THEY WENT BY WAY OF ENNISKERRY AND GLENCREE. THE HIGH BOGS were hidden under snow but already there were newborn lambs on the slopes, spindly, dazed-looking scraps of white and black with stumpy, clockwork tails; even through the rubber-sealed windows of the car their plaintive bleatings could be thinly heard. The mountain roads had been cleared but there were patches of black ice, and on a steep bend approaching a narrow stone bridge the back end of the big car slewed sideways and with cowlike stubbornness refused to straighten until they were across the bridge, the parapet of which the left mudguard missed by what Quirke, wildly looking back, saw had been no more than an inch or two. Sarah steered the machine to the side of the road and stopped, and closed her eyes and leaned her forehead in the space between her hands on the rim of the steering wheel.
“Did we hit anything?” she murmured.
“No,” Quirke said. “We would have known, if we had.”
She gave a low, groaning laugh. “Thank God,” she said. “His precious car.”
She switched off the ignition and they sat for a while listening to the cooling engine ticking and plinking. Gradually the wind, too, made itself heard, faint and fitful, whistling in the car’s front grille and thrumming in the limp strands of rusted barbed wire beside the road. Sarah lifted her head from the wheel and leaned it on the seat-back, still with her eyes closed. Her face was drawn and paper-pale, as if the blood had all drained out of it; this could not be solely the effect of the near miss on the bridge. Quirke’s unease deepened. His leg, too, began to ache, because of the thinned air up here, he supposed, or the cold that was seeping into the car now that the heater was off, or perhaps just because of the cramped position he had been forced to hold it in during the journey up from the city. He suggested that they should get out and walk a little, and she asked if he would be able, and he said impatiently that of course he would, and was already opening the door and lowering his leg with grunts and curses to the ground.
They had stopped on the edge of a long, shallow sweep of mountainside at the foot of which there was a black lake, its surface an unmoving sheet of steely shards. Beside them was a low, rounded hill, snowed over and seeming to crouch, somehow, against a stone-dark sky. Snared tufts of soiled wool fluttered on the barbed wire, and here and there a gorse bush or a clump of heather showed starkly through the snow. A turf cutter’s track led slantwise up the hill, and this they followed, Quirke on his stick stepping cautiously over the ice-ribbed, stony ground with Sarah at his side, her arm firmly linked in his. The cold burned in their nostrils and made their lips and eyelids feel glassy. Halfway up the track Sarah said they should turn back, that they must be mad, coming up here, him with his leg in a cast and she in these ridiculous shoes, but Quirke set his jaw and went on, tugging her with him.
He asked after Phoebe.
“She goes to Boston next week,” Sarah answered. “Her ticket is booked. She’ll fly to New York, then on by train.” She spoke with a willed calmness, keeping her eyes fixed on the track.
“You’ll miss her,” he said.
“Oh, dreadfully, of course. But I know it will be good for her. She needs to get away. She’s furious about Conor Carrington-I’m afraid what she might do. I mean,” she went on quickly, “she might make some awful mistake-girls often do, when they’re thwarted in love.”
“Thwarted?”
“You know what I mean, Quirke. She could throw herself at the next young guy who comes along, and lose everything.” She was silent for a moment, walking along with her arm in his and holding her wrist with her other hand. She wore black silk gloves, and the shoes, slimly elegant, that were so incongruous in this wild place. “I wish,” she said suddenly, hurrying the words, “I wish you’d go with her, Quirke.” She glanced at him, smiling tensely, then looked away again.
He watched her profile. “To Boston?”
She nodded, setting her lips tight together. “I’d like to think,” she said, choosing the words carefully, “that there was someone there to look after her.”
“She’ll be with her grandfather. She won’t be throwing herself at any young men with old Josh there to frighten them off.”
“I meant, someone I could trust. I don’t want her to-I don’t want her to become one of them.”
“Them?”
