The Silver Swan

1

A SAGGING PALL OF CLOUD HUNG LOW OVER THE AIRPORT, AND A steady summer drizzle was drifting slantways down. For a time it seemed the plane would be diverted because of the poor visibility but in the end it was allowed to land, though more than an hour late. Quirke stood with Phoebe at the observation window and watched the machine come nosing in from the runway, its four big propellers churning in the rain and dragging undulant tunnels of wet air behind them. Two sets of steps were wheeled out by men in yellow sou'westers and the doors were opened from inside and the passengers began disembarking, looking groggy and rumpled even at this distance. Rose Crawford was among the first to appear. She wore a close-fitting black suit and a black hat with a veil-"Mourning becomes her," Quirke observed drily-and carried a black patent-leather valise. She paused at the top of the steps and looked at the rain, then turned back to the cabin and said something, and a moment later one of the stewardesses appeared, opening an umbrella, and under this protective dome Rose descended, stepping with care onto this alien soil.

"Really, I can't think what they expected to find in my bags," she said, exaggerating her southern drawl, when she came striding out of the Customs hall at last. "Six-shooters, I suppose, seeing I'm a Yank. Quirke, you look ruined-have you been waiting long for me? And I see you still have a limp. But, Phoebe, my dear, you-you're positively radiant. Are you in love?"

She permitted her cheek to be kissed by both of them in turn. Quirke caught her remembered scent. He took her suitcases, and the three of them walked through the throng of arriving passengers. The taxi rank was busy already. Rose was surprised to learn that Quirke did not drive-"Somehow I saw you behind the wheel of something big and powerful"-and wrinkled her nose at the smell in the taxi of cigarette smoke and sweated-on leather. The rain was heavier now. "My," she said with honeyed insincerity, "Ireland is just as I expected it would be."

Soon they were on the road into Dublin. In the rain the trees shone, a darker-than-dark green.

"It's almost gruesome, isn't it?" Rose said to Quirke, who was sitting in the front seat beside the driver. "The first time we met, you were arriving in America for what would turn out to be a funeral-my poor Josh-and now here I am, come to see his great friend Garret buried in his turn. Death does seem to follow you about."

"An occupational hazard," Quirke said.

"Of course-I always forget what it is you do." She turned to Phoebe. "But you must tell me everything, my dear, all your news and secrets. Have you been misbehaving since I saw you last? I hope so. And I bet you're wishing you had stayed with me in North Scituate and not come back to this damp little corner of the globe."

Rose was the third wife, now widow, of Phoebe's late grandfather Josh Crawford. It was at Rose's house, on the day of the old man's funeral, that Phoebe had found out from Quirke at last the facts of her true parentage. Ever since then Quirke had gone in fear of his daughter, a subdued, constant, and hardly explicable fear.

"Oh, I'm happy here," Phoebe said. "I have a life."

Rose, smiling, patted her hand. "I'm sure you have, my dear." She sat back against the upholstery and looked out at the gray, rained-on outskirts passing by and sighed. "Who wouldn't be happy here?"

From the front seat Quirke said over his shoulder: "Are you tired?"

"I slept on the flight." She turned her eyes from the window and looked at his profile before her. "How is Mal?"

"Mal? Oh, Mal is Mal. Surviving, you know."

"He must be sad, losing his father." She glanced from him to Phoebe, who sat gazing stonily before her at the back of the taxi driver's stubbled neck. Rose smiled faintly; the subject of lost fathers, she noted, was obviously still a delicate one.

"Yes," Quirke said tonelessly. "We're all sad."

Again she studied his Roman emperor's profile and smiled her feline smile. "I'm sure."

At the Shelbourne the doorman in gray top hat and tails came to meet them with his vast black umbrella, beaming. Rose gave him a cold glance and swept on through the revolving glass door. Quirke was about to say something to Phoebe, but she turned from him brusquely and followed quickly after Rose into the hotel lobby. What was the matter with her? She had spoken hardly a word to him since he had picked her up that morning on the way to the airport. She had not even invited him into the flat but had left him standing in the drizzle under the front doorway while she finished getting ready upstairs. She was upset over her Grandfather Griffin's death-she and the old man had been close-but she seemed more angry than sorrowful. But why, Quirke wondered, was it him she was angry at? What had he done? What had he done, that is, that he had not already been punished for, many times over? He tipped the doorman and gave directions for the luggage to be brought in. He was weary of being the object of everyone's blame. The past was tied to him like a tin can to a cat's tail, and even the smallest effort he made to advance produced a shaming din behind him. He sighed and walked on into the hotel, shaking a fine dew of raindrops from his hat.

While Rose was unpacking they waited uneasily together, man and daughter, in the tea lounge on the ground floor. Phoebe sat on a sofa, curled into herself, smoking her Passing Clouds and watching the rain that whispered against the panes of the three big windows giving onto the street. The massed trees opposite lent a faint greenish luminence to the room. Quirke sat fingering his mechanical pencil, trying to think of something to say and failing. Presently Rose came down. She had changed into a red skirt and a red bolero jacket-"I thought I'd add a little color to this grim occasion"-and Quirke noted how these bright things, despite her perfect makeup and gleaming black hair, only showed more starkly how she had aged in the couple of years since he had seen her last. Yet she was still a handsome woman, in her burnished, metallic fashion. She had asked him to stay with her in Boston after her husband died, him and Phoebe both. He smiled to himself, thinking how that would have been, the three of them there in Moss Manor, Josh's big old mausoleum, lapped about by dollars, Mrs. Rose Crawford and her new husband, the pampered Mr. Rose Crawford, and his at last acknowledged and ever unforgiving daughter. Now Rose said to him:

"I thought you'd be in the bar."

"Quirke has given up bars," Phoebe said, in a tone at once haughty and spiteful.

Rose lifted an eyebrow at him. "What-you don't drink anymore?"

Quirke shrugged and Phoebe answered for him again. "He takes a glass of wine with me once a week. I'm his alibi."

"So you're not an alcoholic, then."

"Did you think I was?"

"Well, I did wonder. You could certainly put away the whiskey."

"We say here 'he was a great man for the bottle,'" Phoebe said. Throughout this exchange she had not once looked at Quirke directly.

"Yes," Rose murmured. She held Quirke's gaze and her black eyes gleamed with mirthful mischief. "Just like a baby."

The waitress came and they ordered tea. Quirke asked Rose if her room was satisfactory and to her liking and Rose said it was fine, "very quaint and shabby and old-world, as you would expect." Quirke brought out his cigarette case. Rose took a cigarette, and he held the lighter for her and she leaned forward, touching her fingertips to the back of his hand. When she lifted the cigarette from her lips it was stained with lipstick. He thought how often this little scene had been repeated: the leaning forward, the quick, wry, upwards glance, the touch of her fingers on his skin, the white paper suddenly, vividly stained. She had asked him to love her, to stay with her. Sarah was still alive then, Sarah who-

"For God's sake stop fiddling with that!" Phoebe said sharply, startling him. He looked dumbly at the mechanical pencil in his hand; he had forgotten he was holding it. "Here," she said, for a moment all matronly impatience, "give it to me," and snatched it from him and dropped it into her handbag.

A brief, tight silence followed. Rose broke it with a sigh. "So many deaths," she said. "First Josh, then Sarah, now poor Garret." She was watching Quirke. "You sort of feel the Reaper out there with his scythe, don't you"-she made a circling motion with a crimson-nailed finger-"getting closer all the time." Phoebe was looking to the windows again. Rose turned to her. "But, my dear, this is far too gloomy for you, I can see." She laid a hand on the young woman's wrist. "Tell me what you've been doing. I hear you're working-in a store, is it?"

"A hat shop," Quirke said, and shifted heavily on his chair.

Rose laughed. "What's wrong with that? I worked in stores-or shops, if you like-when I was young. My daddy kept a grocery store, until it went bust, just like so many others. That was in the hard times."

"And look at you now," Quirke said.

She waited a moment, and then: "Yes," she answered softly, "look at me now."

He shifted his gaze. Rose was always most unsettling when she was at her softest.

Phoebe murmured something and stood up and walked away from them across the room and out. Rose looked after her thoughtfully and then turned to Quirke again. "Does she have to be so deeply in mourning? It seems a little much."

"You mean the black? That's how she always dresses."

"Why do you let her?"

"No one lets Phoebe do anything. She's a woman now."

"No she's not." She crushed her cigarette in the glass ashtray on the table. "You still don't know a thing about people, do you, Quirke, women especially." She took a sip of her tea and grimaced: it had gone cold. She put the cup back in its saucer. "There's something about her, though," she said, "something different. Has she got a beau?"

"As you say, I don't know anything."

"You should make it your business to know," she said sharply. "You owe it to her, God knows."

"What do I owe?"

"Interest. Care." She smiled almost pityingly. "Love."

Phoebe came back. Quirke watched her as she approached from across the room. Yes, Rose was right, he had to acknowledge it; there was something different about his daughter. She was paler than ever, ice pale, and yet seemed somehow on fire, inwardly. She sat down and reached for her cigarettes. Perhaps it was not him she was angry at. Perhaps she was not angry at all. Perhaps it was only that Rose's arrival had stirred memories in her of things she would rather have forgotten.

Mal appeared. He hesitated in the archway that led in from the lobby and scanned the room with the tentativeness that was his way now, his spectacles owlishly flashing. He saw them and came forward, picking his way among the tables as if he could not see properly. He wore one of his gray suits with a gray pullover underneath, and a dark-blue bow tie. His hair, brushed stiffly back, stuck out in sharp points at the back of his high, narrow head, and on each cheekbone there was a livid patch of broken veins. Every time Quirke saw Mal nowadays his brother-in-law seemed a little more dry and dusty, as if an essential fluid was leaking out of him, steadily, invisibly. He leaned down and awkwardly shook Rose's hand. One could weep, Quirke thought, for that pullover.

They left the lounge and crossed, the four of them, into the dining room, and took their places at the table Quirke had reserved. When the flurry of napkins and menus had subsided a heavy silence settled. Only Rose seemed at ease, glancing between the other three and smiling, like a person in a gallery admiring the likenesses between a set of family portraits. Quirke saw how Mal's face, when he looked at Phoebe, who for so long the world had thought his daughter, took on a blurred, pained expression. Phoebe, for her part, kept her eyes downcast. Quirke looked at her thin, white clawlike hands clutching the menu. How unhappy she seemed, unhappy and yet-what was it? Avid? Excited?

"Well," Rose said mock-brightly, narrowing her eyes, "isn't this lovely."

ON A COOL GRAY SUMMER MORNING JUDGE GARRET GRIFFIN WAS LAID TO rest beside his wife in the family plot in Glasnevin. There was an army guard of honor, and the many relatives were joined by scores of the public for Judge Griffin, as he was known to all, had been a popular figure in the city. Eulogies were delivered by politicians and prelates. As the first handfuls of clay fell on the coffin a fine rain began to fall. No one, however, wept. The Judge's life had been, the Archbishop said in his homily at the funeral Mass in the overflowing cemetery chapel, a life to be celebrated, a full and fulfilled life, a life of service to the nation, devotion to the family, commitment to the Faith. Afterwards the mourners mingled among the graves, the women talking together in low voices while the men smoked, shielding their cigarettes surreptitiously in cupped fists. Then the black cars began to roll away, their wheels crunching on the gravel.

Inspector Hackett was among the attendants, standing well back at the edge of the crowd in his blue suit and black coat. He had caught Quirke's eye and tipped a finger to his hat brim in a covert salute. Later they walked together along a pathway among the headstones. The rain had stopped but the trees were dripping still. On a child's grave there were plaster roses under a glass dome mottled with lichen on its inner sides.

"End of an era," the detective said, and glanced sideways at Quirke. "We won't see his likes again."

"No," Quirke said flatly. "We won't."

The Archbishop's Bentley glided through the gate, the Archbishop sitting erect in the back seat like a religious effigy being borne on display in its glass case. The inspector brought out a packet of Players and offered it open to Quirke. They stopped to light up. Then they walked on again.

"I had a word with that fellow," the inspector said.

"Which fellow is that?"

"Your friend Mr. Hunt. The one whose wife died-remember?"

Now the hearse followed where the Archbishop's car had gone; the long, bare space in the back, where the coffin had been, was lugubrious in its emptiness.

"Yes," Quirke said. "I remember. And?"

"Ah, God help the poor fellow, he's in an awful state."

"I imagine he is."

The policeman glanced at him again. "I sometimes suspect, Mr. Quirke," he said, "that you have a hard heart."

To this Quirke made no response. Instead he asked: "What did Billy Hunt say?"

"About what?"

They came in sight of Rose Crawford and Phoebe, walking ahead of them along the cinder path, Rose linking the younger woman's arm in her own.

"About his wife's death," Quirke said patiently.

"Oh, not much. Doesn't know why she did it, if she did it."

"If?"

"Ah, now, Mr. Quirke, don't play the innocent. You have your doubts as much as I have in this case."

They had gone half a dozen paces before Quirke spoke again. "Do you think Billy Hunt is not innocent either?"

The inspector chuckled. "In my experience, no one is completely innocent. But then, you'd expect me to say that, wouldn't you?"

They caught up now with Rose and Phoebe. When Phoebe saw it was Quirke behind her she murmured something and disengaged her arm from Rose's and walked off briskly along the path. Rose looked after her and shook her head. "So abrupt, the young," she said. Quirke introduced her to the policeman. "How do you do, Officer?" she said, offering a slender, black-gloved hand to Hackett, who smiled shyly, the corners of his fish mouth stretching up almost to his earlobes. "So glad to meet a friend of Mr. Quirke's. You're one of a select and tiny band, so far as we can see."

Quirke was gazing after Phoebe, who had met up with Mal and stood with him now under the arched gateway that led to Glasnevin Road. They looked more like father and daughter, Quirke knew, than Quirke and she would ever look.

"And you must have known the Judge, too, of course," Rose was saying to the policeman. His grin grew wider still. "Oh, I did, ma'am," he said, putting on his Midlands drawl to match her southern twang. "A grand person he was, too, and a great upholder of justice and the law. Isn't that so, Mr. Quirke?"

Quirke looked at him. Did he imagine it, or did the policeman's left eyelid momentarily flicker?

2

SHE MET THE SILVER-HAIRED MAN ONE WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON WHEN she arrived at the house in Adelaide Road and he was there, sitting on the sofa in Dr. Kreutz's room and looking as if he owned the place. She had thought the Doctor was alone because the copper bowl, his signal to her, was not on the windowsill, but it was only that he had forgotten to put it there, which just showed how agitated he must have been. When he opened the door to her he gave her such a strange, wild look, the meaning of which she could not understand until she went in ahead of him and there was the man sitting sprawled on the sofa in his camel-hair coat. He had one arm draped on the back of the sofa, and his feet with his ankles crossed were on the low table. He was smoking a cigarette, holding it in an affected way, between the second and third fingers of his left hand. He gave her a lazy smile and looked her up and down and said, "Well well, who have we here?" It was the camel-hair coat again, the wings of it flung wide open on either side of him, that made him seem to be displaying himself to her in a way that was almost, she thought, indecent. Dr. Kreutz stood to one side, glancing from one of them to the other with a bemused, helpless expression. She felt awkward, and did not know where to look. The man took his feet from the table and stood up languidly and offered her a slender, almost colorless hand.

"The name is White," he said. "Leslie White."

She took his hand, which was soft as a girl's and coolly damp, but forgot to say her name, so mesmerized was she by that crooked smile, that lock of hair flopping on his forehead-it was platinum, really, more than silver-and those eyes in which were mixed amusement, curiosity, brazenness, but which also had a rueful, mock-apologetic gleam, as if he were saying to her, Yes, I know, I'm a rogue, but I'm such fun, too, you'll see. Dr. Kreutz roused himself then and introduced her, as "Mrs. Hunt," but she, lifting her chin, looked straight into Leslie White's face and said: "Deirdre." She was surprised how steady her voice sounded.

Dr. Kreutz mentioned tea, but it was plain to see his heart was not in the offer. She had never seen him so unsure of himself. He still had that wild, mute look with which he had greeted her at the door, like that of a character in the pictures trying to let the heroine know there is a man with a gun hiding behind the curtains, and he kept lifting his two hands, palm upwards in a peculiar gesture, almost as if he was praying, and letting them fall back again, defeatedly, to his sides. Leslie White ignored him, did not even glance in his direction. "I must be going," he said now, in that soft, sleepy voice that he had, still smiling down at her. As if he knew how uneasily she felt about that coat of his he drew it now slowly, caressingly, around himself, watching her all the time, and knotted the belt loosely, disdaining the buckle. "Good-bye, Deirdre," he said. He pronounced it Deardree. He went to the door, followed hurriedly by Dr. Kreutz, and turned once more before going out and gave her a last, faint, mischievous smile.

She heard them in the hall, Dr. Kreutz speaking in an urgent undertone and Leslie White saying dismissively, "Yes, yes, yes, keep your hair on, for heaven's sake." She heard the front door open and shut again, and a moment later she glimpsed that shining head of his, like a silver helmet, ducking past the window.

What seemed a long time went by before Dr. Kreutz came back into the room. She had not realized that a person that color could turn pale, but his brown skin had taken on a definite grayish tinge. He would not look at her. She said she was sorry to have interrupted but when she saw that the copper pot was not in the window… He nodded distractedly. She felt sorry for him, but she was burning with curiosity, too.

She did not stay long, that day. She could see Dr. Kreutz was relieved when she lied and said that she had arranged to meet Billy, and that she would have to go. At the door he made that ineffectual, pleading gesture again, lifting only one hand this time, and letting it fall back, helplessly.

It was Christmastime and the weather was raw, with flurries of wet snow and showers of sleet as sharp as needles. Although it was the middle of the afternoon it was almost dark, and what light remained was the color of dishwater. Outside the gate she paused and glanced in both directions along the road, then turned right and walked towards Leeson Street, pulling up the collar of her coat against the cold.

He was standing in the shelter of the newspaper kiosk at the bridge. She was not surprised; something in her had told her he would wait for her. He crossed the road, rubbing his hands together and smiling reproachfully. "Crumbs," he said, "I thought you were never going to get away."

She considered telling him what she thought of him for his presumption, but before she could say anything he took her arm and turned and drew her with him across the road to the corner of Fitzwilliam Street.

"And where," she said, with a disbelieving laugh, "do you think we're going?"

