‘Oh Lor’,’ she said, doing her cockney voice, ‘it’s you!’
Why should they both be so surprised, to meet like this? What was more surprising was that their paths hadn’t crossed before now. Dublin was a small city.
‘How are you?’ he asked. They hadn’t shaken hands. ‘You look—’
‘Older?’
‘That wasn’t what I was going to say. You were a girl, last time I saw you.’
‘Yes, I suppose I was, though I didn’t feel particularly girlish. How many years is it?’
‘Ten years. More.’
‘That long? My, doesn’t time fly.’
While they spoke her gaze flitted over him, a slight smile playing at the corners of her mouth. She still found him faintly laughable, he could see. He didn’t mind.
‘You haven’t changed in the slightest,’ she said. ‘What age are you now?’
‘Oh, immensely old. Forty-something. I can’t remember.’
‘And I’m twenty-eight – I know you’re too much the gentleman to ask. I’m getting married tomorrow.’
‘Are you? Congratulations.’
‘Hmm. Buy me a drink – have you time? – and we’ll raise a toast to me and my lucky bridegroom.’
The Horseshoe Bar was still crowded, and the lounge was still gloomy despite the late sunlight pouring in at the three tall windows. They went to the long, narrow saloon on the hotel’s Kildare Street side. Only a few of the tables here were occupied. They sat on stools at the bar. She lit a cigarette – Churchman’s, he noted – and asked for a gin and tonic. He ordered a tomato juice with ice and a dash of Worcester sauce.
‘You’re still not a drinker?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Still practically a virgin.’
‘You used to drink Daddy’s whiskey.’
‘Out of politeness.’
‘Yes, you were always polite. Infuriatingly so.’ He recalled seeing her reflected in the glass of the French window upstairs at Ballyglass House, her glimmering pale nakedness. He realised, it came to him just now, that he had been a little in love with her, while imagining it was her stepmother he desired. He knew himself hardly at all, in those days. Was it any different, now?
‘You know what they call that in New York?’ the young woman said, pointing with her cigarette at his glass. ‘A Virgin Mary. Isn’t that clever? A Virgin Mary for an almost virgin.’
She studied herself idly in the mirror behind the bar.
‘Do you know New York well?’ he asked.
‘No. I’ve never been there.’ She lifted her chin and blew a stream of smoke over his head. ‘I changed my name, by the way,’ she said.
‘Oh? To what?’
‘Laura. I always wanted to be called Laura.’
‘So – Lettie no longer.’
‘That’s right. Lettie is gone.’
She recrossed her legs, and tapped her cigarette on the rim of a heavy glass ashtray that the barman had set before her. Strafford couldn’t get used to her new, stark hairstyle.
‘Who are you marrying?’ he asked, taking a sip of his drink. It tasted of nothing much. He recalled the stylised portrait of Jesus and his Sacred Heart hanging on the wall in Archbishop McQuaid’s parlour. The arid air of sanctity. The silver-grey light beyond the window.
‘I’m marrying a man called Waldron,’ Lettie-Laura said. ‘Jimmy Waldron. We’ve known each other for yonks. He locked us both in a lavatory once and put his hand up my knickers. I can’t have been more than ten or eleven. Then, years later, I kneed him in the balls one evening at a party – he got sick all over the floor. That’s as sound a basis for marriage as any, wouldn’t you say? Mind you, he insists he can’t remember either occasion, says I must have made it all up. Men have wonderfully defective memories, have you noticed?’ She darted her cigarette at the ashtray again. Her bright-scarlet lipstick was slightly smudged at one side of her mouth. ‘And what about you? Still single?’
‘No, I’m married. Her name is Marguerite. We knew each other for a long time too, like you and your chap. In fact, we went out together for years, broke up, then got together again. No children, before you ask.’
‘I wasn’t going to. Children are such a bore – I hope Jimmy won’t expect me to have any of the little blighters. If he does, he’s in for a disappointment.’
