A Death in Summer (31 page)

David at last drew his face back from hers. “Phoebe—” he began, but she cut him off.

“No, David, wait,” she said. “I have something to tell you. It’s about Dannie.”

*   *   *

Dannie could have gone to David Sinclair; even though he was in the hospital she could have gone to him. But instead it was to Phoebe, her new friend, that in the end she came. And it was a new version of Dannie, too, that Phoebe met. For Dannie was in a state, oh, a royal state, as she said herself, with almost a laugh. It was one of the refinements of her mysterious condition—the doctors, it seemed, were baffled by her—that even when she was in the deepest distress there was a part of her that was able to stand off to the side, observing, commenting, judging, mocking. She said, “Not bad enough to feel so bad, I have to see myself feeling it, too.”

Phoebe had been returning from work, strolling thoughtfully along Baggot Street through the summer dusk, when she had spied Dannie sitting in a huddle on the steps in front of the house with her arms around her shins and her forehead resting on her knees. It was the evening of the day that she had made that painful visit to David Sinclair at the hospital. Dannie seemed in a daze, and Phoebe had to help her up, and when they were inside, in Phoebe’s room, Dannie made at once for the bed and sat down on it, with her feet flat on the floor and her hands palm upwards in her lap and her head hanging. “Dannie, please, tell me what’s the matter,” Phoebe said, but Dannie only shook her head slowly, moving it from side to side like a jerky pendulum. Phoebe knelt beside her and tried to see into her face. “Dannie, what is it? Are you ill?”

Dannie muttered something but Phoebe could not make out the words. Phoebe stood up and went to the little stove in the corner and filled the coffee percolator and set it on the heat. She did not know what else to do. Her own hands were shaking now.

When the coffee was made Dannie drank a little of it, clutching the cup tightly with both hands, her head still bent and her hair hanging down. At last she cleared her throat and spoke. “You know I’m Jewish.”

Phoebe frowned. Had she known? She could not remember, but thought it best to pretend. She went back and stood by the stove. “Yes,” she said, “yes, I know.”

“I went to a Catholic school, though. I suppose my parents wanted me to learn how to fit in.” She lifted her head, and Phoebe was shocked by the look of her, the expression in her eyes and the deep mauve shadows under them, the slack and bloodless lips. “What about you, where did you go to school?”

“I went to the nuns, too,” Phoebe said. “Loreto.”

Dannie’s features realigned themselves; it took Phoebe a moment to realize that she was smiling.

“We might have known each other. Maybe we even met at a hockey match, or some choir thing. Do you think that’s possible?”

“Yes,” Phoebe said, “it’s possible, of course. But I’m sure I would have remembered you.”

“Do you think so, really?” The look in Dannie’s eyes turned vacant. “I’d like to have known you. We could have been friends. I would have confessed to you about being a Jew and you wouldn’t have minded. Not that anyone was taken in; they all knew I was different—an outsider.” She blinked. “Have you a cigarette?”

“Sorry, no. I gave up.”

“It doesn’t matter, I don’t really smoke. Only I get so fidgety I try to find something to do with my hands.”

“I could go out and buy some—the Q & L is probably open still.”

But Dannie had lost interest in the subject of cigarettes. She moved her blurred gaze about the room. She seemed exhausted, exhausted and in desolation—the word came to Phoebe and seemed the only one that fitted. Desolation.

There was shouting outside in the street, a couple arguing; they sounded drunk, not only the man but the woman, too.

“Have you been to see David?” Dannie asked. She sounded vague, as if she were thinking of something else, as if this were not quite the question she had meant to ask. The man in the street was cursing now, and calling the woman names.

“Yes,” Phoebe said. “I went to see him this morning, at the hospital.”

“How is he?”

“His hand is very painful, and they had given him some drug, but he’s all right.”

“I’m glad,” Dannie said, more vague than ever. She was still clutching the coffee cup, though she had taken no more than a couple of sips of the coffee. “So this is where you live. I wondered.”

“It’s terribly small. Hardly room enough for one.”

Dannie made a flinching movement and lifted up her face with its stricken look. “I’m sorry,” she said, “do you want me to go?”