"We're going, my dear, to a pub, where I shall order a hot whiskey for each of us, to warm us up."

She stopped and unhooked her arm from his and faced him squarely. "Oh, is that so, now?"

He laughed, looking down at his feet and shaking his head, then reached out and grasped her firmly by the upper arms. "Listen," he said, "we could stand here exchanging pleasantries if you like, telling each other about our past lives and what we had for breakfast this morning, but since we've already been introduced, and since it's bloody cold, can we just go to the pub, where you can stand on your dignity, if you must, but I, at least, can have a drink?"

She had been hoping he would have his car, she would have liked a go in it, but he said Old Mother Riley, as he called it, was sick and in the car hospital. So they walked down the long avenue, under the tall windows of the houses where already the electric lights were coming on, past the square with its leafless, dripping trees, and into Baggot Street. Grainy drifts of sleet had gathered in the corners of the tiled porch of the pub, but inside there was a coke fire burning and the lamps on the bar shed a warm yellow glow. They were the only customers. There were tables with low chairs, but they chose to sit on two stools at the bar. "It's friendlier, don't you think?" Leslie White said, moving his stool nearer to hers. "Besides, if I sit in one of those chairs my knees will be jammed under my chin."

As she was climbing onto the stool she had seen him trying to look up her skirt, but he had seen her seeing and only grinned into her face; he had done it, glancing down and up, not in the dirty way that fellows often did in pubs, leering and licking their lips, but openly, unashamedly, and with a kind of invisible twirl, somehow, like one of those singers in an opera gaily twirling a straw hat or the waxed ends of a mustache. He called the barman and gave his order, telling him exactly how the drinks should be made-"Hot water, mind, not boiling, and no more than three cloves in each glass"-and then offered her a cigarette, which she was going to take but then thought better of it, afraid she would cough and splutter and make a show of herself, for she did not smoke and had only ever in her life taken a couple of puffs. The stool was high and when she crossed her legs she felt herself teetering for a second, and it almost seemed she might fall forward, swooningly, so that he would have to hold her up in his arms. When the steaming whiskeys came her head was already spinning.

He asked her how she had come to know Dr. Kreutz. She made up a story about Mr. Plunkett sending her to Adelaide Road to deliver something that the Doctor had ordered, but it was plain from his half-suppressed smirk that he did not believe her.

"Want to watch him, old Kreutzer," he said, getting rid of the ash on his cigarette by rolling it on the edge of the ashtray until the smoldering tip was pointed like a pencil. "They call him the Wog with the Wandering Hands, you know."

She wondered who they were, or were they really only Leslie White? She wanted to ask him how he had got to know him, but she supposed he would only lie, as, of course, she had done herself. It was strange, but she had to admit there was something about the Doctor that would make a person wary of being completely frank in talking about him. Why was that? Anyway, there were things about Leslie White, she was sure, more and murkier things, that would make frankness seem entirely out of the question.

They stayed in the pub for the best part of two hours-it was a good thing Billy was on the road and not waiting for her at home, to smell the whiskey on her breath. Later, she had only the haziest recollection of what they had talked about, she and Leslie. It was not the alcohol that had affected her memory-though goodness knows she was not used to drinking whiskey in the afternoon, or at any other time of day or night, for that matter-but she had felt so giddy that she had not been able to concentrate properly. She thought of the hoop she had one summer when she was a child-it was only a rusty old bicycle wheel with no tire and half the spokes broken or missing-which she used to bowl with a bit of stick along the pathway that ran all the way round the yard outside the Flats, and which, when she grew too tired to run along with it anymore, would roll off by itself for a little way, upright and really fast at first, then more slowly, until at last it began to wobble before falling over. That was just how she felt now, as if she was slowing down and wobbling, unable to control herself. It was not at the end of something that she was, though, but at the start.

After the third drink she held up a hand and told him not to order another, that she would have to go home, and lied and said that her husband would be expecting her. She was not sure why she had mentioned her husband-was it to put this fellow in his place, because he was so cocksure of himself, or was it, as she dimly suspected, some kind of challenge to him? But what would she be challenging him to do? He was watching her, his eyes roving all over her so that she could almost feel them on her skin, like a blind man's fingertips. She saw herself lying back on Dr. Kreutz's sofa with not Dr. Kreutz but this silvery, slender-limbed man leaning over her, lifting away layer after layer of some gauzy stuff that was all that was covering her, lifting and softly lifting, pushing aside her ever more feeble protests, until she lay naked before him, naked and trembling and damp. The picture was so strong in her mind that this time she really did lose her balance briefly, and had to close her eyes for a moment and concentrate hard to keep from toppling off the stool.

Afterwards she could not stop thinking about him. He haunted her mind, a sort of debonair, cheerful, and all too real ghost. In the shop the next morning she found herself more than once being glared at by Mr. Plunkett, having drifted off into a dream while she was in the middle of serving a customer. Her head was still buzzing from the lingering effects of those three unaccustomed whiskeys, but that was not the real cause of her inattention, and she knew it.

She liked the neat way he did things, Leslie White: little, inconsequential things that he seemed not to notice himself doing, like sharpening the ashy tip of his cigarette that way on the side of the ashtray, or making little lattices out of spent matches, or stacking his change in separate piles on the bar, ha'pennies, pennies, threepenny bits, the edges all perfectly lined up. He could do that thing with a coin, too, rolling it over and over along the knuckles of his hand, so fast that the one coin seemed multiplied into three or four, spinning and flashing. And he dressed well. She was not sure if the shades he favored, white and off-white and metallic gray, were right for his coloring, but the cut of the things he wore was good, she could see, for she had an eye for fine tailoring. Maybe he would take her advice if she offered it. He would look grand in blue or, even better, black, a good black suit, maybe double-breasted, which would show off his slim figure, or even a three-piece, with a gold watch chain across the waistcoat. She saw herself on his arm, him all silver and jet and she in something pale and flowing… "Deirdre!" Mr. Plunkett muttered furiously, making her jump, and she had difficulty focusing on the old biddy in front of the cash register holding out her trembling shilling.

She felt guilty, not towards Billy, of course, but-and this was very strange-because she felt as if she was betraying Dr. Kreutz. She told herself she was stupid to think this way-what had she done, after all, except go for a drink with a man, and not even at night, at that, but in the afternoon? But try as she would to make little of what had happened, even she was not convinced. For something had happened, and something more would happen, and soon, she was sure of it.

But first there was another and altogether unexpected thing, a thing that made her see Dr. Kreutz in an entirely new, lurid light.

3

WHEN PHOEBE WAS A LITTLE GIRL, HER PARENTS, OR THE COUPLE WHO at the time she thought of as her parents, used to take her in July each year for a two-week stay in a house in Rosslare Strand that was lent to them by friends of Sarah's, theater people, as she recalled. This holiday by the sea was made out to be a great thing, but the truth was that none of the three of them really enjoyed it, down there in what was called the Sunny Southeast. Mal fretted at being away from his work, and Sarah had nothing to do and, although she tried not to show it, was bored most of the time. As for Phoebe herself, she did not care for the seaside. She hated showing herself half naked on the beach-she was skinny and knock-kneed, and her pale skin refused to tan no matter how long she spent in the sun-and she had no talent for making friends. Besides, she was afraid of the sea. One year, when she was nine or ten, she was walking by herself on the broad strip of thorns and tough grass that ran between the village and the beach, known for some reason as the Burrow, when she stumbled, literally stumbled, on a hare's nest with two baby hares in it. She had never seen such a thing before. It appeared that the mother hare had fashioned the nest by turning and turning herself around in the grass to form a smooth, tightly braided hollow, in which now the leverets lay coiled against one another head to tail, each a mirror image of the other, so that they looked, she thought, like an emblem on a flag, or on a coin. They were very young, for their eyes were hardly open, and they seemed not so much to breathe as throb, faintly and fast, as if they were already exhausted at the very prospect of all the desperate running they would have to do in their lives. She decided immediately, although she knew in her heart it was not true, that they had been abandoned, and that therefore it was up to her to save them. So she picked them up-how soft they were, and so hot!-and and made a pouch of her cardigan at the front and carried them home that way, and lodged them in the long grass in the corner by the rain barrel behind the house, where no one would see them. She knew, though she would not admit it, that she should not have taken them, and when she came down the next morning and they were gone she experienced a surge of panic and shameful guilt that almost made her be sick there on the spot. She tried to tell herself that the mother hare had somehow been able to follow the babies' scent and had come and taken them away again in the night, but she could not make herself believe it. She ran down to the Burrow again, to see if they might be there, but she could not even find the nest, though she searched all morning, until it was time to go home for lunch.

She had never told anyone of the incident, and whenever she thought of it, as she did with surprising frequency, even all these years later, she was still a little ashamed; yet she recalled, too, recalled so sharply that she as good as experienced it again, the warm thrill of carrying them, these frail, helpless, yet miraculously living creatures, in the pouch of her cardigan, up Station Road, in the silence of the summer afternoon.

Having Leslie White in her flat gave her something of that same thrill. She knew it was wrong, and probably dangerous, to be sheltering him. He was from a world of which she knew little, a disreputable world of sports cars and drinks in the afternoon and shady business deals, a violent world in which one was liable to be set upon in dark alleyways by silent, hard-breathing men with cudgels. He would tell her nothing of the assault other than what he had told her that first night. He insisted he did not know the three toughs or why they had attacked him. She did not believe this. From the way his eyes slid away from hers when she questioned him she saw there were things that he was hiding from her. And she was glad that he hid them. She was sure it was better not to know very much about Leslie White's doings.

PHOEBE HAD GONE THAT NIGHT TO DR. KREUTZ, AS HE HAD ASKED HER to do. The place was not at all what she had expected-it was not a surgery, for a start. When the taxi dropped her at the address in Adelaide Road she had an immediate sense of something indefinably sinister, which was due, she felt sure, to something more than the lateness of the hour and the deserted streets. Although it was past midnight there was a ghostly glow in the sky, but whether it was the last of the day's radiance or the light of an as yet unrisen moon she could not tell. She was not often abroad at such an hour, and the world in the darkness seemed tentative and without definite shape, as if everything were in the process of being dismantled for the night. Above the trees the streetlamps shone, and giant shadows of leaves trembled on the sidewalks. On the far side of the road, near the gate of the hospital, a pair of prostitutes loitered, the tips of their cigarettes making angular weavings in the shadows, like fireflies; seeing her hesitate at the black-painted iron gate of the house they said something to each other and laughed, and one of them called out softly to her what seemed to be a question, or an invitation, the words of which she was not able to catch, which, she thought, was probably just as well.

There was no sign of life in the basement flat, no sounds from within and no light in the window, but she had hardly taken her finger off the bell when the door suddenly swung open, as if under its own power. Dr. Kreutz had not switched on the light in the hall and at first all she saw of him was the glint of the whites of his eyes, which were like the eyes of the snake charmer in that jungle painting by the Douanier Rousseau. Kreutz must have known somehow that she was there, even before she rang the bell. When she said Leslie White's name it seemed for a moment that he would shut the door in her face, but instead he came out onto the step, pulling the door to behind him and holding it ajar with his hand. This was the strangest doctor she had ever encountered.

"He's had-he's had an accident," she stammered. "He said to ask you to give me his medicine for him. He said you'd understand."

He was tall and thin, and his face was darker than the night. He was wearing some kind of tunic without a collar, and when she glanced down she saw that he was barefoot. He gave off a faint odor, too, spicy and sweet.

"An accident," he said, without emphasis. His voice was deep and unexpectedly soft and almost musical.

"Yes." She was conscious of the two whores still watching from the other side of the road; she could feel their eyes boring into her back. "He's quite badly hurt."

"Ah." Dr. Kreutz pondered for a moment in silence, measuring the import of what she had said. "This is most most distressing."

Why did he not ask her what kind of an accident it had been?

"I don't know what the medicine is," she said. "I mean, Mr. White didn't say, he just asked me to come and tell you that he needed it." She was babbling. She could not stop. "I'm not sure if there's a chemist's open at this time of night, but maybe if you give me a prescription I could get it filled somewhere, maybe over there at the hospital." She half turned, to indicate where she meant, and saw the prostitutes out of the corner of her eye, craning in curiosity. Dr. Kreutz was shaking his head slowly from side to side.

"There is no medicine," he said. "You must tell him that-no medicine, no medicine anymore."

"But he's hurt," she said. She felt suddenly close to tears. Every word she uttered dropped like a stone into the bottomless depths of his calm and seemingly unbridgeable remoteness. "Can't you help?"

"I am sorry, Miss," he said, "very very sorry," although he did not sound it, not at all. A moment passed, in which she could think of nothing more to say, and then he stepped back soundlessly into the dark hallway, and again there was that flash of the glistening whites of his eyes, before he shut the door.

It was only on the way out that she saw the plaque on the railings with his name on it. "Spiritual Healing"-what was that, exactly, she wondered.

Leslie was lying on the sofa where she had left him, dozing, his head set crookedly against the cushions. In the light from the electric lamp on the sideboard his battered face seemed more swollen than it had been before, with shiny, purplish-red bruises; it looked like something in the window of a butcher's shop. When she told him what Dr. Kreutz had said, that there would be no more medicine, he put a hand over his eyes and turned away from her, and his shoulders began to shake, and she realized that he was weeping. Whatever she had expected, it was not tears. She put out a hand to touch him but held back. Suddenly there was a gulf between them, a distance not broad but immensely, immeasurably deep. She thought again of the baby hares. It was with him as it had been with them: she was of a different species. She turned away and went into the bedroom and left him there, crying desolate tears into a corduroy-covered cushion.

In the days that followed, that feeling of difference and distance never quite left her. All the same she nursed him as best she could, with tenderness and diligence. She supposed this was how a real, a trained nurse-when she was little she had intended to be a nurse when she grew up-would do her work, caring and yet impersonal. In the mornings she tried to make him take breakfast, a bowl of cereal or a slice of toast with tea, but he would eat nothing. At lunchtimes she came back to check on him, and in the evenings she would run up the stairs, preparing her smile for him before she burst through the door, expecting him to be gone.

"Why, Miss Nightingale," he would croak, "it's you."

She could see he was suffering not just from his injuries but that there was some additional, deeper anguish. She did not know what kind of medicine it was he had hoped for from Dr. Kreutz. Nor did she ask, partly because an admonitory voice inside her told her it was better that she should not know. She thought at first he might be diabetic and that it was insulin he needed, but as the days went on it became evident that this was not the case. He suffered violent bouts of fever and would lie shaking for hours, glaring at the ceiling, with his teeth clenched and a film of sweat on his forehead and on his upper lip. He had shed his soiled and torn suit and wore her-or Sarah's-silk dressing gown with the dragons and birds on it, loosely closed over his concave and palely glimmering chest. She took his things, his shirt and underclothes, and washed them in the sink in the bathroom, averting her eyes from who knew what variety of stains. She had never before been called on to do someone else's laundry.

It was remarkable, though, how little difficulty she had adjusting to this unwonted male presence in her hitherto solitary domain. She did not stop being aware of the strangeness of him, of what he was, how different from her, yet even the difference and the strangeness she got used to. It really was as if some exquisite, half-wild, injured creature had attached itself to her and given itself into her care. She felt like one of those brocaded ladies in a tapestry with a unicorn at her feet. She could hardly remember how it had been when they were together in bed that afternoon, and what details she could recall seemed more dreamlike than real.

She tried to get him to allow her to call a doctor, a real doctor, this time, but he made a sound that was half groan, half laugh and flapped a long, pale hand bonelessly at her. "No quacks!" he cried in a tone of exaggerated comic distress. "No quacks, for pity's sake!" He said he knew there was nothing broken; his ribs ached, but they were sound, he was sure of it. When she helped him to the bathroom she felt as if she were supporting a sack of sticks. Yet to her puzzlement and mild consternation, it was his very frailty, his insubstantiality, that she found most arousing. What did that mean? This was, she reminded herself, a new landscape into which she had ventured. She had never lived in close contact before with a man who was not a relative. Propinquity, that was the word, sounding as it did like the name of a reserved sin out of the catechism: she had until now not lived in propinquity with a man. She smiled to herself and made a faint, involuntary, feline sound deep in her throat. Yes, this was sin, the real thing at last, and all unexpectedly. One hot and airless night when she had lain for what seemed hours sleepless on her bed with the sheet thrown aside, she rose with the dawn's first gray glimmer and went into the living room and lay down in her damp slip beside him on the sofa, and he woke and murmured something and turned, groaning a little, and took her in his arms, and she felt the heat of his bruised flesh burning against hers, and she closed her eyes and opened her lips and heard herself cry out, as if she were the one who was in pain.

Still she could not get him to eat properly. He subsisted mostly on Garibaldi biscuits-they reminded her of flypaper-and Gordon's gin, four bottles of which he had drunk in as many days. After the first one, which she had got in the pub at the end of the street, she had to go farther and still farther afield to buy replacements, afraid that if she went to the same pub she might be reported to the Guards as a dangerous drunkard. He had a craving for sweet things of all kinds, cake, chocolate, sugar-coated bonbons. He sent her out to buy Yorkshire Toffees and sucked away at them all day, like a schoolboy.

Was she afraid of him? Yes, she was. Even as she held him, burning, against her, with his hands in her hair and his mouth on hers and beads of sweat trickling down between her breasts, she could feel her fear, she could almost hear it, a sort of high-pitched whirring inside her. He was not physically strong, she knew, and the beating had left him weaker, but were not the weak ones often the most dangerous of all? She thought of Laura Swan and saw her floating dead under murky, bile-green water, her long, thick hair swaying about her featureless face like fronds of russet seaweed.

She went to see Rose Crawford at the Shelbourne. She knew she could not tell her about Leslie White-no one could be told about that-but just to be in her presence was somehow a comfort, and soothed for a while the confused racings of her mind. Rose, she felt, would not judge her if she were to reveal her secret; Rose in her casually amoral way would understand about Leslie.

They had lunch together in the hotel grill room. "All I seem to do is sit here and eat," Rose said with a jaded sigh. "I no sooner finish breakfast than it seems time for lunch, then there's afternoon tea, and then"-she tucked in her chin and mimicked a headwaiter's booming bass-"dinner, madame!" She smiled. "Oh, my dear, never get old."

"You're not old," Phoebe said.

"But I'm not young, either, which seems almost worse, in a way. You see that man over there, the one having lunch with his rich aunt?"