“My father, all that. Their world.” She twisted her mouth into a bitter smile. “The Crawford clan.”
“Then don’t let her go.”
Her grip on his arm tightened. “I’m not strong enough. I can’t fight them, Quirke. They’re too much for me.”
He nodded. “What about Mal?” he said.
“What about him?” Suddenly there was the coldness of steel in her voice.
“Does he want Phoebe to go?”
“Who knows what Mal wants? We don’t discuss these things. We don’t discuss anything, anymore.”
He stopped, and made her stop with him. “What’s wrong, Sarah?” he said. “Something has happened. You’re different. Is it Mal?”
Her answer this time came like the snap of a tautened wire. “Is what Mal?”
They walked on. Quirke felt the ice under his feet, the treacherous smoothness of it. What if he were to slip and fall here? He would not be able to get himself to his feet again. Sarah would have to go for help. He might die. He entertained the thought with equanimity.
They came to the crest of the hill. Before them was another long valley, the floor of which was hidden under a haze of frost. They stood and gazed into that glowing gray immensity as if it were the very heart of desolation.
“Will you go to America?” Sarah asked, but before he could answer a shiver ran through her, he felt the force of it in her arm that was still linked in his, and with a sort of swooning sigh she let all her weight collapse against him, so that he thought his knee might give way. “Oh, God,” she whispered in distress and terror. Her eyes were closed, the lids fluttering like moth wings. “Sarah,” he said, “what is it?” She took a deep, trembling breath. “Sorry,” she said, “I thought I…” He wedged the walking stick under his elbow for support and held both of her hands in his. Her fingers were icy. She tried to smile, shaking her head. “It’s all right, Quirke. I’m fine, really.”
He led her away from the track, the frozen snow snapping like glass under their shoes, to a large, round rock standing in self-conscious isolation on the barren hillside. He brushed the snow from the top of the rock and made her sit. A little color was coming back into her face. She said again she was all right, that it was just her dizzy feeling. She laughed weakly. “One of my turns, as Maggie calls them.” A nerve in her cheek twitched, giving her a bitter aspect. “One of my turns,” she said again.
Nervously he lit a cigarette. At this high altitude the smoke cut into his lungs like a flung handful of blades. A large gray crow with a sharpened chisel of a beak alighted near them on a fence post and uttered a derisive croak. Sarah was looking at her hands clasped in her lap. “Quirke,” she said, “I have something to tell you. It’s about Phoebe. I don’t know how to say it.” In her distress she lifted her hands, still clasped, and shook them before her in a curious gesture, like a dice player preparing to throw but knowing the throw will fail. “She’s not mine, Quirke. She’s not Mal’s, either.” Quirke stood so still he might have been made of the same stuff as the stone on which she sat. Sarah shook her head slowly from side to side in a kind of disbelieving amazement. “She’s yours,” she said. “Yours and Delia’s. You didn’t know she lived, but she did. Delia died and Phoebe lived. The Judge, Garret, he phoned us in Boston that night, to tell us Delia was dead. I couldn’t believe it. He asked if Mal and I would look after the baby-for a while, he said, until you were over your shock. There was a nun coming out from Dublin. She brought Phoebe with her.” She sighed, and cast about her as if vaguely in search of some way by which she might escape, some passageway or hollow in the snow down which she might drop. “I shouldn’t have kept her,” she said, “but I told myself it was for the be
st. You were already drinking so much, because of Delia, because she wasn’t what you had hoped she’d be. And then she was dead, and there was Phoebe.” He turned, a stone man, and took some steps over the snow, leaning his weight on his stick, and stopped, looking away from her, down again into the frozen valley far below. The bird on the post ducked its head and flexed one wing and this time gave a low, rattling squawk that might have been of entreaty, or mildly regretful deprecation. Sarah sighed again. “I wanted something of you, you see,” she said to Quirke’s enormous, hunched back. “Something that was yours. Terrible of me, I know.” She laughed briefly, as if amazed again, at herself, at what she was saying. “All these years…” She rose to her feet, clenching her fists and holding them at her sides. “I’m sorry, Quirke,” she called to him, making her voice loud, for it seemed to her that when she had stood up the air had somehow grown too thin to carry mere words, and that anyway he was, over on that bare mountain rim, almost beyond hearing her. He would not turn, only stood there in his crow-black coat with his back to her and his head bowed. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and this time it was as if she were saying it to herself.
