he noted down on a scrap of paper and which he telephoned later that same day.