A Death in Summer

by Benjamin Black

  ***

  Quirke had been to dinner, but not with Phoebe. Francoise had invited him to the house on St. Stephen’s Green. She had said that she would be alone and that she would cook dinner for them both, but when he arrived Giselle was there, which surprised and irritated him. It was not that he felt any particular antipathy towards the child-she was nine years old, what was there to take against?-but he found her uncanniness hard to deal with. She made him think of a royal pet, so much indulged and pampered that it would no longer be acknowledged or even recognized by its own kind. He had, too, when she was about, the sense of being sidled up against, somehow, in a most disconcerting way.

  Francoise did not seem to think anything of the child’s presence, and if she noticed his annoyance she did not remark it. This evening she wore a scarlet silk blouse and a black skirt, and no jewelry, as usual. He noticed how she kept her hands out of sight as much as possible; women of a certain age, he knew, were sensitive of their hands. But surely she could be no more than-what, thirty-eight? forty? Isabel Galloway was younger, but not by much. The thought of Isabel brought a further darkening of his mood.

  They ate asparagus, which someone at the French embassy had sent round; it had come in from Paris that morning in the diplomatic bag. Quirke did not care for the stuff, but did not say so; later on his pee would smell of boiled cabbage. They ate in a little annex to the overly grand dining room, a small square wood-paneled space with a canopy-shaped ceiling and windows on two sides looking onto the Japanese garden. The calm gray air, tinted by reflections from the gravel outside, burnished the cutlery and made the single tall candle in its pewter sconce seem to shed not light but a sort of pale fine haze. Giselle sat with them, eating a bowl of mess made from bread and sugar and hot milk. She was in her pajamas. Her braids were wound in tight coils and pinned at either side of her head like a pair of large black earphones. The lenses of her spectacles were opaque in the light from the windows and only now and then and for a second did her eyes flash out, large, quick, intently watchful. Quirke wondered wistfully when it would be her bedtime. She talked about school, and about a girl in her class called Rosemary, who was her friend, and gave her sweets. Francoise attended to her with an expression of grave interest, nodding or smiling or frowning when required. She had, Quirke could not keep himself from thinking, the air of one playing a part that had been so long and diligently rehearsed that it had become automatic, had become, indeed, natural.

  His mind drifted. He had been wrestling anew, for some days now, with the old problem of love. There should be nothing to it, love: people fell in and out of it all the time. Countless poems had been written about it, countless songs had been sung in its praise. It made the world go round, so it was said. He imagined them, the hordes of enraptured lovers down the ages, millions upon millions of them, lashing at the poor old globe with the flails of their passion, keeping it awhirl on its wobbly axis like a spinning top. The love that people spoke of so much seemed a kind of miasmic cloud, a kind of ether teeming with bacilli, through which we moved as we moved through the ordinary air, immune to infection for most of the time but destined to succumb sooner or later, somewhere or other, struck down to writhe upon our beds in tender torment.

  With Isabel Galloway it had not been difficult. She and Quirke had both known what they wanted, more or less: a little pleasure, a little company, someone to admire and be admired by. It was a different matter with Francoise d’Aubigny. The heat that Quirke and she generated together gave off a whiff of brimstone. He knew the kind of fire he was playing with, the damage it could do. Isabel had been the first victim; who would be next? Him? Francoise? Giselle? For she was in it too, he was sure of it, lodged between them like a swaddled bundle even in their most intimate moments together.

  He caught himself up-Isabel the first victim? Ah, no.

  The child now had finished her pap and Francoise rose from the table and took her by the hand. “Say good night to Dr. Quirke,” she said, and the child gave him a narrow look.

  When they had left the room, Quirke pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette. The dying light of evening had taken on a gray-brown tinge. He was uneasy. He had not reckoned on the child being in the house-though where else would she be?-and he was not sure what to expect of Francoise, or what she would expect of him. He imagined the child lying in that narrow white bed in that ghostly white room, sleepless and vigilant for hours, listening intently for every smallest sound around her. He had not slept with Francoise in this house, and thought it unlikely that he would, this night, anyway. Yet he could not be sure. He was not sure of anything, with Francoise. Maybe she had only slept with him at his flat that one time in a moment of weakness, because she had needed a body to hold on to for a little while, in an effort to warm herself back to life. For when her husband died she must have felt something in herself die, along with him. How could she not? Thinking about these things, Quirke would frequently experience a sort of violent start, like the sensation of missing a step in sleep and being jerked into wakefulness, breathless and shocked-shocked at himself, at Francoise d’Aubigny, at what they were doing together. How, in such circumstances, he would ask himself, how could he imagine himself in love? And again he would seem to catch that sulfurous whiff rising up out of the depths.

  What would he do now, tonight, if she asked him to stay? Along with Giselle there was another presence in this house, a listening ghost as vigilant as the living child would be.

  He had finished his cigarette and started another when Francoise came back and took her place opposite him again-he always found stirring the way that women had of sweeping a hand under their bottoms to smooth their skirts when they sat down-and smiled at him and said that there were two escalopes of veal in the kitchen that she should go and cook.

  “Sit for a minute,” Quirke said. “I’m not very hungry.”

