Christine Falls

by Benjamin Black

  He raised his eyebrows. “And how do you know that?”

  “I just know.”

  He nodded. “Your female intuition, is it?”

  She flinched at the sudden cold mockery in his tone. She stood up and pulled the robe tight around her and walked away amidst the capering, ghostly lights, dangling the black bathing cap by its strap from her finger.

  “Your niece was right,” she threw back over her shoulder. “No more jokes.”

  27

  HEAVY WAVES, BOXY AND THICK, ROLLED IN SLOW MOTION PAST THE lighthouse on its offshore rock and broke against the beach, lacing the air with ice-white spume. The coast sloped steeply here, diving off toward Provincetown and the vast Atlantic distances beyond. Quirke and Phoebe stood side by side on the concrete slipway, looking out to the horizon. A hard wind roaring in from the sea blew spray into their faces and whipped the flaps of their overcoats against their legs. Phoebe said something but Quirke could not hear her for the wind and the slushy clatter of the shingle rolling under the waves. He cupped a hand to his ear and she leaned close and shouted again, “I feel if I put out my arms I’d fly!” How young she was; the long and tedious journey from Ireland seemed not to have affected her at all, and her eyes sparkled and her cheeks glowed. Josh Crawford’s big Buick was parked behind them at an angle on the sandy track, humped and shining, like something huge that had slithered its way up out of the sea. Andy Stafford in his chauffeur’s greatcoat stood beside it, watching them narrowly, holding his smart peaked cap at his side, his oiled black hair blowing straight back and plastered against his skull. Slight of form in field-gray outfit and polished leggings he had the look of a boy soldier facing into the wind of battle.

  Quirke and Phoebe turned and set off walking along the sandy pathway in the lee of the low dunes. A few clapboard holiday homes stood some way back from the sea, their paint peeling and windows hazed over from the salt winds. Quirke on his walking stick had to go gingerly for the ground was uneven and shifting in places and the marram grass looked tough and wiry enough to wrap itself around his ankles and send him sprawling. Despite having to stump along clumsily like this he felt so giddily light in the head it seemed he too might be plucked up by the wind and whirled away into the tumultuous sky. He stopped and brought out his cigarettes but the wind was too strong and his lighter would not light. They went on.

  “I used to come here with Delia,” he said, and regretted it at once, for Phoebe pounced, of course.

  “What was she like, Delia?” she asked greedily, putting a hand on his arm and squeezing it. “I mean, really. I want to know, now that I’m here. I can almost feel her presence, in the house.”

  “Oh, exciting, I suppose.”

  Was it true? She had been wholly without scruples of any kind-her father’s daughter-and that had certainly excited him. But he had hated her, too. Curious, loving and hating, the two sides of the precious coin she had so casually handed him. Phoebe was nodding solemnly as if he had uttered a profound insight. This eagerness of hers to know what Delia had been really like-did she have some unconscious inkling of who Delia really was? She said:

  “I thought Mummy was supposed to be the exciting one.”

  “We were all different, then.” He sounded to himself like a fond old fool, maundering over the lost years. It occurred to him that he was sick of being Quirke, but knew there was no one else he could be. “I mean,” he said quickly, irritated, “we were all someone else, your father, Sarah, me-” He broke off. “Look, let’s go back, this wind is making my head ache.”

