The Silver Swan (30 page)

 

"No, you clown," she said, laughing. "But I saw the Aga Khan and Rita Hayworth here one time, when they were married."

 

"Aly," Quirke said. She glowered at him. "It was Aly Khan that was married to Rita Hayworth," he said, "not Aga."

 

She bridled. "Aly, Aga, what does it matter? If you know so much, Mr. Smarty-Pants, tell me this—what other film star was Rita Hayworth a cousin of?"

 

"I've no idea."

 

She grinned triumphantly, showing most of her large, slightly yellowed teeth. "Ginger Rogers!"

 

"Maisie, you're a walking encyclopedia."

 

At that she scowled. Maisie was touchy, and never more so than when she thought she was being mocked. He ordered another drink for her, and for himself a glass of plain water.

 

"Are you still off the gargle?" she demanded. "Would you not have something, to keep a girl company?"

 

He shook his head. "If I have one I'll have another, and then another, and another after that, and then where will I be?"

 

"Christ, Quirke, you're no fun anymore, do you know that?"

 

When, Quirke wondered idly, had he and Maisie had fun together?

 

"That one you were asking me about," Maisie said. "The one that topped herself."

 

"Yes?"

 

He had paused before responding. Maisie liked everyone to keep a leisurely pace. She was gazing into the ruby depths of her second and already half-drunk drink.

 

"I inquired around," she said. "No one knew anything, or not anything that would be likely to interest you, anyway. Then I spoke by chance to a former client of mine, that lives out in Clontarf. A former nun, she is, living with a former priest—would you believe it? Came over from England, the two of them, on the run from the bishops, I suppose, or the peelers, I don't know which. She bought a ring, or got one out of a Halloween cake, and they set up house together, as respectable as you like."

 

"How did you come to know her?"

 

She gave him a look. "How do you think? A ring is one thing, but a bouncing babby is another. Anyway, here's the thing, here's the coincidence. When I asked her about this one, Deirdre Hunt, had she known her or heard of her, she gave a laugh and said, 'Deirdre Hunt, is it? Sure, doesn't she live across the road from me.' "

 

"In Clontarf," Quirke said.

 

"St. Martin's something—Avenue, Gardens, Drive, I can't remember. Isn't that a queer thing, though, me ringing her up and asking her about someone who turns out to be her neighbor opposite?"

 

Quirke waited again, and took a lingering sip of water. "Did she know her?" he asked. "I mean, to talk to."

 

"They kept themselves to themselves."

 

"Which, the nun and her priest or the Hunts?"

 

She turned and studied him for a long moment, shaking her head slowly from side to side. "I sometimes wonder, Quirke, if you're as slow as you seem, or are you only pretending?"

 

"Oh, I'm very slow, Maisie, very slow."

 

"Sure you are," she said with a scathing chuckle. "Sure you are."

 

Her glass was empty, and now she waggled it meaningly. He said: "But your nun—what's her name, by the way?"

 

"Philomena."

 

"—She must have had some contact with the Hunts?"

 

"Only to say good morning and hello to, that kind of thing. 'A nice quiet couple,' Philomena said they seemed. She couldn't believe it when she heard that the wife had drowned herself. 'Must have been
an accident,' she said, 'must have.' " Maisie turned again and this time gave Quirke a searching look. "Was it?"

 

He returned a blank gaze of his own. "Was it what?"

 

Maisie nodded knowingly. "You wouldn't be interested in it if it was an accident," she said. "I know you, Quirke. And by the way"—she tapped a finger on his wrist—"you may have given up the sauce, but some of us around here are dying of the thirst."

 

So he ordered her another brandy and port and waited while the barman poured it, both of them watching him as he worked. He was young, with a short-back-and-sides haircut and a pustular neck. He wore a white shirt and a black waistcoat. Quirke noted a frayed cuff, a greasy shine at the pockets of the trousers. This country. Someone had recently offered Quirke a job in Los Angeles. Los Angeles! But would he go? A man could lose himself in Los Angeles as easily as a cuff link.

 

Maisie took up her drink and resettled herself contentedly, hen-like, on the stool's high perch.

 

"The night Deirdre Hunt died," Quirke said, "did Philomena notice anything out of the ordinary?"