THREE
25
ANDY STAFFORD FELT LIKE HE WAS ON TRIAL. THEY WERE IN SISTER Stephanus’s office, he and Claire, sitting side by side on two straight chairs in front of the big oak desk behind which Sister Stephanus was seated. At her back, standing, was the red-haired priest, Harkins, the one who had called at the house that day to spy on them. Another nun, he could not remember her name-she was a doctor, she had a stethoscope around her neck-was standing by the window looking out at the brilliant day, her face lit by the light reflected from the snow. He had explained to them, again, what had happened, how he had found the baby having a fit or something and had given her-he just managed in time to stop himself saying it-a shake to try to get her to snap out of it, and how she had died instead. It was all a misunderstanding, an accident. He had been drunk, he had not tried to deny it; that was probably part of the reason why it had happened, that the kid had died. So yes, he admitted it, it was sort of his fault, if an accident could ever be anyone’s fault. Even though she was sitting down, Sister Stephanus looked taller than everyone else in the room. At last she stirred herself, and sighed and said:
“You must try as best you can, both of you, to put this terrible thing behind you. Little Christine is with God now. It was His will.”
The other nun turned from the window and looked at Claire, who gave no response. The young woman had not moved or said a word since they had sat down. She was white-faced and hunched, as if she were cold, and her hands, the palms turned upward, lay lifeless in her lap. Her gaze was fixed on the floor in front of the desk, and she was frowning in concentration, trying to make out, it seemed, something in the pattern of the carpet.
Sister Stephanus went on:
“Andy, your task now is to help Claire. You’ve both had a loss, but hers is the greater. Do you understand?”
Andy nodded vigorously, to show how eager he was, and how determined, to try to undo what had been done. “I understand, Sister,” he said, “yes, I understand. Only…” He jerked his chin up and ran a finger around the inside of his shirt collar. He was wearing his tan checked sport jacket and dark pants, and he had even put on a tie, to make a good impression.
Sister Stephanus was watching him with her wide-open, glistening, slightly staring eyes, eyes that looked as if they had been frozen. “Only?” she said.
Andy took a heavy breath, lifting his chin again. “I was wondering if you’d talked to Mr. Crawford about a job for me. I mean a different job, one that would keep me nearer home.”
Sister Stephanus glanced over her shoulder to where the priest was standing. He lifted his eyebrows but said nothing. The nun turned back to Andy. “Mr. Crawford is very ill,” she said. “Gravely ill.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Andy said, a little too slickly, he realized. He hesitated, getting himself ready. Now was the moment. “Must be tough,” he said in his slow drawl, “Mr. Crawford being sick and all. I suppose the rest of you”-he looked from her to Harkins and back again-“have to take up the slack. Funny, a big operation like the one you have going, yet you never see anything about it in the newspapers.”
There was another silence, then the priest said in that twangy harp accent of his: “A lot of things don’t get into the newspapers, Andy. Even serious accidents aren’t reported, sometimes.”
Andy ignored him. “Trouble is, see,” he said to the nun, “I’ll have my hands full helping Claire here to get over her loss. Have to turn down those long runs up to Canada and the Lakes. There’s the overtime, I’ll lose that.”
The nun glanced at Harkins again and again all he did was raise up his eyebrows. She turned back to Andy. “All right,” she said, “we’ll see what can be done.”
“The point is, Andy,” Harkins put in, “we have to keep these matters between ourselves. We have our own way of doing things here at St. Mary’s, and often the world doesn’t understand.”