He took another half-hearted sip from his glass. He really didn’t like the taste of tomato juice, but when it came with ice cubes and a paring of celery it at least looked like a real drink.
‘How are things at home?’ he asked. ‘Are you still living at Ballyglass?’
‘No, I have a place up here now. I’ve been working in an art gallery.’
‘I didn’t know you were interested in art.’
‘I’m not. It’s just a job. That’s why I’m getting married, so Jimmy the groper of little girls can take me away from all this.’
‘I can see you’re very much in love.’
She shrugged. ‘Oh, Jimmy is all right. He makes me laugh, sometimes, especially when he thinks he’s being serious. He has a nice house, on Waterloo Road – his parents died and left him well off, thank God. Being poor wouldn’t suit me at all. Oh, look, I seem to have finished my drink. Can I have another?’
He signalled to the barman. In the lounge, someone had started to play on the piano a soupy version of ‘Falling in Love Again’.
‘Listen to that,’ Strafford said. ‘It’s your song.’
‘Oh, yes, from my Dietrich phase.’ The barman brought her drink. She stirred it pensively with her index finger, then put the finger into her mouth and sucked it. ‘Yes, Jimmy is all right,’ she said. ‘Though I feel sorry for him, having to put up with me for the rest of his life’ – she glanced at Strafford slyly from under her eyelashes – ‘if he lives that long.’
She lit another cigarette. It was her third.
‘And the family,’ he asked, ‘how are they?’
‘Oh, much the same. Daddy’s gone a bit gaga, I think, but then how would you know? The White Mouse still thinks she’s a vamp. She spends most of her time in bed, tended by the Kraut – I don’t know what she’d do without her regular course of injections. Poor old Kraut, how has he put up with her, all this time? I suppose he has to have his injections, too.’ She looked at Strafford speculatively for a long moment, leaning her head to one side. ‘You thought she might have killed my mother, didn’t you.’
He smiled. ‘The possibility crossed my mind.’
‘I suppose it’s a detective’s job, to suspect everybody of everything. And who knows, maybe you were right? – maybe Miss Mouse did give Mummy a shove. I wouldn’t put it past her, though I don’t think she’d have had the nerve.’ Strafford was about to reply to this but she stopped him, tapping a finger rapidly on the back of his hand. ‘But listen,’ she said, ‘you’ll never believe what Dom-Dom went and did. He converted! Yes, turned Catholic. And – wait for it – now he’s a priest. What do you think of that?’
Strafford was surprised not to be surprised. There was a certain, dreadful symmetry to the thing.
‘Where does he – I’m not sure what the word is. Practise? Officiate?’
‘He’s in one of those ghastly schools in Connemara, looking after the souls of a band of juvenile delinquents. I must say, it was the last thing I expected of him.’ She looked into her glass, and her voice became deliberately flat. ‘Of course, he and that priest were very close, for a while.’
‘Yes, like Laurence Radford,’ Strafford said, watching her. She had gone very still, and now she put her finger into the glass again and stirred it slowly round and round in what remained of her drink.
‘I wonder why they put lemon in,’ she said. ‘I used to take my gin neat, you know. I always had a naggin of Gordon’s in my gymslip pocket.’ Now she glanced at him sidelong. ‘I really was a naughty girl, in those days.’
‘The Radford boy,’ Strafford persisted, ‘—his father told me you were sweet on him.’
She lifted the g
lass and drained it, leaning her head far back. ‘I was in love with him,’ she said simply. ‘Can you be in love at – what was I? Sixteen? Seventeen? It felt like love. But of course I was wasting my time. I didn’t know how things were, you see. I didn’t know about Father Tom-Tom and his wiles.’ She paused. The cigarette she held in her fingers had an inch of ash suspended from it. She seemed not to notice. ‘And then my Laurence went and did himself in – not that he was ever mine, of course, except in my schoolgirl fantasies. I cried for a week, poor sap that I was.’
