Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

Phoebe did not try to hide her surprise; it was a part of the unspoken understanding between them, the father-daughter contract-treacherous father, injured daughter-that he would not call on her unannounced. Her hair was held back with a band, and she was wearing black velvet pointed-toed slippers and a peignoir of watered silk with an elaborate design of dragons and birds that had once belonged, he realized, to Sarah. "I was about to take a bath," she said. "Everything feels so filthy in this weather." Side by side they plodded up the long flights of stairs. The house was shabby and dim and in the stairwell there hung the same grayish smell as in the house that he lived in, on Mount Street. He imagined other, similar houses all over the city, each one a warren of vast, high-ceilinged rooms turned into flats and bed-sitters for the likes of him and his daughter, the homeless ones, the chronically unhoused.

Once inside the door of the flat she asked him for a shilling for the gas meter. "Lucky you came," she said. "Hot and horrible as it is, I don't fancy a cold bath."

She made tea and brought it into the living room. They sat, with their cups on their knees, facing each other on the bench seat under the great sash window, the lower half of which was opened fully onto the stillness of the evening. The workers in the offices roundabout had all gone home by now and the street below was empty save for the odd motorcar or a green double-decker bus, braying and smoking and spilling its straggle of passengers onto the pavement. Behind them the room stood in dumb stillness; the light from the window reflected in the mirror of a sideboard at the back wall seemed a huge, arrested exclamation. "I'm keeping you from your bath," Quirke said. She continued gazing into the street as if she had not heard. The old-gold light falling from above lit the angle of her jaw and he caught his dead wife's very image.

"A detective came to see me," he said. A faint frown tightened the pale triangle between her eyebrows but still she did not look at him. "He was asking about Deirdre Hunt-or Laura Swan, whichever."

"Why?"

"Why?"

"I mean, why was he asking you ?"

"I did a postmortem on her."

"That's right. You said."

She picked at a thread in the rough covering of the window seat. In her silk gown she had the look of one of the fragile figures in a faded oriental print. He wondered if she would be considered pretty. He could not judge. She was his daughter.

"Tell me," he said, "how well did you know this woman?"

"I told you already-I bought some stuff from her, hand lotion, that sort of thing."

"And the fellow who was in business with her, Leslie White-did you know him?"

"I told you that, too. He gave me his card one day. I have it somewhere."

He studied her. So it was true: she had been with Leslie White before he saw the two of them in Duke Lane going their separate ways. He turned his head and looked about the room. She had impressed herself hardly at all on the place. The few oversized pieces of furniture had probably been there for a century or more, relics of an oppressively solid, commodious world that was long gone. The mantelpiece bore a few knickknacks-a Meissen ballerina, a brass piggy bank, two miniature china dogs facing each other from either end-and in a corner of the horsehair sofa a one-eyed teddy bear was wedged at a drunken angle. The only photograph to be seen, in a tortoiseshell frame on the sideboard, was of Mal and Sarah on their wedding day; there was no image of her mother, or of him. Where was the Evie Hone pencil study of Delia that he had given her when she came back from America? She had pared her life to its essentials. A bunch of wilted violets lay on the table.

He had been in Dublin on the day that Sarah died, in Boston, in the same hospital where he had first met her nearly twenty years before. The brain tumor, the signs of which none of the medical men around her had recognized, had in the end done its work quickly. After he had got the news from Boston Quirke had spoken longdistance to Phoebe on the telephone. She was staying in Scituate, south of the city, with Rose Crawford, her grandfather's widow. The connection on the transatlantic line had an eerie, hollow quality that brought him back instantly to the big old gaunt house in Scituate that Josh Crawford had left to his wife. He had pictured Phoebe standing in the echoing entrance hall with the receiver in her hand, gazing at the arabesques of light in the stained glass panels on either side of the front door. She had listened for a while to his halting attempts to find something to say to her, some word of condolence and apology, but then had interrupted him. "Quirke," she said, "listen. I'm an orphan. My mother is dead, now Sarah is dead, and you're dead to me, too. Don't phone again." Then she had hung up.

When she came home from America he had expected her to refuse to see him, but it had been a time of truces, and she had joined up, however unenthusiastically, to the general amnesty. He wondered, as he so frequently wondered, what she thought of him now-did she resent, despise, hate him? All he knew was how much easier it had been between them in all the years before she had found out that he was her father. He would have liked to have them back, those years; he would have liked that ease, that dispensation, back again.

She rose and carried the tea tray into the kitchen and came back with her cigarette case and her lighter. She stood by the mantelpiece and lit a cigarette and swiveled her mouth to blow a line of smoke down at the fireplace, and there was Delia again, his hard-eyed, dark, dead wife.

"Let me see that card," he said.

"What card?"

"The one Leslie White gave you."

She looked at him levelly with a faint, brittle smile. "You're starting to meddle again, Quirke, aren't you?" she said.

He was never sure, now, what to call her, how to address her. Somehow just her name was not enough, and yet at the same time it was too much. "The world," he said, "is not what it seems."

Her smile turned steelier still.

"Oh, Quirke," she said, "don't try to sound philosophical, it doesn't convince. Besides, I know you. You can't leave anything alone." She took another, long draw at her cigarette, flaring her nostrils. When she leaned her head back to breathe out the smoke her eyes narrowed and she looked more oriental than ever. Behind him, down in the street, a bicycle bell tinged sharply. "You think there's some mystery to Laura Swan's death, don't you?" she said. "I can hear the little gray cells working."

She was mocking him; he did not mind. He turned his face away from her to look down into the street again. At the far pavement a clerical student, somber-suited, had dismounted from his bike and was leaning down to remove his cycle clips. Even yet the sight of that glossy, raven-black suiting made something tighten in Quirke's gut.

"There are dangerous people about," he said. "They might not seem dangerous, but they are."

"Who are you thinking of, specifically?"

"No one, specifically."

She gazed at him for a long moment. "I'm not going to give you Leslie White's number."

"I'll get it anyway."

She rose and walked into the shadowed depths of the room and sat down on the sofa, crossing one leg on the other and smoothing the silk stuff of the gown over her knee. In the dimness there her pale face shone paler still, a Noh mask. "What are you doing, Quirke? I mean, really."

"Really? I don't know-and that's the truth."

"Then if you don't know, shouldn't you not be doing it?"

"I'm not even sure what 'it' is. But yes, you're right, I should stay out of it."

"Yet you won't."

He did not answer. He was recalling his first glimpse of Billy Hunt that day in Bewley's, sitting at the little marble table before his untouched cup of coffee, erect on the plush banquette, the red of which was the color of an open wound, lost in his misery. It was, Quirke reflected now, so easy to pity the pitiable.