Christine Falls

by Benjamin Black

  Quirke was loosely gowned in green. He apologized for the delay; one of his assistants was off sick, the place was in chaos. She said it was not important, that she could come back another time, yet wondered silently how there could be such urgency to his work-the dead would stay dead, surely? No, he was saying, no, she must stay, now that she was here. She could see him wondering why she was here; Quirke had always been a calculator.

  They sat at a plastic-topped table beside a dusty window in the hospital canteen. Down at the serving end there was a counter with rumbling tea urns and glass cases containing triangular sandwiches curled at the tips, and miniature packets of biscuits, and what were called, with what she thought of as stark aptness, rock cakes. Why was it, she wondered idly, when Quirke had gone off to fetch their tea, that hospitals here were so run-down and dingy and uniformly miserable? The window beside the table where she sat looked out on a blockhouse built of bricks the color of old blood, the flat roof of which, apparently made of asphalt, sported at one corner a crooked stovepipe chimney with a cowl, from which smoke was pouring sideways, flattened by the strong October wind. Without her wanting it to, her mind speculated on what in a hospital could require burning that would produce a smoke so dense and black. Quirke returned, bearing mugs of presugared, milky tea, which she knew she would not be able to bring herself to drink. She felt it coming on, that increasingly familiar sense of weakness, of lightness, as if she were somehow floating up out of herself, as if her mind were detaching itself and floating free of her. Was this what they meant in the old books when they spoke of the vapors? She wondered how worried she should be about her health. But would not death, she thought, be a solution to so many things? Though she did not really imagine she would escape that easily, or that soon.

  “So,” Quirke said, “I suppose this is about Mal?”

  She looked at him searchingly. How much did he know? She wanted to ask, she dearly wanted to ask, but she could not bring herself to speak the words. What if he knew more than she did, what if he was privy to things even more terrible than she had learned of? She tried to concentrate, grasping at her scattering thoughts. What had he asked her? Yes: if it was about Mal that she had come. She decided to ignore this. She said:

  “Phoebe wants to marry that young man.” She touched the handle of the mug with her fingertips; it felt slightly sticky. “It’s impossible, of course.”

  Quirke frowned, and she could see him readjusting his thoughts, his strategies: Phoebe, then, not Mal. “Impossible?” he said.

  She nodded. “And needless to say, there’s no talking to her.”

  “Tell her to go ahead and do it,” he said. “Tell her you’re all for it. Nothing more likely to put her off the idea.”

  She thought it best to disregard this also. “Would you speak to her?”

  He leaned back in the chair and lifted high his head and looked at her along one shallow side of his flattened nose, nodding slowly, grimly. “I see,” he said. “You want to persuade me to persuade Phoebe to give up her inconvenient boyfriend.”

  “She’s so young, Quirke.”

  “So were we.”

  “She has all her life before her.”

  “So had we.”

  “Yes,” she said, pouncing, “and look what mistakes we made!” The fierceness was gone as quickly as it had come. “Besides, it wouldn’t work. They’d make sure of that.”

  Quirke raised an eyebrow. “They? You mean Mal? Would he really want to destroy her happiness?”

  She was shaking her head before he had finished speaking, her eyes cast down. “You don’t understand, Quirke. There’s a whole world. You can’t win with a whole world against you, I know that.”

  Quirke looked out the window. Clouds the color of watered ink were roiling on the far horizon; it would rain. He was silent a moment, studying her with narrowed eyes. She looked away. “What is it, Sarah?” he said.

  “What?” She tried to be offhand and airy. “What’s what?”

  He would not let go; she felt like the quarry borne down on by a single, relentless, huge hound.

  “Something’s happened,” he said. “Are you and Mal-?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Mal,” she said, so fast it might have been not a sentence but a single word. She put her hands on the table before her, beside her gloves, and looked at them. “Then there’s my father,” she said. He waited. She was still frowning at her hands, as if they had suddenly become an object of fascination. “He’s threatened to cut her out of his will.”

  Quirke wanted to laugh. Old Crawford’s will, no less-what next? Then he had a sudden, unnervingly clear image of horse-faced Wilkins, his assistant, waiting for him in the lab-Sinclair was having one of his strategic bouts of flu-and shivered at this glimpse of the world of the dead, his world.

