The Silver Swan (13 page)

 

He went and sat opposite her at the table.

 

"I'm sorry," he said, not knowing what exactly he was apologizing for.

 

"I'm too old for this kind of thing, really, I am," she said. She leaned forward, hunching over the coffee cup as if she were suddenly cold. "In two years' time I'll be forty. What man will look at me after that?" She gave a low, mock-mournful laugh, and then, surfacing to another level of sobriety, focused on him suddenly. "Why are you involved in this," she asked, "this grimy little suburban melodrama?"

 

He lifted one shoulder. "I suffer from an incurable curiosity."

 

She nodded, as if she considered this a sufficient answer. Another thought struck her. "Are you married?"

 

"I was. A long time ago. She died."

 

"Sorry." She did not look it; she looked, with that tightened mouth and narrowed eyes, as if she envied him, having a spouse who was dead. "What happened to her?"

 

"Childbirth. A fluke, one in ten thousand."

 

"And the child?"

 

"She survived."

 

"A daughter."

 

"She's twenty-two now. Twenty-three."

 

"Does she live with you?"

 

"No."

 

"Well, at least she doesn't remember. Losing her mother, I mean." Idly she dabbled a fingertip in the ash from his cigarette in the ashtray between them on the table. "I have no child," she said. "Leslie couldn't have any. That was fine by him. He was pleased as Punch when he found out. Handy, I suppose, for"—she made a crooked mouth—" 'getting round the girls,' as he would put it, I've no doubt." She was silent again, but after a moment stirred herself. "What can I tell you, Mr. Quirke? I've no idea what you want to know. And nor have you, so you say. Is there something suspicious about Deirdre Hunt's death? Do you think she was pushed? I'd have done it myself, if . . ." She stopped, and sat back hard on her chair, making the legs squeal on the tiles. "You don't think Leslie—you don't think Leslie was somehow involved, do you? I mean, you don't think he—?" She
laughed. "Believe me, Leslie wouldn't hurt a fly—he'd be afraid it would bite him. Oh, he could be dangerous, if cornered, I know that. But I can't see him pushing a woman into the sea. Leslie, Mr. Quirke"—she reached out and seemed about to touch his hand but then withdrew her fingers—"my poor Leslie has about as much backbone as a sea slug. Sorry—I love him dearly, or used to, God help us, but it's the truth."

 

 

HE STAYED ANOTHER HOUR. SHE PREPARED PLATES OF SMOKED SALMON and salad and they ate without speaking, facing each other across the table in the gleaming light and silence of the unreal room. The refrigerator jolted into life and hummed away grumpily under its breath for a while, then abruptly switched itself off again with another, seemingly rancorous, jolt. A bubble of trapped air in a water pipe somewhere made a pinging sound. Their knives and forks rang sharply against their plates, their water glasses made joggling noises when they set them down on the Formica tabletop.

 

"I'm sorry," Kate White said, "about earlier."

 

"Earlier?"

 

"You know what I mean. Guzzling wine and throwing myself about. That's not me, really, or at least I hope it's not. I've been struck a blow and I don't know how to deal with it. I keep trying out other personalities, to see if I can find one that will work better, be more plausible, more persuasive than the one I'm stuck with." She smiled, her somehow bruised-looking, beautiful black eyes glistening in that teary way they did. "No luck, so far."

 

She rose and collected their plates and cutlery and carried them to the sink.

 

"Don't imagine," she said, "that I've forgotten the fact that I have no idea who you are or why you're here. I'm not in the habit of letting strange men into the house and treating them to smoked salmon and intimate revelations."

 

He put down his napkin. "I should be on my way."

 

"Oh, I didn't mean that, necessarily. I've quite enjoyed having you here. Not much company about, these days. Leslie and I never went in for friends and all that." She smiled again. "He's English. So am I. Did you know?"

 

"Yes. Your accent . . ."

 

"I thought I'd lost it. It's reassuring that I haven't. I wonder why? I mean, why reassuring." She ran the tap and stood pensive, waiting for the water to turn hot. Above the sink a square window gave onto a side garden with stands of African grass. The day was failing, growing shadowed. "Maybe I should go back," Kate said. "My mother had Irish blood, but I think I'm a London girl at heart. Bow Bells and all that. Winkles, skittles, the Pearly King and Queen." She gave a brittle little laugh. She began to wash the dishes, rinsing and stacking them on a plastic rack. He stood up and went to her side. "Is there a tea towel?"

