Christine Falls: A Novele (22 page)

“I hear you’ve been interfering with our work,” Josh Crawford said.

Quirke looked at him. The old man was watching the spot among the palms where the two women had gone from sight. “What work is that?”

Josh Crawford sniffed, making a sound that might have been a laugh. “You afraid of death, Quirke?” he asked.

Quirke reflected for a moment. “I don’t know. Yes, I suppose. Isn’t everyone?”

“Not me. The nearer I get to it, the less afraid I am.” He sighed, and Quirke heard the rattle in his chest. “The only good thing about old age is that it gives you the opportunity to even up the balance. Between the bad and the good, I mean.” He swiveled his head and looked at Quirke. “I’ve done some wicked things in my time”—a chuckle, another rattle—“even made people take falls, but I’ve done a lot of good, as well.” He paused a moment. “What they say is right, Quirke. This is the New World. Europe is finished, the war and all that followed saw to that.” He pointed the yellowed nail of a long, knobbed finger at the concrete floor. “This is the place. God’s country.” He sat nodding, his jaw working as though he were gnawing on something soft and unswallowable. “I ever tell you the history of this house? Scituate, here, this is where the Famine Irish came to, back in the black eighteen forties. The Prods, the English, the Brahmins, they’d settled the North Shore, no Irish need apply up there, so our people came south. I often imagine them, picture them in my mind”—tapping his forehead with a fingertip—“skin-and-bone wildmen and their scrawny redheaded women, trailing the coast with their litters of unkillable kids. Shit-poor the lot of them, starved at home and then starved here. This was rough country then, cliffs, rocks, salt-burned fields. Yes, I see them, clinging by their fingernails along this shore, scratching in the shallows for crabs and clams, afraid of the sea like most of us Irish, afraid of the deeps. A few fisher-families, though, had settled Second and Third Cliffs down there”—he jerked a thumb over his shoulder—“Connemara people, slick as otters, used to hard water and running the channels. At low tide they spotted it on the rocks: the red moss. They knew it from home, you see.
Chondus crispus
, and another kind,
Gigartina mamillosa
—how’s your Latin, Quirke? Carrageen moss. Red gold, it was, in those days. A thousand uses for the stuff, everything from blancmange to wallpaper size to printer’s ink. They started gathering it, out in dories at low tide with their rakes, dry it on the beach, ship it off to Boston by the cartload. Within ten years there were moss millionaires down here—oh, yes, millionaires. One of them built this house, William Martin McConnell, otherwise known as Billy the Boss, a County Mayo man. The Boss and his moss. Moss Manor—see? Then the railroad arrived, eighteen seventy-one the first trains came through. Hotels went up all along North Scituate, fancy holiday cottages at Egypt Beach, Cedar Point. Fire chiefs, police captains, the lace-curtain Irish, businessmen from over at Quincy, from as far away as Worcester, even, they all came here. Cardinal Curley had a house in…I forget where. All kinds of people, taking their bite of the country, sinking their teeth into this rich coast. The Irish Riviera, it was called, and still is. They built golf courses, country clubs—the Hatherly Beach Playground Association!” He cackled phlegmily, his frail head wobbling on its stringy stalk of a neck. He was tickled at the thought of the shit-poor Irish and their pretensions, their outrageous successes. This was his sustenance, Quirke realized, this was what was keeping him alive, a thin bitter gruel of memories and imaginings, of malice and vindictive amusement. “You can’t beat the Irish, Quirke. We’re like the rats, you’re never more than six feet away from one.” He began to cough again, and thumped a fist repeatedly, hard, into his chest, and slumped back exhausted in the chair. “I asked you, Quirke,” he said in a hoarse whisper, “why did you make this trip? And don’t say you came for the girl’s sake.”

Quirke shrugged, and moved his aching leg to ease it; the iron of the seat was growing cold under him. “I ran away,” he said.

“From what?”

“From people who do wicked things.” Josh smiled and, smiling, looked away. Quirke watched him. “What’s this business of yours I’ve been interfering in, Josh?”

Crawford lifted his eyes and scanned vaguely the tall panes of gleaming black glass all around them. In this vast place with its artificial atmosphere they might have been a hundred leagues under the ocean or a million miles out in empty space.