  But it was not only the wind that was tormenting him. When Phoebe spoke Delia’s name now he felt as an adulterer might feel when his wife makes casual mention of the family friend who is his secret lover. He knew that he should tell his daughter-his daughter!-the truth, should tell her who her real parents were, but he did not know how to say it. It was too enormous to be put into words, a thing outside the commonplace run of life. It would not square, he told himself, with what they had been to each other up to now, the easy tolerance there had been between them, the freedom, the untaxing gaiety. It was absurd-how could he begin to be a father to her, after all these years, the so many years that made up the entirety of her life? Yet even as he went along here with her hand tugging at his arm he was convinced that he could feel the loss of her, the absence of her, from whatever hollow place it was in his heart that she would have filled, in those years. Since the moment in the mountains when Sarah had made her confession to him there had been gathering steadily in him, like a head of water behind a dam, something which if he released it would swamp his life and drown his peace of mind, and so he limped along, and smiled, and entertained his oblivious daughter’s chattering inquiries about the woman she did not know was her mother. Someday, he told himself, with almost a vindictive satisfaction, someday he would suffer for this laxity, this laziness of spirit, this cowardice. For that was what it was-plain funk. He might make all the excuses he wished, might talk of the tolerance there had been between them, the freedom and the gaiety that he must not put at risk, but he knew it was just an alibi he was attempting to construct, a front behind which he could go on as he had always done, in peace, being nobody’s father.

  Andy Stafford had climbed into the car and was just about to light a cigarette. He put it away hastily when he saw them turn back, Quirke swiveling abruptly on his stick like some sort of huge mechanical toy man. In the rearview mirror Andy caught a glimpse of his own reflection and was startled by what he saw, the somehow grimacing face with its dark, furtive eye. He studied Phoebe through the windshield as she approached, the wind molding her coat against her form. When she had got into the car he had tried to spread the tartan lap blanket over her knees but she had taken it from him without giving him even a glance and tossed it over her shoulder into the back window space. Now he listened idly to the two of them talking behind him as the car lurched down the track away from the dunes on its voluptuously squashy suspension.

  “How did you meet up,” Phoebe was asking, “the four of you?”

  Quirke, his hands set atop his stick, was watching the dwindling shore through the side window.

  “Your grandfather had fixed for Mal and me to work at the hospital,” he said. “Summer jobs, you know, with a view to something more permanent, if it worked out, which it didn’t, for various reasons.”

  “Delia being one of them?”

  He shrugged.

  “I might have stayed. Big bucks, even in those days. But then…” He let it drift away. He had the feeling that he was lying even though he was not; the secret that he carried was suddenly infecting everything. “Your grandmother was there, being treated, at the hospital. Sarah came to see her. She didn’t know her mother was dying. I was the one who told her. I think she was glad-to be told, I mean. Then we were a foursome for a while, Sarah, Delia, Mal, me.”

  He stopped. Big bucks. A foursome. What was it-was he hoping the momentum of mere talk would lead him to blurt out another, altogether different word, would lull him into telling her without his intending it the things he had not the nerve to utter straight out, the things it was her right to know? He saw she was no longer listening to him, but was gazing out blankly through the window on her side as the car gained the main road and turned in the direction of North Scituate. Quirke studied the back of Andy Stafford’s head, sleek as a seal’s and narrow at the neck, and pondered how unmistakable it was, the physiognomy of the poor, the low, the dispossessed. Phoebe’s voice startled him.

  “Rose wants me to stay here.”

  She spoke in a sort of sighing fall, pretending weary indifference.

  “Here?” he said.

  She glanced at him archly. With his hands folded like that on the handle of the walking stick he had the distinct look of Grandfather Griffin.

  “Yes,” she said, “here. In America. In Boston.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What do you mean, Hmm?”

  He looked again at the back o
f the driver’s head, uncannily motionless in the moving car. He lowered his voice but spoke with a deliberate emphasis.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “And why not?” she inquired.

  He thought for a moment. What was he to say? After all, why should she not stay here? Why should she not do anything she wanted? Who was he to advise her how to live her life?

  “What about home?” he said. “What about Conor Carrington?”

  She made a wry face and turned to look out her window again. There was the church with the white spire they had passed by last night in the mist-hung darkness; today it looked ordinary and even a little sheepish, as if its ghostly nocturnal springing up were a prank it was ashamed to be reminded of in daylight.

  “Home,” Phoebe said quietly, “feels very far away, here. I don’t mean just in miles.”

  “It is far away,” Quirke said, “in miles and everything else. That’s the point.” He paused, floundering, then tried again. “I promised your-I promised Sarah I’d look after you. I don’t think she’d want you to stay here. In fact, I know she wouldn’t.”

