“My dear,” Rose was saying to Phoebe, releasing her from a light, deft embrace, “look at you, all in black as usual, like a Mafia widow.”
Phoebe introduced her employer, then hesitated- how was she supposed to explain her relationship to Rose?- but Rose immediately rescued her, putting on her most glittering smile and extending an expensively manicured hand. “Rose Crawford,” she said. “Delighted, I’m sure.”
Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes was uncertain how to proceed. Although she allowed Phoebe now and then to make a discount purchase for a family member or a pal, she had set it out clearly to her assistant that actual visits to the shop by friends or relatives would not be countenanced, unless they were prepared to pay full retail prices; there were professional standards to be maintained, after all. Rose Crawford, whoever she might be, was no hard-up cousin trying to cadge a bargain or an old school acquaintance on the eve of her nuptials looking for something fancy to top off her going-away outfit; Rose was Money, possibly even Old Money, and that was all that Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes needed to know about her.
“I was on my way to Brown Thomas when I remembered where Phoebe worked,” Rose said. “I need something to cope with your Irish weather”- a wry smile and eyes cast upwards- “ but at the same time won’t make me look like Mot her Machree’s older sister.”
“Why, of course,” Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes said eagerly, and began plucking hats from all corners of the shop and strewing them along the counter like so many overblown lotus blossoms. Phoebe could see by the tightening of her nostrils that Rose found them all equally ugly; nevertheless she took up two models at random and went to the full-length mirror by the door and tried them on in turn. “Which is the least awful?” she asked of Phoebe, out of the side of her mouth.
Phoebe, standing close beside her, smiled. “You don’t have to buy anything, you know,” she murmured.
Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes, who was a little deaf, was watching them sharply.
In the end Rose decided on a rather severe black felt toque with a ruby pin. It looked very smart on her, Phoebe saw. Rose asked if she could pay with a traveler’s check, and Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes scuttled into her office to phone the bank to ask for guidance.
“So,” Rose said to Phoebe, putting the hat carelessly aside, “how are you, my dear?”
“I’m very well.”
“You’ve changed. You’re older.”
Phoebe laughed. “Not much older, I hope?”
“I worry about you.”
“Do you? Why?”
Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes came back, wheezing in distress. “I’m so sorry, the young man at the bank seemed to think it wouldn’t be-”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rose said. “I’ll go and get some cash and come back.” She smiled her toothed smile again. “Perhaps Miss Griffin here can show me the way to the American Express office?”
“Oh, it’s just down there at the bottom of the-”
“I meant, she could take me there? I get lost so easily in these dinky little streets.”
Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes began to make a further protest but then retreated a step, seeming to deflate. “Oh, well, yes, of course.”
The rain was stopping as Rose and Phoebe walked down Grafton Street. “I wanted,” Rose said, “to consult you about something.” She linked her arm in Phoebe’s. “It’s rather”- she gave a small, embarrassed laugh-”rather delicate, I suppose you’d say.”
Phoebe waited, breathless with curiosity. What could it possibly be that would make Rose Crawford behave so awkwardly? They came to the American Express office. “Here we are,” Phoebe said. “Tell me before we go in.”
Rose looked all about the street, as if fearing to be overheard, and bit her lip. For a moment she might have been half her age. “No,” she said, “let’s get my money first. I always feel more confident, somehow, with a wad of greenbacks in the back pocket of my blue jeans.”
It seemed to take forever to get the check cashed. Phoebe waited near the door, looking at the travel posters and reading the brochures. At last the business was done, and Rose came back, shutting her handbag. “All right,” she said, “let’s go and make your boss a happy woman.”
But Phoebe would not budge. “I’m not moving until you tell me what it is you want to ‘consult’ me about.”
Rose stood and gazed at her in smiling dismay. “O, Lordy!” she exclaimed. “Why did I start this?” She took Phoebe’s arm again and led her determinedly into the street, and there they halted again. Rose took a deep breath. “I wanted to ask you, my dear, how you would feel if I were to- well, if I were to marry into the family again.”
“Marry?”
Rose nodded, pressing her lips tightly together. Phoebe looked upwards. Between the rooftops the narrow strip of sky, flowing swiftly with gray and silver clouds, seemed for a moment a gorgeous, shining, inverted river.
“Of course,” Rose went on quickly, “he may not say yes. In fact, I’ll be- well, I’ll be pretty surprised if he does.”
“You mean, he hasn’t asked you? You’re going to ask him?”
“I’ve dropped hints. But you know how it is with Irishmen and hints. And your father, well-h e’s the Irishman’s Irishman, isn’t he?”
“But but but-”
Rose put a finger to the girl’s lips. “Ssh. Not another word, for now. I’ve embarrassed myself quite enough for one day. I need that hat, to hide my blushes under.”
And they set off up the street towards the Maison des Chapeaux and its expectant proprietress. Above their heads, Phoebe saw, that river of cloud flowed on in joyful spate.
WHEN ROSE HAD PAID FOR HER HAT AND LEFT, STILL LOOKING flustered, Phoebe asked Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes if she might use the telephone. This was a daring request, for the telephone was an object of reverence and some awe to its owner, and sat enshrined in state on the desk in the cubbyhole, making Phoebe think always of a pampered, pedigreed cat. But the hat that Rose had bought was so costly that Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes had not even bothered to bring it down until Rose spotted it on a high shelf and asked to see it, and after such a lavish sale how could she refuse the girl a phone call? She was itching to know who exactly Rose was, but Phoebe offered no account of her and the moment to insist on being told seemed to have passed. Mustering what grace she could, therefore, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes said of course, the phone was there, please feel free.
It was her father Phoebe called, inviting him to invite her to dinner. Like her employer, what could he say but yes?
15
QUIRKE HIMSELF HAD BEEN ABOUT TO MAKE A TELEPHONE CALL, though he was not at all sure that he should. He was in his office and had been thinking of April Latimer. He had never met the young woman, had never even seen her, as far as he knew, though he might have passed her by in a corridor of the hospital, yet the thought of her kept coming back to his mind. It was as if he had glimpsed a figure in the fog and were stumbling in pursuit of it, though it maintained a maddeningly constant distance in front of him and at times disappeared altogether amidst the deceptive, gray billowings. The recollection of that day in Bill Latimer’s office with Latimer and April’s mother and her brother nagged at him; it had felt unreal, like an amateur theatrical per formance put on just for him. Someone there knew something more than had been said.
Oscar Latimer answered the phone himself, on the first ring.
They had agreed to meet by the canal at Huband Bridge. Quirke was early and went down to the towpath and sat on the old iron bench there, huddled in his coat. The rain had stopped and it was damp and misty, with a great stillness everywhere, and when a drop fell from one of the branches of the plane tree above him and landed with a thwack on the brim of his hat it made him start. Ghosts lingered in this place, the ghost of Sarah, poor, lost Sarah, and even the ghost of himself, too, as he was then, when she was alive and they used to walk on days like this beside the water here. Today moorhens paddled among the reeds, as they had then, and that same willow trailed its finger-tips in the shallows, and a double-decker bus that might have been the prototype of all green buses went past up there at Baggot Street, lumbering over the hump-backed bridge with the ungainly grace of some large, loping creature of the forest.