“Yes. I’d always known and never told her I knew. God knows why. Cowardice, of course, there’s always cowardice.”
Rose laughed again, softly. “Secrets and lies, Quirke, secrets and lies.”
He gave her an account of his meeting that morning with the Latimers. She was fascinated. “He called you all together in his office, where the government is, this man- what’s his name?”
“Bill Latimer. Minister of Health.”
“Bizarre. What did he want you to do?”
“Me? Nothing.”
“You mean, nothing nothing?”
“Exactly. He wants the fact of his niece’s disappearance kept under wraps, at least for the time being, so he says. He’s afraid of a scandal.”
“Does he think he can keep it a secret forever? What if she’s dead?”
“You can do anything in this country, if you’re powerful enough. You know that.”
She nodded in grim amusement. “Secrets and lies,” she said again, softly, in her southern drawl, almost singing it.
The sleet shower passed, and they drove down into a long, shallow valley. Distantly the sea was visible, a line of indelible-pencil-blue on the horizon. There were blackish green clumps of gorse, and thornbushes raked by the wind into agonized, clawlike shapes; tatters of sheep’s wool fluttered on the barbed wire by the side of the road. “My God, Quirke,” Rose said suddenly, “this is a terrible place you’ve brought me to.”
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Up here? Terrible?”
“So barren. If there’s a Hell, this is how I imagine it will be. No flames and all that, just ice and emptiness. Let’s go back. I like to be around people. I’m no cowgirl; the wide-open spaces frighten me.”
He turned the car in a gateway, and they set off back towards the city.
They were out of the mountains before Rose spoke again. “Maybe I should marry Malachy,” she said. “It could be my mission in life, to cheer him up.” She looked sideways at Quirke. “Aren’t you lonely?” she asked.
“Yes, of course,” he said simply. “Isn’t everyone?”
She did not answer for a moment and then chuckled. “You’re nothing if not predictable, Quirke.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s not bad or good. It’s just you.”
“A hopeless case, is that it?”
“Hopeless. Maybe Malachy isn’t the one I should marry.”
“Who, then?” Quirke asked lightly; then the lightness drained from him, and he frowned, and kept his eyes on the windscreen.
Rose laughed. “Oh, Quirke,” she said. “You look like a little boy who’s been told he may have to go and live with his grandma for the rest of his life. By the way,” she said, turning her head quickly to look back-”aren’t you supposed to stop when someone steps out on one of those- what do you call them?- those zebra crossings?”
He delivered her to the Shelbourne. She said she still had to unpack and then rest awhile. She suggested that he and Phoebe might join her for dinner. He was back in his flat before he realized that he was still wearing the lewd tie she had given him. He looked at himself in the mirror. There were shadows under his eyes. He wished he had not drunk that glass of champagne; he could taste its sourness still. He took off the tie and went into the kitchen and threw it in the waste bin with the kitchen slops.
12
PHOEBE LAY RIGID, STARING INTO THE DARKNESS. IT WAS OFTEN like this; she would go to sleep and then after an hour or two would start awake from a nightmare not a single detail of which had stayed with her. Somehow this was what was most terrifying, the way the dream just vanished, like an animal scuttling down a hole and leaving nothing behind but an aura of horror and filth. So many dreadful things had happened in her life and surely they were what she dreamed of, yet how was it she forgot everything as soon as she woke? Were the visions in her dreams so terrible that her mind, feeling itself about to wake, whipped them away and hid them from her? If so, she was not glad of it; she would rather know than not know. She had woken lying on her back with her fists clenched against her throat and her teeth bared and her rib cage heaving. It was as if she had been fleeing headlong from something and at last had made her escape, although the thing, what ever faceless thing it was, was still out there, hiding in the dark, waiting for another night to come creeping out again and terrorize her.
She switched on the bedside lamp and laid her head back on the damp, hot pillow and squeezed her eyes shut. She did not want to be awake, but there would be no sleep now for a long time. Sighing, she got up and put on her silk dressing gown- peignoir was what it was properly called, she liked the word. It had belonged to the woman who for the first nineteen years of her life she had thought was her mother.
She went out to the kitchen. Night smells, she had often noticed, were different from day ones, were mustier, fainter, more insidious. She drew open the lapels of her silk gown and put her face into the hollow there and sniffed. Yes, her smell too was different, a babyish, secret staleness.
The thought came to her that she had never got used to being alive.
She took a half-full bottle of milk from the cupboard and shook it to make sure that it had not curdled- she had no refrigerator- and poured some into a blackened saucepan and set it on the gas ring to heat, adding a spoonful of raspberry jam. There was a slice of pound cake left from the piece she had bought two days ago to have after her dinner; it had gone hard and crumbly, but she needed to eat something. Behind her the milk begin to seethe, and she whipped it off the flame just as it was about to come to the boil. A wrinkled scum had formed, of course, and she had to lift it off as best she could with a teaspoon, trying not to let it break, a thing that always made her feel slightly sick. She poured the scalding, pink-tinged milk into a mug and unwrapped the cake from its greaseproof paper and put it on a plate and brought the mug and the plate to the table and sat down. She shut her eyes and sat motionless for a moment, then reopened them. She had not pulled down the blind- she hated blinds, they looked to her like unrolled sheets of pale-gray skin- and the window beside her was a tall rectangle of shining blackness. It was not very late, one o’clock, maybe, yet all outside was silent. She drank her milk with the jam in it and ate the morsel of dry, sweet cake. Her heartbeat even yet was uneven, from the stress of the forgotten dream.
Her thoughts turned, of course, to April, as they always did in sleepless hours such as these, although she thought of her in the daytime, too. It was strange, the sense of helplessness she had about her friend. Indeed, it was like being in a dream, one in which there is something of great importance to be done- a warning to be delivered, a secret revealed-yet everybody else is relaxed and indifferent and there is no one who will bother to listen to the dire news that only she is in possession of. Even though no one else seemed to be as worried as she was, she had thought that Quirke surely would appreciate the awfulness of April’s disappearance- of her just being gone, without a word, without a trace left behind- for after all, another young woman whom she had known had disappeared last summer and Quirke had discovered her to have been murdered. Yet when he went with her and the detective to April’s flat, and then next day to see April’s brother, he had said hardly a word and had seemed not to care about April or what had become of her. But perhaps he was right and she was wrong; perhaps she was being fanciful and melodramatic about the entire thing. Or maybe, simply, it was true that he did not care. Did any of them, really, Isabel, Patrick, Jimmy Minor? They did not seem to be very worried, or not as worried as she was, anyway. She was filled with dread; she could not rid herself of it.
Odd, how clear and sharp the mind can be at this time of night, she thought. Is it just that there are so few distractions in the small hours, or does the brain make use then of energy that normally it would be storing to fuel the next day’s mental business? Thinking of April now, and the seemingly careless attitude of Quirke and the others, she, too, had a sense of estrangement, a sense of alienation, which, to her surprise, seemed to be allowing her to consider her friend’s case with a new and calm dispassion. Somehow in her mind April became separated from all the things that together made up the image she had of her friend, and floated free, as sometimes in one’s consciousness a word floats free of the thing it is attached to and becomes something else, not just a noise, exactly, not a meaningless grunt or bark, but a mysterious, new entity, new and mysterious because it is itself only and not merely a means of signifying something.