A Death in Summer

by Benjamin Black

  Dannie had lain down on her front in the grass with her chin propped on her hands. She was chewing a blade of grass. Three flies circled above her head, round and round, tracing the ghostly outline of a black halo. Sinclair saw again how beautiful she was, with that broad face and delicate chin, more beautiful than Phoebe, though not half so fascinating, he told himself.

  “Isn’t it strange to think,” Dannie said, “that people who are old now were young once, like us? I meet an old woman in the street and I tell myself that seventy years ago she was a baby in her mother’s arms. How can they be the same person, her as she is now and the baby as it was then? It’s like-what do they say?-the headless axe without a handle. Something that’s there and yet impossible.”

  Sinclair had the impression of a tiny speck of darkness, a beam of black light, piercing the sunlit air, infinitesimally fine but thickening, thickening.

  Orphans. The word came to his mind unbidden. Those poor orphans, she had said. But what orphans? He would not ask, not now.

  ***

  Quirke that same Sunday afternoon was in bed with Francoise d’Aubigny. She had telephoned first and then come to his flat. Giselle was at Brooklands, being looked after by Sarah Maguire. There were no preliminaries. He let her in at the front door and they climbed the stairs in silence and once inside the flat she turned to him and lifted up her mouth to be kissed. Their lovemaking at first was not a success. Quirke was uncertain and Francoise seemed preoccupied-it was as if she were conducting an experiment, or an investigation, of him, of herself, of the possibilities of what they might be to each other. Afterwards they sat up in bed in the hot, shadowed room, not speaking, but forgiving of each other. Quirke smoked a cigarette and Francoise took it from his fingers now and then and drew on it, and when he offered her one of her own she shook her head and said no, she wanted to share this one, because it tasted of him.

  “When did you know this was going to happen?” he asked.

  She gave a soft laugh. “Oh, the day we met, I suppose. And you?”

  “Not so quickly. Women always know long before men.”

  Her breasts were like pale apples, her ribs plainly visible under their sheath of silky skin. She was, he realized with a kind of happy dismay, not his kind of woman at all-at least Isabel Galloway had some flesh on her bones.

  “You have someone already?” she asked. She had that gift of reading his thoughts.

  “Yes,” he said. “Sort of.”

  “Who is she?”

  “An actress.”

  “A famous one? Would I know her?”

  “I doubt it. She works mostly at the Gate.”

  “Tell me her name.”

  “Isabel.”

  “And do you feel very guilty about her, now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be-I’m not.”

  She took the cigarette again and put it to her lips, shutting one eye against the smoke. “Shall we continue together, you and I, do you think?” she asked mildly. “Will there be more times like this?” She smiled, and gave him back the cigarette. “Or will you be”-she put a theatrical quiver into her voice-“overcome by your guilt?”

  “There will be more times. There’ll be all the time in the world.”

  “Alors,” she said, “is that what they call a declaration?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It is.”

  She turned and put her arms around him. He crushed the last of the cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table. His eye fell on the telephone there, hunched, black and gleaming, a reminder of all that was outside this room: the world, and Isabel Galloway.

  ***

  Two days after his outing with Phoebe and Dannie, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary morning, Sinclair received a telephone call at the hospital. This was unusual; hardly anyone phoned him at work. The nurse who put the call through from reception sounded odd, she seemed to be trying not to laugh, and then the voice that came on was strangely muffled, as if the speaker were speaking through a handkerchief.

  “Listen, Jewboy,” the voice said, “you keep sticking that big fat nose of yours into places where it’s not wanted and you’ll get it lopped off. Then your prick and your Jew face will be a nice match.” This was followed by a cackle of laughter and then the line went dead.

