Snow

by John Banville

  Conversation proved desultory. Mrs Osborne, sunk in deep distraction, picked about in her food, as if she were searching in it for something she had lost.

  The Colonel turned to Strafford. ‘Why don’t you tell us something about yourself, Inspector,’ he said, showing off his dentures in a desperate imitation of a grin. ‘Married, are you? – kiddies?’

  ‘No,’ Strafford replied. ‘I’m single.’

  He winced. He had bitten on a pellet of buckshot, embedded in a piece of rabbit meat, and thought he might have cracked a molar.

  Lettie smiled at him brightly.

  ‘So you’re a queer, then?’

  ‘Lettie!’ her father fairly bellowed. ‘Apologise to Mr Strafford at once!’

  The girl put a finger to her lower lip and simpered. ‘Oh, I’m tho thowwy, Inspecto’ Sthwaffod.’

  Sylvia Osborne lifted her head and looked about vaguely, as if she had heard her name spoken.

  Lettie winked at Strafford.

  On his side of the table, Dominic Osborne was eating steadily, his face lowered over his plate. Lettie threw a crust of bread at him.

  ‘And why don’t you tell us about yourself, Dom-Dom,’ she said. ‘Got any matrimonial plans? A nice little wife and a few kiddies would be just the thing to smarten you up. Eh, brother dear?’

  ‘Shut up,’ Dominic said. He turned to his father. ‘Has she been drinking again?’

  The Colonel’s eyebrows shot up. ‘She doesn’t drink, does she?’ He turned to his daughter in alarm. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Of co’se not, Daddy,’ she said, doing her baby voice again. She laughed. ‘Unless you count the odd gin and tonic before lunch, a spot of champers around the middle of the afternoon, and a couple of brandies last thing before bed. Strict teetotal, otherwise.’

  The Colonel turned to his son again, pleadingly. ‘She’s joking, isn’t she?’

  Dominic, concentrating doggedly on his food, said nothing.

  Mrs Duffy came to clear away the dinner plates. There was tapioca for dessert, she announced.

  ‘I’m going up to change,’ Lettie said.

  She tossed aside her napkin, pushed back her chair and stood up, drawing the black overcoat tightly around her like a cape. Again she winked at Strafford. Her father began to say something to her, but she ignored him and stalked out, throatily doing her Dietrich voice.

  Falling in love again,

  Never wanted to—

  Sylvia Osborne looked up again. ‘What?’ she murmured, frowning.

  The Colonel too threw down his napkin.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive my daughter’s rudeness,’ he said crossly to Strafford.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ Strafford said.

  Dominic looked up suddenly and fixed him with a venomous glare.

  ‘You’re such a good sport, aren’t you,’ he said, with acid sarcasm. ‘What are you doing here, anyway, when you should be busy hunting down the murderer? And what about that other detective, what’s-his-name, I hear he’s gone missing – why aren’t you out searching for him?’

  ‘Dominic, Dominic,’ his father said quietly. ‘The Inspector is our guest.’

  The young man scrambled to his feet, almost knocking his chair over backwards, and strode out of the room, slamming the door behind him. There were tears in the young man’s eyes, though he had tried to hide them. Strafford wondered what kind of tears they were.

  Colonel Osborne sat silent, looking down at the table, his bow tie askew. ‘I don’t understand the young,’ he said. He looked up at Strafford. ‘Do you? Of course, you’re hardly old, yourself.’

  Strafford too stood up now. ‘I must get back, while the roads are still passable.’

  ‘Oh, but hang on!’ the Colonel exclaimed. ‘The children will be leaving shortly, for their party. They can give you a lift, and drop you off along the way. I’ve told them they can take the Land Rover. That brute of a motor will drive through anything. And so it should,’ – he laughed grimly – ‘it costs me enough to run.’

  ‘Oh, but I wouldn’t want to delay them—’

  ‘Nonsense! They’ll be happy to drop you at the Sheaf of Barley.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll tell them to wait for you.’

  He rose from his chair and strode out of the room, calling after his departed children. Strafford lingered uneasily, a hand braced on the back of his chair. Sylvia Osborne sat hunched around herself at the end of the table, gazing at the floor. He suddenly felt a rush of pity for her. She seemed so small and frail there, under the great chandelier hanging over her like a suspended shower of icicles.

