Christine Falls: A Novele (27 page)

“Are you all right?” she said.

He waved a hand.

“Yes, yes. Tired. My leg hurts.”

She was not listening. She was looking toward the horizon again.

“I’d forgotten,” she said, “how beautiful it could be here. I often think we should have stayed.”

He was trying to see what it was she was twisting in her hands.

“We?” he said.

“Mal and I. Things might have been different.” She saw him looking at what she was holding, and showed it to him. “Phoebe’s scarf,” she said. “There was talk of her and her grandfather going for a walk, if Rose can get someone to clear the paths.” Quirke, sweating now from the alcohol in his blood and the ache in his knee, tottered to the bench and collapsed on it again, his stick clattering against the iron of the seat. “I saw you talking,” Sarah said, “you and Mal. He has no secrets from me, you know. He thinks he has, but he hasn’t.” She walked forward a little, away from him. The palms and the tall ferns rose against her in a green, dense wall. She spoke to him over her shoulder. “We were happy here, weren’t we, in those days? Mal, you, me…”

Quirke put the heels of both hands to his bandaged knee and pressed, and felt a gratifying throb that was part pain and part a vindictive pleasure.

“And then,” he said, “then there was Delia.”

“Yes. Then there was Delia.”

He pressed his knee again, gasping a little and grimacing.

“What are you doing?” Sarah said, looking at him.

“My penance.”

He sat back, panting, on the bench. There were times when he was sure he could feel the pin in his knee, the hot steel sunk rigid in the bone.

“Delia would sleep with you, that was it, wasn’t it?” Sarah said in a new, a hardened voice, hard and sharp as the skewer in his leg. “She would sleep with you, and I wouldn’t. It was as simple as that. And then Mal saw his chance, with me.” She laughed, and the laugh had the same hardness as her voice. She was still turned partly away from him, and was craning her neck, as if in search of something on the horizon, or beyond. “Time is the opposite of space, have you noticed?” she said. “In space, everything gets more blurred the farther away you get. With time it’s different, everything becomes clear.” She paused. “What were you talking about, to Mal?” She gave up looking for whatever it was she had been seeking and turned to gaze at him. Her new thinness had sharpened the lines of her face, making her seem at once more beautiful and more troubled. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what you were talking about.”

He shook his head.

“Ask him,” he said.

“He won’t tell me.”

“Then neither will I.” He put a hand to the place beside him, inviting her to sit. She hesitated, and then came to him, looking at her feet in the way that she did, as if distrustful of the ground, or her ability to negotiate her way over it. She sat. “I want Phoebe to come back with me, to Ireland,” he said. “Will you help me to persuade her?”

She gazed before her, leaning a little forward, as if she were nursing an ache deep inside her gut.

“Yes,” she said. “On one condition.”

“What?” He knew, of course.

“That you tell her.”

A mist was unrolling along the horizon and the foghorns had started up.

“All right,” he said grimly, almost angrily. “All right. I’ll do it now, this minute.”

HE FOUND HER IN THE HIGH, ECHOING ENTRANCE HALL. SHE WAS SITTING
on a chair beside an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand, pulling on a pair of black gum boots. She was already wearing a big, padded coat with a hood. She said she was going for a walk, that she was trying to persuade Granddad to go with her, and asked Quirke if he would like to come, too. He knew that he would remember forever, or for however long his forever would be, the look of her sitting awkwardly there with one foot raised and her face turned up to him, smiling. He spoke without preamble, watching her smile as it dismantled itself in slow, distinct stages, first leaving her eyes, then the planes beside her eyes, and last of all her lips. She said she did not understand. He told her again, speaking more slowly, more distinctly. “I’m sorry,” he said when he had finished. She set down the gum boot and lowered her stockinged foot to the floor, her movements careful and tentative, as if the air around her had turned brittle and she was afraid of shattering it. Then she shook her head and made a curious, feathery sound that he realized was a sort of laugh. He wished that she would stand up, for then he might be able to find a way of touching her, of taking her in his arms, even, and embracing her, but he knew it was not going to be possible, knew that it would not be possible even if she were to stand. She let her hands fall limply by the sides of the chair and looked about her, frowning, at this new world that she did not know and in which she had suddenly found herself a stranger; in which she had suddenly lost herself.