 

"Oh, let them drain," she said. A pale, greenish radiance from the window touched her face. "Just stand about and look handsome, that will do."

 

He lit a cigarette. "You have a workshop, have you?" he said. "A design workshop?"

 

"Yes. I call it a factory—may as well be honest. We cut for the top designers. Irish girls make wonderful seamstresses. It's the training they get from the nuns." She smiled, not looking at him. "And yes, if you're wondering: I'm the breadwinner in the family, or was, when there was still a family. Leslie used to run a hairdressing business, until he ran it into the ground. That's why he went in with little Miss Swansdown. He thought he was her Svengali, but I bet she was the one doing the hypnotizing." She stopped and raised her face to the window again. "I wonder what he'll do now, old Leslie. Too late for him to become a gigolo. He used to be quite decorative, too—different type from you, of course, but dishy all the same, in his languid way. Lately the rot has set in. I suppose that's the main reason he took up with that poor little tart: she was young enough for him to feel flattered."

 

She went off to the den and came back after a moment with her wine glass and the remains of the wine from earlier. She put the almost
empty bottle into the fridge and plunged the glass into the dishwater in the sink and shook it vigorously in the suds.

 

"We were quite well off, in London," she said. "My father made a lot of money out of the war—" She glanced at him sidelong. "Are you shocked? I think you should be. He was a bit of a crook, more than a bit, in fact—the black market, you know. So naturally he got on with Leslie. Then Leslie and I decided to come over here, much against Father's wishes—he wasn't very hot on the Irish, I'm afraid, despite Mother's Tipperary roots—and after that the Daddy Warbucks fund dried up. Leslie was terribly disappointed and blamed me, of course, though he tried not to show it, bless him. Then I opened the factory and the moolah started rolling in again and all seemed well. Until the Black Swan swam into our lives."

 

"How did they meet, your husband and Deirdre—Laura Swan?"

 

She turned her head slowly and gave him a long, smilingly quizzical look. "Are you sure you're not with the police? You have the tone of an interrogator." There was a muffled sound down in the dishwater—
tok!
—and she looked up quickly and gave a tiny gasp. "Oh, Christ, I think I've cut myself." She lifted her hand out of the suds. There was a deep gash, unnaturally clean and straight, on the underside of her right thumb close to the knuckle. The dilute blood raced with impossible swiftness down her wrist and along her arm. She stared aghast at the wound. Her face was paper-white. "The glass," she said tonelessly. "It broke."

 

He put a hand under her elbow.

 

"Come," he said, "come and sit down."

 

He led her to the table. She walked as in a trance. The blood had reached her elbow and was soaking into the rucked sleeve of her black sweater. She sat. He told her to hold her hand upright and made her grasp the ball of her sliced thumb with her other hand and squeeze hard to reduce the flow of blood.

 

"Have you a bandage?" he said. She gazed at him in frowning incomprehension. "A bandage," he said. "Or something I can cut up and use for one?"

 

"I don't know. In the bathroom?"

 

He took out his handkerchief and tried to rip it but the seam would not give. He asked if there was a scissors. She pointed to a drawer under the countertop by the sink. "There." She gave a brief, faintly hysterical laugh. He found the scissors and cut a strip of cotton and set to binding the cut. As he worked he felt her breath on the backs of his hands and the heat of her face beating softly against his cheek. He tried to keep his hands from shaking, marveling at how quickly, how copiously, the blood insisted on flowing. A dull-crimson stain had appeared already in the improvised bandage. "Will it need to be stitched?" she asked.

 

"No. It will stop soon." Or so he hoped; he really did not know what to do with living flesh, with freely running blood.

 

She said: "Do me a favor, will you? Look in my handbag, there are some aspirin." He went into the hall as she directed and took her black handbag from where it hung by its strap on the coat rack behind the front door and brought it to her. "You look," she said. "Don't worry, you won't find anything incriminating."

