Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

Rose’s American origins were obscure. Her southern drawl suggested levees, and black servants in frock coats and powdered wigs, and acre upon acre of cotton fields, but she had once admitted to Quirke that at some stage in her past life she had worked in a dry cleaner’s.

Quirke too enjoyed the house’s awfulness, in a masochistic way. Somehow it suited the state he was in, neither sick nor well, not really alive, floating half-submerged in his own self-absorption. The household had its diversions. There was, for instance, a certain mournful comedy to be derived from Mal’s proliferating eccentricities. The garden was his latest enthusiasm. The long spell of fine weather, with fresh, sunny days and brief, soft nights, had him as excited as a bumblebee, and he spent long and happy hours out among his rosebushes and herbaceous borders. Most of the work was done by the gardener, Casey, a gnarled old party with a kerne’s glittering eye — he was a terror with the billhook and the shears — but he allowed Mr. Malachy, as he called the master of the house, in a tone of high irony, to pose as the begetter and cultivator in chief of the season’s great abundance.

Mal’s particular pride were his sweet peas, and every night for the past week the centerpiece of the dinner table had been a cut-glass bowl of these delicate and, to Quirke’s eye, indecently gaudy blossoms. Tonight their drowsy perfume was adding a peculiar, extra savor to the grilled trout and salad that Maisie the maid was serving out to the three diners sitting about the big, polished oak table, like life-sized waxworks.

“Thank you, Maisie,” Rose said. “You can leave the salad. We’ll help ourselves.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Maisie said.

Maisie had been an inmate — it was the only word — of the Mother of Mercy Laundry, to which she had been sent by her family when her own father had made her pregnant. The laundry was one of many such institutions that had been set up and funded by Mal’s father, Judge Griffin, in partnership with Rose’s late husband, Josh Crawford, to accommodate, and hide from view, dozens of girls and young women like Maisie. It was Mal, with Quirke’s encouragement, who got Maisie out of the laundry and brought her into the house to work as cook, housekeeper, and general maid. Her grand passion was for tobacco, and Rose regularly had to send her off to the bathroom to scrub the nicotine stains from her fingers with a pumice stone.

The meal dragged on. Mal, in a low drone, rhapsodized about his sweet peas, mildly complaining all the while of Casey’s supposed shiftlessness. Rose tried to interest Quirke with an account of a book she was reading, but he couldn’t concentrate, and the topic soon lapsed. Outside in the garden, a blackbird whistled on and on, sounding as tense and florid as the male lead in an opera. The grilled trout was dry, the white wine tepid.

“That particular one,” Mal said, “is called Winston Churchill.”

Rose turned to gaze at him in perplexity. “What?”

“That one, there”—pointing with his knife at a blossom in the bowl, richly red as heart’s blood—“it’s called after Churchill.”

“Fascinating,” Rose said, and turned her attention back to her plate.

Quirke watched the two of them, his adoptive brother, prim and fussy and prematurely aged, and Rose, handsome, impatient, dissatisfied. He didn’t think they were unhappy together, but neither were they happy. Once again he pondered in vain the mystery of their life together.

“I’m going back to work,” he said.

Both Mal and Rose stopped chewing and stared at him, their knives and forks suspended in midair.

“You are?” Rose said.

He nodded. “Yes. I think it’s time I began to do something with myself again, something useful. I’m starting to atrophy.”

Rose smiled skeptically. “I suppose this is because of that young man coming for you today.”

“What young man?” Mal asked, looking from one of them to the other.

“His assistant, at the hospital,” Rose said.

Mal turned to Quirke. “Sinclair? He was here?”

“Yes,” Quirke said. “He wanted me to have a look at something.”

“You went into the Holy Family?”

Quirke put down his knife and fork. The fish, the texture of wadded cotton wool, seemed to have lodged in a lump behind his breastbone. “Yes,” he said, “I went in. Peculiar feeling. Like one of those dreams you have of being sent back to school even though you’re an adult.”

Rose snorted. “And that’s what made you decide to return to work? How you do love to suffer, Quirke.”

Quirke leaned back in his chair. “I’m going back to the flat, too,” he said. “I’ve already stretched your hospitality beyond all bounds. You’ll be glad to have the place to yourselves again.”

A patch of skin between Rose’s eyebrows had tightened and turned pale, and her smile was steely. “This is all very sudden,” she said in a bright, brittle tone. “You might have given some notice, some warning.”

Mal was looking at his plate — Rose when she was angry made all eyes drop. But why was she angry? Quirke wondered, regarding her with a quizzical eye. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to spring it on you. As a matter of fact, I just decided myself, just this moment.”

He wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. His presence here these past months could hardly have been a source of unalloyed joy for the household. He had never quite decided what Rose felt for him, or what he felt for her. That one time they had gone to bed together, years before, surely that couldn’t have meant so much to her? Yet now he recalled how that morning she had spoken of him kissing her, or of her kissing him — he couldn’t remember which. He had paid little attention, assuming it was one of Rose’s teasing jokes — but what if he was wrong? He couldn’t imagine himself desiring Rose now, as he had once desired her, briefly. She was merely Mal’s wife now, however anachronistic a match it might appear to be.

Rose had gone back to her food and was eating, or going through the motions of eating, with fast, angry little movements.

“I’m sorry,” Quirke said again. “I’ve been clumsy, as usual. I’m very grateful to you both for putting me up for so long, but now it’s time for me to move on.”

Rose didn’t even look up, as if she hadn’t heard, while Mal peered at him out of what these days seemed a permanent haze of puzzlement, the lenses of his wire-framed spectacles gleaming.

“You don’t have to go,” he said. “You know, of course, you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”

Quirke folded his napkin and set it down beside his plate and put both of his hands flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet. Mal was still gazing at him, anxious and bewildered. Rose still would not lift her head. He turned stiffly and left the room. He felt as if he had been given some precious thing to hold and admire, instead of which he had let it slip from his grasp and it had smashed to smithereens at his feet.

Why did everything, always, have to be so difficult?

* * *

He went up to the big chilly bedroom: suddenly he saw it as nothing less than a jail cell, cunningly disguised, where for a long time, too long, he had been in voluntary confinement. He packed quickly — he had few things — and carried his suitcase downstairs. Half an hour ago he had seen himself as a part of the place, as fixed as an item of furniture; now he couldn’t wait to get away. The house was silent. He knew he should go and find Rose and make his peace with her. Instead he crept along the hall and opened the front door as quietly as he could and slipped out into the sunlit evening.

The shadows on the road were sharply slanted. As he walked, an occasional car went past, none of them a taxi. He didn’t mind; he was no longer in a hurry. He had a new sense of freedom, even of lightness. He was an escapee.