The Maker of Swans

by Paraic O’Donnell

  She lets herself recede then, knowing that it is finished. She sinks in contented exhaustion, becoming contiguous again with her own body, and realises that she is lying on the cold floor in the litter of what she has written. She is feeble and vacant, unable to move. She tastes blood in her mouth.

  None of it matters, not anymore. She is untouchable now. She has done the last and unsurpassable thing.

  She has flowered.

  Seventeen

  ‘Mr Eustace?’

  The boy, Jonah, knocked three times always. Eustace had the same habit once, but now he no longer knocked on doors. He awaited no one’s pleasure.

  ‘Mr Eustace?’

  The knock came again, but it was hesitant still. Jonah was meek by disposition, and Eustace had given him reason, more than once, to approach his door with caution. He brought himself half upright in the narrow bed. Through the stained and uneven drapes, he tried to read something of the character of the daylight. It was after midday, if not later. Jonah knew better than to trouble him before noon.

  ‘What, damn you?’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Eustace. I wouldn’t have disturbed you, only there’s two bills wants paying.’

  Eustace levered himself to a seated position on the edge of the bed, wincing as he did so. He had come by some new injury, this time just to the right of the small of his back. He lifted his shirt, twisting himself to inspect it. This time, he swore aloud. A tear in the muscle, if not something worse.

  ‘I paid Mrs Haim for a month in advance. Tell your mother that nothing is owed for another week. Leave me in peace.’

  ‘They ain’t our bills, sir.’

  ‘Well, put them under the door, boy. Where are your wits?’

  ‘Sir, they ain’t—’

  Someone was with him. Eustace heard them now, in muttered conference. He crossed to the rough dressing table, where the washbowl held an inch or two of greying dregs, and picked up a spotted mirror. He used it for shaving, though he did so now at irregular intervals. In the month that had passed since he left the Estate, he had not often felt inclined to study his own face. He glanced at one shadowed half of his jaw, then shoved the glass across the dresser, face down.

  ‘Look, Mr Eustace,’ Jonah called again. ‘Might be best if you let me in for a bit. Got Mrs Fraser here with me wants to have a word.’

  Eustace closed his eyes, spanned the ache behind them with his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Let me dress,’ he said.

  Elspeth Fraser gave no sign, in her manner of dress or conduct, of the nature of the business she kept. Eustace had known enough women of her kind, but those he remembered had never troubled to strive for decorum. They had announced themselves with certain excesses of ornament, with jewelled fans and florid silks. Mrs Fraser was compact and clean-skinned. With her grey suit and pleated blouse, the strict arrangement of her hair, she might have been a governess with a prominent family, a widow of means who devoted herself to good works.

  Jonah retreated after admitting her, closing the door behind him. Mrs Fraser walked to the only chair in the room, but did not sit down. She brushed its upholstery with her fingertips and drew them quickly away.

  ‘I will open the window, Mr Eustace, if that would not trouble you.’

  He raised an open hand. ‘I am troubled only by your appearance here. The window you may do with as you wish. You will take a drink of something?’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Eustace, but I do not drink liquor.’

  He took an enamelled cup from the nightstand and filled a third of it with whisky. ‘You will change your mind, I suspect, when you see the view.’

  She drew the curtains briskly, dusting her hands against her skirt. The sash window did not immediately yield when she tried to raise it. From a handsome leather purse, Mrs Fraser produced a small pocket knife. She worked it carefully into the crack beneath the lower pane and succeeded, after some minutes of effort, in prising it a little way open.

  Eustace sat at the end of the bed and looked on. ‘You have done more already than I have in all the weeks I have been here,’ he said. ‘I mean to find better lodgings, of course, when I am less occupied.’

  She remained near the window, taking a long breath as she folded away her pocket knife. ‘Your lodgings are your own private business, Mr Eustace. It is not my practice to come to gentlemen’s homes.’

  Mrs Fraser looked at him keenly, as if to ascertain whether he had understood some unspoken point. She was waiting, perhaps, for him to enquire further. Eustace took a slug from his whisky, holding the cup between his knees while he fastened his cuffs.

