Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (4 page)

“One chap dead, it seems,” Grogan said. “Sounds a funny business.”

*   *   *

Sylvia Clancy steered the big car onto the causeway below the village of Rosscarbery. She always liked to drive back from Cork along the coast road. Today, however, she had no eye for the scenery, for she was worried. This was not unusual. Being worried was Sylvia’s accustomed state of mind. How could it be otherwise? She was married to Jack Clancy and Davy Clancy was her son. Today, however, her specific concern was Mona Delahaye’s party, to be held on the following Saturday night. Mona was what could be described as a party person. Three years ago she had thrown—surely the right word—the first Ashgrove Bash, as she called it, and since then it had become an annual event and the talk of the county, if not of half the country.

Most people who gave parties, Sylvia supposed, gave them in the hope that their guests would enjoy themselves and go home happy. Evidently Mona’s intention was the opposite of this. She seemed to wish that everyone should have a good time, only she had a peculiar notion of what having a good time should involve. She did not want people standing about with drinks in their hands, chitchatting: arguments, insults, challenges, fights, even fistfights, these were the kinds of things Mona wished her parties to inspire. And if matters were not going her way—that is, if they were going peaceably and enjoyably—she was fully prepared to step in and set them awry. Mona had a genius for provocation. She stirred things up without seeming to, bestowing a smile here, a soft word there, inquiring, informing, advising. And as she progressed through the room there would spring up in her wake little conflagrations that were her doing but that yet appeared entirely unconnected with her. Then, reaching the far end of the room, she would turn and survey her handiwork with pleasure, her eyes narrowed and her thin mouth upturned at one corner.

Yet in her heart Sylvia felt sympathy for Mona. Mona was a child, really, with all a child’s avidity and incurable mischievousness. Whatever was going on, Mona had to have it, and if she could not have it she would spoil it for others. It was simply her way. Sylvia suspected that Mona, like her, felt secretly that she had strayed into the wrong family. The Delahayes were a formidable clan, as were the Clancys in their different way, and to have married into them was to be devoured, or as good as. Could poor Mona be blamed for asserting herself in the only way she knew how? Mischief-making was her declaration of independence, which was why she and her father-in-law, old Samuel Delahaye, were fond of each other, if fond was a word that could be fitted to either of these willful, reckless, and malicious creatures.

Sylvia was driving the Delahayes’ Mercedes—Jack was off at the races in their own old Humber—feeling nervous and at the same time faintly thrilled, for the big car frightened her, with its brutishly square front and that emblem on the bonnet that looked to her like the sight of a gun. Yet she had to admit it was exciting to be in control, however fearfully, of such a powerful machine. She had been to Cork to see a new osteopath—they were called bonesetters, down here—whom Mrs. Hartigan had recommended. Mrs. Hartigan swore by him and declared him a miracle worker, but Sylvia had consulted him only out of politeness to the housekeeper, a tiresome woman at the best of times. Sylvia had a bad back. No one had ever been able to discover why she should be suffering such awful, chronic pain, and this new man had been no wiser than the others, though he had talked a lot of mumbo jumbo about frozen joints, and fused discs, and plates—he was very hot on plates, whatever they were supposed to be. A foolish, ignorant man, Sylvia judged. However, the evening was so lovely, with the sun flashing its burning arrows through the trees along the roadside and the wheat and barley in the fields beyond swayed and polished by the breeze, that her heart lifted, despite the motorcar’s slouching impatience and the ache in her lower spine—which, if she was not mistaken, the bonesetter had only made worse.

Sylvia was English. This seemed increasingly to be, for herself as well as for others, the most significant fact about her. Yet by now she had spent more than half of her life in Ireland. It did not matter. They would be conscious of her Englishness until her dying day. Not that they expressed resentment or showed prejudice towards her. Indeed, they seemed to admire her pluck, to think her a good sport, for being undaunted enough to make her life among them. The response in general to the fact that she was English was a sort of amused fascination; people would look at her in that half-smiling, wondering way and say, “And you’re English, are you?” as if it were something outlandish, like being a racing driver, or a jungle explorer. She was a permanent curiosity. She could not resent this. Probably they perceived in a dim way the inner life she continued to live, which was mild, reasonable, tolerant, and self-mocking—which was, in a word, English, or what she thought of as being English, Englishness as she remembered it.

