A Death in Summer (18 page)

Rose had drawn her mouth down at one corner in a clownish grimace. “I don’t know,” she said, “that I approve.”

“You mean you don’t approve of David, or of my seeing him?”

“I haven’t said I
dis
approve. I haven’t decided.”

“Do you know David?” Phoebe asked gently.

“Do I? I may have met him. I’ve certainly heard him spoken of.”

“He’s Jewish.”

“Ah. Is he.”

This brought a brief and thoughtful hiatus, during which Phoebe addressed herself to the rather tough and overcooked piece of beef on her plate. She drank more wine; she felt in need of its fortifying effect. “Do you disapprove of
that
?” she asked, keeping her eyes lowered.

“Of what?”

“You know very well what—of David’s being a Jew.”

“I have nothing but regard for the Jewish people,” Rose said piously. “Industrious folk, careful with money, clever, resourceful, ambitious for their children. I confess I didn’t know you had any, in this country.”

“I didn’t either, really,” Phoebe said, laughing, “but we have.”

Rose’s face took on a dreamy look. “The Jews I know, or at least know of, are New Yorkers, mostly, doctors and dentists and the like, and their wives, large-sized ladies with mustaches and piercing voices.”

“You see?” Phoebe cried, laughing again, “you
are
bigoted.”

Rose was calmly dismissive, lifting her nose at an angle and gazing off to one side. “Some of the most charming and cultivated men I have known were bigots to the bone.”

“Anyway,” Phoebe said, “you needn’t think you’re going to put me off David by being horrible about him. In fact, he’s no more Jewish than I am.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean, may I inquire?”

“Jewishness is a state of mind—”

“It most certainly is more than a state of mind, my girl. There’s such a thing as blood.”

“Oh, please,” Phoebe said, groaning and laughing at the same time. “You’re so old-fashioned. Blood! You sound like someone in the Bible.”

“Which, I would remind you, was written by Jews. They know about such things.”

“Such things? What things?”

“Might I ask, my dear young woman, if by any chance you are familiar with the word
mis-ceg-en-ation
?”

Phoebe put down her cutlery, with a restrained bang this time. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said, but found it impossible really to be angry with Rose, who she knew anyway was only amusing herself by talking about these things in this provocative way. Rose did not care much about anything; it was one of the reasons Phoebe was so fond of her. “Speaking of my father,” she said, “I suspect he’s on the way to getting himself into trouble again.”

“If you think you can change the subject, I can tell you that you won’t.”

“I just have. You’re not eating your fish, by the way—is it all right?”

“I’m too distracted, as you should know. This Sinclair—”

“This
trouble,
” Phoebe said firmly, “that Quirke is maneuvering himself into, has to do with that man who died, who was shot, Richard Jewell.”

“Shot?” Rose repeated, diverted despite herself. “Didn’t he shoot himself? That’s what the papers implied.”

“Quirke thinks someone else did it.”

“Lord”—in her accent it was
Lawd
—“don’t say he’s playing at detectives again?”

“I’m afraid he is. He’s teamed up with that Inspector Hackett—”

“Oh, my!”

“—and they’re going about interviewing people, and all the rest of it, and generally behaving like a pair of schoolboys.”

Phoebe had her eyes on her plate again, and kept them there. Despite the lightness of her tone she knew very well, and so did Rose, that the crimes Quirke had involved himself in solving had not been schoolboy fare; terrible things had been done, and the doers of them had not all been brought to justice. The world, so Quirke and Inspector Hackett had taught Phoebe, is more darkly ambiguous than she would have guessed a few short years ago.

“And how,” she asked, changing the subject again, “is my erstwhile father?”

“Erstwhile? What a way you people have of talking over here—it’s like being in a Shakespeare play all the time. If you mean Malachy, my present spouse, well, my dear, I have to tell you he is getting more weird every day.” Phoebe delighted in an accent that could put three distinct and separate syllables into the word
weird
. “He is loving-kindness itself, of course, and I treasure him, but Lordy, if I thought that after marrying him I could shape and mold the man, I was very,
ve-ry
mistaken. Stubborn as an old mule, that’s my Mal. But then”—she sighed—“I wouldn’t have him any other way.” She pushed her plate away with one finger. Despite being distracted, as she’d claimed, she had eaten every morsel on it save the fish bones. Rose had been poor when she was young, before she married a rich man, and she had the old habit still of letting nothing go to waste. “You do know,” she said, “that I once had a notion of your—what’s the opposite of erstwhile?—well, of your
real
father, the impossible Dr. Quirke?”

“Yes, I know,” Phoebe said, keeping her voice steady; she too had once had a notion of Rose as her stepmother, and had been bitterly disappointed and resentful when Rose fixed on Malachy Griffin instead.

“It would have been a disaster, of course—a
dis-aster,
my dear.”

“Yes, it probably would.”

“Quirke, you see, would have stood up to me, and there would have been fights—oh, my, there would have been
fights
.”

“But you said Malachy is stubborn too.”

“Stubborn is one thing, relentless is another. And ruthless. You know Quirke.”

Did she? Somehow, she doubted it. Somehow, Phoebe thought, there would be no knowing Quirke, not really. He did not even know himself.

“Relentless,” Phoebe said. “Yes, I suppose he is.”

Rose was scanning the dessert menu intently; she had a sweet tooth, which she tried to resist, with not much success. She ordered meringues with cream and raspberry sauce. Phoebe said she would have coffee only; she was feeling slightly queasy, after her struggle with that steak.

“And this business about the man that was shot,” Rose said. “I suppose he won’t let that alone until he’s caused the usual mayhem and annoyed powerful people and got himself roughed up and set everyone against him? He’s a kind of innocent, you know, in spite of everything. That’s what your late grandfather used to say about him. Quirke’s a damn fool, Josh would say. He thinks a good man can set the world to right, all the while not seeing that the last thing folks want is the world to be as it should be. And he knew about the world, and about folks, did my Josh.”

