A Death in Summer (9 page)

His second glass of wine arrived. This time he counted to twenty, but counted faster than before.

“Tell me about the war,” he said. She blinked, momentarily baffled. “You said your brother was killed.”

“Ah. Yes.” She turned her face aside briefly. “They took him to Breendonk—it was a camp, a prison fortress, in Belgium.”

“Because he was a Jew?”

She stared. “What? No, no, he was not a Jew.” Her face cleared. “Ah, I see. You thought—” She broke off and laughed; it seemed to him it was the first time he had heard her laugh. “We are not Jews. What an idea!” She laughed again, shaking her head. “My father was a great Jew hater.”

“And yet…”

“… And yet I married a Jew, yes?” She nodded, her smile turning bitter. “That was the greatest crime I could have committed. My father—what do you say?—disowned me. I was no longer his daughter, he said. That was a pity, really. He had liked Richard, before he found out that he was Jewish. They are—were—very alike, in so many ways. I did not attend his funeral. I regret that now. It’s why I could not bring myself to insist that Giselle should be there when Richard was buried. I understood.”

They were silent. Quirke drank his wine. He should have eaten more of the omelette, it would have helped with the alcohol, but the eggs were cold now, and were developing a sheen, like sweat. It was always the way with him: drink soured his appetite and made him bilious, though it sang so sweetly in his veins. “Your brother,” he said, “what happened to him?”

She was lighting another cigarette. Her hand was steady now, he noted. “We never heard from him again,” she said, “nothing. Probably he was taken to the East. I do not know which was the greater sorrow for my father, that his son had died or that he had died among the Jews.” She glanced at Quirke and away again swiftly. “I’m sorry,” she murmured, “I should not say such a thing. My father could not help being what he was, after all. None of us can help what we are.”

They let some moments pass in silence, a mark of respect, of sorts, for the dead, it might be, the father as well as the son. Then Françoise d’Aubigny stirred herself, and stubbed out her cigarette in the glass ashtray on the table. “I think I should go now,” she said. Quirke signaled to the waiter again. The woman was watching him, weighing something up. “Will you speak to the Inspector about Carlton Sumner?” she asked.

Quirke did not look at her. “Yes, I’ll mention it. Be warned, he may need to ask you questions—Hackett, I mean.”

She shrugged, but he could see she was not as unconcerned as she pretended. “If my husband was murdered,” she said, “then someone did it. We must find out who it was”—she arched an eyebrow, seeking his assent—“must we not?”

*   *   *

The day was blindingly bright when they came out of the hotel, and the glare reflected from the roofs and windows of the passing cars made them squint. They said good-bye on the pavement.

“Thank you for lunch,” she said. “It was very pleasant.”

“You didn’t eat anything.”

“Did I not? I hardly notice, these days.” Once more she offered him briefly her cool soft hand. “
Au revoir,
Dr. Quirke. We shall meet again, I hope.”

He watched her as she walked away in the direction of Nassau Street. She moved quickly but without haste, taking rapid deft steps, with her head bent, looking down, as if scanning the ground for any small obstacle that might rise up in her way. He turned and set off in the opposite direction, not thinking where he was going, not caring.

At the junction of Molesworth Street a warm breeze assailed him, and would have swept off his hat had he not held on to it; the brim flapped and snapped like a duck’s bill, and he grinned to himself blearily. The alcohol in his blood—not enough, not nearly enough—was dispersing already, and he clung in faint and happy desperation to the last of its effect. In St. Stephen’s Green the trees, dusted all over with sunlight, seemed dazed from the heat, their foliage polished and of such a dark-green hue it was almost black. He had a vision suddenly of summer itself, off behind the sticky heat and noise and grime, going blithely about its blue-and-gold business as always, and at just that moment the awful thought came to him that he had fallen in love. He hoped it was the wine.

4

But it was not the wine, and in the days following that lunch with Françoise d’Aubigny Quirke’s increasingly agitated spirit led him helplessly on into ever deeper excesses of amorous folly. He felt like a stonyhearted old roué embarrassingly shackled to a lovesick youth. It was foolish to be like this, at his age. As if the woman herself were too daunting for him to think of directly, he fixed on oblique aspects of her, in the same way that when he was an adolescent and encountered in the street a girl he was sweet on he would look anywhere but at her. France, now, not just France the country but France the idea, suddenly loomed large for him, as if he had been running a magnifying glass idly over a map of the world and had come to a wobbly stop on that big ghost-shaped mass at the western edge of Europe. He had only to take a sip of claret and he was there, in a Midi of the mind, under dappled vine leaves, smelling the dust and the garlic, or in some sultry
impasse
beside the Seine, with swaggering pigeons and water sluicing cleanly along the cobbled gutters, half the street in purple shadow and the other half blinded by sunlight.

He sidled into Fox’s opposite Trinity College and bought a packet of Gauloises, and took them home and sat dreamily smoking by the wide-open window above Mount Street as the evening sky turned yellow along its edge, and the early prostitutes came tottering out on the broad pavements below. He found a newsagent that carried day-old copies of
Le Monde
and bought them up and with his few scraps of French picked his way through reports on the
guerre d’Algérie
and next month’s Tour de France. He had not felt like this since the long-ago days when he was courting Delia, and now he was appalled at himself, shame-faced and embarrassed and yet ridiculously happy, all at the same time. He seemed to float through his days in a state of stupefied bliss, all obstacles parting magically before him like weightless water.

They had made no plan to meet again, he and Françoise, but it did not matter, he knew they would meet, that the fates would arrange it. The fates would arrange everything; there was nothing he need do but wait. And all the time, while that young Lothario gamboled in the meadows of his fancy, plucking nosegays and ecstatically calling out his beloved’s name, in another, unenchanted part of his mind, the old dog he really was shuddered in dismay at the thought of the violent and bloody circumstance that had led him to this love.

