Even the Dead by Benjamin Black Page A

that was his life.
    He turned up Merrion Street. There was lamplight in a few of the windows of Government Buildings. He thought of the poor drudges in there, ordered by their ministers to stay on and finish that report, draw up this schedule, frame those parliamentary questions. He wondered if Leon Corless had sat up at one of those windows, late into the night, doing—doing what?
    For a while, before he started on his medical studies, Quirke had thought of going for the Civil Service. He had done well in his final school examinations, came out among the top fifty in the country; a career awaited him as a bureaucrat, a mandarin. Strange to think that he might have been behind one of those windows himself now, hunched over his desk, his fountain pen scratching away, covering sheet after sheet of foolscap, as the long day faded into the half-night of midsummer. Strange to think.
    At the corner of Merrion Row a lone car was stopped at the traffic light. He drew level with it, and saw that it was Phoebe behind the wheel. The light changed to green just then and the car moved off. He sprinted after it, and caught up, and rapped with his knuckles on the roof. Phoebe braked, and looked up at him in alarm. He opened the passenger door and leaned in. “It’s just me!” he said, laughing.
    “Quirke! You gave me a fright—I thought it was a tramp or something. What are you doing, wandering the streets at this hour?”
    A car came up behind them, and the driver sounded his horn.
    “I’m sorry,” Quirke said, still with his hand on the door. “I just saw you and I—I thought I’d—I just thought I’d say hello.”
    Behind them the horn honked again, a longer blast.
    “Get in, for goodness’ sake!” Phoebe said.
    Quirke sat beside her, feeling foolish, and foolishly happy. “Sorry,” he said again.
    “What’s the matter?” Phoebe said, and drove forward and turned onto Baggot Street.
    “Nothing’s the matter. I—” He stopped. What could he say? How to explain something so ordinary as happiness? “I was out for a walk,” he said.
    “You’re very far from Ailesbury Road.”
    “Well, that’s the thing, you see,” he said. “I’m not at Ailesbury Road anymore. I’m back in the flat.”
    She glanced at him sidelong. “I’m glad to hear it.”
    “Are you?”
    “Of course. I thought you were mad to go and stay there in the first place.”
    “Why?”
    “Oh, Quirke, don’t you know anything?”
    “Funny, Rose said something the same to me just this morning.” He laughed. “Anyway, the answer, of course, is yes—I don’t know anything about anything.”
    They looked at each other, a little helplessly, smiling. It seemed to Quirke somehow an emblematic moment, as if this was how it was always meant to have been between them, meeting by chance, at dusk, and not knowing what to say to each other, and not minding. For it didn’t matter; they could speak or be silent, it was all the same. He felt it again, that happiness, a twinge in his breast, a kind of precious pain.
    She drove them to Herbert Place. They climbed the dimly lit stairs to her flat on the first floor. Large shapes of shadow hung in the living room, and at the window a parallelogram of yellowish radiance from the streetlamp outside was laid out on the floor like an illustration in a geometry book, one corner of it bent at an angle where it was intersected by a chair leg.
    Phoebe dropped her handbag and her keys on the table and went to the window. “I often don’t turn on the light,” she said, “and just leave the curtains open. Do you mind?”
    “I don’t mind.”
    “I like to be in the dark and see the night outside, so glossy and quiet. I imagine there’s a huge animal out there, pressed against the house, sleeping.”
    “The midnight cat,” Quirke said.
    “What?”
    “That’s what your mother used to call it—the midnight cat. She liked the dark, too, said she preferred it to daytime. It appealed to her feline