Even the Dead (10 page)

“Yes, I am.”

“When did you leave?”

“Tonight, just before I met you. Also, I’m going back to work.” He smiled at her in the lamplight. “My sojourn in the desert is over.”

“Good,” she said. “I was worried about you. What did Rose have to say?”

“About what—about my moving out? Not much. I imagine she’s relieved, though she seemed offended. As for Mal, God knows what he thinks. I’m not sure it had sunk in that I was living with them in the first place. You know Mal.”

She walked down with him to the front door. They stood together on the top step, looking out into the night. All was still except for the sound of water tumbling over one of the locks in the canal. Quirke had again that sense of pervasive, mild melancholy. He wanted to touch his daughter, to make some gesture that would communicate all he felt for her, whatever that was. But of course he couldn’t do it. Faintly, as if from afar, the circus music sounded in his head. Would he ever get over that wall, would he ever see the clowns, the strong man, the sequined bareback rider circling the ring, the trapeze artists swooping through beams of powdered light? He felt a sweet pang of self-pity, and despised himself for it.

“Good night,” he said. “Sleep well.”

“Good night, Quirke.”

She watched him descend the steps and walk off into the night. After shutting the door, she went up to the flat and into the living room and switched off the lamp on the mantelpiece and sat down in the armchair by the window. She wasn’t sleepy. She thought of Lisa, alone down there in that little town. She thought of Quirke, too, walking by himself in the dark streets.

For a full minute she sat without stirring. Then she stood up quickly and took her handbag and the car keys from the table. As she was going down the stairs she heard the bell in St. Stephen’s tolling midnight.

*   *   *

The same bell was sounding a later hour when Quirke’s telephone rang, making him spring awake. He was sprawled on the sofa in his flat, still dressed, an open book lying face-down on his lap. He must have dozed off. He got up groggily and crossed to the still-shrilling phone and picked up the receiver.

“She’s gone,” Phoebe said, her voice small and distant and fearful.

“What?” Quirke didn’t understand. “Where are you?”

“In Ballytubber.”

“How did you get there?”

“I drove down, after you left. I was worried, I couldn’t stop thinking of Lisa here on her own. But now she’s gone, Quirke.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t
know
.” Her voice was a distant wail. “I don’t know. Only the house is empty, and she’s gone.”

7

It had been some time after one o’clock when she arrived, for the second time that night, at the house in Ballytubber. She turned off the engine and doused the headlights and sat in the dark for five minutes or more, telling herself she should turn around and go back to Dublin. What had she been thinking of, coming back here like this? Apart from anything else, if she knocked on the door now it would terrify Lisa, for who would be calling at such a late hour to a house that had been standing empty for so long? And what explanation could she give for turning up again, no more than a couple of hours after she had left? Yet she couldn’t deny the instinct that had made her come back. Something was wrong, she knew it was.

In the end she steeled herself and got out of the car. No light showed in the house. Instead of knocking on the front door, she went around by the side, to the window of the bedroom with the double bed, and tapped on the glass and spoke Lisa’s name. There was not a stir inside, and no reply came. She tapped again, more sharply this time. She went back to the front door and knocked, even though she knew by now that it was futile to persist. Lisa was not here; she had gone, somehow. Phoebe knelt by the gatepost and, working from memory, removed a stone from the base, and found the spare key that was always kept there.

She dreaded opening the door, onto the dark hall.

The smell of damp and must, so familiar from childhood, was a faint comfort. She shut the door behind her. She thought of switching on the light, but decided against it. She felt her way along the wall, and went first into the living room, on the right. A splash of moonlight showed her that the room was empty. Next she crossed the hall and tapped on the bedroom door. Nothing. She opened the door and switched on the light. Lisa was not there, as she had known she wouldn’t be, and neither was her suitcase nor the things she had unpacked. The bed, she could see, had not been slept in. She went into the kitchen. Not a trace remained of their having been here earlier, the two of them, when they had sat at the table drinking tea. The cups they had used had been washed and dried and put away. The brandy bottle was nowhere to be found, not on the table, not in the sink, not even in the black plastic bin under the sink.

It was the bareness of the place that she found most frightening. It was as if some supernatural agency had swooped through the house, leaving behind this eerie desertedness.

