Holy Orders A Quirke Novel by Benjamin Black Page A

time Hackett signaled to Frankie, who came down the length of the bar in a hip-rolling sashay. “What’ll it be, gents?” he asked, and pulled out his bow tie past its limit and released it, smirking. Quirke lowered his head and looked at him narrowly; he might have been sighting along the barrel of a gun.

 
     
    8
     
     
    He had settled down with a nightcap and a history of Byzantium that he had been trying to finish for weeks when Isabel rang up. He sat and looked at the telephone and let it ring a dozen times before lifting the receiver, which he did gingerly, as if it might explode in his hand. He knew it would be Isabel. It was nearing midnight, and he had thought he was safe, that she must have slept through the evening and would not get up so late, but no. Her tone was dispiritingly bright. He tried in turn to sound enthusiastic, loving, happy to hear her voice.
    Isabel said she supposed he was in bed himself by now, with his teddy and his toddy, but that she would come over anyway, and maybe join him there, in the scratcher—she liked to use slang words, pronouncing them with an arch, actorly flourish, stretching out the vowels and rolling the r ’s. He could think of no reasonable means of putting her off. Good, she said, she would jump in a taxi right now. He put down the phone and gazed unseeing at the book lying open in his lap. It always annoyed him, that way she had of saying Bye-ee! with another theatrical trill.
    Yet when she arrived and at the front door flew into his arms and kissed him, breathing hotly into his ear, his heart gave a familiar gulp. She was a warm, happy, grown-up woman, after all, and she loved him, so she said, and to prove it she had tried to kill herself for his sake. He held her now, at once desiring her and wishing she had not come. What did he want from her? he asked himself, for the thousandth time. The self-canceling answer was everything and nothing, and therefore it was all impossible. Cringing with guilt he pressed her all the more tightly to him, while in his mind, suddenly, longingly, he had a vision of the towpath by the dark canal, and how it would be there, the hushed trees bending low, the moon shimmering in the water and the dry reeds whispering together, and not a soul anywhere about.
    “Did you miss me?” she whispered, grazing his neck with her lips. “Tell me you did, even if you didn’t.”
    “Of course I missed you,” he said, making his voice go thick as if with emotion. “How can you ask?”
    When they were in the flat she looked about with lively interest, as if she had been away for years. She took off her head scarf and shook out her dark-bronze hair. She was wearing the short fur coat that he had bought her for her birthday, over a dark blue silk suit with a narrow skirt that accentuated the curve of her bottom. When she had taken the coat off she turned her head back sharply and glanced down to check the seams of her stockings, and seeing her do it, as she did so often, he felt himself smile. He had missed her, he told himself; it was not entirely untrue.
    “Can you light a fire or something?” she asked. “It’s bloody freezing in here.”
    He squatted in front of the fireplace and put a match to the gas fire, and the gas ignited with its usual soft whomp! That was another thing that irritated him about Isabel, that she seemed always to be cold.
    He made coffee for them both and laced it with whiskey. He asked if she was hungry, and offered to make an omelette for her, but she said no, that she had been forced to endure enough boardinghouse meals in the past six weeks to cure her of wanting to eat anything ever again. “Do you think I’ve put on weight?” She surveyed herself critically in the big and incongruously ornate mirror behind the sideboard. “I think I have. God!”
    Quirke was admiring the way the hem of her buttoned-up short jacket flared out over her slim hips. “You look wonderful,” he said, and was relieved to realize