BY NOON THE FUNERAL GUESTS HAD BEGUN TO LEAVE, LED BY THE
Archbishop and his attendant clerics. Costigan and the others who had come from Ireland, his fellow Knights, had lingered on in hope of a conference with Rose Crawford, but Rose had gone to her room to rest, taking her martini glass with her. A subdued sense of crisis made its way like a gas into the house. In the drawing room Quirke came upon Costigan and the priest from St. Mary’s on the sofa deep in conversation and Mal standing by the fire, one hand in a jacket pocket and an elbow on the mantelpiece, as if he were posing for his portrait. Seeing Quirke in the doorway the two fell silent instantly, and Costigan did his snarling smile and asked Quirke how were his injuries, and was he recovering from his fall. Mal looked at him calmly and said nothing. Quirke made no answer to Costigan’s inquiries and walked out of the room. His head was pounding. He went upstairs slowly to his bedroom. And it was there that Brenda Ruttledge found him, sitting slumped on the side of the bed in his shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette and gazing at the photographs on the walnut chest of drawers of Delia Quirke née Crawford and her daughter, Phoebe.

He had seen Brenda on so few occasions not wearing her nurse’s uniform that for a moment he hardly knew who she was. She had knocked softly and he had turned to the door in a mixture of relief and dread, thinking it must be Phoebe who had relented and come to talk to him. Brenda entered quickly and shut the door behind her and stood with her back to it looking everywhere but at him. She wore a plain gray dress and low-heeled shoes, and had put on no makeup. He asked her what was the matter but she shook her head, still with eyes on the floor, not knowing where to begin. He stood up, stifling a gasp—his knee was very bad today, despite all the alcohol he had so far consumed—and walked around the bed and stood before her.

“I think,” she said, “I think I know who they gave the baby to.” It was as if she were talking to herself. He touched her elbow and walked with her to the bed and they sat down side by side. “I saw them here, at the Christmas party. They had a baby with them. I didn’t take much notice. Then I saw them again, at the orphanage. She had no child with her that time, and she looked—oh, she looked terrible.” She stared at her hands as if they belonged to someone else. A foghorn boomed, and she turned to the window in vague fright. Outside were fields of snow under a lowering sky of faint, soiled pink. She was thinking distractedly of home, of the year of the big snow when she was seven or eight, and her brothers made a toboggan and let her ride with them, whooping, down the side of the long meadow. She should never have come here, to this place, should never have let herself be among these people, who were too much for her, too clever and well-off and wicked. Quirke was asking her something. “The Staffords,” she said, almost impatiently. He did not know who it was she meant. “Andy Stafford, Mr. Crawford’s driver—him and his wife. That’s who they gave the baby to, I’m sure of it.”

Quirke saw again the back of the young man’s sleek, small head and his glossy dark eye in the driving mirror. He reached forward and turned the two photographs to face the wall again.

IT TOOK A LONG TIME FOR A TAXI TO COME FROM BOSTON. THERE WERE
more snow flurries and the driver, a miniature Mexican whose forehead was just about level with the steering wheel, kept up a low, querulous moaning as he negotiated the winding roads out of North Scituate under an ever-darkening sky. Quirke and Brenda Ruttledge sat facing away from each other in the back seat. An odd constraint, a kind of embarrassment, almost, had settled between them, and they did not speak. Brenda wore a black coat with a hood that gave her, incongruously, the look of a nun. South Boston was deserted. Skirls of snow swept over the pavements, and in the roadway the tracks of cars were lined with brownish slush. On Fulton Street the frame houses seemed crouched against the cold and the blown snow. Quirke had got the address, not without difficulty, from Deirdre, Rose Crawford’s mousy maid.

