Vengeance

4

Sylvia Clancy was afraid of both her husband and her son. She had tried for a long time to deny to herself that this was so, but it was. She did not feel menaced by them or believe they would do her physical harm. What she most feared was their potential to harm themselves, to damage their lives, and hers; to-the word shocked her but she had to admit it-to contaminate the little world the family shared together. They were not wicked, either of them, and probably they loved her, in their way, though it would not be the same as the way she loved them. She had them, as she always thought, in her care. They were her charges. She had to protect them, from the world but, much more, from themselves. She was aware of how outlandish this would sound if her husband were to hear her say it, and she was careful never to let slip the slightest hint of how she felt, how she thought. All the same, she wondered if they did know what she thought and felt, if they knew without knowing, in that way the Irish were so adept at doing.

She knew about her husband’s infidelities. She was hurt, of course, each time she found out about a new one-and probably the ones she learned about represented only a fraction of the real number-but she had come to accept his affairs as a condition of her life, as unalterable as the pain she suffered constantly in her back. It was because of her back, she supposed, that Jack had strayed in the first place. It must have been hard on him, being married to a woman who flinched and drew in her breath every time he put his arms around her. She could hardly blame him for seeking comfort and release elsewhere. Yet she did blame him, she did-she accepted, but she blamed; she could not stop herself. He might have helped her reconcile herself to his waywardness, he might at least have tried. But he was too impatient for that.

Impatience, she thought, was what drove him, was what had always driven him; impatience and the awful resentment that went with it. She remembered the occasion, years, many years before, when she had seen these traits in him for the first time. That night, at the Delahayes’ party, he had snatched the car key out of her hand and walked out into the rain with that look on his face, his mouth twisted all to one side and his eyes blazing. What was it she had said? Something about Victor and Lisa, about what a handsome couple they made, and how happy they seemed together. Had Jack been jealous of Victor? Had he wanted Lisa for himself? Perhaps he had got her-perhaps that was why he was so upset that night. Yes, perhaps Lisa and Jack had been lovers. It amazed her that she could admit this possibility with such dispassion.

Yet these speculations did weary her. Often she wished she could just walk away from everything, say nothing to anyone and just walk away. How much would they miss her, her husband and her son? She closed her eyes. If only she could empty her mind, dull her brain, kill her thoughts. That would be a kind of walking away.

How lovely the sunlight was this evening; how heartless.

She was climbing the stairs and had stopped on the landing a moment to look out of the high window there to Howth Head, far off on the other side of the bay. Below, in the garden, the blossoms of the peony roses were all falling over, dragged low by their own full-blown weight. She had tried to pin them up but they had drooped anyway, as if they wanted to hang their heads like that, as if that was how they saw themselves at their best. It was strange, she thought, to be thinking of flowers at such a time. But life, ordinary life, would not stop, even for a death.

The flowers were not the only things that needed attention. The big old house, in one of Dun Laoghaire’s more stately terraces, was showing the signs of years of neglect. Jack was not interested in the house. Why would he be? He was rarely there. Jack had never got used to being married- tied down was what he would have said, she supposed-and could always find an excuse not to be at home. But that was Jack, take him or leave him.

She went on up the last flight. She had squeezed six big Outspan oranges and poured the juice into a jug, and was carrying the jug together with a glass on a wooden tray spread with a table napkin. Davy was in bed, suffering still from the effects of being out in that boat for hours with no protection from the sun. Who would have thought the sun would be so strong, even in June? When she came into his room she caught the warmish smell of his poor scorched flesh. He lay sprawled on the bed in his pajama bottoms, the sheet kicked aside. He was wearing the black sleep mask that she had not known the house possessed, and she could not tell if he was asleep or awake. She stood over him, listening to him breathe. The sun blisters on his arms had broken and the skin on the bridge of his nose was beginning to peel already. She felt a twinge of embarrassment, standing in his room like this, and thought of setting the jug of orange juice down on the bedside table and tiptoeing away. But then he woke, and pulled off the mask and struggled to sit up, blinking and coughing, and drew the sheet over his knees.