  “What about the Judge?” he said. “Why not get him to talk to Phoebe, or to Mal-to your father, maybe, too? Surely he’d knock sense into them all and make them solve it?” She gave him a pitying look. He said, “There will have to be a solution, one way or the other, in the end. I say it again: tell her she can marry him, urge her on. I bet she’ll give Bertie Wooster the old heave-ho.”

  Sarah would not smile. “I don’t want Phoebe to be tied down in an early marriage,” she said.

  He laughed incredulously. “An early marriage? What’s this? I thought it was because Carrington is a Prod?”

  She was shaking her head again, her eyes on the table. “Everything is changing,” she said. “It will be different in the future.”

  “Oh, yes, in a hundred years’ time life will be beautiful.”

  She shook her head stubbornly. “It will be different, in the future,” she said again. “Girls of Phoebe’s generation, they’ll have a chance to escape, to be themselves, to”-she laughed, embarrassed by what she was about to say-“to live!” She lifted her eyes to his and shrugged one shoulder, abashed. “I wish you’d speak to her, Quirke.”

  He sat forward so abruptly her gloves on the table seemed to shrink back from him, clasping each other. How lifelike they looked, Sarah thought, a pair of black leather gloves. As if some otherwise invisible third person at the table were wringing her hands.

  “Listen,” he said impatiently, “I have no time for that chinless wonder Phoebe has set her heart on, but if she’s determined to marry him, then good luck to her.” She made to protest but he held out a hand to silence her. “However, if you were to ask me to speak to her, for you-not for Mal, or your father, or anyone else, but for you-then I would.”

  In the silence they heard the rattle of raindrops blown against the window. She sighed, then rose and picked up her gloves, banishing that other, invisible, anguished sharer of her troubles. As if to herself she said, ruefully, “Well, I tried.” She smiled. “Thank you for the tea.” The two mugs stood untouched, a crinkled wafer of scum floating on the faintly quaking surface of the gray liquid. “I must go.”

  “Ask me,” Quirke said.

  He had not risen, but sat sideways at the table, poised and tense, one hand on the back of his chair and the other flat on the smeared tabletop. How could he be so cruel, playing with her always like this?

  “You know I can’t,” she said.

  “Why can’t you?”

  She gave a laugh of mild exasperation. “Because I’d be in your debt!”

  “No.”

  “Yes!” she said, as vehement as he. “Do it, Quirke. Do it for Phoebe-for her happiness.”

  “No,” he said again, flatly. “For you.”

  16

  IT WAS SATURDAY, IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE AFTERNOON, AND Quirke was wondering if he should find another pub to drink in. A dry October storm was sweeping through the streets and he had ducked into McGonagle’s with his coat collar up and a newspaper under his arm. The place was almost empty but he had no sooner settled himself in the snug than Davy appeared at the hatch and handed in a glass of whiskey. “Compliments of the gent in the blue suit,” he said, jerking a thumb be
hind him towards the bar and giving a skeptical sniff. Quirke put his head out at the door and saw him, perched on one haunch on a stool at the bar: suit of a shiny, metallic blue, horn-rimmed specs, black hair swept back from a lumpy forehead. He lifted his glass to Quirke in a wordless salute and smiled, baring his lower front teeth. He was vaguely familiar, but from where? Quirke drew in his head and sat with his hands on his knees and contemplated the whiskey as if expecting it to foam up suddenly and overflow with rancid whorls of smoke.

  After a moment the blue suit appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Quirke,” he said, holding out a hand. “Costigan.” Quirke gingerly shook the proffered hand, which was square, blunt-fingered, and slightly damp. “We met at the Griffins’, the day of the party for the Chief Justice. The day the honor from the Pope was announced?” He pointed to the place beside Quirke. “May I?”

  A coincidence, of a sort: Quirke had been thinking about Sarah, her face like Ophelia’s floating up pale but insistent out of the newspaper pages and their quag of reported grim goings-on-the Yanks testing a bigger and better bomb, the Reds rattling their rusty sabers, as usual. He was wondering still why she had come to him at the hospital and what it was exactly that she wanted of him. People seemed forever to be asking him for things, and always just the things he could not give them. He was not the man they took him for, Sarah, and Phoebe, even poor Dolly Moran; he had no help for them.

