Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

"How did they meet, your husband and Deirdre-Laura Swan?"

She turned her head slowly and gave him a long, smilingly quizzical look. "Are you sure you're not with the police? You have the tone of an interrogator." There was a muffled sound down in the dishwater- tok ! -and she looked up quickly and gave a tiny gasp. "Oh, Christ, I think I've cut myself." She lifted her hand out of the suds. There was a deep gash, unnaturally clean and straight, on the underside of her right thumb close to the knuckle. The dilute blood raced with impossible swiftness down her wrist and along her arm. She stared aghast at the wound. Her face was paper-white. "The glass," she said tonelessly. "It broke."

He put a hand under her elbow.

"Come," he said, "come and sit down."

He led her to the table. She walked as in a trance. The blood had reached her elbow and was soaking into the rucked sleeve of her black sweater. She sat. He told her to hold her hand upright and made her grasp the ball of her sliced thumb with her other hand and squeeze hard to reduce the flow of blood.

"Have you a bandage?" he said. She gazed at him in frowning incomprehension. "A bandage," he said. "Or something I can cut up and use for one?"

"I don't know. In the bathroom?"

He took out his handkerchief and tried to rip it but the seam would not give. He asked if there was a scissors. She pointed to a drawer under the countertop by the sink. "There." She gave a brief, faintly hysterical laugh. He found the scissors and cut a strip of cotton and set to binding the cut. As he worked he felt her breath on the backs of his hands and the heat of her face beating softly against his cheek. He tried to keep his hands from shaking, marveling at how quickly, how copiously, the blood insisted on flowing. A dull-crimson stain had appeared already in the improvised bandage. "Will it need to be stitched?" she asked.

"No. It will stop soon." Or so he hoped; he really did not know what to do with living flesh, with freely running blood.

She said: "Do me a favor, will you? Look in my handbag, there are some aspirin." He went into the hall as she directed and took her black handbag from where it hung by its strap on the coat rack behind the front door and brought it to her. "You look," she said. "Don't worry, you won't find anything incriminating."

He rummaged in the bag. The lipstick-face-powder-perfume smell that came up from its recesses reminded him of all the women he had ever known. He found the aspirin bottle, shook out two tablets, and brought a tumbler to the sink and filled it and carried it back to the table. Kate White's good hand trembled as she lifted the glass to her lips. She was still holding her bandaged thumb aloft in a parody of jaunty affirmation. "Will I have to stay like this all day?" she asked, making her voice shake with comic pathos. He said the cut would seal and then the bleeding would stop. She glanced about the room. "Christ," she murmured, with vague inconsequence, "how I hate this house."

SHE ASKED HIM TO TURN THE GAS ON UNDER THE COFFEEPOT, AND when it was hot she poured a cupful for herself, and tasted it, and grimaced. They went back to the den and she sat on the sofa with her legs tucked under her and looked at him over the rim of the coffee cup. "You're quite the Good Samaritan, aren't you," she said. "Have you had a lot of practice?" He did not answer. He went and stood by the window, where she had stood earlier, and put his hands in his pockets and contemplated the garden. The evening would soon turn into night. Above the trees small puffs of pink cloud sailed against a band of tender, greenish sky. "Tell me," she said, "what's your interest in the Swan woman? The truth, now."

"I told you-her husband telephoned me."

"You said."

"He asked me not to do a postmortem."

"Why?"

He went on studying the garden. In the dimming air the trees, glistening yet from the long-ceased rain, were ragged globes of radiance. "He didn't like the idea of it, he said."

"But you didn't believe him. I mean, you didn't believe that was why he was asking you not to do it."

"I had no reason to doubt him."

"Then why are you here?"

He turned to her at last, still with his hands in his pockets. "As I say, I was curious."

"Curious to do what? To get a look at the betrayed wife?" She smiled.

"I really must be going," he said. "Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. White."

"Kate. And thank you for binding my wounds. You did it expertly, like a real doctor." She set the coffee cup beside the telephone on the glass table and stood up. When she was on her feet she swayed a little, and put a hand, the unbandaged one, weakly to her forehead. "Oh dear," she said, "I feel quite woozy."

In the hall she lifted his hat from the peg where she had hung it and handed it to him. He was at the door but she put a hand on his arm, and as he turned back she stepped up to him swiftly and kissed him full on the mouth, digging urgent fingers into his wrist through the stuff of his jacket. He tasted a trace of lipstick. On her breath behind the smell of coffee there persisted a faint sourness from the wine. The tips of her breasts lightly brushed against his shirtfront. She released him and drew away. "Sorry," she said again. "As I say, I'm not myself." Then she stepped swiftly back and shut the door.

SHE DID NOT KNOW WHAT SHE WANTED FROM DR. KREUTZ, OR WHAT she expected from him; she was not sure that there was anything for her to expect. At first she was pleased-she was thrilled-simply to have been noticed by him. It was true, plenty of people noticed her, men especially, but the Doctor's was a unique kind of noticing, in her experience. He did not seem to be interested in her because of her looks or of what he might think he could persuade her to do for him. It was a long time before he even touched her, and when he did, his touch was special, too. And it was strange, but she was never wary of him, as she had learned to be wary of other men. In a curious way she did not think of him as a man at all. Oh, he was attractive-he was the most attractive, the most exquisite human being she had ever encountered in her life-but when she thought about him she did not imagine him kissing her or holding her in his arms or anything like that. It was not that kind of attraction he had for her. The nearest thing she could think of was the way, when she was a little girl, she used to feel sometimes about an actor in the pictures. She would sit at matinees in the sixpenny seats with her hands joined palm to palm and pressed between her knees-an upside-down attitude of prayer, it struck her, though it was certainly not God she was praying to here-and her face lifted to the flickering silver-and-black images of John Gilbert or Leslie Howard or the fellow who played Zorro in the follyeruppers, as if one of them might suddenly lean down from the screen and kiss her softly, quickly, gaily on the lips before turning back to join in the action again. This was how it would be with Dr. Kreutz, she was convinced, this magical, this luminous, this infinitely tender leaning down, when he would eventually judge the time was right to show her how he really felt about her.

Of course, he did not try anything with her, nor even make a suggestive remark, as men always did, sooner or later. No, there was nothing like that with Dr. Kreutz.

He tried to teach her more about Sufism and gave her books and pamphlets to read, but she found it hard to learn. There were so many names, for a start, most of which she could hardly get her tongue around, and which confused her-half of them were called Ibn-this or Ibn-that, though he told her it only meant son of , but still. And the teachings of these wise men did not seem to her all that wise. They were so sure of themselves and sure that they were dispensing the greatest wisdom, but most of the things they said seemed to her obvious or even silly. I have never seen a man lost who was on a straight path or If you cannot stand a sting do not put your finger in a scorpion's nest or What may appear to you a clump of bushes may well be a place where a leopard is lurking -what was so clever or deep in such pronouncements? They were not much different from the kinds of thing her father and his cronies said to each other in the pub on a Saturday afternoon, hunched over their pints at the bar with the wireless muttering in the background and someone doing a crossword puzzle in the paper- It's a wise child that knows its father or There's more than one way to skin a cat or It's a long road that has no turning .