Just as Sylvia knew Mona should not have married Victor Delahaye, so she knew that she should not have married Jack Clancy. Oh, she loved Jack, whatever that meant now, after all these years. At first, when they were young, certainly she had adored him. She had never met—no, she had never conceived of the possibility of there being a person such as Jack: charming, dangerous, darkly handsome, and given to a destructive gaiety that she had found immediately irresistible. These things, the charm, the danger, the satanic good looks, that impish, corrosive humor above all, these, she understood now, were the very things that should have warned her off him.

She was taller than he was, taller by a good two or three inches. He had never seemed to mind this, and only made jokes about it. She, however, was acutely aware of the disparity, not for her own sake but for his, and in their first months together had devised a way of standing beside him with her chin lowered and her left leg drawn back a little way and her right knee surreptitiously flexed, which, if it did not reduce her height in any noticeable way, at least announced that she knew she was the one who must try to right the balance, and suffer the humiliation of not being able to do so. It was not that Jack was too short, but that she was too tall.

She slowed the car and turned in at the gate of Ashgrove.

Now her mind, going its own way as always, went back to the awful prospect of Mona’s party. Last year Davy had got into a scuffle with the son of some local grandee and had bitten off part of his ear. She rather thought the other boy had deserved what he had got, for obviously he was a brat, but still, getting into fights and biting people was not the kind of behavior she would have expected of a son of hers. But then, many things in her life had turned out to be not as she had expected. Davy, she thought, was rather like this brute of a car, barely controllable, single-minded, and always eager to run ahead of himself. And now, all at once, a thought that had been lurking beneath her anxiety about the party came flashing to the surface of her mind and would not be pushed down again. It was the thought of that Somers girl. Tanya Somers had trouble written all over her. It always puzzled Sylvia that men could not see how calculating a girl like Tanya was, how all her effects were—not thought out, perhaps, but instinctive, measured, and sure. What if Davy tried to take her away from Jonas Delahaye? Yes, and what if—what if someone else were to attempt—? What if—?

She had stopped on the gravel in front of the house and was sitting behind the wheel, her appalled gaze fixed unseeing on the windscreen as she contemplated the possibilities for mayhem that Tanya Somers represented, when she heard what seemed to be the sound of someone crying in the house. She opened the door and stepped out onto the gravel and stood to listen. Yes, definitely, someone was crying, a woman: the sound was coming from one of the open upstairs windows, jagged sobs, and in between each sob a sort of labored mooing. Maggie. Maggie was weeping—those heaving gasps were the sounds she made when she was having an asthma attack. And why was the front door wide open like that? And what or whose was that black car, parked beside the laburnums?

Something had happened—something terrible, surely. Sylvia’s first thought was:
Davy
. Her second was:
Jack
.

*   *   *

Superintendent Wallace had thought it best that he should come out himself to Ashgrove to break the news. Not that he had much time for these folk who descended on the house for a few weeks every summer and left the place standing empty and idle for the rest of the year. It was, he considered, a queer comedown for a grand mansion such as this, the seat of gentlemen and their ladies in centuries past, that it should be reduced to the status of a holiday villa for a gang of moneyed Dublin riffraff. The Superintendent was a mild man but, in secret, a great and unrelenting snob. Although his own origins were humble, and despite the fact that in most matters he tried to be accommodating and unjudgmental, he was implacably disapproving of the new Ireland, so called, which had grown up in the decade since the war, and of which the Clancys, and even the Delahayes, who might have been expected to live up to their venerable name, were, in his opinion, typical representatives.

