The Silver Swan (21 page)

She could see he was suffering not just from his injuries but that there was some additional, deeper anguish. She did not know what kind of medicine it was he had hoped for from Dr. Kreutz. Nor did she ask, partly because an admonitory voice inside her told her it was better that she should not know. She thought at first he might be diabetic and that it was insulin he needed, but as the days went on it became evident that this was not the case. He suffered violent bouts of fever and would lie shaking for hours, glaring at the ceiling, with his teeth clenched and a film of sweat on his forehead and on his upper lip. He had shed his soiled and torn suit and wore her—or Sarah's—silk dressing gown with the dragons and birds on it, loosely closed over his concave and palely glimmering chest. She took his things, his shirt and underclothes, and washed them in the sink in the bathroom, averting her eyes from who knew what variety of stains. She had never before been called on to do someone else's laundry.

 

It was remarkable, though, how little difficulty she had adjusting to this unwonted male presence in her hitherto solitary domain. She did not stop being aware of the strangeness of him, of what he was, how different from her, yet even the difference and the strangeness she got used to. It really was as if some exquisite, half-wild, injured creature had attached itself to her and given itself into her care. She felt like one of those brocaded ladies in a tapestry with a unicorn at her feet. She could hardly remember how it had been when they were together in bed that afternoon, and what details she could recall seemed more dreamlike than real.

 

She tried to get him to allow her to call a doctor, a real doctor, this time, but he made a sound that was half groan, half laugh and flapped a long, pale hand bonelessly at her. "No quacks!" he cried in a tone of exaggerated comic distress. "No quacks, for pity's sake!" He said he knew there was nothing broken; his ribs ached, but they were sound, he was sure of it. When she helped him to the bathroom she felt as if she were supporting a sack of sticks. Yet to her puzzlement
and mild consternation, it was his very frailty, his insubstantiality, that she found most arousing. What did that mean? This was, she reminded herself, a new landscape into which she had ventured. She had never lived in close contact before with a man who was not a relative.
Propinquity
, that was the word, sounding as it did like the name of a reserved sin out of the catechism: she had until now not lived in propinquity with a man. She smiled to herself and made a faint, involuntary, feline sound deep in her throat. Yes, this was sin, the real thing at last, and all unexpectedly. One hot and airless night when she had lain for what seemed hours sleepless on her bed with the sheet thrown aside, she rose with the dawn's first gray glimmer and went into the living room and lay down in her damp slip beside him on the sofa, and he woke and murmured something and turned, groaning a little, and took her in his arms, and she felt the heat of his bruised flesh burning against hers, and she closed her eyes and opened her lips and heard herself cry out, as if she were the one who was in pain.

 

Still she could not get him to eat properly. He subsisted mostly on Garibaldi biscuits—they reminded her of flypaper—and Gordon's gin, four bottles of which he had drunk in as many days. After the first one, which she had got in the pub at the end of the street, she had to go farther and still farther afield to buy replacements, afraid that if she went to the same pub she might be reported to the Guards as a dangerous drunkard. He had a craving for sweet things of all kinds, cake, chocolate, sugar-coated bonbons. He sent her out to buy Yorkshire Toffees and sucked away at them all day, like a schoolboy.

 

Was she afraid of him? Yes, she was. Even as she held him, burning, against her, with his hands in her hair and his mouth on hers and beads of sweat trickling down between her breasts, she could feel her fear, she could almost hear it, a sort of high-pitched whirring inside her. He was not physically strong, she knew, and the beating had left him weaker, but were not the weak ones often the most dangerous of all? She thought of Laura Swan and saw her floating dead
under murky, bile-green water, her long, thick hair swaying about her featureless face like fronds of russet seaweed.

 

She went to see Rose Crawford at the Shelbourne. She knew she could not tell her about Leslie White—no one could be told about that—but just to be in her presence was somehow a comfort, and soothed for a while the confused racings of her mind. Rose, she felt, would not judge her if she were to reveal her secret; Rose in her casually amoral way would understand about Leslie.

 

They had lunch together in the hotel grill room. "All I seem to do is sit here and eat," Rose said with a jaded sigh. "I no sooner finish breakfast than it seems time for lunch, then there's afternoon tea, and then"—she tucked in her chin and mimicked a headwaiter's booming bass—"
dinner, madame!
" She smiled. "Oh, my dear, never get old."