Phoebe looked. The man, pin-striped and shod in handmade brogues, was large and florid-faced, with hair parted in the middle and brushed back in two floppy wings at either side of his head. The woman opposite him was tiny and hunched, and the knife and fork in her trembling, mottled claws rattled when they touched her plate. "Do you know him?"

"No," Rose said. "But I know an attentive and hopeful nephew when I see one. The point is, when we walked in here he turned to look at us. Or at you, rather. His eye glided over me without the slightest flicker." She made a wry mouth. "It was not ever thus, my dear."

Rose ordered sole for them both, and a bottle of Chablis. The sun through the window made the linen tablecloth shine like bullion and laid a burning speck on the rim of each of their wine glasses.

"Where's that father of yours?" Rose demanded. "I expected him to dance attendance on me, but I haven't seen him since the day I arrived. What does he think I do with myself all day long? I know no one in this city."

"Why do you stay?"

Rose opened her eyes wide in exaggerated surprise. "Why, my dear! Do you want to get rid of me?"

"Of course not. Only…"

"Oh, you're right-why do I stay? I don't know. Somehow your grim little country is growing on me. I never knew I was a masochist."

Phoebe smiled one of her ghostly, melancholy smiles. "Is it because of Quirke that you stay?"

Rose did not look at her. "I shall ignore that, young lady," she said.

The waiter came and, with a flourish, presented the wine bottle for Rose's inspection, like a conjurer showing a dove preparatory to making it disappear. When he had poured and gone she held up her glass to the light and asked, in her indolent drawl, "And what are you up to, young lady?"

Phoebe had to bite her lip to keep herself from grinning like an idiot. This was what it must feel like to be pregnant, she thought, the same hot, thrilling, secretive sense of being all the time about to brim over. She stared innocently. "Up to?"

"Yes. Don't try to fool me. You're up to something, I can tell."

"How? How can you tell?" She could not keep the eagerness out of her voice. If only Rose would guess her secret, it would not be her fault, she would not be the betrayer, and then they could talk.

"Oh, I don't know," Rose said. "You have a glow-no, a glitter. There's quite a wicked light in your eye. I think you are having an adventure, aren't you?"

Phoebe looked down at the table. She did not often blush but felt she might be blushing now. She was glad when their sole arrived, swimming in brown butter on oval pewter platters. She did not care for fish, but Rose, in her blandly commanding way, had not consulted her before ordering. It did not matter: Phoebe rarely ate lunch and would probably not eat this one. She took a draught of the Chablis and felt it go straight to her head, like a flash of lemon-yellow light.

"There was a coincidence," she said, measuring her words.

"A coincidence? What do you mean?"

"Somebody that Quirke knew came to him and asked him not to perform a postmortem."

"Not to?"

"Yes."

"On whom?"

"On his wife. This man's wife. She died."

"Well, yes, I gathered that, if there was or wasn't going to be a postmortem. Who were, are, these people?"

"It doesn't matter. Just… people. I knew the wife-I mean, I didn't know her, but… She ran a beauty parlor; I bought things from her."

"What sort of things?"

"Just face cream, hand lotion, you know. And then…" She stopped. She had a sensation of helpless, slow, not wholly unpleasurable falling, as in a dream. Her hand, she noticed, was shaking; she was afraid that if she let it, her knife, too, like the old lady's, would rattle against the ridiculous pewter plate. "She killed herself," she said. How stark it sounded, how matter-of-fact. She used to think of death as a mysterious, a mystical thing; not anymore.

Rose had stopped eating and was watching her with a bright, bird-like stare; Rose recognized the moment when mere talk turned into something else.

"Phoebe," she said, "has Quirke got himself involved in more trouble?"

She wondered, Phoebe, when last, if ever, she had heard Rose call her by her name. But then, she reflected, Rose was not really on first-name terms with the world in general. And she had missed the point here; Quirke was not the one who was in trouble. She lifted her glass and looked at it but did not drink. Rose was still watching her with a raptor's eye.

"Trouble?" she said. "No, I don't think Quirke is in trouble."

The unctuous waiter glided up and refilled their glasses, and when he had done so Rose, without looking at him, motioned him away with an impatient flick of an index finger. She took a sip of her wine. The glint of concern in her look was waning, and suddenly Phoebe knew, suddenly and certainly, that Rose was indeed in love with Quirke. She was surprised not to be surprised.

"You mentioned a coincidence," Rose said.

"This woman, the one who died, Laura Swan-I knew her partner, too."

"What sort of a partner?"

"He was in the business with her, the beauty parlor business. Leslie White is his name." Had there been a tremor in her voice when she said it? She hastened on. "Quirke seems to think there was something odd, I mean something odd about her death, Laura Swan's, or about her husband coming to him…"

She faltered into silence. Her voice must have quivered when she said Leslie's name, for Rose's attention had snagged on it.

"Leslie White," she said slowly, looking at her, and made a low, humming sound behind pursed lips. "Is that what he's called, your adventure?"

"Oh, no, no. No, I mean, he, that is, Quirke, he-he can't seem to leave anything alone."

Rose nodded. "That's certainly true." She turned her attention to her plate and speared a fragment of fish. Phoebe watched in peculiar fascination the morsel of white flesh with its broken threads of bright-pink vein passing into Rose's painted, blood-red mouth. There were tiny striations on her upper lip, as if the skin there had been stitched all along with a marvelously fine, transparent filament.

"How is it, between you and your father?" she asked.

Phoebe always experienced a pause, a mental stumble, when she heard Quirke referred to as her father.

"All right," she said neutrally. "He buys me dinner once a week."

"And has his glass of wine." Rose's smile was as dry as the Chablis.

"Our lives don't really… cross," Phoebe said, looking at her plate again.

"Hmm. Except when there's a coincidence, like this one with-what's his name again? Leslie who?" Phoebe, looking resolutely down, did not answer. Rose crossed her knife and fork on her plate and leaned her elbows on the table and folded one hand into the other and laid her lips a moment against the knuckle of a forefinger. "Did you know," she asked slowly, "about all the things that happened that time, in Scituate, and before that, here, in Dublin? About Judge Griffin and your father-Quirke, I mean-and the girl who died-I've forgotten what she was called, too."

"Christine Falls," Phoebe said, surprised at herself-how had she remembered that name, so surely and so quickly?

"Well, then, obviously you did know," Rose said. "Who told you?"

"Sarah."

"Ah."

"But I had guessed a lot of it."

"You know Quirke tried to destroy the Judge's career? Your grandfather, who has just died."

"Yes. I know. But it was all hushed up."

Rose sniffed. "And quite rightly, too. It was a nasty business. That's why I asked you if Quirke was getting himself into more trouble. I think he's still a little bruised from all that-I wouldn't like to think of him becoming embroiled again, in some new scandal. He's not exactly the knight in shining armor that he thinks he is." A soft breeze swooped down on them from the tall, open window beside their table, bringing a scent of trees and grass from the park across the road, and the dry hay-stink of the cabstand where the jarveys in their battered top hats waited on the lookout for moneyed tourists. "You should forgive him, you know," Rose said. Phoebe gazed at her steadily. "Oh, I know it's no business of mine. But, my dear, you owe it to yourself, if not to him." She looked up brightly, smiling. "Don't you think?" Still Phoebe said nothing, and Rose gave the faintest of shrugs. "Well now," she said, "why don't we have some of this delicious-sounding strawberry shortcake, and then take a stroll in the park over there."

"I have to go back to work," Phoebe said.

"Can't you take a little time off, to promenade with your lonely old stepgrandmother?" At times, for no apparent reason, Rose exaggerated her Confederate accent-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."

He looked away from her unsettlingly scrutinizing gaze. It was growing late and the air in the garden had turned a luminous gray. Everything out there seemed touched with an inexplicable, sweetish melancholy, as in a dream. He thought of Deirdre Hunt dead on the slab, her chest cut open and folded back on both sides like the flaps of a ragged and grotesquely bulky, bloodstained jacket.

"It's not just curiosity." He paused. "A couple of years ago," he said slowly, "I became involved in something that never got finished."

"What sort of something?"

"Oh, a scandal. A young woman died, and then another one was killed. People close to me were involved. It was hushed up afterwards."

She waited. He felt in his pockets for his mechanical pencil, but then remembered that he seemed to have lost it, somewhere, somehow.

"I see," she said. He studied her. Did she? Did she see? She said: "You've sniffed another scandal, and this time you want to make sure it's not hushed up but brought out into the open. Yes?"

"No. The opposite."

"The opposite?"

"I want it to stay hidden."

"'It'?"

"Whatever it is. Whoever is involved."

"Why-why do you want to keep it hidden?"

"Because I'm tired of"-he shrugged-"I'm tired of dealing with people's filth. I've spent my life plunged to the elbows in the secrets of others, their dirty little sins." He looked to the window again and the graying light. "One of the first P.M.s I ever did was on a child, a baby, six months old, a year, I can't remember. It had been beaten black and blue and then strangled. Its father's thumbprints were on its throat. Not just the mark of his thumbs, but the actual prints, engraved into the skin." He stopped. "What does it matter what people do? I mean, when it's done it's done. I nailed that bastard for strangling his child, but that didn't bring the child back." He stopped again, and touched a hand to his brow. "I don't know what I mean. Look"-he stood up suddenly-"I should go."

She did not move, but lifted her eyes to his. "I wish you'd stay."

"I can't."

"It's not an offer I make to every strange man who comes to the house asking mysterious questions." He said nothing. He was on his way to the door. Still she stayed as she had been, sitting there on the edge of the sofa with her hands clasped together and resting on her knees. He walked out to the hall. His hat was on the peg behind the door. He took it down and ran a finger around the brim. His throat felt constricted, as if something were welling up in him, a bubble of bile. Why had Phoebe been with Leslie White? That was the question he wanted to ask. But of whom could he ask it, who would have the answer? When he turned, Kate was standing in the doorway behind him, just as she had stood the first time he saw her, one arm lifted against the jamb and her head tilted to one side.

"If you leave," she said, "I won't ask you back." He was still fingering his hat. She turned her face violently aside, as if she might spit. "Oh, go then."

HE WALKED DOWN TO THE FRONT AND CROSSED THE ROAD AND STOOD by the seawall. The day was at an end and the sea was lacquered with streaks of sapphire and leek green and lavender gray under a violet dome of sky. On the other side of the bay-was that Dun Laoghaire?-the lights were flickering on, and farther off the mountains had lost a dimension and seemed painted flat, as on a backdrop. Vague brownish bundles of cloud hugged the horizon, where night was gathering. His thoughts were a blank, were not thoughts at all. He had a sense of being bereft, bereft not of some definite thing but in general. But what had he lost? What had there been for him to lose? A light winked far out to sea: a boat? a lighthouse? He turned and walked back over the grass margin to the road.

When she opened the door she was wearing a blue calico nightgown and was barefoot. She showed no surprise to find him there. She said: "Kismet revisited." She did not smile. "I was going to have a bath."

"I thought you had one earlier," he said.

"I did. I was going to have another. But now I won't."

He sat at the kitchen table, smoking, while she cooked. The window above the sink grew glossy with darkness. She fed him a lamb chop and tomatoes and asparagus with mayonnaise. He asked why she was not eating and she said she had eaten already, and though he did not believe her he said no more. He let his thoughts wander. He was prey to a strange lethargy; he felt as if he had traveled a long way to come to this place, this room, this table. He ate with scant relish. Food that someone else had prepared, had prepared like this, in a kitchen and not a restaurant, always tasted strange to him, not really like food at all, although he knew it must be tastier than anything he ate elsewhere, tastier certainly than the stuff he prepared for himself. Moly-was that the word? Food of the gods. No, ambrosia. Kate sat opposite him and watched him with a matronly intentness as he ate, doggedly consuming the meat, the red pulp of the tomatoes, the limp green spears. When he had finished she took his plate and put it in the sink, and with her back turned to him said: "Come to bed."

"OH," SHE CRIED, AND ROLLED HER HEAD ON THE PILLOW TO ONE SIDE and then to the other, biting her nether lip. Quirke loomed above her in starlight, hugely moving. "Oh, God."

IN THE EARLY HOURS THEY CAME DOWN AND SAT AGAIN AT THE KITCHEN table. Kate had offered to make more coffee but Quirke had declined. He was barefoot now, as she was, and had on only his shirt and trousers; in the bedroom she had brought out Leslie White's dressing gown but he had given her a look and she had said, "Sorry" and put it back on its hook. Now in the kitchen the blue-black night was pressed against the window panes, an avid darkness. There was not a sound to be heard anywhere; they might have been alone in the world. She watched him smoke a cigarette. He was just like every other man she had ever been to bed with, she saw, uneasy now that the main event was done with, trying not to twitch, his eyes flicking here and there as if in search of a means of escape. She knew what was the matter with him. It was not that sadness men were supposed to feel afterwards-that was just an excuse, thought up by a man-but resentment at having been so needy and, worse, of having shown that neediness. But why was she not resentful of his resentment? She could not be angry with him. An upside-down comma of blond hair stood upright on the crown of his great solid head, and she saw for a second how he would have been as a child, big already and baffled by the world and terrified of showing it. When he came to the end of his cigarette he lit another one from the stub.

"You could enter the Olympics," she said. He looked at her. "As a smoker. I'm sure you'd win a gold medal." He smiled warily. Jokes, she had often noticed, did not go down well at moments such as this. He fixed his eyes on the table again. "It's all right," she said, and tapped him lightly on the back of the hand with a fingertip, "you don't have to say you love me."

He nodded in hangdog fashion, not looking at her. Presently he cleared his throat and asked: "Why did your husband go into business with Deirdre Hunt?"

She laughed. "Is that all you can think to talk about?"

"I'm sorry."

Again a quick, hare-eyed glance. Was he really so frightened of her?

"You are an old bulldog, aren't you," she said. "You've got hold of this bone and just won't let go."

He shrugged, dipping his enormous shoulders to the side and sticking out his lower lip. She had a strong urge to reach out and press down that rebellious blond curl. Instead she rose and went to the sink and filled a glass of water.

"I don't know why he got involved with her," she said, sipping the water-it tasted, as it always did, faintly, mysteriously, of gas-and looking through the window at the garden, with its sharp-edged patches of stone-colored moonlight and purple-gray shadows. On the night after she had thrown Leslie out she had stood here like this, willing herself not to weep, and had seen a fox crossing the lawn, its tail sweeping over the grass, and she had laughed and said aloud, "Oh, no, Leslie White, you're not going to trick me so easily and slink back in here." Now she turned from the sink and contemplated Quirke again, hunched at the table with the cigarette clamped in his huge fist. "Leslie was always up to something," she said, "doing deals and offering to cut people in on them. A dreadful spiv, really. I can't think why I didn't see through him at the very beginning. But then"-a wry grin-"love is blind, as they say it is."

She came back to the table and sat down opposite him again and took the cigarette from his fingers and drew on it once and gave it back. He hastened to offer her the packet but she shook her head. "I've given them up."

They were silent for a time. A clock somewhere in the house chimed three.

"I'd better go," he said.

She pretended not to hear. She was looking again to the window.

"Maybe they were having an affair already," she said. "Maybe that's why they went into business together-" She broke off with a bitter laugh. "Business! I don't know why I use the word when talking of Leslie. He really was hopeless. Is." Quirke rolled the tip of his cigarette along the edge of the ashtray, making a point of the ash, and she experienced a faint twinge in her breast, not a pain but the memory of a pain. Leslie too used to do that with his cigarette, perhaps was doing it now, at this very moment, somewhere else. "I wouldn't be surprised if he got money out of her," she said. "The hairdressing salon had failed-it was called the Clip Joint, appropriately enough-and he'd already got a couple of hundred quid out of me, which of course he threw into the money pit to be swallowed up. I told him there would be no more where that came from. Which didn't improve domestic harmony. I'd sue him, if I thought I had any chance of getting the money back."

"Would she have had money, Deirdre Hunt?"

"You mean Laura Swan-I don't know why it irritates me so when you call her by that other name." She put a hand briefly over her eyes. "Money?" she said. "I don't know-you tell me. But Leslie tended not to get interested in anyone who hadn't money, even a little sexpot like her." She smiled a thin and bitter version of her anguished smile.

He asked: "How did they meet?"

"Oh, God knows-or wait, no. It was through some sort of doctor they both knew. An Indian, I think. Very odd name, though, what was it. Krantz? Kreutz? That was it. Kreutz."

"What kind of doctor?"

"I don't know. A quack, I imagine. I don't think Leslie knew anyone that wasn't a fraud of some sort."

When one or the other of them was not speaking the silence of the night came down upon the room like a dark, soft cloak. Quirke drummed his fingers on the table. "Kreutz," he said.

"Yes. With a K."

He sat thinking, then said: "You mentioned photographs, letters."

"Did I?"

"Yes, you did."

She made a disgusted grimace. "They were in an attaché case under our bed. Just lying there, just like that. I think he must have wanted me to find them."

"Why? I mean, why would he want you to find them?"

"For amusement. Or to give himself a thrill. There's a side to Leslie that's a little boy with a dirty mind, showing his thing to the girls to make them squeal." She looked to the side, seeming baffled. "Why did I ever marry him?"

He waited a moment, cautiously.

"Who were the photographs of?" he asked.

"Oh, women, of course."

"Women you knew?"

She laughed. "God, no."

"Prostitutes?"

"No, I don't think so. Just… women. Middle-aged, most of them, showing themselves off while they still had something to show, just about." She gave him a brittle glance. "I didn't look at them very closely."

"Were there any of Deirdre-Laura Swan?"

"No." She seemed almost amused by the possibility. "I would have noticed."

"And who took them-Leslie?"

"I don't know. Him, or the Indian, Kreutz-all his patients, so-called, were women, so Leslie said."

"And the letters?"

"They were hers, the Swan woman's. Not letters, really, just jumbles of filthy things, images, fantasies. I'm sure Leslie got her to write them for him. He liked hearing that kind of thing-" She stopped, and looked down, biting her lip at the side. "That's another thing when a marriage breaks up," she said softly, "the sense of shame it leaves you with." She stood up, seeming suddenly exhausted, and walked to the sink and filled another glass of water. She drank thirstily, facing away from him. He was afraid she might be weeping, and was relieved when she turned to him with a strained smile. "The beauty parlor was in trouble too, at the end. God knows what kind of legal chicanery Leslie had been up to. He probably had his hand in the till, too, if I know him. He really didn't have an honest bone in his body." She checked herself. "Why do I keep talking about him in the past tense?"

