A Death in Summer (33 page)

“And you? Do you like it? Do you feel at home here, among the grown-up people?”

Her hand was beside his on the rail. “I did hope you would come, you know,” she said. “I could not ask you to come, but I hoped you would.”

“Why couldn’t you ask me?”

His hand wanted to close over hers but he held it back.

“Come,” she said, “let’s have our salad.”

They ate sitting on high stools at the white counter. Through the window they could see down to the blue bay far below. The sea was roughly paved with flakes of shimmering white-gold light. “Villefranche is one of the deepest bays along the Côte d’Azur,” Françoise said. “After the war it was crowded with American warships; I saw them. I remember thinking how heartless everything seemed, the sun and the light and the gay people, and so many millions dead.”

Quirke refilled their glasses from the bottle of the sharp and almost colorless
picpoul.
Françoise turned to him suddenly. “You saw her, yes—you saw Dannie?”

He set down the bottle and kept his gaze fixed on it. “I saw her,” he said.

“How was she?”

He shrugged. “As you would imagine.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“No,” Quirke said, “I’m sure you can’t.”

She looked away.

Giselle came in, still in her swimsuit and carrying the tortoise under her arm. The creature had withdrawn into its shell, and in the shadows there its ancient eyes glinted.

“Say
bonjour
to Docteur Quirke,” Françoise said.

The child gave him her accustomed skeptical glance. “Hello,” she said.

“What’s he called?” Quirke asked, indicating the tortoise.

“Achille.” She pronounced it in the French way.

“Ah. Achilles. That’s a good joke.”

She gave him that glance again and set the tortoise on the counter. In the back of its shell, in the center, a small white jewel was inset. Françoise spoke to the child in French, and the child shook her head and turned and walked off into the other room and threw herself down on one of the sofas and began to read a comic book. Françoise sighed. “She is on hunger strike,” she murmured. “I cannot get her to eat.”

“She must be very upset, still,” Quirke said. “It’s hardly more than two weeks since her father died.”

Françoise went to the fridge and brought back a dish of small dark olives. “Try these,” she said. “They are from the region, and very good.” He dipped his fingers into the dish and brought up three or four of the oily beads. She was watching him again. “How is your friend, the detective—?”

“Hackett.”

“He will take care of Dannie, yes?”

“Oh, yes,” Quirke said, “he’ll take care of her, all right.”

“What will they do to her? They will let her off, surely?”

He lifted a cold eye to hers. “They’ll put her away for life,” he said, “in the Dundrum Hospital for the Criminally Insane. That’s what they’ll do.”

Her eyes once more skittered away from his. She picked up her glass; it trembled slightly in her hand. “Is it a terrible place?” she asked.

“Yes.” He held his gaze steady on her. “Yes, it is.”

She gathered up their plates; she had eaten almost nothing. “Come,” she said softly, glancing over her shoulder in her daughter’s direction, “let’s go outside again—there are chairs, in the shade.”

The chairs were low and wide, their wood weathered silver-gray like the flooring. Quirke set down his glass at the side of his chair and lit a cigarette. From the angle here they could see through a gap in the landscape all the way to the sea, a wedge of mirage-blue stillness in the distance. The breeze coming down from the hills was soft and carried the perfumes of lavender and wild sage.

“I met Richard here,” Françoise said.

“Here, in Cap Ferrat?”

“Yes.” With a hand over her eyes she was squinting off in the direction of the white road winding across the hillside. “He was a gambler—did you know? He came for the casinos. He would visit them all, along the coast here, in Nice, in Cannes, Monte Carlo, San Remo. He was very bad at it, he had no luck, and always lost a great deal of money, but that would not stop him.”

“And you?” Quirke said. “What were you doing here?”

“When I met him first? Oh, I was with my father. He used to come every summer to a little hotel in Beaulieu. My mother had died that year. I believed my life, too, was coming to an end.” She shifted in the chair, with an effortful sigh, as if she were indeed far older than she seemed. “I think I might have died, except that I still had my brother to mourn, and my father to hate. Richard I met at a tennis party one day, I cannot remember at whose house it was. He looked very handsome, very
fringant
. He
was
a handsome man, you know, in a savage way—rough, I mean. He was what I thought I needed. I believed he would help me to hate, that together with him I would—how do you say?—I would nurture my hatred, as if it were a child, our child.” She turned to him. “Is that not terrible?”

“Was your father so bad, to merit such hatred?”

“No no, it was not just my father I hated—but everything, France herself, and those who had betrayed us, the collaborators, the Pétainistes, the ones who made their fortune on the black market. Believe me, there was no shortage of people to hate.”

On that triangle of distant blue a tinier triangle had appeared, the leaning white sail of a yacht.

“But Richard you loved,” Quirke said.

To this she made a very French response, dipping her head from side to side and blowing out a ball of breath through pursed lips. “Love?” she said. “Love, no. I do not know what to call it. I married him for revenge, revenge on my father, on France, and on myself, too. I was like one of those saints, punishing myself, falling to my knees and whipping myself, whipping and whipping, until I bled. There was joy in that, a frightful joy.” She turned to him, her eyes glittering and her lips drawn back some way from her teeth. “Do you understand?”

Oh, yes, he understood. It was guilt that had drawn them together, she had said, but guilt was a knout made of many strands, all of them stiff and sharp to cut good and deep into the flesh.

“My father at first was approving,” Françoise said. “He liked Richard. I suppose he recognized one of his own type. He refused to believe he was Jewish—‘How can a man with the word “Jew” in his name be a Jew?’ he used to ask, and he would laugh. It seemed to him too ridiculous. And of course it is true, Richard was not really Jewish except by blood—he was not religious, and cared nothing for the history of his people. But blood, of course, was what counted for my father.”

