Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke)

by Benjamin Black

  He lit a cigarette, turning away in case the match flame might be visible from that far window, and then walked aimlessly on, musing on his wife, of whom, if truth were told, he knew so little. He had loved her, once, this cool pale slender distant woman. He had wanted her because she was so different from the women he had known before he knew her, and whom he continued to know, despite being married. And she had loved him—loved him still, probably. Despite everything.

  He passed by the bandstand. It looked eerie, a filigreed iron gazebo standing in the moonlight, silent and brooding.

  Stop. Listen. There was definitely someone behind him.

  He was suddenly hot with fear, and the skin on the back of his neck crawled. He dared not turn, but then he did turn. Still there was no one to be seen, yet he knew there was someone, the same someone who had started up after him when he left Bella’s house. “Who’s there?” he called out softly, feeling foolish, his voice unsteady. “Who is it? Show yourself!”

  Silence, with the sense in it of stifled, jeering laughter. He slipped into the bandstand and stood in the webbed shadows there under the wrought-iron canopy. The concrete floor gave off a mingled smell of piss and fag ends. He thought with desperate yearning of how it would have been here earlier, when the mail boat was getting ready to set out, the passengers hurrying and people shouting farewells, the porters bumping luggage up the gangplank and the ship sounding its grave, portentous note. He could have lost himself in all that bustle, could have slipped away, and been safe.

  A woman was approaching along the pavement. He shrank back into the shadows. Why had he come in here? The bandstand offered no protection, it was open on all sides. He turned his head this way and that. The woman’s footsteps were closer now. He seemed to hear his name spoken, very softly, but thought he must have imagined it. He was looking all around, trying to see in all directions. He almost laughed to think of himself, like a wooden doll, his head spinning and his eyes starting in fright. Always, behind everything, there was a part of him that stood back skeptically. Now he told himself he was being ridiculous, that there was no one after him, that all this fear and foreboding was the product of a fevered and guilty mind.

  The woman had drawn level with the bandstand. He stepped forward, lifting a hand, ready to speak to her. He knew her! What was she doing here, at this hour? He began to say her name. The blow landed behind his right ear. He felt it distinctly, a dull shock without pain, and thought of a felled tree crashing to the ground. As he pitched forward he saw the moon slide sideways down the sky and disappear in darkness.

  8

  It turned out the Delahaye twins were at the party. Phoebe and Sinclair met one of them coming down the stairs just after they arrived. He was with his girlfriend—Phoebe recognized her but did not remember her name—and they stopped to talk, although they could hardly hear themselves above the din. The house was on a cobbled back street in the North Strand with an iron railway bridge running over it. It was a funny little tumbledown place, with everything on a miniature scale, the tiny windows, the low front door, the narrow staircase leading up to two cramped bedrooms and a bathroom hardly bigger than a cupboard. Whenever a train went past the entire place wobbled and shook like a jelly out of its mold. Breen, the fellow whose house it was, had been at college with Sinclair, and fitted well with the place, being short and stout, with a shock of black curls and rimless glasses that kept sliding down the glistening, concave bridge of his snub nose.

  Neither Phoebe nor Sinclair cared much for parties, and they had come to this one only because they had worried no one else would, since poor Breen was not exactly known as a social magnet. To their surprise they found the house throbbing with people and noise. Breen came bustling to meet them, sweaty and shiny and snuffling with happy laughter. He took the bottle of Bordeaux they had brought and glanced appreciatively at the label and said there was wine open in the kitchen. He gestured with pride at the heaving mass of people around them. “The joint,” he said, “is jumping.” He wore plimsolls and checked tweed trousers hoist at half-mast by a pair of bright red braces and a shirt of emerald green with a floppy collar. He used to profess a desire to be a painter, Sinclair recalled. He worked in the Coombe hospital, delivering babies, “by the yard, like sausages,” as he said.

