The Silver Swan

by Benjamin Black

  "They lived not far from us, you know," Kate said suddenly, the conclusion, it seemed, to a lengthy and somber train of thought. He looked at her. She was running a fingertip pensively around the rim of her glass. "The bitch and her husband-Laura Swan, I mean. I suppose he must live there still. One of those streets of little red-brick terraces over by St. Anne's. The height of respectability, as she would have said herself, I'm sure. I can just see it, plaster ducks flying up the wall and a fluffy cover on the lavatory lid. To think of my Leslie there, snuggling down with her of an afternoon under her pink satin eiderdown-oh, yes, she let him come to her, apparently, while hubby was away. God, it's so humiliating." Now she looked at him. "How could he?"

  When they had finished their drinks they crossed the road and went down the narrow concrete steps between the houses to Abbey Street and the harbor. On the west pier sailors in clogs and smeared aprons were packing salted herring into iron-hooped wooden kegs. Farther on, a squad of trawlermen was mending an immense fishing net strung between poles, vaguely suggestive of harpists in their deft, long-armed reachings and gatherings. There were other couples like themselves, out strolling in the clear, iodine-scented air of evening. A grinning dog raced along the edge of the pier, barking wildly at the gulls bobbing among the boats on the harbor's oilily swaying, iridescent waters. Quirke lit a cigarette, stopping to turn aside and cupping his hands round the lighter and its flame. They walked on. Kate took his arm and pressed herself against him, and he felt the firm warmth of her hip and the slope of a breast in its crisp silken cup.

  "Tell me something," she said.

  "What?"

  "Anything."

  He thought for a moment.

  "I saw your husband," he said.

  She stiffened, still leaning against him, and suddenly she seemed all bone and angles. "Where?"

  He shrugged. "In the street."

  "Do you know him? I mean, had you met him?"

  "No."

  "Then how did you know it was him?"

  He hesitated, and then said: "He was with my daughter. Or he had been."

  HE DID NOT KNOW WHY HE HAD TOLD HER. HE WAS NOT SURE THAT HE had even meant to. He thought it might be because, for a brief moment, there on the quayside, with the couples strolling, the dog barking, and this bright, full, warm woman leaning on his arm, there had seemed the possibility of happiness. For there was another version of him, a personality within a personality, malcontent, vindictive, ever ready to provoke, to which he gave the name "Carricklea." Often he found himself standing back, seemingly helpless to intervene, as this other he inside him set about fomenting some new enormity. Carricklea could not be doing with mere happiness or the hint of it. Carricklea had to poke a stick into the eye of this fine, innocent, blue-and-gold summer evening that Quirke was spending by the sea in the company of a handsome and probably available woman. Carricklea did not go on dates, or not willingly, and now, when it had been forced to, it was making sure to have its revenge.

  The journey back from Howth was fraught and wordless. That was how it always was when Carricklea had done its worst, a pall of rancorous silence over everything and all concerned hot and tight-lipped and grim. Quirke had hailed a taxi outside the station and this time Kate had not protested. In the back seat they sat side by side but apart, Leslie White and the many things that he entailed squatting between them, invisible yet all too palpable. Kate was deep in thought; he could almost hear the ratchets of her mind meeting and meshing. Had he spoken to her of Phoebe before now? Had he even mentioned her? He thought not. Why then was she not plying him with questions? Through the window beside him he watched the dusty, sun-resistant façades of Raheny and Killester sliding past and sighed. The questions, he was sure, would come. The questions were what her mind was working on, even now.

  At the door of the house on Castle Avenue they both hesitated, and then Kate, not looking at him, asked if he would like to come in, and presently he found himself sitting at his unease among the cuboid furnishings of-what had she called it?-the den, smoking a cigarette and sipping at a cup of coffee that had, for him, no taste. He watched Kate doing the things that women all seemed to do at moments such as this, vigorously plumping up a cushion, picking up a hairpin from the carpet, standing before the window and frowning at the garden as if something were seriously amiss out there that only she could see. At last, chafing under the weight of the room's silence, he put down his coffee cup on the tiny glass table beside him and said: "Look, I'm sorry."

