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and less enthusiasm. "You're out late."
     
Quirke said nothing, and Mal stood back and held open the door. The dog retreated backwards, watching Quirke with beady hostility, sliding along on its outstretched paws and making a noise in its gullet like a rattlesnake.
     
Mal led the way into the drawing room, and when Quirke had passed through he shut the door on the dog. Quirke went and stood in the open windows with his hands in his pockets and contemplated the garden, his wedge-shaped bulk almost filling the window frame. He looked incongruous there in his black suit, a harbinger of night. Mal always thought of him as a huge, dangerous, baffled baby, needful and destructive. Quirke said: "I hate this time of year, these endless evenings." He was eyeing the peonies and the roses and the lavishly mournful weeping willow that Sarah had planted when she and Mal had first come to live here. The place had grown unkempt; Sarah had been the gardener.
     
The dog was scratching feebly with its claws at the door and whining.
     
"Want a drink?" Mal asked, and added quickly, "Tea or . . ." and faltered.
     
"Thanks—no."
     
They had made a sort of truce, the two of them, since Sarah's going. Occasionally they dined together at the St. Stephen's Green Club, where Mal had taken over his father's membership, and once they had gone to the races at Leopardstown, but that had not been a success: Quirke had lost twenty pounds and was resentful of Mal, who, though he had little knowledge of horseflesh, had confined himself to betting a few shillings but still had managed to come away five pounds the better.
     
Mal was wondering now, uneasily, what the purpose of Quirke's visit might be. Quirke did not come to the house unless invited, and Mal rarely invited him. He sighed inwardly; he hoped Quirke was not going to tackle him again about budgets—Mal was head of obstetrics at the Hospital of the Holy Family and chairman of the Board ofManagement—but suddenly Quirke startled him by asking if he would care to come for a walk. Mal did not think of Quirke as a man who went for walks. But he said yes, that he had been about to take the dog out for its evening run anyway, and went off to change his slippers for outdoor shoes.
     
Left alone before the humming silence of the twilit garden Quirke had an uncanny notion that the things out there, the roses and the heavy-headed peonies and the luxuriantly drooping tree, were discussing him, quietly, skeptically, among themselves. In his mind he saw Sarah here, in her big-brimmed Mediterranean straw hat, tweed-skirted, garden-gloved, walking towards him across the grass, smiling, and lifting a wrist to push a strand of hair back from her forehead.
     
The day's newspaper lay on the table where Mal had thrown it, the newsprint gleaming eerily, like tarnished white metal, in the evening light from the garden. Quirke saw the headline again:
    GIRL'S BODY FOUND
Mal came back, in his cracked brogues and his crumpled gray linen jacket. He no longer dressed as he used to: the old sartorial care was gone. He had let himself go, like the garden. Physically, too, he had faded, his features become indistinct, as if a fine sifting of dust had settled uniformly over him. His hair was dry—it looked almost brittle—and was going noticeably gray at the temples. Only the lenses of his wire-framed spectacles were as glossy and intent as ever, though the eyes behind them seemed vague, as if worn and wearied by the strain of constant peering through those unrelentingly shiny rounds of glass.
     
"Well," he said, "shall we go?"
     
They strolled by the canal in the hush of evening. Few people were about, and fewer cars. They went as far as Leeson Street and then all the way down to Huband Bridge. Here, once, long ago, Quirke had walked with Sarah Griffin on a Sunday morning in misty autumn. Hethought of telling Mal now about that walk, and what was said, how Sarah had begged him to help Mal— " He's a good man, Quirke