  Now he plunged off, with their bottle of claret under his arm, and the last they saw of him was his tweed-clad, Bunteresque backside disappearing into the crowd. They looked at each other, smiling in dismay. Phoebe took Sinclair’s hand and they set off upstairs, where it might be less crowded, and met the Delahaye twin and his girlfriend coming down. “Don’t bother,” Delahaye said, or yelled, rather, “it’s bedlam up there!”

  They went together, the four of them, down the short hall to the back of the house. Phoebe plucked at Sinclair’s sleeve and put her mouth close to his ear. “Which one of them is it?” she asked, but Sinclair only lifted his hands helplessly and shook his head.

  In the crowded kitchen they found paper cups and sloshed them full of Mooney’s Spanish Burgundy and went on out to the garden, where the soft night air was a sudden balm. The garden was really no more than a walled yard, smelling of drains and dustbins, with a square of weed-choked clay and in one corner a privy with a broken door. There was a crowd of people out here, too, smoking and drinking. A couple were kissing in the shadow of the privy. Beyond the back wall the moon was perched on a distant chimney pot.

  “This is Tanya Somers, by the way,” the young Delahaye said. He wore a black blazer and white sailing trousers with a Trinity tie for a belt. “And I’m Jonas, in case you’re wondering.” Phoebe and Sinclair smiled and shrugged as if to say that of course they had known which twin he was. “People are never sure, I know,” Jonas said. “James is here somewhere,” he added.

  Tanya Somers had lazy good looks and a jaded manner. She wore her hair long, in a smooth, gleaming black swath that she kept pushing from her shoulders with negligent sweeps of the hand. She made no attempt to hide the fact that she did not know who Phoebe and Sinclair were, and that she was not much interested in finding out. When she spoke, Phoebe recognized the Rathgar accent. “This wine is filthy,” she said. With a deft flick she emptied the contents of her cup into the weeds. “I’m going to see if there’s any beer.” She went off at an insolent slouch, tossing her hair back.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” Phoebe said to Jonas.

  He shrugged. “Yes—I think people were a bit shocked to see me—us—here, considering it only happened so recently. I suppose they expected us to go into mourning for a year and a day, like in the old song.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they’d understand,” Phoebe said, too quickly. Jonas Delahaye looked at her, the corners of his mouth twitching with amusement, and she felt herself flush and was glad of the darkness. “I mean,” she went on, “it’s not like the old days, when everybody used to go into mourning for months, it seemed.” She felt Sinclair’s elbow nudge her gently in the side. “Anyway, that’s what I think,” she finished lamely.

  “Yes, well, I daresay you’re right,” Jonas said, doing his patrician drawl. He looked into the paper cup and frowned. “Tanny is right—this stuff is awful.” And he too threw the wine into the weeds and, giving them both a quick little smile, stepped past them and went into the kitchen.

  “Oh, God,” Phoebe wailed softly.

  “I don’t really think he was offended,” Sinclair said drily.

  “And you, just standing there—you could have said something!”

  He laughed. “Such as what? You were doing perfectly well yourself, digging the hole deeper and deeper.” He cupped a hand fondly against her cheek. “Anyway,” he said, “you’re getting as bad as your father.”

  “What do you mean!”

  “You know very well what I mean—poking your nose into other people’s business, asking questions and looking for clues.” Again he laughed, and this time pinched her cheek. “Our own Nancy Drew, female investigator.”

  She
took a step backwards. “You—!” He reached out and took her in his arms. She beat her fists softly against his chest, and now she too was laughing. “Pig,” she said.

  “That’s a nice thing to call a Jew.”

  She kissed him. “My Jew,” she said softly, her breath mingling with his.

  They went inside and for several minutes wandered about in the party, going in single file, Sinclair ahead and leading Phoebe by the hand, the two of them pressing themselves sideways through the dense, hot-smelling crowd. There was a gramophone somewhere, and now a new record began—Elvis Presley, of course, whining about his blue suede shoes. Phoebe had no ear for pop music.

