Now he plunged off, with their bottle of claret under his arm, and the last they saw of him was his tweed-clad, Bunteresque backside disappearing into the crowd. They looked at each other, smiling in dismay. Phoebe took Sinclair’s hand and they set off upstairs, where it might be less crowded, and met the Delahaye twin and his girlfriend coming down. “Don’t bother,” Delahaye said, or yelled, rather, “it’s bedlam up there!”
They went together, the four of them, down the short hall to the back of the house. Phoebe plucked at Sinclair’s sleeve and put her mouth close to his ear. “Which one of them is it?” she asked, but Sinclair only lifted his hands helplessly and shook his head.
In the crowded kitchen they found paper cups and sloshed them full of Mooney’s Spanish Burgundy and went on out to the garden, where the soft night air was a sudden balm. The garden was really no more than a walled yard, smelling of drains and dustbins, with a square of weed-choked clay and in one corner a privy with a broken door. There was a crowd of people out here, too, smoking and drinking. A couple were kissing in the shadow of the privy. Beyond the back wall the moon was perched on a distant chimney pot.
“This is Tanya Somers, by the way,” the young Delahaye said. He wore a black blazer and white sailing trousers with a Trinity tie for a belt. “And I’m Jonas, in case you’re wondering.” Phoebe and Sinclair smiled and shrugged as if to say that of course they had known which twin he was. “People are never sure, I know,” Jonas said. “James is here somewhere,” he added.
Tanya Somers had lazy good looks and a jaded manner. She wore her hair long, in a smooth, gleaming black swath that she kept pushing from her shoulders with negligent sweeps of the hand. She made no attempt to hide the fact that she did not know who Phoebe and Sinclair were, and that she was not much interested in finding out. When she spoke, Phoebe recognized the Rathgar accent. “This wine is filthy,” she said. With a deft flick she emptied the contents of her cup into the weeds. “I’m going to see if there’s any beer.” She went off at an insolent slouch, tossing her hair back.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Phoebe said to Jonas.
He shrugged. “Yes-I think people were a bit shocked to see me-us-here, considering it only happened so recently. I suppose they expected us to go into mourning for a year and a day, like in the old song.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’d understand,” Phoebe said, too quickly. Jonas Delahaye looked at her, the corners of his mouth twitching with amusement, and she felt herself flush and was glad of the darkness. “I mean,” she went on, “it’s not like the old days, when everybody used to go into mourning for months, it seemed.” She felt Sinclair’s elbow nudge her gently in the side. “Anyway, that’s what I think,” she finished lamely.
“Yes, well, I daresay you’re right,” Jonas said, doing his patrician drawl. He looked into the paper cup and frowned. “Tanny is right-this stuff is awful.” And he too threw the wine into the weeds and, giving them both a quick little smile, stepped past them and went into the kitchen.
“Oh, God,” Phoebe wailed softly.
“I don’t really think he was offended,” Sinclair said drily.
“And you, just standing there-you could have said something!”
He laughed. “Such as what? You were doing perfectly well yourself, digging the hole deeper and deeper.” He cupped a hand fondly against her cheek. “Anyway,” he said, “you’re getting as bad as your father.”
“What do you mean!”
“You know very well what I mean-poking your nose into other people’s business, asking questions and looking for clues.” Again he laughed, and this time pinched her cheek. “Our own Nancy Drew, female investigator.”
She took a step backwards. “You-!” He reached out and took her in his arms. She beat her fists softly against his chest, and now she too was laughing. “Pig,” she said.
“That’s a nice thing to call a Jew.”
She kissed him. “ My Jew,” she said softly, her breath mingling with his.
They went inside and for several minutes wandered about in the party, going in single file, Sinclair ahead and leading Phoebe by the hand, the two of them pressing themselves sideways through the dense, hot-smelling crowd. There was a gramophone somewhere, and now a new record began-Elvis Presley, of course, whining about his blue suede shoes. Phoebe had no ear for pop music.
They encountered the second Delahaye twin standing in the doorway of one of the bedrooms, talking to a dark-haired girl with a fringe. He had backed her against the doorjamb, and she was looking up at him out of large, luminous eyes as he leaned over her, one hand on the jamb and the other against the wall, enclosing her in an almost embrace, as if he would menace and at the same time caress her. He had a paper cup of wine in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in the other. A bright red handkerchief drooped from the breast pocket of his pale linen jacket. Sinclair tapped him on the shoulder. “Hello, James.”
Delahaye turned his head. There was a bleared look in his eye. “Oh, hello, Sinclair,” he said, slurring a little. “You here too? God, what a scrum, eh? This is”-he turned back to the girl-“what did you say your name was?”
“I didn’t,” the girl said, and smirked.
“Anyway, you’re a smasher.” He turned again and this time addressed Phoebe. “Isn’t she a smasher?”
Phoebe gave him a cool bland smile and moved on, but not before she had linked a finger around Sinclair’s thumb and tugged at it.
“Take care, James,” Sinclair said. He smiled at the girl. “You too.”
They found a corner of the bedroom that was inexplicably free of people and immediately took possession of it. Breen’s bed was heaped with discarded jackets and cardigans, and in the midst of the heap a couple lay on their sides facing each other, glued mouth to mouth. The boy’s hand kept moving up the girl’s stockinged leg, trying to get under the hem of her skirt, and she kept batting it away, with an almost lazy gesture. Phoebe and Sinclair tried to ignore them.
“You must admit,” Phoebe said, “it’s very strange, the way that man died.”
“Which man?” Sinclair asked innocently. She smacked his hand.
“Don’t tease, you,” she said. “The twins’ father, I mean, as you very well know.”
“Funny,” Sinclair said, “calling them twins. You never think of grown-ups being twins-but they certainly are. You never see one but you see the other.”
Phoebe gave a little shudder. “I’d hate to be a twin-wouldn’t you?”
He offered her a cigarette, but she shook her head, and he lit one for himself, thinking. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t even got a sibling.”
“Well, neither have I.”
They were silent briefly. The subject of Phoebe’s past and parentage was a delicate one, not to be lightly alluded to. Quirke had not been a good father.
“I must say,” Sinclair said, “they don’t seem very-well, they don’t seem very upset. Would you do it? Go out to a party?”
“I don’t know.”
The girl on the bed moaned softly. The boy had succeeded in getting his hand under her skirt and was rummaging urgently in her lap. Phoebe turned away. Sinclair was half sitting against the sill of the little square window, and she had an urge to sit on his knee, but did not.
There was a square of moonlight in the window with two bars of shadow making an out-of-kilter cross. She realized that she had never before considered the possibility of her father dying, of his being dead. For the first nineteen years of her life she had thought Quirke was her uncle, and even still she was wrestling with the fact of what he really was to her. Father was not a word that sat easily in her mind, but father he was, and very much living. How would she feel if he were dead? She did not know, and this surprised her, and faintly appalled her.