Benjamin Black - Even the Dead

What age was she? he wondered. Younger than he was, but not by much. Her arms, he saw, thanks to the sleeveless dress, were firm and shapely. The upper parts of women’s arms, so plumply vulnerable, he always found affecting, the elbows too, those little wizened whorls.

“What was wrong with your car?” he asked, to be asking something.

“I have no idea,” she said, without turning her head or slowing her step. “I know nothing about cars. Indeed, there are many things I know nothing of.” This seemed to amuse her. “And you, Dr. Quirke, are you — what do you say? — mechanically minded?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

It was strange, speaking to the back of her head like this.

“Like me, then. That’s good.”

Why, he wondered, was it good?

She was wearing gilded sandals, like the ones Rose Griffin had worn yesterday. The skin over her Achilles tendons was wrinkled and a little chafed, like her elbows. He imagined holding her foot in his hand; he imagined holding both of them — her feet, in his hands. He thought: How strange life is, sometimes!

They came to Huband Bridge and crossed the road to the Pepper Canister Church and turned left into Herbert Lane. He knew, with a dreamlike certainty, what their destination was to be. He had kept a car here once, an Alvis, a beautiful machine, in a rented lock-up garage that David Sinclair had somehow inherited and now kept his Morris Minor in. It was up the lane a little way from Perry Otway’s repair shop, and sure enough, here was Perry himself, Perry of the soiled blond hair and rolling gait, in his putty-colored boilersuit, coming out of his workshop, wiping his hands on an oily rag.

“Dr. Quirke!” he exclaimed, in his plummy accent. “And Dr. Blake, too! My, my, it’s a small world.”

Dr. Blake’s car was a Volkswagen; it lurked in the narrow recess of the workshop, shiny black and somehow menacing, like a giant scarab. Perry explained at some length what the trouble had been and how he had fixed it. Dr. Blake listened gravely, her head bent forward a little, her eyes fixed on Perry’s broad, bland face. Quirke noticed her upper lip, babyish, heavy, shaped like a child’s stylized drawing of a seagull, with a plump little bleb of almost transparent flesh in the middle of it.

Perry, his surgical report done with, handed over the key, holding it daintily between the tips of an oily finger and thumb and dropping it into Dr. Blake’s palm.

“You will send me a bill,” she said, “yes?”

Perry, wiping his hands with the rag again, turned to Quirke. “Ah, that motor of yours,” he said, shaking his head, “she was a beauty.” He turned back to the woman, who was edging her way between the flank of the car and the greasy workshop wall. “An Alvis, it was,” he said to her. “And not just any old Alvis — a TC 108 Super Graber Coupe. Magnificent beast!”

Quirke wished Perry would shut up. Quirke had crashed the Alvis and let it topple over the side of a cliff into the sea. It was not a happy memory.

Dr. Blake had managed to get the door open and slide in behind the wheel at last. She started the engine, and the two men stood aside to allow her room to maneuver out of the narrow space in which it seemed the little car had been wedged. She rolled down the window and said to Quirke, “Can I bring you somewhere?”

“No, no,” he said, “thank you. I live round the corner here.”

“Ah. I see.”

Still she sat there, her hands on the wheel, looking up at him. He noted again the way she had of concentrating her gaze, on an object or a person, so that it seemed as if everything else around had fallen away, into a fog of insignificance. Quirke felt himself almost blushing; he was not accustomed to being looked at like that, with such calm intensity.

“Nevertheless,” she said, “let me give you a lift. Get in.”

He walked around to the passenger side, and she leaned across and unlocked the door for him. Perry, ignored now, waved the filthy rag in farewell, and disappeared into the garage’s oily gloom.

They drove along the lane, turned right and right again, onto Herbert Street.

“I’m round the corner, as I say,” Quirke said.

“I know, yes. But I think I don’t want to go home yet. Will you come with me for a drink, perhaps?”

“Yes,” Quirke said.

Yes.

* * *

She parked on Merrion Street and they walked up to Doheny & Nesbitt. They drank a whiskey and soda each. Afterwards he couldn’t remember what they had talked about. This was strange, for they had talked for a long time, intensely, about many things. He wondered uneasily if she might have managed somehow to hypnotize him in some mild way — wasn’t that what psychiatrists did to their patients sometimes? — to ensure that he would forget all that had been said. A mad notion, of course. Why would she want him to forget?

There were to be things about that evening he would not forget, things he would never forget, but they weren’t things to be expressed in words.

After their drink she drove him to Upper Mount Street, to his flat, but when they reached the house they sat outside in the car for a long time and had another conversation, and this one too he couldn’t recall afterwards. Late sunlight in the street was like a gold river flowing around them.

They couldn’t part, they didn’t know how, and Dr. Blake — Evelyn — suggested they go for a walk. They left the car and went past the Pepper Canister again, in the opposite direction this time, and across to the canal, and sat on the metal bench by the bridge where Quirke liked to spend his Sunday mornings. He told her about the boys who came here on the weekends to swim, diving from the lock and even from the bridge itself. He told her how Rose Griffin had come and invited him to lunch, and how he had talked to Mal in the garden and Mal had told him he was dying. After that they went back to his flat.

* * *

Dense light of evening in the big window above the bed, and a small round cloud seemingly motionless in the western sky. “So funny,” Evelyn said, lying beside him, propped on an elbow, “so funny, the way we had to walk.”

“What?” he said. “Where?”

“By the canal, with Phoebe. Her, me, you, like Indians on the trail of something.”

“On the trail of ourselves.”

“Yes, yes,” she said, smiling. “That’s it, we were tracking ourselves. I could feel you looking at me, from behind. Did I look nice?”

“Very nice.”

“My big bottom.”

“Your wonderful big bottom.”

Undressing her had been a delightful operation, like peeling a large smooth pale egg. She watched him as he did it, fiddling with zips, buttons, clasps. She laughed and said he looked like a little boy, eager and clumsy. When they kissed she kept her eyes open, and so did he.

“Are we not too old for this?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, smiling, “much too old.”

When she lay down on her back her breasts splayed out over her rib cage, wobbling. There were stretch marks on her belly. “I had a son,” she said. “He died.” He leaned his head down and traced the marks with the tip of his tongue; they were pearly and smooth and slightly brittle, like dried snail trails.

“How lovely you are,” he said.

“Oh, no.”

“You are.”

“All right, then.”

She paid attention to everything he did, as if she had never made love before and were memorizing how it was done. She wrapped herself around him, her arms, her legs. “I want to swallow you,” she whispered, “I want to swallow you, all of you, into me.”

She was Austrian. “Salzburg,” she said, and made a face. “A Nazi town, always, and still. I will not go back there.” Her maiden name was Nussbaum. “Nut tree,” she said. “Isn’t that nice?” Her family — parents, two sisters, and a brother — had died in the camps. She put a finger to his lips. “Ssh,” she said. “Not to be spoken of. Not speakable.”