She turned off the lights, and went out and locked the front door behind herself and put the key back into its hiding place and reinserted the loose stone to hide it. Her hands were shaking. As she was opening the car door she was sure there was someone behind her, in the darkness, about to seize hold of her and clamp a hand over her mouth to silence her cries. But no one was there. Hastily she got behind the wheel and pulled on the starter switch, praying the engine would start and that she wouldn’t have to get out in the dark and use the crank handle. She was in luck, and the engine turned over at the first go. She drove off so quickly that gravel flew from under the tires; she heard it spraying the road behind her.

The telephone booth, on the corner by the Protestant church, smelled of fish and chips and urine. A weak bulb glowed in it, but she wished there were no light at all—she felt terrifyingly vulnerable, huddled there in plain sight, with the phone pressed to her ear, the very picture, she was sure, of panic and fear.

She could hear from the blurriness of his voice that Quirke had been asleep. At first he couldn’t understand what she was saying. Then he told her to get back into the car, lock the doors, and return at once to the city. It was not often in her life that she had found herself close to tears of relief and gratitude just to be told what to do, and by Quirke, at that.

There was a full moon and she could almost have driven with the headlights off. The countryside to her right and left, bathed in the moon’s ghostly glimmer, turned slowly in the car windows like two giant fans endlessly opening. There were few other vehicles on the road. A Land Rover drawing a horse box overtook her, going much too fast, and disappeared over the brow of a hill, though for some miles she could still see the beams of the headlights raking through the darkness far ahead. A fox ran out of a hedge almost under the front wheels and she had to brake so hard the engine almost cut out. She drove on, tense and trembling.

It was a few minutes before three o’clock when she got to Upper Mount Street and stopped outside Quirke’s flat. She couldn’t understand it—she had thought a whole night must have passed since she had set off for Wicklow and heard the bell in St. Stephen’s tolling midnight.

There was a light in Quirke’s flat, and when she rang the bell he came at once to the window and threw the key down to her, wrapped in a handkerchief. He met her on the stairs when she was halfway up. In the urgency of the moment, it seemed he might take her in his arms. She half wished he would, but he didn’t.

“Are you all right?” he asked, looking at her all over, as if expecting to see a broken limb, or blood spilling from a wound.

“Yes, of course I’m all right,” she said, sounding more impatient than she had meant to. Her nerves were jangling; she imagined them like the mixed-up and still jerkily moving parts of a broken clock.

“Come on,” he said, leading the way back upstairs, “I’ll cook you some breakfast.”

Once they were in the flat, he made her sit in the armchair by the fireplace. It was chilly, at this hour, and he lit the gas fire and turned it low. He went out to the kitchen and made tea, and carried it in on a tray and set it on a low table beside her chair. “There doesn’t seem to be anything much to eat,” he said. “Would you like—I don’t know—an egg, maybe? Or I could open a tin of soup.”

Despite herself, she laughed. “I’m fine, Quirke,” she said. “I’m not hungry, I don’t want anything.”

He squatted on his heels to pour the tea. She was reminded again of childhood games, Quirke now her pretend father and she his pretend little girl. It surprised her, how calmly she could think of all they had not had together, of all they could have had, if he had not given her away at birth to Mal and his wife, Sarah, to be their pretend baby. So many lies, so much subterfuge, such grievous betrayals. Why was she not angry? Why was she not in a permanent fury at this man who had behaved so disgracefully towards her, who had robbed her of the childhood she should have had by rights?

He poured tea for himself, too, but she could see he had no intention of drinking it, that he was just being polite. That, it struck her, was what Quirke thought life consisted of: going through the motions, observing the forms, doing the right thing.

“Tell me what happened when you got to Ballytubber,” he said. “By the way, why
did
you go back, when you’d just been there?”

“I don’t know myself,” she said. He had put too much sugar in her tea. “I suppose I must have had—I don’t know what to call it. A premonition? A bad feeling, anyway. And I was right. The house was empty, Quirke. I mean, not only was Lisa not there, but every trace of her was wiped away. I began to wonder if I’d imagined the whole thing, if I’d never gone down there with her, if I’d never met her in the first place, if all of it was just a figment of my imagination.”

