She had a broad, heart-shaped face, a fattish nose, and a sensuously downturned mouth with a prominent, plump upper lip, due to a slight overbite – that little bleb of glistening pink flesh was one of his favourites among, as he expressed it, her ‘bits’. She never went to a hairdresser but cut her own hair, in a severe pageboy style with a fringe that stopped in a straight line just above her eyebrows. When she looked at him like this, with her chin lowered and her baby-lip protruding, Quirke saw in her the solemn-eyed girl she would once have been. He always resented the expanse of time that had passed before he knew her. It seemed to him astounding that they had both been in the world at the same time, having their lives, being themselves, and each ignorant of the other’s existence for so long.

‘Do you know what hotel dining rooms remind me of?’ she said now.

‘No. What do hotel dining rooms remind you of?’

‘Places where wakes are held.’

He frowned, his forehead wrinkling. ‘Wakes?’

‘Yes. Not the room itself with the dead person in it, you know, but the place next door, where the mourners are gathered, nibbling at their plates of dainty food and speaking to each other in quiet voices, so stilted and polite. All you hear is the murmuring all around you, and the little clinking sound of knives and forks on plates, and now and then the tiny chimes that wine glasses make when a knife or a fork knocks against them.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Quirke said, laughing a little. ‘But it doesn’t seem so bad, to me.’

After all, he refrained from saying, he was a pathologist; his professional life was carried on among the dead.

‘But it is unnatürlich, no? Unnatural. People should be with the living. Look around you – here is so much fun.’

Quirke shrugged in the way he did, rolling his shoulders inside his jacket. He had in general a low opinion of what people considered ‘fun’. All the same, he found it amusing to think of the gilded dining room at the Londres as an annexe to the mortuary. Evelyn gazed at him, perplexed – what was funny?

‘You are,’ he said.

‘Am I?’

For Evelyn, no question was rhetorical. Every enquiry required a response.

‘The things you say,’ he said. ‘The way you look at the world.’

‘This is funny?’

‘Sometimes – often – yes.’ He paused, and leaned forward. ‘Someone said of some poet or other that he stood at a slight angle to the world. That’s you, my dear.’

She thought about this.

‘Yes,’ she said, nodding judiciously, ‘it is my job to view these things from an angle. Do you think this is wrong?’