Benjamin Black - Christine Falls

“I came along this way on purpose,” she said, “I suppose you know that. I’m not good at covering up. Luckily, you don’t change your habits.” She paused, gathering her words. “Quirke, I want you to talk to Mal.”

He glanced at her, his eyebrows lifting. “What about?”

She walked to the water’s edge. The two swans turned and swam towards her, etching a closing V on the flawless surface of the water. They must think she had food, and why not? Everyone expected something of her.

“I want you and Mal to stop fighting,” she said. “I want you to be…reconciled.”

She laughed self-consciously at the word, the florid sound of it. Still he looked at her, but he was frowning now, his brows drawn down.

“Did Mal ask you to come here?” he asked suspiciously.

Now it was her turn to stare.

“Of course not!” she said. “Why would he?”

But Quirke would not relent.

“Tell him,” he said evenly, “I’ve done all I can for him. Tell him that.”

The swans before her were turning from side to side slowly on their own reflections, growing impatient with her failure to produce whatever it was that her stopping and standing like this had seemed to promise, this woman in her blood-colored coat and archer’s hat. She paid the birds no heed. She was looking at Quirke, not understanding what he meant, and saw she was not expected to understand. But what could it be that Quirke had done for Mal, Quirke of all people, Mal of all people?

“I’m pleading with you, Quirke,” she said, appalled at herself, at the abjectness she was reduced to. “I’m begging you. Talk to him.”

“And I’m asking you: what about?”

“Anything. Phoebe-talk about Phoebe. He listens to you, even though you think he doesn’t.”

The swan again made its peculiar hoot, calling to her querulously.

“Must be the female,” Quirke said. Sarah, baffled, frowned. He pointed to the birds behind her. “They mate for life, so it’s said. She must be the female.” He smiled his crooked smile. “Or the male.”

She shrugged aside the irrelevance.

“He’s under a great deal of strain,” she said.

“What sort of strain?”

He was, she realized, becoming bored, she could hear it in his voice. Patience, tolerance, indulgence, these had never been among Quirke’s anyway not numerous virtues.

“Mal doesn’t confide in me,” she said. “He hasn’t, for a long time.”

Again she had pushed at that door into the darkness, again he declined her invitation to enter with her.

“You think he’d confide in me?” he said, with intended harshness.

“He’s a good man, Quirke.” She lifted her hands to him in a gesture of pained supplication. “Please-he needs to talk to someone.”

He in turn lifted his great shoulders, let them fall again. There were moments, such as when he flexed his great broad frame like this, that he seemed made not of flesh and bone but of some more dense material, hewn and carved.

“All right, Sarah,” he said in a voice cavernous with weary impatience. The swans, discouraged at last, turned and glided serenely, disdainfully, away. “All right,” he said, a deeper fall. “All right.”

HE INVITED MAL TO LUNCH AT JAMMET’S. THE CHOICE, HE WAS WELL aware, was a mild piece of mischief on his part, since fine food was not among the rich things that Mal coveted, and he was uncomfortable amidst the restaurant’s down-at-heel splendeurs . He sat vigilantly on a chair that was as spindly as his own frame, with his long neck protruding from his white shirt collar and the fingers of both hands-a strangler’s delicate, shapely hands, Quirke always thought-clamped on the table edge as if he might leap up at any moment and hurry out of the place. He wore his habitual pinstripes and bow tie. Despite the elegant cut of his clothes he never seemed quite squared up in them; it was as if someone else had dressed him with fussy care, as a mother would dress her unwilling son in his Confirmation suit. The maître d’ descended on them flutteringly and offered M’sieur Kweerk and his guest an aperitif, and Mal sighed heavily and looked at his watch. Quirke enjoyed seeing him trapped like this; it was part of the payment, part of the recompense, that he exacted from his brother-in-law-his almost-brother-for the advantages he enjoyed, although what those advantages were, had he been challenged, Quirke could not have said, exactly, except that there was the obvious one, which was, of course, Sarah.

Quirke chose an expensive claret and made an ostentatious show of swirling a splash of it in his glass, sniffing, and tasting, and frowning in approval to the wine waiter, while Mal looked away, controlling his impatience. He would not take even a glass of the wine, saying he had work to do in the afternoon. “Fine,” Quirke snapped. “All the more for me, then.” The elderly waiter in his shiny black tailcoat tended them with the unctuous solemnity of an usher at a funeral service. After Quirke had ordered salmon in aspic and a roasted grouse Mal asked for chicken soup and a plain omelette. “For God’s sake, Mal,” Quirke said under his breath.

Their conversation was even more strained than usual. Only a couple of other tables in the place were occupied and everything above a murmur could be heard halfway across the room. They talked desultorily of hospital matters. Quirke’s jaws ached from the effort of not yawning, and presently his mind too began to ache. He was both impressed and irritated by Mal’s capacity to be engrossed, or at least to give a convincing impression of being engrossed, in the minutiae of the administration of the Holy Family Hospital, even the name of which, in all its bathos, always provoked in Quirke a shudder of embarrassment and loathing. Listening to Mal stolidly expounding on what he kept referring to as the hospital’s overall financial position, he asked himself if he were lacking in an essential seriousness: but he knew, of course, that by asking this he was really only congratulating himself for not being dull and dogged like his brother-in-law. He found Mal to be a continuing mystery, but not thereby impressive. Mal was for Quirke a version of the Sphinx: high, unavoidable, and monumentally ridiculous.

Yet what was he to make of this business of Christine Falls? It could not be, he had decided, a question of professional negligence-Mal was never negligent. But what, then? Quirke would have had no doubt of the answer to that question had the man involved been anyone other than Malachy Griffin. Girls like Chrissie Falls were traps for the unwary, but Mal was the wariest man that Quirke had ever known. And yet, watching him now, plying his soup spoon with finical little swoops and lifts-those hands again, slow and somewhat clumsy despite their slender lines; in the delivery room he had a reputation for being too quick to reach for the forceps-Quirke wondered if throughout all these years he might have been underestimating his brother-in-law, or perhaps overestimating would be the better word. What went on behind that bony, coffin-shaped face, those prominent, washed-blue eyes: what illicit hungers lurked there? No sooner had he begun to think this thought than his mind turned aside from it queasily. No: he did not want to speculate on Mal’s secret predilections. The girl had died and he had covered up the sordid circumstances-surely that was all there was to it. These things happened, more often than was imagined. Quirke thought of Sarah standing on the canal bank, looking at the swans and not seeing them, her eyes brimming with troubles. He’s under a great deal of strain, she had said; was the strain all to do with Christine Falls, and if so, did Sarah know about her? And what did she know? He had done, he told himself, the right thing: the registry file was safely rewritten, and that coward Mulligan would keep his mouth shut. The girl was dead-what else was of consequence? And besides, he had an advantage on his brother-in-law now. He did not think he would ever need or want to use it, but it gratified him to know that it was there, available to him, even though, knowing it, he felt the faintest twinge of shame.