Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (15 page)

And yet for all Victor’s besottedness, Maggie was still convinced that deep down he had recognized something unpleasant in his wife, something cheap and ugly and in some way—yes, in some way
soiled
. She wondered if that was part of the attraction for him. Some men liked that kind of thing, liked to think of women being dirty and depraved. Maggie knew how possessive Victor had been of Mona, and how jealously he had watched over her. He had tried to hide his vulnerability behind the famously sophisticated façade he maintained, but he could not deceive his sister. They had always been close, she and Victor. They had grown up together as allies against their father’s bullying and their mother’s neglectfulness. One day, in their hiding place among the trees at Ashgrove, they had made a solemn vow that when they grew up they would marry each other, no matter what anyone said. And, in a way, Maggie had always felt that they
were
married, if only in spirit.

It had been hard for her when Victor actually did marry, and harder still when he married a second time, but she had said nothing, on either occasion—what could she have said?—yet it had pained her to watch him throwing himself away on those two women who were worth so much less than he was. Lisa at least had been harmless, a timid, rather gawky girl always anxious to please, who when she fell ill had surprised everyone by putting up a brave, uncomplaining, but in the end useless fight for survival. Mona, however, was not timid; Mona was not harmless.

Maggie had been as baffled as anyone by her brother’s death. She could not accept that he had taken his own life. People had assured it was the case, but still she could not accept it. She had tried at first to convince herself that Davy Clancy must have done it—why had he thrown away the gun?—but it was no good; she knew that Davy was weak and incapable surely of killing anyone, least of all a Delahaye. But why had Victor taken him out in the boat—why him? It had been Victor’s way of sending a message, of leaving a signal as to why he had done what he had done. But what message was it, and to whom did he think he was directing it?

No: if Davy Clancy had not been the cause of Victor’s death, then Maggie was convinced that Mona must have been involved, in some way that she could not explain or account for. She would have to get away from this house, the horrible, oppressive atmosphere, the awful sense of there being some secret in the air, hidden from her but known to others. Yes, she would go back to Ashgrove. She would have peace there.

She put her book away—pages of it had gone by without her registering a word—and went and sat in front of the mirror of her dressing table and took up a tortoiseshell brush and applied it fiercely to her hair. Brushing her hair was usually a thing that soothed her, but today she went at it almost violently, with hard long strokes that drew the skin of her forehead tight and made her eyes widen, so that in the glass she looked a little mad. But then, she thought, perhaps she was a little mad. There was a streak of insanity in the family, on her mother’s side, and neither had her father’s people been the sanest, with their Bible-thumping and their furious hatred and fear of Catholics. They had never forgiven her father for moving south and going into business with a Taig, which was what they would have called Phil Clancy—a dirty Taig.

She put down the hairbrush and stared at her reflection, her eyes still wide. Maybe that was what had happened to Victor, maybe it had been an attack of temporary insanity. But no, Victor had not been mad. Passionate, yes, and fanciful, with all kinds of wild notions about himself and the people around him, but not mad. Something or someone had driven him to take himself and Davy Clancy in that boat out of Slievemore Bay that day with a gun in his pocket and despair in his heart.

*   *   *

When she came downstairs she found her father in the drawing room, slumped in his wheelchair at the window above the garden. She thought at first he was asleep but when she approached him she saw that was not so. She saw too that his eyes were damp. This startled her. She did not think she had ever seen her father in tears before—he had not wept even at the funeral of his only son. “Are you all right, Daddy?” she asked, but it was not until she put a hand lightly on his shoulder that he responded, jerking himself away from her touch and glaring up at her, first in surprise and then in fury. He had been away somewhere in his thoughts.

He did not speak, and she could not think what else to say to him. She felt compassion for him, but in a detached way; it was as she would feel for someone whose misfortune she had been told about, or had read about in the papers. She had never been close to her father. He had not welcomed closeness, in fact had discouraged it, by his remoteness, his wounding sarcasm, his sudden rages. Yet, for all that, she admired him. He was tough, self-sufficient, unforgiving, which were qualities she held in high regard. As for love, well, love did not come into it.

