Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (3 page)

Delahaye opened dazed eyes and frowned at the sky. He gave a rattly groan and struggled forward as if trying to get to his feet, spoke a string of incomprehensible words in what seemed a tone of irritation, then slumped back into silence and died.

2

Marguerite Delahaye did not like her brother’s wife. She had tried to like her, had tried and tried over, but in vain. This troubled her, for Marguerite—or Maggie, as everyone called her, though she hated it—was a kindly soul and wished to think well of people. However, it was difficult to think well of Mona. Not that Mona seemed to care. There were not many things, it seemed, that Mona did care about. She was what Maggie’s late mother would have called an awkward customer. Still, Maggie kept on trying. Mona was her sister-in-law, after all, and it was her duty to keep up the effort, even if in her heart she knew she would not succeed. In her heart too she suspected that Victor himself found it hard to like his wife. He loved her, that was certain—loved her too much, as Maggie knew to her chagrin—but she was sure it was perfectly possible to be in love with someone without liking the person. Disliking Mona meant that Maggie had to work all the harder at being nice to her. Mona took Maggie’s tribute as she took all signs of kindness and regard: with indifference, or at best a sort of vacant amusement.

Mrs. Hartigan had put a crystal bowl of sweet peas on the table in the hall, and the lovely scent was everywhere in the house, even in the bedrooms and the big stone kitchen off at the end of the corridor behind the green baize door. Maggie, coming down from her room, stopped on the return to admire the flowers, arrayed there in soft sunlight falling in through the transom over the front door. The leads of the transom broke up the light and reassembled it into a bright, complicated shape, like a birdcage.

Maggie loved Ashgrove. She had been coming here with her family every year for as long as she could remember. The house had been old when she was young, yet she had the secret notion that it was somehow accompanying her through the years, keeping pace with her, its most favored visitor. For the rest of the year, when she was not here, she missed the old place, as she would miss a beloved dog, or a friend, even. A pity there had to be so many people in the house. She always made sure to arrive a day or two before the others, and to leave a day or two after they were gone. That was bliss, being on her own. She loved especially to lie awake early in the morning, the newly risen sun striping the counterpane and the house all around her stretching and creaking under the light of the new day. Solitude was her balm. She had never married. There had been offers, but she had wished to live her life in her own way, according to her own wishes and rules, without the interference of a husband.

She had spent most of the afternoon reading in her room, or trying to read, sitting by the window in the faded green armchair, her favorite. The window looked down on a secluded corner of the garden, and now and then she would close her book—Agatha Christie; rather dull—marking her place with her thumb, and watch the blackbirds and the rabbits playing at the edge of the lawn. The rabbits, two or three of them, would venture out from the long grass under the trees, the birds would fly down quickly, and the rabbits would scamper back for shelter; this little game was repeated over and over. She supposed it was not really play, but she liked to think it was.

She had delayed for as long as she could before leaving the sanctuary of her room. Her father was in one of his moods and had deliberately said something to upset Mrs. Hartigan, and of course there were ructions that would go on at least till teatime. Her father had suffered a stroke three years previously and was confined to a wheelchair and therefore was bored and prone to rancorous ill temper, although even in his heyday he had not been exactly of a tranquil disposition. It pleased him to annoy people, to set them against each other. This afternoon it was Mrs. Hartigan’s turn to suffer the edge of his tongue, and having started that particular fire he had then settled down contentedly to warm his hands before it. Mrs. Hartigan kept house for the weeks when the two families were here, and acted as caretaker for the remainder of the year. She was touchy, was Mrs. Hartigan—Maggie suspected she considered herself too good for such menial work—and took offense easily. And of course it always fell to Maggie to smooth her ruffled feathers. Standing in the hall now, still admiring the flowers, Maggie smiled to herself; ruffled feathers, yes—Mrs. Hartigan did look a bit like a plump excitable old hen.

