It was Quirke who had brought the news. It always falls to a Quirke, to bring news like that. Someone had phoned him at the office, he told me, and looked abashed at the grandly proprietorial sound of that at the office. He did not know who the caller was, he said, and had forgotten to ask, and now was very apologetic, as if it really were something that mattered. It had been a woman, he thought, though he was not sure even of that much. Foreign accent, and the line was bad. I never did find out her, or his, identity. Tragedy always has its anonymous messengers, in sandals and robe they run in fleet-footed from the wings and fall to one knee before the throne, heads bowed, leaning on the caduceus. Or do I mean caducous? Words, words. No matter, I have not the energy to look up the dictionary, and anyway, when I think of it, both words apply, in this case.
I am running dry.
The strange woman came forward, still smiling, still nodding encouragement, like the kindly old lady in the gingerbread house in the forest where the babes are lost. I shall call her, let me see, I shall call her—oh, what does it matter, call her Miss Kettle, that will do. She was a Miss, I believe, for I feel, on no evidence, that she was a spinster. I noticed the reason that her specs were askew: the earpiece on one side was missing. She took my hand; hers was warm, and dry, and not at all work-worn, a soft warm pad of flesh, the most real thing I had touched since hearing Lily’s cries and coming out of my room. “I’m sorry for your trouble,” she said, and I heard myself, out of unthinking politeness, answer her almost airily, “Oh, it’s no trouble.”
She had prepared one of those quintessential, archaic meals of childhood. There was a lettuce salad with tomatoes and scallions and cut-up hard-boiled eggs, and plates of soda bread, brown and white, and two big pots of tea, each with its pig’s-tail of steam curling from the spout, and square slices of that processed ham I did not think they still produced, pallid, marbled, evilly aglisten. For a moment we all stood around the table eyeing the food, awkward as a party of incongruously varied dinner guests—Whatever will that actress find to talk to the Bishop about?—then Quirke with a courtly gesture pulled back a chair for Lydia, and she sat, and so did we, clearing our throats and scraping our heels on the floor, and Miss Kettle poured the tea.
This was the first of several sombre repasts that Lydia and I were to be treated to over the following days. At times of bereavement, I have discovered, people revert to a primitive kindliness, which is manifest most obviously in the form of offerings of food. Plates of sandwiches were brought to us, and thermos flasks of chicken soup, and apple tarts, and big-bellied pots of stew, discreetly draped in tea towels that afterwards Lydia washed and ironed and returned to their owners, neatly folded inside the scrubbed pots that I had emptied, every one of them, into the dustbin. We felt like priest and priestess officiating at the place of veneration, receiving the sacrifices of the faithful, which were all handed over with the same sad nodding smile, the same patting of hand or grasping of arm, the same embarrassed, mumbled condolences. I did not weep at all, never once, in those first days—I had done my weeping already, in the luminously peopled darkness of those afternoon cinemas months before—but if I were to break down, it would have been at one of those moments when a plate of fairy cakes or a saucepan of soup was pressed tenderly into my hands. But it all came too late, the muttered invocations, the promised prayers, the funeral baked meats, for the maiden had already gone to the sacrifice.
Grief takes the taste out of things. I do not mean to say merely that it dulls the subtler savours, smoothing out the texture of a fine cut of beef or blunting the sharpness of a sauce, but that the very tastes themselves, of meat, vegetables, wine, ambrosia, whatever, are utterly killed, so that the stuff on the end of the fork might as well be cardboard, the strong drink in one’s glass dead water only. I sat and ate like a machine, slow and ruminant; the food went in, my jaws made their familiar figure-of-eight motion, the cud went down, and if it had come out immediately at the other end without pausing on the way I would not have been surprised, or perturbed, for that matter. Miss Kettle in her commonsensical way kept up a conversation, or monologue, really, that was not exactly cheerful but not lugubrious, either. She must have been a neighbour, or one of Quirke’s relations he had called on for support and succour in this hour of crisis, though she seemed to disapprove of him, for her lips went tight and deeply striated whenever her unwilling gaze encountered him. She was a descendant and refinement of those professional keeners who in the old days in this part of the world would have been hired in to set the process of mourning properly in motion with their screeches and wailings. In her talk she touched on the matter of death with a skill and delicacy worthy of a society undertaker. The only discordant note in her performance was those crooked spectacles, which gave her something of the look of a Dickensian eccentric. She mentioned repeatedly her sister who had died, though when or in what manner I was not attending closely enough to register; from the way that she spoke of her and her going, it almost seemed that I was expected to be already familiar with the details. These exchanges, if exchanges they could be called, would have had the potential for large confusions and embarrassments, in other circumstances; here, however, nothing seemed required of me in the way of manners or politeness; I felt like some harmless big beast who had been brought in wounded from the wild, to be cared for, and covertly studied. Lydia sat opposite me, like me mechanically eating, in silence, her gaze fixed steadily on her plate. Quirke was at the head of the table, looking quite the man of the house, mild and solicitous of expression, keeping an eye on everything. There are people who are good with death, they positively blossom in the icy breath of mortality, and to my surprise, and obscure displeasure, Quirke was turning out to be one of them. Each time I met his eye, which was as seldom as I could manage, he would give me a half-smile accompanied by a short, encouraging nod, a close relative to the smiling nods Miss Kettle had bestowed on me earlier, when we had first caught sight of each other, and it briefly crossed my addled mind that perhaps all this—the sympathy, the distracting talk, the meat tea—was indeed a professional service they were rendering, and that presently there would be an awkward moment of coughs and apologetic shrugs, and an invoice, and a fee to be paid. I pictured Quirke discreetly passing over the bill, the reverse of a magician palming a card—the envelope no doubt done up with a black silk ribbon—and his appreciative, silent mouthings as I disdainfully handed over a pouch of clinking guineas. Yes, there is definitely something Victorian about Quirke; he has the proprietorial, jauntily insolent air of a retainer who has been retained so long he believes he may count himself part of the family.
Lily was the one who puzzled me. After her earlier outburst in the hall, she was all surliness and feline shrinking now. She sat beside me slumped over her plate, her face hidden by hanging locks of hair. I know very well how death bores the young, like a glum intruder come to spoil finally an already dull party, but the silence that radiated off her like heat had a furious force to it that was, as I could see even in my distress of mind, directed entirely at me. But what injury had I done to her? As a rule I do not understand human beings, as I am sure I have remarked more than once, but the young I find especially baffling, and always have found them so. Later, in the hall, when Lydia and I were leaving, shuffling off in our sodden sorrow, the child appeared out of nowhere and fairly flung herself at me and clung to me for a second in a violent, awkward, damp embrace, before speeding off again, on those swift, bare, filthy feet of hers. Perhaps she really did want me for a Dad.