The tray, she realized, was the same one on which she used to bring up his good-night glass of milk when he was a child. How quickly the years had flown!

Davy was twenty-four but seemed younger, or seemed so to her, anyway. Maybe, she reflected, mothers always think their sons will never quite grow up. He was working for the summer as a storeman at the Delahaye amp; Clancy garage in Ringsend. He seemed to like the work and was diligent, Jack said, a thing that surprised Jack, and surprised her, too. She supposed he was trying to impress them. He had confided to her his plan to train to be a mechanic and get a permanent job, but not at Delahaye amp; Clancy. He had not told his father yet, and neither had she. Jack would make a fuss, but she knew there would be no point in arguing; Davy was as stubborn as his father, and would not be told, or cajoled, but would go his own sweet way. She had asked him what he wanted to work at, if he was not going to continue at college, but he would not tell her.

“I brought you some orange juice,” she said. She showed him the jug and the glass. “It’s freshly squeezed.” Looking exhausted, he sat slumped forward, with his head hanging and his arms draped over the mound of his knees. He was very fair-he had her coloring, which was why he had burned so badly under the sun. She looked down at him. A spur of hair stood up on the crown of his head, and she remembered how when he was little she used to have to wet the comb under the tap to get that same recalcitrant curl to lie flat. Was she wrong to dwell on the past like this? She should be treating him like an adult, not all the time harking back to how things were when he was still her little boy. “How do you feel?” she asked. He shrugged, still slumped over his knees. “Drink some of this juice,” she said. “It will help to cool you down.”

She poured the juice and tapped the glass gently against his shoulder, and with a shuddery sigh he took it from her and drank, and had to stop to cough again, and drank again. “That’s good,” he said. “Thanks.”

She sat down on the side of the bed. Since she had come into the room he had not once met her eye. “How are you feeling?” she asked again.

“I can smell myself,” he said. “I can actually smell my skin where it got burned. It’s like fried pork.”

She smiled, and he smiled too, ruefully, although he still would not look at her. He finished the juice and handed her back the glass. She asked if he would like more and he shook his head, and rubbed a finger rapidly back and forth under his nose. It was no good trying not to see these little things-the way he was sitting on the bed, the way he rubbed his nose, that springy curl sticking up-that made her think of him as a child again. The boy was still there, inside the young man’s body. It was the same with all of them, all the men she had ever known, in her family or outside it; they reverted to childhood when they were hurt, or sad, or in trouble.

“A policeman telephoned,” Sylvia said. “A detective. He wants to talk to you. I said you weren’t well, and that you were sleeping.” Davy did not respond to this, only sat with his head hanging, his lower lip thrust out, and picked at a loose thread in the seam of the sheet. “What will you tell him?” she asked. “I mean, what will you say?” Oh, that look, she remembered that, too, the brows drawn down and the lip thrust out and his neck sunk between his shoulders. “Tell me, will you?” she said. “Tell me what happened.”

“I told you already,” he said, with the hint of a whine in his voice. That sullenness, she thought, that resentment, just like his father. He tugged with miniature violence at the thread, drawing in his lip now and tightening his mouth. “There’s nothing more to say.”

“Well,” she said patiently, “why don’t you tell me again. What did-what did he say?”

“He said nothing.”

“He must have said something.”

A ship was leaving Dun Laoghaire Harbor, they heard the sound of its siren shaking the stillness of the sunlit evening. Once when they were crossing to Holyhead they had been on deck when the horn went off like that, like the last trump, and Davy, her Davy, who was four or five at the time, had been so frightened by the terrible sound he had burst into tears and clung to her legs and buried his face in her skirts. They had been so close in those days, the two of them; so close.

“He told me a story,” Davy said, “about when he was a child and his old man took him out in the car one day and gave him money to buy an ice cream and drove off when he was in the shop.”

“Drove off?”

