Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

Malachy Griffin was one of the Dublin grandees who had built a house in the town. It wasn’t really a house but a one-story wooden chalet, with a tarred roof and tongue-and-groove walls and a glassed-in porch that leaked in the winter and spread a smell of damp through the rooms behind it that even the hottest summer weather couldn’t eradicate. It had two bedrooms, one with a real double bed, while the other had a sort of large cot, with springs that jangled every time the sleeper in it stirred but that nevertheless had long ago lost their springiness.

When they arrived at the house, Phoebe attempted to show Lisa around, though Lisa was too distracted to pay attention. They went into the larger bedroom, but Lisa insisted she would take the smaller one. Phoebe said that would be ridiculous, since she would be the only occupant of the house, and in the end she reluctantly agreed, and carried her suitcase into the double-bedded room.

They had stopped at Mahon’s General Store, on the Wexford Road, to buy provisions, and while Lisa was unpacking, Phoebe stowed the butter, milk, and eggs in the mesh-fronted larder, a pan loaf in the bread bin, the tea in the tea canister. She put away slices of cooked ham wrapped in greaseproof paper, tomatoes, lettuce and spring onions, and a bag of assorted chocolate biscuits. She was sure they had forgotten something essential. She checked the bathroom for soap and other things, laid out clean towels, lit the geyser above the bath. She felt like a little girl again, playing house.

Wine! They should have bought wine, before they left the city. Too late now, for certainly they wouldn’t find any in Mahon’s. Anyway, she didn’t know if Lisa drank. It was only one of the very many things she didn’t know about Lisa.

They made tea, and sat at the kitchen table to drink it. An awkward silence fell, neither of them knowing what to say. There were ants in the sugar bowl.

“You’re so kind,” Lisa broke out at last. “I mean, here I am, a complete stranger, practically, and yet you lend me your house.”

“Well, it’s not mine. It belongs to my uncle. I used to live with him and my aunt. In fact, I lived with them until I was nineteen. I thought they were my parents, you see.”

“You thought—?”

Phoebe laughed. “Oh, it’s a complicated story. Maybe I’ll tell it to you one day.”

They were silent again; then Lisa asked timidly, “Does your uncle know I’m here?”

“No. But he wouldn’t mind if he did. His name is Griffin, Malachy Griffin.” She stopped. Something had flickered in Lisa’s eyes; had she recognized the name? “He used to be a doctor — I mean, he’s retired. He hardly comes here anymore, except to check on the place now and then. His first wife died some years ago.” She paused, and looked aside with a dreamy expression. “We used to have such times here. It seems like a world away, now.”

Yet again the silence fell. Lisa sat crouched over her tea. Despite all the activity of traveling, of buying the things at Mahon’s, of arriving at the house and unpacking, Lisa’s terror had not abated for a moment. When they had come into the house, first she had gone from window to window and peered out, though Phoebe could not think what she might be expecting to see — pursuers lurking in the shrubbery, potential attackers hiding behind tree trunks?

“Listen, Lisa,” she said, “I can see how frightened you are. You’re going to have to tell me what’s going on. What happened? Did someone do something to you? Why do you think you’re being followed?”

Lisa was gazing wide-eyed at the tabletop, so that it wasn’t clear if she had even been listening. Then she stirred herself, and sighed, and pushed away the half-drunk mug of tea.

“Someone was hurt,” she said, picking her way over the words as if they were so many stepping stones, slimed and treacherous. “It was someone I knew.”

“When? I mean, when was he hurt?”

“Last night.”

“Last night ?”

“Yes.”

“Is he in hospital?”

“No.” A long pause. “No, he’s not in hospital. He died.”

Phoebe’s hand flew to her mouth.

“Died?” she said in a whisper. “But how?”

“There was a car crash. He was the only one in the car. It ran into a tree and caught fire. That’s what they said on the news.”

“And this happened just last night?”

“Early this morning. I’d been with him. I ran away.”

Lisa was gazing at the table again, as if mesmerized. She’s in shock, Phoebe thought. “What do you mean, you ran away?”

“I can’t say any more. I shouldn’t even have told you this much.”

Phoebe remembered that there used to be a bottle of brandy somewhere in the house. She rose from the table and searched through the cupboards, then went out to the living room and searched there. At last she found the bottle, on a shelf behind the wireless set that no longer worked. There was only a drop of brandy left. She went back to the kitchen and got down a wine glass and emptied the bottle into it and set it in front of Lisa. “Drink that,” she said.

Lisa frowned. Fear had filled her with helpless bewilderment; she was like a sleepwalker who had been wakened too suddenly. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s brandy. It’s only a little — look. Drink it, now.”

Phoebe went to the sink and filled a glass of water from the tap. Ballytubber water was the best and sweetest in the county, everyone said so. There used to be a holy well outside the town, on the road to Enniscorthy; sick people and cripples had come to it from all over, in the old days, and maybe they still did. Also in the town there had been a famous bonesetter; people came to him, too, women especially, not just from round here but from Dublin, and even London. There was a world — there were worlds! — beyond the one she knew, the world of the city, where life was supposed to be so broad and sophisticated but in fact was narrower, in its way, than the life of this little town. There were old, secret ways here, stretching back to times before history began. It was a place of ritual, of sacrifice and slaughter.

She tried to picture it in her head, the park in darkness and at the center of the darkness a pool of fire, under a tree, the flames shooting up into the leaves and scorching them, and behind the windscreen a figure slumped over the steering wheel. What was that line in the Bible, about the burning fiery furnace? She couldn’t remember. She felt an edge of fear herself, now. Had she been mad to listen to this desperate young woman? What if Lisa had made up all this, what if she was delusional? She could be anything — she could be an escapee from an asylum. Darkness was pressing against the windows, like something that was trying to get in.

Lisa hadn’t touched the brandy. She was crying, tears running down her cheeks, though her expression was still blank.

“I’m so frightened,” she said, in a strange, crooning tone. “And I’m going to have a baby.”

Latterly, dinner at the Griffins’ had turned into a solemn procedure, less a meal than a sort of ceremonial, hallowed and ponderous. It wasn’t clear how it had come to be that way, and no one seemed to know what to do about it. Rose believed it was all the fault of the house, which she had begun to refer to, out of Mal’s hearing, as “the barn,” or even “the tomb.” It was an enormous place, a mansion, with gilded reception rooms and grand, sweeping staircases that might have been designed by M. C. Escher, leading up to silent landings and gaunt, brocaded chambers meant not for sleeping in, it seemed, but for some other kinds of repose, such as lyings in state, enchanted comas, vampiric dozings.

“I do hate the place,” Rose would sigh, “and yet I get a real kick out of it, too. I’m perverse, I know.”