  Mrs Duffy appeared with five white bowls on a large wooden tray. She looked around in annoyed surprise. ‘Where have they all gone?’ she demanded, looking accusingly at Strafford. She set the tray down in the centre of the table with such a bang that the bowls on it rattled. She glared at Strafford again. ‘And I don’t suppose you want any? Well, it won’t be my fault if it gets cold,’ she said, and swept out of the room, muttering under her breath. She had not so much as glanced in Sylvia Osborne’s direction.

  Strafford crouched down beside Sylvia’s chair. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I did see him, you know,’ she said, looking up at him suddenly. The pupils of her eyes were two dark dots.

  ‘Who – who did you see?’

  She turned her face away from him now, remembering.

  ‘There was someone, coming out of the library—’

  ‘Yes?’ He held his breath. ‘Who was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was dark in the hall, I just saw a shadow. I thought it might be—’

  Her voice trailed off. Strafford caught her smell, at once sweet and bitter. She drew the tweed jacket more closely about her. The skin in the crook of her elbow was silver-grey, the colour of a polished knife blade.

  ‘Did you think it was your brother?’ he asked urgently. ‘Did you think it was Freddie?’

  She looked up at him again, frowning, as if in a daze. How thin and pale her lips were, like two faint pencil lines.

  ‘Freddie?’ she said, sounding baffled. ‘No, of course not. He never comes here – Geoffrey won’t let him.’

  ‘Then where do you see him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your brother.’

  ‘Oh’ – she shrugged – ‘he comes round to the gate at the end of the Long Meadow, or if the weather is bad I meet him in town, in Grogan’s tea shop.’

  ‘Do you give him money?’

  She bit her lip. ‘Sometimes. He’s always broke. He’s a dreadful person, really.’ She smiled fondly. ‘Poor Freddie.’

  Strafford drew up a chair.

  ‘So you saw someone coming out of the library, but you don’t know who it was?’

  ‘No. I told you. It was dark. There was only the bulb on the landing.’ She was frowning again, trying to concentrate. Morphine, he thought. It must be morphine, or one of the barbiturates, anyway. He was no expert on drugs, but he knew their effects when he saw them.

  ‘And then you went into the library,’ he said, ‘didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I went in. I didn’t turn on the light. Or did I?’ She put a hand to her forehead. ‘I saw what they had done to him. I saw the blood—’

  ‘And then? – what did you do then?’

  ‘I screamed, I think, and ran out into the hall. Geoffrey came down. He looked so silly, in his nightshirt – he always wears a nightshirt, never pyjamas.’ She giggled, and covered her mouth with the tips of her fingers. ‘All that was missing was a nightcap and a candlestick.’

  ‘You recognised who it was in the library – you knew it was Father Lawless?’

  ‘I suppose so. He was lying on his back. So much blood. I’d never seen so much blood before. I knew it was him, of course I did – the black suit, the collar—’ She sighed, and sat up a little straighter. When she spoke, she was suddenly matter-of-fact, almost brisk. ‘I never much cared for him, you know. And I didn’t want him in the house. Geoffrey, however—’ She gave a s
hivery little laugh. ‘Poor Geoffrey, he thinks he’s so much better than Freddie, but they’re just the same, really, except that Geoffrey doesn’t gamble and keep losing all his money all the time, the way Freddie does.’ She paused again. ‘Anyway, the priest is dead now, and I can’t say I’m very sorry. Is that awful? I suppose it is. You won’t be too hard on them, will you?’

  ‘“Them”? Who is “them”?’

  She waved a hand limply before her, as if shooing away something annoying. ‘Oh, all of them. Dominic. Poor Lettie. And the other one. They’re just children, really.’

  ‘The other one?’ he said sharply. ‘Who is the other one?’

  ‘What?’ She looked at him, bleary-eyed, blinking like a tortoise.

  He drew forward, until their knees were almost touching. ‘Dominic, Lettie, and who else?’ he urged. ‘Who, Mrs Osborne?’

