He came to Merrion Road and turned left, in the direction of the city. A Garda squad car came up behind him and slowed. The Garda in the passenger seat peered out at him suspiciously. He supposed he did look odd, a man in a dark suit and a dark hat, with a suitcase, strolling aimlessly. The car went on. Then a taxi approached, going in the opposite direction. He hailed it, and it did a U-turn. He got into the back seat. The driver was a countryman with a large round head and red ears.
“Upper Mount Street,” Quirke said.
Home, he thought. It wasn’t a term he often brought to mind, not when he was thinking of himself, anyway.
* * *
And still the day refused to end. At ten-thirty the sky was an inverted bowl of bruised blue radiance, except in the west, where the sunset looked like a firefight at sea, a motionless Trafalgar. He stood at the open window of the flat, craning to see, up past the tall houses opposite, a single pale star suspended above the rooftops, a dagger of shimmering light. It was a long time since he had felt so calm, so untroubled. Serene: the word came to him unbidden. He felt serene. Why had he stayed so long at the Griffins’? Why in the first place had he let them take him into their arid lives, in that cold house?
The flat smelled slightly musty, but it didn’t matter. Yes, he was home.
He wondered what to do, how to pass this endless night. It was such a luxurious sensation, having again no one to please or even think about except himself. He couldn’t go to bed; he wouldn’t be able to sleep — who could sleep in these white nights? In the old days he would have gone round to the 47 on Haddington Road, or up to the Shelbourne, where he would have been bound to find someone to drink with him. But he couldn’t go back to that old life. If he started drinking now, he’d never stop. He had fallen off the wagon too many times and had the bruises to show for it, the permanent lacerations.
He took his hat and went down to the street.
The whores were out, half a dozen of them, the elderly one with the walking stick who had been in business for as long as he had lived here, and a couple of youngish ones, too, dressed in black and stark as crows, who must be new on the game since he hadn’t encountered them before. He often wondered about their lives, where they came from, how they had ended up on the streets. He might have talked to them, asked them about themselves, but he could never work up the courage. He had been brought up in a male world, a world first of priests and Christian Brothers, then of medical students, then doctors, like himself. He had known women too, of course, but it had always been a special kind of knowing, one that stopped just below the surface or, in most cases, just above it. Would things have been different for him if there had been a mother to take care of him, to teach him things, to let him in on the secrets that only mothers were privy to? He would never know. But he supposed he was exaggerating the preciousness of all the things he had not known.
It was a sweet, secret luxury, to feel sorry for himself now and then, to lament his losses and his woes.
Sometimes it seemed to him that all his life he had been standing with his back to a high wall, on the other side of which an endless circus show was going on. Now and then there would come to him on the breeze the sound of a drumroll, or a snatch of brassy music, a gasp of wonderment or a surge of raucous laughter from the crowd. Why could he not scale the wall, haul himself up the side of it, even if his hands bled, his fingernails splintered, and jump down and run to the flap of the big top and peer in? Just to see what the performance looked like, even if he didn’t go inside, even if he were only to have that one, hindered glimpse of the dingy, sequined magic — that would be something.
He walked along Merrion Square. The greenery behind the railings was giving off its nocturnal scents. He met no one. The whores didn’t come down this far, for some reason, but stayed around Mount Street and the canal, Fitzwilliam Square, Hatch Street. He was aware of a pleasantly melancholy sensation around his heart, as soft and pervasive as the fragrance of the trees and the plants. He was alive. It seemed an amazing fact, the unlikeliness of it, this mysterious and seemingly aimless project that was his life.
He turned up Merrion Street. There was lamplight in a few of the windows of Government Buildings. He thought of the poor drudges in there, ordered by their ministers to stay on and finish that report, draw up this schedule, frame those parliamentary questions. He wondered if Leon Corless had sat up at one of those windows, late into the night, doing — doing what?
For a while, before he started on his medical studies, Quirke had thought of going for the Civil Service. He had done well in his final school examinations, came out among the top fifty in the country; a career awaited him as a bureaucrat, a mandarin. Strange to think that he might have been behind one of those windows himself now, hunched over his desk, his fountain pen scratching away, covering sheet after sheet of foolscap, as the long day faded into the half-night of midsummer. Strange to think.
At the corner of Merrion Row a lone car was stopped at the traffic light. He drew level with it, and saw that it was Phoebe behind the wheel. The light changed to green just then and the car moved off. He sprinted after it, and caught up, and rapped with his knuckles on the roof. Phoebe braked, and looked up at him in alarm. He opened the passenger door and leaned in. “It’s just me!” he said, laughing.
“Quirke! You gave me a fright — I thought it was a tramp or something. What are you doing, wandering the streets at this hour?”
A car came up behind them, and the driver sounded his horn.
“I’m sorry,” Quirke said, still with his hand on the door. “I just saw you and I–I thought I’d — I just thought I’d say hello.”
Behind them the horn honked again, a longer blast.
“Get in, for goodness’ sake!” Phoebe said.
Quirke sat beside her, feeling foolish, and foolishly happy. “Sorry,” he said again.
“What’s the matter?” Phoebe said, and drove forward and turned onto Baggot Street.
“Nothing’s the matter. I—” He stopped. What could he say? How to explain something so ordinary as happiness? “I was out for a walk,” he said.
“You’re very far from Ailesbury Road.”
“Well, that’s the thing, you see,” he said. “I’m not at Ailesbury Road anymore. I’m back in the flat.”
She glanced at him sidelong. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“Are you?”
“Of course. I thought you were mad to go and stay there in the first place.”
“Why?”
“Oh, Quirke, don’t you know anything?”
“Funny, Rose said something the same to me just this morning.” He laughed. “Anyway, the answer, of course, is yes — I don’t know anything about anything.”
They looked at each other, a little helplessly, smiling. It seemed to Quirke somehow an emblematic moment, as if this was how it was always meant to have been between them, meeting by chance, at dusk, and not knowing what to say to each other, and not minding. For it didn’t matter; they could speak or be silent, it was all the same. He felt it again, that happiness, a twinge in his breast, a kind of precious pain.
She drove them to Herbert Place. They climbed the dimly lit stairs to her flat on the first floor. Large shapes of shadow hung in the living room, and at the window a parallelogram of yellowish radiance from the streetlamp outside was laid out on the floor like an illustration in a geometry book, one corner of it bent at an angle where it was intersected by a chair leg.
Phoebe dropped her handbag and her keys on the table and went to the window. “I often don’t turn on the light,” she said, “and just leave the curtains open. Do you mind?”