“And left him there. To teach him self-sufficiency, self-confidence, something like that-I can’t remember.”

Sylvia pursed her lips and nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid that would be the kind of thing old Sam Delahaye would do, all right. What else?”

“ What what else?” That whining note again.

“Was that all Victor said? What happened then?”

“‘What happened then,’” Davy said with heavy sarcasm, mimicking her and waggling his head, “was that he produced this pistol, a huge thing, like a cowboy’s six-shooter, and stuck the barrel up to his chest and fired.”

Now it was she who began picking at the sheet. “Do you think-do you think he meant to do it-”

“Jesus, Ma!”

“-that he didn’t just mean it as a joke, or something, that went wrong?”

Davy laughed grimly. “Some joke.”

“He could be so-odd, at times. Unpredictable.”

“He meant to do it, all right,” Davy said. “There was no mistake about it.”

“But why?” she almost wailed.

Her son closed his eyes and heaved a histrionic sigh of exasperation and annoyance. “I told you. I-don’t-know.”

And why, she wanted to ask, why did he take you for a witness-why you? “Something must have been terribly wrong with him.”

Davy snorted. “Well, yes, I’d say so. You don’t put a bullet through your heart unless there’s something fairly seriously the matter.”

She did not mind the sarcasm or the mockery-she was used to it-but she wished he would look at her, look her straight in the eye, just once, and tell her again that he did not know why Victor Delahaye-Victor, of all people-should have taken him out to sea in a boat and make him watch while he killed himself. “What shall I tell that detective,” she asked, “if he calls again? When he calls again.”

He did not answer. He was looking about and frowning. “Give me my clothes,” he said. “I want to get up.”

Jack Clancy was walking fast along the front at Sandycove when he heard the sound of the ship’s horn behind him. It made him think of his schooldays, long ago. Why was that? There had been a bell, not a bell but more like a hooter, that went off at the end of the lunch hour to summon the boys back to class. That sinking feeling around the diaphragm, he remembered that, and Donovan and-what was that other fellow’s name? — waiting for him in the dark of the corridor where it went round by the cloakroom. They picked on him because he was small. They would pull his hair and pinch him. One day they yanked his trousers down and stood back, pointing and laughing. He had got his own back on Donovan, told on him for stealing hurley sticks from the storeroom and selling them. Funny: it was years since he had thought about those days-why now? Because, he supposed, there were so many other things that he could not allow himself to think about. He was in trouble, no doubt of that.

Dun Laoghaire, formerly Kingstown, is not a harbor but a port of asylum, so called because it was designed as a refuge for merchant ships that for centuries had been lashed by easterly gales and become embayed and were unable to enter the mouth of the Liffey because sailing vessels could not climb the wind and so-and so- His mind reeled, grasping after the old lore he used to have off by heart. His father loved the sea and had tried to teach him the history of the port, its facts and fables. But he had been a bad learner. A good-for-nothing and a waster, his father would say. Wine, women and song, that’s the limit of our bold Jack’s ambitions. Now the old bastard’s wits were gone and all that useless knowledge with it. The old man had spent his life crawling to the Delahayes and where had it got him? First on his belly, groveling before that crowd, and now on his back, lost to himself and helpless and not even able to die.

Otranto Place-funny name. The evening was warm and there were bathers over at the cove still, on the sand and on the rocks, dozens of them, out from the city on the train, tenement families from Sean MacDermott Street and Summerhill, the women fat and the men lean, the kids skinny and white as grubs. Above the strand stood the Martello tower. It had a comical look, he always thought, thick and squat, as if it had once been tall but the top had been blown off by one of Napoleon’s cannonballs.

He turned up Sandycove Avenue. The house looked smaller than in fact it was. One-storied, it too might have been cut off at the top, with just the front door and a window on either side and the roof sloping down. But at the back it extended a long way out, and there were steps leading down to a garden room, where the sun shone in all day in summer. He knew these things because it was he who had found the house, and had even made a down payment on it, though that had been conveniently forgotten. Women tended to take things like that for granted.

