The Silver Swan (8 page)

 

In fact, he had cut Deirdre Hunt open, and had not found the foam in her lungs that would have been there had she drowned; what he had found were strong traces of alcohol in her blood and the residue of a mighty and surely fatal dose of morphine.

 

Sheedy listened to him in silence, one hand placed over the other on his desk, and then, after a brief but, so it seemed to Quirke, skeptical pause, directed the jury to return a verdict of death by accidental drowning. Billy Hunt took his hands from his stricken face and rose and strode out of the court, scurried after by the two women accompanying him, who, Quirke surmised, from the family likeness in their looks, must be his mother and his sister. Quirke, too, made to get away, but Sheedy called him over and, not looking at him but concentrating on squaring a sheaf of documents on his desk, asked quietly, "There isn't something you're not telling me, is there, Mr. Quirke?" Quirke set his shoulders and his jaw and said nothing, and Sheedy sniffed, and Quirke could see him deciding to let it go. After all, no one was innocent here. Sheedy himself most likely suspected suicide but had made no mention of it. Suicide was troublesome, involving tedious amounts of paperwork, and besides, a verdict of
felo de se
only caused heartache to the relatives, who would have to think of their departed loved one even now roasting in what the priests
assured them was a special pit in deepest Hell reserved for the souls of those who had done away with themselves.

 

When Quirke turned from the desk he saw for the first time—had he been there all along?—Inspector Hackett, standing in the aisle with his hat in his hands, breasting the surge of the crowd of onlookers and pressmen making for the exit. He smiled and winked at Quirke and flapped the hat against his chest in a droll greeting, like Stan Laurel flapping the end of his tie, at once bashful and knowing. Then he turned and sauntered out in the wake of the others.

 

Once outside, Quirke walked down to the river in the noonday heat, regretting his black suit and his black hat. He stopped to smoke a cigarette, leaning on the granite wall of the embankment. It was low tide and the blue mud of the riverbed stank and the seagulls wheeled and shrieked about him. He was glad the inquest was over, yet he still felt burdened, a peculiar sensation: it was as if he had emptied something out only to find that the container that had held it was as heavy as before. He still wanted to know how and why Deirdre Hunt had died. He had assumed she had overdosed by accident—although there were no signs to suggest she had been an addict—and that someone had driven her corpse out to Sandycove and slipped it into the sea. But if it was Billy Hunt who had thus disposed of his inconveniently dead wife, why had he imagined that suicide by drowning would seem less of a disgrace than death from an inadvertent overdose of morphine? For even if he had thought Quirke would not notice that puncture mark, he could not have known that Quirke and the coroner would collude in ignoring the obvious likelihood that his wife had drowned herself. Had Billy hoped the body would sink and never be recovered? Or had he thought that if it was found it would be unrecognizable—was that why he had undressed her, if it was he who had done so? People were amazingly ignorant of the intricacies of forensic medicine, and of police procedures, for that matter. When the body was found, with such shocking promptness, how had Billy imagined that Quirke, even if he had not performed a postmortem, would fail to uncover what it was she had
died of? But maybe Billy did not care. Quirke knew how it felt to lose a wife, knew that confused blend of grief and rage and bafflement and strange, shameful elation.

 

He flicked the stub of his cigarette over the embankment wall. A gull, deceived, dived after it. Nothing is what it seems.

6

 

 

IT FELT AS NATURAL AS ANYTHING, THAT WINDY WEDNESDAY AFTER-noon, when Dr. Kreutz invited her to come into the house, yet she could hardly believe it when she found herself, a married woman, following him through the little gate in the black iron railings that made a sound on its hinges like a gasp of surprise, or a sharp warning cry. He brought out his key and opened the basement door and stood back and held it wide, nodding for her to go ahead of him. There was a short, dim passageway and then the room, the consulting room, low-ceilinged and also dim. The air was pleasantly perfumed with some herb or spice; it was a nice smell, woody yet sharp and not at all like the cheap, cloying scents that Mr. Plunkett sold, Coty and Ponds and Evening in Paris. The fragrance made her think of deserts and tents and camels, though she knew these were things that would not be in India—not that she knew much about India, except from the pictures, and she supposed that stuff was all made up, anyway, and nothing like the real-life place. There was a low, deep sofa draped with a red blanket and a little low table and four brightly colored cushions on the floor around it, for sitting on, it must be, instead of chairs, or maybe they were for kneeling on. There was no carpet and the floorboards were painted with shiny, dark-red varnish.

