The Silver Swan (22 page)

Cain't yu taike?
—while laughing a little at herself, an unlikely southern belle. Phoebe shook her head. Rose sighed, lifting her narrow, penciled eyebrows. "Well, then, have some coffee at least, and we'll call it quits." She considered the young woman before her for a moment, her head tilted at a quizzical angle. "You know, my dear," she said, in the friendliest fashion, "I don't think you like me much, do you."

 

Phoebe considered. "I admire you," she said.

 

At that Rose threw back her head and laughed, a sharp, brittle, silvery sound.

 

"Oh, my," she said. "You certainly are your father's daughter."

 

 

SHE DID NOT GO STRAIGHT BACK TO THE SHOP, BUT WALKED ACROSS the Green and up Harcourt Street, and let herself into the unaccustomed early-afternoon silence of the house. Today she did not hurry on the stairs, but plodded slowly, gripping the banister rail as she went. Somehow she knew, even before she opened the door of the flat, that Leslie was gone. The blanket and the cushion were still on the sofa, and there were empty sweet papers on the carpet, and his gin glass and a crumpled copy of last evening's
Mail
were on the coffee table. She stood for a long time, her mind slowly emptying, like a drain. She saw again the baby hares panting in their nest of grass. No fox or weasel would have got Leslie; there was that, at least, though who knew what other dangers might be lying in wait for him. She heard herself sob, almost perfunctorily, heard it as from a distance, as if it were not she who had made the sound but someone in an adjacent room. She put her purse on the table beside the glass—there
was still a bluish drop of gin in the bottom of it—then went and lay down on the sofa, fitting her head into the head-shape he had left in the cushion, and pulled the blanket up to her cheek, and closed her eyes, and gave herself up, almost luxuriously, to her tears.

4

 

 

THEY HAD KNOWN, WITHOUT THE SLIGHTEST DOUBT, THAT THEY would meet again. Quirke waited two days after that first visit to her house before telephoning her. When he took up the receiver he was aware of a tremulous sensation in the region of his diaphragm, which gave him pause. What was it he was embarking on here, and where would the voyage end? He was by nature cautious in matters of the heart. It was not that, after Delia, this organ had ever again suffered a serious breakage, but he preferred to avoid the risk, now that he had come through safe into the middle passage of his life. The very fact of his hesitancy made him more hesitant still. It was apparent, as that warning inner wobble told him, that Kate White offered more than the prospect of what he was in the habit of asking of a woman. Slowly he put down the receiver and took a breath. It was well into July already, a Sunday afternoon, and the wedge of sky he could see between the rooftops if he leaned forward and squinted up through the window of his living room was a clear, warm, cobalt blue that seemed the very shade of all of summer's possibilities. He conjured up Kate's rueful, damp-eyed smile. What could he lose that would outweigh all he might gain?

 

He picked up the receiver and dialed.

 

Oh, he could lose much, much.

 

 

THEY TOOK A TRIP TO HOWTH TOGETHER. QUIRKE HAD SUGGESTED IT; there was a pub in the village where he used to drink that he said he thought she would like. Neither had raised the larger question of what might be done with the remainder of the evening. He arrived by taxi at Castle Avenue and marveled again at the stolid, foursquare ugliness of the house, with its big, glaring windows and slatted blinds and its bricks the color of dried blood. He found it hard to picture Leslie White here, returning home from a hard day managing the affairs of the Silver Swan and settling down after dinner with his slippers and the evening paper. Yet it was Leslie, according to his wife, who had fixed on the house in the first place, when somebody he knew in the hairdressing business had put him on to it. "I think he thought it would be the kind of thing I'd like," Kate had said, pulling a clown's grimace. "He has terrible taste and imagines I share it. Poor old Les."

 

She had come to the door smelling of lemon soap. She had been in the bath. When she saw it was him she put her head on one side and contemplated him for a moment in silence, smiling. "It's kismet," she said. "Obviously." Her hair today was tied back behind her ears with a black band, and she wore no makeup except for lipstick. Her dress was pale yellow with a design of large blue splashes in the shape of giant cornflowers.

 

"How is the cut?" he asked.