 

"You're not old," Phoebe said.

 

"But I'm not young, either, which seems almost worse, in a way. You see that man over there, the one having lunch with his rich aunt?"

 

Phoebe looked. The man, pin-striped and shod in handmade brogues, was large and florid-faced, with hair parted in the middle and brushed back in two floppy wings at either side of his head. The woman opposite him was tiny and hunched, and the knife and fork in her trembling, mottled claws rattled when they touched her plate. "Do you know him?"

 

"No," Rose said. "But I know an attentive and hopeful nephew when I see one. The point is, when we walked in here he turned to look at us. Or at you, rather. His eye glided over me without the slightest flicker." She made a wry mouth. "It was not ever thus, my dear."

 

Rose ordered sole for them both, and a bottle of Chablis. The sun through the window made the linen tablecloth shine like bullion and laid a burning speck on the rim of each of their wine glasses.

 

"Where's that father of yours?" Rose demanded. "I expected him to dance attendance on me, but I haven't seen him since the day I
arrived. What does he think I do with myself all day long? I know no one in this city."

 

"Why do you stay?"

 

Rose opened her eyes wide in exaggerated surprise. "Why, my dear! Do you want to get rid of me?"

 

"Of course not. Only . . ."

 

"Oh, you're right—why
do
I stay? I don't know. Somehow your grim little country is growing on me. I never knew I was a masochist."

 

Phoebe smiled one of her ghostly, melancholy smiles. "Is it because of Quirke that you stay?"

 

Rose did not look at her. "I shall ignore that, young lady," she said.

 

The waiter came and, with a flourish, presented the wine bottle for Rose's inspection, like a conjurer showing a dove preparatory to making it disappear. When he had poured and gone she held up her glass to the light and asked, in her indolent drawl, "And what are you up to, young lady?"

 

Phoebe had to bite her lip to keep herself from grinning like an idiot. This was what it must feel like to be pregnant, she thought, the same hot, thrilling, secretive sense of being all the time about to brim over. She stared innocently. "Up to?"

 

"Yes. Don't try to fool me. You're up to something, I can tell."

 

"How? How can you tell?" She could not keep the eagerness out of her voice. If only Rose would guess her secret, it would not be her fault, she would not be the betrayer, and then they could talk.

 

"Oh, I don't know," Rose said. "You have a glow—no, a glitter. There's quite a wicked light in your eye. I think you
are
having an adventure, aren't you?"

 

Phoebe looked down at the table. She did not often blush but felt she might be blushing now. She was glad when their sole arrived, swimming in brown butter on oval pewter platters. She did not care for fish, but Rose, in her blandly commanding way, had not consulted her before ordering. It did not matter: Phoebe rarely ate lunch and would probably not eat this one. She took a draught of the
Chablis and felt it go straight to her head, like a flash of lemon-yellow light.

 

"There was a coincidence," she said, measuring her words.

 

"A coincidence? What do you mean?"

 

"Somebody that Quirke knew came to him and asked him not to perform a postmortem."

 

"
Not
to?"

 

"Yes."

 

"On whom?"

 

"On his wife. This man's wife. She died."

 

"Well, yes, I gathered that, if there was or wasn't going to be a postmortem. Who were, are, these people?"

 

"It doesn't matter. Just . . . people. I knew the wife—I mean, I didn't know her, but . . . She ran a beauty parlor; I bought things from her."

 

"What sort of things?"

 

"Just face cream, hand lotion, you know. And then . . ." She stopped. She had a sensation of helpless, slow, not wholly unpleasurable falling, as in a dream. Her hand, she noticed, was shaking; she was afraid that if she let it, her knife, too, like the old lady's, would rattle against the ridiculous pewter plate. "She killed herself," she said. How stark it sounded, how matter-of-fact. She used to think of death as a mysterious, a mystical thing; not anymore.

 

Rose had stopped eating and was watching her with a bright, bird-like stare; Rose recognized the moment when mere talk turned into something else.

 

"Phoebe," she said, "has Quirke got himself involved in more trouble?"

