He fumbled with his sleeve, squinting at the face of his watch that refused to stay steady, but kept flicking sideways in a dizzy-making fashion. He had suddenly remembered his dinner date with Phoebe. He lowered his head, a throbbing gourd, into his cupped hands, and groaned.
THEY WENT TO THE RUSSELL. THE PLACE WAS SOMBER AND SILENT as it always was. After lunching with him here one day Rose Crawford had refused to return, saying the dining room reminded her of a funeral parlor. The waiter who showed him to his table was fascinatingly ugly, with a square, blue jaw and deeply sunken eyes under a jutting brow. Quirke remembered that his name, improbably, was Rodney. He saw with relief that Phoebe had not arrived; he had forgotten what time they had agreed to meet, and he had assumed he would be late. While Rodney was drawing back his chair for him he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the gilt-framed looking-glass on the wall behind the table. Tousled and wild of eye, he was a dead ringer for the escaped convict in a Hollywood prison picture. “Now, sir,” the waiter said, pronouncing it surr. Quirke sat down, turning his back on the mirror.
He had walked from the hospital in his still-damp, heavy overcoat and his droop-brimmed hat. The whiskey he had drunk with Oscar Latimer had left him with a hollowed-out, ashen sensation, and lingering fumes of alcohol swirled in a hot fog in his head. That sleep on the couch had not helped, either, and he was groggy. Would he drink a glass of wine with Phoebe- should he?
Phoebe when she arrived was wearing a dark-blue silk dress and a blue silk stole. As she walked across the room, making her way between the tables in Rodney’s wake, she looked so like her mother that Quirke felt a catch in his heart. She had tied her hair back in that complicated way that Delia used to do, and carried a small black purse pressed against her breast, and that, too, was Delia to the life.
“I’m sorry,” she said, seating herself quickly, “have you been here long?”
“No, no, just arrived. You look very nice.”
She set the velvet purse beside her plate. “Do I?” she said. Quirke was normally not one for compliments.
“Is that a new dress?”
“Oh, Quirke.” She made a smiling grimace. “You’ve seen me in it a dozen times.”
“Well, it looks different on you this time. You look different.”
She did. Her face glowed, ivory with the faintest tinge of pink, and her eyes shone. Had she met someone? Was she in love? He longed for her to be happy; it would release him from so much.
“That waiter,” she said in a whisper, indicating Rodney, where he stood just inside the door, blank-faced as a statue, with a napkin draped over his wrist, off in some idle dream of his own. “He’s a dead ringer for Dick Tracy in the comics.”
Quirke laughed. “You’re right, he is.”
They ate sole fried in butter. “Has it ever struck you,” Phoebe said, “that you and I always order the same thing?”
“It’s simple. I wait to see what you’re having and then ask for the same.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes.”
She gazed at him, and something happened to her smile, a sort of crimpling at the edges of it, and her eyes grew liquid. He lowered his gaze hastily to the tablecloth.
The wine waiter arrived. Quirke had ordered a bottle of Chablis. It was good they were having fish, since white wine was hardly a drink at all, and so he would be safe. The waiter, a sleek-haired, acned youth, poured out a sip for Quirke to taste and while he waited let his pale eye wander appreciatively over Phoebe, all ivory glow in her night-blue frock. She smiled up at him. She was happy; she had been absurdly happy all afternoon, since that moment with Rose Crawford outside the American Express office. She had read somewhere that there are insects that travel from continent to continent suspended individually in tiny bubbles of ice borne along by air currents at an immense height; that was how she had been, sailing aloft in a frozen cocoon, and now the ice was melting, and soon she would come sailing down happily to earth. Quirke and Rose; Mr. and Mrs. Quirke; the Quirkes. She saw them, the three of them, standing at the rail of a white ship cleaving its way through waters as blue as summer, the sea wind soft in their faces, on their way to a new world.
What age was Rose? she wondered. Older than Quirke, certainly; it would not matter; nothing would matter.
“Tell me about Delia,” she said.
Quirke looked at her over the rim of his wine glass in startlement and alarm. “Delia?” he said, and licked his lips. “What- what do you want me to tell you?”
“Anything. What she was like. What you did together. I know so little about her. You’ve never told me anything, really.” She was smiling. “Was she very beautiful?”
In panic he fingered his napkin. The steaming fish lay almost menacingly on the plate before him. His headache was suddenly worse. “Yes,” he said, hesitantly, “she was- she was very beautiful. She looked like you.” Phoebe blushed and dipped her head. “Elegant, of course,” Quirke went on, desperately. “She could have been a model, everybody said so.”
“Yes, but what was she like? I mean as a person.”
What she was like? How was he to tell her that? “She was kind,” he said, casting down his gaze again and fixing anew on the napkin, somehow accusing in its whiteness, its mundane purity. “She took care of me.” She was not kind, he was thinking; she did not take care of me. Yet he had loved her. “We were young,” he said, “or at least I was.”
“And did you hate me,” she asked, “did you hate me when she died?”
“Oh, no,” he said. He forced himself to smile; his cheeks felt as if they were made of glass. “Why would I hate you?”
“Because I was born and Delia died, and you gave me to Sarah.”
She was still smiling. He sat and gazed at her helplessly, clutching his knife and fork, not knowing what to say. She reached across the table and touched his hand. “I don’t blame you anymore,” she said. “I don’t know that I ever did, only I felt I should. I was angry at you. I’m not now.”
They sat in silence for a minute. Quirke filled their glasses; his hand, he saw, was a little shaky. They ate. The fish was cold.
“I saw Inspector Hackett today,” Quirke said. He looked at the empty wine bottle lolling in its bucket of half-melted ice. Would he order another? No, he would not. Definitely not. He turned and signaled to the pimpled waiter. “I talked to her brother, too.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why did you want to talk to him again?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re like me- you can’t let it go.”
The waiter came with the second bottle, but before he could begin again the tasting ritual Quirke motioned him impatiently to pour. Phoebe put a hand over her glass, smiling again at the waiter. When he had filled Quirke’s glass and gone, she said, “You think what I do, don’t you, that April is dead.” Quirke did not reply and would not look at her. “What did he say, Oscar Latimer?”