“Right,” Andy said, and allowed himself the ghost of a sneer. “Right.”
Sister Stephanus rose abruptly, the black stuff of her habit making a busy, crumpling sound. “Very well, then,” she said. “We’ll be in touch. But Andy, I want you to be clear on one thing. Claire’s welfare now is our first concern-ours, and yours.”
“Sure,” he said, deliberately offhand this time, just to show them, “sure, I understand.” He too stood up, and turned to Claire. “Come on, honey. Time to go.”
She did not respond, but continued staring at the carpet. Sister Anselm came from the window and put a hand gently on her shoulder. “Claire,” she said, “are you all right?”
Claire blinked, and with an effort lifted her head and looked at the nun, struggling to concentrate. Slowly she nodded.
“She’s fine,” Andy snapped, and could not keep an edge of menace out of his voice. “I’ll take care of her. Right, sweetheart?”
He gripped her by the elbow and made her stand. When she was on her feet it seemed for a moment that she might fall over, but he held her steady with an arm around her shoulders and turned her to the door. Sister Stephanus came from behind her desk and led them out.
When the three of them were gone, Sister Anselm said:
“That young woman is not well.”
Father Harkins eyed her worriedly. “Do you think she might…?” He let the question hang.
“I think,” the nun said with angry emphasis, “her nerves are in a bad way-a very bad way.”
Sister Stephanus came back into the room, shaking her head. “Dear Lord,” she said wearily, “what a business.” She turned to the priest. “Did the archbishop…?”
He nodded. “I spoke to his office. His people will have a word with the Commissioner-there’ll be no need for the police to get involved.”
Sister Anselm made a sound of disgust. Sister Stephanus turned her tired gaze on her. “Did you speak, Sister?”
She turned and limped out of the room. Sister Stephanus and the priest looked at each other, and then away. They said nothing.
THERE WAS ICE ON THE FRONT STEPS AND ANDY KEPT AN ARM AROUND Claire’s shoulders so she would not slip. Since the accident with the kid he had not known what to do with his wife, she was so silent and withdrawn. She spent her time sitting around the house half in a trance, or watching the kiddies’ programs on TV, Howdy Doody and Bugs Bunny and the one with the two talking crows. It gave him the creeps to hear the way she laughed at those cartoons, a sort of gurgling in her throat, just the way, he supposed, her Kraut cousins would laugh, hurgh hurgh hurgh. At night when she lay unsleeping beside him he could feel her thoughts turning and turning in her head, turning on the same damned thing that she could not let go of. She would just about answer when he spoke to her, otherwise she said nothing. One night he came home late and tired out after a run from Buffalo and the house was in darkness with not a sound to be heard. He searched the place and fo
und her in the kid’s room, sitting by the window with the kid’s baby blanket pressed in her arms. He had shouted at her, not so much because he was sore but because of the scare she had given him, sitting there like a ghost in the weird, bluish glow that came up from the snow-covered yard. But even when he yelled she only turned her head a little way toward him, frowning, like a person who has heard someone calling from a long, long way off.
Cora had been the only good thing for him in all of this. She had calmed him down on the night of the accident and helped him get his story straight. Sometimes now during the day she came up and sat with Claire, and more than once he had arrived home to find her preparing his dinner, while Claire, wearing the housecoat that she had not changed out of since morning, red-eyed and with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, lay on her front on their bed with her feet hanging over the side. There was something about her feet, white on the instep and discolored and callused on the undersides, that gave him a nauseous feeling. Cora’s feet were long and tanned, and narrow at the heel and broad and rounded where the toes started. Cora wanted nothing from him but his hard brown body. She never asked him to tell her he loved her, or worried about the future, or what would happen if Claire found out about the two of them. Being with Cora was like being with a man, except when they were in bed, and even then she had almost a man’s brutal appetite.
Christine Falls Page 21