The side of the hill that they were facing was becoming flat and shadowless as the sun angled full upon it, and they could feel faintly on their faces the heat reflecting back off the rocks and even the orange clay itself. A single-engined plane droned overhead, its wing struts shining. There were dark birds, too, Quirke now saw, wheeling in slow arcs at an immense height.

“Why did he marry you?” Quirke asked.

“Why did—? Oh, I see what you mean. Why did he marry any woman, since it was not women that he wanted.” She paused. “Who knows. I suppose it was because I too, like him, was violent, cruel, wanting my revenge on the world. ‘I like your
ferocity,
’ Richard used to say. It was one of his favorite words. The way that I hated—hated my father, my country, everything—that amused him, gave him pleasure.” Again she stopped, gazing out from the verandah’s shade into the harsh light of afternoon, nodding to herself. “He was a very wicked man, you know? Very—
malicieux.
”

“When did you find out about him—about St. Christopher’s, what he did there, all that?”

She considered. “I do not know if I ever ‘found out.’ That kind of knowledge comes slowly, because it is resisted, so slowly that one almost does not notice it. But come it does, eating into the mind, into the conscience, like acid.”

“But sooner or later you did know, even if you tried not to. And you tolerated it.”

She scrambled up suddenly from the chair as if she had been pushed, and walked to the wooden rail again, where the sunlight fell full upon her in an almost violent splash. “I knew, yes,” she said, facing sideways so that he would hear her, but not looking at him. “Of course I knew. He brought me there, once, you know—to the orphanage. He wanted me to see, he wanted me to be impressed by the place, by what he had made of it, how he had stamped his will on it, and on those poor children, those poor little boys.”

“Did you see Father Ambrose?”

“Ambrose? I saw him, yes, Richard made sure of that, too.”

“I met him. He seemed to me not a bad man.”

She turned her head fully now and stared at him. “That priest?” she said. “He is a devil, a devil like Richard. They are all devils, there.”

Quirke recalled Father Ambrose’s wispily gentle voice, the way he drew close, how his gaze seemed to reach out blind fingers to feel all over what was before him. He recalled too the boys sidling past in the corridors, their downcast eyes. How could he have missed what was plain to see, what his own experiences as a child in places like this should have taught him never to forget?

“And Dannie,” he said. “Did you know about Dannie, too, what Richard did to her?”

“No!” She slapped both her hands down hard on the rail. She was glaring at him with eyes ablaze, and then, as suddenly as it had flared up, the fire in her went out, and her shoulders slumped, her face grew slack. “I thought it was only little boys he cared for,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I did not know it was little girls, too. He wanted the young, you see, always and only the young.
Fresh meat,
that is what he would say,
fresh meat.
And he would laugh.”

“When did you find out?”

“About Dannie? Not until—not until that day, that Sunday, at Brooklands. The thing had broken in her, had snapped. She could not keep it secret any longer. Because of Giselle, you see.” She glanced back in alarm towards the glass doors and the room where the child was, and her voice again became a whisper. “Because of Giselle.”

Quirke heard voices faintly, and he too turned to the glass, behind which a shadowed form was approaching. The door slid open and a young woman stepped onto the verandah. She was dark as a Gypsy, with hooded eyes and a shadowed upper lip. She wore a blue housecoat and white shoes like a nurse’s. Seeing Quirke, she hesitated. “Ah, Maria,” Françoise said.
“Cet homme est Docteur Quirke.”
The girl smiled uncertainly and put her hands behind her back. Françoise turned to Quirke. “Maria takes care of Giselle in the afternoons,” she said. She went forward and took the young woman by the elbow and steered her back indoors.

Quirke extricated himself from the low chair and, lighting a cigarette, walked to the rail where Françoise had stood. Despite having removed his jacket and then his tie he was hot, and could feel himself sweating, the beads of moisture running down and stopping at the small of his back. Below in the valley the cicadas had started up, draping the air with their crepitant drone. He fancied he could hear too the noise of traffic on that distant white road, the blare of trucks, the insect whine of a motorcycle.

He should not have come.

After some minutes Françoise returned. “They have gone out,” she said. “Will you come back inside?”

Quirke wanted a drink. The bottle of
picpoul
was three-quarters empty. He offered it to Françoise but she shook her head, and he filled his own glass. The wine had warmed up; it did not matter.

The tortoise was gone, and in its place on the counter was a snow globe; he recognized it, with the little town inside it, the miniature streets and the château and its pointed tower. They went into the other room and sat down on the sofa where the child had sat. Quirke offered his case and Françoise took a cigarette. It was so strange, Quirke thought, so strange to be here, in these rich surroundings, drinking wine and smoking, as if there were nothing except that, two people sitting in a white room in a sunny town, being themselves, being together.

Françoise said, “That Sunday she told me, Dannie told me, what had gone on between her and Richard for so many years. Richard must have been—I don’t know.” She leaned forward and dashed the tip of her cigarette at an ashtray standing on the low table. “Is it possible to be addicted to such things?”

“It’s possible to be obsessed, yes,” Quirke said.

“But with him, you know, I do not think—
obsession
does not seem the right word. He was like a man with a—a pastime, a hobby. It amused him, it entertained him, to use these children, the boys at the orphanage, young people at the newspaper, poor little Marie our maid, Dannie his sister—his
sister.
Yes, it amused him. Can you understand this? Him and those other devils, destroying lives, destroying souls, for their
amusement.
”

They were silent for a time; then Quirke spoke. “Do you know a man called Costigan?”

She waved a hand in a dismissive gesture, as if pushing aside a cobweb. “I do not know names. There was a group of them.”