Benjamin Black - A Death in Summer

In the end she called David Sinclair. She knew it was not fair, calling him when she was like this. It was not as if she were anything more to him than a friend. David was kind-what other man would come and take care of her, as he did, without getting something in return?

He was not at home, so she looked up the number of the hospital where he worked and phoned him there. When he heard who it was he said nothing for a moment or two, and she was afraid he might hang up. She could hear him breathing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can never think who else to call.”

He arrived at the flat an hour later, and sat with her and held her hand. He gave her the old lecture about “seeing” someone, about “talking” to someone, but what good would seeing or talking do? The damage had been started so long ago, and the marks of it were scored so deeply into her that she pictured them like jagged grooves gouged in some kind of stone-marble or what was that other one, alabaster? Yes, alabaster. She liked the sound of it. Her alabaster skin. For she was beautiful, she knew it, everyone had always told her she was. Not that it helped her, being beautiful. A doll could be beautiful, a doll that people could do anything with, love or cuddle or beat or-or anything. But David was so good to her, so patient, so kind. He prided himself on being a tough guy, she knew, but he was not tough, not really. Guarded, that was what he was, wary of showing what he felt, but behind the hard front that he put up he had a soft heart. Someday she would tell him all the things that had happened to her, that had made her as she was, this shivering creature huddled on a sofa with the curtains pulled while everyone else was outside enjoying the summer evening. Yes, someday she would tell him.

He stayed, as he always did, until she was asleep. She did not take long to drop off-he was her sedative, he ruefully told himself-and it was still early, not yet nine, when he slipped out of the house and turned left and walked up towards Fitzwilliam Square. The car that had been parked on the other side of the road when he arrived-a green Morgan, with the top up and someone inside it, a shadow behind the wheel-was no longer there. He walked on.

There was a hazy green glow over the square and mist on the grass behind the black railings. The whores were out, four or five of them, two of them keeping each other company, both skinny and dressed in black and starkly pale as the harpies in Dracula’s castle. They gave him a look as he passed by but made no overture; maybe they thought he was a plainclothes man out to trap them. One of them had a limp-the clap, most likely. One day, not so far in the future, he might fold back the corner of a sheet and find her before him on the slab, that thin face, the bluish eyelids closed, her lip still swollen. He wondered, as he often wondered, if he should leave this city, try his luck somewhere else, London, New York, even. Quirke would never retire, or by the time he did it would be too late to be his successor; something that was in him now would have been used up, a vital force would be gone.

He had walked up this way, rather than going down to Baggot Street, to avoid being tempted to call on Phoebe. He did not know why he was reluctant to see her. She was probably not at home, anyway, he thought; he remembered Quirke saying he would be taking her to dinner tonight. It struck him that he had no friends. He did not mind this. There were people he knew, of course, from college days, from work, but he rarely saw any of them. He preferred his own company. He did not suffer fools gladly and the world was full of fools. But that was not what was keeping him from Phoebe, for Phoebe was certainly no fool.

Poor Dannie. Was there to be no help for her? Something had happened in her life that she would not speak about, something unspeakable, then.

He walked around two sides of the square and turned up towards Leeson Street. Maybe he would call into Hartigan’s and drink a beer; he liked to sit on a stool in the corner and watch the life of the pub going on, what people took to be life. As he was passing by Kingram Place a fellow in a windcheater stepped out, waggling a cigarette at him. “Got a match, pal?” He was reaching for his lighter in his jacket pocket when he heard a rapid step behind him, and then there was a crash of some kind, and a burst of light, and after that, nothing but blackness.

Quirke had been to dinner, but not with Phoebe. Francoise had invited him to the house on St. Stephen’s Green. She had said that she would be alone and that she would cook dinner for them both, but when he arrived Giselle was there, which surprised and irritated him. It was not that he felt any particular antipathy towards the child-she was nine years old, what was there to take against?-but he found her uncanniness hard to deal with. She made him think of a royal pet, so much indulged and pampered that it would no longer be acknowledged or even recognized by its own kind. He had, too, when she was about, the sense of being sidled up against, somehow, in a most disconcerting way.

Francoise did not seem to think anything of the child’s presence, and if she noticed his annoyance she did not remark it. This evening she wore a scarlet silk blouse and a black skirt, and no jewelry, as usual. He noticed how she kept her hands out of sight as much as possible; women of a certain age, he knew, were sensitive of their hands. But surely she could be no more than-what, thirty-eight? forty? Isabel Galloway was younger, but not by much. The thought of Isabel brought a further darkening of his mood.

They ate asparagus, which someone at the French embassy had sent round; it had come in from Paris that morning in the diplomatic bag. Quirke did not care for the stuff, but did not say so; later on his pee would smell of boiled cabbage. They ate in a little annex to the overly grand dining room, a small square wood-paneled space with a canopy-shaped ceiling and windows on two sides looking onto the Japanese garden. The calm gray air, tinted by reflections from the gravel outside, burnished the cutlery and made the single tall candle in its pewter sconce seem to shed not light but a sort of pale fine haze. Giselle sat with them, eating a bowl of mess made from bread and sugar and hot milk. She was in her pajamas. Her braids were wound in tight coils and pinned at either side of her head like a pair of large black earphones. The lenses of her spectacles were opaque in the light from the windows and only now and then and for a second did her eyes flash out, large, quick, intently watchful. Quirke wondered wistfully when it would be her bedtime. She talked about school, and about a girl in her class called Rosemary, who was her friend, and gave her sweets. Francoise attended to her with an expression of grave interest, nodding or smiling or frowning when required. She had, Quirke could not keep himself from thinking, the air of one playing a part that had been so long and diligently rehearsed that it had become automatic, had become, indeed, natural.

His mind drifted. He had been wrestling anew, for some days now, with the old problem of love. There should be nothing to it, love: people fell in and out of it all the time. Countless poems had been written about it, countless songs had been sung in its praise. It made the world go round, so it was said. He imagined them, the hordes of enraptured lovers down the ages, millions upon millions of them, lashing at the poor old globe with the flails of their passion, keeping it awhirl on its wobbly axis like a spinning top. The love that people spoke of so much seemed a kind of miasmic cloud, a kind of ether teeming with bacilli, through which we moved as we moved through the ordinary air, immune to infection for most of the time but destined to succumb sooner or later, somewhere or other, struck down to writhe upon our beds in tender torment.