Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

Here two enormous windows looked across the road to the Green and its trees, and the light pouring in through them had a leafy verdant tinge. A big old grandfather clock with a ponderous and hesitant tick stood against one wall. On a sideboard there rested a bowl of glowing yellow roses. He went and stood at one of the windows; lifting his face, he bathed in the sky’s calm soft radiance. The champagne had set up a mild and not unpleasant buzzing in his head. Disenchanted, she had said. Yes, it was a beautiful word, and yes, it carried a weight of sadness, but there was something hard in it, too, hard and unyielding. He pondered the dark fact that it was due to a violent death that he was here, tipsy on the dead man’s champagne and overflowing at the brim with infatuation for that man’s enchanting and dangerous widow. He knew the perils of the situation he had blundered into, and he accepted them, more than accepted them-what was passion without risk, without transgression? Although he knew himself guilty of many unforgivable lies and evasions in his life, he had never tried to hide from himself his taste for the hazard of sin. And that was what Francoise d’Aubigny represented for him now.

He began to notice a faintly uncomfortable sensation in the back of his head. He turned. A slight, pale, plain little girl with a long narrow face and circular steel-framed spectacles was regarding him from an armchair by the fireplace. The chair was expensively upholstered in yellow silk with a subtle fleur-de-lys pattern, and yellow too, or gold, rather, was the girl’s dress, an unsuitably formal gown with bows and flounces suggestive of the eighteenth century, which made her look like a grown-up woman viewed from the wrong, too distant perspective. Her hair was done in two heavy black braids tied at the ends with gold ribbon that matched her dress. She seemed quite composed, and her gaze was direct and unblinking, and he felt, standing there in the suddenly hard-edged, green-tinged light, like a specimen set up and arranged specifically for her scrutiny.

“Hello,” he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud under the lofty ceiling.

The girl did not respond at once, but continued examining him, the lenses of her glasses two rounds of opaque light. At last she spoke. “Are you one of Daddy’s people,” she asked, “or are you a friend of maman?”

He found it peculiarly difficult to devise a satisfactory, or even plausible, answer to this perfectly reasonable question. “Well, I don’t think I’m either,” he said. “I only spoke to your father once, some time ago, although I’ve met your mother a number of times.”

He frowned, and saw her absorbing this; it was obvious she considered his reply to be as unsatisfactory as he did. “Are you a detective?” she asked. She had the faintest, lisping trace of an accent.

“No,” he said, laughing, “no, I’m a-I’m a sort of doctor. And you must be Giselle, yes?”

“Yes, of course,” she said dismissively.

She had a book open on her lap, a large volume with illustrations done in muted tones.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“ La Belle et la Bete. Maman brought it back for me from Paris.”

“Ah. And you read French, do you?”

This question too she seemed to consider not worth replying to, and merely shrugged, as if to say again, Of course.

Always in moments of social awkwardness Quirke became acutely aware of his bulk; standing there under the unblinking gaze of this small unnerving person he felt like the lumbering giant in a fairy tale. Now the child closed her book and pushed it firmly down between the cushion and the arm of her chair and stood up, smoothing the front of her gold frock. “Why aren’t you at the party?” she asked.

“I was. But I came in to-to look at the house. I haven’t been here before. It’s a very nice house.”

“Yes, it is. We have another one in the country, Brooklands-but you probably know that. And another one in France. Do you know the Cote d’Azur?”

“Not very well, I’m afraid.”

“Our place is in Cap Ferrat. That’s just outside Nice. Our house is on a hill above the bay at Villefranche.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I like it there.”

She came forward until she was standing before him. She was not small for her age, yet the top of her head barely reached the level of his diaphragm. He caught her child’s smell; it was like the smell of day-old bread. Her hair was a deep gleaming black, like her mother’s. “Would you like to see my room?” she asked.

“Your room?”

“Yes. You said you came in to see the house, so you should see the upstairs, too.” He tried to think of a way of declining this invitation but could not. She was a strangely compelling personage. She put her right hand in his left. “Come along,” she said briskly, “this way.”

She led him across the room and opened the door. She had to use both hands to turn the great brass doorknob. In the hall she took him by the hand again and together they climbed the stairs. Yes, that was what he felt like: the misunderstood ogre, monstrous and lumbering but harmless at heart.

“How did you know who I was?” she asked. “Have you seen me before?”

“No, no. But your mother told me your name and I thought you could not be anyone else.”

“So you know maman quite well, then?”

He thought about this for a moment before answering; somehow she compelled serious consideration. “No, not very well,” he said “We had lunch together.”

“Oh, did you,” she said, without emphasis. “I suppose you met her when Daddy died, since you’re a doctor. Did you try to save his life?”

Her hand was dry and cool and bony, and he thought of a fledgling fallen from the nest, but this was a fallen fledgling that would without doubt survive. “No,” he said, “I’m not that kind of doctor.”

“What other kinds of doctor are there?”

She was leading him now across a broad landing spread with a Turkish rug in various shades of red from rust to blood-bright.

“Oh, all sorts,” he said.

This answer she seemed to find sufficient.

Her room was absurdly large, a great square space painted white all over, with a white ceiling and a spotless white carpet and even a white cover on the small narrow bed. It was alarmingly tidy, not a toy or an article of clothing in sight, and not a single picture on the walls. It might have been the cell of a deeply devotional but incongruously well-to-do anchorite. It made Quirke shiver. The only splash of color was in the single tall sash window opposite the door that gave onto Iveagh Gardens, a rectangle of blue and gold and lavish greens suspended in the midst of all that blank whiteness like a painting by Douanier Rousseau. “I spend a lot of time here,” the child said. “Do you like it?”

“Yes,” Quirke said, lying. “Very much.”

“There are not many people I invite to come up here, you know.”

Quirke did his newly learned Frenchman’s bow. “I’m honored.”

She gave a small sigh and said matter-of-factly, “You don’t mean that.”

He did not try to contradict her. They walked together to the window.

“I like to watch the people in the gardens,” she said. “All kinds of people come. They walk about. Some of them have dogs, but not all. They bring picnics, sometimes. And there’s an old man, I believe he lives there, I see him all the time, going along the pathways or sitting on the grass. He has a bottle in a brown paper bag. I tried waving to him once but he couldn’t see me.”

She stopped. Quirke tried to think of something to say, but could not. He pictured her here, leaning at this window, silent, looking out through her big spectacles at life going by.

“Would you like to play a game?” she asked.