  ‘What?’ she said again. She was still gazing at him, still slowly blinking. ‘I don’t know what you mean. I don’t understand.’

  Colonel Osborne appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Step lively!’ he said to Strafford. ‘Those two are waiting for you in the Rover. The snow has stopped, but it looks like it’s going to freeze.’ He looked at his wife. ‘You all right, my dear? Time for bed, I think.’ He rubbed his hands. ‘Christmas Eve!’ he said, and added with a roguish twinkle, ‘I wonder what Santa Claus will bring us?’

  Christmas Eve. So it was. Strafford had forgotten.

  INTERLUDE

  SUMMER, 1947

  I was their shepherd, and they were my flock. That was how I thought of it, and I believe they did, too, in their way. I did my duty by them, more than my duty. I’m only human, with all a human being’s frailties. Nevertheless, I believe I did my best, whatever anyone might say against me.

  They were a wild bunch, but when you got past all the smart talk and the tough-guy posturing, you realised they were just boys, after all. Just children, really, most of them. Of course, there were real ruffians among them, dyed-in-the-wool bad lads, and there was nothing to be done with them except wait till it was time for them to leave and go out into the world – and God help the world, is all I can say.

  There were about thirty of them, sometimes more, sometimes less. The youngest would have been seven, the oldest seventeen, maybe eighteen. Needless to say, the older ones were the hardest to handle. Their hides were so toughened that beatings didn’t work on them any more, unless you sent them to Brother Harkins, which I did only when all else failed. Harkins was a tough bastard, a real sadist, I have to say it. He was brought up in an orphanage himself, so you’d think he’d have a bit of sympathy, but instead it only left him with a grudge, and of course he took it out on the lads – he used a hurley one time on Connors the tinker, who couldn’t have been more than nine or ten.

  The tinkers were the hardiest of the lot, though, they could survive anything. But young Connors damn near died when they let Harkins at him. Connors’s father and two of his uncles came to the school, but Brother Muldoon, the head man, sent them about their business. Muldoon wouldn’t brook any nonsense like that, from parents or relatives or anyone else. We were a law unto ourselves, over there. Oh, yes, a law unto ourselves, and we applied it with rigour.

  If the Connors boy had died, he wouldn’t have been the first. There’d been two or three that were ‘lost’ – that was the common euphemism. The lost boys of Carricklea Reformatory and Industrial School. I never asked for details. That kind of thing wasn’t discussed.

  The place had started out as an army barracks, and it looked it, a big gaunt granite barn of a thing perched on a rock above the sea. Don’t ask me why they needed a barracks out there, in the middle of nowhere – not even in the middle, on the edge of nowhere, more like. There was the bay on one side, and a bog on the other, stretching all the way to Nephin, the second-highest mountain in Connacht. The lads had rechristened it the ’Effin mountain. They gave everything a nickname. Mine was Tom-tit. I didn’t care, they could call me what they liked.

  Sometimes I miss the place, believe it or not. There were certain evenings, especially in summer, that were so lovely I’d get a lump in my throat just to look around me, the sea like a mirror of polished gold and the smoke-blue mountain rising up in the distance, and the whole landscape flat and still, like a backdrop in a play. But I wouldn’t want to return there. Oh, no. My name for it, though I’d never say it to the boys, was Siberia. We were all inmates, the boys, the Brothers and me, inmates of the prison house of Carricklea.

  We’d been warned against making favourites among the boys. A Redemptorist priest, name of Brady, I remember him well, used to come twice a year and give us a talking-to – the Brothers and me, not the boys – and that was his hottest topic. ‘To make a favourite, dear brothers in Christ, is to make an occasion of sin,’ he’d say, leaning over the edge of the pulpit in the little basement chapel, glaring down at us, his horn-rimmed glasses flashing. When he really got going, on sins of the flesh and the fires of Hell and all the rest of it, little splotches of foam, like cuckoo spit, would gather at the corners of his mouth. I never liked him, with his creepy smile, and he didn’t like me, either, that was plain. You can take it from me, that fellow knew a thing or two about the sins of the flesh.