He smoked in silence for a moment and then asked: "Did you ever meet her, Deirdre Hunt?"

She pulled a face of agonized annoyance. "I told you, her name was Laura Swan. And no, I never met her. Leslie would not have been that stupid." She paused. "A wife always knows, isn't that what they say? Or is it that a wife never knows. Either way, Leslie was careful to keep his doxie out of my line of fire."

"And the photos, the letters, where are they now?"

"Gone. I burned them. It took forever. There I was, kneeling in front of the fireplace out in the den, feeding all that filth into the flames and crying like an idiot."

He said nothing, and after a moment he crushed out the last of his cigarette and stood up. She watched him, and said: "You could stay, you know."

He shook his head. "No, I…" She saw him trying to think of a reason, an excuse, to be gone.

"It's all right," she said.

"The thing is, I-"

She held up a hand. "Please. Let's not start lying to each other already."

He hovered barefoot on the tiles, looking at her helplessly. Yes, she thought, they're all the same, all just overgrown infants; once they've had the breast they lose interest.

He went upstairs to fetch the rest of his clothes, and when he was dressed she saw him to the door. On the step they lingered. The dark air was moist and chill, and fragrant with the scent of some night-flowering plant. She asked if he would come back to see her and he said of course he would. He plainly could not wait to be away, and at last she took pity on him and kissed him quickly on the cheek and put a hand to his shoulder and gave him a soft push. When she had shut the door on him she leaned her forehead against the wood and closed her eyes. She had not even asked him for his phone number. But then, he had not offered it, either.

5

IT WAS AMAZING HOW QUICKLY THEY GOT THE SALON UP AND GOING. Deirdre never doubted it would be a success, but she had not dreamt it would all be so smooth and so easy. She discovered what a flair she had for business, not only the treatments and the selling of things but the finance side as well. Yes, she had a real head for money. When she had first heard that Leslie White ran a hairdressing salon it had been, though she tried to deny it to herself, a definite letdown. At first she thought it meant that he was a hairdresser, and that was a real shock, for she knew what they were like, most of them. But he had laughed and asked how she could have had such a notion-what did she take him for, a pansy? She said of course not, that the thought had never entered her mind, though it had, if only for a second. After all, sometimes it was hard to tell whether a man was that way inclined; not all of them were limp-wristed or spoke with a lisp. And in fact, when she thought about it, it struck her that Leslie's own wrists were not the stiffest, and on certain words he did lisp a bit. Still, she was sure he was normal, and yet she could not get rid of the niggle of disappointment that he was in that line of business. She was not sure what she had expected him to be. Something more romantic, certainly, than the proprietor of the Clip Joint, as it was named-which she had to admit was funny-or as it had been named, for the place had just been shut down.

Leslie talked about the failure of the Clip Joint lightheartedly, with a show of cheerful indifference. To listen to him you would not think it had failed at all, but that he had let it run itself gently into decline because he was bored and wanted to move on to something more exciting and worthier of his talents. He had plans, he told her, oh, yes, indeed, big plans. He had brought her to see the premises in Anne Street, a big, white-painted room on the first floor with its own entrance up a flight of stairs beside an optician's. Everything movable had been cleared out, but the washbasins were still there, standing in a row along one wall, making her think, with shamefaced amusement, of a gents' toilet. Leslie stood in the middle of the floor in his camel-hair coat and looked about, and could not keep, she saw, the look of misgiving out of his eyes. But he tried to be all bounce, talking airily of the contacts that he had, the moneymen and the entrepreneurs he was intimately acquainted with, who as soon as they heard his plans would be falling over each other to invest, there was no doubt of that.

"A beauty parlor," he had said, his face alight, "that's the thing. Hairdressing is fine for your average hairdresser, who doesn't know how to do anything else. But the full package, the all-over treatment for the whole woman, that's where the profits are."

She had the clear impression that none of this was original. It was the kind of thing he would have heard from one of his contacts, one of the moneymen, the "chaps with vision," as he called them. He caught the skeptical glint in her look, though she had tried to hide it, but all he did was smirk and bite his lip, like a little boy caught out in a fib. That was one of the things she liked about him, perhaps the thing she liked best, the merrily offhand way in which he dismissed all reversals of fortune, treating them as mere stumbles along the path to unimaginable success, and riches, and happiness.

There was, though, another side to him, and it had not taken her long to see it. When he spoke of his wife, for instance-"that stuck-up bitch," as she thought of her, though she had never even seen her-his pale, long face would flush, and his eyes would take on what she could only describe as a dirtied, a muddied look, and he would make a sucking motion at the side of his mouth, peeling his lip upwards to reveal a slightly tarnished eyetooth. But this show of rage and vengefulness would last only a second or two, and then he would be his old playful self again, and he would do that sort of dance step that he did, prancing nimbly sideways towards her and lifting one hand with palm upturned and touching her teasingly under the chin with the tip of an index finger, humming some tune buzzingly with lips tight shut.

He had lost no time in attempting to get her to go with him, of course. She admitted candidly to herself that he probably would have succeeded straightaway if there had been any surface in the Clip Joint more accommodating than the floor for them to lie down on. Yet he did not try it on with her the way she was used to from other fellows. He did not make a grab at her, or attempt to put his hand up her skirt or down her front. He was more like a wonderful and exotic bird, a peacock, maybe, dancing round her and showing off his plumage, smiling and cracking jokes and making her laugh, often despite herself. Oh, yes, he knew how to make a woman feel good, did Leslie White, knew how, in fact, to make her feel like a woman, not the way most of the men she knew did, treating her as if she was a piece of moving furniture, a sofa, say, or a lumpy old mattress, on which to fling themselves down, snuffling and snorting like a pig.

Billy was like that, sometimes.

It had not taken her long to find out that Leslie was married. She had assumed from the start that he was. He did not tell her much about his wife. She had money, it seemed-she was in business herself, something to do with the rag trade-but kept it safely locked away from him. He did let it slip that she had on at least one tricky occasion in the past stepped in and saved the Clip Joint from closure. Maybe, Deirdre thought, it was that experience that had soured Mrs. High-and-Mighty White on her feckless husband. He was living with her still, although as far as he was concerned the marriage was over, and as soon as he got the new venture under way he would be moving out, so he assured her. All this she took with a certain reservation. She was not a fool; she knew men, and how they talked; she knew what their promises and declarations were worth. Yet there was something about Leslie White that she could not resist-she knew it, and he knew it, too-and meanwhile everything had come to a point from which there would be no turning back. She was the girl in the canoe and the brink of the waterfall was getting steadily nearer and nearer.

In the end it was the photographs that had done it. She often wished, afterwards, that he had not shown them to her. She knew, of course, why he had. It was partly out of simple mischievousness, that schoolboy urge he had to show off the secret he had discovered, but also he had gauged, correctly, as it would turn out, that there was a part of her, buried deep down, so deep that she had been hardly aware of it before now, a part that was, she had to admit it, just as gleefully dirty in its desires as Leslie White was-as any man was. All the same, they were a shock, the photographs, at least at first. When he showed her the one of the woman in the fox-fur stole-they were in the empty room above the optician's shop-she felt hot and excited and almost frightened, in a way that she had not felt since she was a little girl. It was a big photograph, twelve inches by nine or so, but very sharp and clear, all silver grays and soot blacks, and finely detailed. "Exposure" was the word, all right. The woman, very slim, pale, small-breasted, was lying diagonally across a sofa-Deirdre recognized it at once-with one leg thrown wide, the slender foot resting on a cushion on the floor. She was naked except for the fur that was wound around her neck, with the fox's sharp little muzzle seeming to bite into the flesh at the soft incline of her left breast. Her right hand was stretched out to the side, dangling languidly by the splayed right leg; the left hand was in her lap, the thumb and second finger holding wide apart the dark lips there and the index finger stuck inside herself right up to the knuckle. The woman was smiling into the lens, at once brazen and guilty, and her head was turned a fraction to one side, as if she was inviting the person behind the camera, and anyone else who might chance to look at the cameraman's handiwork, to come and join her where she lay.

Deirdre took all this in, the foot on the cushion, the fox's clenched muzzle, that dangling hand, those lips agape, and immediately shut her eyes tight and turned the photo face-down with a snap. She could hear herself breathing. The feeling she had was that feeling, hot all over and at the same time somehow cold, that she would have when she woke as a child in the cot-bed in her parents' bedroom and realized that she was wetting herself, wetting herself and horrified to be doing it and yet unable to stop for the shameful pleasure it gave her. And she was not able to stop now, either, not able not to open her eyes and turn the picture over and look at it again. She was disgusted with herself, yet excited, too, in a horrible way that made her think she should be ashamed, though she was not, not really.

There were other pictures, twenty or thirty of them, which Leslie kept in an old music case that fastened with a metal thing like a horse's bit that came down over the flap. Some were of the same woman, the woman with the fox fur, and some were of others, all of them naked, all shamelessly on display, some of them doing even worse things than the woman was doing with her hand down there, and all smiling that same dirty smile into the camera. At first she had not been able to meet Leslie's eye, and now, when she did look at him at last, she knew her face was burning. He was watching her, and smiling, with one eyebrow wickedly lifted, enjoying her discomfort. It came to her that she would remember this moment for the rest of her life, the chill in the bare room, the winter light on the white walls, the dull and somehow sullen gleam of the washbasins, and Leslie there with his overcoat open, leering at her.

"Where did you get these?" she asked, in a voice that dismayed her, it was so steady. Had she no shame, really?

"Simple," Leslie said, and tapped a fingernail on the one of the woman in the fur stole. "She gave them to me." Then he told her, pacing the floor with his hands in his coat pockets, how he had met her, the woman, one afternoon in a basement pub in Dawson Street where he used to drink-he would not tell her the woman's name, said she might recognize it, since her husband was well known, and would only call her Mrs. T.-and how he had made friends with her in the hope that she might put some cash into the Clip Joint, which was just starting to run into trouble at the time. He had seen straight off, despite the fact that she frequented Wally's place, which had about as bad a reputation as a pub or drinking club or whatever it was could have, that she was well connected. That end of the thing had not worked out, however-Mrs. T. was cautious when it came to money-but she was good company, and a real sport. It was through her that he had come in contact with Dr. Kreutz, and now he and Kreutzer, as he called him, were-he laughed-"Oh, the best of pals."

She thrust the bundle of photographs back into his hands. "They're disgusting."

"Yes, they are, aren't they," he said happily.

"Why did she give them to you-how could she?"

"Well, I suppose she's a bit of an exhibitionist. She thought I'd like them. And, of course, she didn't know I'd show them to you."

"Which you shouldn't have."

"No, I suppose not." He lowered his head and looked up at her from under his eyebrows in the way that made him seem a bit like a smiling, silver-haired devil. "But you're glad I did," he said softly, "aren't you?"

"I certainly am not."

But was she not, really? She did not know. She was confused. Certainly she was shocked to think that Dr. Kreutz would take such pictures-for she was certain, without having to ask, that it was he who had taken them. So these were his clients, so this was spiritual healing. Leslie, of course, could see what she was thinking.

"I warned you about him, didn't I, old Kreutzer? Now you see."

She shook her head. "But why?" she said. "How?"

He looked surprised. "Why did he take them? Because they wanted him to. Some people like to see themselves doing naughty things. Good, aren't they-as photographs, I mean? Look at the technique. He has quite a knack." He chuckled. "Comes from long practice, I imagine."

She knew she should break with Leslie White there and then. Nothing would be the same between them after she had seen those pictures. And yet she could not do it. When the thought of those women, so lewd, so shameless, came into her mind she experienced a thickening in her throat, as if something soft and warm had lodged there, and she felt a panicky sensation that had as much of pleasure in it as anything else. Yes, pleasure, dark and hot and frightening. Billy, her husband, noticed this new excitement in her, although of course he did not know what was causing it, and when he was home he followed her round the house like-she hated to think it but it was true-like a dog sniffing after a bitch that was in heat, and as for the things he tried to get her to do now when they were in bed…

Billy. She knew she must make herself sit down and consider what was to be done about Billy. Sooner or later she would have to tell him about Leslie White, tell him, that is, that she had met this man who wanted her to go into business with him. That was as much as she would need to say, for now; it was also as much as she would dare to say. For the fact was she had accepted Leslie White's proposal-oh, my God, what a word to use!-his business proposal, she meant, to open a beauty parlor with him. It was all arranged. The premises was there already, over the optician's-he had talked to her about ninety-nine-year leases and ground rents and tenants' options until her head was spinning-and the shop fitters would be coming in any day now.

Yes, it was all arranged, all agreed. One rainy January morning Leslie had taken her to a storage shed in Stoney Batter in order to get her opinion, so he said, on a doctor's trolley thing, a sort of high, narrow, flat couch on wheels, which some friend of his was selling and which would be ideal for doing massages on. The friend, a shifty-looking fellow in broad pinstripes who had the worst smoker's cough she had ever heard, went off and left them alone-had Leslie arranged that, too?-and something in the moment affected her, perhaps it was the sense of sudden intimacy that she felt, despite the damp and the gloom of the place, and before she knew it she was on the trolley in Leslie's arms, biting the back of her thumb to stop herself from crying out, and the trolley was moving on its wheels with every rapturous move they made. Afterwards she had pulled his coat over herself-that famous camel-hair coat!-because she was cold and because the champion cougher might come back at any minute. Leslie had got up, since there was not enough room on the narrow rubber mattress for them to lie side by side, and when he had fixed his clothes he lifted the coat by a corner so he could get a look at her. "My my," he said, grinning, "wouldn't the doc be delighted with you." It took her a moment to realize what he meant, and she turned her face aside so as not to let him see her blushing, and smiling, and twitched the coat away from him and wrapped herself up in it. "Snap snap," he said gaily, holding an invisible camera to his eye.

She had to let some weeks go by before she could face Dr. Kreutz again. Yes, everything was changed. It was not just that she had seen the photographs-that, in a way, was the least of it by now-but there was the fact of her and Leslie, too. He saw it in her eyes, she could see him seeing it. What woman could hide the simple truth that she was in love? Thinking this, she paused. Was that what it was-love? The word had not entered her head before this moment. She softened. Why be surprised that she should think of love in Dr. Kreutz's presence? Had he not taught her about such things, the things of the spirit? What did it matter if he liked to take pictures of naked women? Perhaps it was part of the treatment, perhaps it was a way of helping those women by letting them see themselves as they were, in all their womanliness. Perhaps it did heal their spirits-who was she to say otherwise, she who had lain asprawl on that rubber mattress on the trolley in that dirty shed, and on other beds, on other days, with every fiber of her on fire under Leslie White's admiring gaze?

Besides, it was Dr. Kreutz who was financing the setting up of the beauty parlor. Leslie had gone to him and asked for the money and he had agreed, as simple as that. Or so Leslie said.

Now Dr. Kreutz made a pot of herbal tea and invited her to kneel with him on the cushions on the floor before the low table with the copper bow. By now it was almost spring, and through the window she could see black branches that were already budding and, behind them, a sky of nude white with scraps of cloud flying diagonally across it. She had a feeling of pent-up happiness that might burst out at any moment. She knew, of course, that there were things that could go wrong. It would take work and a lot of luck to keep the Silver Swan going at the rate that it had been going at so far-she could hardly keep up with the numbers of new customers coming in every week and was already thinking of when would be the time to hire an assistant-but she could not believe that between them, she and Leslie and Dr. Kreutz, they would not continue the success they had achieved so far. It was true that the Clip Joint had failed, but Leslie had explained how that had happened, and if she did not understand all the technicalities that did not mean his explanation was not the true one. What they had between them, Leslie and she-their love-would overcome any number of difficulties that might arise.

Love. She sipped her tea and in her mind tried out the new word for size, for weight. She would have to use it sparingly. Leslie, she had already learned, did not take kindly to being mauled-that was his word for the kisses and caresses by which, since the day in the shed, she had tried to show how she felt for him. That was because of his being English, she reasoned, since the English were all supposed to be reserved and not willing to let on how they were really feeling. He had a way at times of drawing back from her, his head lifted on its long, pale neck, and looking down at her with an expression that was less a smile than a wince, and giving a little puff of laughter through his nostrils, as if she had done something too foolish for words. He was rough with her, too, sometimes. By now they had a place where they could be together, a bed-sitter in Percy Place, rented, or borrowed, more likely, from another of Leslie's friends. They would go there in the afternoons, and pull the curtains, and he would undress her slowly and almost as if absentmindedly, and then take her in his arms and press himself against her, trembling in the peculiar way that he did-girlishly, almost-which excited her and at the same time made her want not so much to make love to him as to cradle him in her arms and rock him to sleep. But he was no baby. He would bite her lips until they bled, or twist her arm behind her back and make her gasp, and once, when he could not manage to do anything and she laughed it off and said it did not matter, instead of being grateful for her understanding he smacked her across the face, hard, so that her head flew back and banged off the headboard and she saw stars. And then there was the night when she and Billy were getting ready for bed-what a trial it was for her now, being in bed with poor Billy-and he saw the red weals on the backs of her legs where Leslie had whipped her with his leather belt-God, how she had moaned-and she had to make up an excuse, which she could not believe he believed, about having been sitting on a chair that had slats in the seat. And yet she-

"More tea?" Dr. Kreutz asked.

She blinked, waking out of her reverie. She noticed again now, as she had already noticed, that he had hardly looked at her directly since she had arrived. She wondered if he might be jealous, for surely he must have guessed that what she and Leslie had going was more than a business partnership. The thought made her flare up in annoyance. She had enough to do keeping Billy's suspicions at bay. Billy had talked to Leslie only once, when the three of them met by arrangement for a drink in the bar of Wynn's Hotel. It was a Sunday evening and behind them three red-faced priests were drinking whiskey and talking loudly about a hurling match they had been to in the afternoon. Billy had been shy of the Englishman with his hoity-toity accent, as he described it afterwards, and his silver cravat, and had looked at his boots and talked in a mumble-not that he had much to say, anyway-his nearly colorless eyebrows meeting in a frown and the tips of his ears bright pink. When she had looked at him she had felt not so much guilty as… sorrowful; yes, that was the only word for it, she felt sorrow for him, the softhearted poor lummox. And, more strangely, it seemed to her that she had never loved him as much, with such tenderness and compassion and simple concern, as she did in that half hour in that smoky bar with the voices of those priests breaking in on them and Leslie and she trying not to look at each other in case they might burst out laughing.

