The Silver Swan (18 page)

 

She did not believe he had been on his way here. She believed very few of the things he said. But what did it matter, truth or lies—he was so hurt, so hurt.

 

She went and sat in an armchair by the fireplace, and for a long time kept a silent vigil there. She recalled the night two years previously when she had been brought to see Quirke in the Mater Hospital; he, too, had been beaten up by people he did not know and for reasons that were, so he claimed, beyond him. He had tried to convince her he had fallen down a set of steps but she had known he was lying. Now she was certain it was he who had set those fellows onto Leslie. Why? To warn him to keep away from her? And it was Quirke, too, who had been watching her, and following her, snooping into her life, she was convinced of it. She looked at her knuckles: they were white. Would that man—she did not permit herself to call Quirke her father, even, or especially, in her own mind—would he never leave her be, would he continue to interfere in her life and what she did, ruining things, blackening things, soiling all he touched? She hated him with passion, and loved him, too, bitterly.

 

She must have fallen asleep, for when Leslie spoke—how much time had passed?—she started up in the chair in fright. He said her name, weakly. She went to him and before she knew what she was doing—was she still thinking of Quirke?—she had fallen to her knees beside the sofa and taken his hand in both of hers. The knuckles were horribly grazed; two of the nails were broken and bleeding. His eyes were open and he was looking at her. He licked his dry and swollen lips. "Listen, Phoebe," he said, "I want you to do something for me." He tried to pull himself up against the cushion and grimaced in pain. "There's a man, a doctor. I want you to go to him. He'll give you something for me, some medicine. I need it."

 

"Who is he?"

 

"His name is Kreutz." He spelled it for her. "He has a place in Adelaide Road, opposite the hospital. There's a plaque on the railing, with his name."

 

"Do you want me to go
now
?"

 

"Yes. Now."

 

"But it's—I don't know—it's the middle of the night."

 

"He'll be there. He lives on the premises." He made a rattling sound in his chest that it took her a moment to recognize as laughter. "He doesn't sleep much, the Doctor. You can take a taxi. Tell him you need the medicine for Leslie. He'll know." His fingers squeezed one of her hands. "Will you do that? Will you do that for me? Leslie's medicine—that's all you need to say. Tell him I said it's the least he can do, that he owes it to me."

 

From the other end of the sofa her one-eyed teddy bear regarded them both with a glassy, outraged stare.

 

 

AWAY BEYOND THE GREEN, IN HIS FLAT IN MOUNT STREET, QUIRKE, too, had been called out of sleep. He stood in the darkness of the living room in his drawers, barefoot, holding the receiver to his ear and gazing bleakly before him. He had not bothered to switch on a light. The streetlamp below threw a ghostly image of the window high into the room, half on the wall and half on the ceiling, a crazy, broken, vertiginous shape.

 

"It's the Judge," Mal said, his voice down the distance of the line sounding exhausted. "He's gone."

 

And so it was that at the junction of Harcourt Street and Adelaide Road the two taxis, Quirke's and Phoebe's, passed in their separate directions, though neither of them saw the other, lost as they were in their own troubled and disordered thoughts.

TWO

1

 

 

 

 

 

A SAGGING PALL OF CLOUD HUNG LOW OVER THE AIRPORT, AND A steady summer drizzle was drifting slantways down. For a time it seemed the plane would be diverted because of the poor visibility but in the end it was allowed to land, though more than an hour late. Quirke stood with Phoebe at the observation window and watched the machine come nosing in from the runway, its four big propellers churning in the rain and dragging undulant tunnels of wet air behind them. Two sets of steps were wheeled out by men in yellow sou'westers and the doors were opened from inside and the passengers began disembarking, looking groggy and rumpled even at this distance. Rose Crawford was among the first to appear. She wore a close-fitting black suit and a black hat with a veil—"Mourning becomes her," Quirke observed drily—and carried a black patent-leather valise. She paused at the top of the steps and looked at the rain, then turned back to the cabin and said something, and a moment later one of the stewardesses appeared, opening an umbrella, and under this protective dome Rose descended, stepping with care onto this alien soil.

