Authors: Benjamin Black
She considered, tilting her head, birdlike, to one side. “Well, he does talk to me about the work itself. This latest business, for instance—that man Jewell, who was shot.” She was silent for a moment, looking into her cup. “He tells me you know his daughter—no, his sister, is it?”
“Yes, Denise—Dannie, she’s called. I’ve known her since college.”
“Do you know her well?”
He hesitated. That question again, the same one Quirke had asked him. “We play tennis together now and then,” he said.
“Hmm.” She studied him with a closer intent. “I’m sure,” she said, “you’d be a good friend to have.” She uncurled herself from the bed and went to the little stove in the corner and poured more coffee for herself. She turned to him and lifted the percolator inquiringly, but he shook his head. She went back and crawled onto the bed and composed herself as before.
He wondered if he might risk a cigarette, and as if she had read his thoughts she said, “You can smoke if you like. There’s an ashtray on the mantelpiece.” She watched him fetch out his cigarettes and light one, and then stand up to take the ashtray and set it on the floor beside his chair. “What’s it like, being a Jew?” she asked.
Again he stared, expelling a surprised quick stream of smoke. It was a question he had never been asked before, a question he had never expected to be asked. He gave a brief helpless laugh. “I don’t think I do think about it. I mean, you don’t think about what you are, do you?”
“But
I
don’t think I am anything, you see. I’m just like everybody else, here. But you—you have an identity, a race.”
“It’s not really a race.”
She waved an impatient hand. “I know, I know,” she said, “I know all about that, the Semitic peoples, and so on. But the fact is, you are a Jew, a member of a tiny, a
tiny
minority. That must feel like something—I mean, you must be aware of it, part of the time, at least.”
He saw what it was. Despite what she claimed, she did not think she was like everybody else, not at all; she thought she was like him, or what she took him to be, an outsider, an outcast even, a paleface among the Comanches.
“My people weren’t religious,” he said, “and if you’re not at least a little bit religious then you’re not really a Jew.”
“But in the war, you must have been—you must have felt…?”
He set his cup, which still had coffee in it, on the floor beside the ashtray. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said. “The war was ending, and the news of the concentration camps was starting to come out. It was Easter time, when the Catholic Church collects a yearly offering from parishioners, you know? One dark night there was a knock at our front door and my mother sent me to answer it. There, on the threshold, was the biggest, reddest-faced priest I had ever seen, a real clodhopper, his neck bulging over his collar and his little pig eyes popping. He looked down at me along the length of his soutane, and in the thickest Cork accent you can imagine said, ‘
I’m here for the Jews!
’” She put her head to the side again, frowning uncertainly. “The
dues,
he meant,” Sinclair said, “the Easter dues, only a Cork
d
always comes out as a
j
.”
“What did you do,” she asked, laughing now. “What did you say?”
“I shut the door in his face and ran into the kitchen and told my mother it was a traveling salesman selling Bibles.”
“Were you frightened?”
“I suppose so. They were always frightening in those days, priests and so on—anyone official from
their
world.”
She pounced. “You see?” she said, triumphant. “
Their
world. You did feel different.”
“Every child feels different, Jew or otherwise.”
“Only children?”
“What do you mean?”
“
I
feel different, always will. I suppose you’ll think that’s vanity, but it’s not. Can I have a cigarette?”
He rose quickly from the chair, reaching into his pocket for the packet of Gold Flake. “I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly, his dark brow turning darker. “I didn’t think you smoked.”
“I don’t. I used to, but I’ve given up.”
She took a cigarette, and he snapped open his lighter and she leaned forward to the flame and touched a fingertip briefly to the back of his hand for balance. Behind the smoke he caught a faint breath of her perfume. She looked up at him, her eyelashes moving.
He was suddenly aware of the night all around them, vast and still. “I should go soon,” he said.
She leaned back, and folded one arm and cupped her palm under the elbow of the other. She picked a fleck of tobacco from her lower lip. He backed away, turned, walked to the armchair by the fireplace, and sat. “If I didn’t know better,” she said, in almost a conversational tone, “I’d say you were a little frightened of me.”
He gazed at her owlishly, then suddenly laughed. “Well, of course I am,” he said. “What man isn’t frightened when a girl gets him into her room?”
“Isn’t it supposed to be the other way about?”
“Of course,” he said, “but it never is, really, as you know. We’re the weaker sex, after all.”
“Yes,” she said, pleased, “you are. Aren’t you.”
And so they sat for a long moment fairly beaming at each other, neither of them knowing what exactly had happened between them just now, but certain that something had.
5
What the fates arranged, or what the fates in the form of Françoise d’Aubigny herself arranged, was, of all things, a party. She did not call it that: on the little gilt-edged invitation card it said
Memorial Drinks,
which to Quirke’s ear had an almost comical ring. The event was to be at five in the afternoon at Jewell’s—now Françoise d’Aubigny’s—town house at the top of St. Stephen’s Green. It was a very grand house, with a big graveled Japanese garden at the back, and here the guests were gathered. No one had known quite what to wear to such a bizarre occasion. The men were properly sober-suited, but the women had been forced to improvise, and there was a great deal of black silk on show, and many black feathers in night-blue toques, and one or two of the more mature ladies wore elbow-length black cotton gloves. Waiters in frock coats and white ties moved among the crowd bearing aloft silver trays of champagne in crystal flutes; a trestle table covered with a blindingly white tablecloth offered canapés and bowls of olives and pickled onions and, at its center, a mighty salmon, succulently, indecently pink, arranged on a nickel salver and dotted all over with dabs of mayonnaise and a glistening beady stuff that only a handful among the company were able to identify as best Beluga caviar.