Leslie had been very good with Billy, had really acted the part of the businessman, going on about overhead and annual turnover and broad profit margins and all the rest of it. She had to admire him-what a bamboozler he was. He pretended to listen to Billy's mumbles, nodding solemnly with his lips pursed, and made sure to remember to call her Mrs. Hunt and not by her first name. To hear him you would think it was a hospital or something the two of them were setting up. When he said that "Mrs. Hunt would make a great contribution to the salon"-he had learned to follow her example and call it a beauty salon instead of a beauty parlor, which she thought sounded common-"because of her long experience as a pharmacist," Billy blinked. She wondered how much of Leslie's palaver he was swallowing. He knew a bit about business himself, and he was no fool when it came to dealing with people. She told herself not to say too much but to keep quiet and let Leslie do the talking. She limited herself to a glass of Babycham and nursed it for the whole time they were there, for drink went straight to her head on occasions like this-although when in her life, she asked herself, had there been another such occasion?-and above all she must not show how excited she was. For the fact was, it was only now, as she stood there in her sensible shoes and the charcoal-gray two-piece costume she had bought to be her business suit, listening to Leslie fast-talking her husband, that the full realization came to her of just what an adventure it was that she had embarked on. The future suddenly was-

"You must, you know," Dr. Kreutz said, "you must be careful-very very careful."

She looked at him blankly. What was he talking about?

"Careful of what?" she asked.

He shrugged uncomfortably. Today he was wearing a blue silk caftan-it was another of the exotic words and names for things that he had taught her-and under it his shoulders looked more than ever like a coat hanger.

"Why, all this," he said, "this business you have started." There was a new, plaintive note in his voice, she noticed, and between phrases he kept making a sort of humming sound under his breath. "Mr. White's previous enterprise failed, you know-hmm hmm-and Mr. White himself maybe is not-hmm-everything that he seems."

Well! she thought. Talk about the kettle calling the pot black. She felt like inquiring where his camera was today, and how many clients he had taken pictures of recently. But she could not be indignant with him for long. In her newfound state of bliss she could not be indignant with anyone, even Billy, or not for long, anyway. Of course Leslie was not all that he seemed, but she knew that if he was anything, he was more of it rather than less. Only that more, of course, was something Dr. Kreutz would not understand. Now she pushed her cup away-it had a peculiar aftertaste, cloying and sickly sweet-and said that she must be going. When she stood up, however, she felt suddenly light in the head, and it seemed for a moment that she might fall over. The doctor was on his feet in a flash and holding her hand, and with his other hand under her elbow he led her to the sofa-that sofa-and lowered her gently onto the cushions and stood back, watching her, his head on one side and his lips set in that down-turned way that he had, which was the nearest he ever came to a smile.

"Rest," he said softly. "Rest now, my dear lady, my dear dear lady."

She thought of all the women who had lain down there, naked and showing themselves off. She wondered what it would feel like to be exposed like that, not in front of a man, exactly, but a camera. And wondering that, she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

6

MAISIE HADDON-OR NURSE HADDON, WHICH WAS HOW SHE LIKED TO be known, in private as well as in public-had a soft spot for Quirke, and frequently assured him so, especially after a second or a third rum and black-currant cordial, which was her tipple. They had arranged to meet, as they usually did, in a murky little pub on a side street behind the Gaiety Theatre. They arrived simultaneously, he on foot and she in her open-topped miniature red sports car that always reminded him of a scuffed and slightly battered ladybird. She wore dark glasses with white frames, and was smoking a cigarette in an ebony holder. Despite the warmth of the day she sported a mink jacket and a long yellow chiffon scarf, one end of which was flung back dramatically over her right shoulder. She pulled in to the curb with a shriek of tires and the little car mounted the pavement and stopped and the engine gave a final, rivet-loosening roar before she switched it off.

"Howya, handsome," she said, leaning over the low door and offering him a lace-gloved hand.

He bowed and brushed his lips against a bony knuckle, catching a sharp waft of her perfume. "I tell you, Maisie," he said, "one day you'll end up like Isadora Duncan."

She took up her handbag from the passenger seat and clambered out of the car. "Who's she when she's at home?"

"Dancer. Her scarf got caught in the back axle of a sports car and broke her neck."

"Jesus," she said, "what a way to go."

They entered the pub. It was a Saturday afternoon and the usual rackety crowd was in. When Maisie paused on the threshold to scan the room through her white-framed specs a dozen heads lifted; there were few here who did not know who Nurse Haddon was. She walked to the bar with Quirke in her wake and perched herself on a high stool, smoothing her tight skirt over her knees with a demure little gesture that made Quirke smile. In his way he, too, had a soft spot for her, this preposterous creature. He wondered what age she was, exactly-it was impossible to tell from her looks or figure. Her big, square, countrywoman's face showed hardly a wrinkle, and her hair, if it was dyed, was blond to the roots, so far as he could see-he did not dare look too closely for Maisie was quick to anger and was said to have once knocked out cold a Garda detective who was trying to arrest her. It amused Quirke to think, not for the first time, that he was probably putting his professional reputation at grave risk by being seen with her, and in a public house, at that. For Maisie Haddon was the city's most notorious, most successful, and busiest back-street abortionist.

He ordered drinks, her rum and black, and a tomato juice for himself.

"Are you off the gargle?" she said, incredulous.

"Six months now."

"Holy God." She still had the accent, raw and flat, of wherever it was she hailed from, over in the west. "Did you have a conversion, or what?" Their drinks arrived and she clinked the rim of her glass against his. "Well, I hope you get a high place in Heaven."

He offered her his cigarette case and flipped the lid of his lighter. She screwed up her mouth and blew smoke sideways, and touched the tip of a little finger delicately to one corner of her mouth and then to the other.

"So," she said. "What is it you're after?"

He pretended puzzlement. "What do you mean?"

"I know you-you're always after something."

"Only your company, Maisie."

She flexed a skeptical eyebrow. "Oh, sure."

Maisie had spent two stretches in jail. The first time was twenty years before, when she had been charged with running a nursing home, so-called, where women with inconvenient pregnancies came in secret to have their babies, many of which were left for Maisie to dispose of, often in a bundle of swaddling on the side of a country road at dead of night. When her sentence was served she had promptly rented a room in Hatch Street and started in the abortion trade. Shortly afterwards her clinic, as she called it, had been raided by the Vice Squad and she had done another two-year stretch in Mountjoy. Released again, and undeterred, she had gone straight back to work. Maisie was the keeper of many secrets. She knew Malachy Griffin and claimed to have worked with him at the Holy Family hospital in the days when she was still a real nurse, a claim, Quirke reflected, that no doubt Malachy would not wish to hear too often or too loudly put about.

"How is business?" Quirke asked now.

"Never better." She took a slug of her rum and fitted another of his cigarettes into her ebony holder. "I tell you, Quirke, the women of this town must never have heard of a French letter."

"Hard to come by."

She cackled, and poked him in the chest with a forefinger. "Hard to come by- that's a good one." Her glass was empty already; he signaled to the barman for a refill. "Anyway, they're not," she said. "I have a fellow brings them in by the suitcaseful through Holyhead. I offer them to my clients. 'Here,' I say, 'take a couple of dozen packets of them with you, for I don't want to see you here again for a good long while, and preferably never.' But will they take them?" She put on a whining tone. "'The priest will give out to me, Nurse. My fella won't hear of it, Nurse.' Bloody little fools."

Quirke toyed with his glass. "Ever come across a woman called Hunt?" he asked. "Deirdre Hunt?"

She gave him an arch look. "Oho," she said. "Here it comes."

"She also called herself Laura Swan."

She was still looking at him hard along one side of her nose.

"Do you know what it is, Quirke," she said, "but you're a terrible man." Putting on a show of unwilling surrender, she rummaged in her handbag and brought out a dog-eared address book bound in leather. This was her famous little black book, which, as she declared frequently in her cups, she intended one day to sell to the People or the News of the World, to keep herself in comfort in her declining years. She flipped through the pages, reading off names under her breath. It was all show, Quirke knew: there was not a woman Maisie had treated, in the three decades and more in which she had been in business, whose name, address, and telephone number she could not recite from memory at a moment's notice. "No," she said, "no Hunt. What was the other name-Swan? No Swan, either. Who is she?"

Quirke raised one shoulder an inch and let it fall again. "Was," he said.

"Ah. So that's the way it is." She shut the address book with a slap and thrust it back into the depths of her bag. "In that case, I certainly do not know and have never known any person or persons of that name or names. Right?" She finished her second drink and fairly banged the glass down on the bar.

Quirke lifted a finger to the barman. "In fact," he said, deliberately pausing, as if in judicious scruple, "in fact it wasn't her, Deirdre Hunt, that I was particularly interested in. She wouldn't have been one of your customers." She looked at him. "I did a postmortem on her," he said. "She had never been in the family way."

A small man wearing a puce-colored tie, on his way to the gents', staggered as he was going past and jogged Maisie's elbow, and a drop of rum from her glass splashed onto her chiffon scarf.

"Bloody queers," Maisie muttered, glaring after the little man and plumping herself up like a ruffled hen. She turned her attention back to Quirke. "So what," she asked, "was the matter with her, then?"

The fumes of the rum she was breathing over him were making Quirke's head swim. His mouth was dry and his fingers had the arthritic ache in the joints that came on when he was most in need of a drink. Would it never abate, he wondered, this raw craving? Perhaps he was an alcoholic, after all, and not just the heavy drinker he had always told himself he was. Suddenly he wanted to be away from here, from this reeking place, these jabbering, reeling people, this woman with the blood of countless embryos on her hands, and of more than one misfortunate mother, too, if the stories whispered of her were true.

"Do you know-" he began and had to stop. His thirst was a rage now, his mouth drier than ever, and his forehead moist with a chill sweat. He ran a hand over his eyes, his nose, his mouth. "Do you know a man called Kreutz?" he asked, clenching his fists under the rim of the bar and digging his fingernails into his palms.

She focused on him, frowning. "How do you spell that?" He spelled it. "Oh, I know him, all right," she said, and gave a low laugh. "'Dr.' Kreutz, so-called. The darkie. Has a place in-where is it? Adelaide Road, that's right." She chuckled again. "I've had a few of that gentleman's patients referred to me."

"What does he do?"

"I don't know, some kind of mumbo jumbo. Healing for the spirit. Incense and fruit diets, that kind of thing. Women go to him."

"And he sent some of them to you?"

She grew wary, and looked into her drink and shrugged. "A couple. Why?"

"Was it the usual trouble?"

"What do you mean?"

"The reason he sent these women to you, was it the usual?"

"No," she said with harsh sarcasm, "they were in need of further spiritual guidance and advice on their complexions." She leaned her face into his. She was not drunk, but she was not any longer sober, either. "Why the fuck do you think he sent them to me?" She guzzled another go of her drink. A thought struck her. "What has he to do with the other one, what's her name-Hunt?"

"I don't know," Quirke said. He slid himself cautiously off the stool. This was how their meetings most often ended, with Maisie tipsy and morose and him sidling for the door and escape. Behind Maisie's back, and with a finger to his lips, he paid the barman for another rum and black and stepped away from the bar nimbly. Maisie looked over her shoulder and watched him go. For such a big fellow, she blearily mused, he could move awful fast.

The sunlight in the street blinded him. An enormous Guard was examining Maisie's car, skewed at an angle with two of its wheels on the pavement. Quirke veered aside and made off.

Everywhere he turned in the business of Deirdre Hunt, things that had seemed substantial evaporated into smoke and air, and what had appeared open and inviting entryways were suddenly slammed shut in his face.

WHEN HE HAD ROUNDED THE CORNER FROM MERRION SQUARE AND was walking up Mount Street he spotted a figure sitting in the sun on the steps outside No. 39 and knew at once who it was. Even at that distance there was no mistaking the big head with its cap of carroty hair and monk's tonsure. He thought of turning back before he was spotted himself, but instead went on, for lack of will. His rage for a drink had abated but he had a dry hangover now; there was a pounding in his head, and his eyes scalded in their sockets.

Billy Hunt was sitting on the steps with his back sloped and a hand under his chin, like Rodin's Thinker. Quirke wondered what had possessed him to get involved with the likes of Deirdre-what was her maiden name?-Deirdre Ward. But then, what possessed any man to fix on any woman, or any woman to fix on any man? In the case of his own marriage the answer had been simple, and Sarah, dead Sarah, his dead wife's sister, had enunciated it clearly for him: Delia had been willing to sleep with him without a wedding ring, and Sarah had not, and on that basis he had made his choice. But Delia, the lovely, dissatisfied, dangerous Delia, why had she accepted him, knowing, as she must have known-for Delia was clever, and missed nothing-that it was her sister he had really wanted? Had she, he wondered now-it had never occurred to him before-had she done it to spite her sister? God knows, Delia would have been capable of it; Delia, he thought, would have been capable of anything.

He stopped at No. 39 and stood with one foot on the lowest step, his hat tipped back and his jacket over his shoulder with a thumb hooked in the tag.

"Hot day," he said.

Billy lifted a hand to shade his eyes and squinted up at him. "Ah, Quirke, there you are. I said I'd buy you a drink."

Quirke shook his head. "I told you, Billy, I don't drink."

"Did you? I forget things all the time, these days. There's a permanent fog in my head. Anyway, you must drink something-tea? coffee? a bottle of minerals?"

Quirke smiled. A-boddle-a-minerls. Billy would always be the boy from Waterford.

They went round by the Peppercanister Church and crossed the road to the canal. They did not speak. The trees, hotly throbbing, hung their heads out over the unmoving water. A Swastika Laundry van, comically high and narrow, appeared on Huband Bridge, its electric engine purring. Billy Hunt was tall, Quirke had no more than an inch or two on him, and he walked with a sportsman's muscle-bound shamble. Percy Place was cloven down the middle, with glaring sunlight along one side and a wedge of shadow along the other. At the door of the 47 Quirke caught the familiar pub reek of alcohol and male sweat and ancient cigarette smoke that he used to savor so and that now made him feel nauseous. When they were at the bar Billy Hunt asked him what he would have and he asked for a soda water-by now he thought he might never again manage to drink another tomato juice-and Billy ordered it without comment, and a pint of stout for himself. Quirke watched him drink off the pint in two goes. He seemed to have no swallow mechanism, merely opened his mouth impossibly wide and tilted the heavy black liquid straight down his throat.

"So," Quirke said, hearing how wary his own voice sounded, "how is it going?"

Billy tucked his chin into his chest and belched.

"I appreciate you doing that thing for me," he said. Quirke said nothing. Billy Hunt belched again, less loudly. "That detective called me in," he said. He was looking at his reflection in the mirror behind the bar, above a shelf full of bottles. He rubbed a hand back and forth on his chin, making a rasping sound. "What's his name? Hackett."

"Oh, yes?" Quirke said. Johnnie Walker, Dimple Haig, Jameson twelve-year-old. A tin sign assured him that PLAYERS PLEASE. "And?"

"You may well ask." He put his empty glass on the bar and looked at the barman, who took the glass and produced a clean one and set it under the Guinness tap and pulled the club-shaped wooden handle. All three men watched the sallow gush of stout turning black in the bottom of the glass. "He talked about the weather," Billy said. "Wanted to know if Deirdre was able to swim. Asked me where I was the night she died." He turned suddenly and looked at Quirke with his ox's injured eyes. "He wasn't fooled."

"Wasn't fooled about what?"

Suddenly he saw, for the first time, really, just how angry Billy was. Anger, he realized, was his permanent condition now. And that would never change. Not only his wife, but the whole world had wronged him.

"He knows it wasn't an accident," Billy said.

"Knows? Knows for a fact, or is guessing?"

Billy's new pint arrived. He considered it, turning the glass round and round on its base.

"The coroner didn't believe it either, did he?" he said. "I could see it in his eye. And yet he let it go." Quirke said nothing, but Billy nodded, as if he had. "What did you say to him?"

"You heard the evidence I gave."

"And that was all?"

"That was all."

"You didn't have a word with him beforehand?" Once more Quirke chose not to answer, and Billy nodded again. "There wasn't anything in the papers," he said.

"No."

"Did you fix that, too?"

"I haven't got that kind of influence, Billy."

Billy chuckled. "I bet you have," he said. "I bet you have a cozy little arrangement going with the reporters. You're all the same, you crowd. A cozy gang."

This time Billy sipped his pint instead of devouring it, pursing his mouth into a beak and dipping it delicately into the froth like a waterbird breaking the scummed surface of a rock pool. Then he wiped the back of a hand across his lips and frowned into the mirror before him, the surface of which had a faint, inexplicably pink-tinged sheen.

"That's the thing I can't understand," he said. "She would never have wanted to make a show of herself like that. Being found on the rocks, with no clothes on her." He paused, thinking, remembering. "I never saw her naked, you know, when she was alive. She wouldn't let me."

Quirke coughed. "Billy-"

"No no, it's all right," Billy said, waving one of his great, square hands. He bent his face, waderlike again, over his pint, and drank, and again swabbed his lips with the back of his knuckles. "That's the way she was, that's all. So I can't understand it, her doing what she did." He looked at Quirke. "Can you?"

Quirke was lighting a cigarette.

"I didn't know your wife, Billy," he said. "I'm sure she was…"

Billy was still looking at him. "What?"

Quirke took a long breath. He had the strange and surely mistaken feeling that Billy was laughing at him. He drank his soda water. "It doesn't do, Billy," he said, "to keep going over things. The past is the past. Death is death. It doesn't give up its secrets."

For a moment Billy did not respond; then he made a muffled, snuffling sound which after a moment Quirke realized was indeed laughter. "That's good," Billy said, "'Death is death and doesn't give up its secrets.' Did you rehearse that, now, or make it up on the spot?"

Quirke felt himself flush. "I meant-" he began, but Billy interrupted him by lifting that meaty hand again and laying it with complacent heaviness on his shoulder. Quirke flinched. He did not like to be touched.