“Know what I am, Quirke?” Crawford said. “I’m a planter. Some people plant grain, others plant trees—me, I plant souls.”

THE WOMEN HAD PAUSED BY A TERRA-COTTA POT CONTAINING A LEAF-LESS
rose bush with long, many-thorned, thin branches that reminded Phoebe of the clawing hands of a fairy-tale witch. “It’s called after me,” Rose said. “Isn’t it crazy? Josh paid a fortune to some fancy grower in England, and there it is,
Rose Crawford
. The flowers when they come out are a nasty shade of crimson, and have no scent.” She smiled at the girl trying dutifully to seem interested. “You don’t care for horticulture, I can see. It doesn’t matter. To be honest, neither do I, but I have to pretend, for Josh’s sake.” She touched a hand to Phoebe’s arm and they turned back the way they had come. “Will you stay here for a while?” she said.

Phoebe stared at her in surprise and faint alarm. “In Boston?” she said.

“Yes. Stay with us—with me. Josh thinks you should.”

“What would I do?”

“Whatever you like. Go to college—we can get you into Harvard, or Boston U. Or just do nothing. See things. Live—you know how to do that, don’t you?”

In fact, she suspected that was one of the things—the main thing—the girl had not yet learned how to do. Behind the lipstick-thin veneer of worldliness she was, Rose could see, a sweet little thing, untried, uncertain, hungry for experience but not sure that she was ready for it yet, and worried as to what frightening form it might take. There were so many things that Rose could teach her. She rather liked the idea of having a protégée.

Ducking under a tropical climbing plant, the entwined, shaggy tendrils of which reminded Phoebe of the legs of a giant spider, they came in sight again of Quirke and Josh Crawford.

“Look at them,” Rose said softly, pausing. “They’re talking about you.”

“About me? How do you know?”

“I know everything.” She touched the girl’s arm again. “You’ll think over what I said, yes, about staying?”

Phoebe nodded, smiling with her lips pressed tight together and her eyes shining. She felt giddy and excited. It was the same feeling that she used to have on the garden swing when she was a child. She loved it when her father pushed her higher and higher until it seemed she would go right over in a complete circle. There was an instant at the highest point of the arc when everything would stop and the reeling world would hang suspended over a huge emptiness of air and light and thrilling silence. That was how it was now, except that the instant was going on and on. She knew she should not have said yes when Rose offered her that gin—although it was only ten o’clock here it was really the middle of the night for her—but she did not care. One moment she had been sitting motionless on the swing, a good little girl, then a hand had pushed her in the small of the back and here she was, higher than she had ever been before.

They went forward to where the men were sitting. Quirke’s damaged face was swollen from the effects of travel tiredness and drink and the knotted lump of flesh under his left eye was a dead white color. Josh Crawford looked up at Phoebe and smiled broadly. “Here she is,” he said, “my favorite granddaughter!”

“That’s not much of a compliment,” Phoebe said, smiling back at him, “since I’m the only granddaughter you have.”

He took her by the wrists and drew her toward him. “Look at you,” he said, “a woman already.”

Quirke watched the two of them, marveling with bitter amusement at how quickly Phoebe had forgiven her grandfather for siding with the others against her determination to marry Conor Carrington. Rose in her turn was watching Quirke, registering the haggard sourness of his look. “Where do they go to,” she said lightly, “the years, eh, Mr. Quirke?”

Brenda Ruttledge appeared, in her nurse’s uniform and neat little hat, bearing a vial of pills and a glass of water on a silver tray. Seeing Quirke she faltered and her mouth went loosely sideways for a second. He too was faintly shocked to see her; he had forgotten that she would be at Moss Manor.

“Time for your pills, Mr. Crawford,” she said in a voice that cost her an obvious effort to hold steady.

Quirke gave her his weary smile. “Hello, Brenda,” he said.

She would not, could not meet his eye. “Mr. Quirke.” She smiled glancingly at Phoebe, and they both nodded, but no one bothered to introduce them.

Rose cast a sharp look from the nurse to Quirke and back again. Josh Crawford too caught the frisson of acknowledgment that had passed between them, and grinned, baring his side teeth. “Know each other, do you?” he said.

Quirke did not look at him. “We were colleagues, in Dublin,” he said.