A narrow-faced woman in a brown apron came to the door of the house and looked them up and down distrustingly, this ill-matched couple, taking in Quirke’s walking stick and Brenda’s habitlike greatcoat. Quirke said they had come from Mr. Crawford’s house. “He died, didn’t he?” the woman said. Her face at the side of her nose bore a recent, angry gray and purple bruise. She told them the Staffords lived upstairs but that Andy Stafford was not there. “Far as I know he’s out at Scituate,” she said, sounding suspicious. She did not like any of this, these two coming to her door, and asking after Andy, and looking like they knew something bad about him. Quirke asked if Mrs. Stafford was at home and she shrugged and made a dismissive grimace, baring an eyetooth. “I guess. She never goes out, hardly.”

Despite the snow on the ground she followed them around the side of the house and stood under the shelter of the eaves with her arms folded and watched them climb the wooden steps. Quirke knocked with his knuckle on the glass of the French door. No answering sound came from within. “Probably open,” the woman called up. Quirke tried the handle; it turned without resistance. They stepped, he and Brenda, into the narrow hallway.

They found Claire Stafford sitting on a spindle-backed chair at a table in the kitchenette. She wore a pink housecoat, and was barefoot. She was sitting sideways, motionless, with one hand in her lap and the other resting on the plastic tabletop. Her pale hair looked damp and hung lankly in strings on either side of her stark white face. Her eyes were rimmed with pink, and there was no color in her lips.

“Mrs. Stafford?” Brenda said softly. Still Claire gave no response. “Mrs. Stafford, my name is Ruttledge, I’m—I was Mr. Crawford’s nurse. Mr. Crawford, Andy’s—Andy’s boss. He died—Mr. Crawford died—did you know that?”

Claire stirred, as if at some faint, far-off sound, and blinked, and turned her head at last and looked at them. She showed no surprise or curiosity. Quirke came and stood opposite her at the table, his hand on the back of a chair for support.

“Do you mind if I sit down, Mrs. Stafford?” he asked.

She moved her head a fraction from side to side. He pulled out the chair from the table and sat, and motioned Brenda Ruttledge to come forward, and she too sat.

“We want to talk to you,” Brenda said, “about the baby—about what happened. Will you tell us?”

A look of something, of faint protest and denial, had come into Claire’s almost colorless eyes. She frowned.

“He didn’t mean to,” she said. “I know he didn’t. It was an accident.”

Quirke and Brenda Ruttledge looked at each other.

“How did it happen, Mrs. Stafford?” Quirke said. “Will you tell us how the accident happened?”

Brenda reached out and put her hand over Claire’s hand where it lay on the table. Claire looked at her and at their two hands. When she spoke it was Brenda alone that she addressed.

“He was trying to make her stop crying. He hated it when she cried. He shook her. That’s all—he just shook her.” Her frown now was a frown of bewilderment and vague wonder. “Her head was heavy,” she said, “and so warm—hot, nearly.” She turned up the palm of the hand in her lap and cupped in it the recollection of the child’s head. “So heavy.”

“What did you do then?” Brenda said. “What did Andy do?”

“He telephoned, to St. Mary’s. He was a long time away, I don’t know…Father Harkins arrived. I told him about the accident. Then Andy came back.”

“And Father Harkins,” Quirke asked, “did he call the police?”

She drew her eyes away from Brenda’s face and looked at him.

“Oh, no,” she said simply. She turned to Brenda again, appealing to another woman, to her good sense. “Why would he do that? It was an accident.”

“Where is she, Mrs. Stafford,” Quirke said, “where’s the baby?”

“Father Harkins took her. I didn’t want to see her anymore.” Again she appealed to Brenda. “Was that bad of me?”

“No,” Brenda said soothingly, “no, of course not.”

Claire looked again into her cupped palm.

“I could still feel her head in my hand. I can still feel it.”

The silence in the room grew heavy. Quirke had a sense of something coming into the house, wafting in, soft and soundless like the snow outside. He was suddenly tired, with a tiredness he had never known before. He felt as if he had come to the end of a road on which he had been traveling for so long his trudging on it had begun to seem a state of rest, a rest however which afforded him no respite but made his bones ache and his heart labor and his mind go dull. Somewhere along that difficult way he seemed to have got lost.