  He often recalled the first unsupervised postmortem he had performed. He was working in those days with Thorndyke, the State Pathologist, who was already going gaga, and Quirke that day had been called on at short notice to stand in for the old boy. The cadaver was that of a large, silver-haired, antiquated gentleman who had died when the car in which he had been a passenger had skidded on a patch of ice and toppled into a ditch. His daughter had been bringing him back after a day out from the old folks’ home where he was living; she was elderly herself, the daughter, and had been driving cautiously because of the freezing conditions, but had lost all control of the machine when it began its sedate slide across the ice. She had escaped without injury, and the car was hardly damaged, but the old boy had died, instantly, as the newspapers liked to put it-who could say, he often asked himself, how long that instant might seem to the one who was doing the dying?-of simple heart failure, as Quirke was able quickly to establish. When the dissecting-room assistant had begun to undress the corpse with the usual, rough adroitness, there had slipped out of the fob of the waistcoat an old and beautiful pocket watch, an Elgin, with Roman numerals and a second hand in an inset dial. It had stopped at five twenty-three exactly, the moment, Quirke was certain, when the old man’s heartbeat too had stopped, heart and watch giving up the ghost together in sympathetic unison. So it had been with him, he believed, when Delia died: an instrument that he carried at his breast, one that had been keeping him aligned and synchronized with the rest of the world, had stopped suddenly and never started up again.

  “A lovely day, that was,” Costigan was saying. “We were all so happy for the Judge, happy and proud. A papal knighthood, that’s a rare honor. I’m a knight myself”-he pointed to a pin in his lapel, in the form of a little gold staff twined about by a gold letter P-“but of a humbler order, of course.” He paused. “You never thought of joining us, Mr. Quirke? I mean the Knights of St. Patrick. You’ve been asked, I’m sure. Malachy Griffin is one of us.”

  Quirke said nothing. He found himself fascinated, almost hypnotized, by the steady, omnivorous regard of Costigan’s magnified eyes, suspended like two deep-sea creatures in the fishbowl lenses of his spectacles.

  “Lovely people, the Griffins,” Costigan went on, undeterred by Quirke’s wordless and resistant stare. “Of course, you were married into the family, weren’t you.”

  He waited. Quirke said:

  “My wife was Sarah’s-Mrs. Griffin’s-sister.”

  Costigan nodded, assuming now an expression of unctuous solemnity. “And she died,” he said. “In childbirth, wasn’t it? Very sad, a thing like that. It must have been hard for you.”

  Quirke hesitated again. Those undersea eyes seemed to be following his very thoughts. “It was a long time ago,” he said, maintaining a neutral tone.

  Costigan was nodding again.

  “Still and all, a hard loss,” he said. “I suppose the only way to cope with a thing like that would be to try to forget it, to put it out of your mind altogether. Not easy, of course. A young woman dead, a child lost. But life must go on, mustn’t it, Mr. Quirke?” There was the sense of some large, dark thing stirring soundlessly between them in the little space where they sat. Costigan pointed to the whiskey glass. “You haven’t touched your drink.” He glanced down at another lapel pin, declaring him a member of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association. “I’m strictly t.t., myself.”

  Quirke leaned back on the bench seat. Davy the barman hovered by the serving hatch, polishing a glass and eavesdropping.

  “What exactly is it you’re saying to me,” Quirke asked, “Mr… what was the name again?”

  Costigan ignored the second question, smiling tolerantly, as at a childish ruse. “I’m saying, Mr. Quirke,” he said softly, “that some things are best forgotten about, best left alone.”

  Quirke felt his forehead go hot. He folded the newspaper and clamped it under his arm and stood up. Costigan watched him with what seemed a lively interest and even a touch of amusement. “Thanks for the drink,” Quirke said. The whiskey sat untasted in the glass. Costigan nodded again, briskly this time, as if something had been said that demanded his assent. He was still seated, but Quirke, towering over him, felt that somehow it was he who was on the inferior level.

