Holy Orders A Quirke Novel by Benjamin Black Page B

that he meant it.
    “Do I?” She turned from the mirror and looked at him, measuring him up and down with an arched eyebrow. “I wish I could say the same for you. I suppose you’ve been boozing nonstop since I left.”
    “Oh, nonstop,” he said. “Blotto every night.”
    “You should let me marry you,” she said.
    “Should I?”
    “Yes, you should. I’d see to it that you were set straight. Cook proper meals for you, iron your shirts, put you to bed at night with a warm flannel on your chest to ward off the chill. And if you came home late I’d be standing behind the door with a rolling pin, to teach you the error of your ways. Can’t you see it?”
    “I can. Andy Capp and Flo.”
    “Who?”
    “Andy Capp and his battle-axe missus—cartoon characters in the paper.”
    She put her head to one side, smiling thinly. “A cartoon strip,” she said, in a voice suddenly turned brittle, “is that how you see us? Give me a cigarette.”
    She sat on the arm of the armchair by the fireplace and crossed her legs, while he went to the mantelpiece and took two cigarettes from the silver box there, lit both, and gave one to her. She was leaning across to look at the book he had left lying open on the chair’s other arm. “Belisarius,” she read. “Who’s he when he’s at home?”
    “Byzantine general. They say the emperor Justinian had his eyes put out and left him to beg in the streets.”
    “Why?”
    “Too successful in the wars, a threat to the throne.”
    “Typical.”
    “Of what?”
    “Men.”
    “Who was the typical one, Belisarius or the emperor?” She gave him a scathing glance. “Anyway,” he said, “it’s only a legend.”
    “Like all history.”
    He smiled at her blankly, nodding. Something dangerous had come into the atmosphere, a sense of rancor. He did not want a fight.
    “So,” she said, “tell me what’s been happening. It feels as if I’ve been away forever.”
    He saw again fleetingly, but with startling clearness, that image of the canal bank, the soft darkness over the water, the leaning, stealthy trees. “Jimmy Minor was killed,” he said.
    Still perched on the chair arm, with her shapely legs crossed, she had forgotten about the book and was examining idly the toe of one of her shoes. Now she frowned, and seemed to give herself a tiny shake. “What?”
    Quirke added another drop of whiskey to the cold dregs of coffee in his cup and drank. The bitter taste made him wince. “Jimmy Minor,” he said. “You met him, didn’t you? Reporter on the—”
    “I know who he was,” she said sharply, turning to look at him. “That friend of Phoebe’s. Killed, you say?”
    “Murdered. Someone, or some ones, beat him to death. He was found in the canal below Leeson Street Bridge.”
    She was gazing at him now in what seemed a kind of wonderment. “When?”
    “Couple of days ago.”
    “My God,” she said tonelessly. She rose and walked to the fireplace and put one hand on the mantelpiece and stood there, facing the mirror, her eyes hooded. She was silent for a time, then spoke in an oddly faraway voice. “Don’t you ever feel anything?”
    He looked at the pale back of her neck. “How do you mean?”
    “You just—you just announce these things, as if…” She stopped. She was shaking her head. Now she turned. She was pale, and her mouth quivered. “Don’t you even care?”
    “About what? About Jimmy Minor being killed? Of course I care—”
    “You don’t !” she cried. “You couldn’t, and speak of it in that—that offhand way.”
    He sighed. “I care,” he said, “of course I care. But what good does caring do? Caring is only another way of feeling sorry for yourself.”
    She was looking at him with such intensity that her eyes seemed to have developed a slight cast. “What a monster you are, Quirke,” she said softly, almost in a murmur.
    He turned away from her, suddenly furious. It was always the same, there was always someone telling him how awful he