Jack rapped softly with his knuckles on the door, rat-a-tat-tat-tat, tat tat, the old signal. She might be out. Her name was Bella. That was what she called herself; her real name was-what? Anne? Angela? He could not remember. She was an artist: blue skies over poppy fields and bare-breasted hoydens lolling in the grass with flowers wreathed in their hair.

He knocked again and waited.

Dun Laoghaire, formerly called Kingstown.

Otranto Place.

Trouble.

The door opened. “Well well,” she said, one hand on the door frame and the other on her hip. “Hello, stranger.” She was wearing ski pants and sandals, and a white woolen shawl, one corner of it flung over her shoulder and pinned there somehow, like a Roman senator’s robe. Her dyed-blond hair was piled on top of her head and stuck through with what looked to him like two wooden knitting needles. He noted a pair of spectacles-he had not seen them before-resting on the slope of her bosom and attached to a string that went around her neck. There was a fan of fine wrinkles at the outer corner of each eye. Yes, it had been a long time.

“Hello, Bella,” he said.

She was giving him an appraising eye, her head cocked. Had she heard what had happened in Cork?

“Come in,” she said. “I was just about to take a bath.”

When Hackett arrived at Nelson Terrace, Mrs. Clancy herself let him in. She took his hat and hung it on the hat stand and walked with him through the house to the kitchen at the back. Young Clancy was there, sitting at the table with a mug of tea in front of him. He was not small, exactly, Hackett thought, that was not the word, but compact, with a rugby player’s shoulders and a neat, squarish head, his reddish hair cut short and standing upright in a flat mat of bristles, in the style of the day-Hackett could imagine some girl running the palm of her hand over that ticklish crest and wriggling inside her dress. He seemed hardly more than a boy. He certainly did not look like a killer.

Mrs. Clancy offered tea; the detective declined out of politeness, then regretted it. The woman was tall and stood in a curiously stiff way, as if someone had just said something offensive and she had drawn herself up and back in indignation.

“This is a shocking business, Inspector,” she said.

English accent, but English to look at, too, somehow-with that bony face and the hair tied neatly behind, and the friendly yet remote expression.

“Indeed, ma’am,” he said. “Shocking.”

Together they turned to look at the young man sitting by the table. He did not lift his eyes. A mother’s boy, Hackett thought, but with something of a boxer about him, too.

“How are you getting on?” the Inspector asked him. “You’ve been in the wars.”

Davy Clancy sighed impatiently. “I’m all right,” he said. “I got a bit of sunburn.”

“A bit!” his mother exclaimed, and seemed startled herself at the sudden vehemence of her tone. “You should see his arms, Inspector.”

Davy plucked instinctively at the cuffs of his white shirt, as if he thought his mother might take hold of him and roll up his sleeves herself and show off his blisters.

“The sun can be a terror, all right,” Hackett said, nodding. “Especially on the water-I believe the reflected sunlight is worse than anything.” He put his hand on the back of a chair and lifted an eyebrow in Mrs. Clancy’s direction.

“Of course,” she said, “of course, please, sit.”

He sat. The chair gave a little cry, as if in protest at the weight of him. He leaned forward, setting his clasped hands on the table. For some moments he said nothing, not for effect but simply because he could not think how to start, yet he felt the atmosphere in the room tightening. A person’s feeling of guilt was a hard thing to measure. He had known entirely blameless people to start babbling explanations and excuses before the first question had been asked, while the hard cases, the ones who five minutes previously had been sluicing blood off their hands, could be as cool as you like, and not bat an eyelid or offer a word unless provoked to it.

“I don’t suppose,” he said, looking at the whorl of hair on the crown of the young man’s bent head, “you’ve any idea why Mr. Delahaye did what he did?” Davy Clancy shook his head without lifting it. “No,” Hackett said, with a little sigh, “I didn’t think you would.”

