[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.“I mean, is there anything you need?”Quirke said no, and added that the Judge was good to come.At the top of his nose and between his eyes he had again that tremulous, hollow sensation of incipient weeping, an effect, he assumed, of delayed shock—his system, after all, would be in turmoil still, working desperately to fix itself, and why would he not want to weep?“Mal and Sarah were here,” he said.“Phoebe, too, at some stage, when I was still half comatose.”The Judge nodded.“Phoebe is a good girl,” he said, with a faint note of insistence, as if to forestall an objection.He molded his hands against each other again in a washing motion.“She’s going to America, did she tell you?”Quirke felt a breathless, lifting sensation in the region of his heart.He said nothing and the Judge went on: “Yes, to Boston, to her Grandfather Crawford’s.” He was looking everywhere except at Quirke.“A holiday, only.Or vacation, as I believe they say out there.”He fished in the pocket of his jacket and brought out his tobacco pipe and pouch and busied himself with them, plugging the damp dark strands into the bowl with the discolored ball of his thumb.Quirke watched him from the bed.The afternoon light was failing fast in the room.The old man struck a match and put it to the pipe and smoke and sparks flew up.Quirke said:“So the boyfriend has been given his final marching orders, has he?”The Judge was looking about for an ashtray in which to deposit the spent match.Quirke made no attempt to help, but lay and watched him, unblinking.“These mixed marriages,” the Judge said, trying to sound unconcerned, “they never work.” He leaned forward and placed the match carefully on a corner of the wooden locker beside the bed.“Besides, she’s…what is she?”“Twenty, in the new year.”At last the Judge looked at him, the glimmer from the window making his faded blue eyes seem paler still.He said:“A life is easily ruined, at that young age.”Without lifting his head from the pillows Quirke put down a hand beside the bed and tried gropingly to open the locker, but in the end the Judge had to help him, and found his cigarettes for him and gave him one and struck a match.Then Quirke rang the nurse’s bell and the nurse came and he told her to fetch an ashtray.She said he should not be smoking but he ignored her, and she turned to the Judge and threw her eyes to heaven and asked him if he did not think Quirke was a holy terror, but went back into the corridor and a moment later returned with a tinfoil pie plate and said that would have to do them for it was all she could find.When she had gone they smoked in silence for a while.The old man’s pipe had fouled the air and Quirke’s cigarette tasted to him of burning cardboard.The last of the daylight was dying away into the shadowed corners of the room but neither man made a move to switch on the lamp beside the bed.“Tell me,” Quirke said, “about this Knights of St.Patrick business that Mal is involved in.” The Judge put on a puzzled frown but Quirke saw that he was feigning.“The thing in America, with the Catholic families, that Josh Crawford funds.”The old man took from his pocket a smoker’s penknife and used the blunt end of it to tamp the tobacco in his pipe, sucking away meanwhile at the mouthpiece and blowing out busy clouds of blue smoke.“Malachy,” he said at last, with heavy emphasis, “is a good man.” He looked Quirke directly in the eye.“You know that, don’t you, Quirke?”Quirke only looked back at him; he recalled yet again Sarah saying the same thing: a good man.“A young woman died, Garret,” he said.“Another woman was murdered.”The Judge nodded.“Are you suggesting,” he inquired, as if he had no more than the mildest interest in hearing what the reply might be, “that Mal was involved in these things?”“He was—he is.I told you so.He arranged for Christine Falls to—”The old man waved a hand wearily.“Yes yes, I know what you told me.” In the gloom now, with the window behind him, his face was a featureless mask.Quirke could see the burning dottle in the pipe bowl flare and fade, flare and fade, a slow, fiery pulse.“He’s my son, Quirke.If he has things to tell me, he’ll tell me, in his own time.”Quirke reached out cautiously and crushed the last of his cigarette in the tin plate on the locker, the stub exhaling its final, bitter fume.The nicotine had reacted with whatever the painkillers were they had given him and his nerve ends were fizzing.The old man went on:“When I was a boy I used to go to school with my boots tied around my neck to spare the shoe leather.Oh, I’m telling you—they laugh about that sort of thing these days, saying people of my generation are exaggerating, but I can tell you, it’s no exaggeration.The boots around the neck, and a roasted spud and a bottle of milk with a bit of paper for a stopper and that was our rations for the day.Josh Crawford and myself, two lads from the same townland.Half the time we had no backsides to our trousers.”“And look at you now,” Quirke said, “you the Chief Justice and him a Boston millionaire.”“We were the lucky ones.People talk about the good old days, but there was precious little that was good about them, and that’s the sad truth.” He paused.The room was almost in darkness now, the lights of the city coming on and twinkling fitfully afar in the window.“We all have a duty to try to make the world a better place, Quirke.”“And the likes of Josh Crawford are out to make a better world?”The Judge chuckled.“When you think of the material God has to work with,” he said, “you have to feel sorry for Him, sometimes.” Again he paused, as if to test what he would say before he said it.“You’re not much of a believer, are you, Quirke? You realize it’s a great disappointment to me, that you left the church.”The effect of the cigarette had worn off and Quirke was sinking again into a dull fatigue.“I don’t know,” he said, his voice growing thin, “that I was ever in it.”“Ah, but you were—and you’ll come back, sooner or later, don’t you mistake it
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]