Could it be this evening that the car was aware he was in a more than usually vulnerable state of mind? It was the end of his first, dried-out day back at work, and it had not been easy. Sinclair, his assistant, had been unable to hide his displeasure at his boss’s return and the consequent eclipsing of the powers that he had wielded, and enjoyed wielding, in these past two months. Sinclair was a skilled professional, good at his job- brilliant, in some ways- but he was ambitious, and impatient for advancement. Quirke had felt like a general returning to the battlefield after an emergency spell of rest and recuperation who finds not only that his second-in-command has been running the campaign with ruthless efficiency but that the enemy has been thoroughly routed. He had walked in that morning confidently enough, but somehow his helmet no longer quite fitted him and his sword would not come out of its scabbard. There had been slips, vexations, avoidable misunderstandings. He had carried out a postmortem- his first in many months- on a five-year-old girl and had failed to identify the cause of death as leptomeningitis, hardly a subtle killer. It was Sinclair who had spotted the error and had stood by, coolly silent, examining his nails, while Quirke, swearing under his breath and sweating, had rewritten his report. Later he had shouted at one of the porters, who went into a sulk and had to be elaborately apologized to. Then he cut his thumb on a scalpel- a new one and unused, luckily- and had been compelled to suffer the smirks of the nurse who bandaged the wound for him. No, not a good day.
In the Russell Hotel as always a mysterious quiet reigned. Quirke liked it here, liked the stuffy, padded feel of the place, the air that seemed not to have been stirred for generations, the blandishing way the carpets deadened his footsteps, and, most of all, the somehow pubic texture of the flocked wallpaper when his fingers brushed against it accidentally. Before he had gone on the latest drinking bout, when he was supposed not to be taking alcohol in any form, he used to take Phoebe to dinner here on Tuesday nights and share a bottle of wine with her, his only tipple of the week. Now, in trepidation, he was going to see if he could take a glass or two of claret again without wanting more. He tried to tell himself he was here solely in the spirit of research, but that fizzing sensation under his breastbone was all too familiar. He wanted a drink, and he was going to have one.
He was glad to find himself the only customer in the bar, but no sooner had he got his glass of Mйdoc and settled himself at a table in one of the dimmer corners of the room- it was not, he told himself, that he was hiding, only that wine drunk in a shadowed, cool place somehow gained in depth- than a party of four came in, making a commotion. They had been drinking already, by the look and sound of them. There were three men and a woman. They gathered at the bar and began at once to call for gins and vodkas and bloody marys. Two of the men were the famous Hilton and Mнcheбl, the queer couple who ran the Gate; the third was a handsome, hopeful youth with curls and a sulky mouth. The woman was smoking a cigarette in a long ebony holder, with which she made much ostentatious play. Quirke opened wide his newspaper and slid down behind it in his chair.
His mind soon drifted away from reports of the latest fears of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and the horrors of foreign wars. Idly he pondered the distinction between solitude and loneliness. Solitude, he conjectured, is being alone, while loneliness is being alone among other people. Was that the case? No, something incomplete there. He had been solitary when the bar was empty, but was he lonely now that these others had appeared?
Had April Latimer been lonely? It did not seem probable, from everything he had heard of her so far. Had there been anyone with her when her child miscarried, or was aborted? Had there been one to hold her hand, wipe her brow, murmur words of solace in her ear? He did not know very much about women and their ways. That side of their lives especially, the having of babies and the rest of it, was a mystery into which he had no wish to be initiated. He could not understand how his brother-in-law had chosen to make a career among all that messy and transient melodrama- all that hysteria. Give me the dead, he thought, the dead whose brief scenes on the stage are done with, for whom the last act is over and the curtain brought down.
If the baby had been aborted, had April done it herself? She was a doctor; he supposed she would know how to do it. But would she have taken such a risk? It would depend on how anxious she was to conceal the fact that she had been pregnant. Surely she would have gone to someone for help, or at least to confide in. If she did, might that someone, he wondered, have been Phoebe? At the thought he sat upright suddenly in the chair and held the newspaper tighter, making the pages crackle. Was that why Phoebe was so sure her friend had come to harm? Were there things she knew that she had not told him and Hackett? Phoebe was a damaged soul astray in the world. How much of this he was responsible for he did not care to measure. He had not loved her when she needed to be loved. He was a bad father; there was no getting away from that sad, awkward, and painful fact. If she was in trouble now, if she knew the truth about April Latimer and did not know whom to turn to, then it was his moment to help her. But how? He could feel himself beginning to sweat.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
He looked up from his paper, startled and at once wary. She stood before him, lightly smiling, with the cigarette holder in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. She wore a clinging dress of red wool under an overcoat with a fur collar and fur trimming. Her face was narrow and wonderfully delicate and pale, and her dark-red hair had a rich metallic gleam. He felt a vague panic- was she someone he should know? She seemed faintly familiar. He was not good at remembering faces. He stood up, and the woman, suddenly lowered over, gave a faint laugh, and took a tottering step backwards. “I know you’re Phoebe’s father,” she said. “I’m a friend of hers- Isabel Galloway.”
Of course. The actress.
“Yes,” he said. “Miss Galloway. Hello.” He offered his hand, but she glanced at the cigarette holder on one side and the gin glass on the other, amusedly pointing out her helplessness. “Phoebe often speaks of you,” he said. “And of course I’ve seen your- I’ve seen you on the stage.”
“Have you?” she said, opening wide her eyes in a simulacrum of surprise and plea sure. “I wouldn’t have thought you were the theatergoing type.”
She was slightly tipsy. Behind her, the others at the bar were making a point of not being in the least interested in who it was she was speaking to.
“Well, it’s true,” he said, “I don’t go very often. But I’ve seen you, in- in a number of things.” She said nothing, only waited, pointedly, leaving him no choice but to invite her to join him. “Sit down, won’t you?” he said, feeling the soft snap of something closing on him.
Later he would not remember if he saw, that first time, how lovely she was, in her sly, languid, feline way. He was too busy adjusting himself to the steady light of her candid regard; as she sat and gazed at him he felt like a slow old moose caught in the crosshairs of a polished and very powerful rifle. Her self-possession alarmed him; it was the result, he imagined, of her actor’s training. She seemed to be amused at something large and ongoing, a marvelously absurd cavalcade, of which, he suspected, he was just now a part.
They spoke of Phoebe. He asked her how long she had known his daughter, and she waved the cigarette holder in a great circling gesture, like a magician twirling a flaming hoop. “Oh,” she said in that creamy voice of hers, “she’s too young for me to have known her for long. But I’m very fond of her. Very fond.” He drank his wine; she drank her gin. Smiling, she gazed at him. He felt as if he was being patted all over by someone searching for something hidden on his person. He put down his glass. He said he would have to go. She said it was time for her to go, too. She bent that gaze on him again, tilting her head a fraction to one side. He asked if he could give her a lift. She said, why, that would be wonderful. He frowned and nodded. They paused as they were passing by the trio at the bar, and she introduced Quirke.