What I want to know now is, how long exactly have the Quirkes been living here, and, more important, how many of them were there here to start with? Lily clings to a stubborn vagueness on the matter. Yet she claims to remember clearly the circumstances, even if she will not disclose the precise location, of her mother’s death—too clearly, I surmise, for it happened many years ago, and I do not see Lily as an infant prodigy, beadily recording the events of family history over the rim of her cradle. Her mother woke one night with a pain, she says. The doctor was sent for, but there was a mix-up and he went to the wrong house, and did not realise the mistake because by chance in the other house there was also a mother in distress, though she was giving birth, and did so, successfully, while Lily’s poor Mam was engaged in an opposite exercise, which in time she accomplished, with much anguish. Her Auntie Dora came, Lily says, from the far end of town, wearing a raincoat over her nightdress, but even Auntie Dora, evidently a stalwart among incompetent Quirkes, even she could do nothing to save her sister. She had shouted at Quirke, and said it was all his fault, and said if he was any example of a husband she was glad she had never married, and Quirke had made to hit her and she put up her fists to him, and there might have been a real fight, for Quirke was beside himself and Auntie Dora was ready for him, except that someone else who was there, a neighbour or a family friend, Lily could not recall who it was, had stepped between the opponents and said they should be ashamed of themselves, with Kitty not yet cold. All this I heard, sitting on that bench, in the sun, while Lily picked at that thread in her dress and squinted off. It must have been quite a night, the night that Kitty died. I had the purloined photograph in my pocket. I showed it to Lily, and she looked at it blankly. I asked if it was not her mother. She peered harder and was silent for a long moment. “I don’t think so,” she said, tentatively. “I don’t think it’s her.” “Then who is it?” I asked, in some chagrin. I told her where I had got the picture, thinking she might protest my invasion of her father’s privacy, but she only snickered.
“Oh, it’s some girl, then,” she said. “Da always had girls.” Quirke as Casanova; it does not seem likely, somehow. “And did you have a brother,” I said, “or a sister, that died?” At that she took on a furtive, rabbity look, and after hesitating for a moment gave a quick little nod, darting her head forward as if to pluck a morsel of something from my hand.
Is it true? Can this be the identity of the ghostly mother and her child who have been haunting me? I want to believe it, but I cannot. I think Lily was lying; I think there is no dead sibling, except in her fancy.
There was a waiting stillness about us now. The air had grown leaden, and the leaves of the tree above us hung inert. A cloud had risen in the sky, blank as a wall, and now there was a hushing sound, and the rain came, hard quick vengeful rods falling straight down and splattering on the pavement like so many flung pennies. In the three hurried steps that it took Lily and me to get to the doorway of the public lavatory we were wet. The door was sealed with a chain and padlock, and we had to cower in the concrete porch, with its green-slimed wall and lingering ammoniac stink. Even here the big drops falling on the lintel above us threw off a chill fine mist that drifted into our faces and made Lily in her thin dress shiver. She wore a black look, huddled there with her head drawn down between her shoulders and her lips set in a line and her thin arms tightly folded. Meanwhile the air was steadily darkening. I remarked the peculiar light, insipid and shrouded, like the light in a dream.
“It’s the eclipse,” Lily said sullenly. “We’re missing it.” The eclipse! Of course. I thought of the thousands standing in silence, in the rain, their faces lifted vainly to the sky, and instead of laughing I felt a sharp and inexplicable pang of sadness, though for what, or whom, I do not know. Presently the downpour ceased and a watery sun, unoccluded, struggled through the clouds, and we ventured out of shelter. The streets that we walked through were awash, grey water with brief pewter bubbles running in the gutters and the pavements shining and giving off wavering flaws of steam. Cars churned past like motorboats, drawing miniature rainbows in their wake, while above us a life-sized one, the daddy of them all, was braced across the sky, looking like a huge and perfect practical joke.
When we came to the square again the circus show was still in progress. We could hear the band inside the tent blaring and squawking, and a big mad voice bellowing incomprehensibly, with awful hilarity, through a loudspeaker. The sun was drying off the canvas of the tent in patches, giving a camouflage effect, and the soaked pennant mounted above the entrance was plastered around its pole. It was not the regular kind of circus tent, what they call the Big Top—I wonder why?—but a tall, long rectangle, suggesting equally a jousting tournament and an agricultural show, with a supporting strut at each of the four corners and a fifth one in the middle of the roof. As we drew near there was a hiatus of some kind in the performance. The music stopped, and the audience inside set up a murmurous buzzing. Some people came out of the tent, ducking awkwardly under the canvas flap in the entrance-way, and stood about in a faintly dazed fashion, blinking in the glistening air. A fat man leading a small boy by the hand paused to stretch, and yawn, and light a cigarette, while the child turned aside and peed against the trunk of a cherry tree. I thought the show was over, but Lily knew better. “It’s only the interval,” she said bitterly, with revived resentment. Just then the red-haired fellow, the one who had grinned at me from the back step of his trailer, appeared from around the side of the tent. Over his red shirt and clown’s trousers he wore a rusty black tailcoat now, and a dented top hat was fixed somehow at an impossible angle to the back of his head. I realised who it was he reminded me of: George Goodfellow, an affable fox, the villain in a cartoon strip in the newspapers long ago, who sported a slender cigarette holder and just such a stovepipe hat, and whose brush protruded cheekily between the split tails of his moth-eaten coat. When he saw us the fellow hesitated, and that knowing smirk crossed his face again. Before I could stop her—and why should I have tried to?—Lily went forward eagerly and spoke to him. He had been about to slip inside the tent, and now stood half turned away from her, holding open the canvas flap and looking down at her over his shoulder with an expression of mock alarm. He listened for a moment, then laughed, and glanced at me, and said something briefly, and then with another glance in my direction slipped nimbly into the darkness of the tent.