 

"Welcome welcome," the Doctor said, and urged her towards the sofa with a gesture of one long, slender hand the color of melted chocolate. But she would not let herself sit, not yet.

 

On the table there was a bowl made of hammered copper, and into this the Doctor emptied the three bright-red apples from the string bag—she thought of Snow White and the Wicked Stepmother—and then went out through a doorless archway into another room, from where she heard him filling a kettle with water. She stood in the silence, feeling the slow, dull beating of her heart. She was not thinking anything, or not in words, anyway. It was the strangest thing she had experienced in her life so far, just being here, in that room, with that exotic perfume in the air, and the look of everything somehow different from anything she was accustomed to. If Billy had walked in the door this minute she would hardly have known who he was. She felt no touch of worry or alarm. In fact, she had never felt so far from danger. In the street outside the wind soughed, and vague shadows of leaves moved before her on the far wall. She was trembling, she realized, trembling with excitement and a strange sort of expectant happiness that somehow had something to do with the deep-red color of the blanket on the sofa and the cushions on the dark-red floor and those three unreally perfect, glossy apples in the copper dish, each one reflecting on its cheek an identical gleaming spot of light from the window.

 

The room beyond the arch was a little kitchen, with badly painted cupboards and an old stone sink and a Baby Belling stove, on which the Doctor boiled the kettle and made herbal tea in a green metal pot that was not round but boat-shaped, a bit like Sinbad's lamp, with a long, curving spout and swirling designs cut into the metal all over. This time she accepted his invitation to sit and arranged herself carefully on the sofa with her knees pressed tight together and her hands clasped in her lap. The Doctor, with marvelous grace and effortlessness, folded himself rapidly downwards, like a corkscrew going into a cork, until he was sitting tailor-fashion on one of the cushions by the table. He poured the almost colorless tea into two dainty little
painted cups. She waited for him to offer milk and sugar but then realized that of course this was not that kind of tea, and even though she had not said anything to show up her ignorance she blushed anyway, and hoped he would not notice.

 

They began to talk, and before she knew it she was telling him all sorts of things about herself, things she would never have told anyone else. First she talked about her family and her life in the Flats, or a version of it—she was careful not to say what the Flats were called or where they were, exactly, in case he might know what they were like, for they had an awful reputation, one that people who had never had to live there made jokes about all the time—and managed to give the impression that they were old and quite grand, grand as the ones on Mespil Road that she often passed by when she went for walks on her own at the weekends. She told him too about the stolen bicycle when she was little and how she had knocked out Tommy Goggin's tooth, and that was certainly not the sort of thing that would happen on Mespil Road. She was even going to tell him what her father used to do to her when she was a little girl, what he had made her promise would be "our own little secret," but stopped just in time, shocked at herself. How could she talk like this to a total stranger? Thinking of her Da and all that she got a wobbly feeling in the pit of her stomach, and despite the spicy perfume in the air and the fragrance of the tea, she was sure she smelled distinctly for a second the very smell Da always used to have, of coal dust and fags and sweat, and she had to stop herself giving a shiver.

 

But what was she doing here, anyway, she asked herself as she sipped the bittersweet tea, what did she think she was at, sitting on this red blanket in this strange man's room on an ordinary autumn afternoon? Only the afternoon was not ordinary, she knew that. She knew, in fact, that she would think of this forever after as one of the most momentous days of her life, more momentous even than the day she was married.

