Benjamin Black - Christine Falls

She held the rectangle of pasteboard up to the light of the streetlamp and her eyes took on a strange shine and at the same time seemed to dim. “Consultant pathologist,” she read aloud. “You’ve come a long way.”

She opened the door and stepped into the hall but still he was not finished with her. “Did you deliver the child, Dolly-Chrissie’s child?”

She had not switched on the hall light and he could barely see her outline in the darkness.

“It wouldn’t have been the first one I ever did.” He heard her sniff. “Little girl, it was.”

He moved towards the doorway but stopped on the threshold, seeming to meet an invisible barrier. She had her back to him, still in the dark, and would not turn.

“What happened to her?” he said.

When she spoke her voice had hardened yet again. “Forget the child,” she said. It had an almost sibylline ring to it, this voice speaking to him out of the gloom.

“And the father?”

“Forget him, too. Especially forget him.”

Firmly but with no violence she pushed the door against him and he stepped back and heard the lock click shut and the dead bolt sliding into place.

And in the morning he went to registry and had Mulligan, the clerk there, write in his ledger that the ambulance had collected Christine Falls not in Stoney Batter but from her parents’ house. Mulligan was reluctant at first-“It’s a bit unusual, isn’t it, Mr. Quirke?”-but Quirke was firm. “Need to keep your files in order, laddie,” he said briskly. “Don’t want inaccuracies. It wouldn’t look good, if there was to be an inquiry.” The clerk nodded dully. He knew, and knew that Quirke knew, that there had been inaccuracies, to say the least, before now, when files had to be rewritten on the quiet. So with Mr. Quirke looking over his shoulder he got to work with razor blade and steel pen, and presently the record showed that Christine Falls had been collected at 1:37 A.M. on the 29th of August from No. 7, St. Finnan’s Terrace, Wexford, and conveyed to the Holy Family Hospital in Dublin, where she was pronounced dead on arrival, having suffered a pulmonary embolism while staying at the family home.

SUNDAY MORNING WAS FOR QUIRKE A TINY INTERVAL OF SWEET redress for the oppressions of his childhood. When he was at Carricklea, and later, too, when the Judge got him away from there and sent him along with Mal to St. Aidan’s to board, the Sabbath morning was its own kind of torment, different from weekdays but just as bad, if not worse. During the week at least there were things to be done, work, lessons, the grinding rote of school, but Sundays were a desert. Prayers, Mass, the interminable sermon, and then the long, featureless day until Evening Devotions, with the Rosary and another sermon followed by Benediction, and then lights-out, and the dread of Monday morning coming round again. Now his Sundays had other rituals, ones of his own devising, which he could vary, or ignore, or abandon, at his whim. The only constant was the Sunday papers, which he bought from the hunchback vendor on Huband Bridge and with which, when the weather was fine, he would settle down on the old iron bench there beside the lock and read, and smoke, his mind only half engaged by what was already yesterday’s news.

He sensed Sarah’s approach before he looked up and saw her walking toward him along the towpath. She was wearing a burgundy-colored coat and a Robin Hood hat with a feather, and was carrying her purse clutched in both hands against her breast. She kept her eyes downcast as she walked, on the watch for puddles from last night’s rain, but also because she was not ready yet to meet Quirke’s surprised stare. She had known where he would be-Quirke was a creature of habit-yet she was already regretting coming to find him here. When she looked up at last she saw that he had guessed what she was feeling, and he did not rise to meet her as she drew near, only sat with the newspaper open on his knees and watched her with what seemed to her an ironical, even a faintly contemptuous, mocking smile.

“Well,” he said, “what brings you down here, from the fastnesses of Rathgar?”

“I was at Mass, over in Haddington Road. I go there some Sundays, just for…” She smiled, shrugged, winced, all at the same time. “…just for a change.”

He nodded, and folded the newspapers and stood up, as huge as ever, and as always she felt reduced a size or two, and leaned back involuntarily on her heels before him.

“Can I walk with you?” he asked, in that deliberately boyish way that he did, making it seem as if he were prepared to be refused. It was strange, she thought, to be in love with him still and expect nothing of it.

They went back along the path the way she had come, passing by stands of dried sedge. It was the first real day of autumn and the sky was a luminous mist that cast a milky reflection on the water. They were silent for a while, then Quirke said:

“That night of the party at your house-I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that seems an age ago, now. Besides, you were drunk. I always know you’re drunk when you tell me how fond of me you are.”

“I wasn’t apologizing for that. I meant I shouldn’t have taken Phoebe to the pub.”

She laughed unsteadily. “Yes, Mal was terribly angry, at both of you, but you especially.”

He sighed his irritation.

“I brought her for a drink,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to sell her into the white slave trade.” Rebuked, she was silent. “Anyway,” he said, softening his tone, “what is all this about Mass? You weren’t always so devout.”

“Perhaps it’s desperation,” she said. “Aren’t people always supposed to turn to God in desperation?”

He did not answer, but turned his head and looked at her, and found that she was already looking at him, smiling distressfully with lips compressed, and it was as if they had come suddenly to a secret door and she had pushed it open a little way and turned to see if he would go with her into the darkness beyond. He felt himself draw back; there were places he would not enter. Two swans on the water came from behind and drew level with them, bearing aloft their strange, masked heads. He said:

“This young man of hers, this Conor Carrington-is she serious about him?”

“I hope not.”

“What if she is?”

“Oh, Quirke-is anyone serious at that age?”

“We were.” He said it so quickly, with such seeming conviction, that it made her start. She looked down at the path. He was acting, she knew, but what a good actor he was; so good that on occasion, she felt sure, he managed to convince even himself. “Please, Quirke,” she said. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“You know very well.”

The swans were still swimming beside them, and now one made a sound deep in its breast, a subdued yet plaintive hoot; it seemed to Sarah a sound she might have made herself. They came to the bridge at Baggot Street. The sawmill on the opposite bank was shut because it was Sunday but still they caught a faint waft of its resinous smell. They stood below the bridge, side by side, facing the water. The swans, too, had paused in their progress.

“My father is very ill,” Sarah said. “I thought of paying the priest at Haddington Road to say a Mass for him.” Quirke laughed briefly and she turned her serious eyes on him. “Do you really not believe in God, Quirke?”

“I believe in the Devil,” he answered. “That was one thing they taught us to believe in, at Carricklea.”

She nodded. He was acting again, now.

“Carricklea,” she said. “I’ve heard you say that name so often, and always in the same way.”

“It’s the kind of place that stays with you.”

She laid a hand on his arm, but he made no response and she took it back. What if he did pose and pretend? He had suffered, she was sure of that, even if his sufferings were long in the past.