The Silver Swan

by Benjamin Black

  Was she afraid of him? Yes, she was. Even as she held him, burning, against her, with his hands in her hair and his mouth on hers and beads of sweat trickling down between her breasts, she could feel her fear, she could almost hear it, a sort of high-pitched whirring inside her. He was not physically strong, she knew, and the beating had left him weaker, but were not the weak ones often the most dangerous of all? She thought of Laura Swan and saw her floating dead under murky, bile-green water, her long, thick hair swaying about her featureless face like fronds of russet seaweed.

  She went to see Rose Crawford at the Shelbourne. She knew she could not tell her about Leslie White-no one could be told about that-but just to be in her presence was somehow a comfort, and soothed for a while the confused racings of her mind. Rose, she felt, would not judge her if she were to reveal her secret; Rose in her casually amoral way would understand about Leslie.

  They had lunch together in the hotel grill room. "All I seem to do is sit here and eat," Rose said with a jaded sigh. "I no sooner finish breakfast than it seems time for lunch, then there's afternoon tea, and then"-she tucked in her chin and mimicked a headwaiter's booming bass-"dinner, madame!" She smiled. "Oh, my dear, never get old."

  "You're not old," Phoebe said.

  "But I'm not young, either, which seems almost worse, in a way. You see that man over there, the one having lunch with his rich aunt?"

  Phoebe looked. The man, pin-striped and shod in handmade brogues, was large and florid-faced, with hair parted in the middle and brushed back in two floppy wings at either side of his head. The woman opposite him was tiny and hunched, and the knife and fork in her trembling, mottled claws rattled when they touched her plate. "Do you know him?"

  "No," Rose said. "But I know an attentive and hopeful nephew when I see one. The point is, when we walked in here he turned to look at us. Or at you, rather. His eye glided over me without the slightest flicker." She made a wry mouth. "It was not ever thus, my dear."

  Rose ordered sole for them both, and a bottle of Chablis. The sun through the window made the linen tablecloth shine like bullion and laid a burning speck on the rim of each of their wine glasses.

  "Where's that father of yours?" Rose demanded. "I expected him to dance attendance on me, but I haven't seen him since the day I arrived. What does he think I do with myself all day long? I know no one in this city."

  "Why do you stay?"

  Rose opened her eyes wide in exaggerated surprise. "Why, my dear! Do you want to get rid of me?"

  "Of course not. Only…"

  "Oh, you're right-why do I stay? I don't know. Somehow your grim little country is growing on me. I never knew I was a masochist."

  Phoebe smiled one of her ghostly, melancholy smiles. "Is it because of Quirke that you stay?"

  Rose did not look at her. "I shall ignore that, young lady," she said.

  The waiter came and, with a flourish, presented the wine bottle for Rose's inspection, like a conjurer showing a dove preparatory to making it disappear. When he had poured and gone she held up her glass to the light and asked, in her indolent drawl, "And what are you up to, young lady?"

  Phoebe had to bite her lip to keep herself from grinning like an idiot. This was what it must feel like to be pregnant, she thought, the same hot, thrilling, secretive sense of being all the time about to brim over. She stared innocently. "Up to?"

  "Yes. Don't try to fool me. You're up to something, I can tell."

  "How? How can you tell?" She could not keep the eagerness out of her voice. If only Rose would guess her secret, it would not be her fault, she would not be the betrayer, and then they could talk.

  "Oh, I don't know," Rose said. "You have a glow-no, a glitter. There's quite a wicked light in your eye. I think you are having an adventure, aren't you?"

  Phoebe looked down at the table. She did not often blush but felt she might be blushing now. She was glad when their sole arrived, swimming in brown butter on oval pewter platters. She did not care for fish, but Rose, in her blandly commanding way, had not consulted her before ordering. It did not matter: Phoebe rarely ate lunch and would probably not eat this one. She took a draught of the Chablis and felt it go straight to her head, like a flash of lemon-yellow light.

  "There was a coincidence," she said, measuring her words.

  "A coincidence? What do you mean?"

  "Somebody that Quirke knew came to him and asked him not to perform a postmortem."

  "Not to?"

