When Phoebe’s taxi drove away he stood on the hill by the cathedral in the light of the streetlamp for a long time, turning this way and that, not knowing what to do. It was bitterly cold, and the frosty air when he breathed it in sliced at his throat like a cold flame. Should he hide? Should he run away? Yet where could he go? It was not as if he could melt into the crowd, not in this city. London, perhaps? But he knew no one there, and besides, he had no money, or not money enough to keep himself in a place like London. And would they be watching the mail boats, the airport?
He knew so little about this country, about the people in it. They were strange. They took such a grave view of some things, while other, apparently serious matters they ignored or laughed about. You could get so much done here for nothing, just by asking, not like at home where every smallest Service had to be bought with dash, that nice term for a bribe. Here they would not take your money, but neither would they take you seriously. That was what puzzled him most of all, the way they mocked and jeered at everything and everyone, themselves included. Yet the laughter could stop without warning, when you least expected. Then suddenly you would find yourself alone in the midst of a circle of them, all of them looking at you, blank-eyed and silently accusing, even though you did not know what it was you were being accused of.
He crossed the street and let himself into the house, pausing with the key in his hand and glancing back both ways over his shoulders, just like a real felon. It was three o’clock in the morning, and not a soul was to be seen. He eased the key out of the lock silently, and silently closed the door behind him and crept along the pitch-black hall. Above all he must not disturb Mrs. Gilligan, who would surely call the Guards if she heard someone down here at this time of the morning. He crept up the stairs.
In the room a hint of Phoebe’s fragrance lingered, though it was hard to smell anything over the sticky reek of paraffin from the stove. That was another thing about this country: how was it that people never tried to cope with the climate? In winter they were content to huddle over tiny fires of evil-smelling coke or smoldering turf, while at the first hint of summer they began immediately to complain of the heat. Mechanically he set about making the bed, then realized he would have to change the sheets, for he knew Mrs. Gilligan often came up and poked around during the day when he was out. He was suddenly assailed by the memory of Phoebe not half an hour ago lying here in his arms. Would it ever happen again? Would he ever see her again? He sat down on the bed and stared at the floor, trying to think and yet not to think.
But this was no good; he could not allow himself to lose his nerve and feel sorry for himself like this. Wearily he lay down on the bed, stretching out his limbs. Yes, he was tired, very tired. His mind began to drift. A thought came to him, a thought of where he might go, of who might help him, but all at once he was too sleepy and could not hold on to what the thought was trying urgently to tell him.
17
IT WAS EIGHT O’CLOCK AND STILL NOT FULLY LIGHT WHEN QUIRKE woke enveloped in a hot and muggy haze of alcohol fumes and his own stale stink. At first he could not tell where he was. The bedroom and the bed he was lying on were not his, and yet not entirely unfamiliar. He remained some moments without stirring, wary even of lifting his head, which felt at once leaden and as breakable as a globe of crystal. He tried to summon up the previous night’s events. Dinner with Phoebe, wine, too much wine, and then…? He had been in a taxi, he remembered it driving him away from the Russell. Following that there was a blank, and the next thing he recalled, indistinctly, was being in another hotel. The Central, was it? No, Jury’s, in Dame Street; he remembered the stained-glass windows of the bar there. Then he had been in one of the rooms upstairs, where a party was going on. People had kept giving him drinks- who were they? He saw shiny red faces pressing forward, four or five of them bristling at him as if they shared only one neck, and heard booming laughter, and a woman’s voice saying something to him over and over. Then he was outside again, in another taxi- no, not a taxi, for he was driving this time, driving along the canal, with the window open, the air in his face as cold and sharp as a blade.
He got out of bed, sliding himself sideways from under the sheet and straightening up cautiously. He was in his shirt and underpants, and was wearing his socks, too. He went to the window and drew back the curtain at one side. A gray dawn was breaking on the canal. It was cold, down there, with a whitish coating of frost on the roadway and floatings of ice on the unmoving surface of the water. The Alvis was parked at a sharp angle to the pavement. He heard a sudden, loud beating in the air and flinched instinctively, and two swans like intent and vehement ghosts went flying past, low and straight, their great wings thrashing on the air. He had seen them before, those birds.
The bedroom door behind him opened. “Ah. Sleeping beauty has awoken at last.” Today Isabel Galloway wore not her silk wrap but an outsized pink wool dressing gown. She was smoking a cigarette. She leaned in the doorway and folded one arm into the crook of the other and regarded him with a faint, sardonic smile. “How do you feel, or need I ask?”
“About as bad as I imagine I deserve to feel. Where are my trousers?”
She pointed. “On the chair, behind you.” He pulled them on, then sat down on the edge of the bed. He was dizzy. Isabel came forward and put a hand on top of his head, pushing her fingers into his hair. “Poor you.”
He looked up at her out of suffering eyes. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember much,” he said. “Was I very drunk?”
“I’m not sure what you’d consider very drunk.”
“Did I- did I disgrace myself?”
“You tried to get me into bed, if that’s what you mean. But then you toppled over, very slowly, rather like a tree being felled, and so my honor was preserved.”
“I’m sorry.”
She heaved an exaggerated sigh and grasped a fistful of hair and tugged it. “I hope you’re not going to keep on apologizing, are you? Nothing is as annoying for a girl as a man in the morning saying sorry. Come down, there’s coffee on.”
When she had gone he went into the tiny bathroom at the end of the hall and peered at himself in the mirror. It seemed for a moment that he was about to be sick, but then the nausea passed. He bathed his face in ice-cold water, gasping softly.
In the kitchen Isabel was standing by the stove, waiting for the percolator to come to the boil. She saw him looking at her dressing gown. “The silk one was for effect,” she said. “My bottom was blue as a baboon’s by the time you left.” He looked at her socks, too; they were thick and gray. “My mother knits them for me,” she said. She turned back to the stove. “Yes, I have a gray-haired old mother, who knits for me. It’s all terribly banal, my little life.”
He sat down at the table, bracing a hand on the back of the chair and easing himself down slowly. He was about to apologize again but stopped himself in time.
She brought the coffee to the table and poured out cups for both of them. “The toast is cold,” she said. “Shall I make more?”