They turned into Grafton Street and arrived at McGonagle’s. Quirke pulled open the big door with its red-and-green stained-glass panels, and a waft of beer fumes and cigarette smoke and noise came out to meet them. Despite the early hour the place was crowded.

“Huh,” Phoebe said, “call this low?”

She followed after Quirke as he pushed his way through to the bar. They found two unoccupied high stools beside a square wooden column into which a narrow mirror was set. Phoebe hitched up her skirt to sit, smiling at him. Yes, Quirke told himself, she had Delia’s smile. When they were seated he found that he could see his reflection in the mirror behind her shoulder, and had her change places with him: it always made him uneasy to look himself in the eye.

“What will you have?” he asked her, lifting a beckoning finger to the barman.

“What can I have?”

“Sarsaparilla.”

“Gin. I’ll have gin.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, will you, now?”

The barman was elderly and stooped and of a priestly mien.

“The usual for me, Davy,” Quirke said, “and a gin and tonic for her ladyship here. More tonic than gin.” McGonagle’s had been one of his watering holes in the old days, the days of his serious drinking.

Davy nodded and sniffed and shuffled off. Phoebe was looking about the smoke-dimmed room. A large, florid woman in purple, holding a glass of stout in a beringed hand, winked at her and smiled, showing a mouthful of gapped and tobacco-stained teeth; the man with her was lean as a greyhound, with colorless, flat, and somehow crusted hair.

“Are they somebody?” Phoebe asked, out of the side of her mouth; McGonagle’s was famous as the haunt of self-appointed poets and their muses.

“Everybody is somebody here,” he said. “Or think they are.”

Davy the barman brought their drinks. It was strange, Quirke reflected, that he had never got to like the taste of whiskey, or of any alcohol, for that matter; even in the wild times, after Delia had died, the sour burn of the stuff had always repelled him a little, though he had still managed to pour it into himself by the jugful.