Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (7 page)

Yet these speculations did weary her. Often she wished she could just walk away from everything, say nothing to anyone and just walk away. How much would they miss her, her husband and her son? She closed her eyes. If only she could empty her mind, dull her brain, kill her thoughts. That would be a kind of walking away.

How lovely the sunlight was this evening; how heartless.

She was climbing the stairs and had stopped on the landing a moment to look out of the high window there to Howth Head, far off on the other side of the bay. Below, in the garden, the blossoms of the peony roses were all falling over, dragged low by their own full-blown weight. She had tried to pin them up but they had drooped anyway, as if they wanted to hang their heads like that, as if that was how they saw themselves at their best. It was strange, she thought, to be thinking of flowers at such a time. But life, ordinary life, would not stop, even for a death.

The flowers were not the only things that needed attention. The big old house, in one of Dun Laoghaire’s more stately terraces, was showing the signs of years of neglect. Jack was not interested in the house. Why would he be? He was rarely there. Jack had never got used to being married—
tied down
was what he would have said, she supposed—and could always find an excuse not to be at home. But that was Jack, take him or leave him.

She went on up the last flight. She had squeezed six big Outspan oranges and poured the juice into a jug, and was carrying the jug together with a glass on a wooden tray spread with a table napkin. Davy was in bed, suffering still from the effects of being out in that boat for hours with no protection from the sun. Who would have thought the sun would be so strong, even in June? When she came into his room she caught the warmish smell of his poor scorched flesh. He lay sprawled on the bed in his pajama bottoms, the sheet kicked aside. He was wearing the black sleep mask that she had not known the house possessed, and she could not tell if he was asleep or awake. She stood over him, listening to him breathe. The sun blisters on his arms had broken and the skin on the bridge of his nose was beginning to peel already. She felt a twinge of embarrassment, standing in his room like this, and thought of setting the jug of orange juice down on the bedside table and tiptoeing away. But then he woke, and pulled off the mask and struggled to sit up, blinking and coughing, and drew the sheet over his knees.

The tray, she realized, was the same one on which she used to bring up his good-night glass of milk when he was a child. How quickly the years had flown!

Davy was twenty-four but seemed younger, or seemed so to her, anyway. Maybe, she reflected, mothers always think their sons will never quite grow up. He was working for the summer as a storeman at the Delahaye & Clancy garage in Ringsend. He seemed to like the work and was diligent, Jack said, a thing that surprised Jack, and surprised her, too. She supposed he was trying to impress them. He had confided to her his plan to train to be a mechanic and get a permanent job, but not at Delahaye & Clancy. He had not told his father yet, and neither had she. Jack would make a fuss, but she knew there would be no point in arguing; Davy was as stubborn as his father, and would not be told, or cajoled, but would go his own sweet way. She had asked him what he wanted to work at, if he was not going to continue at college, but he would not tell her.

“I brought you some orange juice,” she said. She showed him the jug and the glass. “It’s freshly squeezed.” Looking exhausted, he sat slumped forward, with his head hanging and his arms draped over the mound of his knees. He was very fair—he had her coloring, which was why he had burned so badly under the sun. She looked down at him. A spur of hair stood up on the crown of his head, and she remembered how when he was little she used to have to wet the comb under the tap to get that same recalcitrant curl to lie flat. Was she wrong to dwell on the past like this? She should be treating him like an adult, not all the time harking back to how things were when he was still her little boy. “How do you feel?” she asked. He shrugged, still slumped over his knees. “Drink some of this juice,” she said. “It will help to cool you down.”

She poured the juice and tapped the glass gently against his shoulder, and with a shuddery sigh he took it from her and drank, and had to stop to cough again, and drank again. “That’s good,” he said. “Thanks.”

She sat down on the side of the bed. Since she had come into the room he had not once met her eye. “How are you feeling?” she asked again.

“I can smell myself,” he said. “I can actually smell my skin where it got burned. It’s like fried pork.”

