A bus came along and he flagged it down and got on. There was a to-do about his not having the exact fare, and in the end, he just dropped a handful of coins in the driver’s lap and gave him a look that shut him up. The tyres hummed on the winding road. Luckily the bus was bound for the city centre, and soon he recognised the square with the building with the twin cannons where he had stopped earlier for a beer. He might go to the same place again, and have another glass. There was no hurry. His time was his own. The kind of job he was on shouldn’t be rushed. Rushing things could prove fatal.

Fatal! That was a good one. He’d be proving fatal himself, any day now. He chuckled, and sauntered off across the square in the morning sunshine.

Chapter 39

Breakfast next morning at the Londres was, for Phoebe, a travesty of normal life, although the farcical aspects of the occasion would, in other circumstances, have pleased her. They sat at a table by a window in the dining room, the four of them – Quirke and Evelyn, Strafford and herself – like  actors in a brittle little comedy about a well-to-do middle-class family on holiday abroad. Even the light in the window was unreally effulgent, as if its source were not the sun but a battery of carefully arranged arc lamps up in the flies. When they had first come in and the waiter was seating them, she had caught a number of the other guests looking up with warm and seemingly appreciative smiles, as if in acknowledgment of the cut of the quartet’s stage costumes and the persuasive manner in which they carried themselves. She and Strafford would be taken for a recently married couple, she still with something of the young bride about her, he the doting older husband, while Quirke and Evelyn would be the parents of one or other of them, her, most likely.

She had already seen, the night before, that there was no love lost between Strafford and her father. Quirke this morning was subdued, keeping his head lowered over his plate and saying little. As if to compensate, Evelyn was all talk.

‘My dear,’ she said to Phoebe, ‘we must go out immediately after breakfast and find you a dress.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Phoebe responded, smiling. ‘And what’s wrong with this one, may I ask?’

‘Down here you cannot wear your “black habit”.’ She glanced at Quirke and smiled, and, getting no response from him, turned back to her stepdaughter. ‘You will be taken either for a young widow or a duenna. You must have something sunny and bright. There’s a shop nearby that I have seen, we shall find something for you that will be perfect.’