Benjamin Black: A Death in Summer

“I met Richard here,” Francoise said.

“Here, in Cap Ferrat?”

“Yes.” With a hand over her eyes she was squinting off in the direction of the white road winding across the hillside. “He was a gambler-did you know? He came for the casinos. He would visit them all, along the coast here, in Nice, in Cannes, Monte Carlo, San Remo. He was very bad at it, he had no luck, and always lost a great deal of money, but that would not stop him.”

“And you?” Quirke said. “What were you doing here?”

“When I met him first? Oh, I was with my father. He used to come every summer to a little hotel in Beaulieu. My mother had died that year. I believed my life, too, was coming to an end.” She shifted in the chair, with an effortful sigh, as if she were indeed far older than she seemed. “I think I might have died, except that I still had my brother to mourn, and my father to hate. Richard I met at a tennis party one day, I cannot remember at whose house it was. He looked very handsome, very fringant. He was a handsome man, you know, in a savage way-rough, I mean. He was what I thought I needed. I believed he would help me to hate, that together with him I would-how do you say?-I would nurture my hatred, as if it were a child, our child.” She turned to him. “Is that not terrible?”

“Was your father so bad, to merit such hatred?”

“No no, it was not just my father I hated-but everything, France herself, and those who had betrayed us, the collaborators, the Petainistes, the ones who made their fortune on the black market. Believe me, there was no shortage of people to hate.”

On that triangle of distant blue a tinier triangle had appeared, the leaning white sail of a yacht.

“But Richard you loved,” Quirke said.

To this she made a very French response, dipping her head from side to side and blowing out a ball of breath through pursed lips. “Love?” she said. “Love, no. I do not know what to call it. I married him for revenge, revenge on my father, on France, and on myself, too. I was like one of those saints, punishing myself, falling to my knees and whipping myself, whipping and whipping, until I bled. There was joy in that, a frightful joy.” She turned to him, her eyes glittering and her lips drawn back some way from her teeth. “Do you understand?”

Oh, yes, he understood. It was guilt that had drawn them together, she had said, but guilt was a knout made of many strands, all of them stiff and sharp to cut good and deep into the flesh.

“My father at first was approving,” Francoise said. “He liked Richard. I suppose he recognized one of his own type. He refused to believe he was Jewish-‘How can a man with the word “Jew” in his name be a Jew?’ he used to ask, and he would laugh. It seemed to him too ridiculous. And of course it is true, Richard was not really Jewish except by blood-he was not religious, and cared nothing for the history of his people. But blood, of course, was what counted for my father.”

The side of the hill that they were facing was becoming flat and shadowless as the sun angled full upon it, and they could feel faintly on their faces the heat reflecting back off the rocks and even the orange clay itself. A single-engined plane droned overhead, its wing struts shining. There were dark birds, too, Quirke now saw, wheeling in slow arcs at an immense height.

“Why did he marry you?” Quirke asked.

“Why did-? Oh, I see what you mean. Why did he marry any woman, since it was not women that he wanted.” She paused. “Who knows. I suppose it was because I too, like him, was violent, cruel, wanting my revenge on the world. ‘I like your ferocity, ’ Richard used to say. It was one of his favorite words. The way that I hated-hated my father, my country, everything-that amused him, gave him pleasure.” Again she stopped, gazing out from the verandah’s shade into the harsh light of afternoon, nodding to herself. “He was a very wicked man, you know? Very- malicieux. ”

“When did you find out about him-about St. Christopher’s, what he did there, all that?”

She considered. “I do not know if I ever ‘found out.’ That kind of knowledge comes slowly, because it is resisted, so slowly that one almost does not notice it. But come it does, eating into the mind, into the conscience, like acid.”

“But sooner or later you did know, even if you tried not to. And you tolerated it.”

She scrambled up suddenly from the chair as if she had been pushed, and walked to the wooden rail again, where the sunlight fell full upon her in an almost violent splash. “I knew, yes,” she said, facing sideways so that he would hear her, but not looking at him. “Of course I knew. He brought me there, once, you know-to the orphanage. He wanted me to see, he wanted me to be impressed by the place, by what he had made of it, how he had stamped his will on it, and on those poor children, those poor little boys.”

“Did you see Father Ambrose?”

“Ambrose? I saw him, yes, Richard made sure of that, too.”

“I met him. He seemed to me not a bad man.”

She turned her head fully now and stared at him. “That priest?” she said. “He is a devil, a devil like Richard. They are all devils, there.”

Quirke recalled Father Ambrose’s wispily gentle voice, the way he drew close, how his gaze seemed to reach out blind fingers to feel all over what was before him. He recalled too the boys sidling past in the corridors, their downcast eyes. How could he have missed what was plain to see, what his own experiences as a child in places like this should have taught him never to forget?

“And Dannie,” he said. “Did you know about Dannie, too, what Richard did to her?”

“No!” She slapped both her hands down hard on the rail. She was glaring at him with eyes ablaze, and then, as suddenly as it had flared up, the fire in her went out, and her shoulders slumped, her face grew slack. “I thought it was only little boys he cared for,” she said, almost in a whisper. “I did not know it was little girls, too. He wanted the young, you see, always and only the young. Fresh meat, that is what he would say, fresh meat. And he would laugh.”

“When did you find out?”

“About Dannie? Not until-not until that day, that Sunday, at Brooklands. The thing had broken in her, had snapped. She could not keep it secret any longer. Because of Giselle, you see.” She glanced back in alarm towards the glass doors and the room where the child was, and her voice again became a whisper. “Because of Giselle.”

Quirke heard voices faintly, and he too turned to the glass, behind which a shadowed form was approaching. The door slid open and a young woman stepped onto the verandah. She was dark as a Gypsy, with hooded eyes and a shadowed upper lip. She wore a blue housecoat and white shoes like a nurse’s. Seeing Quirke, she hesitated. “Ah, Maria,” Francoise said. “Cet homme est Docteur Quirke.” The girl smiled uncertainly and put her hands behind her back. Francoise turned to Quirke. “Maria takes care of Giselle in the afternoons,” she said. She went forward and took the young woman by the elbow and steered her back indoors.

Quirke extricated himself from the low chair and, lighting a cigarette, walked to the rail where Francoise had stood. Despite having removed his jacket and then his tie he was hot, and could feel himself sweating, the beads of moisture running down and stopping at the small of his back. Below in the valley the cicadas had started up, draping the air with their crepitant drone. He fancied he could hear too the noise of traffic on that distant white road, the blare of trucks, the insect whine of a motorcycle.

He should not have come.

After some minutes Francoise returned. “They have gone out,” she said. “Will you come back inside?”