Mrs. Clancy, behind him, spoke. “Tell him,” she said, sounding anxious and as if aggrieved, “tell him what you told me.” Davy, looking up at last, frowned at her, as if not knowing what she meant. “The story he told you,” his mother said, “about old Mr. Delahaye taking him out in the car and abandoning him.”

Davy scowled. “It wasn’t anything,” he said.

“Tell it anyway,” his mother said quickly, suddenly sharp and commanding. “The Inspector will want to know everything there is to know.”

Davy shrugged and, forced into this wearisome duty, recounted in jaded tones the story of Victor Delahaye’s father and young Victor and the ice cream. Hackett listened, nodding, a pink lower lip protruding. “And did he say,” he asked, when Davy had finished, “what the point of the story was?” He smiled, showing his tarnished dentures. “Was there a moral in the tale?”

Davy was peering into his mug. “He said his father said it was to teach him to be self-reliant. And as he was putting the gun to his chest he said it again: a lesson in self-reliance. ”

“I see.” Hackett leaned close to the table. “And what do you think he meant by that?”

Davy rolled his shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe he thought he was doing to me what his father had done to him.”

“And why would he do such a thing, do you think?”

“I told you-I don’t know.”

The detective nodded again. “And that was it? That was all he said? Nothing else?”

Davy, still looking into the mug, shook his head; he had, Hackett thought, the air of a schoolboy hauled on the carpet by his headmaster. He muttered something, and Hackett had to ask him to repeat it. “What more would he have said?” the young man almost snarled, lifting his head suddenly, with a look of fury in his eyes. “What was there to say?”

A moment of silence passed. “How did Mr. Delahaye seem?” Hackett asked. “Was he agitated?”

“I don’t know what he was. He didn’t say much. He never talked much to me anyway.”

Hackett thought the boy-he kept thinking of him as a boy-was lying, if only by omission. It was clear from his evasive manner that he knew more than he was prepared to say. What exactly had happened on that boat, out on the sunlit sea? Hackett tried to picture it: the furled sails, the sudden quiet, the lapping of the water on the keel and the cries of the seabirds, the man speaking and then the shot, not loud, a sound like that of a piece of wood being snapped in two.

“My son is very upset, Inspector,” Mrs. Clancy said. “He’s had a terrifying experience.”

The boy-the young man-looked at her with another flash of anger, his mouth twisting. “Maybe he was agitated, I don’t know,” he said to Hackett. “He must have been-he was going to shoot himself, wasn’t he?”

Davy pushed the mug away and stood up and walked to the window with his hands thrust into the back pockets of his trousers and looked out at the garden.

“Would you hazard a guess,” Hackett inquired, in a conversational tone, “as to why it was you he chose to bring with him?”

“I keep telling you,” Davy said without turning, “I don’t know why he did any of this-why he went out in the boat, why he brought me, why he shot himself. I don’t know.”

Hackett turned on the chair to look at Sylvia Clancy. She held his gaze for a moment, then gave a faint shrug, of distress and helplessness, and turned away.

In the garden the last of the evening sunlight was the rich soft color of old gold. “Isn’t it wonderful,” Bella murmured, “how long the day lasts at this time of year?” They were lying on a chaise longue in the garden room, she nestling in the crook of Jack’s arm and Jack asprawl with a hand behind his head. Bella had pulled her white shawl over them; the rest of her clothes she had dropped in disarray on the floor, mixed up with his. He craved a cigarette, but he did not want to move, did not want to interrupt this little interval of longed-for rest. He felt as if they were balancing something between them, he and the naked woman, some delicate structure spun out of air and light that would collapse if he made the slightest stir. He was trying to remember where he had first met Bella. Was it at the party in Pembroke Street that night at the solicitor’s flat-what was his name? — when the two fellows who worked for the Customs and Excise had brought a crate of confiscated hooch and they had all got wildly drunk and gone out and danced in the street? He remembered Bella leaning her back against a wall with her hands behind her, swaying her front at him and smiling with those smoky eyes of hers. Or was that someone else, some other girl out for a good time?