She smiled, and he smiled too, ruefully, although he still would not look at her. He finished the juice and handed her back the glass. She asked if he would like more and he shook his head, and rubbed a finger rapidly back and forth under his nose. It was no good trying not to see these little things—the way he was sitting on the bed, the way he rubbed his nose, that springy curl sticking up—that made her think of him as a child again. The boy was still there, inside the young man’s body. It was the same with all of them, all the men she had ever known, in her family or outside it; they reverted to childhood when they were hurt, or sad, or in trouble.

“A policeman telephoned,” Sylvia said. “A detective. He wants to talk to you. I said you weren’t well, and that you were sleeping.” Davy did not respond to this, only sat with his head hanging, his lower lip thrust out, and picked at a loose thread in the seam of the sheet. “What will you tell him?” she asked. “I mean, what will you say?” Oh, that look, she remembered that, too, the brows drawn down and the lip thrust out and his neck sunk between his shoulders. “Tell
me,
will you?” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

“I told you already,” he said, with the hint of a whine in his voice.
That sullenness,
she thought,
that resentment, just like his father.
He tugged with miniature violence at the thread, drawing in his lip now and tightening his mouth. “There’s nothing more to say.”

“Well,” she said patiently, “why don’t you tell me again. What did—what did he say?”

“He said nothing.”

“He must have said something.”

A ship was leaving Dun Laoghaire Harbor, they heard the sound of its siren shaking the stillness of the sunlit evening. Once when they were crossing to Holyhead they had been on deck when the horn went off like that, like the last trump, and Davy, her Davy, who was four or five at the time, had been so frightened by the terrible sound he had burst into tears and clung to her legs and buried his face in her skirts. They had been so close in those days, the two of them; so close.

“He told me a story,” Davy said, “about when he was a child and his old man took him out in the car one day and gave him money to buy an ice cream and drove off when he was in the shop.”

“Drove off?”

“And left him there. To teach him self-sufficiency, self-confidence, something like that—I can’t remember.”

Sylvia pursed her lips and nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid that would be the kind of thing old Sam Delahaye would do, all right. What else?”

“
What
what else?” That whining note again.

“Was that all Victor said? What happened then?”

“‘What happened then,’” Davy said with heavy sarcasm, mimicking her and waggling his head, “was that he produced this pistol, a huge thing, like a cowboy’s six-shooter, and stuck the barrel up to his chest and fired.”

Now it was she who began picking at the sheet. “Do you think—do you think he meant to do it—”

“Jesus, Ma!”

“—that he didn’t just mean it as a joke, or something, that went wrong?”

Davy laughed grimly. “Some joke.”

“He could be so—odd, at times. Unpredictable.”

“He meant to do it, all right,” Davy said. “There was no mistake about it.”

“But
why
?” she almost wailed.

Her son closed his eyes and heaved a histrionic sigh of exasperation and annoyance. “I told you.
I—don’t—know
.”

And why,
she wanted to ask,
why did he take you for a witness—why you?
“Something must have been terribly wrong with him.”

Davy snorted. “Well, yes, I’d say so. You don’t put a bullet through your heart unless there’s something fairly seriously the matter.”

She did not mind the sarcasm or the mockery—she was used to it—but she wished he would look at her, look her straight in the eye, just once, and tell her again that he did not know why Victor Delahaye—Victor, of all people—should have taken him out to sea in a boat and make him watch while he killed himself. “What shall I tell that detective,” she asked, “if he calls again?
When
he calls again.”

He did not answer. He was looking about and frowning. “Give me my clothes,” he said. “I want to get up.”

*   *   *

Jack Clancy was walking fast along the front at Sandycove when he heard the sound of the ship’s horn behind him. It made him think of his schooldays, long ago. Why was that? There had been a bell, not a bell but more like a hooter, that went off at the end of the lunch hour to summon the boys back to class. That sinking feeling around the diaphragm, he remembered that, and Donovan and—what was that other fellow’s name?—waiting for him in the dark of the corridor where it went round by the cloakroom. They picked on him because he was small. They would pull his hair and pinch him. One day they yanked his trousers down and stood back, pointing and laughing. He had got his own back on Donovan, told on him for stealing hurley sticks from the storeroom and selling them. Funny: it was years since he had thought about those days—why now? Because, he supposed, there were so many other things that he could not allow himself to think about. He was in trouble, no doubt of that.