ANDY KNEW WHAT THE GIRL WAS AFTER WHEN HE CAME INTO THE
garage and found her sitting in the back seat of the Buick, just sitting there, in a big coat, staring in front of her, pale and sort of shocked-looking. She said nothing, and neither did he, only buttoned up his jacket and got in behind the wheel and started up the engine. He just drove, without thinking, which was what she seemed to want—
Take me anywhere
, she had said that first time, after they had left the big guy in the village. The snow was coming down now, it was not bad, but it meant the roads were empty. They went up along the coast again. He asked her if she had any of them English cigarettes with her today but she did not even answer, only shook her head at him in the mirror. She had that look—scared and sort of paralyzed but frantic underneath—that girls got when they could think of only the one thing. It was a look that told him it would be her first time.

He knew where to go, and stopped on the headland. There was no one around, and there would be no one. The wind was so strong up there it rocked the big car on its springs, and the snow straightaway started piling up under the wipers and around the rims of the windows. At first he had a little trouble with the girl. She pretended not to know what was going on, or what he wanted—which was what she wanted, too, if only she would admit it—and although he had hoped he would not have to, in the end he brought out the blade that he kept clipped to a couple of magnets he had fixed under the dash. She started to cry when she saw the knife but he told her to quit it. It was funny, but it really got him going when he ordered her to take off those weird rubber boots she was wearing, and because there was so little space between the seats she had to twist up her leg and he got his first glimpse of her garter belt and the white inner sides of her leg right up to the seams of those lace pants she was wearing.

It was good. She tried to fight him and he liked that. He made sure to keep her lying on her overcoat because he did not want stuff getting on the upholstery—or not lying, really, but sort of wedged in a half-sitting position, so he had to do some fancy contortions before he could get himself inside her finally. She made a funny little squeaking sound in his ear and he was so fond of her in that moment that he eased off a bit, and leaned up, and looked out through the snowy window and saw away out at the harbor mouth the sea boiling up somehow, he guessed the tide was turning or something, and a big head of blue-black water with a flying white fringe along the top of it was surging in between the two prongs of the harbor, and although he had only started he could not hold himself back, and he arched himself between her shaking legs and plunged into her and felt the shudder begin deep in the root of his groin, and he bit into her neck at the side and made her scream.

AFTERWARD, THERE WAS THE PROBLEM OF WHAT TO DO WITH HER. HE
could not bring her back to the house. He had no intention of returning to Moss Manor, ever again; with the old man dead, he knew his time there was at an end. That bitch who had suddenly become a rich widow would waste no time in selling—he had seen the way she used to look around the place, twisting up her mouth in disgust, when she thought no one was watching—and move to somewhere more to her la-di-da taste. He had his plans made, and now this thing with the girl had made his decision for him: it was time, and there was no time to lose. He had talked to a guy he knew, a dealer in antique cars, who had moved to New Mexico and settled in Roswell to look for little green men and who had agreed to work on the Buick and make it anonymous and find a buyer for it. But time, yes, time was the thing. He could start by getting rid of the girl. She was lying curled up on the back seat when he drove into North Scituate. The snow was coming down heavy now, and the streets were deserted—not that they were ever exactly crowded, in this one-horse dump—and he stopped at the corner where he had picked up Quirke the other day, and went around and opened the door for her and told her to get out. It was cold, but she had her coat and those boots, and he figured she would be all right—he even made sure she had a handful of dimes for the telephone. She got herself out, moving like one of the living dead, her face all smeared, somehow, and her eyes blurred-looking as if her sight had gone bad. As he drove away he took his last look at her in the rearview mirror, standing in the snow on the street corner in her tepee-shaped coat, like some squaw that had got lost when the tribe moved on.