  They encountered the second Delahaye twin standing in the doorway of one of the bedrooms, talking to a dark-haired girl with a fringe. He had backed her against the doorjamb, and she was looking up at him out of large, luminous eyes as he leaned over her, one hand on the jamb and the other against the wall, enclosing her in an almost embrace, as if he would menace and at the same time caress her. He had a paper cup of wine in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in the other. A bright red handkerchief drooped from the breast pocket of his pale linen jacket. Sinclair tapped him on the shoulder. “Hello, James.”

  Delahaye turned his head. There was a bleared look in his eye. “Oh, hello, Sinclair,” he said, slurring a little. “You here too? God, what a scrum, eh? This is”—he turned back to the girl—“what did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t,” the girl said, and smirked.

  “Anyway, you’re a smasher.” He turned again and this time addressed Phoebe. “Isn’t she a smasher?”

  Phoebe gave him a cool bland smile and moved on, but not before she had linked a finger around Sinclair’s thumb and tugged at it.

  “Take care, James,” Sinclair said. He smiled at the girl. “You too.”

  They found a corner of the bedroom that was inexplicably free of people and immediately took possession of it. Breen’s bed was heaped with discarded jackets and cardigans, and in the midst of the heap a couple lay on their sides facing each other, glued mouth to mouth. The boy’s hand kept moving up the girl’s stockinged leg, trying to get under the hem of her skirt, and she kept batting it away, with an almost lazy gesture. Phoebe and Sinclair tried to ignore them.

  “You must admit,” Phoebe said, “it’s very strange, the way that man died.”

  “Which man?” Sinclair asked innocently. She smacked his hand.

  “Don’t tease, you,” she said. “The twins’ father, I mean, as you very well know.”

  “Funny,” Sinclair said, “calling them twins. You never think of grown-ups being twins—but they certainly are. You never see one but you see the other.”

  Phoebe gave a little shudder. “I’d hate to be a twin—wouldn’t you?”

  He offered her a cigarette, but she shook her head, and he lit one for himself, thinking. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t even got a sibling.”

  “Well, neither have I.”

  They were silent briefly. The subject of Phoebe’s past and parentage was a delicate one, not to be lightly alluded to. Quirke had not been a good father.

  “I must say,” Sinclair said, “they don’t seem very—well, they don’t seem very upset. Would you do it? Go out to a party?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The girl on the bed moaned softly. The boy had succeeded in getting his hand under her skirt and was rummaging urgently in her lap. Phoebe turned away. Sinclair was half sitting against the sill of the little square window, and she had an urge to sit on his knee, but did not.

  There was a square of moonlight in the window with two bars of shadow making an out-of-kilter cross. She realized that she had never before considered the possibility of her father dying, of his being dead. For the first nineteen years of her life she had thought Quirke was her uncle, and even still she was wrestling with the fact of what he really was to her. Father was not a word that sat easily in her mind, but father he was, and very much living. How would she feel if he were dead? She did not know, and this surprised her, and faintly appalled her.

  “Of course, I know what you think,” Sinclair said, mock-innocently again. “I heard you telling Jonas Delahaye—you’re all for casting aside those old fuddy-duddy notions about mourning and all the rest of it.”

  “Oh, stop,” she said distractedly. She was still puzzling over the prospect of Quirke’s projected demise. Would she be sad? Of course she would. Would she suffer, would she grieve? That was an altogether different question.

  The girl on the bed wriggled out of the boy’s embrace and struggled up and sat there among the crumpled clothes, blinking, a hand plunged in her hair. The boy sat up too, more slowly, and pawed at her shoulder entreatingly. The girl wriggled again, and disconsolately he let fall his hand. The two of them seemed unaware that anyone else was in the room, although there were people milling at the foot of the bed and in the doorway.

  In the moonlight at the window Sinclair, still seated awkwardly, put an arm around Phoebe’s hips and drew her close to him. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Why?” She touched him under the chin and made him look up at her. “What are you sorry for?”

  He glanced aside. “Oh, you know. Fathers. Death. All that.”

