The Silver Swan (3 page)

 

When she was sixteen she went to work in a chemist's shop. She liked it there among the neatly packaged medicines and bottles of scent and fancy soaps. The chemist, Mr. Plunkett, was a married man, but still he tried to persuade her to go with him. She refused, of course, but sometimes, to get him to let her alone for a while and because she thought he might give her the sack if she did not cooperate, she would trail unwillingly behind him into the room at the back where the drugs were kept, and he would lock the door and she would let him put his hands under her clothes. He was old, forty or maybe even more, and his breath smelled of cigarettes and bad teeth, but he was not the worst, she reflected, gazing dreamily over his shoulder at the stacked shelves as he palmed and kneaded her
belly under the waistband of her skirt and pressed his thumb to the stubbornly unresponsive tips of her breasts. Afterwards she would catch Mrs. Plunkett, who did the books, studying her out of a narrowed, speculative eye. If old Plunkett should ever think of trying to get rid of her she would waste no time in letting him know that she had a thing or two she could tell his missus, and that would put manners on him.

 

Then one day Billy Hunt came in with his suitcase of samples, and although he was not her type—his coloring was something like her own, and she knew for a fact that a woman should never go with a man of the same skin type as herself—she smiled at him and let him know that she was paying attention as he did his salesman's pitch to Mr. Plunkett. Afterwards, when he came to talk to her, she listened to him with a concentrated look, and pretended to laugh at his silly, schoolboy jokes, even managing to make herself blush at the risky ones. On his next time round he had asked her out to the pictures, and she had said yes loud enough for Mr. Plunkett to hear, making him scowl.

 

Billy was a lot older than she was, nearly sixteen years older, in fact—was there something about her, she wondered ruefully, that was especially attractive to older men?—and he was not good-looking or clever, but he had a clumsy charm that she liked despite herself and that in time allowed her to convince herself she was in love with him. They had been going together only a few months when one night as he was walking her home—she had a little room of her own now, over a butcher's shop in Kevin Street—he started to stammer and all of a sudden grabbed her hand and pressed a little square box into it. She was so surprised she did not realize what the box was until she opened it.

 

That was the first time she let him come up to her room. They sat side by side on the bed and he kissed her all over her face—he was still stammering and laughing, unable to believe she had said yes—and talked about all the plans he had for the future, and she almost believed him, holding her hand out in front of her with the fingers bent back and
admiring the thin gold band with its tiny, flashing diamond. He was from Waterford, where his family kept a pub that his Da would probably leave to him, but he said he would not go back, though she noticed that when he spoke of Waterford city he called it
home
. He told her about Geneva, where he was summoned twice a year for a meeting at Head Office, as he called it, of all the top bosses worldwide, hundreds of them. He was so proud to be brought all that way, him, who was only a salesman! He described the lake, and the mountains, and the city—"so clean, you wouldn't believe it!"—and said he would take her there one day. Poor Billy, with his big ideas, his grand schemes.

 

So the years went on, and so it seemed they would go on forever, until the day the Doctor walked into the shop. Although his name was Kreutz, which sounded German, she thought he must be an Indian—an Indian from India, that is. He was tall and thin, so thin it was hard to know where there would be room inside his body for his vital organs, and he had a wonderfully long, narrow face, the face, she thought immediately, of a saint in one of those books they had in school about the foreign missions. He wore a very beautiful suit of dark-blue material, silk it might be except that it had a weight that made it hang really elegantly from his sloped, bony shoulders and his practically nonexistent hips. She had never been this close to a colored man before and she had to stop herself from staring at him, especially his hands, so slender and dark, with a darker, velvety line along the edges where the pale, dusty-pink skin of the palms began. He had a smell that also was dark, she thought, spicy and dark—she caught it distinctly when he came in; she was sure it was not cologne or shaving lotion but a perfume produced by his skin itself. She found herself wanting to touch that skin, to run her fingertips along it, just to feel the texture of it. And his hair, very straight and smooth and black, black with a purplish sheen, and combed back from his forehead in smooth waves; she wanted to touch that, too.