Tea arrived, wheeled in on a trolley by Sarah the red-haired maid. The taking of afternoon tea was something Victor’s first wife had instituted—poor Lisa, she had been so thrilled to find herself married into the grand and mighty Delahayes. Sarah maneuvered the trolley into the bay of the big window. Maggie said that she would take over, and the maid smirked—a brazen girl, with scant respect for anything, but a good worker—and sauntered away, humming. Maggie poured a cup of tea for her father, adding milk and two spoonfuls of sugar as she knew he liked, and brought it to him. He waved it away with a violent sweep of his arm. “Don’t want tea,” he growled. “I’m sick of drinking tea.”

Maggie sighed. “Have you taken your pill?”

“No I have not!”

“You know what the doctor said about—”

“Ach, to blazes with that. What do the doctors know? Look at the state they’ve left me in”—he had got himself convinced somehow that his stroke was due to medical incompetence—“stuck in this blasted contraption and wheeled around like an infant.”

Maggie might have laughed at that—the idea of her father letting anyone wheel him anywhere! She waited patiently, standing back a little, then proffered the cup again. “Take your tea,” she said.

He let her put the cup and saucer into his hands. She was afraid he would spill the tea, scald himself perhaps, but one of the things the doctors had told her was that he must be allowed to fend for himself as much as possible. He set the saucer in his lap, the cup clattering. He did not drink; he was glaring into the garden.

“Are you sure you didn’t take your pill?” Maggie said.

He turned his head and looked at her with furious contempt. “What was the good Lord thinking,” he said, “to take my only son from me and leave me
you
?”

He watched her, almost smiling, eager to see the barb strike home. Maggie was thinking how remarkable it was that his accent had never softened, though he had lived down here in the Republic for half a century. It was another of the things he clung to, unrelenting, that Northern growl. “Drink your tea,” she said again, mildly.

She brought a chair and sat down by the trolley and poured a cup of tea for herself. They both turned their eyes now to the garden. How strange to see everything in bloom and the sun shining so gloriously. But then, why was it strange? Death did not come only in times of dark and cold. It must have been beautiful, out in the bay, when Victor turned the gun against himself and fired. What would have been going through his mind, what terrors, what memories? She felt tears welling in her eyes but held them back by force of will. Her father was furious that he had let her see him weeping; she would not allow him to have redress by weeping herself, now.

“I was watching the birds,” the old man said. “Thrushes, blackbirds. There’s a robin, too, that comes and goes. Fierce creature, the robin—did you know that? Courage a hundred times his size. Aye, he holds on, that bird, doesn’t weaken and let go.” He made a fist of his left hand and brought it down with a thump on the arm of the wheelchair, making the cup in his lap joggle and slopping the tea.

It occurred to Maggie that what pained her father most about his son’s death was the shame of it, the disgrace. Or was she being unfair? He was as capable of grief as she was. She speculated as to whether he might know what had driven Victor to do what he had done. Should she ask him? Surely a time such as this should permit them to speak as otherwise they never would? She glanced at her father, his carved profile, his poet’s shock of silver hair. She knew nothing about him, next to nothing. He had never bothered with her; a daughter was nothing to him. And now he had no son. How would he not be furious? And heartbroken, perhaps; perhaps that, too.

Jonas came in. Automatically she looked to the door to see James entering behind him, as always. But Jonas was alone. This was so unusual that she gave him a questioning look, which he ignored. “Any tea in that pot?” he asked.

Maggie laid her hand against the teapot’s cheek. “It’s gone cold. Sarah can bring a fresh pot.”

Jonas shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. It’s too hot to drink tea anyway.” He threw himself down in an armchair. He had changed out of the black suit he had put on for the funeral, and wore dark slacks and a white silk shirt and loafers with no socks. His slender ankles were tanned. He had not wept at the graveside either. The suspicion came to Maggie sometimes that she allowed herself to feel things far too deeply. Her brother’s death had set going in her a rushing underground river of grief that would in time slow down but that would be there always, running under everything. There were other streams from the past that were still flowing. Billy Thompson, a boy she had been sweet on when she was young—he had died, and she mourned him yet, all these years later. She looked at Jonas draped there in the armchair, a dazzling creature, so seemingly at ease. Surely he too was grieving for his father, in his own, subterranean fashion.