  ‘It is not out of deference to your privacy, Mr Eustace. I keep an orderly house, and give no one any cause to look into my affairs. On a Friday morning, by rights, I should be on the train to London. An aunt of mine in Kentish Town has no one else in the world.’

  ‘When I was a boy,’ Eustace said, ‘the train did not even come here. Fifteen years it took them, out on the marshes with theodolites.’

  Her cheek flickered. She was irritated, perhaps, or it was a nervous habit. ‘I would not have chosen to come here, Mr Eustace, and I’d as soon not prolong the visit.’

  ‘You managed the window well enough, Mrs Fraser. The door should give you no trouble.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll not keep you, Mr Eustace, but there is a matter of business we must discuss before I go. You did not leave my house peacefully last night, and your account was not in good standing.’

  Eustace went to a drawer in the dresser. ‘Was that all, Mrs Fraser? An oversight, merely. The girl herself had as much champagne as I did. I will be happy to put matters right.’

  ‘If it were only that, I need not have put off my trip, Mr Eustace. I would have reminded you on your next visit, of course. It was not only champagne, by the by. There was a bottle of single malt also.’

  He folded four bills and passed them to her. ‘I do not doubt you, Mrs Fraser. This will settle the account, I trust, and recompense you for your trouble.’

  ‘I would not have put aside my plans, Mr Eustace, for an unpaid slate. As I said, you did not leave peacefully. A doctor had to be called for the young gentleman. Doctors, in my experience, will be followed by constables. It is a thing I will not tolerate, and nor will my landlord, for that matter.’

  Eustace put his hand to the tender place at the base of his back. ‘You must forgive me, Mrs Fraser, if I do not recollect the incident in all particulars, but I wonder why it is my rest you are disturbing, and not that of the man who had half-strangled your own employee when I came upon him.’

  Mrs Fraser looked away briefly. Again, there was a small disturbance in the muscle of her cheek. ‘If the girl had not already told me the same story, Mr Eustace, I would not be here, and you would no longer be welcome in my house. The boy was rough with her. It has happened before with other girls. We deal with these things in our own way.’

  Eustace drained the enamel cup, allowing the whisky to pool for a moment beneath his tongue. He could feel a new ulcer there, livid and precise. ‘Your way has made little impression on him, it seems.’

  ‘The boy’s father is a magistrate, Mr Eustace, and our way has kept him from looking too closely into how his son spends his evenings. As I told you, I keep an orderly house.’

  Eustace went back to the dresser and set down his cup. He stared for a moment into the open drawer, then slammed it shut with the heel of his hand. ‘Let him come to me with his price,’ he said, turning to Mrs Fraser. ‘Let his father come with his. I will give them my answer in person.’

  She consulted a plain but finely made wristwatch. ‘I must go, Mr Eustace. It is not a question of money, I assure you. Mr Gill wishes only that you make your apologies before those who were present last night.’

  ‘That is all he wants?’ said Eustace. ‘What good will that do him, or anyone else?’

  Mrs Fraser looked away in distaste. ‘I cannot think, Mr Eustace. Perhaps he wishes to restore his dignity before those who saw him humiliated
. Perhaps he wishes to act the part of his father, calling people to account before him in the court. It is as near as he will ever get. The good Lord did not greatly burden him with gifts.’

  She began buttoning her jacket and pulling on her gloves. ‘In any case,’ she said, ‘he visits us on Thursday evenings, as a rule. It need not be next week, since it will be only a few days past Christmas, but it must be soon. If you do not come, Mr Eustace, and make this small concession to him, I will take it that you no longer wish to be a visitor at my house. That may not concern you, perhaps, but I will not stop there. I will take the girl’s belongings from her room, and I will burn them. I will turn her out on the coal quay, where she will find some occupation, I’m sure, though she may be without some of the comforts that she is used to. You will find her there, if you are heartsick when she is gone. She will be delighted to see you, I’m sure, and to hear how you defended her honour.’

  ‘Jonah,’ Eustace called. When there was no answer, he picked up the enamel cup and flung it at the door. ‘I know you are there, you imbecile. I did not hear you go down the stairs.’