  Sinclair stood looking at the receiver. He thought it must be a prank, some so-called friend from college days, maybe-it had been a young man’s voice, he was sure of that-doing it for a bet, or out of some long-remembered grudge, or even just for a moment’s amusement. Despite himself he was shocked. He had never experienced this kind of thing before, certainly not since school days, but then it had been a matter of malicious teasing, not abuse like this, not hatred. The effect was first of all physical, as if he had been punched in the pit of the stomach; then the rage came, like a transparent crimson curtain falling behind his eyes. He had an urge, too, to tell someone, anyone. Quirke was in his office, he could be seen through the glass panel in the door; he was doing paperwork and smoking a cigarette in the ill-tempered way that he did, blowing the smoke out swiftly sideways as if he could not bear the stink of it. Sinclair knocked on the door and walked in. Quirke looked at him and lifted his eyebrows. “Christ,” he said, “what’s the matter with you? One of the stiffs come back to life?”

  Suddenly, to his intense surprise and puzzlement, Sinclair was overcome by shyness. Yes, shyness; it was the only word.

  “I had a-I had a call,” he said.

  “Oh? Who from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No. A man.”

  Quirke leaned back in his chair. “A man phoned you and didn’t give his name. What did he say?”

  Sinclair pushed back the wings of his white coat and shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers. He stared through the long window that gave onto the dissecting room, garishly lit under the big white fluorescent lamps in the ceiling. “It was just…” He touched a finger to his forehead. “Just abuse.”

  “I see. Personal or professional?”

  “Personal. But it could have been professional, I don’t know.”

  Quirke rotated the open packet of Senior Service on his desk until the cigarettes, arrayed like the pipes of an organ, were facing in Sinclair’s direction; Sinclair took one, and lit it with his Zippo.

  “I’ve had those calls,” Quirke said. “No point in telling you not to mind, they’re always a shock.” He stubbed out his own cigarette and took a fresh one, and leaned back farther. “Phoebe tells me you and she went to Howth. Nice, out there?”

  Sinclair thought about being indignant-did she tell Quirke everything she did? did she tell him about that kiss, too?-but the anger was not there sufficiently. “Dannie Jewell came with us,” he said.

  Quirke looked surprised. “Did she? Phoebe didn’t say. Do they know each other?”

  “No, they hadn’t met before. I thought it would be good for Dannie.”

  “And was it?”

  Sinclair looked at him. The cold light that had come into Quirke’s eye, what was that? Was he worried Phoebe would be affected by Dannie and her troubles? Sinclair suspected Quirke did not know very much about his daughter. “She’s doing well, Dannie. She’s coping.”

  “With her grief.”

  “That’s right.”

  Something had tightened between them, as if the atmosphere had developed a kink.

  “Good,” Quirke said briskly. He was rolling the tip of his cigarette back and forth in the ashtray, sharpening it like the point of a red pencil. “You’re aware that Phoebe, too, like Dannie Jewell, has things to cope with, things that happened, in the past.”

  Sinclair nodded. “She doesn’t talk about it-at least she hasn’t so far, to me.”

  “She’s seen more than her share of violence. And in America she was-she was attacked.”

  Sinclair had heard all this; it was talked about in the hospital, a fact he hope
d Quirke was not aware of.

  “If you’re telling me to be careful,” Sinclair said, “you needn’t. I like Phoebe. I think she likes me. That’s as far as we’ve got.” He wanted to say, And besides, you’re the one who put us together, but did not.

  Quirke’s cigarette was spent already; he crushed it in the ashtray among the remains of a dozen others. The subject of Phoebe, Sinclair could see, was closed.

  “This fellow on the phone,” Quirke said, “did he mention names?”

  Sinclair had walked to the window and was leaning against it, one foot lifted behind him and the sole of his shoe pressed against the wall. “How do you mean, names?”

  “Sometimes when they’re bereaved they call up mad with grief and complain about their loved ones being cut up. God knows why the switch puts them through.”

  “No, no, nothing like that. He told me I’d get my Jew nose cut off if I stuck it in other people’s business.”

  “Your Jew nose.”

  They both smiled.

  “All right,” Sinclair said. “I’ll forget about it.”

  He came forward and stubbed out his cigarette in the crowded ashtray and made for the door. Behind him Quirke said, “Phoebe and I are having dinner tonight. It’s our weekly treat. It used to be Thursday, now it’s Tuesdays. You want to join us?”

  Sinclair stopped, turned. “Thanks,” he said, “no. I have a thing to do. Maybe another time.” He set off again towards the door.

  “Sinclair.”

  Again he stopped. “Yes?”