 

"Really, I can't think what they expected to find in my bags," she said, exaggerating her southern drawl, when she came striding out of the Customs hall at last. "Six-shooters, I suppose, seeing I'm a Yank.
Quirke, you look ruined—have you been waiting long for me? And I see you still have a limp. But, Phoebe, my dear, you—you're positively radiant. Are you in love?"

 

She permitted her cheek to be kissed by both of them in turn. Quirke caught her remembered scent. He took her suitcases, and the three of them walked through the throng of arriving passengers. The taxi rank was busy already. Rose was surprised to learn that Quirke did not drive—"Somehow I saw you behind the wheel of something big and powerful"—and wrinkled her nose at the smell in the taxi of cigarette smoke and sweated-on leather. The rain was heavier now. "My," she said with honeyed insincerity, "Ireland is just as I expected it would be."

 

Soon they were on the road into Dublin. In the rain the trees shone, a darker-than-dark green.

 

"It's almost gruesome, isn't it?" Rose said to Quirke, who was sitting in the front seat beside the driver. "The first time we met, you were arriving in America for what would turn out to be a funeral—my poor Josh—and now here I am, come to see his great friend Garret buried in his turn. Death does seem to follow you about."

 

"An occupational hazard," Quirke said.

 

"Of course—I always forget what it is you do." She turned to Phoebe. "But you must tell me everything, my dear, all your news and secrets. Have you been misbehaving since I saw you last? I hope so. And I bet you're wishing you had stayed with me in North Scituate and not come back to this damp little corner of the globe."

 

Rose was the third wife, now widow, of Phoebe's late grandfather Josh Crawford. It was at Rose's house, on the day of the old man's funeral, that Phoebe had found out from Quirke at last the facts of her true parentage. Ever since then Quirke had gone in fear of his daughter, a subdued, constant, and hardly explicable fear.

 

"Oh, I'm happy here," Phoebe said. "I have a life."

 

Rose, smiling, patted her hand. "I'm sure you have, my dear." She sat back against the upholstery and looked out at the gray, rained-on outskirts passing by and sighed. "Who wouldn't be happy here?"

 

From the front seat Quirke said over his shoulder: "Are you tired?"

 

"I slept on the flight." She turned her eyes from the window and looked at his profile before her. "How is Mal?"

 

"Mal? Oh, Mal is Mal. Surviving, you know."

 

"He must be sad, losing his father." She glanced from him to Phoebe, who sat gazing stonily before her at the back of the taxi driver's stubbled neck. Rose smiled faintly; the subject of lost fathers, she noted, was obviously still a delicate one.

 

"Yes," Quirke said tonelessly. "We're all sad."

 

Again she studied his Roman emperor's profile and smiled her feline smile. "I'm sure."

 

At the Shelbourne the doorman in gray top hat and tails came to meet them with his vast black umbrella, beaming. Rose gave him a cold glance and swept on through the revolving glass door. Quirke was about to say something to Phoebe, but she turned from him brusquely and followed quickly after Rose into the hotel lobby. What was the matter with her? She had spoken hardly a word to him since he had picked her up that morning on the way to the airport. She had not even invited him into the flat but had left him standing in the drizzle under the front doorway while she finished getting ready upstairs. She was upset over her Grandfather Griffin's death—she and the old man had been close—but she seemed more angry than sorrowful. But why, Quirke wondered, was it him she was angry at? What had he done? What had he done, that is, that he had not already been punished for, many times over? He tipped the doorman and gave directions for the luggage to be brought in. He was weary of being the object of everyone's blame. The past was tied to him like a tin can to a cat's tail, and even the smallest effort he made to advance produced a shaming din behind him. He sighed and walked on into the hotel, shaking a fine dew of raindrops from his hat.

 

While Rose was unpacking they waited uneasily together, man and daughter, in the tea lounge on the ground floor. Phoebe sat on a sofa, curled into herself, smoking her Passing Clouds and watching the rain that whispered against the panes of the three big windows giving
onto the street. The massed trees opposite lent a faint greenish luminence to the room. Quirke sat fingering his mechanical pencil, trying to think of something to say and failing. Presently Rose came down. She had changed into a red skirt and a red bolero jacket—"I thought I'd add a little color to this grim occasion"—and Quirke noted how these bright things, despite her perfect makeup and gleaming black hair, only showed more starkly how she had aged in the couple of years since he had seen her last. Yet she was still a handsome woman, in her burnished, metallic fashion. She had asked him to stay with her in Boston after her husband died, him and Phoebe both. He smiled to himself, thinking how that would have been, the three of them there in Moss Manor, Josh's big old mausoleum, lapped about by dollars, Mrs. Rose Crawford and her new husband, the pampered Mr. Rose Crawford, and his at last acknowledged and ever unforgiving daughter. Now Rose said to him:

 

"I thought you'd be in the bar."