  He had agreed with himself that if she pretended not to know what he was apologizing for he would get up at once and leave. But all she said was "Yes," vaguely, letting her voice trail off. Then, suddenly brisk, she sat down opposite him on the white sofa, her shoulders hunched and her hands clasped together on her knees, and gazed at him for a long moment, holding her head to one side in that way she had, as if he were an example, a specimen of some special, rare, or hitherto unknown kind that she had been directed to evaluate.

  "Why did you come here, that day?" she asked calmly, in a spirit of pure inquiry, it might be, with not a hint of challenge or resentment detectable in her tone. "What were you after, really?"

  He did not hesitate. "I don't know," he said. It was the truth. "I told you, I'm curious."

  "Yes, so you said. 'I suffer from an incurable curiosity,' those were your very words."

  "And you didn't believe me."

  "Why would I not believe you? Besides, I was three-quarters drunk. Otherwise I'm sure I wouldn't have let you in the house."

  He looked away from her unsettlingly scrutinizing gaze. It was growing late and the air in the garden had turned a luminous gray. Everything out there seemed touched with an inexplicable, sweetish melancholy, as in a dream. He thought of Deirdre Hunt dead on the slab, her chest cut open and folded back on both sides like the flaps of a ragged and grotesquely bulky, bloodstained jacket.

  "It's not just curiosity." He paused. "A couple of years ago," he said slowly, "I became involved in something that never got finished."

  "What sort of something?"

  "Oh, a scandal. A young woman died, and then another one was killed. People close to me were involved. It was hushed up afterwards."

  She waited. He felt in his pockets for his mechanical pencil, but then remembered that he seemed to have lost it, somewhere, somehow.

  "I see," she said. He studied her. Did she? Did she see? She said: "You've sniffed another scandal, and this time you want to make sure it's not hushed up but brought out into the open. Yes?"

  "No. The opposite."

  "The opposite?"

  "I want it to stay hidden."

  "'It'?"

  "Whatever it is. Whoever is involved."

  "Why-why do you want to keep it hidden?"

  "Because I'm tired of"-he shrugged-"I'm tired of dealing with people's filth. I've spent my life plunged to the elbows in the secrets of others, their dirty little sins." He looked to the window again and the graying light. "One of the first P.M.s I ever did was on a child, a baby, six months old, a year, I can't remember. It had been beaten black and blue and then strangled. Its father's thumbprints were on its throat. Not just the mark of his thumbs, but the actual prints, engraved into the skin." He stopped. "What does it matter what people do? I mean, when it's done it's done. I nailed that bastard for strangling his child, but that didn't bring the child back." He stopped again, and touched a hand to his brow. "I don't know what I mean. Look"-he stood up suddenly-"I should go."

  She did not move, but lifted her eyes to his. "I wish you'd stay."

  "I can't."

  "It's not an offer I make to every strange man who comes to the house asking mysterious questions." He said nothing. He was on his way to the door. Still she stayed as she had been, sitting there on the edge of the sofa with her hands clasped together and resting on her knees. He walked out to the hall. His hat was on the peg behind the door. He took it down and ran a finger around the brim. His throat felt constricted, as if
something were welling up in him, a bubble of bile. Why had Phoebe been with Leslie White? That was the question he wanted to ask. But of whom could he ask it, who would have the answer? When he turned, Kate was standing in the doorway behind him, just as she had stood the first time he saw her, one arm lifted against the jamb and her head tilted to one side.

  "If you leave," she said, "I won't ask you back." He was still fingering his hat. She turned her face violently aside, as if she might spit. "Oh, go then."

  HE WALKED DOWN TO THE FRONT AND CROSSED THE ROAD AND STOOD by the seawall. The day was at an end and the sea was lacquered with streaks of sapphire and leek green and lavender gray under a violet dome of sky. On the other side of the bay-was that Dun Laoghaire?-the lights were flickering on, and farther off the mountains had lost a dimension and seemed painted flat, as on a backdrop. Vague brownish bundles of cloud hugged the horizon, where night was gathering. His thoughts were a blank, were not thoughts at all. He had a sense of being bereft, bereft not of some definite thing but in general. But what had he lost? What had there been for him to lose? A light winked far out to sea: a boat? a lighthouse? He turned and walked back over the grass margin to the road.