  “I’m glad that you and Phoebe are-are friends,” Quirke said. “And I appreciate your-your concern for her.” He suddenly looked vulnerable there, wedged in the chair that was too small for him, his big hands resting palms upwards on the desk as if in supplication.

  Sinclair nodded, and went out.

  8

  St. Christopher’s was a gaunt, gray, mock-Gothic pile standing on a rocky promontory that looked across to Lambay Island. The more sophisticated among the priests of the Redemptorist Order who administered the place referred to it jocularly as the Chateau d’If, though the inmates called it something else. It was an orphanage, exclusively for boys. Those who passed through it remembered most vividly of all the particular smell of the place, a complex blend of damp stone, wet wool, stale urine, boiled cabbage, and another odor, thin and sharp and acidic, that seemed to the survivors of St. Christopher’s the stink of misery itself. The institution had a formidable reputation throughout the land. Mothers threatened their miscreant sons that they would be sent there-for not all the inmates were orphans, not by any means. St. Christopher’s welcomed all comers, and the mite of state subsidy that each one brought. Overcrowding was never a problem, for boys are small, and St. Christopher’s boys tended to be smaller than most, thanks to the frugal diet they enjoyed. Passengers on the Belfast train were offered the best view of the great house standing upon its rock, with its sheer granite walls, its louring turrets, its bristling chimneys dribbling meager plumes of coal smoke. Few going past looked on it for long, however, but turned their eyes uneasily aside, and shuddered.

  Quirke traveled by train to Balbriggan and at the station hired a hackney car that drove him down along the coast to Baytown, a huddle of cottages abutting St. Christopher’s and looking like so many lumps of weathered masonry left over after the construction of the house had been completed. The day, though heavily overcast, was hot, and had a sulky look to it, determined as it was on withholding the rain that the fat clouds were full of and that the parched fields so sorely craved. At the tall gates Quirke pulled the bell chain and presently an old man came out of the gate lodge bearing a great iron key and let him in. Yes, Quirke said, he was expected. The old man eyed his well-cut suit and expensive shoes and sniffed.

  The driveway Quirke remembered as much longer, and much wider, a great curved sweep leading majestically up to the house, but in fact it was hardly more than an unfenced track with a ditch on either side, dry now. He supposed this would be the general tenor of his visit this afternoon, everything misrecalled and jumbled up and out of proportion. He had spent less than a year here, on his way to Carricklea, the industrial school, so called, in the far west, where he had been sent because no one could think what else to do with him. He had not been very unhappy at St. Christopher’s, not if his unhappiness were measured against the scale of the things he had experienced up to then in his short life, and certainly not if measured against what awaited him at Carricklea. One or two of the priests at St. Christopher’s had been kind, or at least had shown an intermittent mildness, and not all of the bigger boys had beaten him. Yet it gave him an awesome shiver to be walking up this dusty way, in this sullenly radiant light, and at every step his feet and his legs seemed to sink deeper into the ground before him.

  A lanky boy with cropped blond hair, a trusty of the place, led him along a soundless corridor to a high dim room with an oak dining table that had probably never been dined on and three windows that were enormous and yet seemed to let in only a trickle of light from outdoors. When he was here he had not known of the existence of such a room, so grand, as it would have seemed to him, so richly appointed. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out blankly-a bit of lawn, a graveled path, a far patch of sea-and listening to the faint and seemingly apprehensive poppings and pingings deep in his gut. His lunch was not sitting well with him.

  Father Ambrose was tall and thin and grizzled, like one of those pared-down selfless priests who till the mission fields or care for lepers. “Good afternoon, Dr. Quirk,” he said, in the strained and reedy voice of an ascetic. “St. Christopher’s is always glad to see old boys.” A fan of fine wrinkles opened at the outer corner of each eye when he smiled. His hand was a bundle of thin dry twigs in a wrapping of greaseproof paper. He gave off a faint aroma of candle wax. He was an implausibly perfect specimen of what a priest should look and sound and even smell like, and Quirke wondered if he was kept in a cell somewhere and brought out and pressed into service whenever a visitor called.