“How are you feeling, Grandad?” he asked.

The old man lifted a hand and let it fall again limply in a gesture of weary dismissal. “I’m no better than the rest of us,” he said, still eyeing the garden, his jaw working.

Jonas turned to Maggie. “And what about you, Auntie?” he inquired, jaunty and ironical. He addressed his aunt always in a tone of half-fond raillery. He seemed, she thought without rancor, to find her something of a joke. But then, she supposed she was a joke—the spinster sister living in the home she had always lived in, despised by her father, mocked by her nephews, abandoned now by her beloved brother; even Sarah the maid paid her no regard. Yes, she should retire to Ashgrove, live there alone, keep cats, and become the local eccentric. “By the way,” Jonas said, in an undertone, “you and I need to have a talk.”

“Yes? What about?”

He frowned, and glanced in the direction of his grandfather. “I’ll tell you later.”

*   *   *

Mona too had changed out of black, into a silk dress of dark sapphire that set off her milky pallor and the rich bronze textures of her hair. When she entered the drawing room she paused in the doorway, seeing the three of them—Maggie, her father-in-law, one of the twins—in their separate places at the far end of the big bright room, posed there like actors awaiting the entrance of the leading lady.

She came forward, stopping at the sideboard to take a cigarette from the box and light it with the fat heavy lighter. She was conscious of the three of them watching her. She was accustomed to being the center of attention, but this was different. Becoming a widow had given her a new role. It was a curiously pleasant, light-headed feeling. A widow, at her age! It seemed absurd, like something in a stage musical. The merry widow. She was still herself, of course, and yet she was someone else at the same time, the Mona Vanderweert she had always been and now Mrs. Victor Delahaye, whose husband was dead. It made her feel—well, it made her feel grown-up, in a way she had not felt before.

“Oh,” she said, “am I late for tea?”

It was not tea she wanted, anyway, but a drink, though she supposed she had better not ask for one. It had been a trying day and did not seem set to get any easier. Everything felt flat. She would have liked the mourners to come back to the house after the funeral but her father-in-law had not wanted it. It would have been interesting to stand here being sad but brave among all those people.

Maggie had risen from her chair by the tea trolley. “How are you, my dear?” she asked.
As if she cared,
Mona thought.

“I’m fine, thank you. I seem to be a bit—dizzy.” Her sister-in-law stood before her with her hands clasped under her bosom, what there was of it, gazing at her with a forlorn expression. All at once she had a vision of time stretching before her like a tunnel, or no, like an avenue in a cemetery, lined with dark trees, and a person standing mournfully under each tree, looking at her in just this way. A silent scream formed inside her. Boredom was one of her acutest fears. “Really,” she said, turning away, “I’m fine.”

None of them liked her. She had taken their precious Victor away from them, which was bad enough, but now they seemed to think she was somehow responsible for his death. They would not say so, of course, but she could feel them thinking it. She looked at the twin—was it James? for she was never quite sure which of them was which, even after all this time—and wondered what he knew. Both twins had been very cold towards her at the funeral, not that they were ever exactly warm where she was concerned. She would have to be careful. She supposed she had been foolish, had taken a foolish risk. Had Victor done it just because…? No: she would not let herself think that, she would not, it was too absurd.

She turned to the young man in the armchair. “Where’s Jonas?” she asked.

He sighed, and his mouth tightened. “I’m Jonas.” He held up his left hand and showed her the ring on his little finger. “Jonas is the one who wears this, remember?”

She laughed, and put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, sorry, yes, I didn’t look.” His angry sarcasm amused her. Did they really expect her to check their little fingers every time she met them? It was not her fault that he and his brother were a pair of freaks. “Sorry,” she said again, and looked around for an ashtray.