"I know what you meant, Quirke," Billy said. Again he twirled his glass slowly on its base. The cork mat it stood on had a cartoon of a pelican with a yellow beak. GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU, yes, and PLAYERS PLEASE. What an agreeable place the world might be, with merely a little adjusting. "One of the things about being in my position," Billy said, in a now seemingly relaxed, conversational tone, "is the way people talk to you. Or I should say, the way they don't talk to you. You can see them watching every word they're saying, afraid they'll make some blunder and remind you of 'your loss,' as they call it, or 'your trouble,' then the next minute they'll suddenly blurt out some saying, or some proverb, you know-'she's in a better place,' or 'time is a great healer,' that sort of thing-which you're supposed to grateful for." He nodded again, amused and sardonic. "And the other thing is that you have to listen to all of them and pretend to be grateful, and not say anything back that might upset them. Because, of course, when someone has died on you, suddenly you must be the nicest, most forgiving, most understanding, most harmless person in the world." He gripped his glass where it stood on the bar, and Quirke could see his knuckles whiten. "But I'm not harmless, Quirke," he said, with almost a sort of grim gaiety. "I'm not harmless at all."

They left shortly afterwards. Billy Hunt's mood had shifted again. A light had gone out in him and he had a hazed-over aspect. He looked, Quirke thought, sated, sated and-smug, was it?-as if he knew a thing that Quirke and everyone else did not. At the door of the pub they parted, and Billy shambled away in the direction of Baggot Street. Quirke crossed over the little stone bridge. The trees along the canal seemed to lean lower now, exhausted in the heat of the day, yet to Quirke the sunlight was dimmed, as if a fine dust had sifted into the air, thickening and sullying it.

7

DEIRDRE REALLY DID WISH SOMETIMES THAT LESLIE HAD NEVER SHOWN her those pictures. It was not that she was shocked by them-on the contrary, they fascinated her. And that was the trouble. It was the fascination that led her on to other things, things that she would not have thought herself capable of. For a start there were the letters that Leslie got her to write to him. Not that they were letters, really, more like those accounts of her dreams that she used to scribble down when she was a girl, because she had heard someone say that you could tell the future from your dreams. Only no girl would write the kind of things that she wrote for Leslie. He said she was to put down any thought that came into her head, any thought at all, so long as it was dirty. At first she had laughed and said she would do no such thing, but he kept on at her and would not take no for an answer. What she should do, he said, was imagine that he was a prisoner and she was the prisoner's girlfriend and that she was writing to him to keep his spirits up-"And not only his spirits," he murmured, nuzzling her ear and softly laughing. In the end she said all right, that she would try, but that she was sure she would not be able to do it. It turned out that she was able, though, and more than able.

And the things she wrote! She carried a pad of pale-blue Basildon Bond writing paper everywhere with her in her handbag-and envelopes, too, for Leslie insisted they should be like real letters-and whenever she got the chance would take it out and start scribbling with an indelible pencil, not thinking of what she was writing only letting it pour out of her, blushing half the time and biting her lip, hardly able to keep the lines straight, hunched over the page like she used to do in school when the girl she shared a desk with was trying to copy off her. She took terrible risks; she seemed to have no fear. She wrote at her dressing table in the bedroom while Billy was in the bathroom shaving, or at the desk in the cubbyhole behind the treatment room in the Silver Swan when she was between clients. She wrote on park benches, in cafés, on the bus if there was nobody beside her. Once even she slipped into Clarendon Street church and sat hunched over in a pew at the back with the pad on her knee, panting almost in the midst of that holy hush, the waxy smell of burning penny candles reminding her of other and very different smells, night smells, Leslie smells. As she wrote she grew more and more excited, and almost frightened. It made her think of that time when she was working at the pharmacy and she went to confession and told the priest a screed of made-up sins, about sucking Mr. Plunkett's thing and doing it with an Alsatian dog, just to shock the old boy behind the grille and hear what he would say.

Were the things that she wrote down that day in the church filthier than usual, or did they only seem worse because of the surroundings? She got herself in such a state, her pencil flying over the page, that she had to stop writing and undo the button at the side of her skirt and put a hand inside her knickers, into the hot moistness there, and use her finger to make herself come. The pleasure was so intense she had to clench her teeth and shut her eyes tight to keep from crying out. Luckily it was morning and there was no one else in the place, except a bald and bent old sacristan in a rusty surplice who kept crossing back and forth in front of the altar, stopping always in the middle to genuflect before the Blessed Sacrament, and who did not even glance in her direction. When she was leaving, her knickers all wet between her thighs, she could feel the red beam of the sanctuary lamp boring into her back like an accusing eye. To think she had done those things in a church! She knew she should be ashamed, but she was not; she was exultant.

All this delighted Leslie, of course. "Well well," he said to her, chuckling, "I'd no idea what a filthy mind you had." Although he pretended it was all just a bit of fun that he had thought up for his amusement, it was plain that he really was impressed by how much she wrote and how detailed it was. She could see he could hardly believe his luck in having found someone who was willing-who was, if she was to tell the truth, only too eager-to let him know all the darkest and most disgusting things that went on in her mind. They would lie twined together naked in the narrow bed in the room in Percy Place-that name always made Leslie laugh-and he would read aloud what she had written for him since she had seen him last. While he was reading she would bury her face in the hollow of his shoulder, flushing to the soles of her feet but making sure not to miss a word, hardly able to believe it was she who had written such things. She loved Leslie's voice, his accent like you would hear in the pictures, so that what he read out sounded different from how it had sounded in her head when she was writing it. In Leslie's mouth it seemed serious, somehow, and-and authoritative, that was the word; just like, in fact, it suddenly struck her, just like how the actor doing the voice-over in a film would sound, only not-she laughed to herself-not the kind of film that was ever likely to be shown in a picture house in this country.

Leslie got as excited as she was by what he was reading out, and would stop in the middle of some really spicy bit and lie back against the pillow and twist a handful of her hair round his fist the way her brothers used to do and push her head into his lap. How silky he was there, how hard and hot and silky, when she pulled the skin back from the helmet-shaped head with the funny little slit in the top like an eye winking at her and put her lips delicately around it. She liked doing it that way, liked to make him writhe and groan, knowing that she was the one who was in charge, that she was the one with power.

She would never have dreamt of doing it like that with Billy.

Whenever the thought of Billy came into her mind now she would immediately hurry on and think of Leslie instead. Did that mean she really was in love with Leslie? A girl in school years ago had told her, and she had believed it, that when you thought of one fellow and then immediately of another it was the second one you really loved. But the fact was, she did not know what she felt for Leslie. She was not even sure that she liked him, which was strange-how could you be with someone as she was with Leslie if you did not like him? He was good-looking, of course, in a thinned-out sort of way. In bed, when he had not taken anything, he could keep going for ages. It was easy to tell he had been with a lot of women and knew what he was doing. And he was funny. He would do imitations of Dr. Kreutz and even, though she tried to stop him, of Billy-he had nicknames for him, such as Billy in the Bowl, or Billy the Kid, or the Old Boy-which made her scream with laughing. He would get her down on the floor and sit on her and tickle her, as if they were a pair of kids. Sometimes when he was about to go into her he would stop for a second and raise himself above her on his arms and inquire, putting on the fruity voice of that woman who had stopped them in the street one day to ask directions, "Is this Percy's Place?" Yet for all that it sometimes seemed to her-and this was really strange-that she would prefer him to be not real but a part of her fantasies. That way it would be so much easier. Billy, and their little house on St. Martin's Drive, and her work in the salon, and her mother, who was sick now, and her father she was still afraid of, and her brothers that she never saw-that was life, real life, and though none of it could compare in intensity with what she had here in this shabby little room below street level, with the net-curtained half window looking directly onto the pavement, and the worn lino and the lavatory down the hall and the cracked hand basin and the bed that sagged in the middle, still she valued that other life, the normal one, and wanted to keep it separate from all this with Leslie, separate, and uncontaminated.

Nothing was simple, though Leslie tried to make her think otherwise. She did not believe they were just having a bit of fun together, a bit of a lark, as he said. Sometimes she was shocked by the mixed-up feelings she had for him. For instance, there was the time when he told her there was no danger of her getting into trouble because he and his missus had both been tested and it had been found that he could not make a child. He thought she should be relieved, and happy, even, and she supposed she should be, but she was not. She knew how unlikely it was that a time would come when they could have a baby together, yet the fact that it could never happen, not ever, gave her a sort of empty, hollow feeling in her stomach, as if a part of her had been removed.

No, nothing was simple. And to make it all even more complicated, as well as their very private life together she and Leslie had a sort of a public one, too, in which she had to pretend to be nothing more than his business partner. The Silver Swan was doing well, better than she, or Leslie, either, she suspected, for all his confident talk, would have dared to hope. There were more rich, bored women in this city than she could have imagined. Nor could she have imagined how many of them would be funnily inclined: hardly a week passed that she did not have to fend off the advances of some stark-faced viper with razor-sharp fingernails and eyes like bits of ice. In time she came to think of these women-they claimed to be women, though they were more like men than some men were-as hazards of the trade, and added a hefty premium to their bills.

And how the money rolled in. It had been a surprise to discover what a shrewd head for business she turned out to have, but it was just as well she had, for Leslie, as she very soon discovered, was hopeless-charming, but hopeless. In fact, his sole asset was his charm, and there were many among her clients, she knew, though obviously not the icy-eyed ones, who came to her chiefly in the hope of cornering him for a cozy chat, at least, and no one did cozy chats better than Leslie. She made a point of not criticizing him for his incompetence or his laziness. Why should she complain? For the first time in her life she felt fulfilled. She had confidence, security, money in her purse, and a brand-new Baby Austin to drive, and next winter, if things continued as they were going, she would be able to buy herself a mink coat. In other words, she was no longer Deirdre Hunt-she had become Laura Swan. And she had Leslie, too, into the bargain.

He showed her how to do things that, before she knew him, she would not have thought of even in her most secret fantasies. They were things that made her ashamed at first, which of course was a big part of the pleasure of them, but soon they became a source almost of pride to her. It was like learning a new skill, training herself to new levels of daring and endurance. She had always been shy of her body; she supposed it was because of being brought up in the Flats and having to sleep in her parents' room even when she was well past being a child, with no privacy anywhere, even in the lav, since her father would not fix the lock that had been broken for longer than anyone could remember. Now all that awkwardness had disappeared, Leslie had seen to that. There was only one worry she had, which was that Billy might notice the change in her. One night in bed she forgot herself and guided him into a place he had probably thought she would never allow him even to touch-she had been fantasizing that he was Leslie-and afterwards he had heaved himself off her and flopped down on his belly, panting, and asked in a muffled voice where she had learned that sort of thing. In a panic she said she had read about it in a magazine that someone had lent her, and he had snorted and said that was a nice kind of magazine for her to be reading. The next morning when she looked at herself in the mirror she saw for the first time something in her face, a new hardness, a sort of tinny sheen, and, worse than that, a look she had never noticed before: it was, though it shocked her to have to admit it, a look of her father.

Yes, this place Leslie had brought her to was a different place, a place she had not known existed, and yet somehow it felt not at all strange to her. It was like a place she had been to in childhood and had forgotten about and then had come back to suddenly, unexpectedly. What she felt when she thought of Leslie was the same feeling that she would have when they played games of blind man's buff at home at Christmastime. It was a mixture of giddy anticipation and gleeful terror, and it made her skin tingle and her throat go thick. Or maybe it was a feeling she had known even further back, when she was a baby, yes, that was it, with Leslie she was a baby again, a babe in arms. She had tried to explain this to him one day but of course he had only laughed at her, and said sure, she was a babe, all right, his babe, and he had pinched her breast so hard with the long, pearly nails of a finger and thumb that it had made her gasp.

It was strange, too, that she was not jealous of the woman in the fox fur, the woman she had seen Leslie meeting in the bookshop on the bridge, the one showing herself off so brazenly in the photo. When she asked Leslie about her he had given that smiling shrug of his and said that of course he had fucked her-the word made the blood rush to her cheeks-and then picked up the other photographs and splayed them under her nose like a hand of cards and grinned in that cold-eyed way that he did sometimes when he wanted to hurt her and said, "Fucked them all, didn't I." She did not know whether to believe him or not, but it did not matter, she did not care if he was telling the truth or lying just to tease her. No, she did not care; she was not jealous. Where she was now, the old rules did not apply. It was all right if Leslie had slept with Foxy-that was the nickname she had invented for Mrs. T., since Leslie still refused to tell her the woman's real name-and even if he had slept with every one of those women in the photos, that was all right, too. Somehow, they did not matter, they were like the people in the fantasies she wrote out for him, not real at all. Leslie, for his part, said he did not mind if she went with other men. In fact, he wanted her to find people to sleep with, men, women, anyone, so long as she would tell him about it afterwards. On that one thing she was adamant, though: she would never go with anyone but him.

"Oh, yes," he said, "and what about old Billy Boy?"

That, she had discovered, was Leslie's one big weakness: she might not be jealous of his women, but he was certainly jealous of Billy. The thought of her husband so much as touching her made him furious. She had to pretend to him, had to swear to him, that she would not let Billy near her, ever again. It was hard to convince him. When he had first demanded that she promise it she had asked, offhandedly, almost laughing, just how she was supposed to fend Billy off, for he was a strapping fellow and insisted on his conjugal rights. Leslie had given her a frightening look then, his head at an angle and his eyes seeming to draw even closer together, and had said nothing; only when, a little later, they were in bed together, he had twisted her arm up behind her back until she thought it might break, and had breathed into her ear the one word, "Remember."

Yet he could be gentle, too, and even kind sometimes. She hated her hands, they had never been anything but square and blunt, but now they were all sinewy, the veins in the backs of them almost like ropes, a masseuse's hands, yet Leslie always said they were lovely, and twined his slender, pale fingers in her sausagey ones and lifted them to his lips and kissed the tips of them, one by one, smiling at her with his eyes.

He brought things for her to take when they were in bed together, pills, and drops of odd-tasting oily stuff out of little glass bottles. There was a powder that he mixed into sugar and coaxed her to eat, which just gave her an itch and made her feel bilious, and which only afterwards he told her was Spanish fly. Then one afternoon he produced a velvet-lined box with a hypodermic syringe in it, and a handful of ampoules of liquid clear as water, and offered her a "toot," as he called it. She drew the line at that. "It's good for you," he said, in that crooning way that he had when he was trying to get round her. "It's made from poppies. It's like a health food." Oh, no, she said, oh, no you don't. She had not worked in a chemist's shop all those years without being able to recognize dope when she saw it. He said she did not know what she was missing. All the same, when he had rolled up his sleeve to give himself the injection she noticed that he turned away from her and held his arm pressed in close against his side-how naked it was, suddenly, that arm, how naked and white-and she was reminded of a cat doing its business and trying not to be seen. Yet how beautiful he looked there, too, sitting half turned away from her on the bed with his leg bent in front of him and one foot on the floor, the overcast day's pale, dry light from the window falling across the side of his face, with its long, sharp jaw and sharply pointed chin. When the stuff had taken its effect he lay down on his side on the bed, and she lay down too and put her arms around him, and so they remained for a long time, so peaceful, he with a hand under his cheek, gazing up at the window, and she looking into his face, which seemed, with the window light still on it, to be made of silver, a different silver to his hair, and so like the face of a saint, a martyred saint, in an old painting. He slept for a while, breathing like a baby, and when he woke up they made love, and he was so dreamily tender that she almost cried in his arms. "Next time," he murmured into her hair, in a slowed-down, underwater voice, shivering a little, "next time you'll have to try a toot of joy juice."

She supposed she should not have let him come to the house. She supposed that was the worst thing she could have done to Billy, or would have been if he knew about it, which God forbid. Billy was away in Switzerland, hobnobbing with the swanks, and maybe it was out of resentment-before they were married he had been full of promises about taking her with him to Geneva, but he never had-that she said yes when Leslie asked if he could "pop out" to Clontarf and see her. He was just itching to get into the house and have a look, of course, that was all; she knew that. She let him in from the laneway at the back, afraid some busybody on the street would spot him. She was determined to get him out again double-quick, for already she was having cold feet, but no sooner was he in the back door than he swept her into his arms and kissed her on the mouth so hard and deep that she forgot about the danger and the hurt she could be causing Billy.

Leslie walked all round the house, with his hands in his pockets and bouncing on his tiptoes-he had a way of walking that reminded her of a tennis player-smiling delightedly and saying how fascinating everything was, the wedding photos on the sideboard, the silver-plated tea service her Ma and Da had given her, Billy's salesmanship diploma in a gilt frame, and the Sacred Heart lamp and the reproduction of the Monarch of the Glen over the fireplace. She trailed behind him in silence. Instead of being pleased that he liked the place-her place, since Billy had no interest in it except as somewhere to eat and sleep and slump in an armchair on a Sunday afternoon listening to the football matches on the wireless-she felt a growing sense of doubt, of misgiving. The things after Leslie had looked at them seemed changed, dimmed, somehow, as if he had breathed on them and left them covered with a fine, gray mist that, unlike real mist, did not fade. But then he made her take him upstairs, into the bedroom, hers and Billy's, and took off her clothes in that slow, dreamy way that nearly drove her mad with desire for him, and they lay down on the bed, and she lost consciousness of everything except his lips, and his hands on her, and his pale, cool, glimmering skin pressing against hers.

Afterwards, of course, he had to have a toot, and she warned him not to forget to take all that stuff away with him, the needle and the empty vial and the cotton wool and the little bottle of alcohol he was so careful to swab his arm with before injecting himself. Those would be nice things for Billy to happen on when he came home.

That was the evening that she told him about the time in Dr. Kreutz's office when she had drunk the herbal tea and passed out. She had said to Leslie, while she was getting dressed, that she supposed he had got that stuff, the Spanish fly and the dope and so on, from the Doctor-nothing anymore would surprise her about the man she used to think so highly of-and then she heard herself blurting out about how she had woken up on the sofa that day feeling as if she had been hit over the head. No sooner had she spoken than she regretted it. Suddenly, for the first time, it was clear to her what had happened, what she had known without knowing had happened, and her heart froze. So that was the reason her clothes had felt as if they were on back to front. Why, the dirty old… Even though he was half doped Leslie had been listening, and had heard even more than she had said, for Leslie had an ear for such things. He was still in the bed, lying on his back with the sheet pulled up to his chin, like a patient after an operation; it gave her a shiver to see his head where she was so accustomed to seeing Billy's. He swiveled his eyes until the big pupils of them were focused on her, and waited, and of course she had to go on then, though she tried to make light of it. "There must have been something in the tea," she said, with a little laugh that sounded even to her a bit hysterical. She sat down on the bed to fasten her suspenders, her fingers nervously fumbling with the clips. "I suppose it was something relaxing that he gives his clients. I must say, I did have a good sleep." Leslie made no comment, only went on watching her, and then, slowly, he smiled. She knew that smile. It frightened her, though she tried not to show it. "Right, mister," she said, smacking her hands on her thighs and rising smartly to her feet, "you better be off." He made no move to get up, though, only turned his face away and sighed. His long, thin white feet were sticking out from under the sheet.