Phoebe laughed and went and sat beside her on the bed. “Of course not—that’s not what I meant. It’s just that I don’t realize how tiny the place is until there’s someone else here. My father keeps trying to get me to move. He wants to buy a house for the two of us to share.”

Dannie had turned her head and was gazing at her now in what seemed a kind of dreamy wonderment. “Your father is Dr. Quirke.”

“That’s right.”

“But your name is Griffin.”

Phoebe smiled and lowered her gaze awkwardly. “That’s a long story.”

“I hardly remember my father; he died when I was very young. I remember his funeral. They say he was a terrible man. I’m sure it’s true. Everyone in our family is terrible. I’m terrible.” More striking than the words was the mildly pensive way in which she spoke them, as if she were stating a truth known to all. She looked into the coffee cup. “You know that what happened to David was my fault.”

“Your fault? How?”

“Everything has been my fault. That’s why I’ve come here—do you mind?”

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

Dannie set the cup on the floor and lay back abruptly on the bed. She folded both her arms over her eyes. Phoebe had not switched on a light and the last of the dusk was dying in the room. Dannie looked so strange, lying there, with her feet on the floor and her head almost touching the wall behind the bed. When she spoke, her words seemed to be coming out of a covered hollow in the air. “Do you remember,” she said, “at school when we were little, how they used to tell us to prepare ourselves mentally before going to confession? I used to go, you know, even though I wasn’t supposed to. I always liked examining my conscience and making a mental list of my sins.” She lifted her arms and squinted along the length of herself at Phoebe. “Did you invent sins?”

“I’m sure we all did.”

“Do you think so? I thought I was the only one.” She put her arms back over her face and her voice became muffled again. “I used to pretend to have stolen things. I’m sure now the priests knew I was lying, though they never said. Maybe they weren’t interested—I often thought they weren’t even listening. I suppose it was boring, a string of little girls whispering in the dark about touching themselves and talking back to their parents.”

She stopped. The couple in the street had gone, swearing and shrieking as they went.

Phoebe spoke. “What did you mean when you said that what happened to David was your fault?”

There was no reply for a long time; then Dannie dropped her arms away from her face and put her elbows behind her and pushed herself up until she was half lying, half sitting on the mattress. She coughed, and sat up fully, and with both hands pushed her hair away from her face.

“Phoebe,” she said, “will you hear my confession?”

*   *   *

It was dark in the room when Dannie fell asleep. She had drawn up her legs and lain down on her side and joined her hands as if for prayer and placed them under her cheek, and within moments her breathing had become regular and shallow. All the tension had drained from her and she seemed at peace now. Phoebe sat by her, not daring to move for fear of waking her. She wondered what she should do. The things she had heard in the past hour seemed a sort of fairy tale, a dark fantasy of injury, loss, and revenge. Some parts of it, she supposed, must be true, but which parts? If even a little of it was the case, she must do something, tell someone. She was frightened, frightened for Dannie and what she would be like when she woke up, what she might attempt; she was frightened for herself, too, though she did not know what it was exactly that she feared might happen to her. Yes, it was like a fairy tale, and she was in it, wandering lost by night in a dark enchanted forest, where strange night birds whistled and shrieked, and beasts moved in the thickets, and the brambles with their terrible thorns reached out to twine themselves around her limbs and hold her fast.

At last, cautiously, anxious not to make a sound, she stood up from the bed. She made to switch on a lamp but changed her mind. At the window the light from the streetlamp outside had erected a tall box of faint grainy radiance into which she stepped, searching in her purse for change. On her way out she paused by the bed and lifted the hanging half of the coverlet and draped it over the sleeping young woman. Then she went down to the hall and on the telephone there called Jimmy Minor.

Jimmy was in the newsroom at the
Clarion,
writing up a report on a train crash out at Greystones. “No,” he said, “no one killed, damn it.”