  But I should have listened to him, I know I should. I was the chaplain there, the only priest in the place – the Brothers resented me for it – and I had a special responsibility to set a good example. And I tried. I really did try. I’m no theologian, certainly I’m not, but what I could never understand was how God, having created us, should expect us to act differently to the way he’d made us. Not one of the great conundrums, like Free Will and Transubstantiation, I’ll grant you. All the same, it’s a question I’ve wrestled with all my life, all my life as a priest, that is.

  His nickname was Ginger. Hardly original, given that mop of rusty curls that no comb could tame. He was nine, when he came to Carricklea. He’d been in a place in Wexford, a proper orphanage, I think it was, but they couldn’t handle him, so they said, and offloaded him on us. He wasn’t the worst, by any means. Half wild, yes, like all of them, couldn’t read or write and didn’t even know how to wash himself. I took him on as my special project, with the aim of civilising him. I taught him to read. I was proud of that. Yes, Ginger was my special lad. It never occurred to me this might be what Brady, the Redemptorist, meant by ‘making favourites’. I still don’t believe I was doing harm. Oh, some of it was sinful, I don’t deny it. But as an old priest I knew years ago in the seminary used to say, that’s what God is there for, to forgive us our sins.

  Anyway, where there’s love, how can there be sin? Didn’t Jesus himself command us to love one another?

  Ginger was a fine lad, as I saw when we’d managed to scrape the dirt off him and get his hair cut. Big, even then, and not what you’d call graceful, but there must have been something about him that led me to single him out. Maybe it was that he was a loner, like me. I believe he preferred horses to human beings. There was a Connemara pony that he used to ride around on, bareback. The pony was so small, and sawbacked, too, that Ginger used to have to hold his feet up to keep them from dragging on the ground. He was devoted to that animal, though, and the feeling was mutual. It was a pleasure to see the two of them trotting along the bog roads, the big red-headed boy and the little pony with its yellow mane floating on the breeze.

  Ginger, I have to admit, had a savage side to him, though he tried to keep it under control when I was around. To be with him was like being in a cage with a wild animal that had been tranquillised, and the tranquilliser was wearing off. So keep in mind, through what follows, that I was always just that little bit afraid of him. But fear is a fine spice, sometimes, isn’t it? – some of you will know what I mean.

  I made enquiries about him. It was never easy to find out the backgrounds of the poor waifs that had the misfortune to end up at Carricklea. His mother, so I was told, was a respectable girl, or she had a respectable job, anyway, as
an assistant in a hardware store in that town where she lived in County Wexford. As usual, no one was saying who the father was. All I learned was that he was well-to-do, and well known in the place, and that when she got in the family way he paid her to take herself off to England and stay there. It was the old story, a decent working-class girl preyed on by a rich seducer and ending up alone in a back street in some soot-begrimed city in the Midlands – or the wastelands, more like – of England. And they’d have the nerve to call me a sinner!

  How did it happen that I got banished to Siberia? It was all on account of what started out as a bit of a lark. I was a young seminarian, and got a chance to go to Rome one summer, with three or four others. We’d been chosen, along with a dozen or so groups from various seminaries around the country, to have the honour of an audience with Pope Pius himself. I liked Rome. No – God, I loved it. I’d never been out of Ireland before, and then there I was, in Italy! The sunlight, the food, the wine, the fresh mornings on the Pincian Hill or the soft nights in the shadow of the Colosseum. Nothing could have prepared me for what they call the dolce far niente of Italian life, even though the war wasn’t long over and the city was a shambles and seemed to be inhabited entirely by crippled soldiers, prostitutes and black-marketeers. Fellows like me, ‘the boys in black’, as we used to call ourselves, we were innocents abroad, in a wicked world.

  I met up with a young fellow called Domenico – what better name for a trainee priest? – who took a shine to me and showed me around the city. He used to call me bel ragazzo, and tease me for not having a word of Italian, even though his English wasn’t as fluent as he thought it was. He was a little fellow, with dark smooth skin and oiled black curls tumbling over his forehead. And those eyes – I’d always thought the description ‘laughing eyes’ was just a form of words until I met Domenico. Years later I saw a reproduction of a painting, by Caravaggio, I think it was, with a figure in the background that was the dead spit of my Roman pal. Domenico. Ah, yes.