Dun Laoghaire, formerly Kingstown, is not a harbor but a port of asylum, so called because it was designed as a refuge for merchant ships that for centuries had been lashed by easterly gales and become embayed and were unable to enter the mouth of the Liffey because sailing vessels could not climb the wind and so—and so—
His mind reeled, grasping after the old lore he used to have off by heart. His father loved the sea and had tried to teach him the history of the port, its facts and fables. But he had been a bad learner.
A good-for-nothing and a waster,
his father would say.
Wine, women and song, that’s the limit of our bold Jack’s ambitions
. Now the old bastard’s wits were gone and all that useless knowledge with it. The old man had spent his life crawling to the Delahayes and where had it got him? First on his belly, groveling before that crowd, and now on his back, lost to himself and helpless and not even able to die.

Otranto Place—funny name. The evening was warm and there were bathers over at the cove still, on the sand and on the rocks, dozens of them, out from the city on the train, tenement families from Sean MacDermott Street and Summerhill, the women fat and the men lean, the kids skinny and white as grubs. Above the strand stood the Martello tower. It had a comical look, he always thought, thick and squat, as if it had once been tall but the top had been blown off by one of Napoleon’s cannonballs.

He turned up Sandycove Avenue. The house looked smaller than in fact it was. One-storied, it too might have been cut off at the top, with just the front door and a window on either side and the roof sloping down. But at the back it extended a long way out, and there were steps leading down to a garden room, where the sun shone in all day in summer. He knew these things because it was he who had found the house, and had even made a down payment on it, though that had been conveniently forgotten. Women tended to take things like that for granted.

Jack rapped softly with his knuckles on the door,
rat-a-tat-tat-tat,
tat tat,
the old signal. She might be out. Her name was Bella. That was what she called herself; her real name was—what? Anne? Angela? He could not remember. She was an artist: blue skies over poppy fields and bare-breasted hoydens lolling in the grass with flowers wreathed in their hair.

He knocked again and waited.

Dun Laoghaire, formerly called Kingstown.

Otranto Place.

Trouble.

The door opened. “Well well,” she said, one hand on the door frame and the other on her hip. “Hello, stranger.” She was wearing ski pants and sandals, and a white woolen shawl, one corner of it flung over her shoulder and pinned there somehow, like a Roman senator’s robe. Her dyed-blond hair was piled on top of her head and stuck through with what looked to him like two wooden knitting needles. He noted a pair of spectacles—he had not seen them before—resting on the slope of her bosom and attached to a string that went around her neck. There was a fan of fine wrinkles at the outer corner of each eye. Yes, it had been a long time.

“Hello, Bella,” he said.

She was giving him an appraising eye, her head cocked. Had she heard what had happened in Cork?

“Come in,” she said. “I was just about to take a bath.”

*   *   *

When Hackett arrived at Nelson Terrace, Mrs. Clancy herself let him in. She took his hat and hung it on the hat stand and walked with him through the house to the kitchen at the back. Young Clancy was there, sitting at the table with a mug of tea in front of him. He was not small, exactly, Hackett thought, that was not the word, but compact, with a rugby player’s shoulders and a neat, squarish head, his reddish hair cut short and standing upright in a flat mat of bristles, in the style of the day—Hackett could imagine some girl running the palm of her hand over that ticklish crest and wriggling inside her dress. He seemed hardly more than a boy. He certainly did not look like a killer.

Mrs. Clancy offered tea; the detective declined out of politeness, then regretted it. The woman was tall and stood in a curiously stiff way, as if someone had just said something offensive and she had drawn herself up and back in indignation.