Benjamin Black - Christine Falls

Maggie gave a low, sardonic snort. “I suppose you’re here about the girl,” she said.

Quirke frowned. “Phoebe?”

“No!” Maggie said, with another snort. “The one that’s after dying.”

There was a burst of applause outside as the Judge finished his speech. Sarah entered carrying a stack of used plates. Seeing Quirke she hesitated, then came and set the plates on the table among the other piles of washing-up waiting to be done. With weary forbearance she asked Maggie if the soup might be ready sometime soon-“They’ve eaten all the sandwiches, I’m afraid”-but Maggie, still bent over the steaming pot, only muttered something under her breath. Sarah sighed, and turned on the hot-water tap. Quirke watched her with a tipsily unfocused smile.

“I wish,” she said quietly, not looking at him, “you wouldn’t take Phoebe to places like McGonagle’s. Mal is right, she’s too young to be in pubs, drinking.”

Quirke put on a repentant expression. “I shouldn’t have come here either, I suppose,” he said, hanging his head, but looking up at her from a corner of his eye.

“Not straight from that place, no.”

“I wanted to see you.”

She turned a quick glance in Maggie’s direction. “Quirke,” she murmured, “don’t start.”

The hot water from the tap blurted into the sink, throwing up clouds of steam. Sarah put on an apron and took a soup tureen down from a shelf, shaking her head at the dusty state of it, and washed it with a sponge. Quirke was gratified to see how agitated she was. She carried the tureen to the stove and Maggie poured the soup into it. “Will you serve it, Maggie, please?” Quirke lit another cigarette. The smoke, the smell of the soup, the whiskey fumes all combined to promote in him a feeling of faint, sweet regretfulness. All this might have been his, had he done differently, he thought-this fine house, the band of friends, the family retainer, and this woman in her scarlet gown and elegant high-heeled shoes and those silk stockings with such straight seams. He watched her as she held the door for Maggie to pass through with the soup. Her hair was the color of rain-wet wheat. He had chosen her sister, Delia Crawford; Delia the dark one; Delia who died. Or was it he who had been chosen?

“Do you know,” he said, “what it was that struck me first about you, all those years ago, in Boston?” He waited, but she made no response, and would not turn to look at him. He whispered it: “Your smell.”

She gave a short, incredulous laugh. “My what ? My perfume, do you mean?”

He shook his head vigorously. “No no no. Not perfume-you.”

“And what did I smell of?”

“I’ve told you-you. You smelled of you. You still do.”

Now she did look at him, smiling in a strained, unsteady way, and when she spoke her voice had a feathery quality, as if she were faintly in pain. “Doesn’t everybody smell of themselves?”

Again he shook his head, gently this time.

“Not like you,” he said. “Not with that-that intensity.”

Quickly she turned her attention back to the sink. She knew she was blushing. She could smell him, now, or not smell but feel him, rather, the fleshy heat of him pressing against her like the air of a midsummer day thick with the threat of thunder. “Oh, Quirke,” she said with an effort at gaiety, “you’re just drunk!”

He swayed a little, and righted himself. “And you’re beautiful,” he said.

She closed her eyes for a second and seemed to waver. She was holding on to the rim of the sink. Her knuckles were white.

“You shouldn’t talk to me like this, Quirke,” she said in an undertone. “It isn’t fair.” He had leaned so close to her from where he was standing that it seemed he might put his face into her hair at the side, or kiss her ear or her pale, dry cheek. He swayed again, smiling emptily. Suddenly she turned to face him, her eyes shining with anger, and he reared back from her unsteadily. “This is what you do, isn’t it,” she said, her lips whitening. “You play with people. You tell them how nice they smell, and that they’re beautiful, and all just to see their reaction, just to see if they’ll do something interesting, to relieve your boredom.”

She began to weep, making no sound, big, shining tears squeezing out between her shut eyelids and her mouth clenched and dragged down at the corners. The door behind her opened and Phoebe stepped into the room and stopped, staring first at her mother’s bowed back and then at Quirke, who unseen by Sarah lifted high his eyebrows and his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug of bewildered innocence. The girl hesitated a moment, a faint fear coming into her face, then soundlessly withdrew and as soundlessly closed the door.

The spectacle of another female in tears, the second this evening, was rapidly making Quirke sober. He offered Sarah his handkerchief, but she fumbled in a pocket of her frock and brought out one of her own and held it up for him to see. “I always keep a handkerchief handy,” she said, “just in case.” She gave a congested laugh and blew her nose, then braced her hands on the sink again and lifted her face to the ceiling with a hoarse, infuriated groan. “Look at me, my God! Standing in my own kitchen, crying. And for what?” She turned and contemplated him, shaking her head. “Oh, Quirke, you’re hopeless!”

Encouraged by her tearful smile Quirke lifted a hand to touch her cheek, but she twitched her head aside, no longer smiling. “Too late, Quirke,” she said, in a hard, tight voice. “Twenty years too late.”

She tucked the handkerchief into the sleeve of her dress and took off the apron and set it on the sideboard and stood for a moment with her hand resting on the cloth as if on a child’s head, her eyes downcast and blank. Quirke watched her; she was stronger than he was, in the end, far stronger. Again he moved to touch her, but again she flinched from him and he let fall his hand. Then she gave herself a faint shake and turned and walked out of the room.

Quirke stayed where he was for a minute, gazing into his glass. It puzzled him, how with people nothing ever went as it seemed it should, or as it seemed it might. He sighed. He had the hot and guilty sense of having tinkered with something too delicately fine for his clumsy fingers. He put down his glass, telling himself to leave and not say another word to anyone. He was halfway to the door when it was pushed open brusquely and Mal came in. “What did you say to her?” he demanded. Quirke hesitated, willing himself not to laugh; Mal looked so perfectly, so theatrically, the part of the irate husband. “Well?” he snapped again.

“Nothing, Mal,” Quirke said, trying to sound both blameless and contrite. Mal watched him narrowly. “You’re a troublemaker, Quirke,” he said, in an unexpectedly mild and almost matter-of-fact tone. “You come to my house, drunk, on this night when my father-”

“Look, Mal-”

“Don’t Look, Mal me!”

He stepped forward and planted himself in front of Quirke, breathing loudly down his nostrils, his eyes bulging behind his spectacles. Maggie appeared in the doorway, in a repeat of Phoebe’s appearance earlier. Seeing the two men confronting each other she, too, quickly withdrew, with a gleeful look.

“You have no place here, Quirke,” Mal said, speaking evenly. “You may think you have, but you haven’t.”

Quirke made to step past him but Mal put a hand against his chest. Quirke leaned backwards, teetering on his heels. He had a sudden vision of the two of them grappling clumsily, grunting and swaying, their arms thrown about each other in a furious bear hug. The urge to laugh was stronger than ever. “Listen, Mal,” he said, “I was bringing Phoebe home, that’s all. I shouldn’t have taken her to the pub in the first place. I’m sorry. All right?” Mal was clenching his fists again; he now looked like the thwarted villain in a silent film. “Mal,” Quirke said, trying to put conviction into his voice, “you have no reason to hate me.”