“Of course, I know what you think,” Sinclair said, mock-innocently again. “I heard you telling Jonas Delahaye-you’re all for casting aside those old fuddy-duddy notions about mourning and all the rest of it.”
“Oh, stop,” she said distractedly. She was still puzzling over the prospect of Quirke’s projected demise. Would she be sad? Of course she would. Would she suffer, would she grieve? That was an altogether different question.
The girl on the bed wriggled out of the boy’s embrace and struggled up and sat there among the crumpled clothes, blinking, a hand plunged in her hair. The boy sat up too, more slowly, and pawed at her shoulder entreatingly. The girl wriggled again, and disconsolately he let fall his hand. The two of them seemed unaware that anyone else was in the room, although there were people milling at the foot of the bed and in the doorway.
In the moonlight at the window Sinclair, still seated awkwardly, put an arm around Phoebe’s hips and drew her close to him. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why?” She touched him under the chin and made him look up at her. “What are you sorry for?”
He glanced aside. “Oh, you know. Fathers. Death. All that.”
“Yes,” she said distantly, as if not to him but to someone else. “All that.”
He woke, if it could be called waking, into liquid darkness. Everything was moving under him with a slewing, sideways roll that was familiar. He thought of his student days, when he was starting to drink, and after half a dozen beers he would wake in the middle of the night with a parched mouth and a thudding headache, while the bed on which he lay revolved slowly around him like a broken carousel. Also, he was wet. He was lying on his side with his legs drawn up to his chest and half his head submerged in water. It was seawater, he knew from the texture of it. A boat, then, but a boat that had something wrong with it. There was none of the sense of a boat’s trim lightness; this vessel felt stodgy, like the barely floating hollowed-out stump of a tree.
He tried to sit up, and indeed saw himself doing it, as in a piece of trick photography, a wraith rising up out of himself while his body lay there lumpy and inert. The pain in the back of his head seemed a kind of noise, a dully pulsing roar that made the bones of his skull vibrate. He turned his head and peered up at the stars. They too seemed to be vibrating, zigzagging about, like fireflies. The last thing he had seen was the moon sliding down the sky-where was it now?
At last, with a groan, he got himself up to a sitting position. He had been wedged into the space between the two thwarts. His clothes were sopping. He put a hand cautiously to the back of his head and winced when he felt the pulpy knot under his ear. What had he been hit with? Something wooden. He looked about. Ahead there was only the darkly gleaming sea to the horizon, behind him were the lights of Dun Laoghaire, a long way off. And what was that? A boat, gliding away from him landwards, silent, white-sailed, a light glimmering at the tip of its mast. He tried to shout but his voice would not work. He was shivering now, sitting there in the slopping, warmish, deepening water. He looked to the mast. There was no saiclass="underline" it had been taken away.
Deepening. The water was deepening.
He pressed forward onto his hands and knees and felt about, under the puddle of water. Sound workmanship, clinker-built. It was-could it be? — yes, it was the Rascal, his own twelve-footer. His questing hands, scrabbling and splashing, found what they had been looking for, what he had known they would find. Someone had taken a crowbar to the bottom of the boat and opened a crack between the boards six inches long and a good half inch wide; he could feel the current of colder water coming up through it, a silken flow. He had been scuttled. A strange calm came over him. She’s sinking, he thought, and I’m going to drown.
It seemed almost a joke, a prank someone had played on him. Then panic surged up like bile and he plunged both his hands over the rent in the boards, as if that way he could stop the water coming in. But water was a thing that would not be stopped. He groaned and cursed. This was wrong, this was all wrong-he could not drown, it was impossible. He looked over his shoulder towards the other boat, but all he could see of it now was the mast light, swaying and winking. He tried again to cry out- Help! Wait! — but the paltry words stuck in his swollen throat. He began to weep helplessly. The bruise on the back of his head, as if angered by his tears, set up a violent hammering that drove him down on all fours again, with his head hanging.
The water was coming in faster now. He tried to stand but the blood rushed from his head and he fell over, making a great splash. The boat tipped heavily sideways and then righted itself, the water sloshing around his knees. He was very cold now, shivering in rhythmic spasms, and his teeth chattered. His mind raced, skittering this way and that, like a rat in a trap.
He stood up again, and this time managed to stay upright. He gazed at the far dark shore with its swaying lights. He thought of the people there, sleeping, dreaming, and of the ones who were awake, doing ordinary things, making love, drinking, fighting-alive, all of them. Would Sylvia be asleep? Maybe she was lying awake in the dark, wondering where he was. Or maybe she had got up: maybe she was standing at the window in the living room, looking out anxiously into the night, watching for him.
The water was up to the gunwales now, and lapping round his knees. Terror had tightened his throat and he could not swallow. The mast light of the other boat was no longer to be seen. He held his cold face in his hands.
No, he would not go this way, he would not let the boat take him with her. He sucked in a deep breath, the air rasping in his throat, then closed his eyes and clambered over the side.
How black the water was, wrapping him round like swaths of icy satin. He was a good swimmer, always had been. He should have taken off his clothes.
Mother! Oh, Jesus. Oh, God.
The pain pounded in his head. His arms were tired already, his muscles beginning to lock.
The lights of shore seemed farther off than ever.
He stopped flailing.
No good, no good.
Convolvulus.
TWO
9
Another funeral, with the same mourners as before, save the one who was in the coffin. Yet to Quirke the atmosphere this time was different, even though he could not at first say what the difference was. Perhaps it was just the weather. On the day of Victor Delahaye’s funeral the sun had shone as if for a festival, but today there was rain, a fine warm mist that drifted down absently yet still managed to soak its way rapidly into everyone’s clothes, so that the inside of the church smelled like a sheep pen.
He stood at the back as the priest, up at the altar, droned his way through the funeral Mass. He looked over the heads of the congregation, trying to identify individuals from behind. That was surely Mona Delahaye in the big floppy black hat, while the tall upright woman with the graying blond hair must be Jack Clancy’s widow; and that would be her son beside her. There was no mistaking the Delahaye twins, of course, with their long, straw-pale heads. Hackett was there too, in an aisle seat halfway up. Hackett without his hat, shiny-haired, with a bald patch, always seemed to Quirke somehow incomplete, a novice monk, perhaps, tonsured and prematurely aged.
There was another blond woman, younger than Mrs. Clancy, and nearer the back. She wore not a hat but a navy blue beret, jauntily tipped to the side, and a purple silk shawl over a dress of scarlet corduroy. In this flaunted outfit she had the look of a passionflower stuck in among a funeral wreath.