They left shortly afterwards. Billy Hunt's mood had shifted again. A light had gone out in him and he had a hazed-over aspect. He looked, Quirke thought, sated, sated and-smug, was it?-as if he knew a thing that Quirke and everyone else did not. At the door of the pub they parted, and Billy shambled away in the direction of Baggot Street. Quirke crossed over the little stone bridge. The trees along the canal seemed to lean lower now, exhausted in the heat of the day, yet to Quirke the sunlight was dimmed, as if a fine dust had sifted into the air, thickening and sullying it.
7
DEIRDRE REALLY DID WISH SOMETIMES THAT LESLIE HAD NEVER SHOWN her those pictures. It was not that she was shocked by them-on the contrary, they fascinated her. And that was the trouble. It was the fascination that led her on to other things, things that she would not have thought herself capable of. For a start there were the letters that Leslie got her to write to him. Not that they were letters, really, more like those accounts of her dreams that she used to scribble down when she was a girl, because she had heard someone say that you could tell the future from your dreams. Only no girl would write the kind of things that she wrote for Leslie. He said she was to put down any thought that came into her head, any thought at all, so long as it was dirty. At first she had laughed and said she would do no such thing, but he kept on at her and would not take no for an answer. What she should do, he said, was imagine that he was a prisoner and she was the prisoner's girlfriend and that she was writing to him to keep his spirits up-"And not only his spirits," he murmured, nuzzling her ear and softly laughing. In the end she said all right, that she would try, but that she was sure she would not be able to do it. It turned out that she was able, though, and more than able.
And the things she wrote! She carried a pad of pale-blue Basildon Bond writing paper everywhere with her in her handbag-and envelopes, too, for Leslie insisted they should be like real letters-and whenever she got the chance would take it out and start scribbling with an indelible pencil, not thinking of what she was writing only letting it pour out of her, blushing half the time and biting her lip, hardly able to keep the lines straight, hunched over the page like she used to do in school when the girl she shared a desk with was trying to copy off her. She took terrible risks; she seemed to have no fear. She wrote at her dressing table in the bedroom while Billy was in the bathroom shaving, or at the desk in the cubbyhole behind the treatment room in the Silver Swan when she was between clients. She wrote on park benches, in cafés, on the bus if there was nobody beside her. Once even she slipped into Clarendon Street church and sat hunched over in a pew at the back with the pad on her knee, panting almost in the midst of that holy hush, the waxy smell of burning penny candles reminding her of other and very different smells, night smells, Leslie smells. As she wrote she grew more and more excited, and almost frightened. It made her think of that time when she was working at the pharmacy and she went to confession and told the priest a screed of made-up sins, about sucking Mr. Plunkett's thing and doing it with an Alsatian dog, just to shock the old boy behind the grille and hear what he would say.
Were the things that she wrote down that day in the church filthier than usual, or did they only seem worse because of the surroundings? She got herself in such a state, her pencil flying over the page, that she had to stop writing and undo the button at the side of her skirt and put a hand inside her knickers, into the hot moistness there, and use her finger to make herself come. The pleasure was so intense she had to clench her teeth and shut her eyes tight to keep from crying out. Luckily it was morning and there was no one else in the place, except a bald and bent old sacristan in a rusty surplice who kept crossing back and forth in front of the altar, stopping always in the middle to genuflect before the Blessed Sacrament, and who did not even glance in her direction. When she was leaving, her knickers all wet between her thighs, she could feel the red beam of the sanctuary lamp boring into her back like an accusing eye. To think she had done those things in a church! She knew she should be ashamed, but she was not; she was exultant.
All this delighted Leslie, of course. "Well well," he said to her, chuckling, "I'd no idea what a filthy mind you had." Although he pretended it was all just a bit of fun that he had thought up for his amusement, it was plain that he really was impressed by how much she wrote and how detailed it was. She could see he could hardly believe his luck in having found someone who was willing-who was, if she was to tell the truth, only too eager-to let him know all the darkest and most disgusting things that went on in her mind. They would lie twined together naked in the narrow bed in the room in Percy Place-that name always made Leslie laugh-and he would read aloud what she had written for him since she had seen him last. While he was reading she would bury her face in the hollow of his shoulder, flushing to the soles of her feet but making sure not to miss a word, hardly able to believe it was she who had written such things. She loved Leslie's voice, his accent like you would hear in the pictures, so that what he read out sounded different from how it had sounded in her head when she was writing it. In Leslie's mouth it seemed serious, somehow, and-and authoritative, that was the word; just like, in fact, it suddenly struck her, just like how the actor doing the voice-over in a film would sound, only not-she laughed to herself-not the kind of film that was ever likely to be shown in a picture house in this country.
Leslie got as excited as she was by what he was reading out, and would stop in the middle of some really spicy bit and lie back against the pillow and twist a handful of her hair round his fist the way her brothers used to do and push her head into his lap. How silky he was there, how hard and hot and silky, when she pulled the skin back from the helmet-shaped head with the funny little slit in the top like an eye winking at her and put her lips delicately around it. She liked doing it that way, liked to make him writhe and groan, knowing that she was the one who was in charge, that she was the one with power.
She would never have dreamt of doing it like that with Billy.
Whenever the thought of Billy came into her mind now she would immediately hurry on and think of Leslie instead. Did that mean she really was in love with Leslie? A girl in school years ago had told her, and she had believed it, that when you thought of one fellow and then immediately of another it was the second one you really loved. But the fact was, she did not know what she felt for Leslie. She was not even sure that she liked him, which was strange-how could you be with someone as she was with Leslie if you did not like him? He was good-looking, of course, in a thinned-out sort of way. In bed, when he had not taken anything, he could keep going for ages. It was easy to tell he had been with a lot of women and knew what he was doing. And he was funny. He would do imitations of Dr. Kreutz and even, though she tried to stop him, of Billy-he had nicknames for him, such as Billy in the Bowl, or Billy the Kid, or the Old Boy-which made her scream with laughing. He would get her down on the floor and sit on her and tickle her, as if they were a pair of kids. Sometimes when he was about to go into her he would stop for a second and raise himself above her on his arms and inquire, putting on the fruity voice of that woman who had stopped them in the street one day to ask directions, "Is this Percy's Place?" Yet for all that it sometimes seemed to her-and this was really strange-that she would prefer him to be not real but a part of her fantasies. That way it would be so much easier. Billy, and their little house on St. Martin's Drive, and her work in the salon, and her mother, who was sick now, and her father she was still afraid of, and her brothers that she never saw-that was life, real life, and though none of it could compare in intensity with what she had here in this shabby little room below street level, with the net-curtained half window looking directly onto the pavement, and the worn lino and the lavatory down the hall and the cracked hand basin and the bed that sagged in the middle, still she valued that other life, the normal one, and wanted to keep it separate from all this with Leslie, separate, and uncontaminated.