Samuel Delahaye was in the lounge, which was what the main living room had always been called, listening to a program on the wireless. He had parked his wheelchair next to the sideboard on which the set stood, its green eye pulsing, and had his ear pressed up close to the mesh of the speaker; it was one of his amusements to pretend to be hard of hearing. He was a big man, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with a swept-back mane of silver hair; Maggie believed he modeled himself on William Butler Yeats—certainly he was as vain as the poet surely must have been. When she had entered the room and shut the door, and before she had spoken even a word, he flapped a hand irritably in her direction, as if she were making a commotion of some sort and interfering with his enjoyment of the program, which seemed to be about bees. He did not look at her.

She sighed. Her sister-in-law was seated on the long beige sofa in front of the fireplace, flipping through a glossy magazine. On a low table before her stood a tall glass of gin and tonic, with ice cubes and sliced lemon; the glass was misted down the sides. The French windows at the far end of the room were wide open onto the lawn, at the far side of which was the stand of ash trees that gave the house its name.

Maggie came forward, and Mona looked up from her magazine. “We thought you must have left and gone home,” Mona said, in her languid way. “Where have you been hiding?”

Mona’s abundant hair was the color of polished bronze, and her skin was porcelain pale. Her eyes were violet, and tapered at the outer corners. The only flaw in her beauty, Maggie considered, was her mouth, a thin scarlet slash that gave her something of the look of a mean and sulky child.

“Oh, you know, I was just pottering,” Maggie said.

“For Christ’s sake!” her father cried from across the room. “Can’t you stop that racket and let me listen?”

Neither woman paid him any heed.

“Has Mrs. H. calmed down yet?” Maggie asked quietly of her sister-in-law. Mona shrugged; she was turning the pages of her magazine again, pausing only to examine the ads with a narrowed eye.

“How should I know?” she said. “The old bitch never speaks to me.”

Maggie sat down at the other end of the sofa. “I do wish he wouldn’t provoke her,” she said. “If she were to leave, we’d be lost.”

Mona gave a soft snort of laughter. “No fear of that,” she said. “She has it too easy here.”

“I think she works quite hard,” Maggie said mildly, picking a speck of fluff from the hem of her skirt. “It’s a very big house, and there’s just herself and the girl she gets in at the weekends.”

Mona did not reply to this, and leaned forward and took up her glass. Maggie watched her gazing before her vague-eyed as she drank. She really was an exquisite creature—to look at, at least. She was not yet thirty, which made her—what was it?—a good sixteen years younger than her husband. It always puzzled Maggie that Mona should have consented to marry Victor. Victor was handsome, of course, though she supposed his looks were faded a bit by now, and he was well-off, and generous, but he was not the kind of man Maggie would have thought Mona would
go for
, as she would say herself. The kind of man Mona would go for, Maggie would have thought, would be as careless and cruel as she was herself. Thinking this, Maggie immediately felt guilty, and even blushed a little, though it had only been a thought, with no one to hear.

The dance of the drones,
the voice on the wireless was saying,
is thought to be a system by which returning bees direct their fellow workers to the richest sources of pollen in the vicinity of the hive. Bees will travel for distances of as much as—

And then the telephone outside on the hall table began to ring.

*   *   *

A week of rain had left the ground in a soggy state, but all the same Blue Lightning, the sprightly four-year-old from the late Dick Jewell’s stables, that was supposed to like the going hard, romped home at seven to two, surprising everyone. Everyone except Jack Clancy. He collected his winnings from the bookie’s in Slievemore and went round the corner to Walsh’s and ordered drinks for everyone in the bar. The locals, he knew, would despise him for his largesse—
Who does your man think he is, playing the big fellow?
—but all the same they would drink his drink. Their contempt did not bother him. On the contrary, he was gratified to see the resentful looks they gave him, as they muttered behind their pints.

The publican’s wife, a big redhead with green eyes—a splash of tinker blood there, surely—helped out behind the bar on race days. Jack sat in the alcove just inside the door and watched her as she worked. From here he had a view of the woman herself and also of her reflection in the fly-blown looking glass behind the bar. She was wearing a sleeveless summer frock and when she lifted her freckled arm to pull a pint he glimpsed a smear of sweat-damp coppery moss in the shadowed hollow of her armpit. Her name was Sadie.