  He offered her a cigarette and then the flame of his lighter. She said, “I can see you disapprove of Giselle being allowed to stay up so late.”

  “Not at all. You’re her mother. It’s not my business.”

  “It is that she has bad dreams, you see.”

  He nodded. “And you?”

  “Me?”

  “What are your dreams like?”

  She laughed a little, looking down. “Oh, I do not dream. Or if I do, I do not remember what I dreamed about.”

  There was a pause, and then he asked, “What are we doing, here, you and I?”

  “Here, tonight?” Her black eyes had widened. “We are having dinner, I think, yes?”

  Quirke leaned back in his chair. “Tell me about Marie Bergin,” he said.

  She started, as if at a pinprick. “Marie? How do you know Marie?”

  “I went to see Carlton Sumner, as you recommended. Inspector Hackett and I went out to Roundwood.”

  “I see.” She was looking at the burning tip of her cigarette. “And you spoke to him-to Carlton.”

  “Yes.”

  She waited. “And?”

  Quirke looked through the window behind her to the sky’s darkening blue over Iveagh Gardens. “He said you and your husband used to be friends with him and his wife. That they stayed with you, at your place in the south of France.”

  She made a quick, sweeping gesture with her left hand. “That was not a successful occasion.”

  “Something about towels.”

  “Towels? What do you mean, towels? Carl Sumner tried to make love to me. Now I am going to cook our food.”

  She stood up and walked from the alcove and quickly across the dining room and out, shutting the door behind her. She had left her cigarette half smoked in the ashtray. A lipstick stain on a cigarette: that was another thing that excited him, every time, whatever the circumstances. He thought of Carlton Sumner’s bristling mustache, the sweat stains at the armpits of his gold-colored shirt. He rose from the table and went to the door through which Francoise had gone. Silence hung in the hallway like a drape. He remembered coming through the
kitchen the day of the memorial party, and set off again in that direction.

  She was standing by the sink, holding a glass of white wine with the fingers of both hands wrapped around the stem. The veal was on a plate by the stove, and there were carrots and broccoli on a wooden chopping board, waiting to be prepared. She did not turn when he came in. Blue-black night was in the window now. “I do not know what we are doing,” she said, still without turning.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was a stupid thing to say, to ask.” He went and stood beside her and looked at her in profile. There were tears on her face. He touched her hands holding the glass and she flinched away from him. “Forgive me,” he said.

  She took a sharp breath and wiped at the tears with the heel of a hand. At last she turned. He saw that she was angry. “You know nothing,” she said, “nothing.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “I know a great deal. That’s why I’m here.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I. But I am here.”

  She put down the wine glass and took a step towards him and he held her in his arms and kissed her, tasting the wine on her breath. She moved her face aside and leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “I do not know what to do,” she said.

  He did not know, either. With Isabel he had been free, or as free as it was possible to be with anyone; but now, here, what had seemed silk cords had turned out to be the rigid bars of a cage in which he was a captive.

  He led her to a small plastic-topped table and they sat down, he on one side and she on the other, their hands entwined in the middle. “Tell me about Sumner,” he said.

  “Oh, what is there to tell. He tries his luck with every woman he meets.”

  “But you were friends, you and Richard and he.”

  She laughed. “You think that would make a difference, to a man like Carlton Sumner?”

  “Did Richard know about this pass that Sumner made at you?”

  “I told him, of course.”

  “And what did he do?”

  “He asked them to leave.”

  “And they left.”

  “Yes. I don’t know what Carl told Gloria, how he explained the sudden departure. I imagine she guessed.”

  “Could this be the cause of the fight your husband had with Sumner at that business meeting?”

  She gazed at him for a moment, then suddenly laughed. “Ah, cheri, ” she said, “you are so quaint and old-fashioned. Richard would not care about such a thing. When I told him, he was amused. The truth is, he was glad of a reason to ask them to leave, for he was bored with their company. I suspect, by the way, that Gloria had made a pass, as you say, at him. They were, they are, that kind of people, the Sumners.” She took her hands from his, and he brought out his cigarettes. “What did he say to you, when you spoke to him?” she asked. “You tell me the policeman was there too? Carlton would have enjoyed that, a visit from the police.”

  “He said very little. That he had made your husband an offer of a partnership that day, and that your husband walked out.”

  “A partnership? That is a lie. He wanted-he wants -to take over the business entirely. He wanted Richard out, with some silly title-executive director or something; that was his idea of a partnership.” She turned and gestured vaguely towards the food on the counter. “We should eat…”

  “I told you, I’m not hungry.”

  “I think you live on cigarettes.”

  “Don’t forget alcohol-that, too.”

  They left the kitchen and went back to the nook in the dining room. The night was pressing its glossy back against the window. The candle had burned halfway, and a knobbly trail of wax had dripped down the side and onto the table. Quirke lifted the bottle of Bordeaux. “You were drinking white, in the kitchen…?”

  “Red will do, it doesn’t matter-I never notice what I am drinking.” She watched him pour. “Why did you ask about Marie Bergin? Did you see her at the Sumners’? Did you speak to her?”