 

"What? Oh." She held up her thumb to show him the neat circlet of sticking plaster. "Healing nicely. You should go into medicine."

 

She invited him to step inside for a moment while she went to fetch her handbag. He waited in the hall, and a feeling of unease broke out on his skin like sweat; other people's houses, their other arrangements for living, always unsettled him. When Kate came back he saw that she, too, was ill at ease—was she having second
thoughts about Howth, and him?—and she avoided looking at him directly. The taxi man, hunched toadlike behind the wheel of his car, eyed her with disdainful lasciviousness as she came out onto the pavement, her light dress swishing about her legs.

 

"Oh, not a taxi," she said. "Let's take the bus. I'm in a democratic mood today."

 

Quirke did not protest. He paid the driver, who shot away from the curb in a resentful snarl of exhaust smoke. They set off walking together down the hill road to the seafront. For Quirke there was something at once dreamy and quintessential about summer afternoons; they seemed the very definition of weather, and light, and time. The sunlit road before them was empty. Heavy frondages of lilac leaned down from garden walls, the polished leaves mingling their faint, sharp scent with the salt smell of the sea. They did not speak, and the longer the silence between them lasted the more difficult it was to break. Quirke felt slightly and pleasantly ridiculous. This could only be called a date, and he could not remember when he had last been on one. He was too old, or at least too unyoung, for such an outing. He found this fact inexplicably cheering.

 

The lower deck of the bus was full of raucous families, bristling with fishing rods and sand shovels, off to spend the long summer evening by the sea. They climbed the narrow, winding stairway to the upper deck, Kate going first and Quirke the gentleman trying not to look at her behind. He found a seat for them at the front. The sky was clear, a flat blue plane clamped squarely along its lower edge to the horizon; there was a strong breeze and the salt-laden light out over the bay had a bruised cast to it. Before them, Howth Head was a low, olive-green hump dotted with bursts of yellow gorse.

 

Kate was the first to speak. "You look very smart," she said.

 

Startled, he glanced down at himself dubiously, taking in his pale-blue shirt, his pale-gray suit, his suede shoes—he was never sure about suede shoes. He recalled Leslie White sloping around the corner of Duke Lane, with that silver helmet of hair, those boneless wrists; Leslie would be a born suede-shoe wearer. Kate laughed
briefly. "I'm sorry," she said, "I see I've embarrassed you. I'm always doing that, making people feel self-conscious and awkward and hating me for it."

 

In Howth the bus stopped at the railway station and they walked along the front and turned up Church Street. The Cock Tavern was dim inside and slightly dank. A single shimmering blade of sunlight slanting down from the unpainted strip at the top of the window was embedded at an angle in the center of the floor. Three dusty cricket caps were pinned to a board on the wall, and there was a chart of the coast hereabouts with all the lighthouses marked. They sat at a low table near the open doorway, from where they could see the sunlight in the street. Quirke drank a glass of tomato juice and Kate a Campari and soda. Through the stuff of her dress he could make out the broad bands of her stocking tops and the imprint of a garter clasp. He approved of the way she dressed, the freedoms she allowed herself; the women he was used to wore too many clothes, belts and straps, corsets, rubber roll-ons, and came heaving into his arms with all the voluminous rufflings and strainings of an old-style sailing ship in full rig.

 

"They lived not far from us, you know," Kate said suddenly, the conclusion, it seemed, to a lengthy and somber train of thought. He looked at her. She was running a fingertip pensively around the rim of her glass. "The bitch and her husband—Laura Swan, I mean. I suppose he must live there still. One of those streets of little red-brick terraces over by St. Anne's. The height of respectability, as she would have said herself, I'm sure. I can just see it, plaster ducks flying up the wall and a fluffy cover on the lavatory lid. To think of my Leslie there, snuggling down with her of an afternoon under her pink satin eiderdown—oh, yes, she let him come to her, apparently, while hubby was away. God, it's so humiliating." Now she looked at him. "How could he?"