He was not surprised by what had happened this afternoon—puzzled, certainly, but not surprised. The crust of civilization was very thin, and very brittle. In his youth he had lived through the War of Independence and the Civil War that had followed, and he had seen things done—young men slaughtered, great houses burned, the land laid waste—that flew in the face of what the priests taught and the former generations had believed in. Now there was peace in the country, yet on a sunny afternoon in the height of summer two men had gone out in a boat and one of them had been brought back dead, shot through the chest and wallowing in his own blood. It was a bad business.

Having delivered his dreadful message, he was uncertain how to proceed. Everyone had rushed off to other parts of the house and left him standing in the front hall with his cap in his hand. From upstairs he could hear Miss Delahaye crying—she was the best of the lot of them, a decent woman with a good heart—but somewhere nearby a tinny voice was delivering what seemed to be a lecture of some kind. Old man Delahaye, after a minute of slack-mouthed staring, had spun his wheelchair on the spot and bowled himself down the hall at a fast lick and disappeared into the back of the house. The dead man’s wife—his widow, now—had also gone off somewhere and was not to be seen. It was as if, the Superintendent thought, he had brought the plague with him, which of course in a way he had.

There was a quick step behind him and he turned to see a tall woman hurriedly bearing down on him. She was a moving silhouette against the sunlight in the doorway and at first he could not see who it was. Then she spoke and he recognized the Clancy woman. “Tell me,” she said urgently, almost whispering, her fingers clutching at the sleeve of his uniform.
“Tell me.”

He told her. While he was speaking she watched him intently, nodding, her eyes fixed on his lips, as if to make out there the shape of the words she did not trust her ears to absorb. “A trawler out of Castletownbere spotted the boat adrift and brought it in,” he said. “The poor man was long dead by then.”

“And my son,” she said, “where is he? How is he?”

“They have him in the Bon Secours in Cork,” the Superintendent said. “He has a touch of sunstroke, they think. He’ll be all right.”

“My God—Cork,” she said, shifting her stare to one side and fixing it on nothing. “I’ve just come from there.” She seemed so incredulous of this small coincidence that for a moment he thought she was going to laugh. “I must go back,” she muttered.

She made to turn away, patting the pockets of her loose cardigan in search of the car keys, but he caught her elbow and said it was all right, that her son would be brought down from Cork in an ambulance, that he was probably on his way already. She nodded. She was frowning now. “And Mr. Delahaye is dead, you say,” she said, still unable to grasp it.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Shot.”

She stared at him again in that almost hungry fashion. “But who shot him?”

“Well now,” he said, “that’s the question, ma’am.”

He liked her voice, the softness of it, the gentility. He had never had anything against the English, himself, though the Black and Tans had murdered an uncle of his—he was only an uncle by marriage. She turned and walked slowly to the straight-backed chair beside the hall table and sat down, folding her hands in her lap. He had been noticing something odd and now he realized what it was: she had no handbag. He thought women never went anywhere without a handbag. Her hair was blond, or maybe more gray than blond, and gathered at the back in a bun that had already released a few stray straggles. That was as far as the disarray would go, he thought; this lady was not the kind to tear her hair out

Upstairs Miss Delahaye was still crying, but with less abandon now, her sobs become hiccups.

The Superintendent heard a whirring sound behind him, and turned to see old Delahaye reappear from the back of the house, wheeling himself along the black-and-white tiled hall with surprising speed and smoothness. He looked neither at the Superintendent nor at the woman sitting by the table, but wrenched the wheelchair to the left and put out a foot in front him and kicked open the door to the lounge and glided through. The door, sighing, swung slowly shut behind him. After a moment Sylvia Clancy stood up and followed him, and the Superintendent, not knowing what else to do, followed her.

Mona Delahaye was sitting on the beige sofa, facing the fireplace. She wore a frock of dark green silk. She was leaning forward, her clasped hands resting on her crossed knees. She held her head inclined a little to the side, as if she were listening for some faint, far-off sound. Samuel Delahaye in his wheelchair was at the open French windows, his chin sunk on his chest, glaring out at the garden. The crazy thought came to the Superintendent that perhaps these two people had not understood what he had told them, and that they were waiting for clarification, enlightenment; waiting for someone to explain it all to them again, more comprehensibly.