Benjamin Black: The Silver Swan

She was so flustered at the time that afterwards she could not remember exactly how he had got her to stop and talk. There was a raw wind, she recalled, swooping down in gusts from the sky and making the fallen sycamore leaves scuttle along the pavements like big, withered hands. He did not seem to mind the cold, even in his thin caftan and his practically bare feet. A purple-faced old fellow going by in a motorcar slowed down and goggled at them, the pale young woman and the dark man standing there together, she grinning like a lunatic and he as calm as if they had known each other forever.

Yes, forty , she thought, he must be forty if he's a day, older than Billy, even . But what did it matter what age he was?

He was asking her name. "Deirdre," she said, her voice hardly more than a breath, and he repeated it, trying it out, as if it were the first two syllables of a song, or of a hymn, even. Deirdre .

QUIRKE HAD LONG AGO LOST WHAT LITTLE FAITH HE MIGHT ONCE HAVE had in the Catholic pieties that the Brothers at the workhouse, officially known as Carricklea Industrial School, where he had endured his early childhood, had tried for so long to beat into him. Yet even now, when he was well into middle age, he still had his household gods, his not-to-be-toppled totems, one of which was the giant remnant of the man whom for most of his life he had unquestioningly taken to be good, even great. Garret Griffin, or the Judge, as everyone called him, even though it was some time since he had been in a position to deliver judgment on anything, had been felled the previous year, his seventy-third, by a stroke that had paralyzed him entirely, except for the muscles of his mouth and eyes and the tendons of his neck. He was confined, mute but in some way sentient, to a large white room on the third floor of the Presentation Convent of St. Louis in Rathfarnham, a far suburb of the city, where two windows, one in each of the adjoining corner walls of the room, looked out on two contrasting aspects of the Dublin Mountains, one rocky and barren, the other green and strewn with gorse. It was to these soft hills that his eyes turned constantly, with an expression of desperation, grief, and rage. Quirke marveled at how much of the man, how much of what was left of the living being, was concentrated now in his eyes; it was as if all the power of his personality had come crowding into these last, twin points of fierce and desperate fire.

Quirke visited the old man on Mondays and Thursdays; Quirke's daughter, Phoebe, came on Tuesdays and Fridays; on Sundays it was the turn of the Judge's son, Malachy. On Wednesdays and Saturdays the Judge was left to contemplate alone the day-long play of light and shadow on the mountains and to endure with speechless and, if the expression in his eyes was to be credited, furious resentment the ministrations of the octogenarian nun, Sister Agatha, who had been assigned to care for him. In his former life, his life in the world, he had done many quiet favors for the Presentation nuns, and it was they who had been the first to offer to take him in when the catastrophe befell him. It had been expected that after such a devastating stroke he would live no more than a week or two, but the weeks had passed, and then the months, and still his will to endure showed no sign of flagging. There was a school for girls on the first two floors of the building, and at fixed times of the day-midmorning, lunchtime, the four o'clock end of lessons-the pupils' voices in raucous medley rose up as far as the third floor. At that sound a tense and concentrated look would come into the Judge's eyes, hard to interpret; was it indignation, nostalgia, sorrowful remembrance-or just puzzlement? Perhaps the old man did not know where he was or what he was hearing; perhaps his mind-and those eyes left little doubt that there was a mind at some kind of work behind them-was trapped in a state of continuous bewilderment, helpless doubt. Quirke did not know quite what to think of this. Part of him, the disappointed, embittered part, wanted the old man to suffer, while another part, the part that was still the child he had once been, wished that the stroke might have killed him outright and saved him from these final humiliations.

Quirke passed these visits in reading aloud to the old man from the Irish Independent . Today was a Monday in midsummer and there was little of interest in the news pages. Eighty priests had been ordained in ceremonies at Maynooth and All Hallows- More clerics , Quirke thought, that's all we need . Here was a picture of Mr. Tom Bent, manager of the Talbot Garage in Wexford, presenting the keys of a new fire engine to the town's mayor. The Summer Sale was on in Macy's of George's Street. He turned to the foreign page. Dozy old Ike was harrying the Russians, as usual. "The German people cannot wait eternally for their sovereignty," according to Chancellor Adenauer, addressing a North Rhine-Westphalia state election rally in Düsseldorf the previous night. Then Quirke's eye fell on a paragraph on the front page, under the headline GIRL'S BODY FOUND.

The body of Mary Ellen Quigley (16), shirt factory worker, who had been missing from her home in Derry since June 17th, was recovered yesterday from the River Foyle by a fisherman pulling in his net. An inquest will be held today.

He put the paper aside. He needed a cigarette. Sister Agatha, however, did not allow smoking in the sickroom. For Quirke this was an added annoyance, but on the other hand it did give him the excuse to escape at least twice in every hour to pace the echoing, tiled corridor outside, tensely dragging on a cigarette like an expectant father in a comedy.

Why did he persist in coming here like this? Surely no one would blame him if he stayed away altogether and left the dying man to his angry solitude. The Judge had been a great and secret sinner, and it was Quirke who had exposed his sins. A young woman had died, another woman had been murdered, and these things had been the old man's fault. What impressed Quirke most was the cloak of silence that had been drawn over the affair, leaving him standing alone in his indignation, exposed, improbable, ignored, like a crackpot shouting on a street corner. So why did he keep coming dutifully each week to this barren room below the mountains? He had his own sins to account for, as his daughter could attest, the daughter whom he had for so long denied. It was a small atonement to come here twice a week and read out the court cases and the death notices for this dying old man.

His thoughts turned again to Deirdre Hunt. There had been no question of not performing a postmortem, after he had chanced on that needle mark in the woman's arm. He had his professional duty to carry out, but that was not what had made him take up the knife. He had been, as always, simply curious, though Quirke knew there was nothing simple about his curiosity. He had cut open the cadaver, palped the organs, measured the blood, and now, with the Judge for silent witness, he had it all out for himself again and viewed it from all the angles he could think of. Still it made no sense.

He turned. "What do you think, Garret?" he asked. "Just another lost girl?"

The Judge, propped against pillows, his mouth awry, glared at him. Quirke sighed. The room was hot and airless, and even though he had taken off his jacket he was sweating and could feel the damp patches on his shirt under the armpits and between his shoulder blades. He wondered, as he often did, if the Judge registered these things: heat, cold, the commonplace vagaries of the day. Was he in pain? Imagine that-imagine being in unrelenting pain and not even able to cry out to be released from it or just to plead for sympathy.

He sighed again. He recalled the premonitory twinge of unease he had felt when the woman at the hospital reception desk had handed him the note from Billy Hunt asking him to phone. How had he known that something was amiss-what intuition, what sixth sense, had forewarned him? And what was this dread he was feeling now? It was a postmortem he had performed on the body of another young woman that had led to the unraveling of the Judge's web of secrets; did he want to become involved in another version of all that? Should he not just let the death of Deirdre Hunt alone, and leave her husband in merciful ignorance? What did it matter that a woman had drowned herself?-her troubles were over now; why should her husband's be added to? Yet even as he asked himself these questions Quirke was aware of the old itch to cut into the quick of things, to delve into the dark of what was hidden-to know .