Again she had the icy sensation in her chest. If Kreutz had knocked her out to take pictures of her, what was he going to do with them?

She found out soon enough. When the morning post was delivered at the salon a couple of days later and she saw the big brown envelope, with the square handwriting on it that looked so innocent, somehow she knew straightaway what would be in it. She had a client on the table-she was getting to be good, really professional, at massage, even though she had no training and had only read it up in a book-but she had to stop immediately and wipe the oil off her hands and open the envelope, though it was addressed to Leslie. When she saw the photograph the blood seemed to drain straight down out of her brain and she almost fainted. She must have caught her breath out loud, for the client, a crotchety, fat old bitch with asthma, lifted herself up on her elbows with her eyes out on stalks to try to see what the picture was of. She turned away and hurried into the cubbyhole behind the curtain and sat down at the desk there and made herself take three or four deep breaths. She had thrust the photo back into the envelope-was it really her?-and though she tried to she could not bring herself to look at it again. She had gone white first, but now she could feel herself turn bright red with shame. How could he, the dirty brute! It was as if a bucket of slops had been flung into her face. Even the things her Da used to do to her when she was little seemed not as bad to her now as the way Kreutz had betrayed her. How could he?

Leslie only laughed, of course, and held the photo at arm's length and pretended to study it as if it was an old-master painting or something, shutting one eye and tilting his head first to one side and then the other. "He definitely has a flair, old Kreutzer," he said. "He should take it up professionally." He grinned. "Photography, I mean." They were in the room in Percy Place, and he was lying on his back on the bed with his jacket still on and one leg flexed and a skinny ankle propped on a knee. There was a summer storm, and the wind was blowing rain in sheets diagonally across the light from the street-lamps. She had bought cheese and a Vienna roll and a bottle of Liebfraumilch for their supper. Leslie was still chuckling. She said it was not funny, and asked if there was nothing he would not laugh at. Could he not understand how ashamed it made her, to see herself like that, with her dress up round her and her legs all over the place and every bit of her on show? "He's made you look quite the doll, I think," Leslie said. "Quite the pinup."

She said she did not look anything of the kind, and that it was only what it was, a dirty picture.

"Oh, I don't know," he said slyly. "I'm sure I could find some connoisseur who'd pay a pretty penny for a framed copy of this."

"Don't you even think about it, Leslie White," she cried.

She knew he was joking about selling it, but even so the very idea made her go hot all over. When she was handing him his glass of wine she could not help glimpsing the photo again, where he was holding it up to the light to study it, and she shivered. Strangely, the worst part of it for her, though she did not say so, was the fact that in the photos her eyes were shut. It made her look like a corpse.

"What was it he gave you, I wonder," Leslie said. "Must have been something pretty good, for you to stay knocked out while he was setting up this little scene." He threw her an impish look, the sharp little tip of his tongue showing. "You're sure you weren't just pretending?"

She did not deign to answer him. The whole thing was disgusting, and yet somewhere inside her, deep, deep down inside her, a small flame flared at the thought of herself sprawled unconscious there on that sofa, on the red blanket, and Kreutz, with the camera round his neck, leaning over her and pulling up her dress and taking off her knickers and parting her knees… Leslie was watching her. He always knew what was going on in her mind. He laid the photograph flat on his chest and reached out a hand to her. "Come here," he said softly. She wanted to say no, that she was too upset, that she felt dirty and ashamed. But in the end, of course, she could not resist him. As he undid the buttons of her dress he hummed under his breath, as he always did, as if she were a job of work he was about to get busy on.

"I want that photo," she said.

"Mmm?"

"I'm going to tear it up. I'm going to burn it."

"He'll have copies. He'll have a negative."

"You could get them from him. Will you do that, for me? Get them and burn them, burn them all?"

"Mmm."

HE THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY THAT KREUTZ WOULD DARE TO TRY TO blackmail him-why else had he sent the nudie photo of D.?-and would have dismissed the whole thing if D. had not kept on at him so. In the end, to shut her up, he had said that he would go round in the morning and call on Kreutz and give him a talking to. He had not expected to keep his promise, yet early the next day-it was early for him, anyway-he found himself bowling up Adelaide Road in the Riley. The storm of the night before had blown itself out, and the sun was shining, and the smell of rain drying on the pavements and the look of the rinsed trees all in full leaf cheered him up. He had stopped at a postbox on Fitzwilliam Square and dropped in the re-sealed envelope with a forwarding address on it, and a girl in a white blouse going past had given him a hot look. He drove on, whistling through his teeth and smiling to himself, with the wind ruffling his long hair.

At Kreutz's place he parked at the curb and went through the iron gate and hammered on the door and waited. When paying a call such as this one was likely to be, a fist on the wood and plenty of noise, he considered, was a better way of announcing his arrival than merely pressing the bell; it put the wind up those indoors and at the same time got his own adrenaline going. He thumped on the panels again, but still no one came. He retraced his steps to the gate and glanced up and down the street-it was empty, at this hour in the middle of a sunny summer morning-then went back to the door and took from a zipped pocket of his wallet a gadget made of toughened, tensile wire, intricately bent. It looked as harmless as a hairpin. He inserted the business end of it into the keyhole and turned it delicately this way and that, thinking with idle satisfaction how wise he had been to bone up on so many useful skills when he was young, and presently he felt, with almost a sensual satisfaction, the oiled yet resistant shift and slide of the engaged tumblers as they gave way and turned. He pushed the door open hardly more than a hand's width and stepped sideways smartly into the hall and stood listening, holding his breath. He liked breaking and entering; it gave him a real thrill. Then his heart did a bounce and he almost shouted out in fright. Kreutz was standing motionless in the shadows at the end of the hall, looking at him.

He had never really understood Kreutz. Not that he expected to-wogs were different, in all sorts of ways-or cared to, for that matter. There was something in the way the fellow had of moving, though, or of not moving, more like, that he found uncanny. And quiet, too, he was always very quiet. It was not just that he said little and moved lithely; no, his kind of quiet was more a way of not being there-of being there, that is, and, at the same time, not. Inscrutable, that was it-or was that Japs? Anyway, Kreutz was a man it was hard to scrute, if there was such a word. He was barefoot today, and wore a collarless tunic of dark-red silk buttoned to the neck and some sort of baggy Ali Baba trousers or pajama bottoms that seemed to be made of silk too. To cover his initial shock Leslie laughed and said: "Jesus, Doc, the way you're standing there I thought someone'd had you done in and stuffed. And why didn't you answer my knock?"

Kreutz seemed to ponder the question seriously, then asked: "What do you want?"

Leslie sighed, shaking his head in a show of regretful sorrow. "I ask you, Doc, is that any way to greet an old pal? Where's your warmth? Where's your hospitality? Why don't you invite me in to share a pot of your special tea? Why don't you do that, eh?"

The Doctor seemed to be pondering again. Leslie wondered if he was thinking of putting up a fight. That would be a laugh, if he tried it. But he would not, of course, being a Buddhist or whatever he was. Leslie was aware of a faint regret. He had that tickle in the palms of his hands that he knew of old, the tickle of wanting to hit something or someone, provided the someone or something, a woman, preferably, could be counted on not to hit back, or not seriously, anyway. And Kreutz was as good as a woman, in that regard. Without a word now he turned on his bare, horny-rimmed heel and walked into the living room. Leslie followed, and stopped in the doorway and leaned against the jamb in a negligent pose with his hands in his pockets and his ankles crossed. He looked down at his shoes, admiring them absently: brown loafers with tassels, old but good. Kate always made fun of the way he dressed, saying he looked like a successful spiv. "Instead of," he would say, with one of his laughs, "an unsuccessful one, which is what you think I really am." And then the fight would start. She was a good fighter, was Kate. In the early days their rows had always ended in bed; not anymore. He waggled the toes of his right foot inside the shoe. Good old Kate.

"What do you want?" Kreutz asked again, bringing him out of his reverie.

"I told you-nice cup of tea." The room was brightly, almost garishly, lit by a great panel of sunlight slanting down through the window from above the roof of the hospital opposite. Leslie could see how worried Kreutz was by the way he was standing, his arms rigid at his sides and his fingers jiggling and the whites of his eyes flashing. Well, good; he should be worried. "Go and put the kettle on," Leslie said. "There's a good lad."

Kreutz did not stir, just stood there beside the low table with his arms held in that stiff way, like, Leslie thought, a squaddie standing to attention; he would be saluting in a minute. Not that Leslie knew much about army life, having been clever enough to avoid the war and, afterwards, National Service, too. Kreutz took a deep breath, almost a gulp, and said: "I expected you would come."

"Oh? Why was that?"

Kreutz blinked a number of times rapidly. "I sent you something."

Leslie put on an act of remembering, smacking a palm softly to his forehead. "Why, so you did," he said. "How could I have forgotten?"

"I make the tea," Kreutz said shortly, and turned and loped off to the kitchen on his skinny stork's legs. Even on level ground, Leslie thought, Kreutz always looked as if he was scaling an awkward incline. There were kettle noises and tap noises, clatter of tea caddy and spoon and crockery-the Doc was nervous, all right. Leslie went and stood in the kitchen doorway, again with his hands in the pockets of his slacks and one ankle crossed on the other. Kreutz was spooning dried leaves of something or other into a pot that had a long, curved spout.

"Yes, that photo," Leslie said. "Very nice. You made old Deirdre look as pretty as a picture. You have a flair. I said it to Deirdre, I said to her, 'The Doc has a real flair for taking snaps.' " He brought out cigarettes and a lighter. "I posted it on, by the way," he said, blowing smoke upwards.

A sort of ripple passed over the Doctor's smooth brown polished face; it took Leslie a second to recognize it as a frown.

"What?" he asked.

"The photo. I sent it on. Forwarded it. It'll probably come back to you-I put your name on it, and the address here. Thought we might get a round-robin kind of thing going. You to me, me to someone else, someone else to you. You know."

Kreutz did not look at him. "Who did you send it to-why?"

"That's no matter." He picked a fragment of tobacco from his lower lip. "Tell me why you sent it to me in the first place. Did you think I'd be worried because you had a snap of Deirdre with her twat on show, like the ones you took of all those tarts you pretend to treat?" He chuckled. "Thought I'd be concerned for my girl's honor, did you?"

Kreutz did not look at him. "I can't pay you anymore," he said sulkily. "It's too much for me; I cannot support that place you and she are running. When will it start making money? You are supposed to repay me what I have already given you."

The kettle boiled and set up a whistle through its spout, first quavering and then increasingly strong and shrill. "Here, let me," Leslie said, and stepped forward and turned off the gas flame. He lifted the kettle and pulled the whistle thing gingerly off the wide neck of the spout. Then, so fast that it was done before he knew he was going to do it, he seized Kreutz by his left wrist high up and jerked him to the sink and poured a gout of the boiling water straight onto the back of his hand. Kreutz hardly had time to realize what was happening before the water was rolling and seething over his skin. He gave a peculiar, stifled shriek and leapt back, brandishing his scalded hand aloft and waggling it, like a voodoo dancer, or some sort of dervish, Leslie thought. He dropped the kettle into the sink. Some of the water had splashed on his own hand, and he turned on the tap and held it under the cold stream. "Now look what you've done," he said crossly. "You've gone and made me scald myself."

Kreutz came crowding forward and tried to thrust his hand above Leslie's under the gushing water, making a high-pitched, nasal, whining noise.

"Oh, stop the racket, will you?" Leslie snapped. "You'll have the rozzers in on us. Aren't you supposed to be some sort of Buddhist who can put up with pain?"

"You have destroyed my hand!" the Doctor cried. "My hands are my living!"

"Serves you right-teach you to keep them to yourself." Leslie was examining his own hand; it was mottled with angry red patches but not blistering. By now he really was very cross indeed. He grabbed Kreutz by the shoulder and spun him around to face him and got him by the throat with his good hand and pressed him backwards until his back was arched against the draining board. He was all skin and bone, like a long, brown bird. "Listen, you nigger or kraut or whatever it is you're supposed to be-did you think you could blackmail me? Did you?"

Kreutz, in his pain and fright, was making gargling sounds, his eyeballs popping whitely in a swollen face growing ever darker with congested blood. Leslie released him and stepped back, wiping the palm of his hand on the side of his jacket and grimacing in disgust.

"I want the negative of that picture," he said, "and any prints you've made. If I see it anywhere, in anybody's hands but mine, I'll come back here and break your fucking neck for you, you black bastard. Understand?" The Doctor had his hand under the tap again. Leslie moved forward quickly and stamped hard with the heel of one of his tasseled shoes on the instep of the fellow's bare left foot. "Do you understand?" Kreutz did his stifled scream again, and despite his annoyance Leslie had to laugh, so comical did the old boy look, hopping on one leg and flapping his blistered hand in the air, more than ever like a stringy old bird with a damaged wing.

"Come on," Leslie said, "get those pictures."

THERE WERE HALF A DOZEN PRINTS, AND THE NEGATIVE. HE HANDED the lot to Deirdre when she came to Percy Place that evening, and she burned them in the mean little fireplace, filling the room with a scorched, chemical stink. He did not tell her what he had done with the first print, the one Kreutz had sent him, or that he had kept another one for himself, for old times' sake, he thought, and then caught himself up, startled-old times? But when he considered the matter he realized it was true: their time together was up, his and Deirdre's. It had been fun, and she was a good girl in many ways, but it was over. He lolled on the bed with a cigarette and contemplated her where she squatted in front of the grate, poking with the blade of a table knife at the still smoldering remains of the photographs. He admired absently the taut, full curve of her behind, the pert, freckled nose, the plump bosom. She was saying something to him but he was not hearing her; it was as if she was too far away, as if she was out of earshot. Suddenly he hardly knew her-she might have been a stranger, a servant tending the room, or a waif who had wandered in from the street; she might have been anyone. Strange, the way things had of resolving themselves while a body was blissfully unaware of what was going on. He had used her up without knowing it, and now it was done. There would be the usual fuss, tears and pleas, screams, recriminations, but all that would not last long. He was an old hand at ending things.

8

MAISIE HADDON TELEPHONED QUIRKE AND SAID SHE WANTED TO SEE him. She suggested they go to the Gresham Hotel, for a change. He tried to get her to say what it was she had to tell him but she would not. "Just meet me there," she said, in her truculent way. "In the bar." It was midafternoon when he got to the hotel and when he came in out of the sunlight he was half blinded at first, but there was no missing Maisie Haddon. Today she wore a white suit with padded shoulders and broad lapels, large white high-heeled shoes, a crimson blouse, and a scarf of gauzy, lime-green silk. She had a hat, too, a boat-shaped concoction of green felt sailing at a jaunty angle above the waves of her bright-yellow perm. She was sitting on a stool at the bar with her legs crossed. Today, in deference to the venue, she was drinking a brandy and port. "For the innards," she said. "They're very delicate, the innards." He complimented her on her hat and she gave an angry laugh. "It should be nice," she said. "It cost a bloody fortune. How she gets away with it, that old hake Cuffe-Wilkes, as she calls herself, I don't know. Maison des Chapeaux, how are you. Maison de Clappo, more like." Despite the accustomed raucous tone she seemed subdued; Quirke suspected she was intimidated by the hotel's grand appurtenances, the chandeliers and high, gleaming mirrors, the polished marble floors, the soft-footed waiters in morning coats and the waitresses in white bibs and black stockings and little silk mobcaps.

"Mickey Rooney stayed here, you know," Maisie said, looking about herself appraisingly. "And Grace Kelly."

Quirke lifted an eyebrow. "Together?"

She gave him a shove with her elbow.

"No, you clown," she said, laughing. "But I saw the Aga Khan and Rita Hayworth here one time, when they were married."

"Aly," Quirke said. She glowered at him. "It was Aly Khan that was married to Rita Hayworth," he said, "not Aga."

She bridled. "Aly, Aga, what does it matter? If you know so much, Mr. Smarty-Pants, tell me this-what other film star was Rita Hayworth a cousin of?"

"I've no idea."

She grinned triumphantly, showing most of her large, slightly yellowed teeth. "Ginger Rogers!"

"Maisie, you're a walking encyclopedia."

At that she scowled. Maisie was touchy, and never more so than when she thought she was being mocked. He ordered another drink for her, and for himself a glass of plain water.

"Are you still off the gargle?" she demanded. "Would you not have something, to keep a girl company?"

He shook his head. "If I have one I'll have another, and then another, and another after that, and then where will I be?"

"Christ, Quirke, you're no fun anymore, do you know that?"

When, Quirke wondered idly, had he and Maisie had fun together?

"That one you were asking me about," Maisie said. "The one that topped herself."

"Yes?"

He had paused before responding. Maisie liked everyone to keep a leisurely pace. She was gazing into the ruby depths of her second and already half-drunk drink.

"I inquired around," she said. "No one knew anything, or not anything that would be likely to interest you, anyway. Then I spoke by chance to a former client of mine, that lives out in Clontarf. A former nun, she is, living with a former priest-would you believe it? Came over from England, the two of them, on the run from the bishops, I suppose, or the peelers, I don't know which. She bought a ring, or got one out of a Halloween cake, and they set up house together, as respectable as you like."

"How did you come to know her?"

She gave him a look. "How do you think? A ring is one thing, but a bouncing babby is another. Anyway, here's the thing, here's the coincidence. When I asked her about this one, Deirdre Hunt, had she known her or heard of her, she gave a laugh and said, 'Deirdre Hunt, is it? Sure, doesn't she live across the road from me.' "

"In Clontarf," Quirke said.

"St. Martin's something-Avenue, Gardens, Drive, I can't remember. Isn't that a queer thing, though, me ringing her up and asking her about someone who turns out to be her neighbor opposite?"

Quirke waited again, and took a lingering sip of water. "Did she know her?" he asked. "I mean, to talk to."

"They kept themselves to themselves."

"Which, the nun and her priest or the Hunts?"

She turned and studied him for a long moment, shaking her head slowly from side to side. "I sometimes wonder, Quirke, if you're as slow as you seem, or are you only pretending?"

