Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

“No one calls me by it, of course.”

“I could, if you like.”

A silence fell between them.

“I thought they were my real parents, Sarah and Malachy,” Phoebe said, “until — until my father told me the truth.”

“When did he tell you?”

“When I was nineteen.” Phoebe lowered her eyes and picked a loose fiber from the rug they were sitting on. “It doesn’t matter now. It was a shock at first, of course.”

“But why…?”

Sally’s voice trailed off and Phoebe looked at her, with a melancholy smile. “Why did Quirke give me away? I’ve never asked him.”

“But—”

“There’d be no point — he wouldn’t know the answer.”

Sally nodded slowly. “And so you’ve forgiven him.”

“Forgiven him?” Phoebe raised her eyebrows; it was as if the notion of forgiveness, of the necessity for forgiveness, had not occurred to her before. “I suppose I have. My father — Quirke, I mean — he’s not — he’s not like other people, you see.”

“In what way?”

“I sometimes think he never really grew up. He’s obsessed with the past — he was an orphan, and part of him is still that orphan. He has this look sometimes, I know it well: sort of furtive, and puzzled, as if there’s a little boy hiding inside him and looking out through adult eyes at the world, trying to understand it, and failing.” She stopped, and smiled, and bit her lip. “The fact is, I don’t know my father, not really, and I doubt I ever will.”

Sally, nursing the glass between both hands, was frowning into the flames of the fire. “It’s all so — it’s all so sad,” she said.

“Oh, no,” Phoebe said quickly. “I don’t think of it as sad. He did tell me, in the end, he did confess the truth. Now I know who I am, more or less. That was something he gave to me, something that he doesn’t have himself, something that no one can tell him. I have to think that’s a mark of generosity”—she laughed—“or of something like it, anyway.”

The storm had intensified and the wind was hurling big splashes of rain against the windows. They might have been in a boat plowing through sea spray. “It’s so nice, here,” Sally said. “You’re lucky.”

“Where do you live, in London?” Phoebe asked.

Sally pulled a face. “Kilburn,” she said. “I have a room over a greengrocer’s shop. The shopkeeper is Indian, with a little roly-poly wife and a dozen or so kids who fight all day and cry throughout the night.” She looked about appreciatively. “I love the big windows here, and the high ceilings.”

“Is the sofa very uncomfortable, to sleep on?”

“Oh, no,” Sally said. “It’s fine.”

It was uncanny, Phoebe reflected, how little of herself Sally had imposed on the room. In the morning when Phoebe came out from her bedroom Sally had cleared away every sign of her having slept here, the bedclothes and the pillow folded away behind the sofa and the cushions straightened and the window open at the top to clear the night’s staleness. In the bathroom, too, she kept her things all packed away in her vanity bag, including her toothbrush and toothpaste — Phoebe suspected she even had her own soap and kept that tidied away too when she was not using it. It really was a pity that Sally did not have a job in Dublin. They could get a bigger place, maybe, and live together; Sally would be the perfect flatmate. And indeed, Sally herself must have been thinking something the same, for now she said, “If I did come back, this is the kind of place I’d like to live in.” She smiled. “No screaming kids, and no smell of curry all day long.”

“But you said you wouldn’t come back, that there’s nothing here for you.”

Sally looked into her glass; it was empty, but still she nursed it between her palms. “Oh, I know,” she said, “but there are times when I think about it — coming back, I mean, coming home. London is so big, so — so impersonal. Someone could murder me in that little room and I wouldn’t be found for days — weeks, maybe.” She laughed. “The smell of Mrs. Patel’s cooking would cover up anything.”

Sally frowned. The word murder had fallen between them like a heavy stone. “Strange,” she said meditatively, “how you can forget even the most terrible things for a while. I keep thinking James is alive, that the phone will ring and I’ll pick it up and hear him say, ‘Hi, Sis,’ the way he always did, with that silly American accent he liked to put on. Then I remember that he’s gone, that he’ll never phone me again, and I’m shocked at myself for having forgotten, even if only for a little while.” She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was low and soft, as if it were coming from a long way off. “I dream about him, you know, every night. I dream we’re children again, playing together. Last night we were in a meadow I remember from when we were small. There were always buttercups in it, in summer, and then, later, there would be dandelion clocks. We used to blow the fluff off of the dandelions, and the number of breaths it took to get rid of them all was supposed to tell you what hour of the day it was. Silly…”

A furious gust of wind made the window boom in its frame, and a fistful of rain rattled against the panes.

“Here,” Phoebe said, “give me your glass.”

She had risen to her knees, and discovered now, too late, that her left leg had gone to sleep, and as she reached out for the glass she felt herself beginning to topple over. Sally, realizing what was happening, put out a hand to steady her, but Phoebe kept falling sideways awkwardly, and suddenly they found themselves in a sort of embrace, Sally with her back arched and Phoebe leaning heavily against her. Their faces were very close together; they could each feel the warmth of the other’s breath.

Later, Phoebe could not remember if it was she who had kissed Sally or if Sally had kissed her. Their lips met so lightly, so fleetingly, that it might have happened by accident. But it was not an accident. At once they drew back, and both of them began to speak at the same time, and stopped, flustered and half laughing. Then something happened in the air between them. It was as if lightning had struck. They were not laughing at all now. Slowly they leaned forward again, and again their lips met, deliberately this time, drily, warmly, exerting a soft, tentative pressure. Phoebe was aware of her heart beating, of the blood pulsing in her veins. They had both kept their eyes open, gazing at each other in surprised, wordless inquiry. Then they disengaged, and Phoebe sat back on her heels. Sally’s face was below hers, tilted upwards; there was a faint flush on her cheeks and forehead and her umber eyes were lustrously damp.

“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said. “I don’t…” Words failed her. She did not know what it was she had begun to say. It seemed to her all at once that she knew nothing, and that, gloriously, there was nothing she needed to know.

Sally was shaking her head. “No no,” she said, her voice congested, “there’s no need…” But she too fell silent.

They looked away from each other in a sort of giddy desperation. Phoebe’s heart was making an awful, dull thudding, so loud that she thought Sally must be able to hear it. She struggled to her feet, shedding involuntary little moans of distress — that ridiculous leg of hers had pins and needles in it now — and limped off to the kitchen and stood at the window there with a hand to her mouth, gazing out unseeing at the rain. She was trembling all over, though not violently; she imagined this must be how a tuning fork would feel when it had been softly struck. She realized she was listening intently and almost fearfully for any sound from the other room. She did not know what she would do if Sally were to follow her out here. What would they say to each other. What would they do? She had never kissed a girl before, never in her life, nor had she felt the urge to, so far as she knew. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. So far as she knew —what did that mean?