On one of those romance-tinted evenings—that apricot sky, those drifting copper clouds!—he arrived home to find Jimmy Minor sitting on the steps outside his front door. Minor was absurdly well named, for he was a tiny fellow, with thin red hair that came to a widow’s peak and a pinched little bloodless face blotched all over with big shapeless freckles. He wore faded corduroy trousers and a tweed sports jacket and a tightly knotted narrow green tie that had the look of a wilted vegetable. He was smoking a cigarette with grim distaste, as if it were a task he had been unfairly assigned but that he must not shirk.

Quirke was not surprised; he had been waiting for Minor to come calling. “I hear you’re on the
Clarion
now,” he said, stopping on the steps while the young man got to his feet. “Didn’t think that would be your kind of paper.”

“It’s a living,” Minor answered defensively, and showed for a second a tobacco-stained canine.

Quirke had his key in the lock. “A friend of mine used to say of the
Clarion
that it was all horses and dead priests. I imagine that was in the respectable old days, before the Jewells took over and turned it into a scandal sheet.”

Minor sighed; no doubt this was not the first taunt his new job had elicited. “Some things are easier to attack than others,” he said. “I suppose you read the
Irish Times
—sorry, I suppose you ‘take’ the
Times
.”

Quirke, stepping into the hallway, shook his head. “If I take anything I take the
Indo
.”

“No shortage of dead priests and horses there.”

“Not that I think much of it, mind. I read it for the court cases.”

“You like a bit of genteel smut, then.”

Quirke blandly smiled. “Come on up,” he said. “I need to change out of this suit.”

In the flat the air was heavy and stale—he had forgotten to leave a window open. He opened one now, letting down the sash as far as it would go. The sky had turned a deep rose along its edge with higher bands of orange and creamy white; the little clouds were gone. And there was Venus, dotting the
i
of the Pepper Canister’s spire with a spike of greenish ice. “Cup of tea?” Quirke said over his shoulder. “Or shall we go up to the pub?”

“I thought you needed to change.”

“I will, in a minute.”

Minor was at the bookcase, scanning the titles with his little sharp head thrown back. He had a new cigarette going. “You know why I’m here, of course,” he said in a studiedly distracted tone, still eyeing the books. “I see you like poetry. Lot of Yeats.” He turned his head. “He your man, is he, Yeats?” He assumed a chanting voice in imitation of the poet in full resonant flow:
“The fury and the mire of human veins.”

Quirke gave no reply to that. “How is the
Clarion
managing, without its head?” he asked.

Minor snickered. “Without its head, eh? You’re a great man for the gallows humor. Goes with the job, I suppose.” He took down a book and flicked through it. Quirke watched the tip of Minor’s cigarette, afraid he might spill burning ash on the page. It was a first edition of Yeats’s
The Tower
, a thing he treasured. “The headless
Clarion
sounds on its exquisite note,” Minor said, his eye still on the page. “Like Orpheus.”

Quirke thought he was quoting from the book in his hand but then realized his mistake. “The other way round,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“Orpheus ended up only a head, after the maenads had torn the rest of him to pieces.”

“Ah. I bow to your superior education, Dr. Quirke.”

Now it was Quirke’s turn to sigh. He was suddenly bored. He took no pleasure in trading leaden banter with this sour little man. He suspected he had invited him in only because it might give him the opportunity to talk about Françoise d’Aubigny. “I hear you wrote the report on Richard Jewell’s death,” he said. “No byline, though.” He lit a Gauloise. “You know, for days after Stalin died, none of his gang of toadies could work up the nerve to announce the news to the great Soviet public. As if the old monster might come back and liquidate them.”

Minor put the book back on the shelf. Quirke grudgingly noted with what delicacy he had handled the volume, and how careful he was to fit it snugly into its original place.

“It wasn’t the kind of story that needs a byline,” Minor said mildly. “Your pal Hackett of the Yard wasn’t giving much away. I take it Jewell’s death wasn’t suicide?”

“You do?”

“And it could hardly have been an accident.”

“Hardly.”

Minor came to the window and the two men stood side by side looking out.

“There are a lot of people glad to see Dick Jewell dead,” he said.

“I’m sure there are.”

“I hear even his widow isn’t acting as if she’s exactly grief-stricken.”

“I think that marriage came to an end a long time ago.”

“Is that right?”

“They seem to have led separate lives.”

Minor shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“She implied as much.”

“Oh, yes?”

“When we met.” It was annoying, but Minor seemed hardly to be listening. “We had lunch, at the Hibernian. A few days after—after the body was found.”

Minor was frowning now. “You had lunch with Jewell’s wife?”

“Yes.” Quirke realized he was sweating lightly. It was dangerous, talking to Minor like this—who knew where it might lead? And yet he could not stop. It was as if he were clinging by his fingertips to a merry-go-round that was going out of control, spinning faster and faster. “She phoned me up. She wanted to talk.”

“About what?” Minor stared, incredulous. “About her husband’s
death
?”

Quirke went to the mantelpiece and pretended to be straightening a framed photograph hanging on the wall there. Atget,
Versailles, Vénus, par Legros.
The marble statue’s poised yet faintly suffering look. Like hers. His mind ran on, gabbling to itself. He felt vaguely unwell, as if he had a chill coming on.
La grippe.
The fevers of love. Absurd, absurd. He turned back to the little man at the window. “How would she not? Talk about him, I mean. About it.”

“And what did she say?”

What
did
she say? He could hardly remember, except the one thing, of course. “She mentioned Carlton Sumner.”