 

He had come in to ask for some herbal medicine stuff that Mr. Plunkett had never heard of. His voice was soft and light, yet deep,
too, and he might almost have been singing rather than speaking. "Ah, this is most strange," he said when Mr. Plunkett told him he did not have the particular thing he wanted, "most most strange." Yet he did not seem put out at all. He said he had been to a number of chemist's shops but no one could help him. Mr. Plunkett nodded sympathetically but obviously could think of nothing else to say, yet the man went on standing there, frowning not in annoyance but only what seemed to be polite puzzlement, as if waiting for something more that he was sure was coming. Even when the chemist turned away pointedly the man still made no move to depart. This was something about him she would come to know well, this curious way he had of lingering in places or with people when there seemed nothing more that could happen; his manner was always relaxed and calm yet quietly expectant, as though he thought there must surely be something more and he was waiting to see if it might occur after all. She never heard him laugh, in all the time she knew him, nor did he smile, not what you would call a smile, but still he gave the impression of being quietly, benignly amused at something—or everything, more like.

 

That first time he did not look at her once, not directly, but she could feel him taking her in: that was how it felt to her, that he was somehow
absorbing
her. Most of the men who came into the shop were too timid to look at her, and would stand turned away a little from her, fidgeting, and grinning like fools with a tongue tip showing between their teeth. But Dr. Kreutz was not timid, oh, no—she had never before encountered a person of such self-confidence, such assurance. Contented, that was the word she thought of to describe him, quite contented—or
quite quite
contented, for that was another of his habits, the way he had of saying words twice over, so rapidly he made a single word of them,
mostmost, quitequite
, in his soft, amused, singsong voice.

 

He took out a little leather-bound notepad from the inside pocket of his jacket and tore a page out of it and insisted on writing down
his address for Mr. Plunkett, in case the stuff he wanted should come in—it was only aloe vera, although she thought that day it was
'allo
he was saying, like a Frenchman in a cartoon trying to say hello—and then left at last, ducking his dusky, narrow head as he went through the door, like a pilgrim, she thought, or one of those holy men, bowing devoutly on the threshold of a temple. He had such beautiful manners. When he had gone, Mr. Plunkett muttered something under his breath about darkies, and dropped the slip of paper with the address on it into the wastebasket. She waited awhile and then, when the chemist was not looking, retrieved the paper.

 

Dr. Kreutz had his consulting room—that was what he called it—in an old house on Adelaide Road, in the basement flat there. When she saw it first she was disappointed. She was not sure what she had expected, but it was not this poky, dingy place with a single window, the top half of which looked out on a narrow strip of fusty grass and a bit of black iron railing. On the day after he had come into the shop, a Wednesday, which meant early closing and therefore she had the afternoon off, she told Billy she was going to visit her mother and took the bus to Leeson Street Bridge and walked down Adelaide Road, keeping to the opposite side, under the trees in front of the Eye and Ear Hospital. She passed by the house once and made herself go all the way to the top of Harcourt Street before turning round and coming back, this time on the right-hand side. She glanced at the house as she went past, and read the brass plate mounted on a wooden board on the railings.

DR. HAKEEM KREUTZ
SPIRITUAL HEALER

There was nothing to be seen in Dr. Kreutz's window, the panes of which gave her back briefly an indistinct, watery reflection of her head and shoulders. She told herself she was being stupid, creeping about the streets like this on an October afternoon, using up her half
day. What if he should come out of the house and see her there, and maybe remember her? And just as she was thinking it, there he was all of a sudden, walking towards her from the Leeson Street direction. He was dressed today in a sort of shirt-length tunic, gold-brown, with a high, round collar, and loose silk trousers and sandals that were just cut-out leather soles held on with a couple of lengths of thong wound around up to his ankles; his feet, she could see, were another version of his hands, long and narrow and golden brown like the stuff of his tunic. He was carrying a string bag with three red apples in it and a loaf of Procea bread—how strange, she thought, that even in her agitation she should notice these details. She considered turning and walking rapidly away, pretending to have remembered something, but instead she kept going, though her knees were trembling so much she could hardly walk in a straight line.
Will you get a grip, for God's sake!
she told herself, but it was no good, she could feel the blood rising to her face, that alabaster-white face of hers that registered even the faintest of embarrassments with a show of pink. He had seen her—he had recognized her. She wondered, with crazy inconsequence, how old he was—as old as Mr. Plunkett, she guessed, but how differently he carried his age. Her steps led her on. What a lovely loose way he had of walking, leaning down a little way to one side and then the other at each long, loping stride he took, his shoulders dipping in rhythm with his steps and his head sliding backwards and forwards gently on its tall stalk of neck, like the head of some marvelous, exotic wading bird.

