Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

“What did you do,” she asked, laughing now. “What did you say?”

“I shut the door in his face and ran into the kitchen and told my mother it was a traveling salesman selling Bibles.”

“Were you frightened?”

“I suppose so. They were always frightening in those days, priests and so on-anyone official from their world.”

She pounced. “You see?” she said, triumphant. “ Their world. You did feel different.”

“Every child feels different, Jew or otherwise.”

“Only children?”

“What do you mean?”

“ I feel different, always will. I suppose you’ll think that’s vanity, but it’s not. Can I have a cigarette?”

He rose quickly from the chair, reaching into his pocket for the packet of Gold Flake. “I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly, his dark brow turning darker. “I didn’t think you smoked.”

“I don’t. I used to, but I’ve given up.”

She took a cigarette, and he snapped open his lighter and she leaned forward to the flame and touched a fingertip briefly to the back of his hand for balance. Behind the smoke he caught a faint breath of her perfume. She looked up at him, her eyelashes moving.

He was suddenly aware of the night all around them, vast and still. “I should go soon,” he said.

She leaned back, and folded one arm and cupped her palm under the elbow of the other. She picked a fleck of tobacco from her lower lip. He backed away, turned, walked to the armchair by the fireplace, and sat. “If I didn’t know better,” she said, in almost a conversational tone, “I’d say you were a little frightened of me.”

He gazed at her owlishly, then suddenly laughed. “Well, of course I am,” he said. “What man isn’t frightened when a girl gets him into her room?”

“Isn’t it supposed to be the other way about?”

“Of course,” he said, “but it never is, really, as you know. We’re the weaker sex, after all.”

“Yes,” she said, pleased, “you are. Aren’t you.”

And so they sat for a long moment fairly beaming at each other, neither of them knowing what exactly had happened between them just now, but certain that something had.

What the fates arranged, or what the fates in the form of Francoise d’Aubigny herself arranged, was, of all things, a party. She did not call it that: on the little gilt-edged invitation card it said Memorial Drinks, which to Quirke’s ear had an almost comical ring. The event was to be at five in the afternoon at Jewell’s-now Francoise d’Aubigny’s-town house at the top of St. Stephen’s Green. It was a very grand house, with a big graveled Japanese garden at the back, and here the guests were gathered. No one had known quite what to wear to such a bizarre occasion. The men were properly sober-suited, but the women had been forced to improvise, and there was a great deal of black silk on show, and many black feathers in night-blue toques, and one or two of the more mature ladies wore elbow-length black cotton gloves. Waiters in frock coats and white ties moved among the crowd bearing aloft silver trays of champagne in crystal flutes; a trestle table covered with a blindingly white tablecloth offered canapes and bowls of olives and pickled onions and, at its center, a mighty salmon, succulently, indecently pink, arranged on a nickel salver and dotted all over with dabs of mayonnaise and a glistening beady stuff that only a handful among the company were able to identify as best Beluga caviar.

“C’est tres jolie, n’est-ce pas,” Francoise d’Aubigny said behind him, and Quirke turned quickly, almost spilling his champagne.

“Yes,” he said, “very jolly-very elegant, I mean.”

She had on a cocktail dress of metallic-blue satin and wore no adornment of any kind, save a tiny diamond-encrusted watch on her left wrist. She touched the rim of her glass to his, making the faintest chime. “Thank you for coming,” she said quietly. Quirke made a polite response that came out as a sort of gurgle. He had spent so many days remembering her, imagining her, and now the sudden reality of her presence was overwhelming.

She turned her head to scan the murmurous crowd. “Do you think I have shocked them, again?” she asked.

“Well, they haven’t stayed away,” Quirke said. “The Irish love a wake, you know.”

“A wake? Yes, of course, I suppose that is what they think this is.”

“And isn’t it?”

She was still looking about, with a faint considering smile. “Perhaps I should have offered whiskey, not champagne,” she said. “That is what people drink at an Irish wake, yes?”

“And stout, you forgot the stout, and bottles of black porter, and crubeens in a bucket.”

“Crubeens?”

“Pigs’ trotters- pieds de porc. ”

She laughed softly, ducking her head. “I’m afraid I am a very poor hostess. They will say terrible things about me, afterwards.”

“Even crubeens wouldn’t stop them saying terrible things. This is Dublin.”

“You are very”-she searched for the word-“ cynique, Dr. Quirke.” She was smiling.

“Cynical? I hope not. Realistic, I’d rather say.”

“No, I know the word for you: disenchanted. A beautiful word, but sad.”

He conceded, and inclined his head in a little bow-he was quite getting the hang of the Gallic bow-and stopped a passing waiter and exchanged his empty glass for a full one. Two must be the limit, he told himself; he was already feeling sufficiently derange in the presence of this intoxicating woman.

“Do eat something, Dr. Quirke,” she said. “I’m sure you will not miss the feet of the pig. Now I must-what do you say?-circulate.” She began to turn away, and paused, and laid two fingers flat on his wrist. “Don’t leave before we speak again, yes?”

She walked off in that rapidly stepping way that she did, her head bowed and the champagne glass clutched to her breast in both hands. Beside him a ginkgo tree, no taller than he was, hardly more than a slender shoot, trembled and trembled in all its leaves.

Over the following half hour he conversed with various people; a minimum of socializing was unavoidable, although he would have avoided it if he could. He wanted to be alone to play over again in his mind, without distraction, those moments he and Francoise d’Aubigny had shared beside the trestle table with its coy little bowls of glistening savories and its shameless salmon. There was an ancient judge who had known his adoptive father, whom he had to stop and listen to for a painful five minutes-the old boy was deaf, and spoke in bellowing tones as if everyone else shared his disability-and an Abbey actress who gave him a playfully reproving eye and inquired in a voice dripping with saccharine sweetness why Isabel Galloway was not with him. Now and then, when a gap opened among the gabbling heads, he had a tantalizing glimpse of Francoise-in his mind he had at last been able to drop the formality of the surname-but maneuver his way as he might through the crowd, he somehow could not manage to put himself directly in her vicinity. He drank a third glass of champagne, and then took a fourth, and stepped through the french windows with it and wandered into the house.

He entered a big modern kitchen, where he was ignored by the hired-in catering staff, busy at their work, and then a long passageway that in stages, through two successive green baize doors, widened to become the front hall. This part of the house seemed deserted. He noted paintings-a couple of insipid Paul Henrys and a dubious oil portrait of a prissy fellow in a periwig-and an antique oak side table with, over it, a big gilt-framed mirror that leaned out at an angle from the wall and gave an impression of vigilance and faint menace. To right and left two tall white doors faced each other. The one on the right, to his vague surprise, was locked. The other opened onto a square high-ceilinged drawing room ablaze with early evening sunlight. He stepped inside.