  "Yes."

  "On whom?"

  "On his wife. This man's wife. She died."

  "Well, yes, I gathered that, if there was or wasn't going to be a postmortem. Who were, are, these people?"

  "It doesn't matter. Just… people. I knew the wife-I mean, I didn't know her, but… She ran a beauty parlor; I bought things from her."

  "What sort of things?"

  "Just face cream, hand lotion, you know. And then…" She stopped. She had a sensation of helpless, slow, not wholly unpleasurable falling, as in a dream. Her hand, she noticed, was shaking; she was afraid that if she let it, her knife, too, like the old lady's, would rattle against the ridiculous pewter plate. "She killed herself," she said. How stark it sounded, how matter-of-fact. She used to think of death as a mysterious, a mystical thing; not anymore.

  Rose had stopped eating and was watching her with a bright, bird-like stare; Rose recognized the moment when mere talk turned into something else.

  "Phoebe," she said, "has Quirke got himself involved in more trouble?"

  She wondered, Phoebe, when last, if ever, she had heard Rose call her by her name. But then, she reflected, Rose was not really on first-name terms with the world in general. And she had missed the point here; Quirke was not the one who was in trouble. She lifted her glass and looked at it but did not drink. Rose was still watching her with a raptor's eye.

  "Trouble?" she said. "No, I don't think Quirke is in trouble."

  The unctuous waiter glided up and refilled their glasses, and when he had done so Rose, without looking at him, motioned him away with an impatient flick of an index finger. She took a sip of her wine. The glint of concern in her look was waning, and suddenly Phoebe knew, suddenly and certainly, that Rose was indeed in love with Quirke. She was surprised not to be surprised.

  "You mentioned a coincidence," Rose said.

  "This woman, the one who died, Laura Swan-I knew her partner, too."

  "What sort of a partner?"

  "He was in the business with her, the beauty parlor business. Leslie White is his name." Had there been a tremor in her voice when she said it? She hastened on. "Quirke seems to think there was something odd, I mean something odd about her death, Laura Swan's, or about her husband coming to him…"

  She faltered into silence. Her voice must have quivered when she said Leslie's name, for Rose's attention had snagged on it.

  "Leslie White," she said slowly, looking at her, and made a low, humming sound behind pursed lips. "Is that what he's called, your adventure?"

  "Oh, no, no. No, I mean, he, that is, Quirke, he-he can't seem to leave anything alone."

  Rose nodded. "That's certainly true." She turned her attention to her plate and speared a fragment of fish. Phoebe watched in peculiar fascination the morsel of white flesh with its broken threads of bright-pink vein passing into Rose's painted, blood-red mouth. There were tiny striations on her upper lip, as if the skin there had been stitched all along with a marvelously fine, transparent filament.

  "How is it, between you and your father?" she asked.

  Phoebe always experienced a pause, a mental stumble, when she heard Quirke referred to as her father.

  "All right," she said neutrally. "He buys me dinner once a week."

  "And has his glass of wine." Rose's smile was as dry as the Chablis.

  "Our lives don't really… cross," Phoebe said, looking at her plate again.

  "Hmm. Except when there's a coincidence, like this one with-what's his name again? Leslie who?" Phoebe, look
ing resolutely down, did not answer. Rose crossed her knife and fork on her plate and leaned her elbows on the table and folded one hand into the other and laid her lips a moment against the knuckle of a forefinger. "Did you know," she asked slowly, "about all the things that happened that time, in Scituate, and before that, here, in Dublin? About Judge Griffin and your father-Quirke, I mean-and the girl who died-I've forgotten what she was called, too."

  "Christine Falls," Phoebe said, surprised at herself-how had she remembered that name, so surely and so quickly?

  "Well, then, obviously you did know," Rose said. "Who told you?"

  "Sarah."

  "Ah."

  "But I had guessed a lot of it."

  "You know Quirke tried to destroy the Judge's career? Your grandfather, who has just died."

  "Yes. I know. But it was all hushed up."