Quirke picked up his teacup and put it down again. “Surely there must have been some sign of her having been there,” he said.

“There wasn’t. The place was bare.”

Quirke rose and went to the mantelpiece and took a cigarette from the silver box there and lit it. He wore corduroy trousers and a bulky old sweater the color of wet wheat. Also he had slippers on; she didn’t think she had ever seen Quirke in slippers before. The outfit somehow made him seem not homely but, on the contrary, peculiarly sinister, like one of those suave villains in a spy picture, an enemy agent masquerading as a country squire.

“Remind me of her name again,” he said.

“Lisa Smith.”

“Yes, yes, that’s right, Lisa Smith. What else do you know about her, aside from her name, which you don’t even think is genuine?”

“Nothing,” Phoebe said. “Except what I told you, that she’s pregnant.”

They were silent for a while; then Quirke spoke. “Look,” he said, “I’m sure she’s all right. What could happen to anyone in Ballytubber? Plus there’s the fact that no one knows she was there except you.”

“I do know where she lives,” Phoebe said. “Or where she has a flat, at least. I don’t know anything about her family, about her background. She just appeared out of nowhere, and now she’s gone back there.” She lifted frightened eyes to Quirke’s face. “It was so eerie, Quirke,” she said. “The house was completely empty, as if no one had been there. Where can she have gone to? She wouldn’t have left by herself, I’m sure of it. Someone must have followed us, someone she knew, that she would open the door to. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense.” She paused, staring at the flames of the gas fire. “She was so terrified, I could feel it, the way you can feel a child has a raging temperature even without feeling its forehead.”

She saw that Quirke was gazing at a framed photograph on the mantelpiece. It was of himself and Delia, Phoebe’s mother, arm in arm with Mal and Sarah, Delia’s sister. They were dead, both of those sisters. Delia had died giving birth to Phoebe, and Sarah had been struck down by a brain tumor—how long ago was it now? She couldn’t remember.

She put the teacup and saucer back on the tray and stood up. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m going home to rest. I can’t think anymore—my mind is a blank.”

“We’ll talk again in the morning,” Quirke said. “Mind you”—he glanced at the window—“it is morning, pretty well. The dawn is coming up.”

He walked her down to the car. He was right: there was a thin, grayish glow, dirty as dishwater, in the eastern sky, above the rooftops.

“You’ve still said nothing to David?” he asked, leaning on the open door of the car as she put her hand on the starter.

“No.” She didn’t look at him. “What would I say?”

He didn’t answer that. “I’m glad you came to me,” he said.

Now she did look up, startled. “Are you?”

“Yes. Of course.” He did his crooked smile, which in the dawn light was more like a grimace. “Of course I am.”

*   *   *

When she got to Herbert Place she went straight into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. She meant to rest there for only a minute or two, and didn’t even undress, sure she wouldn’t be able to sleep. Hours later, she started awake with the sun shining on her face. She got up, moving stiffly; she felt as if she had run rather than driven all the way back from Ballytubber.

She made coffee and ate a slice of toast, then drew a lukewarm bath and lay in it for a long time, until the water was cold and she began to shiver. The bathroom was so narrow she had to stand sideways to towel herself dry.

She went back to the kitchen and made more coffee—she knew it would give her palpitations, but she didn’t care—and sat at the table by the window in her dressing gown. It was early still, and the street was deserted. Also it was Saturday, and all the offices in the houses round about would be closed. She loved the weekends here, when all day long it was so quiet she could hear the sound of canal water from across the road, and the ducks quacking. The sawmill over at Percy Place sometimes opened on Saturday mornings, but not until ten or even later, and it was only seven yet.

Strong sunshine was falling down through the window, onto the table; it was going to be another hot day. Already people were growing tired of the fine weather; she had heard them on the buses and in the shops, complaining of the heat. She didn’t mind it, and while everyone else had put on summer clothes, she saw no reason to change out of her accustomed black. When she had left the Maison des Chapeaux the owner, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes, had given her a big straw hat with a floppy brim as a parting gift. She had put it away on the top shelf of the wardrobe, thinking it much too frivolous for her, but today, she decided, she would wear it, no matter how silly it made her look.