  “Yes,” she said distantly, as if not to him but to someone else. “All that.”

  * * *

  He woke, if it could be called waking, into liquid darkness. Everything was moving under him with a slewing, sideways roll that was familiar. He thought of his student days, when he was starting to drink, and after half a dozen beers he would wake in the middle of the night with a parched mouth and a thudding headache, while the bed on which he lay revolved slowly around him like a broken carousel. Also, he was wet. He was lying on his side with his legs drawn up to his chest and half his head submerged in water. It was seawater, he knew from the texture of it. A boat, then, but a boat that had something wrong with it. There was none of the sense of a boat’s trim lightness; this vessel felt stodgy, like the barely floating hollowed-out stump of a tree.

  He tried to sit up, and indeed saw himself doing it, as in a piece of trick photography, a wraith rising up out of himself while his body lay there lumpy and inert. The pain in the back of his head seemed a kind of noise, a dully pulsing roar that made the bones of his skull vibrate. He turned his head and peered up at the stars. They too seemed to be vibrating, zigzagging about, like fireflies. The last thing he had seen was the moon sliding down the sky—where was it now?

  At last, with a groan, he got himself up to a sitting position. He had been wedged into the space between the two thwarts. His clothes were sopping. He put a hand cautiously to the back of his head and winced when he felt the pulpy knot under his ear. What had he been hit with? Something wooden. He looked about. Ahead there was only the darkly gleaming sea to the horizon, behind him were the lights of Dun Laoghaire, a long way off. And what was that? A boat, gliding away from him landwards, silent, white-sailed, a light glimmering at the tip of its mast. He tried to shout but his voice would not work. He was shivering now, sitting there in the slopping, warmish, deepening water. He looked to the mast. There was no sail: it had been taken away.

  Deepening. The water was deepening.

  He pressed forward onto his hands and knees and felt about, under the puddle of water. Sound workmanship, clinker-built. It was—could it be?—yes, it was the Rascal, his own twelve-footer. His questing hands, scrabbling and splashing, found what they had been looking for, what he had known they would find. Someone had taken a crowbar to the bottom of the boat and opened a crack between the boards six inches long and a good half inch wide; he could feel the current of colder water coming up through it, a silken flow. He had been scuttled. A strange calm came over him. She’s sinking, he thought, and I’m going to drown.

  It seemed almost a joke, a prank someone had played on him. Then panic surged up like bile and he plunged both his hands over the rent in the boards, as if
that way he could stop the water coming in. But water was a thing that would not be stopped. He groaned and cursed. This was wrong, this was all wrong—he could not drown, it was impossible. He looked over his shoulder towards the other boat, but all he could see of it now was the mast light, swaying and winking. He tried again to cry out—Help! Wait!—but the paltry words stuck in his swollen throat. He began to weep helplessly. The bruise on the back of his head, as if angered by his tears, set up a violent hammering that drove him down on all fours again, with his head hanging.

  The water was coming in faster now. He tried to stand but the blood rushed from his head and he fell over, making a great splash. The boat tipped heavily sideways and then righted itself, the water sloshing around his knees. He was very cold now, shivering in rhythmic spasms, and his teeth chattered. His mind raced, skittering this way and that, like a rat in a trap.

  He stood up again, and this time managed to stay upright. He gazed at the far dark shore with its swaying lights. He thought of the people there, sleeping, dreaming, and of the ones who were awake, doing ordinary things, making love, drinking, fighting—alive, all of them. Would Sylvia be asleep? Maybe she was lying awake in the dark, wondering where he was. Or maybe she had got up: maybe she was standing at the window in the living room, looking out anxiously into the night, watching for him.

  The water was up to the gunwales now, and lapping round his knees. Terror had tightened his throat and he could not swallow. The mast light of the other boat was no longer to be seen. He held his cold face in his hands.

  No, he would not go this way, he would not let the boat take him with her. He sucked in a deep breath, the air rasping in his throat, then closed his eyes and clambered over the side.