 

He rummaged in the bag. The lipstick-face-powder-perfume smell that came up from its recesses reminded him of all the women he had ever known. He found the aspirin bottle, shook out two tablets, and brought a tumbler to the sink and filled it and carried it back to the table. Kate White's good hand trembled as she lifted the glass to her lips. She was still holding her bandaged thumb aloft in a parody of jaunty affirmation. "Will I have to stay like this all day?" she asked, making her voice shake with comic pathos. He said the cut would seal and then the bleeding would stop. She glanced about the room. "Christ," she murmured, with vague inconsequence, "how I hate this house."

 

 

SHE ASKED HIM TO TURN THE GAS ON UNDER THE COFFEEPOT, AND when it was hot she poured a cupful for herself, and tasted it, and grimaced. They went back to the den and she sat on the sofa with her
legs tucked under her and looked at him over the rim of the coffee cup. "You're quite the Good Samaritan, aren't you," she said. "Have you had a lot of practice?" He did not answer. He went and stood by the window, where she had stood earlier, and put his hands in his pockets and contemplated the garden. The evening would soon turn into night. Above the trees small puffs of pink cloud sailed against a band of tender, greenish sky. "Tell me," she said, "what's your interest in the Swan woman? The truth, now."

 

"I told you—her husband telephoned me."

 

"You said."

 

"He asked me not to do a postmortem."

 

"Why?"

 

He went on studying the garden. In the dimming air the trees, glistening yet from the long-ceased rain, were ragged globes of radiance. "He didn't like the idea of it, he said."

 

"But you didn't believe him. I mean, you didn't believe that was why he was asking you not to do it."

 

"I had no reason to doubt him."

 

"Then why are you here?"

 

He turned to her at last, still with his hands in his pockets. "As I say, I was curious."

 

"Curious to do what? To get a look at the betrayed wife?" She smiled.

 

"I really must be going," he said. "Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. White."

 

"Kate. And thank you for binding my wounds. You did it expertly, like a real doctor." She set the coffee cup beside the telephone on the glass table and stood up. When she was on her feet she swayed a little, and put a hand, the unbandaged one, weakly to her forehead. "Oh dear," she said, "I feel quite woozy."

 

In the hall she lifted his hat from the peg where she had hung it and handed it to him. He was at the door but she put a hand on his arm, and as he turned back she stepped up to him swiftly and kissed him full on the mouth, digging urgent fingers into his wrist through
the stuff of his jacket. He tasted a trace of lipstick. On her breath behind the smell of coffee there persisted a faint sourness from the wine. The tips of her breasts lightly brushed against his shirtfront. She released him and drew away. "Sorry," she said again. "As I say, I'm not myself." Then she stepped swiftly back and shut the door.

11

 

 

SHE DID NOT KNOW WHAT SHE WANTED FROM DR. KREUTZ, OR WHAT she expected from him; she was not sure that there was anything for her to expect. At first she was pleased—she was thrilled—simply to have been noticed by him. It was true, plenty of people noticed her, men especially, but the Doctor's was a unique kind of noticing, in her experience. He did not seem to be interested in her because of her looks or of what he might think he could persuade her to do for him. It was a long time before he even touched her, and when he did, his touch was special, too. And it was strange, but she was never wary of him, as she had learned to be wary of other men. In a curious way she did not think of him as a man at all. Oh, he was attractive—he was the most attractive, the most exquisite human being she had ever encountered in her life—but when she thought about him she did not imagine him kissing her or holding her in his arms or anything like that. It was not that kind of attraction he had for her. The nearest thing she could think of was the way, when she was a little girl, she used to feel sometimes about an actor in the pictures. She would sit at matinees in the sixpenny seats with her hands joined palm to palm and pressed between her knees—an upside-down attitude of prayer, it struck her, though it was certainly not God she was praying
to here—and her face lifted to the flickering silver-and-black images of John Gilbert or Leslie Howard or the fellow who played Zorro in the follyeruppers, as if one of them might suddenly lean down from the screen and kiss her softly, quickly, gaily on the lips before turning back to join in the action again. This was how it would be with Dr. Kreutz, she was convinced, this magical, this luminous, this infinitely tender leaning down, when he would eventually judge the time was right to show her how he really felt about her.