“A penny for them,” she said now, running her fingers through the grizzled hairs on his chest.

“I was thinking of the first time I met you,” he said.

“Oh, yes-that opening in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. You told me I had nice earlobes.” She pinched his right nipple. “Always the sweet talker, pretending to appreciate things no one else would bother to notice. Earlobes, indeed-it wasn’t earlobes you were after.”

Whose opening had it been? He had no memory of it-he was not even sure he had ever been in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. Maybe she too was thinking of someone else. He felt a sudden sweet pang for the lost past, all those possibilities now gone, never to be offered again. He kneaded the plump flesh of her flank just below her ribs and she twisted away from him and laughed and told him to stop, that he knew how ticklish she was. He released her and stood up, then bent to find his jacket on the floor and the cigarettes in the pocket. Lighting one, he walked to the big picture window and stood there naked, smoking, squinting out at the sunlight.

“Let me guess why you’re here,” she said.

He glanced over his shoulder. She was lolling on her back on the chaise, the shawl covering her lap. He saw how her breasts, slacker than he remembered them, were slewed sideways, the nipples as if looking at him, endearingly cock-eyed. She was a handsome woman still, and he was sad to see the signs of how she was aging.

“Guess away,” he said. “Why am I here?”

“Because of what’s-his-name, your partner, Delahaye.”

“Oh. You heard.”

She laughed. “It was all over the papers!” She turned over onto her stomach, and the shawl slithered to the floor. She wriggled her behind. “What happened? The papers said it was an accident. Was it?”

He turned back to the window and the overgrown garden. Those tangled roses looked sinister, he thought, like briars in a fairy tale. “You have convolvulus,” he said.

“I have what?”

“Bindweed. That creeper, with the white flower. It’ll strangle everything if you don’t get it dug out.”

“Jack Clancy, nurseryman,” she said, and laughed again, throatily. She rose and came and stood beside him, picking up the shawl and hitching it round her waist for a makeshift skirt. He caught her familiar smell: perfume, sweat, warmed flesh. She took the cigarette from his fingers, drew on it, and gave it back, blowing smoke in the direction of the ceiling. “Do you not want to talk about it?” she said.

“Talk about what?” He was still eyeing the convolvulus.

“All right, sulk.” She went to the pile of clothes and pulled on her knickers, her shirt, the tight black trousers. “He killed himself, didn’t he,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“When it’s a suicide, the papers have a certain way of reporting it. You can always tell. What was it? Was he sick?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Business in trouble?”

“On the contrary. Business”-he gave a brief laugh-“is booming.”

She stood a moment studying his back; he still had a nice bum, she thought, though it was scrawnier now than she remembered. “You don’t seem exactly heartbroken,” she said.

He turned. “Don’t I?”

She went on looking at him, slowly arranging the shawl about her shoulders and pinning it up again at one corner. “You know why he did it, don’t you,” she said; it was not a question. “You know, but you’re not saying.” She came to him and touched a fingertip to his face. He looked back at her blankly, his eyes gone dead. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you,” she said softly. “Aren’t you? You can tell me, you know. I’m the wild horses’ despair, I am.”

He turned from her to the garden again. “You should get that convolvulus seen to,” he said. “It’s a killer, if you let it get established.”

She went up the steps, and he heard her in the kitchen up there, opening drawers and cupboard doors. He got dressed; he felt as if he were putting on not his clothes but his troubles, the ones that had fallen from him earlier when Bella had wound her arms round him and whispered hotly in his ear. How long was it since he had been here last? Two years? Three? Bella had always been an easygoing girl. You turned up, she opened wide her arms, you lay down together, then you got up again and left. Never once, in all the times he had walked out of here, had she asked if he would be coming back. Maybe she was the kind of woman he should have married.

She came down the steps again, carrying a straw-covered bottle of Chianti and two wine glasses. She held the bottle aloft in a Statue of Liberty pose. “Have a drink,” she said, “before you go.”

