Even the Dead by Benjamin Black Page B

side.”
    He thought of Delia, long dead, of how she used to curl up against him, purring; her feline side. He was glad it was dark; he didn’t want Phoebe to see his face, how he looked. He didn’t often think of his dead wife, nowadays.
    “Will I make us some coffee?” Phoebe asked.
    When she turned to him, away from the window, her face became a blank mask, featureless.
    “If you want to,” he said. “I mean, if you’re going to have some yourself.”
    “Oh, Quirke,” she said, “can’t you ever just say yes or no, and leave it at that?”
    He followed her into the kitchen. Here she had to turn the light on. He watched her at the sink, filling the kettle. How pale she seemed; tired, too. He wondered where she had been, in the car, Sinclair’s car. She didn’t like to drive, he knew, especially not at night.
    “Are you all right?” he asked.
    She didn’t look at him. “Yes. Why?”
    “I don’t know. You seem—I don’t know.”
    “You worry about everyone,” she said. “Except about yourself, of course.”
    “People are always telling me that.”
    “Don’t you think they might be right?”
    “Maybe. I doubt it. Sometimes it seems to me I’m all I ever think of, all I’m capable of thinking of. I’m much more selfish than anyone realizes.”
    “Everyone feels that way, Quirke. We’re trapped inside ourselves.”
    She put the kettle on the stove and lit the flame under it. There was the flabby smell of burning gas. Someday, he thought, someday, for no reason, I’ll remember all this, the darkness in the window, the gas flame sputtering, the red-and-white checked tablecloth, the cups, the smell of the ground coffee, and Phoebe in her black dress with the white lace collar, my nunlike daughter.
    “What’s the matter, Phoebe?” he said.
    This time she did look at him, the merest glance. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said. “Or maybe it is. I don’t know. Let’s wait and have our coffee.”
    The kettle came to the boil, and she poured the steaming water into the percolator and put the percolator on the ring and turned down the gas. Soon the coffee began to burble into the glass lid. She got down cups, saucers, spoons. She poured the coffee. He watched her. Sometimes he thought he would have made a better physician than a pathologist. He had an eye for the way people moved, their tics, their tensions. But would he have been able to deal with the living? As it was, even the dead were almost too much for him.
    They returned to the living room, carrying their cups. It took some moments for their eyes to adjust to the darkness. Quirke barked his shin on something. Phoebe asked if she should switch on the light, but he said no. He guessed that she didn’t want him to see her face, either. They both preferred the anonymity of darkness.
    He groped his way to the table and sat down on a cane-backed chair, while Phoebe went and perched on the arm of the sofa, the light from the streetlamp falling across her knees.
    “I met someone today,” she said. “Someone I used to know, in the agency where I was doing that shorthand course. It was the strangest thing. I was in the Country Shop, having lunch, when the waitress brought me a note, just a scribble, asking me to come across to the Green.”
    She paused and watched Quirke light a cigarette. The match when he struck it made a suddenly expanding sphere of yellow light in which for a moment his face loomed like a caricature, the nose grotesquely hooked and the eye sockets empty.
    “Who was it from, this note?” he asked.
    “A girl called Lisa, Lisa Smith. I hardly knew her during the course, except to nod to or say hello. She’d seen me through the window of the café and wrote the note and gave it to the waitress to give to me. I went over to the Green, as she’d asked, and sure enough there she was, waiting for me, by the pond.” She paused. “Give me one of your cigarettes, will you? I’ve run out.”
    He rose and went to her, offering his