Quirke could feel his smile slowly, helplessly congealing. There had been nights when he and Barney had stood here happily like this until closing time and long after, toe to toe, drink for drink, barging their pumped-up personalities at each other like a pair of boys fighting with balloons. Well, those days were long gone. When Barney attempted to order another round Quirke lifted a staying hand and said no, that they must be going.
“Sorry, Barney,” he said, stepping down from the stool and ignoring Phoebe’s indignant glare. “Another time.”
Barney measured him with a soiled eye, chewing his mouth at the side. For the second time that evening Quirke anticipated an assault, and wondered how best to avoid it-Barney, for all his diminutiveness, knew how to fight-but then Barney shifted his glare to Phoebe. “Griffin, now,” he said, screwing up one eye. “Are you anything, by any chance, to Judge Garret Griffin, the Chief Justice and Great Panjandrum himself?”
Quirke was still trying to make Phoebe get down from the stool, tugging her by the elbow and at the same time gathering up his raincoat and his hat. “Different family altogether,” he said. Barney ignored him. “Because,” Barney said to Phoebe, “that’s the boyo that put me away for fighting for the freedom of my country. Oh, yes, I was with the squad that set off them firecrackers in Coventry in ’thirty-nine. You didn’t know that, did you now, Miss Griffin? The bomb, I can tell you, is mightier than the pen.” His forehead had taken on a hot sheen and his eyes seemed to be sinking back into his skull. “And when I came home, instead of getting the hero’s welcome I deserved, I was sent to the boys’ jail for three years by Mr. Justice Griffin, to cool your heels, as he put it, provoking laughter in the court. I was sixteen years old. What do you think of that, Miss Griffin?”
Quirke had begun determinedly to move away, trying to draw a still unwilling Phoebe after him. The man with the bad hair, who had been listening to Barney with interest, now leaned forward, a finger lifted.
“I think-” he began.
“You fuck off,” Barney said, without looking at him.
“Fuck off yourself,” the woman in purple told him stoutly, “you and your friend and your friend’s tart.”
Phoebe giggled tipsily, and Quirke gave her a last, violent tug and she toppled forward from the stool and would have fallen but for his steadying hand under her arm.
“And now, I’m told,” Barney bellowed, loud enough for half the bar to hear, “he’s after being made a papal count. At least”-more loudly still-“I think count is the word.”
THERE WAS A LOW BUZZ OF TALK IN THE DRAWING ROOM. THE GUESTS, a score or so, stood about in clusters, the men all alike in dark suits, the women bird-bright and twittering. Sarah moved among them, brushing a hand here, touching an elbow there, trying to keep her smile from slipping. She felt guilty for not being able to like these people, Mal’s friends, mostly, or the Judge’s. Apart from the priests-always so many priests!-they were businesspeople, or people in the law, or in medicine, well-heeled, watchful of their privileges, of their place in the city’s society, such as it was. She had acknowledged to herself a long time ago that she was a little afraid of them, all of them, not just the frightening ones, like that fellow Costigan. They were not the sort she would have expected Mal or his father to have for friends. But then, was there any other sort, here? The world in which they moved was small. It was not her world. She was in it, but not of it, that was what she told herself. She must not let anyone else know what she was thinking. Smile, she told herself, keep smiling!
All at once she felt faint and had to stop for a moment, pressing her fingers down hard on the drinks table for support. Mal, watching from across the room, saw that she was having what Maggie the maid called, not without a touch of contempt, one of her turns. He felt a rush of something resembling grief, as if her unhappiness were an illness, one that would-he flinched to think it-kill her. He bowed his head and closed his eyes briefly, savoring for a moment the restful dark, then opened them again and turned to his father with an effort. “I haven’t congratulated you,” he said. “It’s a great thing, a papal knighthood.”
The Judge, fiddling with his tobacco pipe, snorted. “You think so?” he said with scornful incredulousness, then shrugged. “Well, I suppose I have done the Church some service.”
They were silent, each wishing to move away from the other but neither knowing how to manage it. Sarah, recovered, turned from the table and approached them, smiling tensely. “You two are looking very solemn,” she said.
“I was congratulating him-” Mal began, but his father interrupted him with angry dismissiveness:
“Arrah, he was trying to flatter me!”
There was another awkward silence. Sarah could think of nothing to say. Mal cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he murmured, and walked softly away.
Sarah linked her arm through the old man’s and leaned against him fondly. She liked his staleish smell of tobacco and tweed and dry, aging flesh. Sometimes it seemed to her he was her only ally, but that thought made her feel guilty too, for why and against whom did she need an ally? But she knew the answer. She watched as Costigan put out a hand and took Mal by the arm and began to talk to him earnestly. Costigan was a thickset man with heavy black hair swept straight back from his forehead. He wore horn-rimmed spectacles that magnified his eyes.
“I don’t like that man,” she said. “What does he do?”
The Judge chuckled. “He’s in the export business, I believe. Not my favorite, either, I confess, among Malachy’s friends.”
“I should go and rescue him,” she said.
“No man more in need of it.”
She gave him a smile of rueful reproof and unlinked her arm from his and set off across the room. Costigan had not noticed her approaching. He was saying something about Boston and our people over there. Everything that Costigan said sounded like a veiled threat, she had noticed that before now. She wondered again how Mal could be friends with such a man. When she touched Mal’s arm he started, as if her fingertips had communicated a tiny charge through the cloth of his sleeve, and Costigan smiled at her icily, baring his lower teeth, which were gray and clogged with plaque.
When she had got Mal away she said to him, smiling to soften it: “Were you fighting with your father again?”
“We don’t fight,” he said stiffly. “I lodge an appeal, he delivers a judgment.” Oh, Mal, she wanted to say, oh, my poor Mal! “Where’s Phoebe?” he asked.
She hesitated. He had taken off his spectacles to polish them. “Not home yet,” she said.
He halted. “What-!”
With relief she heard, beyond the voices in the room, the sound of the front door opening. She walked away from him quickly, out to the hall. Phoebe was handing a man’s hat and coat to Maggie. “Where have you been?” Sarah hissed at the girl. “Your father is…” Then Quirke turned from the door, with an apologetic smile, and she stopped, feeling the blood surge up from her breast and burn in her cheeks. “Quirke,” she said.
“Hello, Sarah.” How youthful and gauche he looked, leaning down at her, still smiling; a big blond overgrown boy. “I’m just delivering this black sheep home,” he said.
Mal came into the hall then. Seeing Quirke he stopped, with that pop-eyed glare that made it seem as if something had become stuck in his throat. Maggie, grinning mysteriously to herself, made off for the kitchen without a sound.