“C’est très jolie, n’est-ce pas,”
Françoise d’Aubigny said behind him, and Quirke turned quickly, almost spilling his champagne.
“Yes,” he said, “very jolly—very elegant, I mean.”
She had on a cocktail dress of metallic-blue satin and wore no adornment of any kind, save a tiny diamond-encrusted watch on her left wrist. She touched the rim of her glass to his, making the faintest chime. “Thank you for coming,” she said quietly. Quirke made a polite response that came out as a sort of gurgle. He had spent so many days remembering her, imagining her, and now the sudden reality of her presence was overwhelming.
She turned her head to scan the murmurous crowd. “Do you think I have shocked them, again?” she asked.
“Well, they haven’t stayed away,” Quirke said. “The Irish love a wake, you know.”
“A wake? Yes, of course, I suppose that is what they think this is.”
“And isn’t it?”
She was still looking about, with a faint considering smile. “Perhaps I should have offered whiskey, not champagne,” she said. “That is what people drink at an Irish wake, yes?”
“And stout, you forgot the stout, and bottles of black porter, and crubeens in a bucket.”
“Crubeens?”
“Pigs’ trotters—
pieds de porc.
”
She laughed softly, ducking her head. “I’m afraid I am a very poor hostess. They will say terrible things about me, afterwards.”
“Even crubeens wouldn’t stop them saying terrible things. This is Dublin.”
“You are very”—she searched for the word—“
cynique,
Dr. Quirke.” She was smiling.
“Cynical? I hope not.
Realistic,
I’d rather say.”
“No, I know the word for you: disenchanted. A beautiful word, but sad.”
He conceded, and inclined his head in a little bow—he was quite getting the hang of the Gallic bow—and stopped a passing waiter and exchanged his empty glass for a full one. Two must be the limit, he told himself; he was already feeling sufficiently
dérangé
in the presence of this intoxicating woman.
“Do eat something, Dr. Quirke,” she said. “I’m sure you will not miss the feet of the pig. Now I must—what do you say?—circulate.” She began to turn away, and paused, and laid two fingers flat on his wrist. “Don’t leave before we speak again, yes?”
She walked off in that rapidly stepping way that she did, her head bowed and the champagne glass clutched to her breast in both hands. Beside him a ginkgo tree, no taller than he was, hardly more than a slender shoot, trembled and trembled in all its leaves.
* * *
Over the following half hour he conversed with various people; a minimum of socializing was unavoidable, although he would have avoided it if he could. He wanted to be alone to play over again in his mind, without distraction, those moments he and Françoise d’Aubigny had shared beside the trestle table with its coy little bowls of glistening savories and its shameless salmon. There was an ancient judge who had known his adoptive father, whom he had to stop and listen to for a painful five minutes—the old boy was deaf, and spoke in bellowing tones as if everyone else shared his disability—and an Abbey actress who gave him a playfully reproving eye and inquired in a voice dripping with saccharine sweetness why Isabel Galloway was not with him. Now and then, when a gap opened among the gabbling heads, he had a tantalizing glimpse of Françoise—in his mind he had at last been able to drop the formality of the surname—but maneuver his way as he might through the crowd, he somehow could not manage to put himself directly in her vicinity. He drank a third glass of champagne, and then took a fourth, and stepped through the french windows with it and wandered into the house.
He entered a big modern kitchen, where he was ignored by the hired-in catering staff, busy at their work, and then a long passageway that in stages, through two successive green baize doors, widened to become the front hall. This part of the house seemed deserted. He noted paintings—a couple of insipid Paul Henrys and a dubious oil portrait of a prissy fellow in a periwig—and an antique oak side table with, over it, a big gilt-framed mirror that leaned out at an angle from the wall and gave an impression of vigilance and faint menace. To right and left two tall white doors faced each other. The one on the right, to his vague surprise, was locked. The other opened onto a square high-ceilinged drawing room ablaze with early evening sunlight. He stepped inside.
Here two enormous windows looked across the road to the Green and its trees, and the light pouring in through them had a leafy verdant tinge. A big old grandfather clock with a ponderous and hesitant tick stood against one wall. On a sideboard there rested a bowl of glowing yellow roses. He went and stood at one of the windows; lifting his face, he bathed in the sky’s calm soft radiance. The champagne had set up a mild and not unpleasant buzzing in his head.
Disenchanted,
she had said. Yes, it was a beautiful word, and yes, it carried a weight of sadness, but there was something hard in it, too, hard and unyielding. He pondered the dark fact that it was due to a violent death that he was here, tipsy on the dead man’s champagne and overflowing at the brim with infatuation for that man’s enchanting and dangerous widow. He knew the perils of the situation he had blundered into, and he accepted them, more than accepted them—what was passion without risk, without transgression? Although he knew himself guilty of many unforgivable lies and evasions in his life, he had never tried to hide from himself his taste for the hazard of sin. And that was what Françoise d’Aubigny represented for him now.
He began to notice a faintly uncomfortable sensation in the back of his head. He turned. A slight, pale, plain little girl with a long narrow face and circular steel-framed spectacles was regarding him from an armchair by the fireplace. The chair was expensively upholstered in yellow silk with a subtle fleur-de-lys pattern, and yellow too, or gold, rather, was the girl’s dress, an unsuitably formal gown with bows and flounces suggestive of the eighteenth century, which made her look like a grown-up woman viewed from the wrong, too distant perspective. Her hair was done in two heavy black braids tied at the ends with gold ribbon that matched her dress. She seemed quite composed, and her gaze was direct and unblinking, and he felt, standing there in the suddenly hard-edged, green-tinged light, like a specimen set up and arranged specifically for her scrutiny.
“Hello,” he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud under the lofty ceiling.