  “I wanted to inquire,” Quirke said, “about a girl-a young woman-called Marie Bergin.” He spelled the surname. “It seems she worked here, for a time, some years ago.”

  Father Ambrose, still absently holding the hand that Quirke had given him to shake, stood very close to him and was examining his features minutely, running his eyes rapidly here and there, and Quirke had the eerie sensation of being not looked at but rather of being palped, softly, delicately, as if a blind man were feeling all over his face with his fingertips.

  “Come, Dr. Quirke,” he said in his breathily confidential voice, “come and sit down.”

  They sat at a corner of the dining table, on two of the high-backed chairs that were ranged around it like effigies of ancient priests, the founders of the place. Quirke was wondering if he might be permitted to smoke when the priest delved into a fold of his cassock and brought out a packet of Lucky Strike. “One of the fathers over in America sends them to me,” he said. He tore the silver foil and tapped with a finger expertly on the underside of the pack and a cigarette popped out. He offered it to Quirke, then tapped out another. The first breath of the exotic-tasting smoke brought Quirke back instantly to a big house near the sea south of Boston, years before.

  “Do you recall your time here?” the priest was asking.

  “I was very young, Father, seven or eight. I remember the food.”

  Father Ambrose did his crinkly smile. “Our cooks were never famous for their culinary skills, I’m afraid.” He drew on his cigarette as if he were tasting some fabulous and costly vintage. That was another thing Quirke remembered, from the various institutions he had endured: the way the priests and brothers smoked, like eager debauchees, indulging all their senses in one of the very few permitted pleasures. “That would be quite a while ago, then, way before the war. We have changed a great deal since those days. This is a happy home, Dr. Quirke.” His tone was not defensive but his eye took on a quickened light.


  “I didn’t mind it, here.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.”

  “But then, my expectations were modest. I was an orphan, after all.” Why, really, had he come here today? Making inquiries about the Sumners’ maid was only a pretext. He was kneading an old wound.

  “And you were brought to St. Christopher’s. The Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, as the Psalmist tells us. Where had you come from?”

  “I have no origins, Father. I have a suspicion of what they were, but if what I suspect is the case, I don’t want it confirmed.”

  The priest was studying him closely again, running ghostly fingers over the braille of Quirke’s soul. “There are some things, indeed, that it’s better not to know. This girl, this-what did you say her name was?”

  “Marie-Marie Bergin.”

  “That’s right.” The priest frowned. “I don’t recall her. Did she work in the kitchens?”

  “I think so.”

  “Yes. Because of course we don’t have maids; the lads shift for themselves. It’s a good discipline for life, knowing how to make a bed properly and how to keep your things in order. We’ve sent out many a fine young independent man into the world. You say this Marie Bergin is working now for someone you know?”

  Had he said that? He did not think he had. “Yes, she worked for the Jewell family, and then-”

  Father Ambrose threw up his hands. “The Jewells! Ah!” His face darkened. “Poor Mr. Jewell. What a tragedy.”

  “He was one of your benefactors, I believe.”

  “He was. And he’s a great loss to us, a tragic loss.”

  “He raised funds for the place?”

  “Yes, and contributed himself, very generously. There’s a little unofficial committee”-he pronounced it comity -“that he set up, you know, himself and a few friends, businessmen like himself. I can hardly think what we would do without the Friends of St. Christopher’s-that’s what they call themselves-and certainly this is a worrying time for us, a time of uncertainty, with Mr. Jewell gone.” He turned his eyes to the window, his saintly profile sharp against the light. “Such a good man, especially so, considering he was not of our persuasion. But then, you know, there’s a history of quiet cooperation between the Jewish community here and Holy Mother Church. Mr. Briscoe, our new Lord Mayor, is a great friend of Rome, you know, oh, yes.” He paused to look at the cigarette packet on the table before him, reached for it, then drew back his hand. He smiled apologetically. “I ration myself to ten a day,” he said. “It’s a little mortification of the flesh I make myself indulge in. If I smoke another one now I won’t have one for after my tea-but forgive me, Dr. Quirke, I didn’t offer you anything. Would you like some tea, or maybe a glass of sherry? I’m sure there’s a bottle somewhere about.”