“All the time. Especially when I’m out.”
“Oh, you!” she said, and laughed.
She crossed to the fireplace and took a cigarette from an ormolu box on the mantelpiece. Quirke watched her. He had always wondered about her life with Mal, and since he had been staying with them, the mystery had deepened. When husband and wife were together, at lunch, for instance, or sitting in the drawing room of an evening, they spoke in what sounded to Quirke like strained, superficial phrases, never seeming to say anything. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, he thought perhaps it was the effect of the house and its stultified atmosphere — it had been an embassy before Mal and Rose bought it. And there was his own presence, which was bound to be a constraint. Maybe when they were alone together they behaved entirely differently, in ways that Quirke could hardly begin to imagine. He tried not to speculate on what they did in bed. Mal and Rose embracing, the two of them naked in a sweat of passion — no, he couldn’t picture it, he just couldn’t. The prospect was too bizarre, too sad, and too funny.
“How are you feeling today?” Rose asked; it was what she asked every day. “I see you’ve stopped going about half the morning in that awful dressing gown.”
“Awful? I always thought it gave me a certain Noël Coward look, no?”
“No, Quirke, I’m afraid it doesn’t. The certain look it gives you is of an old alcoholic drying out — or taking the cure, as you say here.”
Rose was never one to pull her punches.
“It’s not drink that’s my trouble this time,” Quirke said. “This time, they tell me I’m sick.”
“Oh, you’re not sick. People like us have no business being sick, Quirke.”
He turned to the window and the street again. Rose, smoking her cigarette, stood with one arm folded, regarding him with a fondly skeptical eye. “But go on, tell me: how are you, really?”
“Really, I don’t know. Half the time my brain seems dead.”
“And the other half?”
He said nothing for a moment. He took out his own cigarettes and lit one. “I seem hardly alive,” he said. “I’m stalled, as if something in me had run down.”
“The doctor said you’d get well, yes?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t in fact think it’s the damage to my brain, I don’t think that’s the trouble. Something has happened to me, something has — gone out.”
“Maybe you should go somewhere, for a holiday.”
He looked at her. “Oh, Rose,” he said, “come on.”
Stung, she took an angry drag on her cigarette and lifted her chin and expelled a thin, quick stream of smoke upwards. “You’re impossible, Quirke, do you know that?”
“You find me impossible? Think what it’s like for me, stuck with myself.”
Rose stamped her foot, stabbing her heel into the Persian rug she was standing on. “You make me so impatient,” she said. “Sometimes I’d like to shake you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was trying to be funny.”
“Funny? You? Please don’t bother.”
He sketched a little bow, conceding the point. “I shouldn’t have let you persuade me to come and stay here,” he said. “I knew it wouldn’t work — kind though the invitation was, of course,” he added, not without a sharp edge of irony.
“Then why did you accept?”
“Because it was you who asked me.”
They looked away from each other, and were silent. Old things that had once been between them stirred and flashed, like fish in a deep, shadowed pool.
Rose sat down on the arm of a brocaded chair, balancing an ashtray on her knee.
“Mal is in the garden,” she said, “pretending to be a gardener. Have you seen his new sun hat? It makes him look like a cross between a coolie and a standing lamp.” She paused, casting about her with an impatient frown. “Maybe I should take a holiday. Let’s get in the car, Quirke, just the two of us, you and I, and drive down to — oh, I don’t know. Monte Carlo. Marrakech. Timbuktu.” She paused again. “Don’t you ever get tired of this one-horse town, this one-horse country?”
He chuckled, wreathing himself in cigarette smoke. “All the time.”
“Then why do you stay?”
“I don’t know. My life happened here, such as it was.”
“My sweet Lord, Quirke, must you always talk in the past tense, as if everything were over and done with already?”
“Or as if it never began.”
She narrowed her eyes. There was a lipstick stain on the end of her cigarette. “What would you do if I walked over to you now and told you to kiss me?” He turned his head slowly and stared at her. “Well?” she said, with an angry quiver.
He looked out onto the street again.
“The last time I was in St. John of the Cross, drying out,” he said, “there was a fellow there, not young, about my age, whose wife used to come and visit him every day — every day, without fail. She wasn’t young either, a bit dowdy, a bit scattered, you know the type. They were just an ordinary couple. But every time she came into the cafeteria, which was where we all went to greet our visitors, the first thing she’d do, every time, was grab his face between both of her hands and kiss him, full on the mouth, passionately, as if they were a pair of young lovers and hadn’t seen or touched each other for weeks.”
He crossed to where she was sitting and ground the butt of his cigarette into the ashtray on the arm of the chair beside her.
“That’s a nice story,” she said, looking up at him, sounding not angry now but wistful instead.
“The strangest thing was the effect it had on the rest of us.”
“What was it?”
“We were embarrassed, a little, and amused, scornful, you know, all those things. But what we mostly felt was sadness. Just that, just sadness. It wouldn’t have been the case if in fact they had been young, and good-looking — then we’d have been jealous, I suppose. But no, we were sad.” He stood by the fireplace with his hands in his pockets, his eyes on the rug. “What it was that we saw in them, I think, this couple in their forties, standing there kissing, was a reminder of all we’d lost, or never had — all of life’s possibilities that were passing us by, that we’d let go past, without even putting out a hand to stop them, to hold on to them. Don’t misunderstand me, it wasn’t a strong feeling, this sadness. It was like a — like a wisp of mist blowing against us on a hot day, making us shiver for a second and leaving us colder than we were before.” He fell silent for a moment. “Sorry, am I being melodramatic? I hear myself talking sometimes and think it must be someone else saying these things. Maybe my brain is turning to porridge.”
He frowned at himself, dissatisfied and cross. Rose stood up from the chair and went to him and lifted a hand and laid it against his cheek. He didn’t raise his eyes.
“Oh, Quirke,” she said softly, shaking her head, “what are we going to do with you, you poor man?”
There was a tap at the door. Rose left her hand where it was, caressing him, and said, “Come in.”
It was Maisie the maid, a rawboned, pink-faced girl with red hair. She stared at them for a second, the two of them standing close together there in front of the big marble fireplace, then quickly composed her face into an expressionless mask. “There’s a person here to see Dr. Quirke, ma’am,” she said.
Rose at last let her hand fall from Quirke’s cheek. “Who is it, Maisie?”