Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

"Yes." She felt ridiculously giddy, as if she had already consumed half a dozen drinks.

"How did you hear?"

"Someone told me."

"Ah. I was afraid there might have been a story in the papers. I'm glad there wasn't. It would have been unbearable, seeing it in cold print." He looked at his shoes. "Christ. Poor Laura." He knocked back the last of his drink and caught the barman's eye and waggled his empty glass. He looked at hers and said, "You're not drinking."

"I don't, really."

He gazed at her for a moment in silence, smiling, then asked suddenly, "What age are you?"

"Twenty-five," she said, and was surprised at herself: why had she lied, adding two years to her age? "And you?"

"Oh, now," he said. "A girl doesn't ask a gentleman his age."

She smiled back at him, then looked into her glass.

The barman brought the second drink and Leslie turned the tumbler this way and that in his hand, making the ice cubes chuckle. For the first time since he had spoken to her he seemed momentarily at a loss. She asked: "Are you closing up?"

"Closing up…?"

"The Silver Swan. I thought, when I saw you with the cardboard box…"

"No, I was just taking away some of-some of Laura's things." He paused, with an exaggeratedly mournful expression. "I don't know what I'll do with the place, really. It's complicated. There are a number of interests involved. And the finances are a little-well, tangled, shall we say."

Phoebe waited, then said, "Her husband, is he one of the 'interests'?"

For a second he was struck silent. "Do you know him, the husband?" he asked, a hint suspiciously.

"No. Someone I know knows him-used to know him."

He shook his head ruefully. "This city," he said. "It's a village, really."

"Yes. Everyone knows everyone else's business."

At that he gave her a sharp look from under his eyebrows. "It's true, I'm sure," he said, letting his voice trail off.

A couple came into the pub then and greeted him. The man was dressed in a remarkable ginger-colored suit made of a coarse, hairy material. The woman with him had dyed shiny black hair that was gathered in a topknot and tied tightly with a ribbon, which gave her a look of wide-eyed, fixed astonishment. Leslie White excused himself and sauntered over to them. She watched him as he talked to them in his languidly animated way. If Laura Swan had been more than his business partner, as Phoebe had suspected, it was clear that her death had not broken his heart. All at once she saw in her mind with unnerving clarity Laura Swan's-Deirdre Hunt's-broad face with its slightly flawed features, the saddle of faint freckles on the bridge of her nose, her purplish-blue eyes and the look in them, eager, anxious, excited, and she felt a stab of pity-was it?-so piercing that it made her catch her breath. She was surprised at herself, and even a little shocked. She had thought she had grown out of the way of such feelings.

Leslie White came back looking apologetic again and urged her to have another drink, but she said no. She stepped down from the stool. She was uncomfortable. It was so hot and airless in here and the stuff of her thin dress clung briefly to the backs of her thighs and she had to reach a hand down quickly and peel the material from her skin. Leslie-was she really thinking of him already by his first name?-laid two long, slender fingers on her wrist to detain her. She fancied she could feel the faint rustle of his blood beneath the pads of his fingertips. Life consists, she reflected with matter-of-fact clarity, in a long series of misjudgments. The man in the hairy suit and his topknotted companion-she looked, in fact, as if she were suspended from the ceiling by an invisible cord attached to her hair-were examining her from across the room with unmasked speculation.

"I must go," she said. "There's someone waiting."

She could see him not believing her. "You have my card," he said. "Will you ring me?"

She tipped her head to one side and looked at him, allowing herself a faint smile. "I very much doubt it."

She realized she was still clutching the bunch of violets in her damp and not quite steady hand; they looked like some small, many-headed creature that had been accidentally strangled.

QUIRK, TOO, HAD BEEN BROODING ON THAT PLACE OVER THE OPTIcian's shop in Anne Street, and he, too, had found himself being led there after he had finished work for the day, so that when Phoebe left the pub in Duke Lane he was standing at the very spot, although he did not know it, where she had stood a half hour earlier watching Leslie White come out of the doorway with the cardboard box in his arms. She did not see Quirke now, but he saw her. He did not hail her; he let her go on, and watched as she turned into a now nearly deserted Grafton Street and disappeared from his view. He frowned. He did not like coincidences; they made him uneasy. Again he felt the touch of a cold tentacle of unease. A few seconds later, as he was about to move off, he saw another figure duck out of the pub, and knew at once who it must be-there was only one person who could have hair like that. Quirke was familiar with the type: long and gangly, with a stooping, sinuous, flat-footed gait, his long pale hands swinging at the ends of his arms as if they were connected to his wrists not by bone but skin alone. A hollow man: if he were to be rapped on there would come back only a dull, flat echo. The fellow climbed into his little car, not bothering to open the door but throwing one long leg and then the other over it and plumping down in the seat beside the cardboard box and starting up the engine and making it roar. What was his name-White? Someone White, yes. The car shot out of the lane and turned in the direction of Dawson Street, sweeping past Quirke where he stood with his back to the window of a draper's shop. The man, his fine hair flying, did not look at him. Leslie, that was the name. Leslie White.

QUIRKE FELT LIKE A MAN WHO HAS BEEN MAKING HIS WAY SAFELY along beside a tropic and treacherous sea and suddenly feels the sand begin to shift and suck at his bare, defenseless, and all at once unsteady feet. The possibility that Phoebe, too, might be somehow involved in the business of Deirdre Hunt's death, that was a thing he could not have anticipated, and it shook him. It was Phoebe who had told him about Leslie White in the first place. Did she know him better than she had pretended to? And if so, what kind of knowing was it?

He walked slowly up Dawson Street and across the Green in the direction of Harcourt Street. Couples sat on benches self-consciously holding hands, and white-skinned young men with their shirts open to the waist lay sprawled on the grass in the last of the day's sunshine. He felt acutely, as so often, the unwieldy bulk of himself, his squat neck and rolling shoulders and thick upper arms and the vast, solid cage of his chest. He was too big, too barrelsome, all disproportionate to the world. His brow was wet under the band of his hat. He needed a drink. Odd, how that need waxed and waned. Days might go by without a serious thought of alcohol; at other times he shivered through endless hours clenched on himself, every parched nerve crying out to be slaked. There was another self inside him, one who hectored and wheedled, demanding to know by what right he had imposed this cruel abstinence, or whispering that he had been good, oh so good, for so long, for months and months and months, and surely by now had earned one drink, one miserable little drink?

In Harcourt Street he rang the bell of Phoebe's flat and heard faintly its electric buzzing from high above him on the fourth floor. He waited, looking down the broad sweep of the street to the corner of the Green and the glimpse afforded there of crowding, dejected leafage. A hot breeze blew against his face, bearing a dusty mix of smells, the exhausted breath of summer. He remembered the trams in the old days trundling along here, clanging and sparking. He had lived in this city for most of his life and yet felt a stranger still.