  “I saw her, yes. I didn’t speak to her. She doesn’t seem to say much. She looked frightened, to me.”

  “Frightened of what?”

  “I don’t know. Sumner, maybe. Why did you let her go?”

  “Oh, you know what servants are like-”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “They come and they go. They always think they are being treated badly, and that things will be so very much better elsewhere.” She was leaning forward with her hands clasped on the table before her and as she spoke her breath made the candle flame waver, and phantom shadows leapt up the walls around them. “Marie was nice, but a silly girl. I don’t know why you are interested in her.”

  He too leaned forward into the wavering cone of candlelight. “I’m trying to understand,” he said, “why your husband was killed.”

  It struck him that each of them rarely spoke the other’s name.

  “But what has this servant girl to do with it?” Francoise demanded.

  “I don’t know. But there has to be a reason why he died.” To that she said nothing. The prancing shadows around them grew still. “I think,” he said, “I should go home.”

  His hand was resting on the table; she touched the back of it with her fingertips. “I hoped you would stay.”

  He thought of that sprite lying in her white room, staring into the darkness, attending.

  “I think it’s better that I go,” he said.

  She pressed her nails lightly into his skin. “I love you,” she said, as matter-of-factly as if she were telling him the time.

  ***

  His footsteps echoed on the granite pavement as he walked along by the side of the Green. Behind the railings the trees were still; they stood in the light of the streetlamps, these vast living things, seeming to lean down as if watchful of his passing. What was he to do? His mind was a swirl of doubts and confusion. He did not know himself, he never had; he did not know how to live, not properly. He put a hand to his face and caught a trace of her perfume on his fingers, or was he imagining it? He could not get the woman out of his head, that was the simple fact of the matter; the thought of her had infected him, like a worm lodged in his brain. If only he could shake free of her, if somehow she were to cease to exist for him, even for a minute or two, he would be able to think clearly, but he was at the middle of a maze, and whichever way his thoughts turned her image was there before him, blocking all paths. What was he to do?

  The Shelbourne was lit up like an ocean liner. He walked along Merrion Row past Doheny amp; Nesbitt’s, and at Baggot Street turned into the broad sweep of Merrion Street and passed by the Government Buildings. His city, and yet not. No matter how many years he might live here there would always be a part of him that was alien. Was there anywhere that he truly belonged? He thought of the far west, where he had been an orphan child, that land of bare rock and crackling heather and stunted, wind-tormented trees. The trees, yes, they all leaned inland, frozen in perpetual flight, their thin bare branches clawing to be gone from this fearsome place. That was his west. They were trying to sell it now to the Americans as the land of trout streams and honeybees and Paul Henry skies. Any day now they would drive all the orphans and the miscreants out of Carricklea and turn it into a luxury hotel. Carricklea, Carricklea. The name tolled in him like the dark tolling of a distant bell.

  Mount Street was deserted. At No. 39 there was something white tied to the door knocker. It was an envelope, crumpled and stained, with a bit of string through one corner and tied in a neat bow to the knocker. His name was on it. He shrank from it, he did not want to touch it, but how could he not? He reached out and tugged with squeamish delicacy at the loose ends of the bow, and the loops of string slipped apart slackly, as if they had been dipped in oil. There was something in the envelope, a thing-could it be?-of flesh and bone, by the feel of it.

  He went back down the steps to the pavement and stood under the light of the streetlamp. His name, lacking the final e, had been scrawled
in shapeless block capitals, as if by a child. He ripped open the flap. The thing inside was wrapped in what, from the smell that floated up, he recognized as a torn-off scrap of a chip bag. When he saw the thing inside he instinctively threw it into the gutter. He squatted, peering, and twisted the torn envelope into a baton and poked at it. He saw with relief that it was not what he had first thought it to be. It was a finger, cheese-pale, crooked a little, as if beckoning. It had been cut off at the point where it joined the hand, and there was blood, and the white glint of bone. He unrolled the torn envelope again and looked inside. No message, nothing. He straightened up. He was aware of his heartbeat, a heavy dull slogging, and for a moment he felt light-headed and was afraid he might fall over. He looked up and down the street in the darkness, and saw no one. A car went past, but the driver did not give him a glance. He bent again and picked up the finger from the gutter and dropped it into the torn half of the envelope, folded it quickly, and put it in his pocket.

  ***

  In the flat he went into the kitchen and put the envelope in the sink. He supposed he should not feel so shaken, given that he dealt with dead flesh every day in work. It was a man’s finger, which was a relief-when he had first seen it he had thought at once of Phoebe, whom he had led so many times unwittingly into harm’s way. Back in the living room he picked up the telephone receiver, and only half knowing what he was doing dialed the number of Hackett’s office. He had still not switched on the light. Why would Hackett be there, at this hour? But he was. The familiar voice seemed to rise out of a hole in the darkness.

  “Dr. Quirke,” he said, “I was trying to call you myself.”

  Quirke could not grasp this. He was calling Hackett-why would Hackett be calling him? He stared into the receiver. “When?” he asked dully. “When were you calling me?”

  “The past hour. It’s your chap Sinclair. He was attacked.”

  “Attacked? What do you mean?”