She told him the gist of Dannie’s story, hearing how unlikely it sounded, how crazy, and yet how persuasive too, in all its awfulness. By the time she was finished, her pennies had run out and Jimmy said he would call her back. She waited by the phone but five minutes or more passed before it rang. Jimmy’s tone had changed now; he sounded distant, almost formal. Had he been speaking to someone in the office, had he sought someone’s advice? He said he thought Dannie must be having a breakdown, and that Phoebe should call a doctor for her. Phoebe was puzzled. She had thought Jimmy would leap at the story, that he would drop everything and grab his hat and coat, like a reporter in a film, and come rushing up to Baggot Street to hear it for himself, from Dannie’s own lips. Was he afraid? Was he worried for his job? The Jewells still owned the
Clarion,
after all, and Richard Jewell’s brother, Ronnie, was expected to arrive any day from Rhodesia and take over the running of the business. Phoebe was disappointed in Jimmy—more, she felt abandoned by him, for despite any reservations she might have about him she had always thought of Jimmy as a fearless friend.

“She’s raving,” he said coldly, “she must be. She’s half mad most of the time, isn’t she? Or so I hear.”

“I don’t think it’s all a fantasy,” Phoebe said. “You didn’t hear her, the conviction in her voice.”

“Loonies always sound convincing—it’s what keeps the head doctors in employment, trying to find the grain of truth in the sackloads of chaff.”

How glib he is, she suddenly thought, glib and—yes—and cowardly. “All right,” she said dully. “I’m sorry I called.”

“Listen—” he began, with that whine that came into his voice when he felt called on to defend himself, but she hung up before he could say any more.

Why should she listen? He had not listened to her.

She had no more pennies, but she found a sixpence at the bottom of her purse, and pressed it into the slot, and dialed.

*   *   *

Rose Griffin, who was rich, had made her husband, Malachy, sell his house in Rathgar after he married her, and now the couple lived in glacial splendor in a square white mansion on Ailesbury Road not far from the French embassy. It was almost midnight when the taxi carrying Dannie Jewell and Phoebe drew up at the high wrought-iron gates. Rose was standing in the lighted doorway, waiting for them. She wore a blue cocktail dress with a light shawl draped over her shoulders. She had been to dinner at the American ambassador’s residence in the Phoenix Park. “Your phone call caught me just as I came in,” she said in her broadest southern drawl. “What an evening—my dears, the tedium! Malachy, by the way, is off at some conference or other—all about babies, I’m sure—so I’m all alone here, rattling around like a dry old bean in a dry old pod.” She turned to Dannie. “Miss Jewell, I don’t believe we’ve met, but I’ve heard of you.”

She led the way along the hall, over the gleaming parquet. They passed by large lofty rooms with chandeliers and crammed with big gleaming pieces of dark furniture. Rose wore high heels, and the seams of her stocking were as straight as plumb lines. She prided herself, Phoebe knew, on never being caught unprepared. On the phone she had listened without comment or question while Phoebe told her about Dannie, and then had said at once that they must take a taxi, both of them, and come to Ailesbury Road. “I would send the car for you, but I told the driver to put it in the garage and go home.”

Now she stopped and opened the door onto a small but splendid study, with leather-upholstered armchairs and a small exquisite Louis XIV writing desk. There was a Persian rug on the floor, and the curtains were of yellow silk, and the walls were hung with small dark-framed oil paintings, one of them a portrait by Patrick Tuohy of her first husband, Phoebe’s grandfather, the rich and wicked late Josh Crawford. A small fire of pine logs was burning in the grate—“I know it’s supposed to be summer here,” Rose said, “but my American blood is awfully thin and needs constant warming in this climate. Sit down, my dears, do. Shall I have the maid bring us something—some tea, perhaps, a sandwich?—I know she’s still awake.”

Dannie was dazed after her sleep, but she was calm; just coming here had calmed her, for Rose was the kind of person she was accustomed to, Phoebe supposed, rich and poised and in manner reassuringly remote. Phoebe said no, that she wanted nothing, and neither did Dannie, that they had been drinking coffee and she was still fizzing from the effects of it. And it was true, her nerves felt like a pit of snakes, not only because of the caffeine, of course. This night and the things that had happened and were happening still had taken on the dark luster of a dream. Perhaps Jimmy Minor was right; perhaps Dannie was suffering from delusions, delusions that Phoebe had foolishly entertained, and now was asking Rose to entertain as well. But Rose at least was real, with her drawling voice and lazily accommodating smile, and that look she had, both tolerant and skeptical, made Phoebe trust her more than anyone else she knew.