"Oh, I'm very slow, Maisie, very slow."

"Sure you are," she said with a scathing chuckle. "Sure you are."

Her glass was empty, and now she waggled it meaningly. He said: "But your nun-what's her name, by the way?"

"Philomena."

"-She must have had some contact with the Hunts?"

"Only to say good morning and hello to, that kind of thing. 'A nice quiet couple,' Philomena said they seemed. She couldn't believe it when she heard that the wife had drowned herself. 'Must have been an accident,' she said, 'must have.' " Maisie turned again and this time gave Quirke a searching look. "Was it?"

He returned a blank gaze of his own. "Was it what?"

Maisie nodded knowingly. "You wouldn't be interested in it if it was an accident," she said. "I know you, Quirke. And by the way"-she tapped a finger on his wrist-"you may have given up the sauce, but some of us around here are dying of the thirst."

So he ordered her another brandy and port and waited while the barman poured it, both of them watching him as he worked. He was young, with a short-back-and-sides haircut and a pustular neck. He wore a white shirt and a black waistcoat. Quirke noted a frayed cuff, a greasy shine at the pockets of the trousers. This country. Someone had recently offered Quirke a job in Los Angeles. Los Angeles! But would he go? A man could lose himself in Los Angeles as easily as a cuff link.

Maisie took up her drink and resettled herself contentedly, hen-like, on the stool's high perch.

"The night Deirdre Hunt died," Quirke said, "did Philomena notice anything out of the ordinary?"

Maisie Haddon fairly tittered. "You talk like a detective in the pictures. Humphrey Bogart. Alan Ladd. 'Notice anything suspicious, lady?' " Laughing, she took up her drink, a little finger cocked, and delicately sipped. "Do you know where Philomena insisted on meeting me?" she asked. "In the church in Westland Row. What do you think of that? You'd imagine she'd be too ashamed to show her face in God's house. 'Why not Bewley's?' I said. 'Or the Kylemore.' But no, St. Andrew's it had to be. There was a Mass ending, we had to sit in the far back, whispering. Philomena kept blessing herself and looking pious. The rip! She goes in for stylish outfits, you know-the sky pilot she's living with must have money-nylons, makeup, perfume, the lot. But do you know what it is?" She paused for effect. "She still smells like a nun. That musty whiff, there's no getting rid of that."

Quirke was bored, and his damaged knee ached, and, as always in Maisie's company, he was beginning to want a drink badly. Maisie had nothing to tell him. Why had she asked him to come here? Perhaps she had been bored, too. He thought of slipping away, as he usually did, and had even begun to ease himself off the stool in preparation for flight when Maisie, looking into her glass, a little bleary now, told him, with blithe offhandedness, what it was she had summoned him to hear.

9

THEN ONE DAY, WITHOUT WARNING, HER WORLD JUST FELL ASUNDER. that was the way she thought of it, that was the phrase she kept saying over and over in her mind: The world has fallen asunder. At the start it seemed a day like any other. True, Billy had hardly spoken a word to her, and ate his breakfast on his own in the kitchen and then departed without even a good-bye, lugging his bag of samples. Either he had used too much aftershave lotion or his face was flushed, as it tended to be when he was angry. But he did not seem angry, only in a mood of some sort. The kitchen when he was gone from it was left smoldering, the lingering smoke of his cigarette rolling in slow, gray-blue billows in the big shaft of sunlight through the window beside the back door. She had poured herself a cup of lukewarm tea from the brown china pot and sat with it at the littered table half listening to the wireless. Billy had left a smear of marmalade on the white tablecloth; it glittered like a shard of glass. In the garden a bird was whistling its heart out. She reminded herself that before she set off for work she must start the laundry, in the brand-new washing machine that was another little luxury the bountiful Silver Swan had brought to her.

Yes, a day like any other, so it seemed.

When the telephone rang it made her jump. Who would be calling at this early hour? She hurried into the hall. At first she could not make out who it was on the line. Hardiman, he said his name was. Did she know anyone called Hardiman? Then he said he was with the bank. Her mouth went dry, and she felt her heartbeat suddenly slow to a dull, effortful thumping, as if something was climbing up laboriously inside her. Dealing with the bank had been the part of the business that she secretly hated. Banks terrified her; she had never been in one before she was in her twenties. They were so big, with such high ceilings, and so many counters with so many people behind them, all wearing ties, or twinsets, while the men in the back, the managers or whatever they were, all wore pin-striped suits. She was frightened even by the smell, dry and papery, like the smell in the head nun's room at school. Hardiman was saying something about "some matters," and "these figures," and "these checks signed by Mr. White." He asked her to come in and see him. Somehow she managed to get her voice to work, and said she was very busy today, and would Monday do. There was a silence on the line then, a silence that was more alarming even than the man's voice, and then she heard him give a little cough-though she had never even met him she could see him, gray and precise, with dandruff on his collar, sitting at his desk with the phone in one hand and the knuckle of an index finger pressed to his pursed lips-and he said no, no, it would not keep till Monday, that it would be better if she came in right away. She tried to protest but he cut her off, and with a new sharpness. "Really, Mrs. Hunt, I think it will be in all our interests for you to come in, now, and see if we can sort this out."

When she put the phone down she had to run upstairs, into the bathroom, and sat on the lavatory with the pee gushing out of her, just gushing and gushing, she could not think how there could be so much of it inside her. When she touched her face it felt as dry as dead leaves-no, not leaves but ashes, yes, and her throat was so constricted she could hardly swallow, and her eyelids were burning and even her hair pained her, if that was possible. Despite all this, the fright and the panic and the helpless peeing, she was not surprised. This, she suddenly saw, this was what she had been waiting for all along, since that very first day in the pub on Baggot Street when she had sat at the bar listening to Leslie White telling the barman exactly how he wanted their hot whiskeys prepared-"Hot water, mind, not boiling, and no more than three cloves in each glass"-and she had been so excited to be in a pub in the middle of the afternoon drinking with this beautiful, silver-haired creature that she had been afraid she might fall off the stool in a swoon straight into his arms. For what had made it all so thrilling, in its horrible way, she realized now, was not the success of the salon or the money, not Leslie's playful talk or the intoxicating feel of his fingers on her skin, no, not even love, but the unacknowledged prospect of this, the telephone call at nine in the morning of an ordinary day, the call to announce that the catastrophe had come. That was strange.

The interview with Hardiman passed for her in a hot blur. She had been wrong about him: he was not the weedy, dry stick she had pictured but a big, white-haired, red-faced, worried man in a blue suit who leaned forward intently with his elbows on the desk and his huge, meaty hands clasped before him, telling her in a voice resonant with sadness how Leslie White had ruined the business. She did not understand, she could not take it in. It seemed that for every pound she had earned Leslie had spent two. He had used the salon as security to raise a mortgage with another bank, but that was spent, too. There were checks that had not been "made good," Hardiman said. She stared at him, slack-jawed, and he looked down at his hands and then back at her and sighed and said, "Bounced, Mrs. Hunt. The checks bounced." But where had the money gone, she asked, pleading for enlightenment, what had Leslie spent it on? Mr. Hardiman lifted his big, blue-clad shoulders and let them fall again, as if the weight of the world was on them. "That's something the bank is not privy to, Mrs. Hunt," he said, and when she went on gazing at him helplessly he blinked and frowned and said harshly, "I mean, we don't know what he spent it on. Perhaps that's a question"-he checked himself, and softened his tone-"perhaps it's a question you should ask him, Mrs. Hunt."

She walked out into the summer morning feeling as if she were the sole survivor of a huge and yet entirely soundless disaster. The sunlight had a sharp, yellowish cast and hurt her eyes. A coal merchant's cart went past, the black-faced coalman standing up on the board with the reins in one hand and his whip in the other and the big horse's nostrils flaring and its lips turned inside out and foam flying back from them. A bus blared, a newsboy shouted. The world seemed a new place, one that she had never seen before, only cunningly got up to look like the old, familiar one. She stepped into a phone box and fumbled in her bag for coppers. She had none. She went to a newsagent's and bought a newspaper, but the change was in silver and she had to ask for pennies, and the newsagent scowled at her and said something under his breath but gave her the coins anyway. She telephoned the salon, but there was no reply. She had not expected Leslie to be there, of course, but there was a tiny comfort in dialing the familiar numbers, and hearing the phone ring in the empty room. Then, before she knew what she was doing, she called his home. Home. The word stuck in her heart like a splinter of steel. His home. His wife. His other life; his real life.

Kate White answered. The English accent was a surprise, though it should not have been. It seemed so strange to her now that they had never met, she and Leslie's wife. At first she could not speak. She stared through the grimy panes of the phone box at the street, the passing cars and buses sliding sinuously through the flaws in the glass.

"Hello," Kate said. "Who is this?" Bossy; in charge; used to being obeyed, to her word being hopped to.

"Is Leslie there?" she asked, and sounded to herself like a little girl, a schoolgirl afraid of the nuns, afraid of the priest in the confession box, afraid of Margy Rock the school bully, afraid of her father. There was a silence. She knew Kate knew who she was.

"No," Kate said at last, coldly, "my husband is not here." She asked again: "Who is this?"

She could not bring herself to say her name. "I'm his partner," she said. "I mean, I work with him, at the Silver Swan."

At that Kate snickered. "Do you, now?" she said.

Another silence followed.

"I need to talk to him," she said, "urgently. It's about the business. I've been to the bank. The manager spoke to me. It's all…" What could she say? How could she describe it? The thing was so vast, so terrible, so hopeless, and so shaming.

"In trouble again, is he?" Kate said, with a sort of trill in her voice, a mixture of bitterness and angry amusement. "That doesn't surprise me. Does it surprise you? Yes, I should think it would. You haven't as much experience of him as I have, whatever you might think. Well, I hope he doesn't imagine I'm going to bail him out again." She paused. "You're in this together, you know, you and him. As far as I'm concerned, you can sink or swim. Can you swim, Deardree?" And she hung up.

When she got home she decided, although she was not hungry-she thought she might never be hungry again-that she must eat something, to keep her strength up. She made a ham sandwich, but had got only half of it down when she had to scamper to the bathroom and throw it back up. She sat on the side of the bath, shivering, and a cold sweat sprang out on her forehead. The nausea passed and she went downstairs again and got out the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed the carpet in the parlor, pushing the brush back and forth violently, like a sailor on punishment duty swabbing a deck. It had never struck her before that it was not possible to get anything completely clean. No matter how long or how hard she worked at this carpet there would be things that would cling stubbornly in the nap, hairs and bits of lint and tiny crumbs of food, and mites, millions and millions of mites-she pictured them, a moving mass of living creatures so small they would be invisible even if she were to kneel and put her face down until her nose was right in among the fibers.

She remembered the bottle of whiskey that someone had given them for Christmas. It had never been opened. She had put it on the top shelf in the airing cupboard, along with the mousetraps and the caustic soda and the old black rubber gas mask left over from when the war was on and everybody expected the Germans to invade. She turned off the vacuum cleaner and left it there in the middle of the floor, for the mites to crawl over, if they wanted.

The whiskey seemed to her to have a brownish tinge. Did whiskey go off? She did not think so-they were always talking about it being better the older it was. This one had been twelve years old when it was bottled, the same age as the gas mask, the same age as she was when she turned on her Da at last and threatened to tell Father Forestal in St. Bartholomew's about the things he had been doing to her since the time she had learned to walk. Never the same in the flat again after that. The strangest thing was how furious her Ma was at her-her Ma, who should have been protecting her all those years. How she wished, then, that she knew where Eddie was, Eddie her brother who had run away from school and gone to sea when he was still only a boy. At night in bed, listening with a sick feeling for her father's step on the landing, she would make up stories about Eddie, about him coming home, grown up, in a sailor's vest and bell-bottom trousers and a hat like Popeye's on the back of his head, Eddie smiling and showing off his muscles and his tattoos and asking her how she was, and her telling him about Da, and him going up to his father and showing him his fist and threatening to knock his block off if he ever again so much as laid a finger on his little sister. Stories, stories. She drank off a gulp of whiskey straight from the bottle. It burned her throat and made her gag. She drank again, a longer swallow. This time it burned less.

It was late in the afternoon when Kate White came. When she heard the bell she thought it must be Leslie, and she ran to the door, her heart going wildly, from the whiskey she had drunk as much as from excitement and sudden hope. He had come to apologize, to explain, to tell her it was all a misunderstanding, that he would fix it up with the bank, that everything would be all right. When she opened the door Kate looked at her almost with pity. "My God," she said, "I can see what he's done to you." She led the way into the parlor. Kate looked at the vacuum cleaner, and Deirdre picked it up and put it behind the sofa. She could not speak. What was there to say?

Kate paced the floor with her arms folded across her chest, smoking a cigarette in fast, angry little puffs. She had found the photographs, and the letters. Leslie had left them in the bag under his bed-their bed. She gave a furious laugh. "Under the fucking bed, for God's sake!" She supposed he had wanted her to find them, she said. He had wanted an excuse to leave, and this way it would be she who would have to throw him out. She laughed again. "He always liked to leave decisions to someone else." She did not know where he had gone. She said she supposed the two of them had a love nest-he would probably move in there. She stopped pacing suddenly. "Have you somewhere?" Deirdre told her yes, they had a room, but she would not say where it was. Kate snorted. "Do you think I care where you did your screwing? By the way"-she looked up at the ceiling-"did you ever do it here? I'm interested to know."

Deirdre lowered her eyes and gave the barest of nods. Yes, she said, Leslie had stayed one night when her husband was away, in Switzerland. Kate stared, and she had to explain that Billy sometimes had to go to Geneva, for conferences at the head office of the firm he worked for. "Conferences?" Kate said, with another snort. "Your husband went to conferences?" The idea seemed to amuse her. "The poor fool."

But Kate, she could see, was not as angry now as she had been when she had arrived. She supposed Kate felt sorry for her, or maybe it was just some feeling of solidarity between the two of them. After all, Leslie had done wrong to them both, to her as much as to Kate. Now Kate, as if thinking the same thought, stopped pacing again and looked at her closely, for the first time. "Are you drunk?" she asked. She said no, she was not drunk, but she had been drinking whiskey, and she was not used to it. "I'll give you a piece of advice," Kate said. "Don't take to drink." Abruptly she sat down on the sofa with her knees together and her fists pressed on her knees. "Christ almighty," she said, "look at us, taken in by that… that rat." And amazing as it was, Deirdre at that felt a protest rising in her throat, a cry of denial and defense. In that moment, for the first time in this long day, she was pierced by the inescapable realization of all that she was losing. Not money, not the business, not her new car and her frocks and next year's mink coat-none of that mattered-but Leslie, Leslie who she loved, as she had never loved anyone before and never would love again. She felt something shrivel in her, shrivel and crumble, as the photographs had crumbled into ash when she had burned them in the grate that day in Percy Place.

Kate stood up. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know why I should be, but I am. I came here to scream at you for stealing my husband. I had fantasies of hitting you, of scratching out your eyes, all those things you imagine you'll do at a time like this. But all I feel is sadness." She stepped forward and lifted a hand as if indeed to strike, but instead merely touched her lightly, fleetingly, on the cheek with her fingertips. "You poor, stupid bitch," she said. And then she left.

The day wore on, grindingly. The air in the house was suffocating yet she did not dare go outside, even into the back garden; she did not know why, except that the outdoors now seemed a hostile place, smoky and sulfurous. She went into the kitchen, still hugging the whiskey bottle, and got a glass and sat at the table and filled the glass to the brim, so full that she had to lean down to take the first sip from the rim. Her eyes felt like live coals and her tongue and the insides of her lips were raw and pulpy. She drank on. Then she slept for a while, still sitting at the table, with her head on her arms. When she woke it was twilight. Where had the day gone? It seemed such a short time ago that she had been at the bank, with Mr. Hardiman. The house was unnaturally silent; she sat motionless for a long time, listening, but heard no sound except a steady, dull hum that she knew was only in her head. Her skin itched under her clothes. She felt unclean-not dirty, but just that, unclean. She took the bottle and went upstairs, pressing it to her chest and supporting herself with an elbow along the banister rail. At the top of the stairs she saw herself like that in the full-length mirror on the wall outside the bathroom, with her elbow out and her fist with the bottle in it turned in against her breast, as if she had the palsy or was crippled or something.

In the bathroom she set the bottle carefully on the shelf at the head of the bath and got down the toothglass. When she leaned forward to put in the bath plug she almost toppled over headlong. She took off her clothes, shedding them about her like so many swatches of sloughed skin. The sharp non-smell of steam stung her nostrils. She climbed into the water-it was so hot it was hardly bearable-and lay down with a sigh. She looked at her pale body under the water, its shifting lines, its wavering planes. Then she kneeled up and poured the last of the whiskey into the glass-had she really drunk the whole bottle?-and lay down again up to her neck in the water, holding the glass between her sluggishly buoyant breasts. Her mind wandered in vague distress over scenes of her past life, the Christmas when her Da brought her the present of the bicycle, the day she knocked out Tommy Goggin's tooth, the glorious morning when she marched into the pharmacy and told that dirty old brute Plunkett that she was resigning and off to start up a business of her own. She dozed for a while, until the bathwater went cold and she woke up shaking. She wrapped herself in a towel and went into the bedroom, staggering in the doorway and hurting her shoulder against the door-jamb. It was dark by now but she did not bother to put on the light. The shaking had lessened but her teeth were chattering. She drew back the bedcovers and, still wrapped in the damp towel, lay down and pulled the sheet to her chin. There was a full moon shining in the window, watching her like a fat and gloating eye. She cried for a while, the shivering making hiccups of her sobs. What was she crying for-what good would crying do? Everything had fallen asunder.

She watched the moon, and suddenly saw herself, so clear, in radiant light, standing those summer evenings at the window in the flat when she was a girl, smelling the lovely smell from the biscuit factory and listening to the bird singing on the black wire. She had stopped crying. Maybe something was still possible, maybe something could be salvaged from the wreck that Leslie had made of things. "Yes," she said aloud, "maybe we can save something, after all." Then she remembered Kate White touching her face with her fingers, so gently. She had liked her, despite everything. They might have been friends, if things had been different. They might even have gone into business together, might have started up another salon, without Leslie. Thinking these consoling thoughts she sighed, and smiled into the moonlit darkness, and closed her eyes. And closed her eyes.