Rose’s meringues arrived; they looked like soiled snow splashed with blood. Phoebe averted her eye. “Yet you said Quirke also is ruthless,” she said.

“And so he is, when it comes to getting what he wants, for himself. That’s what they’re all like, these self-appointed knights in shining armor—inside all that gleaming steel they’re just like the rest of us, greedy and selfish and cruel. Oh, don’t mistake me”—she waved her dessert spoon—“I love Quirke dearly, I surely do. I was
in
love with him, once, for a while, but that didn’t stop me from seeing him as he is.” She gave Phoebe a piercing look, and grinned. “I know what you’re thinking—it takes one to know one. And it’s true. I ain’t no saint”—suddenly she was a hillbilly—“but I don’t pretend otherwise. Now, do I?”

“You’re better than you think,” Phoebe said, smiling. “And Quirke is better than you think, too.”

“Well, my darling, you may be right, but oh, dear, you have so much to learn. By the way, this meringue is just
dee-licious
.”

*   *   *

A leaden dawn was struggling to break when the telephone on Quirke’s bedside table rang. He reared up in fright, fighting an arm free from the tangle of sheets, his heart pounding. In his haste he knocked the receiver off its stand and had to fumble for it on the floor. He feared and hated telephones. It was Isabel Galloway, he knew it was she almost before she spoke. “You bastard,” she said breathily—her lips must have been pushed against the mouthpiece—and immediately hung up. He kept the receiver to his ear, listening to the hollow hum inside it, his head hanging and his eyes shut tight. Dear God.

The room was hot and airless and smelled of himself. He found his cigarettes on the table, lit one. He got out of bed and drew the curtains all the way open. Three floors below, the long narrow garden that no one ever tended was a riot of sullen green under the gray light of day. The cigarette smoke made him cough; he doubled over, hacking and wheezing. He needed a drink—what he would not give for a drink, right now, despite the hour and his cotton-wool morning mouth. He sat down on the side of the bed and dialed her number. Engaged—she would have left it off the hook. He pictured her, in her silk tea gown with the big flowers printed on it, lying across the bed with her face in the pillows, sobbing, and cursing him between sobs.

How did she know? How had she found out?

*   *   *

He realized, later, what a mistake he had made in not going straightaway to her house in Portobello, however early it was when she had called him. Now it was his turn to curse himself. He was cutting open the rib cage of an old woman who had died under suspicious circumstances in the care of her spinster daughter when Sinclair came to tell him he was wanted urgently on the phone—the phone, again!—and something inside him instantly turned to ice.

She had been brought to St. James’s. Of all the city’s hospitals it was the one he disliked most. Whenever he thought of the place he recalled with a shiver a night of storm and black rain when he had stood sheltering in a bleak porch under the wildly swaying light of an oil lamp—an oil lamp? surely he was mistaken?—and waited for a nurse who worked in the casualty department, who was supposed to be going on a date with him, but who in the end stood him up. How Isabel had got there he never discovered—maybe she had called for an ambulance herself, before she took the pills. He would not have put it past her.

She was in a tiny room with a narrow brick window that looked down on a brick boiler house. The bed too was narrow, much too narrow, it seemed, to accommodate a normal-sized person, even one as trimly made as Isabel. Her face was drawn and had a greenish cast. She had on what he could see was a hospital smock. Her arms were outside the blankets, stretched rigid at her sides. At least, he thought, she had not cut her wrists.

“You know,” he said, “this kind of thing is terribly bad for your health.”

She gazed at him in silence. She had the look of an El Greco martyr. “That’s right, laugh,” she said. “A joke for every occasion.”

She was hoarse, he supposed from the effect of the tubes they would have forced down her throat when they were pumping her stomach. He had spoken to the ward sister, a raw-faced nun in a white wimple, who had not met his eye but tightened her lips and said Miss Galloway had been very careless, swallowing all those pills by accident; no, she had not been in serious danger; yes, they would keep her in tonight and probably she could go home tomorrow.

“Do you want me to open this window?” he asked her now. “It’s stuffy in here.”

“Jesus,” Isabel said, “is that all you can say, that it’s stuffy?”

“What do you want me to say?”

He felt sorry for her, and yet he felt remote from her, too, remote from everything here in this shabby little room, as if he were floating high up under the ceiling and looking down on the scene with no more than mild curiosity.

“I didn’t think you could be so cruel,” she said.

“I didn’t think you could be so stupid.” He winced; the words had come out before he could check them. He lifted his shoulders and let them droop again. “I’m sorry.”

She stirred in the bed, as if something somewhere had delivered her a stab of pain. “Yes, well, you’re not half as sorry as I am.”

“How did you find out? Who told you?”

She tried to laugh, but coughed instead, drily. “Did you think you could climb into bed with the widow of what’s-his-name—Diamond Dick, is it?—while he was still fresh in his grave and that half the city wouldn’t know before you’d got your socks back on? You’re not only a louse, Quirke, you’re a fool, too.” She turned her face to the wall.

He did not want to see her suffer, really, he did not, but he felt paralyzed and did not know how to help her. “I’m sorry,” he said again, more weakly than ever.

She was not listening. “What’s she like, anyway?” she asked. “Which kind of French is she—sultry and smoldering or cool and detached?”

“Don’t.”

“You’d prefer cool, I imagine. You don’t go in much for passion, do you.”

He wished she would stop; he did not want to be made to pity her. “I’m sorry I’ve hurt you,” he said. “These things happen. It’s no one’s fault.”

“Oh, no,” she said bitterly, “no one’s to blame, of course, least of all you. Give me a cigarette, will you?”