  The door was opened quietly, though Jonah felt it prudent to keep himself from view.

  ‘Show Mrs Fraser out, Jonah. And be so good as to admit no more visitors.’

  Eustace had asked for a room that did not overlook the river.

  Mrs Haim, who kept the boarding house, was quick to point out that he would save himself nothing by forgoing the view. There was just as much work in it for her, whatever a guest might look out on, and she took it as a very bad sign if money was quibbled over at the outset. Eustace paid her for a month in advance. The rates were hardly in proportion to the limited comforts of the accommodation, but he assured her that they would not be disputed.

  The room that was found for him was cold and cheerless, its faded wallpaper stained with damp. It was at the top of the house, its walls curtailed on two sides by the pitch of the roof. A single sash window was set into a gable wall and looked over a side street to the gated yard of an abattoir. The slaughtermen, Eustace found, took no particular pains to disguise the noises of their labours. A lorryload of pigs arrived during the first week of his stay, and the first of them to be gutted could be heard screeching even while its fellows were being herded across the clattering yard. On most days now, Eustace left the curtains closed.

  He spent little enough time in the room, in any case, that the view from his window was a matter of indifference. His habits kept him apart from his fellow guests. He rose so late, sometimes, that the winter dusk had already begun. Mrs Haim served meals at strictly observed hours, in a dining room as dark and narrow as the interior of a mail train. Eustace went down for dinner only once, and was joined at the table by a single other guest, a man in a brown suit whose skin was profoundly yellowed by jaundice and who muttered incessantly between mouthfuls of soup, as if to some unseen confessor.

  He ate elsewhere and infrequently. Though he usually left his room not long after waking, he was often too sickened by the ale and whisky of the night before to contemplate food. But it was not only that. At mealtimes now, no one came in by the kitchen door, smelling of woodsmoke and sorrel. No one slipped to her seat with ink-darkened wrists and untended hair. He had only his own nourishment to think of. It no longer seemed pressing.

  He bought bread rolls from a bakery, but brought them untouched to the modest public square in front of the guildhall. There he sat on a bench under a cherry blossom of the kind that flowers even in the dark months. He chose this place because it was opposite a fountain where small songbirds gathered. If the weather allowed, he would stay and watch them until it was almost dark, the sparrows and finches dipping hesitant wingtips, scattering the water from themselves in brief convulsions. He tore the bread patiently, dispensing the tiny morsels one by one as the birds approached in tentative, stitching leaps.

  When it grew dark, he went to the Grey Swan. It was a place, unlike the more reputable establishments in the centre of the town, where a man could drink alone and be left largely in peace, where he could go unremarked even if he had not been fastidious in his grooming, his history and occupation attracting no enquiry. It was a place, Eustace thought, where he would not be recognised. Indeed, there were nights now when he scarcely recognised himself.

  The Swan was presided over by Rosie Ennis, who had lost half her leg to polio and had not reconciled herself to the prosthesis that replaced it. Rosie was a handsome woman, possessing a natural authority of demeanour. She seated herself usually at the end of the bar, where the two stools on either side of her remained vacant by strict convention. She tended for the most part towards vigilant restraint, intervening only against the most flagrant disorder, or when her arbitration was directly appealed for. In all cases, Rosie made her wishes known by way of Viking Boone, whose stature and magisterial beard had earned him his nickname, and who kept the bar and fulfilled most other practical functions at the Swan.

  Rosie’s tolerance did not extend to excessive curiosity. It was she who enforced her establishment’s indifference to the private affairs of its patrons. This Eustace discovered on one of his early visits, when he attracted the scrutiny of a querulous old drunkard, a man in perhaps his middle eighties who wore the brass-buttoned regalia of some minor and long-relinquished office. The old man peered at him with undisguised suspicion, and exclaimed several times that he knew his face. At length, he tottered to where Eustace sat, his face set in an inquisitorial leer.

  ‘I knew it’d come to me,’ he said. His breath was hot and sour. ‘That’s what they says about me, you see. Bill don’t forget nothing. Might take him a while, but Bill don’t forget fucking nothing.’