 

Maisie Haddon fairly tittered. "You talk like a detective in the pictures. Humphrey Bogart. Alan Ladd. 'Notice anything suspicious, lady?' " Laughing, she took up her drink, a little finger cocked, and delicately sipped. "Do you know where Philomena insisted on meeting me?" she asked. "In the church in Westland Row. What do you think of that? You'd imagine she'd be too ashamed to show her face in God's house. 'Why not Bewley's?' I said. 'Or the Kylemore.' But no, St. Andrew's it had to be. There was a Mass ending, we had to sit in the far back, whispering. Philomena kept blessing herself and looking pious. The rip! She goes in for stylish outfits, you know—the sky pilot she's living with must have money—nylons, makeup, perfume, the lot. But do you know what it is?" She paused for effect. "She still smells like a nun. That musty whiff, there's no getting rid of that."

 

Quirke was bored, and his damaged knee ached, and, as always in Maisie's company, he was beginning to want a drink badly. Maisie had
nothing to tell him. Why had she asked him to come here? Perhaps she had been bored, too. He thought of slipping away, as he usually did, and had even begun to ease himself off the stool in preparation for flight when Maisie, looking into her glass, a little bleary now, told him, with blithe offhandedness, what it was she had summoned him to hear.
THEN ONE DAY, WITHOUT WARNING, HER WORLD JUST FELL ASUNDER. that was the way she thought of it, that was the phrase she kept saying over and over in her mind:
9

 

 

 

The world has fallen asunder
. At the start it seemed a day like any other. True, Billy had hardly spoken a word to her, and ate his breakfast on his own in the kitchen and then departed without even a good-bye, lugging his bag of samples. Either he had used too much aftershave lotion or his face was flushed, as it tended to be when he was angry. But he did not seem angry, only in a mood of some sort. The kitchen when he was gone from it was left smoldering, the lingering smoke of his cigarette rolling in slow, gray-blue billows in the big shaft of sunlight through the window beside the back door. She had poured herself a cup of lukewarm tea from the brown china pot and sat with it at the littered table half listening to the wireless. Billy had left a smear of marmalade on the white tablecloth; it glittered like a shard of glass. In the garden a bird was whistling its heart out. She reminded herself that before she set off for work she must start the laundry, in the brand-new washing machine that was another little luxury the bountiful Silver Swan had brought to her.

 

Yes, a day like any other, so it seemed.

 

When the telephone rang it made her jump. Who would be calling at this early hour? She hurried into the hall. At first she could not make out who it was on the line. Hardiman, he said his name was. Did she know anyone called Hardiman? Then he said he was with the bank. Her mouth went dry, and she felt her heartbeat suddenly slow to a dull, effortful thumping, as if something was climbing up laboriously inside her. Dealing with the bank had been the part of the business that she secretly hated. Banks terrified her; she had never been in one before she was in her twenties. They were so big, with such high ceilings, and so many counters with so many people behind them, all wearing ties, or twinsets, while the men in the back, the managers or whatever they were, all wore pin-striped suits. She was frightened even by the smell, dry and papery, like the smell in the head nun's room at school. Hardiman was saying something about "some matters," and "these figures," and "these checks signed by Mr. White." He asked her to come in and see him. Somehow she managed to get her voice to work, and said she was very busy today, and would Monday do. There was a silence on the line then, a silence that was more alarming even than the man's voice, and then she heard him give a little cough—though she had never even met him she could see him, gray and precise, with dandruff on his collar, sitting at his desk with the phone in one hand and the knuckle of an index finger pressed to his pursed lips—and he said no, no, it would not keep till Monday, that it would be better if she came in right away. She tried to protest but he cut her off, and with a new sharpness. "Really, Mrs. Hunt, I think it will be in all our interests for you to come in, now, and see if we can sort this out."

