Benjamin Black - Holy Orders

“ Investigating is a strong word. We’re not exactly Holmes and Watson.”

“You’re quite the pair of sleuths, though.”

He put away the tongs and sat down again. The fire hissed and crackled, sending up a snaking column of dense, yellowish-white smoke. “Could that be what’s troubling you?” he said. “I mean this young man’s death? It seems to have been very violent, from what I read in the papers.”

Quirke rose and went to the table and the tray with the decanter on it. He poured himself another brandy, a good inch of it. “No,” he said, returning slowly to the fire. “My troubles are all my own work.”

“Yes,” Mal said, groping for his sherry glass where he had set it on the floor beside his chair. “I think you’re overwhelmed, Quirke.”

“Overwhelmed?”

Mal blushed a little. “Yes. By yourself, by your life. You must do something about it.”

“Such as?”

Mal hesitated for only a second. “You have to forgive yourself,” he said.

“Forgive myself?” Quirke stared. “For what?”

“For whatever it is that’s burdening you.” Mal located his glass and fished it up, but it was empty. He turned it in his long pale fingers, looking through it from the side. “The things that happened to you when you were a child, they were no fault of yours.”

Silence fell like a blade, and the already dim light in the room seemed to darken further for a moment. The twig tap-tapped at the window. Quirke was thinking how Mal’s father, Judge Garret Griffin, had played a role in the things that had happened to him in his childhood.

“Tell me, Mal, do you think Garret was my father?”

Again the light in the room seemed to dim. This was the question that had stood unasked between them since they were boys together, growing up in Judge Griffin’s house. There had been a young woman, Dolly Moran, who worked years ago in that house and who might have had a child and been forced to give it up for adoption. The facts were unclear, buried, deliberately so, in the murk of time. If there had been a child, was Garret Griffin the father of it? — of him? Quirke had been taken from an orphanage and given a new life by the Judge and his wife. By then Dolly Moran was gone. So many mysteries, Quirke thought, so many questions, unasked and unanswered.

Mal took a slow breath. “I don’t know,” he said. “My father never talked about it — he never talked about any of those things.”

“You protected him, when those things were threatening to come out.”

“Yes, I did,” Mal said, lifting his chin defiantly. “I did what I could.” He lowered the sherry glass and looked hard at Quirke. “He was my father.”

Quirke drank his brandy. He felt strangely calm, remote, almost. It was a shock to discover how little he seemed to care, suddenly, about all this, where he had come from, who his parents were, what his real name might be — these patches of darkness in his past had seemed deep pools in the depths of which he might someday finally be lost to himself. Now, all at once, they were what they were, mere gaps, mere absences. He should have asked that question of Mal a long time ago. He should have asked it of Garret Griffin.

He studied the amber lights in his glass. The brandy held an image of the fire, tiny and exact. “Time to go,” he said.

Mal did not answer — perhaps he had not heard? He seemed sunk in himself, lost perhaps in the shadows of his own past. Quirke tossed back the last of the brandy and stood up. He had drunk too much, again, and felt light-headed. He put a hand to the back of the sofa to steady himself. Mal rose slowly. “I’m glad you came to me,” he said. “It means something.”

“Does it?”

“Yes.” He laid a hand on Quirke’s shoulder. “I’ll call Philbin first thing — he’ll get you in for an X-ray straightaway.”

Quirke nodded, looking at the floor. “Right. Thanks.”

Mal still had his hand on his shoulder; then slowly he took it away and let it fall to his side. “Look after yourself, Quirke,” he said.

* * *

Quirke walked along the hall, his shoes squeaking on the parquet. Mal had not offered to see him to the door, and he was glad of it, for by now he was regretting having come here, to ask help of his quasi-brother and let him see how weak he was, how defenseless. On an ormolu table below one of the antique portraits there was a bell jar with, inside it, a stuffed parrot, of all things, perched on a marble stand. Quirke wondered idly as to its provenance. What eccentric diplomat, what homesick third secretary, from Liechtenstein or Baden-Württemberg, had brought it here, a memento of home, perhaps, of a happy childhood tinted with the colors of bright plumage and loud with the harsh cries of Fritzl or Lou-Lou here, the magical talking bird? The past, the past — everyone tried to hold on to it, this thing that had gone, festooning its immateriality with beads and baubles, with bits of themselves.

Rose must have heard him approach, for now she appeared out of one of the absurdly grand reception rooms that lined the hallway. “Did you have a nice heart-to-heart?” she asked sarcastically, leaning in the doorway.

“Hardly,” Quirke said. “I don’t think Mal is any better at locating that particular organ than I am. The heart, I mean.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, looking him up and down. “Mal has a heart — you, on the other hand, have a soul.”

“What’s the difference?”

“All the difference in the world.”

She smiled, glancing down, then stepped forward and kissed him on the mouth, pressing her body lightly against his. Her breath tasted of whiskey and cigarette smoke. He put his arms around her. She was so slender, and almost weightless; soon she would begin to get old. He bent his head and laid his forehead on her shoulder. She moved back, and he lifted his head, looking at her inquiringly. She gave a shrug. “Old times,” she said.

“Rose, I—”

“Ssh.” She reached out and put a fingertip to his lips and smiled. “Don’t give up, Quirke,” she said. “Live. It’s all we have.”

He nodded. She took his coat and hat from the stand and gave them to him. When she opened the door the night surged forward into the hall, smelling of rain and the wet garden and, beyond that, of the road, of trees, and city, and world. He stepped out into the darkness.

On Merrion Road he stopped and waited for a passing taxi. He saw himself standing there, hunched under the night, like an old bull standing in the rain. When at last a taxi arrived the driver leaned over and peered up at him suspiciously, this solitary figure in his big black coat and his drenched hat. Quirke climbed into the back seat.

“Tallaght,” he said.

* * *

When they had finished their tea at the Country Shop, Phoebe and David took Sally Minor to the pictures. It was Phoebe’s idea. She wanted to be able to sit in the dark for an hour or two, not speaking, not thinking, even, just watching these enormous, soot-and-silver creatures flit across the screen, making make-believe trouble for themselves and anyone else who was unwise enough to wander into their circle of light. Sally had been to the Carlton the previous night, so tonight they went to the Savoy, across the road. At the start of the film Bette Davis was seen shooting her lover and then being sent for trial for murder. After that, Phoebe’s mind wandered, and when she tried to concentrate again she could not catch up with what was going on. She did not care. Her own life at the moment seemed far more tangled and difficult than the plot being acted out before her with such large gestures, such overblown emotions.

Again her mind strayed. Watching the actress on the screen, she found herself wondering what it would be like to shoot someone. A person would have to be very desperate indeed to do such a thing. She thought of the pistol in Sally’s handbag. She knew it was there — Sally was too careful ever to leave it out of her keeping — yet it seemed unreal, as unreal as Bette Davis pretending to be a murderess when everyone knew she was a lavishly successful Hollywood film star.