Vengeance

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither woman paid him any heed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Shot.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sylvia Clancy went and sat down beside Mona on the sofa and tried to take her hand, but Mona kept her hands clasped, and did not look at her.

“I suppose,” Mona said, mildly, thoughtfully, “we’ll have to cancel the party, now.”

Mrs. Clancy and the Superintendent decided not to hear this, and to act as if it had not been said. No doubt the young woman was suffering from shock. At the window, Samuel Delahaye made a snorting sound that might have been laughter.

Was that an ambulance siren, in the distance?

“I think, ma’am,” the Superintendent said softly, addressing Sylvia Clancy over the back of the sofa, “I think I’ll be on my way.”

“Yes,” the woman said, not looking at him.

Still he lingered. “There’ll be people out, after me,” he said. “To ask questions, and the like.” He waited. No response came. He coughed delicately into his fist and turned away and walked as if on eggshells to the door. In the hall he brought out a handkerchief and took off his cap and gave the shiny peak a wipe. In the dimness at the back of the hall a white face appeared for a moment and was gone. The housekeeper-what was her name? Hennigan? No, Hartigan. He put on his cap again and went out to the car. The young Guard who had driven him down here-he could not remember his name, either-hopped out from behind the wheel and scurried round to the passenger side and opened the door for him and stood to attention. The leather seat was hot where the sun had been shining on it. “Right,” the Superintendent said, with a grim sigh. “Let’s go.” The young Guard started up the engine, and did something to the gears that made the rear wheels spin in the gravel.

In the lounge, Samuel Delahaye wheeled himself away from the French windows and approached the two women seated on the sofa.

“That’s a fine-” he began, glaring at Sylvia, and had to stop and cough harshly and start again. “That’s a fine thing that cullion of a son of yours is after doing now.”