HE KNEW HE WAS IN TROUBLE, MAYBE THE WORST TROUBLE HE HAD
ever been in—it was the knife, he should not have brought out the knife—but he did not care. He was exultant. He had made his mark, had shown what he was capable of. His lap felt wet still but the sweat on his back and on the insides of his arms had cooled and was like oil, like—what was the word?—like balm. He wished that Cora Bennett could have seen him in the Buick with the girl out there on the headland, he wished Cora could have been there, and forced to watch. Cora, Claire, the big Irishman, Rose Crawford, Joe Lanigan and his sidekick that looked like Lou Costello, he imagined them all standing around the car, looking in the windows at him, shouting at him to stop and him just laughing at them.

Cora Bennett had laughed at him that night when her blood got all over him and he rolled away from her and felt it on his thighs, the hot stickiness of it. “Why, hell,” she had said, laughing, “it’s only blood!” There had been blood with the girl, too, but not much. If Cora had been there he would have smeared it on her face, and laughed, and said,
Why, Cora, it’s only blood!
When she had seen how mad he was she had said she was sorry, though she was still sort of grinning. When she came back from the bathroom she sat down on the side of the bed where he was lying and rubbed her hand along his back and said again she was sorry, that it was not at him she had been laughing, but only that she was relieved because she had been kind of worrying, seeing she was two weeks late and she was never late, and that was why she had begun to wonder if what Claire had told her might not be the case, might just be one of crazy Claire’s crazy fantasies. He had sat up on the bed then, all his nerves alert, and asked her what she meant, and what it was that Claire had told her. “Why, that you shoot blanks, Tex,” she said, with that grin again, and put up her hand and mussed his hair. “Hence no little Andys or little Claires, or little Christines, either, of your own.”

He could hardly believe she was saying what she was saying. At first he did not understand—Claire had told her it was him and not her who could not make a kid? But when she had come home from the doctor’s that day after she got the results of the tests that they had both taken she had said to him that the doctor had told her it was she who was the dud, that there was something wrong with her insides and that she could never have a baby, no matter how hard she tried. Cora, who was beginning to look like she was sorry she had started to tell him all this, said, well, Claire had told her it was the other way around, one day when he was at work and she had gone up to see if Claire maybe needed a cup of coffee or something. Claire was real upset, Cora said, crying and talking about the kid and the accident, and then she had told Cora about what the doctor had really said and how she had lied about it to Andy. As Cora was speaking, Andy’s leg had begun to shake that way that it did when he was worried or mad. Why, he wanted to know, why would Claire say it was her if it was really him that could not, could not…? “Oh, honey,” Cora had said soothingly, not grinning now but all serious, seeing clearly the damage she had done, “maybe it’s just what she told you, a little lie, you know, so you wouldn’t feel bad?” That was when he had smacked Cora. He knew he should not have done it, but she should not have said what she said, either. He had smacked her pretty hard, across the face and his knuckles caught her across the bridge of her nose. There was more blood then, but she just sat there on the bed, leaning away from him with a hand to her face and the blood running down out of her nose and her eyes cold and sharp as needles. That was the end, of course, for them. Cora would probably have kept it on, once she got over being sore at him for smacking her, but the truth was he was tired of her, of that slack belly of hers and her flat-fronted boobs and her ass that was already starting to get puckers in it. Now the laugh was on her.

BY THE TIME HE HAD LEFT THE GIRL AND GOT BACK TO THE HOUSE HE
had decided to take Claire with him. The decision surprised him, but it pleased him, too. It must be that he loved her, despite everything, despite even the things she had told Cora Bennett about him. He parked the car a couple of houses down, not because he did not want the neighbors noticing the fancy car—they had seen him in the Buick before this—but he wanted to get into the house without Cora Bennett coming out and pestering him. He slipped across the yard and went up the outside stairs three at a time, thankful for the snow that muffled the sound of his boot heels on the wood.

Claire in her housecoat was slumped on the couch in front of the television on which some dumb quiz show was playing—who gives a fuck what the capital of North Dakota is?—and he paused in passing by her and gave her shoulders a shake and told her to get up and start packing. She did not move, of course, and he had to come back and put his fist in front of her nose and shout at her. He was in the bedroom, throwing shirts into the old carpet bag that had once belonged to his daddy, when he felt her behind him—he had developed a sixth sense, and could feel her presence without looking, as if she was a ghost already—and turned to find her leaning in the doorway in that tired-out, drooping way that she did, the housecoat pulled shut and her arms folded so tight it was like this was the only way she had of holding herself together.

