The tragedians are wrong, grief has no grandeur. Grief is grey, it has a grey smell and a grey taste and a grey ashy feel on the fingers. Lydia’s instinct was to struggle against it, vainly ducking and clawing, as though grappling with an attacker, or trying to fend off a pestilence out of the air. Of the two of us, I was the luckier; I had been in practice, so to speak, and had come to quietude, a kind of quietude. When at last I left the safety of my little room that evening, the evening after the circus, the scene that met me was strikingly reminiscent of the one the day before, when Lydia had arrived and I had found her in the hall and she had shouted at me for not coming sooner to greet her. There she was now, again, in her leggings and smock, and there too was Lily, barefoot, just as they had been yesterday—I think I was even holding my fountain pen. Lydia still wore her charlady’s headscarf, and her smock today was white, not red. Her expression… no, I shall not attempt to describe her expression. When I saw her, what came into my head immediately was a recollection of something that happened once when I was with Cass, when she was a child. It was summer, and she was wearing a white dress made of layer upon layer of some very fine, translucent, gauzy stuff. We had just stepped out of the house, we were going somewhere together, I cannot remember where, it was some outing we were on. The day was sunny, with thrilling gusts of wind, I remember it, the gulls crying and the mast-ropes of the boats in the harbour tinkling like Javanese bells. A group of half-drunk loud young men was in the street, all vests and belt buckles and menacing haircuts. As they went reeling past us, one of them, a blue-eyed brute clutching himself by the wrist, turned about suddenly and with a flick of his hand, the palm of which bore a broad gash from knife or broken bottle, threw a long splash of blood diagonally across Cass’s dress. He laughed, a high, crazed whinny, and the others laughed too, and they went on, down the road, staggering, and shouldering each other, like a skulk of Jacobean villains. Cass said nothing, only stood a moment with her arms lifted away from her sides, looking down at the crimson sash of blood athwart her white bodice. At once, without a word, we turned back to the house, and she went off quickly upstairs and changed her dress, and we set out again, to wherever it was we had been going, as if nothing had happened. I do not know what she did with the white dress. It disappeared. When her mother questioned her about it she refused to answer. I said nothing, either. I think now that what had happened had happened out of time, I mean had happened somehow not as a real event at all, with causes and consequences, but in some special way, in some special dimension of dream or memory, solely, and precisely, that it might come to me there, as I stood in the hall, in my mother’s house, on an evening in summer, the last evening of what I used to think of as my life.
With three quick, stiff steps Lydia was on me, pounding her fists on my chest, pressing her face close up to mine. “You knew!” she cried. “Blubbering in picture-houses, and coming back to this place, and seeing ghosts—you knew!” She was trying to get at me with her nails now. I held her by the wrists, smelling her tears and her snot, feeling against my face the awful furnace heat of her sorrow. I was aware of a low animal wailing somewhere, and looked past Lydia’s shoulder and saw that it was Lily, up at the front door, who was keening in this unhuman way—it must have been she, not Lydia, her child’s stricken cries, that I had heard from my room. She stood at a crouch, with her fists braced on her knees and her face a crumpled mask, trying not to look at us as we grappled there. I found myself wondering in mild annoyance what it could be that so ailed her, when it was we, Lydia and I, who should have been crying out in anguish and in pain; had Lydia frightened her, or hurt her in some way, by slapping her, perhaps? The door behind her was open a disturbing foot or so. The evening sun shone through the transom window, an ancient light, golden, dense, dust-laden. Now Quirke appeared in the kitchen doorway, carrying a tall glass of water, holding it on the palm of one hand and balancing it with the fingers of the other. Without surprise, almost wearily, he looked at Lydia and me, still locked in struggle. At sight of him Lily abruptly left off her wailing, and something of Lydia’s fierceness abated too. I let go of her wrists, and Quirke he came forward with a priestlike mien and did not so much hand her the glass as entrust it to her, as if it were a chalice. The ecclesiastical tenor of the moment was heightened by the paper coaster he had placed under the glass, white and brittle as a Host. All these things I noted with avid attention, as if a record of them must be kept, for evidence, and the task of preserving them had fallen to me. Holding the coaster in place during the handing over of the glass, which both of them seemed to feel was essential, required a complicated pas de deux of swivelling thumbs, and fingertips held delicately en pointe. Lydia took a long deep draught of the water, leaning her head far back, her throat, the new and slightly goitrous pale fatness of which I had not noticed until now, working with a pumping motion, as if there were a fist inside it, going up and down. Having done, she handed back the glass to Quirke, both of them repeating the business with the coaster. Lily at the door had begun to snivel, with every sign of being about to start wailing again, but Quirke made a sharp noise of command in her direction, such as shepherds make at their dogs, and she clapped a hand over her mouth, which made her eyes seem all the more abulge and terrified. Lydia, the fight all gone out of her, had pulled off her headscarf and stood before me dispiritedly now with her head bowed, her splayed fingers pressed to her forehead at the hairline, in the attitude of one who has escaped a catastrophe, instead of being caught in the middle of it. The front door standing open like that was still troubling me, there was something horribly insinuating about it, as if there were someone or something out there waiting for just the right moment to slip inside, unnoticed.
“The tea is on,” Quirke said in a sombre, curiously flat voice, like that of the villain in a pantomime.
I could not understand him at all; it was as if the words were all out of order, and I thought he must be drunk, or attempting some sort of hideous joke. Struggling to comprehend, I had that panicky sensation one has sometimes abroad, when a request to a chambermaid or shop assistant spoken three times over in three different languages elicits only the same dull shrug and downcast glance. Then I noticed the sounds that were coming from the kitchen, the homely sounds of crockery being laid out and chairs set in place at table, and when I looked into the room a woman was there whom I did not remember ever having seen before, though yet she seemed familiar. She was elderly, with iron-grey hair, and pink-framed spectacles that were slightly askew. She was wearing my mother’s apron, the same one that Lydia had been wearing earlier. The woman looked to be perfectly at ease out there and familiar with everything, and I wondered for a moment if she might be yet another secret tenant of the house whose presence I had not detected. Seeing me looking in, she gave me a warmly encouraging smile, nodding, and wiping her hands on her—I mean my mother’s—apron. I turned to Quirke, who only raised his eyes and inclined his head a little to one side. “The tea,” he said again, with a heavier emphasis, as if the word should explain everything. “You’ll be hungry, though you won’t know it.” I found his flat complacent tone suddenly, deeply, irritating.