Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

In his confusion he did not at first recognize the voice, and when he did he had to stop himself from groaning. “Oh, Dannie,” he said. “Are you all right?” Knowing that of course she was not.

He let the taxi go at the bottom of Pembroke Street, not wanting to have to get out directly in front of her door, he was not sure why. She was in her dressing gown when she let him in. She had not bothered to turn on the light on the stairs coming down and they climbed to her flat in the dark. A fanlight on the return held a single star, stiletto-shaped and shimmering. Dannie had not yet said a word. He was filled with foreboding; he could almost feel it sloshing about inside him like some awful oily liquid. Why had he answered the damned phone, anyway? Now he was trapped. Dannie would make a night of it. He had been through this before, the floods of words, the tears, the soft wailing, the pleas for understanding, tenderness, pity. Now they reached the open door of the flat, and when she trailed in ahead of him he hesitated for a second on the threshold, wondering if he had the courage just to turn on his heel and go running off down those stairs as fast as he had run up the stairs at home to answer her anguished call for help.

Her flat had the familiar smell, brownish and dull, that it took on when Dannie was in one of her lows; it was like the smell of hair left long unwashed, or perhaps that was indeed what it was. Dannie had two modes, wholly distinct. For most of the time she was a coolly self-contained daughter of the middle class, fond of her pleasures, a little bored, somewhat spoiled. Then something would happen, some blend of chemicals in her brain would tip the wrong way, and she would sink into what seemed a limitless depth of sorrow and bitter distress. Her friends had learned to dread these lapses, and at the first sign of them would discover convenient excuses to be unavailable. Sinclair, however, was unable to refuse her when she was like this, so sad and helpless. She was infuriating, too, of course. Her relentlessness was hard to bear, and after hours of her hammering on at him he would have the urge to seize her by the shoulders and shake her until her teeth chattered.

Afterwards, when the depression had lifted and she had regained her equilibrium, she would be full of apologies, ducking her head in that childish way she did and doing her mortified laugh. Although they never remarked it outright, it was acknowledged between them how much she appreciated the fact that he had never taken advantage of her when she was at her weakest, for when she was like that she would do anything to win even a crumb of sympathy. More than once he had been tempted, when she fell into his arms and clung to him, but always he called to mind the wise but cruel watchword from his student days: never screw a nut. Anyway, he suspected she had not much interest in that kind of thing. She had the air of a debauched virgin, if such a thing were possible. Poor Dannie, so beautiful, so damaged, so pitiful.

In the front room they sat on the bench seat in the bay of the big window that looked down on the deserted street. Though it was almost midnight a bluish glow still lingered in the air, and the streetlights glimmered wanly.

“I’m sorry,” Sinclair said, “about your brother.” He did not know what else to say.

“Are you?” she said listlessly. “I don’t think I am. Isn’t that strange?” She was looking down into the street. She seemed calm except for her hands, clasped together in her lap and swarming over each other in a convulsive washing movement. “Or maybe it’s not strange,” she said, “maybe no one is ever really sad when someone dies, but only pretending. Don’t they say it’s not the person who’s dead that we feel sorry for but ourselves, because we know we’ll die, too? And yet people cry at the graveside and I don’t think they could be so sorry for themselves that it would make them cry, do you? Have you ever watched children at a funeral, how fed up they look, how angry they seem at being made to do this boring thing, standing in the cold and the rain while the priest says prayers they can’t understand and everyone looks so solemn? I remember when Daddy died and I…”

Sinclair let his thoughts wander. Despite everything it was almost soothing, sitting here in the gloaming with the young woman’s voice pouring over him like some mild balm-soothing, that is, so long as he paid no attention to what she was saying. He was remembering an encounter, if such it could be called, that he had witnessed between her and her late brother. It was an evening in spring. Sinclair and Dannie were walking together down Dawson Street. They had been drinking in McGonagle’s and Dannie was a little tipsy, talking and laughing about two writers who had been standing next to them at the bar arguing drunkenly as to whether or not the country still could boast a peasantry worthy of the name. A gleaming chauffeur-driven black Mercedes with a high square rear end had pulled up outside the Hibernian and three men came out of the hotel, talking together loudly and laughing. At the sight of them Dannie abruptly stopped speaking, and although she kept walking Sinclair sensed her faltering, or shying, like a nervous horse approaching a difficult jump. One of the men was Richard Jewell. She had spotted him before he saw her, and then he turned, sensing her gaze, perhaps, and when his eye fell on her he too hesitated for a beat, and then put his head far back, his nostrils flaring, and smiled. It was a strange smile, fierce, somehow, almost a snarl. The two siblings did not greet each other, merely exchanged that swift intense glance, the one with his smile and the other looking suddenly stricken, and then Jewell turned to his companions and slapped them on the shoulders in farewell, and went forward quickly and climbed into the back seat of the Mercedes, which pulled away smoothly from the curb. Yes, Dannie said through clenched teeth, yes, that was her brother. She was walking quickly with her back held stiffly straight, staring ahead; she had gone very pale. It was clear that she would say no more on the subject, and Sinclair let it go. But he remembered the look on Dannie’s face, taut and stark, and the almost violent manner in which she marched along with her spine rigid and her shoulders thrust unnaturally high, all thought of McGonagle’s and those funny drunken scribblers clearly gone from her mind.

“… And yet it’s strange, too,” she was saying now, “the way people just disappear when they die. I mean the way they’re still here, the body is still here, but they are gone, whatever was them has been extinguished, like a light that’s just been switched off.” She stopped, and turned her face towards Sinclair, sitting there, a dim figure before her in dusk’s last lingering gleam. “I’m glad he’s dead,” she said, very softly, as though someone else in the room with them might overhear her. “Yes, I’m glad.”

He saw that she was weeping, the tears running down her face unchecked, as if she were unaware of them. He tried to think of something to say, something comforting, that she was being too hard on herself, that she was in shock, that kind of thing, but the words would not come, and if they had he knew they would have been inadequate to the moment, fatuous, weak words, ridiculous, even, in the circumstances. He did not know how to deal with the grief of others.

“Tell me what happened,” he said.

She had turned away from him and sunk into herself again, and at his words she twitched, as if he had wakened her suddenly from sleep. She frowned. “What happened where?”

“At Brooklands. On Sunday.”

She thought for fully a minute before she spoke. “They wouldn’t let me see him,” she said. “I wanted to but they wouldn’t let me. I suppose he would have looked terrible, with blood and everything. It was a shotgun, his own, the one that he was so fond of.” She turned to him again and spoke rapidly, urgently. “First they said he shot himself but then there was a policeman, a detective, he said he hadn’t, that someone else had done it. But who would come there on a Sunday and shoot him-who would do that?” She reached out in the shadows and groped for his hand where it lay on the bench seat and grabbed it, squeezed it. “Who would do such a thing?”