Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

How did she know? How had she found out?

He realized, later, what a mistake he had made in not going straightaway to her house in Portobello, however early it was when she had called him. Now it was his turn to curse himself. He was cutting open the rib cage of an old woman who had died under suspicious circumstances in the care of her spinster daughter when Sinclair came to tell him he was wanted urgently on the phone-the phone, again!-and something inside him instantly turned to ice.

She had been brought to St. James’s. Of all the city’s hospitals it was the one he disliked most. Whenever he thought of the place he recalled with a shiver a night of storm and black rain when he had stood sheltering in a bleak porch under the wildly swaying light of an oil lamp-an oil lamp? surely he was mistaken?-and waited for a nurse who worked in the casualty department, who was supposed to be going on a date with him, but who in the end stood him up. How Isabel had got there he never discovered-maybe she had called for an ambulance herself, before she took the pills. He would not have put it past her.

She was in a tiny room with a narrow brick window that looked down on a brick boiler house. The bed too was narrow, much too narrow, it seemed, to accommodate a normal-sized person, even one as trimly made as Isabel. Her face was drawn and had a greenish cast. She had on what he could see was a hospital smock. Her arms were outside the blankets, stretched rigid at her sides. At least, he thought, she had not cut her wrists.

“You know,” he said, “this kind of thing is terribly bad for your health.”

She gazed at him in silence. She had the look of an El Greco martyr. “That’s right, laugh,” she said. “A joke for every occasion.”

She was hoarse, he supposed from the effect of the tubes they would have forced down her throat when they were pumping her stomach. He had spoken to the ward sister, a raw-faced nun in a white wimple, who had not met his eye but tightened her lips and said Miss Galloway had been very careless, swallowing all those pills by accident; no, she had not been in serious danger; yes, they would keep her in tonight and probably she could go home tomorrow.

“Do you want me to open this window?” he asked her now. “It’s stuffy in here.”

“Jesus,” Isabel said, “is that all you can say, that it’s stuffy?”

“What do you want me to say?”

He felt sorry for her, and yet he felt remote from her, too, remote from everything here in this shabby little room, as if he were floating high up under the ceiling and looking down on the scene with no more than mild curiosity.

“I didn’t think you could be so cruel,” she said.

“I didn’t think you could be so stupid.” He winced; the words had come out before he could check them. He lifted his shoulders and let them droop again. “I’m sorry.”

She stirred in the bed, as if something somewhere had delivered her a stab of pain. “Yes, well, you’re not half as sorry as I am.”

“How did you find out? Who told you?”

She tried to laugh, but coughed instead, drily. “Did you think you could climb into bed with the widow of what’s-his-name-Diamond Dick, is it?-while he was still fresh in his grave and that half the city wouldn’t know before you’d got your socks back on? You’re not only a louse, Quirke, you’re a fool, too.” She turned her face to the wall.

He did not want to see her suffer, really, he did not, but he felt paralyzed and did not know how to help her. “I’m sorry,” he said again, more weakly than ever.

She was not listening. “What’s she like, anyway?” she asked. “Which kind of French is she-sultry and smoldering or cool and detached?”

“Don’t.”

“You’d prefer cool, I imagine. You don’t go in much for passion, do you.”

He wished she would stop; he did not want to be made to pity her. “I’m sorry I’ve hurt you,” he said. “These things happen. It’s no one’s fault.”

“Oh, no,” she said bitterly, “no one’s to blame, of course, least of all you. Give me a cigarette, will you?”

“I don’t think you should smoke.”

“Bad for my health?” She had turned from the wall and was watching him narrowly, searching for a way to wound, he could see. “You know she’s been through every half-presentable man in this town, don’t you? Or did you think you were the first? She hated that husband of hers-it’s probably her that shot him. She must have a taste for bastards, first him and now you. God, what are we like-women, that is. Such fools.”

“I’ll come for you in the morning,” he said. “I’ll take you home.”

“Don’t bother.” She struggled to sit up. He made to help her with the pillows but she slapped at him with both hands and told him to get away from her. “You never loved me, Quirke.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone,” he said mildly.

“Except yourself.”

“Myself least of all.”

“What about that wife you had of yore that you talk about so much? What’s her name? Delia?”

“She died.”

“Oh, that’s not allowed, is it, dying?” She looked at him, the sad spectacle of what he was. “I almost feel sorry for you,” she said.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

She turned her face aside again. “Good-bye, Quirke.”

As he walked away down the long corridors he was aware of a faint sharp pain, as if he had been pierced by a bolt shot from another planet, a wounding so fine it could hardly be felt.

The smell of hospitals, he realized, was the smell of his life.

In the street he huddled in a telephone booth and called Francoise.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. He told her. There was a long silence on the line; then she said, “Come to the house.”

On Sunday mornings when the weather permitted Quirke bought an armful of the English newspapers and sat with them on a bench by the canal below Huband Bridge. There he read, and smoked, and tried to forget for a while the emotional complications into which over the years he had allowed himself to stumble. Today the papers were full of menacing news. It was some comfort to Quirke, but not much, that the world was in so much more of a sorry state than he was.

The morning was hot still, but at least the cloud cover of recent days had lifted and the sun was shining out of what seemed a freshly lacquered sky. On the water a moorhen paddled busily about with five chicks veering in a line behind her like feathered balls of soot, and an iridescent dragonfly was prancing among the tall shoots of sedge. Gamal Abdel Nasser had been appointed president of Egypt. Polio was still on the increase. He lit another Senior Service and leaned back and closed his eyes. Gamasser appointed pres. Egypt on the increase. Gamdel Abel Nassolio…

“Dr. Quirke-am I right?”

He emerged with a start from his doze.

Who?

Blue suit, horn-rimmed specs, oiled black hair brushed fiercely back from a pockmarked brow. He was sitting at the other end of the bench, one arm laid easily along the back of it and one knee crossed on the other. Familiar, but who was he?

There was an inch and a half of ash on Quirke’s forgotten cigarette; it detached itself now and tumbled softly to the ground.

“Costigan,” the man said, and took his arm from the back of the bench and laced his fingers together before his breast. When he smiled he bared the lower front row of his teeth; they were yellow, and overlapped. “You don’t remember me.”

“Sorry, I don’t recall…?”

“I knew your adoptive father, Judge Griffin. And Malachy Griffin, of course. And we had a drink together, once, you and I, in McGonagle’s public house, if I’m not mistaken. A drink and a chat.” Those teeth again.