 

She stopped talking then, thinking she had said quite enough about herself for the moment, and waited to see what he in return
would reveal about himself and his life. But he told her little, or little that she could get a real grasp of, anyway, it sounded so strange. He had been born in Austria, he said, the son of an Austrian psychoanalyst and a maharajah's daughter who had been sent from India to be the psychoanalyst's pupil but had fallen in love with him. As she listened to this she felt, despite herself, a small qualm of doubt; though he spoke matter-of-factly, seeming not to be concerned whether she believed him or not, there was something in his tone that did not sound to her entirely, well, natural. She caught him watching her, too, with what looked to her like a speculative gleam in those black-brown eyes of his, and she wondered if he was testing her gullibility or, indeed, if he might be laughing at her. But she could not believe that he would lie, and she did not mind even if he was making fun of her, which was strange, for if there was one thing that usually she would not stand for it was being made a mockery of. Later, she would come to see that this was how he was with everyone and everything, that for him there was nothing that did not have its playful side, and he taught her, or at least he tried to teach her—she had never been good at getting jokes—that being solemn was the same as being sad, and that God wanted us only to be happy.

 

He explained to her that he was a Sufi. She did not know what that was, or even how to spell it. She assumed at first it was the name of the tribe or—what was the word?—the caste that he came from, or at least that his mother came from, in India. But no, it was a religion, it seemed, or a kind of a religion. He explained that the name was a version of the Arab word
saaf
, meaning pure. Sufism was based on the secret teachings of the Prophet Muhammad—at that name he bowed his head and muttered something, a prayer, she assumed, in a guttural language that sounded as if he was clearing his throat—who had lived almost fourteen hundred years ago, and who was as great a teacher as Jesus. The Prophet had been sent by God as "a mercy to all the world," he explained, and always talked to people in a way they could understand. Since most people are simple, he had put his teachings into simple words, but he had other doctrines, too, mystical and
difficult, that were meant for only the wisest ones, the initiates. It was on these teachings that the Sufis had founded their religion. The Sufis had started out in Baghdad—she had seen that picture,
The Thief of Baghdad
, but thought she should not mention it—and their teachings had spread throughout the world, and today there were Sufis everywhere, he said, in all countries.

 

He talked for a long time, quietly, gravely, not looking at her but gazing dreamily before him, and from the way he spoke—chanting, it was more like—he might have been thinking aloud, or repeating something he had said many times before, in many other places. She was reminded of a priest giving a sermon, but he was not like a priest, or not like the priests she was used to, at any rate, with their smelly black clothes and badly shaved chins and haunted, resentful eyes. The doctor was, quite simply, beautiful. It was a word she would never have thought of applying to a man, until now. He told her so many things, and said so many names—Ali somebody Talib, and El-Ghazali, and Omar Khayyám, whom at least she had heard of, and ones that were almost funny, like Al-Biruni, and Rumi, and Saadi of Shiraz—that soon her head was spinning. He instructed her that Sufis believe that all people must try to cleanse themselves of low human instincts and approach God through stages,
maqaam
, and states of mind,
haal
. He pronounced these and other exotic words very clearly and carefully, so that she would remember them, but most of them she immediately forgot. However, there were two words that she knew she would remember, and these were
shaykh
, which is the sage, and
murid
, the student or apprentice who places himself under the guidance and care of the
shaykh
. As she listened to him talk about the love that must exist between these two, the teacher and his pupil, that feeling she had felt when she had first entered the room glowed in her more strongly than ever. It was a sort of—she did not know how to describe it to herself—a sort of calm excitement, if such a thing was possible; excitement, and heat, and a sense of happy yearning. Yes, yearning—but for what?

 

It was only afterwards that she came fully to realize just how
extraordinary had been that hour she had spent with him—how extraordinary, that is, that she had gone there at all, and had sat there all that time, listening to him. She had always been impulsive—everyone said it about her, even her Auntie Irene, though she managed to make it sound like a big fault—but this was something different. She had been drawn to Dr. Kreutz out of need. What that need was, or how she had known that he was the one who could fulfill it, she could not say. Only she was aware, when he had shown her out and she was walking again along Adelaide Road towards the bus stop in the windy twilight—it must have been more than an hour she had spent with him, if it was this late—of having been set apart somehow from everything around her. She felt like the people in the advertisement for Horlicks, or maybe it was Bovril, who are shown walking along through driving winter rain but smiling cheerfully, each one enclosed in a protective aura of light and warmth.