  Rose sniffed. "And quite rightly, too. It was a nasty business. That's why I asked you if Quirke was getting himself into more trouble. I think he's still a little bruised from all that-I wouldn't like to think of him becoming embroiled again, in some new scandal. He's not exactly the knight in shining armor that he thinks he is." A soft breeze swooped down on them from the tall, open window beside their table, bringing a scent of trees and grass from the park across the road, and the dry hay-stink of the cabstand where the jarveys in their battered top hats waited on the lookout for moneyed tourists. "You should forgive him, you know," Rose said. Phoebe gazed at her steadily. "Oh, I know it's no business of mine. But, my dear, you owe it to yourself, if not to him." She looked up brightly, smiling. "Don't you think?" Still Phoebe said nothing, and Rose gave the faintest of shrugs. "Well now," she said, "why don't we have some of this delicious-sounding strawberry shortcake, and then take a stroll in the park over there."

  "I have to go back to work," Phoebe said.

  "Can't you take a little time off, to promenade with your lonely old stepgrandmother?" At times, for no apparent reason, Rose exaggerated her Confederate accent-Cain't yu taike?-while laughing a little at herself, an unlikely southern belle. Phoebe shook her head. Rose sighed, lifting her narrow, penciled eyebrows. "Well, then, have some coffee at least, and we'll call it quits." She considered the young woman before her for a moment, her head tilted at a quizzical angle. "You know, my dear," she said, in the friendliest fashion, "I don't think you like me much, do you."

  Phoebe considered. "I admire you," she said.

  At that Rose threw back her head and laughed, a sharp, brittle, silvery sound.

  "Oh, my," she said. "You certainly are your father's daughter."

  SHE DID NOT GO STRAIGHT BACK TO THE SHOP, BUT WALKED ACROSS the Green and up Harcourt Street, and let herself into the unaccustomed early-afternoon silence of the house. Today she did not hurry on the stairs, but plodded slowly, gripping the banister rail as she went. Somehow she knew, even before she opened the door of the flat, that Leslie was gone. The blanket and the cushion were still on the sofa, and there were empty sweet papers on the carpet, and his gin glass and a crumpled copy of last evening's Mail were on the coffee table. She stood for a long time, her mind slowly emptying, like a drain. She saw again the baby hares panting in their nest of grass. No fox or weasel would have got Leslie; there was that, at least, though who knew what other dangers might be lying in wait for him. She heard herself sob, almost perfunctorily, heard it as from a distance, as if it were not she who had made the sound but someone in an adjacent room. She put her purse on the table beside the glass-there was still a bluish drop of gin in the bottom of it-then went and lay down on the sofa, fitting her head into the head-shape he had left in the cushion, and pulled the blanket up to her cheek, and closed her eyes, and gave herself up, almost luxuriously, to her tears.

  4

  THEY HAD KNOWN, WITHOUT THE SLIGHTEST DOUBT, THAT THEY would meet again. Quirke waited two days after that first visit to her house before telephoning her. When he took up the receiver he was aware of a tremulous sensation in the region of his diaphragm, which gave him pause. What was it he was embarking on here, and where would the voyage end? He was by nature cautious in matters of the heart. It was not that, after Delia, this organ had ever again suffered a serious breakage, but he preferred to avoid the risk, now that he had come through safe into the middle passage of his life. The very fact of his hesitancy made him more hesitant still. It was apparent, as that warning inner wobble told him, that Kate White offered more than the prospect of what he was in the habit of asking of a woman. Slowly he put down the receiver and took a breath. It was well into July already, a Sunday afternoon, and the wedge of sky he could see between the rooftops if he leaned forward and squinted up through the window of his living room was a clear, warm, cobalt blue that seemed the very shade of all of summer's possibilities. He conjured up Kate's rueful, damp-eyed smile. What could he lose that would outweigh all he might gain?

  He picked up the receiver and dialed.

  Oh, he could lose much, much.