Watching the woman made him think of Jonas Delahaye’s girlfriend. Not that Sadie resembled Tanya Somers even in the least degree. Just picturing Tanya in her black swimsuit gave him an ache at the root of his tongue. Not a hope there, of course. On the other hand, you could never tell. He was more than twice her age, but some young ones, he knew, had a taste for older men—look at Mona Delahaye. That would be some row, if he were to have a go at Jonas’s stuck-up girlfriend and got found out. Jonas, that spoiled whelp. He knew Jonas and Tanya were sleeping together. They were in separate bedrooms, but that was only for the look of it, and not to scandalize old Ma Hartigan; every night after lights-out Jonas was in there like a shot, Jack knew it for sure. Victor Delahaye prided himself on being broad-minded and modern, now that his father was ailing and he was no longer under the old man’s thumb. Victor’s sister was a different matter, though; when Tanya came sashaying through the house, Maggie’s mouth got small and wrinkled, as if she were sucking on a sour sweet.

And what about Davy? Jack was uneasily aware that his son was of an age to be his rival when it came to the ladies. Davy was a handsome young fellow—Jack had seen the looks women gave him, even Mona Delahaye. What if Davy were to make a play for Tanya Somers? That was a possibility Jack did not care to contemplate. A row of that scale between the two families would be disastrous, especially now, when all his plans for the future of the firm were so delicately balanced.

*   *   *

He thought, not for the first time, how strange it must be being a twin. The Delahaye brothers, tall, blond, blue-eyed, were like two peas in a pod. Imagine having someone around all the time who was your spitting image. Jonas and James did not seem to mind; in fact, they were always together. What, he wondered, did James make of Tanya Somers? Would he resent her, would he be envious—resentful of her for coming between him and his brother, and envious of his brother for having her? And Tanya: Was she able to tell the difference between the twins? What if Jonas and James were to swap places some night and James were to slip into bed with her—would she know it was him? Or what if the two of them got in with her, one on either side—would she be able to tell them apart? Those two big blond lads in bed with Tanya in the middle, that was a thought he had found himself entertaining on more than one occasion over these past weeks, with a mixture of excitement, envy, and sweet regret. He was forty-seven, himself, and hated it.

He signaled to Sadie for another Jamaica red rum. He handed over a ten-shilling note and when she brought the change she gave him a queer sort of smile, her lips pressed together and one eyebrow arched, and he did not know what to make of it. Either she was telling him she knew his type and he was not to bother trying, or the opposite, that she liked the look of him and would listen to any offer he might care to make. If it was the latter, it would be impossible, down here. He had made that mistake once before, years ago—a cattle dealer’s wife over at Crosshaven, a redhead too, as it happened—and had got such a beating from the cattle dealer’s three brutes of sons that there were bones in his shoulders and his back that still ached when the weather turned wet. But surely Sadie must come up to the city sometimes, to shop, or whatever. He would slip her his phone number before he left.

A fellow he knew from the sailing club came in and Jack stood him a drink and they talked boats for a while. Jack loved being in a pub at this time of a summer evening, loved the sound of slow talk and the rich reek of whiskey, loved the look of sunshine the color of brass coming in at the open doorway and lighting up the lazy swirls of cigarette smoke in the dusky air. Being here was not being at Ashgrove, a pleasure in itself. And then there was Sadie, and the possibilities she might represent.

The sailing club fellow’s name was Grogan, a solicitor from Cork and, as Jack now belatedly remembered, a terrible bore. They had sailed together in the Slievemore regatta; Grogan in his
Mermaid
had taken the Commodore’s Cup this year. He was saying something now about a boat with two men in it having been found adrift off Slievemore Bay—there had been a report about it on the wireless, on the six o’clock news. Jack was watching Sadie, admiring the way her frock tightened over her bust when she drew the handle of the beer tap back and down in a slow, effortful arc. Yes, he would definitely suggest a drink next time she was in Dublin. What had he to lose?