  “Oh?” she said, turning again to stare at him superciliously down her nose, and for a second he saw how she would look when she was middle-aged, a slightly less hard-eyed, less imperious Delia. “Just how do you know she wouldn’t?”

  He felt a pressure inside his chest-was it anger?-and had to pause again. He was acutely aware now of the back of Andy Stafford’s head, which seemed to have become a bulbed and shiny listening device. He made his voice go lower still.

  “There are things you don’t know, Phoebe,” he said. She was still fixing him with that ingenuously haughty stare.

  “What things?” she said scoffingly. “What sort of things?”

  “About your mother. About your parents.” He looked away. “About me.”

  “Oh, you,” she said, softening suddenly, and laughed. “What’s there to know about you?”

  WHEN THEY CAME INTO THE VILLAGE HE TOLD ANDY STAFFORD TO stop and levered himself on his stick out of the car, saying there was a place he wanted to find, a bar, where he used to drink when he first came here. Phoebe said she would come with him but he waggled his stick impatiently and told her no, that she should go on to the house and send the car back for him in an hour, and he slammed the door. She watched him lurch away, his long coat billowing and his hat in his hand and his hair shaking in the icy wind. Andy Stafford said nothing, letting the engine idle. The quiet in the car seemed to broaden, and something unseen began to grow up out of it and spread its indolent fronds.

  “Take me somewhere,” Phoebe said crisply. “Anywhere.”

  He palmed the gearshift and she felt a greased meshing as he let out the clutch and the car glided away from the curb with an almost feline stealth, purring to itself. She had turned aside to look out her window but she could feel him watching her in the mirror, and she was careful not to let her eye meet his. They whispered along the empty broad main street of the icebound village-Joe’s Diner, Ed’s Motors, Larry’s Tackle and Bait: it seemed the men owned everything here-and then they were on the coast road again, from which despite its designation she could catch only occasional glimpses of the sea, iron-blue and somehow tilted up toward the horizon. She did not like the sea, its unnatural uniform flatness, its worrisome smells. Untidy, tracklike roads led down to it, the continent petering out along this ragged eastern coastline. She experienced a sudden flush of weariness, and for a second her head nodded unstoppably and her eyelids came down like two curved, leaden flanges that had suddenly been attached to her eyes. She snapped herself upright, blinking. The driver was looking at her again in the mirror-should she tell him please to concentrate on the road? She wondered if his eyes, small and glossy brown, like a squirrel’s, she thought, and much too close together, were particularly lacking in expression, or if everybody’s eyes looked like that in isolation from the face’s other features. She leaned forward to check her own reflection but quickly sat back again, shaken by the sight of their two faces in the glass, suddenly beside each other but in different perspectives.

  “So,” he said, “how do you like Boston?”

  “I haven’t seen it, yet.” She had been determined to maintain a frosty distance, and was disconcerted to hear herself adding, “Maybe you’d take me there, sometime.” She faltered, and sat upright quickly, clearing her throat. “I mean, you might take Mr. Quirke and me, to see the sights, some afternoon.” She told herself: Shut up, you dope! “If my grandfather can spare you, that is.”

  She could feel him being amused.

  “Sure thing,” he said easily. “Anytime.” He paused, calculating how much he might risk. “Mr. Crawford don’t have much use for the car, him being sick and all, and Mrs. Crawford, well…” The very back of his head seemed to smirk. She wondered what that well might mean and thought it was probably best not to inquire. “You want to go to New York,” he said. “Now, there’s a real town.”

  She asked his name. “Stafford?” she said. “That’s Irish, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “I guess.” He did not much care for the idea of being Irish, even though she was not like any of the Irish over here that he knew.

  She asked him where he was from. “Originally, I mean. Where were you born?”

  “Oh, out West,” he lied, in a voice he made purposely vague and dry, wanting to suggest sagebrush and shimmering deserts and a silent man solitary on his horse, gazing off from the rim of a mesa toward distant, rocky peaks.