‘Two deaths, within a year,’ Strafford said, ‘your Laurence, and then Fonsey Walsh.’
‘Oh, Fonsey did the right thing,’ she said. ‘Poor Caliban, he would have had an awful time in prison.’ Suddenly she pushed her glass away. ‘Listen, it’s hateful in here – all this mahogany – shall we go out, maybe take a little stroll in the Green? It’s early still. Are you meeting someone? – is wifey on her way?’
‘No, she’s – she’s not here.’ In fact, he and Marguerite were separated, perhaps permanently, he wasn’t sure. After it had happened – no wine on the wall this time – he had found, to his surprise and faint shame, that he didn’t mind very much. ‘What about you? Will you be meeting your fiancé?’
‘No, this is his stag night, God help us. He’s staying at the Kildare Street Club, round the corner – God help them. He’s quite the puker, still, especially when he drinks.’
She stepped down from the stool and shouldered her canvas bag. They went out into the sunlight, and crossed the road and passed through the big corner gate into the Green. The evening was still warm. Courting couples lay on the grass. At the pond a small boy and his mother were feeding crusts of bread to the ducks. A tramp was stretched full length on a bench, fast asleep. The sky above the trees had turned to indigo. They skirted the flower beds. People were sitting on the granite parapet of the fountain, others were slumped in deckchairs, as if stunned after the day’s long heat. A man in shirtsleeves and braces wore a handkerchief on his head, knotted at all four corners, to protect his bald scalp from the sun’s dying rays.
‘Are you still a detective?’ Lettie asked – Strafford couldn’t think of her as Laura.
‘Yes – just about.’ She looked at him questioningly. ‘I was very nearly kicked out of the Force,’ he said. ‘I gave the story to an English newspaper, after Fonsey was found.’
‘I know. The Sunday Express, wasn’t it? Daddy was very disappointed in you’ – she put on her father’s voice – ‘Damned fellow, thought I could trust him, then look what he goes and does.’
Strafford smiled, biting his lip. ‘The Archbishop was disappointed too,’ he said. ‘Tried to get me transferred to the Blasket Islands, or somewhere equally congenial.’
‘What happened?’
‘My boss dragged his heels, and here I am, still pounding the beat.’ With four stiff fingers, he pushed a lock of hair away from his forehead.
‘I quite fancied you, you know,’ Lettie said. ‘I knew I hadn’t a chance, of course – you were too busy pining after the White Mouse.’
A pale little girl went past, bowling a hoop, with a little boy running behind her, crying.
‘Were you there, when they found Fonsey?’ Lettie asked.
‘No.’
‘Why did he kill that detective? – what was his name?’
‘Jenkins.’
‘That’s right.’ They had stopped, and she was watching the play of water in the fountain. ‘Why did Fonsey kill him?’
‘You know why,’ Strafford said.
‘Do I?’ Still she kept her eyes turned away from him. ‘Look at all those tiny rainbows the spray makes.’ Now she turned to him. ‘How would I know?’ she asked.
‘Because you know everything there is to be known, about that time, about all that happened. Don’t you?’
She held his gaze for a moment, then turned abruptly and walked on. He watched her go, then followed. The bandstand was ahead of them. In two or three paces he caught up with her. She had slipped the canvas bag from her shoulder and was swinging it at her side now.
‘Everyone said he got what he deserved,’ she said.
‘The priest?’
‘Of course the bloody priest!’ she snapped. ‘Who else did you think I meant? – Fonsey?’ She shook her head. ‘Daddy, the poor booby, was the only one who was taken in by Father Tom, with all his talk about horses, and hunting, and the rest of it.’ She swung the bag more rapidly at her side. ‘You know it was him who drove Laurence Radford to kill himself? Did you know that?’
‘I knew, yes.’