 

She was so flustered at the time that afterwards she could not remember exactly how he had got her to stop and talk. There was a raw wind, she recalled, swooping down in gusts from the sky and making the fallen sycamore leaves scuttle along the pavements like big, withered hands. He did not seem to mind the cold, even in his thin caftan and his practically bare feet. A purple-faced old fellow going by in a motorcar slowed down and goggled at them, the pale young woman and the dark man standing there together, she grinning like a lunatic and he as calm as if they had known each other forever.

 

Yes, forty
, she thought,
he must be forty if he's a day, older than Billy, even
. But what did it matter what age he was?

 

He was asking her name. "Deirdre," she said, her voice hardly more than a breath, and he repeated it, trying it out, as if it were the first two syllables of a song, or of a hymn, even.
Deirdre
.

3

 

 

QUIRKE HAD LONG AGO LOST WHAT LITTLE FAITH HE MIGHT ONCE HAVE had in the Catholic pieties that the Brothers at the workhouse, officially known as Carricklea Industrial School, where he had endured his early childhood, had tried for so long to beat into him. Yet even now, when he was well into middle age, he still had his household gods, his not-to-be-toppled totems, one of which was the giant remnant of the man whom for most of his life he had unquestioningly taken to be good, even great. Garret Griffin, or the Judge, as everyone called him, even though it was some time since he had been in a position to deliver judgment on anything, had been felled the previous year, his seventy-third, by a stroke that had paralyzed him entirely, except for the muscles of his mouth and eyes and the tendons of his neck. He was confined, mute but in some way sentient, to a large white room on the third floor of the Presentation Convent of St. Louis in Rathfarnham, a far suburb of the city, where two windows, one in each of the adjoining corner walls of the room, looked out on two contrasting aspects of the Dublin Mountains, one rocky and barren, the other green and strewn with gorse. It was to these soft hills that his eyes turned constantly, with an expression of desperation, grief, and rage. Quirke marveled at how much of the man, how much
of what was left of the living being, was concentrated now in his eyes; it was as if all the power of his personality had come crowding into these last, twin points of fierce and desperate fire.

 

Quirke visited the old man on Mondays and Thursdays; Quirke's daughter, Phoebe, came on Tuesdays and Fridays; on Sundays it was the turn of the Judge's son, Malachy. On Wednesdays and Saturdays the Judge was left to contemplate alone the day-long play of light and shadow on the mountains and to endure with speechless and, if the expression in his eyes was to be credited, furious resentment the ministrations of the octogenarian nun, Sister Agatha, who had been assigned to care for him. In his former life, his life in the world, he had done many quiet favors for the Presentation nuns, and it was they who had been the first to offer to take him in when the catastrophe befell him. It had been expected that after such a devastating stroke he would live no more than a week or two, but the weeks had passed, and then the months, and still his will to endure showed no sign of flagging. There was a school for girls on the first two floors of the building, and at fixed times of the day—midmorning, lunchtime, the four o'clock end of lessons—the pupils' voices in raucous medley rose up as far as the third floor. At that sound a tense and concentrated look would come into the Judge's eyes, hard to interpret; was it indignation, nostalgia, sorrowful remembrance—or just puzzlement? Perhaps the old man did not know where he was or what he was hearing; perhaps his mind—and those eyes left little doubt that there was a mind at some kind of work behind them—was trapped in a state of continuous bewilderment, helpless doubt. Quirke did not know quite what to think of this. Part of him, the disappointed, embittered part, wanted the old man to suffer, while another part, the part that was still the child he had once been, wished that the stroke might have killed him outright and saved him from these final humiliations.