  They turned inland. She wondered, a little uneasily, where he was taking her. Well, it was what she had told him, to take her anywhere. And despite that eye of his in the mirror it was not unpleasant, rolling leisurely along these country roads that did not look all that much different from the roads at home.

  The engine was running so smoothly he could hear the quick little hiss of nylon against nylon when she crossed her legs.

  “Do you have to drive at such a slow speed?” she said. “I mean, is it the rule, here?”

  “It’s standard with Mr. Crawford. But”-carefully-“I don’t always stick to it.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m sure.”

  She brought out her oval cigarettes and lit one. The smoke snaked over Andy Stafford’s shoulder and he sniffed the unfamiliar flat dry papery odor of the tobacco and asked if they were Irish cigarettes. “No,” she said, “English.” She considered offering him one but thought she had better not. She held the slim silver case lightly in her palm and with her thumb clicked the catch open and shut, open and shut. She had suddenly begun to feel the effects of the air journey, and everything seemed to her to have a beat of its own, precise, regular, yet to be part too of a general ensemble, a sort of drawn-out, untidy, complexly rhythmic chord which she could almost see in her mind, undulant, flowing, like a bundle of wires pulsing and twitching inside a pouring column of thick oil. The urge to sleep was like oil too, spreading over her mind and slowing it. She closed her eyes and felt the gathering momentum of the car as Andy Stafford increased the acceleration, gradually, or stealthily, it even seemed-was he afraid she would tell on him for breaking the Crawford limit?-but the cushioned churning of the wheels underneath her feet seemed more like something that was happening inside her, and gave her a horrible, lurching sensation and she hastily opened her eyes and made herself focus on the road again. They were going very fast now, the car bounding along effortlessly with a muted roar, seeming to exult in its own tigerish power. Andy Stafford was tensed forward at the wheel. She noted his leather driving gloves with holes punched in the backs of them; he was just the type that would wear that sort of thing, she told herself, and then felt a little ashamed for thinking it. They were on a long straight stretch of narrow road. Tall marsh grasses on either side leaned forward languorously even before the car was abreast of them, its momentum somehow reaching a yard or two ahead and folding the air inward. Phoebe stubbed out her cigarette and braced her hands flat o
n either side of her on the seat. The leather was stippled and warmly pliant under her palms. There was some kind of barrier in the road away in front of them, with an upright wooden pole and a white signboard with a black X painted on it. She felt rather than heard a drawn-out wail that seemed to come from far off, but a moment later there was the railroad train, bullet-nosed and enormous, hurtling forward at a diagonal to the road. Clearly, calmly, as if from high above the scene, she saw the X of the sign resolve itself into a diagram of the twin trajectories of car and train, speeding toward the level crossing. Now the upright wooden pole ahead quivered along its length and began jerkily to descend. “Stop!” she cried, and was startled-it had sounded more like a shout of glee than a cry of panic. Andy Stafford ignored her and on the car sped, seeming to sweep together all the countryside behind and whirl it with it into the funnel of its headlong rushing. She was sure they would hit the descending barrier, she could hear already the crash of metal and shattering glass and timber. In the corner of her eye she saw a snapshot, impossibly detailed and exact, of the crossing keeper standing in the doorway of his wooden hut, his long-jawed face and his mouth open to call out something, a shapeless felt hat pushed to the back of his head and one buckle missing from the bib of his dungarees. A little black car, squat and rounded like a beetle, was approaching from the other side of the crossing, and at the sight of them surging forward it veered in fright and seemed for a moment as if it would scurry off the road altogether to hide among the marsh grass. Then with a rumble they went bounding over the tracks and Phoebe turned about quickly to see the barrier fall the last few feet and stop with a bounce, and a moment later the train thundered through, sending after them a long, accusatory bellow that dwindled quickly into the distance and died. They flashed past the little black car, which sounded at them its own little bleat of protest and reproof. She realized that she was laughing, laughing and hiccuping, and her hands were clutching each other in her lap.