‘Oh, of course,’ she said with bitter sarcasm, ‘you knew it all, didn’t you. But you didn’t. It was all guesses, most of them wrong.’
‘Yes, you’re right. When I look back, I seem to myself to have been like someone in a theatre watching a play and understanding only a fraction of the plot.’
She stopped abruptly on the path and turned to him. ‘What would you do,’ she asked, ‘if you found out who really killed that priest? It wasn’t Fonsey, you know that, don’t you? Fonsey cut him, in that awful way, and lit a candle by his head, God knows why, but he didn’t kill him.’
She was gazing at him, motionless, not blinking.
‘Then who did kill him, Lettie?’
‘Laura.’
‘Who killed him, Laura? Are you going to tell me?’
‘You didn’t answer my question. What would you do, if you knew the truth?’
‘You don’t think I do know?’ he asked, almost teasingly. She said nothing, only fixed him still with that unblinking stare. He looked away from her, over the tops of the trees. A full moon, transparent as tissue paper, hung at a crooked angle at the tip of a distant spire, making him think vaguely of the East. ‘I don’t know what I’d do,’ he said. ‘Nothing, probably.’ He looked at the toecaps of his shoes. ‘How did Fonsey get into the house? That was the thing I kept asking myself. Did he have a key, or did someone let him in? What do you think, Lettie?’
‘I told you,’ she said coldly, ‘my name is Laura.’
‘Sorry – Laura. But tell me, did someone come down and let him in, and creep up the stairs with him and wait for Father Tom to come out of – to come out of wherever he was?’
She turned and walked on again. ‘What does it matter?’ she said over her shoulder. Again he followed, and again caught up with her.
‘You knew about Dominic, didn’t you,’ he said. ‘—You knew about him and Father Tom.’
‘I wish you’d stop calling him that – Father Tom! Jesus! You know he invented that name for himself? “Call me Tom, for the Lord’s sake!” he used to say, with that fake heartiness, grinning, and slapping people on the back. I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad I—’ She broke off.
‘What are you glad you did?’ He put a hand lightly on her shoulder. ‘Tell me,’ he said, in almost a whisper. ‘Tell me. I know you’re right, I know Fonsey didn’t kill him. Maybe he meant to, and his nerve failed – he didn’t like killing things, not in cold blood. Tell me.’
She looked down at his hand. ‘Oh, are you going to arrest me?’ She raised her eyes and smiled into his face. ‘What do you want me to tell you, that you don’t know already?’
‘You could tell me how a person can sleep at night, a person, for instance, who grabbed the knife from Fonsey and ran up behind the priest and drove the blade into his neck and let him stagger down the stairs and into the library and fall on the floor there and bleed to death. Could you sleep, Lettie – Laura – if you’d killed a man like that, no matter how much he deserved to die?’
She opened her eyes very wide, leaning a little way back from him, still smiling.
‘How would I know?’ she asked lightly, with a little laugh. ‘You remember what a sound sleeper I was, in those days. I still am.’
Then she hitched her bag on her shoulder again, and turned and walked away, back towards the hotel. He watched her until she had crossed the little hump-backed bridge ov
er the duck pond and disappeared into the shadows on the far side, under the trees.
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About the Author
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of seventeen novels, including The Book of Evidence; The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize; and the Quirke series of crime novels, under the pen name Benjamin Black. Other major prizes he has won include the Franz Kafka Prize, the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature and the Prince of Asturias Award. He lives in Dublin.
By the Same Author
NIGHTSPAWN
BIRCHWOOD
DOCTOR COPERNICUS
KEPLER
THE NEWTON LETTER
MEFISTO
THE BOOK OF EVIDENCE
GHOSTS
ATHENA
THE UNTOUCHABLE
ECLIPSE
SHROUD
THE SEA
THE INFINITIES
ANCIENT LIGHT
THE BLUE GUITAR
MRS OSMOND
COPYRIGHT
First published in 2020
by Faber & Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
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