Benjamin Black - Christine Falls

“What happened to your face?” she said. “I noticed earlier. And you’re limping.”

“Took a tumble.”

She gazed into his face; he could see her not believing him. “Oh,” she said suddenly, “I’ve a drop on my nose!”

She sniffed, and laughed, and buried her face in the towel. Quirke thought: All this has happened before somewhere .

At the pool’s edge there were two cane armchairs on either side of a low bamboo table. Brenda put on a white terry-cloth robe and they sat down. The cane crackled like a fire of thorns under Quirke’s weight. He offered Brenda a cigarette but she shook her head. The reflections from the pool, calmer now that the water had calmed, moved in dreamy arabesques on wall and ceiling, reminding him vaguely of blood cells pressed between the glass slides of a microscope. Brenda said:

“What are you doing up, anyway, at this hour?”

He shrugged, and the chair made another loud complaint. “Can’t sleep,” he said.

“I was like that for ages, when I first came. I thought I would go mad.”

He seemed to hear a rasping something in her voice, a sorrowing catch. “Homesick, are you?” he asked.

Again she shook her head. “I was sick of home, that’s why I left.” She gazed before her, seeing not here but there, not now but then. “No,” she went on, “it’s the place I can’t get used to. This house. Those bloody foghorns.”

“And Josh Crawford?” he said. “Have you got used to him?”

“Oh, I can handle the likes of Mr. Crawford.” She turned to him, lifting her legs and tucking her feet under her and stretching the robe over her smooth, round knees. He imagined putting his face between her thighs, his mouth finding the cold wet lips there and the burning hollow within. “I was surprised,” she said, “when I heard you were coming.”

“Were you?”

Their voices traveled out over the water and struck faint, marine echoes from the walls. She was still studying him. “You’ve changed,” she said.

“Have I?”

“You’re quieter.”

“ No more jokes .” He smiled glumly. “It’s something Phoebe said.”

“She seems nice, Phoebe.”

“Yes. She is.”

They were silent, and the echoes fell. Distantly in the house a clock struck a single, silver note, and an instant later from farther off there came another chime, and yet another, farther off still, and then the silence settled again. Quirke said:

“Tell me, what do you know about this charity work that Josh does?”

“You mean the orphanage?”

He looked at her. “What orphanage,” he asked slowly, “is that?”

“St. Mary’s. It’s out in Brookline. He gives money to it.” A tremor of unease touched her like the tip of a needle. What was he after? To change the subject she said, “Mrs. Crawford has taken a shine to you.”

He raised his eyebrows. “And how do you know that?”

“I just know.”

He nodded. “Your female intuition, is it?”

She flinched at the sudden cold mockery in his tone. She stood up and pulled the robe tight around her and walked away amidst the capering, ghostly lights, dangling the black bathing cap by its strap from her finger.

“Your niece was right,” she threw back over her shoulder. “No more jokes.”

HEAVY WAVES, BOXY AND THICK, ROLLED IN SLOW MOTION PAST THE lighthouse on its offshore rock and broke against the beach, lacing the air with ice-white spume. The coast sloped steeply here, diving off toward Provincetown and the vast Atlantic distances beyond. Quirke and Phoebe stood side by side on the concrete slipway, looking out to the horizon. A hard wind roaring in from the sea blew spray into their faces and whipped the flaps of their overcoats against their legs. Phoebe said something but Quirke could not hear her for the wind and the slushy clatter of the shingle rolling under the waves. He cupped a hand to his ear and she leaned close and shouted again, “I feel if I put out my arms I’d fly!” How young she was; the long and tedious journey from Ireland seemed not to have affected her at all, and her eyes sparkled and her cheeks glowed. Josh Crawford’s big Buick was parked behind them at an angle on the sandy track, humped and shining, like something huge that had slithered its way up out of the sea. Andy Stafford in his chauffeur’s greatcoat stood beside it, watching them narrowly, holding his smart peaked cap at his side, his oiled black hair blowing straight back and plastered against his skull. Slight of form in field-gray outfit and polished leggings he had the look of a boy soldier facing into the wind of battle.

Quirke and Phoebe turned and set off walking along the sandy pathway in the lee of the low dunes. A few clapboard holiday homes stood some way back from the sea, their paint peeling and windows hazed over from the salt winds. Quirke on his walking stick had to go gingerly for the ground was uneven and shifting in places and the marram grass looked tough and wiry enough to wrap itself around his ankles and send him sprawling. Despite having to stump along clumsily like this he felt so giddily light in the head it seemed he too might be plucked up by the wind and whirled away into the tumultuous sky. He stopped and brought out his cigarettes but the wind was too strong and his lighter would not light. They went on.

“I used to come here with Delia,” he said, and regretted it at once, for Phoebe pounced, of course.

“What was she like, Delia?” she asked greedily, putting a hand on his arm and squeezing it. “I mean, really. I want to know, now that I’m here. I can almost feel her presence, in the house.”

“Oh, exciting, I suppose.”

Was it true? She had been wholly without scruples of any kind-her father’s daughter-and that had certainly excited him. But he had hated her, too. Curious, loving and hating, the two sides of the precious coin she had so casually handed him. Phoebe was nodding solemnly as if he had uttered a profound insight. This eagerness of hers to know what Delia had been really like -did she have some unconscious inkling of who Delia really was? She said:

“I thought Mummy was supposed to be the exciting one.”

“We were all different, then.” He sounded to himself like a fond old fool, maundering over the lost years. It occurred to him that he was sick of being Quirke, but knew there was no one else he could be. “I mean,” he said quickly, irritated, “we were all someone else, your father, Sarah, me-” He broke off. “Look, let’s go back, this wind is making my head ache.”

But it was not only the wind that was tormenting him. When Phoebe spoke Delia’s name now he felt as an adulterer might feel when his wife makes casual mention of the family friend who is his secret lover. He knew that he should tell his daughter-his daughter!-the truth, should tell her who her real parents were, but he did not know how to say it. It was too enormous to be put into words, a thing outside the commonplace run of life. It would not square, he told himself, with what they had been to each other up to now, the easy tolerance there had been between them, the freedom, the untaxing gaiety. It was absurd-how could he begin to be a father to her, after all these years, the so many years that made up the entirety of her life? Yet even as he went along here with her hand tugging at his arm he was convinced that he could feel the loss of her, the absence of her, from whatever hollow place it was in his heart that she would have filled, in those years. Since the moment in the mountains when Sarah had made her confession to him there had been gathering steadily in him, like a head of water behind a dam, something which if he released it would swamp his life and drown his peace of mind, and so he limped along, and smiled, and entertained his oblivious daughter’s chattering inquiries about the woman she did not know was her mother. Someday, he told himself, with almost a vindictive satisfaction, someday he would suffer for this laxity, this laziness of spirit, this cowardice. For that was what it was-plain funk. He might make all the excuses he wished, might talk of the tolerance there had been between them, the freedom and the gaiety that he must not put at risk, but he knew it was just an alibi he was attempting to construct, a front behind which he could go on as he had always done, in peace, being nobody’s father.