They took to the chaise again, sitting side by side this time, facing the big window. The sunlight had gone from the garden but a bronze glow lingered, polishing the rosebushes and lending an amber tint to the white convolvulus flowers. Jack lit another cigarette. The wine tasted bitter in his mouth. He had a cavernous sensation behind his breastbone, as if his chest had been hollowed out and emptied of every organ. It was not exactly fear he felt but a heavy, dull dread. Something was coming that would not be avoided.

“And how,” Bella asked, “is the Lady Sylvia?” She put on a prissy accent. “Spiffing form as usual, I suppose, what?”

He drank his wine and said nothing. He did not mind her mocking his wife. He supposed he should. He felt protective towards Sylvia, most of the time. She had done her best with him, for him, and he was grateful to her, in his way. Thinking this, he imagined her turning aside from him with that deliberately abstracted expression, frowning, as if she had lost something and was trying to remember what it was. Grateful, dear? I must say, you have a funny way of showing it. It was true. He owed her a debt, he knew that, but he knew too that he had no intention of settling it, not yet, anyway, not while he still had this fire in him; not while he still had Bella, and the others like her, discreet, easy, indulgent. He closed his eyes briefly. He knew in his heart that it was all over, that old, carefree life. There would be no more simple fun; from now on, everything would be complicated, knotted, insoluble. Half an hour ago, lying here in Bella’s arms, he had relaxed and felt like weeping.

“I suppose you’ll be the boss now?” Bella said.

“Do you think so?” He cast a crooked smile at her and she saw that flash of mischief she remembered from the old days, that look of a boy who has got his first kiss and means to have more.

“Isn’t it what you always wanted?” she said, smiling in her turn.

Her warm haunch was pressed against his leg, and there was a look of slightly unfocused merriment in her eye-she never could hold her drink; it was something that had always amused him. In a minute she would be swarming all over him again. He made to stand up, but she put a hand in the crook of his elbow and held him back. “Don’t go,” she said.

“Got to,” he said. “I’m expected.”

Yet he lingered. He did not want to go home, did not want to face Sylvia, did not want to meet that look she would give him, anxious, soulful, searching. How much did she know, how much did she guess? All this past year he had been sure she knew he was up to something. She did not trust him, never had; he could hardly have expected that she would. He did not trust himself, anymore.

“How is the widow?” Bella asked. “What’s her name-Monica?”

“Mona.”

“He was about twice her age, wasn’t he?”

“She’s young, yes.”

He felt a sort of ripple in her thigh, and she sat forward and swiveled about to look closely into his face. “Oh, Jack,” she said softly, “I hope you haven’t been a naughty boy, have you? Haven’t been putting in your thumb there and pulling out a plum, as you always do?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” he said.

She wagged her head at him, making a tut-tutting sound with her tongue. “Oh, Jackie-boy. I see now the reason for your sudden appearance on my doorstep. It wouldn’t be the first time you came running to Bella for shelter when the Hound of Heaven was at your heels. Or just a husband on the warpath.”

He sighed. “Shut up, Bella,” he said wearily. “You have a one-track mind.”

“Yes,” she said, and made a grab at the crotch of his trousers, “and you haven’t, I suppose.”

He batted her hand aside and held out his glass. She groped for the bottle on the floor and poured another go of wine.

“I hope you’re not intending to make a lamp out of that, are you?” he said, indicating with his chin the bulbous bottle in its straw jacket.

“Is that what you think of me?”

“Oh, yes, I forgot-you’re an artist.” He had not meant it to sound so sour.

“Dear me,” she said, “we are on edge today.” She put the bottle on the floor again and sat back, holding her glass in both hands and nursing it against her breast. “Were you that fond of your late partner?”

He did not respond, only drank his wine and gazed before him, frowning. “David was on the boat with him,” he said.

“Who?”

“My son, Davy.”

She stared. “My God. Why?”