 

When she put the phone down she had to run upstairs, into the bathroom, and sat on the lavatory with the pee gushing out of her, just gushing and gushing, she could not think how there could be so much of it inside her. When she touched her face it felt as dry as dead leaves—no, not leaves but ashes, yes, and her throat was so constricted she could hardly swallow, and her eyelids were burning and even her hair pained her, if that was possible. Despite all this, the
fright and the panic and the helpless peeing, she was not surprised. This, she suddenly saw, this was what she had been waiting for all along, since that very first day in the pub on Baggot Street when she had sat at the bar listening to Leslie White telling the barman exactly how he wanted their hot whiskeys prepared—"Hot water, mind, not boiling, and no more than three cloves in each glass"—and she had been so excited to be in a pub in the middle of the afternoon drinking with this beautiful, silver-haired creature that she had been afraid she might fall off the stool in a swoon straight into his arms. For what had made it all so thrilling, in its horrible way, she realized now, was not the success of the salon or the money, not Leslie's playful talk or the intoxicating feel of his fingers on her skin, no, not even love, but the unacknowledged prospect of this, the telephone call at nine in the morning of an ordinary day, the call to announce that the catastrophe had come. That was strange.

 

The interview with Hardiman passed for her in a hot blur. She had been wrong about him: he was not the weedy, dry stick she had pictured but a big, white-haired, red-faced, worried man in a blue suit who leaned forward intently with his elbows on the desk and his huge, meaty hands clasped before him, telling her in a voice resonant with sadness how Leslie White had ruined the business. She did not understand, she could not take it in. It seemed that for every pound she had earned Leslie had spent two. He had used the salon as security to raise a mortgage with another bank, but that was spent, too. There were checks that had not been "made good," Hardiman said. She stared at him, slack-jawed, and he looked down at his hands and then back at her and sighed and said, "Bounced, Mrs. Hunt. The checks bounced." But where had the money gone, she asked, pleading for enlightenment, what had Leslie spent it on? Mr. Hardiman lifted his big, blue-clad shoulders and let them fall again, as if the weight of the world was on them. "That's something the bank is not privy to, Mrs. Hunt," he said, and when she went on gazing at him helplessly he blinked and frowned and said harshly, "I mean, we don't know what he spent it on. Perhaps that's a question"—he
checked himself, and softened his tone—"perhaps it's a question you should ask him, Mrs. Hunt."

 

She walked out into the summer morning feeling as if she were the sole survivor of a huge and yet entirely soundless disaster. The sunlight had a sharp, yellowish cast and hurt her eyes. A coal merchant's cart went past, the black-faced coalman standing up on the board with the reins in one hand and his whip in the other and the big horse's nostrils flaring and its lips turned inside out and foam flying back from them. A bus blared, a newsboy shouted. The world seemed a new place, one that she had never seen before, only cunningly got up to look like the old, familiar one. She stepped into a phone box and fumbled in her bag for coppers. She had none. She went to a newsagent's and bought a newspaper, but the change was in silver and she had to ask for pennies, and the newsagent scowled at her and said something under his breath but gave her the coins anyway. She telephoned the salon, but there was no reply. She had not expected Leslie to be there, of course, but there was a tiny comfort in dialing the familiar numbers, and hearing the phone ring in the empty room. Then, before she knew what she was doing, she called his home. Home. The word stuck in her heart like a splinter of steel. His home. His wife. His other life; his real life.

 

Kate White answered. The English accent was a surprise, though it should not have been. It seemed so strange to her now that they had never met, she and Leslie's wife. At first she could not speak. She stared through the grimy panes of the phone box at the street, the passing cars and buses sliding sinuously through the flaws in the glass.

 

"Hello," Kate said. "Who is this?" Bossy; in charge; used to being obeyed, to her word being hopped to.

 

"Is Leslie there?" she asked, and sounded to herself like a little girl, a schoolgirl afraid of the nuns, afraid of the priest in the confession box, afraid of Margy Rock the school bully, afraid of her father. There was a silence. She knew Kate knew who she was.

 

"No," Kate said at last, coldly, "my husband is not here." She asked again: "Who is this?"

 

She could not bring herself to say her name. "I'm his partner," she said. "I mean, I work with him, at the Silver Swan."

 

At that Kate snickered. "Do you, now?" she said.

 

Another silence followed.

 

"I need to talk to him," she said, "urgently. It's about the business. I've been to the bank. The manager spoke to me. It's all . . ." What could she say? How could she describe it? The thing was so vast, so terrible, so hopeless, and so shaming.