 

When they had finished their drinks they crossed the road and went down the narrow concrete steps between the houses to Abbey Street and the harbor. On the west pier sailors in clogs and smeared aprons were packing salted herring into iron-hooped wooden kegs.
Farther on, a squad of trawlermen was mending an immense fishing net strung between poles, vaguely suggestive of harpists in their deft, long-armed reachings and gatherings. There were other couples like themselves, out strolling in the clear, iodine-scented air of evening. A grinning dog raced along the edge of the pier, barking wildly at the gulls bobbing among the boats on the harbor's oilily swaying, iridescent waters. Quirke lit a cigarette, stopping to turn aside and cupping his hands round the lighter and its flame. They walked on. Kate took his arm and pressed herself against him, and he felt the firm warmth of her hip and the slope of a breast in its crisp silken cup.

 

"Tell me something," she said.

 

"What?"

 

"Anything."

 

He thought for a moment.

 

"I saw your husband," he said.

 

She stiffened, still leaning against him, and suddenly she seemed all bone and angles. "Where?"

 

He shrugged. "In the street."

 

"Do you know him? I mean, had you met him?"

 

"No."

 

"Then how did you know it was him?"

 

He hesitated, and then said: "He was with my daughter. Or he had been."

 

 

HE DID NOT KNOW WHY HE HAD TOLD HER. HE WAS NOT SURE THAT HE had even meant to. He thought it might be because, for a brief moment, there on the quayside, with the couples strolling, the dog barking, and this bright, full, warm woman leaning on his arm, there had seemed the possibility of happiness. For there was another version of him, a personality within a personality, malcontent, vindictive, ever ready to provoke, to which he gave the name "Carricklea." Often he found himself standing back, seemingly helpless to intervene, as this
other he inside him set about fomenting some new enormity. Carricklea could not be doing with mere happiness or the hint of it. Carricklea had to poke a stick into the eye of this fine, innocent, blue-and-gold summer evening that Quirke was spending by the sea in the company of a handsome and probably available woman. Carricklea did not go on
dates
, or not willingly, and now, when it had been forced to, it was making sure to have its revenge.

 

The journey back from Howth was fraught and wordless. That was how it always was when Carricklea had done its worst, a pall of rancorous silence over everything and all concerned hot and tight-lipped and grim. Quirke had hailed a taxi outside the station and this time Kate had not protested. In the back seat they sat side by side but apart, Leslie White and the many things that he entailed squatting between them, invisible yet all too palpable. Kate was deep in thought; he could almost hear the ratchets of her mind meeting and meshing. Had he spoken to her of Phoebe before now? Had he even mentioned her? He thought not. Why then was she not plying him with questions? Through the window beside him he watched the dusty, sun-resistant façades of Raheny and Killester sliding past and sighed. The questions, he was sure, would come. The questions were what her mind was working on, even now.

 

At the door of the house on Castle Avenue they both hesitated, and then Kate, not looking at him, asked if he would like to come in, and presently he found himself sitting at his unease among the cuboid furnishings of—what had she called it?—
the den
, smoking a cigarette and sipping at a cup of coffee that had, for him, no taste. He watched Kate doing the things that women all seemed to do at moments such as this, vigorously plumping up a cushion, picking up a hairpin from the carpet, standing before the window and frowning at the garden as if something were seriously amiss out there that only she could see. At last, chafing under the weight of the room's silence, he put down his coffee cup on the tiny glass table beside him and said: "Look, I'm sorry."

 

He had agreed with himself that if she pretended not to know what
he was apologizing for he would get up at once and leave. But all she said was "Yes," vaguely, letting her voice trail off. Then, suddenly brisk, she sat down opposite him on the white sofa, her shoulders hunched and her hands clasped together on her knees, and gazed at him for a long moment, holding her head to one side in that way she had, as if he were an example, a specimen of some special, rare, or hitherto unknown kind that she had been directed to evaluate.

 

"Why did you come here, that day?" she asked calmly, in a spirit of pure inquiry, it might be, with not a hint of challenge or resentment detectable in her tone. "What were you after, really?"

 

He did not hesitate. "I don't know," he said. It was the truth. "I told you, I'm curious."

 

"Yes, so you said. 'I suffer from an incurable curiosity,' those were your very words."

 

"And you didn't believe me."

 

"Why would I not believe you? Besides, I was three-quarters drunk. Otherwise I'm sure I wouldn't have let you in the house."