“There were people here today,” she said.

“Oh, yeah? What people?” He had not realized he had so many shirts and coats and pairs of jeans—where did it come from, all this stuff?

“They were asking about the baby,” Claire said.

He went still suddenly, and turned slowly to look at her. “What?” he said softly. He was holding in his hand a belt with a buckle shaped like a steer’s head with horns.

She told him, in that wispy voice she had developed lately, that sounded as if it was wearing out and would soon be just a sort of sighing, a sort of breathing, with no words. It was the Irish guy and the nurse. They had asked her about little Christine, and the accident, and what had happened. As she spoke she paused now and then to pick at stray bits of lint on the housecoat. She might have been talking about the weather. Once she stopped altogether and he had to give her a push to get her started up again. Christ, a clockwork ghost, that was what she was turning into! He would have gone at her with the belt except that she looked so strange, sort of not here, but lost somewhere inside herself.

He paced the room, gnawing on a knuckle. They would have to go tonight—they would have to go now! As if she sensed what he was thinking, Claire took note for the first time of the bag on the bed, the gaping drawers, and the closet doors standing open.

“Are you leaving me?” she said, sounding as if it would not much matter to her if he was.

“No,” he said, stopping in front of her with his hands on his hips and speaking slow so she would understand him, “I’m not leaving you, baby. You’re coming with me. We’re going west. Will Dakes is out there, he’s in Roswell, he’ll help us, help me find a job, maybe.” He moved closer to her and touched her face. “We can start a new life,” he said softly. “You could get another kid, another little Christine. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He was surprised how little, really, he minded her saying that to Cora about the doctor’s test, or telling the Irish guy about the accident—surprised, in fact, at how little he cared about any of that. The Irish guy, Rose Crawford, that nun and the priest, they were the past now. But he knew they would be coming for him, and soon, and that the two of them had to get away. Claire’s cheek was cold under his hand, as if there was no blood at all under the skin. Claire; his Claire. He had never felt so tenderly toward her as he did at that moment, there in the doorway, with the snow coming down outside and the light failing and the walnut tree in the window holding up its bare arms, and everything ending for them here.

HE WAS DRIVING TOO FAST. THE ROADS WERE SLICK UNDER THE SOFT
new snow. Every time a cop car passed by heading into the city he expected it to swing around on two wheels and come bumping over the central divide after them with its blue light flashing and its siren going. The girl would be back at the house by now and would have told them her story, and he knew, of course, what a story it would be. He did not care. In two days they would be in New Mexico, and Will Dakes would file off the engine number and whatever else needed to be done, and the car would be sold and he and Claire would take the money and travel on, to Texas, maybe, or maybe they would go north, to Colorado, Utah, Wyoming. The wide world was before them. Out there, under those skies, Claire would forget the kid and would be her old self again, and they would begin to live, like they had never lived before. He saw through the swirls of snow the red light flashing ahead, at the crossing. It reminded him of the girl, of Phoebe, and he smiled to himself, feeling good remembering her sprawled under him on the back seat of the car, and he put his foot down. Yes, life was just starting, his real life, out where he belonged, in those wide-open spaces, on those plains, in that sweet air. The barrier was coming down, but they would make it. They would flash under it and on the other side there would be a new place, a new world, and they would be new people in it. He glanced at Claire beside him. She was feeling the same excitement, the same wild expectancy, he could see it in her face, in the way she was leaning forward with her neck thrust out and her eyes wide, and then they were on the tracks, and suddenly—what was she doing?—she reached out a hand sideways and snatched the wheel and wrenched it out of his grip, and the big car screeched and spun on the snow and the shiny steel rails and stopped, and the engine stopped, and everything stopped, except the train that was rushing toward them, its single eye glaring, and which at the last moment seemed to raise itself up as if it would take to the black air, shrieking and flaming, and fly, and fly.