“He asked him to go with him-Victor, that is, asked Davy. The night before, when we were all in the pub, he invited him to come out. Davy hates the sea, but he went, all the same.”

“My God,” Bella said again, more softly this time, more wonderingly. “Did he-did he see him do it? Did he see him shoot himself?”

Jack watched one last, anxious-seeming bubble crowding at the brim of his glass. “Yes,” he said, “he saw it.”

“But-but why?”

“Why did he take Davy with him? I don’t know. Maybe to get back at me.”

“For what?”

The wine bubble burst.

“I don’t know.”

She was watching him, staring at his profile. “I think you do know,” she said, in a voice that made her suddenly sound sober. “I think you’re lying.”

He put a hand over his eyes and massaged his temples at either side with a finger and a thumb. “There was a-there was a problem, in work. In the business.”

“What sort of problem?”

He took the hand away from his face and turned towards the window. She saw the pulse working in his jaw. He was still good-looking, with that small neat head, that strong nose, those broad lips that had a twist to them at once humorous and sly. There used to be something about him, something weak and furtively vulnerable. Now that was gone, that youthful defenselessness, but what had come in its place was not strength, only hardness. She put her glass on the floor beside the wine bottle. She should not drink so early in the evening; it always went straight to her head. It was not an occasion to be tipsy; a girl had to watch herself around Jack Clancy.

“He could never let go of anything,” he said, with a distant look now, talking to himself. “He could never relent. Always had to be top dog, and have everyone around him acknowledge it. Got that from his father, of course, Old Ironsides himself. A pair of them in it-overbearing and ruthless yet still expecting the rest of us to treat them like proper gentlemen of the old school. And all the time they’d cut your heart out for a farthing.”

He stopped. She had an urge to put her finger to that pulse in his jaw to stop it twitching. “Did you know?” she asked.

“What?”

“Did you know he was going to do it?”

“No. How could I? If I had, do you think I’d have let Davy go out with him? Do you think I’d have let my own son’s life be put at risk?”

She picked up her glass again from the floor-what good would staying sober do? “Tell me what was going on in the business,” she said. “Were you fiddling the books?”

He said nothing for a moment, then laughed harshly. “Fiddling the books? For Christ’s sake, Bella.”

“Then what was this ‘problem’ that you’re so concerned about?”

He shrugged, and looked away from her again. “Nothing,” he said. “Forget I mentioned it.”

“Had he found out about it, your partner, Delahaye-had he found out what you were up to, whatever it was?”

He shook his head as if amused. “What I was ‘up to’-as if I was an office boy, stealing the tea money.” He lay back against the sofa, suddenly weary-seeming. “You don’t know what it’s like, having something going round and round in your head, round and round. I don’t sleep, I just lie there, thinking.”

She waited, but he had lapsed into silence. His eyes were closed. She could hear him breathing; he might have been in a fever, or asleep and having a bad dream. She felt sorry for him, but she was apprehensive, too. She realized that she did not want to know what it was that was going round and round in his head. Some things it was better not to know, especially when they were things that Jack Clancy knew. It had been a long time since they had seen each other but it might have been yesterday, so familiar was the sense she had of his resentment and pent-up anger. He was a dangerous person. Not violent, not menacing, even, yet in some way dangerous, all the same. That was why she had let him go, before; he had been too much for her. She stood up, not looking at him. She wanted him to leave. Something had come into the house with him, the presence of which she felt only now; it was as if some animal had loped in silently behind him and hidden itself and now was getting ready to spring out at her. She felt suddenly vulnerable. It was catching, whatever it was that was tormenting him.

“I have to change,” she said. “I’m going out.”

“Where?”

“Just out.”

“A date.”

“Yes. A date.”

It was a lie, but it did not matter, he was not listening. A dense shadowy glow had come into the window now, as it always did at this time of day. She felt like shivering. That strange light was on Jack’s face, a phosphorescent sheen. What did you do, Jack? What did you do that made your partner shoot himself?