 

"Quirke has given up bars," Phoebe said, in a tone at once haughty and spiteful.

 

Rose lifted an eyebrow at him. "What—you don't drink anymore?"

 

Quirke shrugged and Phoebe answered for him again. "He takes a glass of wine with me once a week. I'm his alibi."

 

"So you're not an alcoholic, then."

 

"Did you think I was?"

 

"Well, I did wonder. You could certainly put away the whiskey."

 

"We say here 'he was a great man for the bottle,'" Phoebe said. Throughout this exchange she had not once looked at Quirke directly.

 

"Yes," Rose murmured. She held Quirke's gaze and her black eyes gleamed with mirthful mischief. "Just like a baby."

 

The waitress came and they ordered tea. Quirke asked Rose if her room was satisfactory and to her liking and Rose said it was fine, "very quaint and shabby and old-world, as you would expect." Quirke brought out his cigarette case. Rose took a cigarette, and he held the lighter for her and she leaned forward, touching her fingertips to the back of his hand. When she lifted the cigarette from her lips it was
stained with lipstick. He thought how often this little scene had been repeated: the leaning forward, the quick, wry, upwards glance, the touch of her fingers on his skin, the white paper suddenly, vividly stained. She had asked him to love her, to stay with her. Sarah was still alive then, Sarah who—

 

"For God's sake stop fiddling with that!" Phoebe said sharply, startling him. He looked dumbly at the mechanical pencil in his hand; he had forgotten he was holding it. "Here," she said, for a moment all matronly impatience, "give it to me," and snatched it from him and dropped it into her handbag.

 

A brief, tight silence followed. Rose broke it with a sigh. "So many deaths," she said. "First Josh, then Sarah, now poor Garret." She was watching Quirke. "You sort of feel the Reaper out there with his scythe, don't you"—she made a circling motion with a crimson-nailed finger—"getting closer all the time." Phoebe was looking to the windows again. Rose turned to her. "But, my dear, this is far too gloomy for you, I can see." She laid a hand on the young woman's wrist. "Tell me what you've been doing. I hear you're working—in a store, is it?"

 

"A hat shop," Quirke said, and shifted heavily on his chair.

 

Rose laughed. "What's wrong with that? I worked in stores—or shops, if you like—when I was young. My daddy kept a grocery store, until it went bust, just like so many others. That was in the hard times."

 

"And look at you now," Quirke said.

 

She waited a moment, and then: "Yes," she answered softly, "look at me now."

 

He shifted his gaze. Rose was always most unsettling when she was at her softest.

 

Phoebe murmured something and stood up and walked away from them across the room and out. Rose looked after her thoughtfully and then turned to Quirke again. "Does she have to be so deeply in mourning? It seems a little much."

 

"You mean the black? That's how she always dresses."

 

"Why do you let her?"

 

"No one
lets
Phoebe do anything. She's a woman now."

 

"No she's not." She crushed her cigarette in the glass ashtray on the table. "You still don't know a thing about people, do you, Quirke, women especially." She took a sip of her tea and grimaced: it had gone cold. She put the cup back in its saucer. "There's something about her, though," she said, "something different.
Has
she got a beau?"

 

"As you say, I don't know anything."

 

"You should make it your business to know," she said sharply. "You owe it to her, God knows."

 

"What do I owe?"

 

"Interest. Care." She smiled almost pityingly. "Love."

 

Phoebe came back. Quirke watched her as she approached from across the room. Yes, Rose was right, he had to acknowledge it; there was something different about his daughter. She was paler than ever, ice pale, and yet seemed somehow on fire, inwardly. She sat down and reached for her cigarettes. Perhaps it was not him she was angry at. Perhaps she was not angry at all. Perhaps it was only that Rose's arrival had stirred memories in her of things she would rather have forgotten.