There was a brief quiet as the echoes of that word,
colleagues,
reverberated incongruously. Crawford took the glass of water and Brenda shook three large tablets from the vial into his palm. He clapped them into his mouth, and drank, and grimaced.

Rose brought her hands soundlessly together. “Well,” she said, gently brisk, “Phoebe, Mr. Quirke, shall we have dinner…?”

LATER, QUIRKE COULD NOT SLEEP. OVER DINNER IN THE FUNEREALLY
candlelit dining room, conversation had been scant. Glistening slabs of beef were served, and hickory-brown roasted potatoes and minced cabbage and heat-shriveled carrots, all seeming to be slathered over with a sticky coating of the ubiquitous household varnish. More than once Quirke had felt his mind swimming away from him into a dim, twittering place that was neither here nor elsewhere. He had stumbled on the stairs coming up, and Phoebe had put a hand under his arm and laughed at him and said he was obviously missing his beauty sleep. For a while he lay on the bed in his room, Delia’s room, without undressing—he had not unpacked yet—and even though he turned Delia’s photograph to the wall she was still unsettlingly present. Or no, not she, exactly, but a remembrance of her, rancid with resentment and old anger. He tried to keep it from his mind but could not. It was the night of the going-away party Josh Crawford had given for him and Mal, twenty years before. Delia had drawn him aside, a finger to her mischievously smiling lips, and brought him up here and lain with him on the bed in her party frock. At first she would not let him make love to her, would not let him do anything, and kept pushing away his importunately questing hands. He could still hear her laughter, soft, mocking, provocative, and her voice hoarse in his ear as she called him her big buffalo. When he was about to give up, however, she shucked off her dress, with a practiced ease the acknowledgment of which afterwards slipped like a heated knife blade into his unwilling consciousness, and lay back smiling and opened her arms and took him so deeply inside her he knew he would never quite find his way out again.

He got up from the bed now and had to stand a moment with his eyes closed, waiting for the dizziness to pass. He had drunk too much whiskey and then too much wine at dinner and had smoked too many cigarettes and the inside of his mouth seemed to be lined with a gossamer-thin integument of warm, smooth, seared meat. He put on his jacket and left the room and went down through the silent house. He had the sense that others too were awake, he seemed to feel their presence around him in the gaunt air, jadedly attending him. Cautiously he negotiated the wide, oaken staircase, carrying his walking stick under his arm and gripping his strapped and still bandaged leg in both hands and swinging it awkwardly from one step to the next. He did not know where he was going. The atmosphere was watchful, hostile even, as if the place itself and not just its inhabitants were aware of his presence, aware of him, and resentful, somehow. Doors as he opened them clicked their tongues in annoyed unwelcome and, when he was leaving, closed behind him sighingly, glad of his quittance.

He thought he was heading in the direction of the Crystal Gallery and its silent plant life, hoping the company for a while of living but insensate things might soothe his mind and drive him back to his bed and sleep at last, but try as he would he could not locate it. Instead he found himself in a space almost as lofty, housing a long, shallow swimming pool. The lights were set in hooded niches under the lip of the pool, the stealthily shifting surface of which cast wallowing reflections onto the sheer marble walls and the ceiling that was a segmented dome of pale plaster molded in the shape of the roof of a bedouin chieftain’s tent. Here too the artificially heated air was cottony and cloying, and as Quirke approached the edge of the pool he felt the sweat gathering between his shoulder blades and on his eyelids and his upper lip. There came again the blarings of distant foghorns; they sounded to him like the forlorn and hopeless calls of great wounded animals crying in pain far out at sea.

He heard himself catch his breath. There was a body in the water.

It was a woman, wearing a black bathing suit and a rubber bathing cap. She was floating on her back with her eyes closed, her knees flexed a little and her arms outspread. The rim of the tight black cap blurred her features and at first he did not know her. He thought of slipping quietly away—his heart was still thumping from the start the sudden sight of her had given him—but just then she turned onto her front and began to swim with slow breast strokes toward the edge where he was standing. Seeing him towering above her on his stick she drew back in fright with a froglike thrashing of arms and legs, making the water churn. Then she came on again, with her chin lifted, ruefully smiling. It was Brenda Ruttledge. “God almighty,” she said, grasping the sides of the metal ladder and flipping herself up out of the water with a buoyant little bound, “you gave me an awful fright.”