  “Good luck, Mr. Quirke,” Costigan said, smiling. “I’ll see you around, I’m sure.”

  IN GRAFTON STREET GUSTS OF WIND WERE SWOOPING MORE STRONGLY than ever and the Saturday evening shoppers were hurrying homeward with their heads down. Quirke was aware of his quickened breathing and a thick, hot sensation in his chest that was not fear, exactly, but a kind of dawning alarm, as if the smooth, empty little island on which he had been happily perched had given a preliminary heave, and would presently reveal itself to be not dry land at all but the humped back of a whale.

  17

  ANDY STAFFORD KNEW HE WAS NOT THE SHARPEST TOOL IN THE BOX. It was not that he was stupid, but he was no genius either. This knowledge did not trouble him. In fact, he considered that he was pretty much of a good balance. He had known guys who were all brawn, and one or two who were all brain, and both kinds had been a mess. He was between the two extremes, like the kid standing in the middle of the seesaw, having a good time without the effort of all that swinging up and down. So he just could not understand why it had not struck him, before he had agreed to Claire taking the kid, what the consequences might be for his reputation. It was in Foley’s one night that he first heard, behind his back, that particular laugh he would come to hear often, too often.

  He had arrived in from a night and most of a day on the road, and had stopped to drink a beer before going home to the house that these days seemed to smell of nothing else but baby things. Foley’s was crowded and noisy, as it always was on Friday night. On his way to the bar he passed a table of five or six guys, truckers like him, most of whom he knew, sort of. One of them, a big meaty fellow with sideburns the size of lamb chops, name of M’Coy, known as Real-ha ha, big joke-said something as he went past, and that was when he heard it, the laugh. It was low, it was dirty, and it seemed to be directed at him. He got his beer and turned and stood with his elbows behind him on the bar and one boot heel hitched on the brass foot rail and lazily surveyed the room, not looking at M’Coy’s table but not avoiding it either. Be cool, he told himself, be easy. Besides, he did not know the laugh well enough yet to be absolutely sure it was him they had been laughing at. But it was him M’Coy was grinning at, and now he called out: “Hello, stranger.”

  “Hello, M’Coy,” Andy answered. He would not call him Real; it sounded so dumb, e
ven for a nickname, though M’Coy himself was proud of it, as if it really did make him someone special. “How’s it going?”

  M’Coy took a drag from his cigarette and shoved his big gut against the table and pushed himself back, then leaned up his face and blew a fan of smoke at the ceiling, settling in for some fun. “Don’t see much of you, these days,” he said. “Gotten too good for us, now that you’ve moved out to Fulton Street?”

  Easy, Andy told himself again, nice and easy. He shrugged. “You know how it is,” he said.

  M’Coy, grinning wider, gave him a measuring look, while the others at the table, grinning too, waited for what was coming next.

  “I was telling the boys here,” M’Coy said, “I heard you had a miracle over at that new place of yours.”

  Andy let a beat or two pass by. “How’s that?” he said, making his voice go soft.

  By now M’Coy was almost laughing outright. “Didn’t your old lady have a kid without ever being knocked up?” he said. “I call that miraculous.”

  A heave of suppressed merriment passed along the table. Andy looked at the floor, his lips pursed, then sauntered forward, carrying his beer glass. He stopped in front of M’Coy, who was wearing a checked lumberjack shirt and denim overalls. Andy had gone chill all over, as if he was breaking out in a cold sweat, although his skin was dry. It was a familiar feeling; there was almost a kind of joy in it, and a kind of happy dread that he could not have explained. “Better watch your mouth, pal,” he said.

  M’Coy put on a look of innocent surprise and lifted his hands. “Why,” he said, “what’ll you do, give me the one you can’t give your old lady?”

  The others were still scrambling out of the way when Andy with a quick spin of the wrist threw the beer from his glass into M’Coy’s face and broke the rim of the glass against the table edge and thrust the crown of jagged spikes against the side of the fat man’s fat soft throat. The quiet spread outward from the table like fast, running ripples. A woman laughed and was abruptly silenced. Andy had a clear picture in his head of the barman directly behind him reaching down cautiously for the baseball bat he kept slung on two coat hooks behind the bar.