  When she opened the door she was wearing a blue calico nightgown and was barefoot. She showed no surprise to find him there. She said: "Kismet revisited." She did not smile. "I was going to have a bath."

  "I thought you had one earlier," he said.

  "I did. I was going to have another. But now I won't."

  He sat at the kitchen table, smoking, while she cooked. The window above the sink grew glossy with darkness. She fed him a lamb chop and tomatoes and asparagus with mayonnaise. He asked why she was not eating and she said she had eaten already, and though he did not believe her he said no more. He let his thoughts wander. He was prey to a strange lethargy; he felt as if he had traveled a long way to come to this place, this room, this table. He ate with scant relish. Food that someone else had prepared, had prepared like this, in a kitchen and not a restaurant, always tasted strange to him, not really like food at all, although he knew it must be tastier than anything he ate elsewhere, tastier certainly than the stuff he prepared for himself. Moly-was that the word? Food of the gods. No, ambrosia. Kate sat opposite him and watched him with a matronly intentness as he ate, doggedly consuming the meat, the red pulp of the tomatoes, the limp green spears. When he had finished she took his plate and put it in the sink, and with her back turned to him said: "Come to bed."

  "OH," SHE CRIED, AND ROLLED HER HEAD ON THE PILLOW TO ONE SIDE and then to the other, biting her nether lip. Quirke loomed above her in starlight, hugely moving. "Oh, God."

  IN THE EARLY HOURS THEY CAME DOWN AND SAT AGAIN AT THE KITCHEN table. Kate had offered to make more coffee but Quirke had declined. He was barefoot now, as she was, and had on only his shirt and trousers; in the bedroom she had brought out Leslie White's dressing gown but he had given her a look and she had said, "Sorry" and put it back on its hook. Now in the kitchen the blue-black night was pressed against the window panes, an avid darkness. There was not a sound to be heard anywhere; they might have been alone in the world. She watched him smoke a cigarette. He was just like every other man she had ever been to bed with, she saw, uneasy now that the main event was done with, trying not to twitch, his eyes flicking here and there as if in search of a means of escape. She knew what was the matter with him. It was not that sadness men were supposed to feel afterwards-that was just an excuse, thought up by a man-but resentment at having been so needy and, worse, of having shown that neediness. But why was she not resentful of his resentment? She could not be angry with him. An upside-down comma of blond hair stood upright on the crown of his great solid head, and she saw for a second how he would have been as a child, big already and baffled by the world and terrified of showing it. When he came to the end of his cigarette he lit another one from the stub.

  "You could enter the Olympics," she said. He looked at her. "As a smoker. I'm sure you'd win a gold medal." He smiled warily. Jokes, she had often noticed, did not go down well at moments such as this. He fixed his eyes on the table again. "It's all right," she said, and tapped him lightly on the back of the hand with a fingertip, "you don't have to say you love me."

  He nodded in hangdog fashion, not looking at her. Presently he cleared his throat and asked: "Why did your husband go into business with Deirdre Hunt?"

  She laughed. "Is that all you can think to talk about?"

  "I'm sorry."

  Again a quick, hare-eyed glance. Was he really so frightened of her?

  "You are an old bulldog, aren't you," she said. "You've got hold of this bone and just won't let go."

  He shrugged, dipping his enormous shoulders to the side and sticking out his lower lip. She had a strong urge to reach out and press down that rebellious blond curl. Instead she rose and went to the sink and filled a glass of water.

  "I don't know why he got involved with her," she said, sipping the water-it tasted, as it always did, faintly, mysteriously, of gas-and looking through the window at the garden, with its sharp-edged patches of stone-colored moonlight and purple-gray shadows. On the night after she had thrown Leslie out she had stood here like this, willing herself not to weep, and had seen a fox crossing the lawn, its tail sweeping over the grass, and she had laughed and said aloud, "Oh, no, Leslie White, you're not going to trick me so easily and slink back in here." Now she turned from the sink and contemplated Quirke again, hunched at the table with the cigarette clamped in his huge fist. "Leslie was always up to something," she said, "doing deals and offering to cut people in on them. A dreadful spiv, really. I can't think why I didn't see through him at the very beginning. But then"-a wry grin-"love is blind, as they say it is."

