A Death in Summer (21 page)

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He stayed, as he always did, until she was asleep. She did not take long to drop off—he was her sedative, he ruefully told himself—and it was still early, not yet nine, when he slipped out of the house and turned left and walked up towards Fitzwilliam Square. The car that had been parked on the other side of the road when he arrived—a green Morgan, with the top up and someone inside it, a shadow behind the wheel—was no longer there. He walked on.

There was a hazy green glow over the square and mist on the grass behind the black railings. The whores were out, four or five of them, two of them keeping each other company, both skinny and dressed in black and starkly pale as the harpies in Dracula’s castle. They gave him a look as he passed by but made no overture; maybe they thought he was a plainclothes man out to trap them. One of them had a limp—the clap, most likely. One day, not so far in the future, he might fold back the corner of a sheet and find her before him on the slab, that thin face, the bluish eyelids closed, her lip still swollen. He wondered, as he often wondered, if he should leave this city, try his luck somewhere else, London, New York, even. Quirke would never retire, or by the time he did it would be too late to be his successor; something that was in him now would have been used up, a vital force would be gone.

He had walked up this way, rather than going down to Baggot Street, to avoid being tempted to call on Phoebe. He did not know why he was reluctant to see her. She was probably not at home, anyway, he thought; he remembered Quirke saying he would be taking her to dinner tonight. It struck him that he had no friends. He did not mind this. There were people he knew, of course, from college days, from work, but he rarely saw any of them. He preferred his own company. He did not suffer fools gladly and the world was full of fools. But that was not what was keeping him from Phoebe, for Phoebe was certainly no fool.

Poor Dannie. Was there to be no help for her? Something had happened in her life that she would not speak about, something unspeakable, then.

He walked around two sides of the square and turned up towards Leeson Street. Maybe he would call into Hartigan’s and drink a beer; he liked to sit on a stool in the corner and watch the life of the pub going on, what people took to be life. As he was passing by Kingram Place a fellow in a windcheater stepped out, waggling a cigarette at him. “Got a match, pal?” He was reaching for his lighter in his jacket pocket when he heard a rapid step behind him, and then there was a crash of some kind, and a burst of light, and after that, nothing but blackness.

*   *   *

Quirke had been to dinner, but not with Phoebe. Françoise 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.

Françoise 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. Françoise 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 Françoise 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? Françoise? 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 Françoise 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 Françoise, 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 Françoise 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 Françoise. 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 Françoise 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 Françoise 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 Françoise 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,
chéri,
” 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.”