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the counter flooded him suddenly with a wash of self-pity.
     
“Thanky-voo,” the shopman said plumply, handing over change.
     
In the flat Quirke unplugged the electric fire— it had made little impression on the big, high-ceilinged room— and crumpled the pages of an ancient copy of the Irish Independent and put them in the grate with the kindling on top and lumps of coal from the scuttle and set a match to the paper and stood back and watched the flames catch and the coils of heavy white smoke snake upwards. Then he went into the kitchen and scrambled two eggs and toasted slices of bread under the gas grill. Malachy accepted a cup of tea but would eat nothing. “My God,” Quirke said, suspending the teapot in midpour, “look at us, like a pair of old biddies on pension day.” They had been married to two sisters. Quirke’s wife, Delia, had died in childbirth, having Phoebe; Malachy’s Sarah had succumbed to a brain tumor two years ago. Being a widower suited Malachy, or so it seemed to Quirke; it was as if he had been born to be bereaved.
     
Angelus bells were tolling from all quarters of the city.
     
Quirke sat down at the table, still in his overcoat, and began to eat. He could feel Malachy watching him with the melancholy shadow of a smile. A sort of intimacy, however uneasy, had developed between the two of them since Sarah’s death. They were indeed like two sexless cronies, Quirke reflected, two aging androgynes shuffling arm in arm down the wearying middle stretch of life’s long road. Malachy’s thoughts must havebeen running on the same lines, for now he startled Quirke by saying, “I’m thinking of retiring— did I tell you?”
     
Quirke, teacup suspended, stared at him. “Retiring?”
     
“My heart is not in it anymore,” Mal said, lifting and letting fall his left shoulder, as if to demonstrate a deficiency of ballast on that side.
     
Quirke set down his cup. “For God’s sake, Malachy, you’re not fifty yet.”
     
“I feel as if I was. I feel about eighty.”
     
“You’re still grieving.”
     
“After all this time?”
     
“It takes all this time. Sarah was …” He faltered, frowning; he did not know how to begin listing the things that Sarah had been. After all, they had loved her, Quirke as well as Malachy, each in his way.
     
Mal smiled miserably and looked up at the gray light in the window beside the small table where they sat. He sighed. “It’s not Sarah, Quirke, it’s me. Something has gone out of my life, something that’s more than Sarah— I mean, that’s different from Sarah. Something of me .”
     
Quirke pushed his plate away; his appetite was gone, not that it had been keen to start with. He sat back on the chair and lit a cigarette. Malachy had been reminding him of someone, and now he realized who it was: Harkness, but without the apostate Christian Brother’s invigorating bitterness and biting scorn.
     
“You have to hold on, Mal. This is all there is, this life. If something is gone out of it for you, it’s your job to replace it.”
     
Malachy was gazing at him, his eyes hardly visible behind those gleaming lenses; Quirke felt like a specimen being studied under a glass. Now Mal asked softly, “Don’t you ever just want it to be— to be done with?”
     
“Of course,” Quirke answered impatiently. “In the past coupleof months I thought at least once a day it might be best to go, or to be gone, at least— the going itself is the thing I don’t care for.”
     
Malachy considered this, smiling to himself. “Somebody asked, I can’t remember who, How can we live, knowing that we must die? ”
     
“Or you could say, how can we not live, knowing that death is waiting for us? It makes just as much sense— more, maybe.”
     
Now Malachy laughed, or at least it was a sort of laugh. “I never knew you to be so enthusiastically on the side of life,” he said. “Doctor Death, they call you at the hospital.”
     
“I know that,” Quirke said. “I know what they call me.” He tipped the ash of his