“Oh, my dear fellow,” the painted actor manager said, “by the size of you, I thought you must be a policeman at least.”
When they came out into the street it was night, and raining.
“My God,” Isabel Galloway said, “is that your car?”
Quirke sighed.
SHE LIVED IN A TINY TERRACED HOUSE OF PINK AND OCHER BRICKS on the canal at Portobello. Inside, it was curiously impersonal and reminded Quirke of a jewel box from which all the more intimate pieces had been removed. In the miniature living room almost the entire space was filled by two chintz-covered armchairs and a chintz-covered sofa that looked as if it had never been sat on. There were china and porcelain figurines on the mantelpiece, dogs and shepherdesses and a ballerina in a tutu hard and sharp-edged as coral. As soon as Isabel came in, and before she had even taken off her coat, she went and switched on the big wireless set that stood on a shelf beside the sofa; when after some moments it had warmed up it began at once to play dance music at a low volume, lush and swoony, though the signal was bad and there was static.
“Make yourself at home,” Isabel said, with a faint, ironical flourish, and went off into another room, the kitchen, it must be, from the sounds that came out of clinking glasses and a running tap.
Quirke draped his rain-grayed overcoat on one of the armchairs and laid his hat on top of it. He considered the sofa but found it too intimidating and stood instead, waiting for her to return. The ceiling could not have been more than six inches higher than the crown of his head. He felt like Alice after she had eaten the magic cake and grown huge.
“I’ve only gin, I’m afraid,” Isabel said, coming in with a tray of glasses and bottles and shutting the door behind her with a deft back kick of her heel. She set the tray on a low, rectangular table in front of the sofa and poured a generous splash of gin into one of the glasses, but Quirke put his hand over the mouth of the second one. “Just tonic, for me,” he said. “I don’t drink.”
She stared. “Yes you do. You were drinking wine in the hotel; I saw you.”
“That was by way of an experiment.”
“Ah.” She shrugged. “Yes. Phoebe told me you were- that you had a problem.” He said nothing, and she poured the tonic into his glass. She was a little tipsy still, he could see. “There’s no ice,” she said, “since the bloody fridge stopped working. It does it every winter- I think it thinks it should be let have a holiday when the weather turns cold. Here you are.” She handed him the glass, her cool fingers brushing against his hand. “It’s a bit flat. Chin-chin.” He was trying to place her accent. Had Phoebe said that she was English? “Think we might sit,” she said, “or do you prefer to go on looming?”
The sofa felt as unsat on as it looked; the cushion under Quirke was plump and hard, and perched on it he had the sense of being borne swayingly aloft, like a child on a merry-go-round, or a mahout on his elephant. He sipped the tonic water; she was right, it was flat.
The dance tune on the radio came to an end, and the announcer said the next one would be a tango. “We could dance, if there was room,” Isabel said. She looked askance at him. “Do you dance, Dr. Quirke?”
“Not much.”
“I thought so.” She took a drink of her gin and laid her head back on the sofa, sighing. “God, I’ve been boozing all afternoon with those people; I’m sure I must be completely tiddly.” Again she gave him that sideways glance. “Mind you, don’t let that give you any ideas.”
There was a silver cigarette box on the table, and now she leaned forward and took two cigarettes and put them both in her mouth and lit them and handed one to him. “Sorry,” she said, “lipstick,” and Quirke remembered another woman doing that, turning from a mantelpiece, in snow-light, and handing him a cigarette and saying those same words.
“How did you know me?” he asked. “At the hotel, I mean.”
“I must have seen you, I suppose, with Phoebe.” She narrowed her eyes, still smiling. “Or maybe I saw you in front of the footlights all those times when you came to see me act, and remembered you.”
The tango music swirled, toffee-brown and smooth.
“Do you know Phoebe well?” he asked.
She heaved a sharp sigh, pretending to be vexed. “You keep asking me that. Does anyone know Phoebe well? Anyway, she’s really April’s friend- April Latimer?” Quirke nodded. “The rest of us I think she just tolerates.”
“The rest of you?”
“We’re a little band of friends, the Faubourg set, don’t you know. We meet once a week and drink too much and talk behind other people’s backs. Well, I drink too much, usually. You needn’t worry about Phoebe; she’s very careful.”
“April Latimer, then,” he said, “how well did you know her?”
“Oh, I’ve known April forever. She stole a man from me, once.”
“Is that how you met her?”
“What? Oh, no. We’d known each other a long time when that happened.”
“So you were able to forgive her.”
She gave him a sharp look, suspecting mockery. “Well, of course. To tell the truth, he wasn’t much of a catch in the first place, as April soon found out. We had many a laugh behind his back, April and I.”
The tango ended and there was applause, tinny and remote, and the announcer came on to say that the news would be next. “Oh, turn that off, will you?” Isabel said. “Do you mind? I hate hearing of the day’s disasters.” She watched him get up and, craning her neck, followed him with her eye as he went to the set to switch it off. “You really are very big,” she said, putting on a lisping, little-girl voice. “I didn’t quite realize it at the hotel, but in this dinky little house you look like Gulliver.”
He returned to the sofa and sat down. “She was fond of men, was she, April?” he asked.
She gave him a wide-eyed stare. “You do come right out with it, don’t you?” she said. She laid her head back on the sofa and rolled it slowly from side to side. “I notice you speak of her in the past tense. You must have been talking to Phoebe, who thinks April has been done away with by Jack the Ripper.”
“And you – what do you think has become of her?”
“If her past behavior is anything to go by, right now she’ll be shacked up with some hunk in a nice cozy inn somewhere in… oh, let me see… in the Cotswolds, under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, dining by candlelight and sporting a Wool-worth’s wedding ring. What do you think, Dr. Quirke?”
He suggested she might call him by his first name. When she asked him what it was and he told her, she gave a little shriek of delight and incredulity, and immediately put a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t laugh. But I think I’ll stick to Quirke, if you don’t mind- even Phoebe calls you that, doesn’t she?”
“Yes,” he said flatly. “Everyone does.”
He finished his cigarette and was leaning forward to stub the end of it in the ashtray on the table when he felt her fingers on the back of his neck. “You have such a nice little corkscrew curl just there where your hair ends,” she said.
She allowed her hand to glide slowly down between his shoulder blades to his waist. He turned and put his hands on her shoulders- how delicate the bones were there!- and kissed her painted mouth. It was cool and tasted of gin. She drew back an inch and laughed softly into his mouth. “Oh, Dr. Quirke,” she murmured, “I really must be drunk.” But when Quirke put a hand on her breast she pushed him away. “Let’s have another drink,” she said, and sat up, touching her hair. She poured the gin and the last of the flat tonic water and handed him his glass. She looked at him closely. “Now you’re sulking,” she said. “I can see you are. What do you expect? Don’t you know what it’s like for a girl in this town?”