Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

To his surprise, they got on together from the start, Phoebe and Dannie. As he was introducing them he saw how alike they were. Not that they looked alike, but there was something definite that they shared, though he could not say exactly what it was-a quality of things endured, perhaps, of troubles not surmounted but absorbed, with grit and determination, painfully.

They took the bus to Sutton and then mounted the little tram that whirred and rattled its way up the long slope of Howth Head. Phoebe had packed the picnic, ham sandwiches on brown bread with lettuce and sliced tomatoes, and a cucumber cut in four lengthways, and pickles in a jar, and a fancy tin of biscuits from Smyths on the Green. Sinclair and Dannie had each brought a bottle of wine, and Dannie had a basket with three glasses wrapped in napkins. They kept meeting each other’s eyes and smiling, a little bashfully, for they felt suddenly childish and exposed, to be on an outing, like ordinary people, and ordinarily happy. Seagulls were circling above them in the blue, and far in the distance the sun sparkled on the sea, and no one mentioned Richard Jewell.

They got off near the summit and walked down the road, but no one knew the way to the castle, and for a while they got lost, and in the end gave up on the rhododendrons and sat down at the corner of a field and unwrapped their sandwiches and opened the wine. Sinclair’s bottle of liebfraumilch had lost its chill but they did not mind; they drank it first and then drank the much grander Bordeaux Dannie had brought. When the wine was finished the girls went off to find a secluded place to pee, and Sinclair lay back in the soft lush grass and shielded his eyes with his arm and briefly dozed, and had a sort of dream in which Phoebe and Dannie, merged into a single person, came to him and touched his face and confided to him some profound piece of knowledge that he forgot the moment the voices of the real girls woke him. He sat up and watched them picking their way towards him through the grass. They had found the wood with the rhododendrons in it; it was just across the next field. “The blossoms are nearly finished, though,” Phoebe said, sitting down beside him, and smiling at him with a particular intent that he could not fathom, and he thought again of his strange little dream.

He lit a cigarette and offered the packet around, but Dannie shook her head, and Phoebe reminded him that she had given up smoking.

There were cows at the other side of the field, black and white, some standing and some lying down. A black bird, rook or crow, flew across in a ragged sort of way, cawing.

“Look,” Phoebe said, “those boats are in a race.” They shaded their eyes to peer down to where the yachts were plying their way against the wind, and sure enough there came to them up the length of the hillside, delayed by distance, the boom of the starting signal. “Such white sails,” Phoebe murmured. “Like wings, look.”

Dannie had lain down on her front in the grass with her chin propped on her hands. She was chewing a blade of grass. Three flies circled above her head, round and round, tracing the ghostly outline of a black halo. Sinclair saw again how beautiful she was, with that broad face and delicate chin, more beautiful than Phoebe, though not half so fascinating, he told himself.

“Isn’t it strange to think,” Dannie said, “that people who are old now were young once, like us? I meet an old woman in the street and I tell myself that seventy years ago she was a baby in her mother’s arms. How can they be the same person, her as she is now and the baby as it was then? It’s like-what do they say?-the headless axe without a handle. Something that’s there and yet impossible.”

Sinclair had the impression of a tiny speck of darkness, a beam of black light, piercing the sunlit air, infinitesimally fine but thickening, thickening.

Orphans. The word came to his mind unbidden. Those poor orphans, she had said. But what orphans? He would not ask, not now.

Quirke that same Sunday afternoon was in bed with Francoise d’Aubigny. She had telephoned first and then come to his flat. Giselle was at Brooklands, being looked after by Sarah Maguire. There were no preliminaries. He let her in at the front door and they climbed the stairs in silence and once inside the flat she turned to him and lifted up her mouth to be kissed. Their lovemaking at first was not a success. Quirke was uncertain and Francoise seemed preoccupied-it was as if she were conducting an experiment, or an investigation, of him, of herself, of the possibilities of what they might be to each other. Afterwards they sat up in bed in the hot, shadowed room, not speaking, but forgiving of each other. Quirke smoked a cigarette and Francoise took it from his fingers now and then and drew on it, and when he offered her one of her own she shook her head and said no, she wanted to share this one, because it tasted of him.

“When did you know this was going to happen?” he asked.

She gave a soft laugh. “Oh, the day we met, I suppose. And you?”

“Not so quickly. Women always know long before men.”

Her breasts were like pale apples, her ribs plainly visible under their sheath of silky skin. She was, he realized with a kind of happy dismay, not his kind of woman at all-at least Isabel Galloway had some flesh on her bones.

“You have someone already?” she asked. She had that gift of reading his thoughts.

“Yes,” he said. “Sort of.”

“Who is she?”

“An actress.”

“A famous one? Would I know her?”

“I doubt it. She works mostly at the Gate.”

“Tell me her name.”

“Isabel.”

“And do you feel very guilty about her, now?”

“Yes.”

“Ah. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be-I’m not.”

She took the cigarette again and put it to her lips, shutting one eye against the smoke. “Shall we continue together, you and I, do you think?” she asked mildly. “Will there be more times like this?” She smiled, and gave him back the cigarette. “Or will you be”-she put a theatrical quiver into her voice-“overcome by your guilt?”

“There will be more times. There’ll be all the time in the world.”

“Alors,” she said, “is that what they call a declaration?”

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

She turned and put her arms around him. He crushed the last of the cigarette in the ashtray on the bedside table. His eye fell on the telephone there, hunched, black and gleaming, a reminder of all that was outside this room: the world, and Isabel Galloway.

Two days after his outing with Phoebe and Dannie, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary morning, Sinclair received a telephone call at the hospital. This was unusual; hardly anyone phoned him at work. The nurse who put the call through from reception sounded odd, she seemed to be trying not to laugh, and then the voice that came on was strangely muffled, as if the speaker were speaking through a handkerchief.

“Listen, Jewboy,” the voice said, “you keep sticking that big fat nose of yours into places where it’s not wanted and you’ll get it lopped off. Then your prick and your Jew face will be a nice match.” This was followed by a cackle of laughter and then the line went dead.

Sinclair stood looking at the receiver. He thought it must be a prank, some so-called friend from college days, maybe-it had been a young man’s voice, he was sure of that-doing it for a bet, or out of some long-remembered grudge, or even just for a moment’s amusement. Despite himself he was shocked. He had never experienced this kind of thing before, certainly not since school days, but then it had been a matter of malicious teasing, not abuse like this, not hatred. The effect was first of all physical, as if he had been punched in the pit of the stomach; then the rage came, like a transparent crimson curtain falling behind his eyes. He had an urge, too, to tell someone, anyone. Quirke was in his office, he could be seen through the glass panel in the door; he was doing paperwork and smoking a cigarette in the ill-tempered way that he did, blowing the smoke out swiftly sideways as if he could not bear the stink of it. Sinclair knocked on the door and walked in. Quirke looked at him and lifted his eyebrows. “Christ,” he said, “what’s the matter with you? One of the stiffs come back to life?”