  THEY TOOK A TRIP TO HOWTH TOGETHER. QUIRKE HAD SUGGESTED IT; there was a pub in the village where he used to drink that he said he thought she would like. Neither had raised the larger question of what might be done with the remainder of the evening. He arrived by taxi at Castle Avenue and marveled again at the stolid, foursquare ugliness of the house, with its big, glaring windows and slatted blinds and its bricks the color of dried blood. He found it hard to picture Leslie White here, returning home from a hard day managing the affairs of the Silver Swan and settling down after dinner with his slippers and the evening paper. Yet it was Leslie, according to his wife, who had fixed on the house in the first place, when somebody he knew in the hairdressing business had put him on to it. "I think he thought it would be the kind of thing I'd like," Kate had said, pulling a clown's grimace. "He has terrible taste and imagines I share it. Poor old Les."

  She had come to the door smelling of lemon soap. She had been in the bath. When she saw it was him she put her head on one side and contemplated him for a moment in silence, smiling. "It's kismet," she said. "Obviously." Her hair today was tied back behind her ears with a black band, and she wore no makeup except for lipstick. Her dress was pale yellow with a design of large blue splashes in the shape of giant cornflowers.

  "How is the cut?" he asked.

  "What? Oh." She held up her thumb to show him the neat circlet of sticking plaster. "Healing nicely. You should go into medicine."

  She invited him to step inside for a moment while she went to fetch her handbag. He waited in the hall, and a feeling of unease broke out on his skin like sweat; other people's houses, their other arrangements for living, always unsettled him. When Kate came back he saw that she, too, was ill at ease-was she having second thoughts about Howth, and him?-and she avoided looking at him directly. The taxi man, hunched toadlike behind the wheel of his car, eyed her with disdainful lasciviousness as she came out onto the pavement, her light dress swishing about her legs.

  "Oh, not a taxi," she said. "Let's take the bus. I'm in a democratic mood today."

  Quirke did not protest. He paid the driver, who shot away from the curb in a resentful snarl of exhaust smoke. They set off walking together down the hill road to the seafront. For Quirke there was something at once dreamy and quintessential about summer afternoons; they seemed the very definition of weather, and light, and time. The sunlit road before them was empty. Heavy frondages of lilac leaned down from garden walls, the polished leaves mingling their faint, sharp scent with the salt smell of the sea. They did not speak, and the longer the silence between them lasted the more difficult it was to break. Quirke felt slightly and pleasantly ridiculous. This could only be called a date, and he could not remember when he had last been on one. He was too old, or at least too unyoung, for such an outing. He found this fact inexplicably cheering.

  The lower deck of the bus was full of raucous families, bristling with fishing rods and sand shovels, off to spend the long summer evening by the sea. They climbed the narrow, winding stairway to the up
per deck, Kate going first and Quirke the gentleman trying not to look at her behind. He found a seat for them at the front. The sky was clear, a flat blue plane clamped squarely along its lower edge to the horizon; there was a strong breeze and the salt-laden light out over the bay had a bruised cast to it. Before them, Howth Head was a low, olive-green hump dotted with bursts of yellow gorse.

  Kate was the first to speak. "You look very smart," she said.

  Startled, he glanced down at himself dubiously, taking in his pale-blue shirt, his pale-gray suit, his suede shoes-he was never sure about suede shoes. He recalled Leslie White sloping around the corner of Duke Lane, with that silver helmet of hair, those boneless wrists; Leslie would be a born suede-shoe wearer. Kate laughed briefly. "I'm sorry," she said, "I see I've embarrassed you. I'm always doing that, making people feel self-conscious and awkward and hating me for it."

  In Howth the bus stopped at the railway station and they walked along the front and turned up Church Street. The Cock Tavern was dim inside and slightly dank. A single shimmering blade of sunlight slanting down from the unpainted strip at the top of the window was embedded at an angle in the center of the floor. Three dusty cricket caps were pinned to a board on the wall, and there was a chart of the coast hereabouts with all the lighthouses marked. They sat at a low table near the open doorway, from where they could see the sunlight in the street. Quirke drank a glass of tomato juice and Kate a Campari and soda. Through the stuff of her dress he could make out the broad bands of her stocking tops and the imprint of a garter clasp. He approved of the way she dressed, the freedoms she allowed herself; the women he was used to wore too many clothes, belts and straps, corsets, rubber roll-ons, and came heaving into his arms with all the voluminous rufflings and strainings of an old-style sailing ship in full rig.