They stopped in Cashel, at the Cashel Arms Hotel, which even in the lobby smelled of cooked cabbage. With sinking hearts they allowed themselves to be conducted to the dining room, where they were given a table by a window looking down into a cobbled yard. “Order a bottle of wine, for pity’s sake,” Rose said. They ate doubtful fish with mashed potato; the cabbage they had been smelling since they arrived made a soggy appearance. But the wine was good, a lustrous Meursault that in Quirke’s mouth tasted of gold coins and melons.
Rose began to feel better. “Tell me,” she said to Quirke, “how is that lady friend of yours, the actress?”
“She’s very well,” Quirke said, but would not meet her eye. “Very well.”
“Is it serious?”
Now he did look at her. “Is what serious?”
“You and your lady friend, of course.”
“You make it sound like an illness.”
Rose shook her head. “Quirke, Quirke, Quirke,” she said, “what are we to do with you?”
“I wasn’t aware that something needed to be done.”
“Well, exactly.”
They went on eating, in an ill-tempered silence. Then Rose tried again. “This trip, it’s to do with those two men who died, yes? Maggie’s brother, and then his partner? What was the outcome of all that?”
Half a minute elapsed before Quirke answered. “An outcome,” he said, “is still awaited.”
“That’s why you want to talk to Maggie?”
“That’s why I want to talk to Maggie.”
“You know she’s thinking of living permanently down there, in-what’s the place?”
“Slievemore.”
“That’s it. Fishing town, is it? Sounds like Scituate.” It was in Scituate, south of Boston, that Quirke had first met Rose Crawford, as she was then. “Why would she want to bury herself away down there?” She chuckled. “Maybe to get away from her family, especially that Mona Delahaye.”
She stopped. At the mention of Mona’s name she had felt something from across the table, a tiny tremor, and she looked hard at Quirke. Mona Delahaye. So that was it-Mona had got her talons into him. Well, that would smart, all right. Her gaze softened. Poor Quirke, he would never learn.
Outside, the afternoon had mellowed, and the air, laden with dust and midges, was the same soft gilded color as the Meursault they had drunk. They did not want to set off and instead strolled for a while in the town’s main street. The great gray ruin of the castle loomed above them on its crag against a sky of bird’s-egg blue. Rose had an urge to talk seriously to Quirke-it was probably the effect of the wine-to tell him he was frittering away his life on things that were not worthy of him. But somehow Quirke would not be spoken to like that, he would not allow it, and she held her peace, and felt cross. If he had indeed got himself entangled with Mona Delahaye then he was in for a deal of heartache, and serve him right. Rose and Quirke had gone to bed together, just once, many years before. It had not been a success, yet Rose remembered the occasion with a melancholy fondness. Scituate seemed very far away, now.
In Fermoy they stopped again, Quirke having run out of cigarettes, and while he was in the tobacconist’s Rose sat in the car and watched in dismay a man belaboring a cart horse with a stick. He was a coarse-looking fellow with a red face and a lantern jaw and a prominent forehead-he might have been modeled on a Punch cartoon-and he wore an old coat with a belt of plaited straw. The horse stood between the shafts of the cart, its head hanging, suffering the blows without flinching. Oh, my Lord, Rose thought, this poor benighted country!
Slievemore was a green hill above a turquoise bay. When they arrived, along the winding road from the north, the early-evening sunlight was tawny, and there was a breeze and the air was hazed with salt, and the blue water was flecked with ragged scraps of white. Ashgrove, the Delahayes’ house, was on the far side of the hill, and they had to drive along the harbor front, and climb another stretch of winding road for ten miles. Neither of them had been to the house before, and they had trouble locating it. When at last they pulled in at the gate the house rose before them, a gray granite mansion with arched windows and a steep roof angled in many planes, and there were even turrets. All that was missing, Quirke thought, was a flag, or pennant, flapping above the chimneys on a tall pole.
The house had a deserted look. No door opened, no face appeared at any window, no voice called a greeting. “Dear me,” Rose said, “it seems as if our trip has been in vain. Where can she be?”
They knocked at the front door, waited, knocked again. Then they walked along a gravel path round to the side of the house. French windows there stood open to the evening. They looked at each other, and went in.
Quirke was sensitive to the atmosphere in old houses. It was an instinctive memory, buried deep in his very bones, of Carricklea, the industrial school and reformatory in the west of Ireland where he had passed his childhood. He remembered the sounds, the thud of heels on polished floors, the hollow echoes of distant doors shutting, the whispers in the darkness.
“We should have telephoned,” Rose said. “Maggie is peculiar, you know. She has peculiar ways.” They went through all the rooms downstairs. Everything was so neat and tidy it seemed no one could be living here. Then they heard it, a sound, from upstairs, as of something being dragged across a wooden floor. They stood and listened. The hall around them seemed somehow to be breathing, slowly, deeply. Above the hall table hung a tall looking glass in a gilt frame, reflecting the hat stand opposite and a pair of dusty antlers mounted on a sort of plaque on the wall. Quirke understood they were not welcome here, he and Rose; houses had a way of showing their resentment.
Upstairs all was disorder. Furniture was stacked in the corridors, chairs, dressing tables, tallboys, a folding screen with painted panels, a full-length looking glass on a mahogany stand. In many rooms the beds had been stripped and their mattresses raised up and propped against the walls. Curtains too had been taken down, and thrown in untidy heaps on the bare bedsteads. Pictures had been lifted from their hooks and set on the floor against the walls, all facing inwards. A white chamber pot with a shriveled red rose leaning in it stood on top of a bureau, like a parody of a votive offering.
They found Maggie Delahaye in one of the big bedrooms at the back of the house. She wore a man’s checked shirt and an old pair of baggy corduroy trousers, and a red bandanna was tied around her head. Rose had never noticed before her friend’s faint mustache, or the few gray whiskers sprouting on her chin. She looked at them both with a mixture of puzzlement and alarm, as if she did not know what they were. For a moment it seemed she might dive past them and escape through the door and down the stairs and out at those open French windows. She had been pushing, with great effort, a heavy antique wooden chest across the floor, and now she straightened, and brushed her hands.
“I was just rearranging things,” she said. “I was just… tidying.”
In the kitchen she made coffee for them, and put out dry crackers on a plate. There was no butter, it seemed. “I’m a bit low in provisions,” she said. “I’d have gone into the village if I’d known you were coming.” She had put Quirke and Rose Griffin to sit at a big wooden table; over the years the surface of it had been scrubbed to furrows and ridges, like sand at the tide line.