Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

“I’m sorry,” Mal said; it might have been a general apology, aimed at no one in particular.

Rose turned her face away from him, twisting her mouth to one side as she did so. Quirke sat very still, as if to move would be to shatter something. Then Rose relaxed her mouth, and nodded, and turned up her hand under Mal’s and squeezed his fingers. “I’m sorry too, old darling,” she said. “So sorry.”

Maisie came to take their plates away, and Mal smiled at her. “Maisie,” he said, “sit down with us for a minute.” Maisie stared at him, and so did Rose. “No, no,” he said, undaunted, “sit down, just for a little while. Take a glass of wine.”

By now Maisie looked terrified. “I have things to do in the kitchen, Doctor,” she said in a faltering voice.

“Yes,” Rose said to Mal, with a warning glint, “there’ll be all sorts of things waiting for her down there.”

“Yes, I know,” Mal said, still looking at Maisie. “But they can wait for five minutes. Sit, Maisie.”

Maisie cast a wildly questioning look at Rose, who only shrugged in resignation, then drew a chair forward and set it a yard short of the table and sat down, her face ablaze. She would not look at Quirke at all now.

“Let’s see,” Mal said. “Have we got a glass for you?”

“Oh, no, Doctor,” Maisie said quickly. “I never touch the drink.”

“No? What a pity. But I suppose you’re right — better not to start.”

There was silence. They could hear Maisie’s rapid breathing. Someone would have to speak, and the task fell to Rose. “Tell me, Maisie,” she said, “how is your mother? Do you hear from her?”

Maisie shook her head rapidly. “She’s not very good at the writing, ma’am. But I do hear from my brothers, like, and they tell me she’s grand.”

Rose was about to speak again, but Mal interrupted her. “And your father,” he said, “do you hear from him?”

Maisie shook her head again, wringing her red-knuckled hands. “Ah, God, no, Doctor,” she said. “Sure, he wouldn’t be having anything to do with me at all.”

“Where is he now?” Mal asked. “Is he at home?”

“No, Doctor. I believe he’s in Wolverhampton. He do be working on the building sites.”

“Oh, yes? And what does he do?”

“He’s a plasterer, sir.”

“That’s a skilled trade, isn’t it?”

“I believe so, Doctor.”

There was a brief pause; then Mal spoke again: “And do you miss them, your family?” he asked.

“I miss my mother, sir, and some of my brothers.”

“And would you like to go and see them?”

Maisie’s face grew redder still and seemed to swell, and tears swam in her eyes. “Oh, no, Doctor,” she said, with a note of terror in her voice. “I’m grand here.”

“It’s all right, Maisie,” Rose said. “What Dr. Griffin means is, maybe you’d like to pay your family a visit.”

Maisie pressed her lips tightly together and gave her head another rapid shake. “No,” she said, “no, thanks, I’m grand.” She suddenly smiled wildly. “Sure, they’d get the fright of their lives if I turned up on the doorstep out of the blue.”

Probably the last time any of her family had seen her, Quirke reflected, was the day she was delivered to the Mother of Mercy Laundry, pregnant with her father’s child. He looked hard at Mal, trying to warn him to stop tormenting the poor creature, however unwittingly, and let her go back to her lair in the kitchen. It was clear she thought that for some reason beyond her understanding she was being threatened with the sack.

Mal sat and gazed at her with a vague, distracted smile. Rose turned to her and said firmly, “Maisie, dear, I think maybe it’s time we took our coffee. You can run along now.”

Maisie fairly sprang to her feet and, casting a last, fearful glance at Mal, hurried from the room.

Rose sighed, and turned to her husband. “Oh, my dear,” she said, “you just frightened that poor thing half to death.”

He looked at her, blinking. “Why would she be frightened?” he said, genuinely puzzled.

“She thought you were letting her go — don’t you see?”

“No,” Mal said, laughing a little. “She can’t have thought that. I just wanted to talk to her, to ask her about her people, if she missed them.” He looked out of the window at the sunlit garden. “There were always so many people that I never spoke to, never even thought about. Nurses, porters, other doctors — my patients, too — them most of all.”

“You were always good with patients,” Quirke said. “You were known for it.”

Mal shook his head slowly. “It was all a performance,” he said, “nothing more.”

“We’re all performers, Mal,” Quirke said. “The trick is to make it convincing. What else can we do?”

Mal got up from his chair and went and stood at the window with his hands in his pockets and his back to the table.

“Such growth, this year,” he murmured, as if to himself. “So much life.”

Quirke and Rose looked at each other, expressionless. Rose said, “Give me a cigarette, will you?”

* * *

They returned for their coffee to the conservatory. The sunlight had lost its noonday intensity and the day was a little cooler now, though the air was as heavy and moist as ever. They sat around the little wrought-iron table and Maisie, who seemed to have calmed down after her earlier fright, came and served them, avoiding all eyes. When she had gone, Rose turned to Quirke and said, “Let’s hear more about this business Phoebe has got herself involved in.”

Quirke told her of Leon Corless, and of his own and Sinclair’s suspicions about the circumstances in which the young man had met his death.

“And the girl,” Rose said, “the one Phoebe brought down to Ballytubber?”

“Corless’s girlfriend. She’s pregnant by him, it seems.”

Rose leaned back in the chair and sipped her coffee. She seemed not tipsy anymore, as she had been at the lunch table, and her mood was almost languid now. “My,” she said, “I thought that kind of thing only happened where I come from, girls getting in a family way and boys ending up in a burning automobile crashed against some big old cottonwood tree. I guess if you had Negroes here you’d be lynching them, too, just like we do.”

Quirke was lighting a cigarette. “I’m going to ask a favor of you again, of both of you. I’m going to try to persuade Phoebe to come and stay here for a while.” He smiled wryly. “She can have my old room.”

Rose glanced at Mal, then turned back to Quirke. “We’d sure be pleased to have her here with us,” she said, “but is there a reason?”

“You think she might need protecting?” Mal asked.

Quirke avoided his eye. If Phoebe was in danger, it wouldn’t be the first time, as Mal well knew. In the past she had suffered at the hands of people Mal and his father had been associated with. Mal hadn’t been to blame for the harm that had been done to her, but he hadn’t been entirely innocent, either. This was all old business now, but that didn’t mean it was forgotten, or fully forgiven.

“The girl, Lisa Smith, disappeared, without a trace,” Quirke said. “That’s enough to make me concerned for Phoebe, too.”

“Maybe she didn’t ‘disappear,’” Rose said. “Maybe she just changed her mind and went off. It’s what girls do, you know.”

“She was frightened,” Quirke said. “According to Phoebe, she was terrified. There must have been some threat, one she believed in.”

“Oh, girls imagine things,” Rose said scoffingly. “Especially when they’ve just found out they’re pregnant and lacking a husband.”

“No,” Quirke said. “There’s something wrong here, something badly wrong.”