But no, she told herself, no-she had known, of course she had. She had known and had chosen not to know. It was exactly what she had always secretly despised in the Irish, that capacity for self-delusion, that two-faced way of dealing with the world. She was just as dishonest, as hypocritical, as anyone else, and might as well admit it.
She stood up suddenly, clutching her handbag and looking about herself wildly. Her lower lip was trembling. She needed the lavatory urgently. Quirke, too, rose to his feet, and she reared back almost in fright-she had almost forgotten that he was there. He was saying something, but she was not listening. She shook her head and stepped back. “I must go,” she said, in a choked voice. “I’m sorry, I have to-” And she turned and fled.
12
The first thing that struck Phoebe was the fact that they had known where to find her. But how had they known? She had been in the habit of stopping at the coffee shop two or three evenings a week on her way home from work. It was a place where she could be on her own-she had not even told David Sinclair about it. The owner of the shop, Mr. Baldini, an Italian man of middle age with wonderfully soft eyes and a melancholy smile, knew her well by now, and would greet her when she came in, and would show her to her favorite table by the window, as if she were a regular at some grand restaurant and he the maitre d’. She would sit at the plastic-topped table in a wedge of evening sunlight and read the paper, and drink a cup of milky coffee and eat one of the dismayingly sweet little cakes that the owner’s wife baked in the kitchen at the back, from where there wafted warm smells of vanilla and chocolate and roasted coffee beans. She prized these intervals of solitude, and was shocked this evening when the Delahaye twins came in and without being invited sat down at her table.
She could not get used to the uncanny likeness between them. Looking at them sitting there smilingly side by side, she had the unnerving sensation, as she always had in their presence, that a fiendish and immensely complicated trick was being played on her, by means of mirrors and revolving chairs and walls that only looked like walls. They were dressed alike, in brown corduroy slacks and short-sleeved gray woolen shirts, and each had a cricket sweater slung over his back with the sleeves loosely knotted in front. She would not have been surprised if they had begun to speak to her in unison, like a pair of characters out of the Alice books.
“Hello,” she said, keeping her voice steady and her tone light. “I thought I was the only one who knew about this place.”
“Ah,” the one on the left said, “but you see, we’re good at nosing out secrets.” He pressed his smiling face forward across the table, making snuffling noises, like a pig after a truffle. Then he lifted a hand and showed her the signet ring on his little finger. “I’m Jonas, by the way, to save you having to ask.”
The other one, James, laughed. She looked at him. She had noted before how strange his eyes were, hazed over somehow and yet alight with eagerness, as if he lived in constant expectation of some grand and hilariously violent event that he was convinced would begin to unfold at any moment. She wondered uneasily if his mind was quite right. “Where’s your boyfriend this evening?” he asked, with a sort of playful truculence.
“Yes, where is he?” Jonas said. “We thought one of you was never seen without the other, like James and me.”
James at this gave a snort of laughter, as if it were richly funny.
“He’s at work, I think,” Phoebe said. These days he always seemed to be at work, whatever the time of day. That was why she was here now, trying to fill in some of the long night that was ahead of her.
“Mit ze cadavers, ja?” Jonas said, putting on a comic accent and making a broad slicing gesture, as with a scalpel. “Professor Frankenstein in his laboratory.”
She did not know what to reply. She pushed her coffee cup aside and gathered up her purse and her Irish Times and made to rise, but Jonas reached across and pressed an index finger to the back of her hand, quite hard, and she sat down again, slowly. “Don’t go,” he said pleasantly. “We’ve only just arrived.”
Mr. Baldini came to take the twins’ order. He was from a hill town in Tuscany, he had told her. She often wondered how he had ended up here, but did not like to ask. The twins said they would have coffee and a cake, like her. Mr. Baldini nodded, unsmiling. His soft brown eyes slid sideways and met hers, as if to send a warning signal. Had the twins been here before? Did he know something about them that she did not? “For you, signorina?” he said. “Something else, perhaps?” She shook her head and he turned to go, as if reluctantly, and gave her again that odd, cautioning look.
“Enjoy the party?” Jonas said.
“The one at Breen’s house?”
“Where we saw you, yes.”
“It was all right. A bit too noisy for me.”
Jonas played a brief tattoo on the edge of the table with his fingers. “Good old Breen, eh?” he said. “Good old Breen.” He was looking at her with what seemed a dreamily calculating air. She wondered what he was thinking, but decided it was probably better not to know.
“Breen is a brick,” James said, more loudly than was necessary. “A real brick.”
“James is fond of rhyming slang,” Jonas said, and grinned, and winked.
Mr. Baldini brought the coffee and the cakes. “Two and eightpence,” he said.
Jonas glanced up at him, and the Italian stared back stonily. For a moment there was the sense of something teetering in the air, dipping first this way and then that. Then Jonas shrugged. “Pay the man, Jamesy,” he said quietly, smiling at Phoebe, and began to hum under his breath the tune of “O Sole Mio.” James handed over a ten-shilling note, and Mr. Baldini went off again.
Jonas, pushing aside the coffee and the plate with the cake on it, extended his arms straight out in front of him across the table, almost touching Phoebe’s face, and turned his hands backwards and linked his fingers and pressed them against each other, making his knuckles crack. Then he gave himself a shivery shake and blew loudly through slack lips like a horse. “Seeing your chap later, are you?” he asked. Phoebe nodded. “Jolly good,” Jonas said, giving her again that narrow speculative stare. “In the meantime,” he said, “why not come along with us?”
She stared back. “Come along where?”
“We’re off to the ancestral pile. Have a glass of something, bite to eat, listen to the wind-up gramophone. Typical relaxed evening chez Delahaye. What do you say? The stepmater is home, I’m sure she’d love to meet you. She’s a bit of a party girl herself, though you mightn’t think it to see her in her widow’s weeds.”
She looked at the two of them, Jonas lazily smiling and James with that avid light in his eye. It would be foolish to go with them, she knew, and yet, to her surprise, a small sharp voice in her head immediately spoke up, urging her to accept.
“All right,” she heard herself say, with an insouciance she did not really feel, “but just for an hour.”
“That’s settled, then!” Jonas exclaimed, and smacked both his palms flat on the table and stood up. He was wearing a Trinity tie for a belt. “Avanti!”
He went first, with Phoebe after him and James following. Phoebe could feel the twin’s eye on her, and a tiny tremor made her shoulder blades twitch. At the door she glanced back and saw Mr. Baldini standing by the big silver espresso machine, looking after her with a grave and melancholy gaze.
The evening was smoky and hot. They walked along by the railings of St. Stephen’s Green, the two young men sauntering with their hands in their pockets and Phoebe in the middle, to where Jonas’s car, a low-slung, two-door red Jaguar, was parked under the trees. “See that shop?” Jonas said, pointing across the road to Smyth’s. “I once bought a jar of honey there with bumblebees drowned in it. And a box of chocolate-covered ants.”