Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes.” He sat down. “I shouldn’t drink wine.”

“Oh?”

He did not feel like elaborating on that topic, even as an evasion tactic. “Sumner and your husband,” he said, “were they in business together?” His voice in his own ears sounded thin and wispy.

Francoise d’Aubigny was leaning forward with her elbows on the table and the cigarette held aloft to one side. Her lipstick was a deep and almost violent shade of scarlet. She still had not touched her salad, and the lettuce had already begun to wilt. “Carlton Sumner,” she said, “was trying to take my husband’s business.”

“You mean, he was trying to move in on his market, or-?”

“He was trying to take the business over. He wanted-wants-especially the Clarion. He bought some shares in it secretly.”

“How many?”

“I do not know-I cannot remember. Very many, I think. Richard was worried. I believe he was afraid of Sumner.” One corner of her mouth lifted in a faint ironic smile. “There were not many people Richard was afraid of, Dr. Quirke.”

“No,” Quirke said, “I don’t imagine there were.” He lit one of his own cigarettes. He wanted another glass of wine. “So Sumner was making an attempt to take over?”

“I think so. There was a meeting at Sumner’s house in the country. Something went wrong, and Richard left.”

“Why?”

“I do not know. Richard did not speak to me of these things.” Her eyes narrowed and she tilted her head an inch to one side. “You know about this, don’t you, about the argument, and Richard walking out.”

“Do I?”

“I can see it in your face.”

He signaled to the waiter, and held up his empty glass and waggled it. “My assistant, at the hospital, knows your sister-in-law.”

She drew back a little, frowning. “Dannie? She has been treated, at your hospital?”

“No, no. He knows her socially. They met at college.” It occurred to him to wonder how they had met, for Sinclair was surely two or three years older than Dannie Jewell. Was Sinclair one of those opportunists who prey on younger women in their starting year? “They play tennis together.”

“Yes, Dannie is a good player,” she murmured; it was apparent she was thinking of something else. “What is his name, your assistant?”

“Sinclair.” He paused. “He’s a Jew.”

“Oh, yes?” she said vaguely. The information did not interest her; indeed, he was not sure that she had properly registered it. “Poor Dannie,” she said, frowning into space, “this has been very hard for her, this death.”

His second glass of wine arrived. This time he counted to twenty, but counted faster than before.

“Tell me about the war,” he said. She blinked, momentarily baffled. “You said your brother was killed.”

“Ah. Yes.” She turned her face aside briefly. “They took him to Breendonk-it was a camp, a prison fortress, in Belgium.”

“Because he was a Jew?”

She stared. “What? No, no, he was not a Jew.” Her face cleared. “Ah, I see. You thought-” She broke off and laughed; it seemed to him it was the first time he had heard her laugh. “We are not Jews. What an idea!” She laughed again, shaking her head. “My father was a great Jew hater.”

“And yet…”

“… And yet I married a Jew, yes?” She nodded, her smile turning bitter. “That was the greatest crime I could have committed. My father-what do you say?-disowned me. I was no longer his daughter, he said. That was a pity, really. He had liked Richard, before he found out that he was Jewish. They are-were-very alike, in so many ways. I did not attend his funeral. I regret that now. It’s why I could not bring myself to insist that Giselle should be there when Richard was buried. I understood.”

They were silent. Quirke drank his wine. He should have eaten more of the omelette, it would have helped with the alcohol, but the eggs were cold now, and were developing a sheen, like sweat. It was always the way with him: drink soured his appetite and made him bilious, though it sang so sweetly in his veins. “Your brother,” he said, “what happened to him?”

She was lighting another cigarette. Her hand was steady now, he noted. “We never heard from him again,” she said, “nothing. Probably he was taken to the East. I do not know which was the greater sorrow for my father, that his son had died or that he had died among the Jews.” She glanced at Quirke and away again swiftly. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, “I should not say such a thing. My father could not help being what he was, after all. None of us can help what we are.”

They let some moments pass in silence, a mark of respect, of sorts, for the dead, it might be, the father as well as the son. Then Francoise d’Aubigny stirred herself, and stubbed out her cigarette in the glass ashtray on the table. “I think I should go now,” she said. Quirke signaled to the waiter again. The woman was watching him, weighing something up. “Will you speak to the Inspector about Carlton Sumner?” she asked.

Quirke did not look at her. “Yes, I’ll mention it. Be warned, he may need to ask you questions-Hackett, I mean.”

She shrugged, but he could see she was not as unconcerned as she pretended. “If my husband was murdered,” she said, “then someone did it. We must find out who it was”-she arched an eyebrow, seeking his assent-“must we not?”

The day was blindingly bright when they came out of the hotel, and the glare reflected from the roofs and windows of the passing cars made them squint. They said good-bye on the pavement.

“Thank you for lunch,” she said. “It was very pleasant.”

“You didn’t eat anything.”

“Did I not? I hardly notice, these days.” Once more she offered him briefly her cool soft hand. “ Au revoir, Dr. Quirke. We shall meet again, I hope.”

He watched her as she walked away in the direction of Nassau Street. She moved quickly but without haste, taking rapid deft steps, with her head bent, looking down, as if scanning the ground for any small obstacle that might rise up in her way. He turned and set off in the opposite direction, not thinking where he was going, not caring.

At the junction of Molesworth Street a warm breeze assailed him, and would have swept off his hat had he not held on to it; the brim flapped and snapped like a duck’s bill, and he grinned to himself blearily. The alcohol in his blood-not enough, not nearly enough-was dispersing already, and he clung in faint and happy desperation to the last of its effect. In St. Stephen’s Green the trees, dusted all over with sunlight, seemed dazed from the heat, their foliage polished and of such a dark-green hue it was almost black. He had a vision suddenly of summer itself, off behind the sticky heat and noise and grime, going blithely about its blue-and-gold business as always, and at just that moment the awful thought came to him that he had fallen in love. He hoped it was the wine.

But it was not the wine, and in the days following that lunch with Francoise d’Aubigny Quirke’s increasingly agitated spirit led him helplessly on into ever deeper excesses of amorous folly. He felt like a stonyhearted old roue embarrassingly shackled to a lovesick youth. It was foolish to be like this, at his age. As if the woman herself were too daunting for him to think of directly, he fixed on oblique aspects of her, in the same way that when he was an adolescent and encountered in the street a girl he was sweet on he would look anywhere but at her. France, now, not just France the country but France the idea, suddenly loomed large for him, as if he had been running a magnifying glass idly over a map of the world and had come to a wobbly stop on that big ghost-shaped mass at the western edge of Europe. He had only to take a sip of claret and he was there, in a Midi of the mind, under dappled vine leaves, smelling the dust and the garlic, or in some sultry impasse beside the Seine, with swaggering pigeons and water sluicing cleanly along the cobbled gutters, half the street in purple shadow and the other half blinded by sunlight.