  ‘You have mistaken me for someone,’ Eustace said. I am not myself.

  ‘Nah, nah,’ said the old man, jabbing the air with satisfied certainty. ‘No mistake. There’s not many remember it now, what happened to that poor Swaine girl, out on the river. Her uncle tried to save her, so they say, but he weren’t never seen again. Long time ago, that was. They never found the ferryman’s boy neither, who done Swaine’s man. Or maybe he done them all. They said they found him, in the papers. Some headcase up in Pentonville copped to it, they said, before he swung for knifing a postmistress. Said he was him and changed his name. But that don’t mean much, does it? Confessions from headcases up in Pentonville ain’t exactly hard to come by. Nah, he run off, the ferryman’s boy, and you’d have thought he’d have the sense to stay run off.’

  ‘You are mistaken,’ Eustace repeated. He stared fixedly at his glass and gripped the counter in front of him. The old man raised his finger again, and was about to resume his interrogation when Viking leaned over the bar and took hold of his wrist.

  ‘Rosie says to leave the gentleman be.’

  ‘Ain’t no gentleman, this one,’ said Bill. ‘You don’t know the half of what this little river monkey got up to when he—’

  Viking moved his grip to Bill’s upper arm, pulling him closer to the counter. ‘When he what, Bill? How long ago was it, all that business with the Swaines? Forty years? Even if that headcase didn’t do it, this gentleman here don’t look much over forty-five. What’s he supposed to have done, bashed their heads in with his rattle? Now piss off home, Sherlock Holmes, before I take you outside and crack your fucking case.’

  This drew a murmur of amusement from the Swan’s patrons, though most took care to disguise their interest, keeping their eyes fixed on their drinks.

  Bill retreated, licking his lips in thwarted vindication. He finished his drink and lurched away, raising his finger from the door in a final denunciation. Eustace had no idea who he was and had no inclination to ask, but he knew the story of the hanged lunatic well enough. The Crouch brothers had done him more than one service, all those years ago. The confession they had procured had satisfied those who mattered, whatever this creature might believe. The boy the drunkard remembered was dead. He lay in an unmarked prison grave.

  Eustace murmured his
thanks to Viking, then looked to Rosie Ennis. He raised his glass slightly in acknowledgement and gave a brief and courteous nod. Rosie’s answering look was knowing but disinterested. She joined her hands and separated them, as if in absolution.

  Eustace did not go to Mrs Fraser’s house on the Thursday that followed. He went instead to the Grey Swan.

  It was not long after midwinter, and already the low sun was dissolving in the dregs of the sky. He stopped at the bakery, but a cold and insidious rain had set in by the time he reached the square. He disposed of the bread and continued towards the quays.

  He had walked perhaps a quarter of a mile when it came to him that he was being followed. He stopped to cross the market square, where the traders had begun to pack up their stalls, the rain spilling from the edges of their awnings. Behind him, the street was busy, but most of those Eustace could see were trudging back towards the town, clutching sodden paper bags against their raincoats. The man moving against the crowd was thinly built, and not particularly tall. He wore a loosely fitting cap, whose peak he had pulled down so as to obscure the upper part of his face.

  In a side street, Eustace stood to check his watch in the light from a shop window. When he glanced around, the thin man had stopped too. He patted a jacket pocket, as if to satisfy himself that he had remembered his wallet. As he walked on, Eustace reached into his own coat, a movement that had recently become habitual, but his fingers met with nothing. He had left the gun at the boarding house. He did not take it with him when he went out at night, though he often felt the urge to do so. He acted with excess, on occasion, when he had been drinking. It was better, at such times, that he was without easy means of doing harm.

  Eustace kept his hand in his coat, making sure that he could be seen to do so. He walked on, taking care not to alter his pace, not to be seen to hurry. When he reached the doorway of the Swan, he looked back once more. The thin man halted halfway along the street, making no show this time of having a reason for doing so. Like Eustace, he kept one hand out of view. For a long moment, neither of them moved. The street was otherwise deserted, and the only sound was of the rain, insinuating itself among the cobbles. A van emerged from a gateway and sat idling between them. When it moved off, the thin man had vanished.