  She came back to the table and sat down opposite him again and took the cigarette from his fingers and drew on it once and gave it back. He hastened to offer her the packet but she shook her head. "I've given them up."

  They were silent for a time. A clock somewhere in the house chimed three.

  "I'd better go," he said.

  She pretended not to hear. She was looking again to the window.

  "Maybe they were having an affair already," she said. "Maybe that's why they went into business together-" She broke off with a bitter laugh. "Business! I don't know why I use the word when talking of Leslie. He really was hopeless. Is." Quirke rolled the tip of his cigarette along the edge of the ashtray, making a point of the ash, and she experienced a faint twinge in her breast, not a pain but the memory of a pain. Leslie too used to do that with his cigarette, perhaps was doing it now, at this very moment, somewhere else. "I wouldn't be surprised if he got money out of her," she said. "The hairdressing salon had failed-it was called the Clip Joint, appropriately enough-and he'd already got a couple of hundred quid out of me, which of course he threw into the money pit to be swallowed up. I told him there would be no more where that came from. Which didn't improve domestic harmony. I'd sue him, if I thought I had any chance of getting the money back."

  "Would she have had money, Deirdre Hunt?"

  "You mean Laura Swan-I don't know why it irritates me so when you call her by that other name." She put a hand briefly over her eyes. "Money?" she said. "I don't know-you tell me. But Leslie tended not to get interested in anyone who hadn't money, even a little sexpot like her." She smiled a thin and bitter version of her anguished smile.

  He asked: "How did they meet?"

  "Oh, God knows-or wait, no. It was through some sort of doctor they both knew. An Indian, I think. Very odd name, though, what was it. Krantz? Kreutz? That was it. Kreutz."

  "What kind of doctor?"

  "I don't know. A quack, I imagine. I don't think Leslie knew anyone that wasn't a fraud of some sort."

  When one or the other of them was not speaking the silence of the night came down upon the room like a dark, soft cloak. Quirke drummed his fingers on the table. "Kreutz," he said.

  "Yes. With a K."

  He sat think
ing, then said: "You mentioned photographs, letters."

  "Did I?"

  "Yes, you did."

  She made a disgusted grimace. "They were in an attaché case under our bed. Just lying there, just like that. I think he must have wanted me to find them."

  "Why? I mean, why would he want you to find them?"

  "For amusement. Or to give himself a thrill. There's a side to Leslie that's a little boy with a dirty mind, showing his thing to the girls to make them squeal." She looked to the side, seeming baffled. "Why did I ever marry him?"

  He waited a moment, cautiously.

  "Who were the photographs of?" he asked.

  "Oh, women, of course."

  "Women you knew?"

  She laughed. "God, no."

  "Prostitutes?"

  "No, I don't think so. Just… women. Middle-aged, most of them, showing themselves off while they still had something to show, just about." She gave him a brittle glance. "I didn't look at them very closely."

  "Were there any of Deirdre-Laura Swan?"

  "No." She seemed almost amused by the possibility. "I would have noticed."

  "And who took them-Leslie?"

  "I don't know. Him, or the Indian, Kreutz-all his patients, so-called, were women, so Leslie said."

  "And the letters?"

  "They were hers, the Swan woman's. Not letters, really, just jumbles of filthy things, images, fantasies. I'm sure Leslie got her to write them for him. He liked hearing that kind of thing-" She stopped, and looked down, biting her lip at the side. "That's another thing when a marriage breaks up," she said softly, "the sense of shame it leaves you with." She stood up, seeming suddenly exhausted, and walked to the sink and filled another glass of water. She drank thirstily, facing away from him. He was afraid she might be weeping, and was relieved when she turned to him with a strained smile. "The beauty parlor was in trouble too, at the end. God knows what kind of legal chicanery Leslie had been up to. He probably had his hand in the till, too, if I know him. He really didn't have an honest bone in his body." She checked herself. "Why do I keep talking about him in the past tense?"