 

She wondered, Phoebe, when last, if ever, she had heard Rose call her by her name. But then, she reflected, Rose was not really on first-name terms with the world in general. And she had missed the point here; Quirke was not the one who was in trouble. She lifted her glass and looked at it but did not drink. Rose was still watching her with a raptor's eye.

 

"Trouble?" she said. "No, I don't think Quirke is in trouble."

 

The unctuous waiter glided up and refilled their glasses, and when he had done so Rose, without looking at him, motioned him away with an impatient flick of an index finger. She took a sip of her wine. The glint of concern in her look was waning, and suddenly Phoebe knew, suddenly and certainly, that Rose was indeed in love with Quirke. She was surprised not to be surprised.

 

"You mentioned a coincidence," Rose said.

 

"This woman, the one who died, Laura Swan—I knew her partner, too."

 

"What sort of a partner?"

 

"He was in the business with her, the beauty parlor business. Leslie White is his name." Had there been a tremor in her voice when she said it? She hastened on. "Quirke seems to think there was something odd, I mean something odd about her death, Laura Swan's, or about her husband coming to him . . ."

 

She faltered into silence. Her voice must have quivered when she said Leslie's name, for Rose's attention had snagged on it.

 

"Leslie White," she said slowly, looking at her, and made a low, humming sound behind pursed lips. "Is that what he's called, your adventure?"

 

"Oh, no, no. No, I mean, he, that is, Quirke, he—he can't seem to leave anything alone."

 

Rose nodded. "That's certainly true." She turned her attention to her plate and speared a fragment of fish. Phoebe watched in peculiar fascination the morsel of white flesh with its broken threads of bright-pink vein passing into Rose's painted, blood-red mouth. There were tiny striations on her upper lip, as if the skin there had been stitched all along with a marvelously fine, transparent filament.

 

"How is it, between you and your father?" she asked.

 

Phoebe always experienced a pause, a mental stumble, when she heard Quirke referred to as her father.

 

"All right," she said neutrally. "He buys me dinner once a week."

 

"And has his glass of wine." Rose's smile was as dry as the Chablis.

 

"Our lives don't really . . . cross," Phoebe said, looking at her plate again.

 

"Hmm. Except when there's a coincidence, like this one with—what's his name again? Leslie who?" Phoebe, looking resolutely down, did not answer. Rose crossed her knife and fork on her plate and leaned her elbows on the table and folded one hand into the other and laid her lips a moment against the knuckle of a forefinger. "Did you know," she asked slowly, "about all the things that happened that time, in Scituate, and before that, here, in Dublin? About Judge Griffin and your father—Quirke, I mean—and the girl who died—I've forgotten what she was called, too."

 

"Christine Falls," Phoebe said, surprised at herself—how had she remembered that name, so surely and so quickly?

 

"Well, then, obviously you did know," Rose said. "Who told you?"

 

"Sarah."

 

"Ah."

 

"But I had guessed a lot of it."

 

"You know Quirke tried to destroy the Judge's career? Your grandfather, who has just died."

 

"Yes. I know. But it was all hushed up."

 

Rose sniffed. "And quite rightly, too. It was a nasty business. That's why I asked you if Quirke was getting himself into more trouble. I think he's still a little bruised from all that—I wouldn't like to think of him becoming embroiled again, in some new scandal. He's not exactly the knight in shining armor that he thinks he is." A soft breeze swooped down on them from the tall, open window beside their table, bringing a scent of trees and grass from the park across the road, and the dry hay-stink of the cabstand where the jarveys in their battered top hats waited on the lookout for moneyed tourists. "You should forgive him, you know," Rose said. Phoebe gazed at her steadily. "Oh, I know it's no business of mine. But, my dear, you owe it to yourself, if not to him." She looked up brightly, smiling. "Don't you think?" Still Phoebe said nothing, and Rose gave the faintest of shrugs. "Well
now," she said, "why don't we have some of this delicious-sounding strawberry shortcake, and then take a stroll in the park over there."

 

"I have to go back to work," Phoebe said.

 

"Can't you take a little time off, to promenade with your lonely old stepgrandmother?" At times, for no apparent reason, Rose exaggerated her Confederate accent—