Vengeance

5

Quirke had no birthday. He had been an orphan-he was an orphan still, he supposed, though it was odd to think so-and his records, if there had been any, were lost. Not knowing his date of birth, and therefore having no particular day on which to celebrate the annual crossing over as others did, was not something that troubled him. He knew his age, more or less accurately, though he did not know how he knew it. Someone, at some time, long ago, when he was a child, must have told him, and the figure must have impressed itself on his mind, though he could not remember being told, or having been told. It was just there, an accumulating number, as meaningless as any other, and as lacking in significance for him. Each New Year’s Day he took down mentally another used-up calendar from his inner wall, and lifted a glass in a sardonic toast to himself. It amused him, especially when he was in his cups, to picture his gravestone and the lopsided legend on it: a blank, a dash, and then a date. Of course, they could count back, his relicts, and put in a notional year of birth, but it would not be certain they were right: whoever it was who had told him how old he was might have lied, or might have been mistaken.

Phoebe, of course, insisted he should have a birthday, and would pick a date each year and surprise him with it. This year she chose a random day in June, just because it was summer and the sun was shining. She and David Sinclair, Quirke’s assistant and her boyfriend, took him to dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel. She had reserved his favorite table, in the corner by the window to the left that looked across the street to the trees in St. Stephen’s Green. The evening was overcast and muggily warm, but Quirke nevertheless was in his black suit, the jacket fastened tightly and his white shirt cuffs on show. Phoebe wished he would let her take him over and smarten him up a bit, get him fitted for a good three-piece tweed suit in Brown Thomas and buy him a shirt or two of some shade other than white. It was not that he did not spend money on his clothes-that suit was Italian, his shoes were handmade-but he always managed to look dusty, somehow. Not dirty, or unlaundered, or shabby, even, but as if he had been standing for too long in some spot where a very fine silt had settled on him, out of the air, without his noticing. Her present to him this year was a tie of shimmering green silk. She apologized for being so unimaginative, but he said no, it was very handsome-he took it out of its cellophane wrapper and held it up to the light from the window and turned it this way and that, an emerald snake, and thought of Mona Delahaye-and besides, he said, he had been in need of a tie for ages, most of the ones he had being old and greasy by now. Sinclair had bought him a book, Yeats’s Autobiographies in the handsome new Macmillan edition in its smart cream jacket. Quirke, to hide how touched he was, pored over it for so long, with his head bent, that Phoebe in the end had to take it away from him.

They had ordered Dover sole and a Sancerre that when it came was interesting enough though almost colorless. Quirke was fussy about his wine. Tonight he was making himself drink slowly, his daughter saw, and she wanted to tell him she appreciated it-Quirke with drink taken could be difficult, especially on occasions such as birthdays or other supposed celebrations-but she said nothing, only filled his water glass to the brim and passed him the plate of bread rolls. She felt sorry for him. He seemed slightly lost, in the awkwardness of the moment, suffering smilingly the enforced gaiety that none of the three of them could quite carry off. She supposed he found it difficult to make the adjustment between work and here, and probably David’s presence made it more difficult still. But then, David too was being required to adjust. How strange it must be for both of them, dealing with the dead all day and now being here with her, marking an invented day of birth, with the elegantly crisp wine and the fragrance of the food and the glint and shimmer of that suddenly sinister-seeming tie.

“I met someone yesterday who knows you,” Quirke said to Sinclair, looking at him over the rim of his glass.

Sinclair’s expression turned wary. “Oh, yes?” he said.

“Young chap, name of Delahaye. Jonas Delahaye.”

For a moment Sinclair looked as if he would deny knowing any such person, thinking himself the victim of one of Quirke’s odd jokes; Quirke had an unpredictable sense of humor. But then he nodded. “Oh, yes,” he said again, more flatly this time.

Phoebe was looking from one of them to the other with lively interest. She enjoyed watching them together, though in a slightly guilty way. They made her think of two highly strung but excessively well-behaved prize dogs, Quirke a black boxer, say-were there black boxers? — and David one of those purebred terriers, aloof and watchful and not averse to showing a fang when the occasion required. David’s attitude to Quirke was always circumspect, and Phoebe wondered how they managed to work together. But then, the Saddle Room in the Shelbourne was bound to be a far cry from the pathology department of the Hospital of the Holy Family. Or so she supposed, looking doubtfully at the half-eaten fish on her plate.

“Delahaye,” she said. “Why do I know that name?”

“The father… died,” Quirke said.

Phoebe frowned. “Yes, of course, it was in the papers. What happened?”

“Shot himself.”

She flinched. “The papers didn’t say that.”

Quirke shrugged. “Well, no. Our fearless purveyors of the truth in the news don’t report suicides.”

Sinclair with his fork was picking over the bones of his fish with fastidious thoroughness. “How was Jonas?” he asked.

“Very calm,” Quirke said drily. “And the brother, the two of them-very calm and collected.” He turned to Phoebe. “They’re twins, Jonas and-what’s the other one called? James? Have you met them? Replicas of each other.” He turned back to Sinclair. “You know both of them?”

“Hard not to-they’re never apart. I see them in Trinity now and then-they play cricket. Tennis, too, championship standard. I had a match against Jonas once.” He shook his head ruefully. “Never again.”

“Yes,” Phoebe said, “I remember that. He did trounce you.” Sinclair looked at her dourly and she smiled and touched the back of his hand.

“They work-worked-for their father, yes?” Quirke said.

Sinclair turned to him. “I believe so. One is in the shipping end, the other in road freight, I think. Don’t ask me which does which-they probably swap around and no one notices. I doubt they actually work. It wouldn’t be quite their style.”

Quirke was looking out the window at the trees across the road. Their tops were touched with the last copper glints of evening sunlight. Since he had met them, the Delahaye twins had been on his mind. Their manner, especially Jonas’s-cool, amused, faintly insolent-had fascinated him, and unnerved him, too, a little. Theirs was not the demeanor of sons suffering from the shock of their father’s sudden death, as Hackett had charitably suggested might be the case. Quirke knew about shock. In his work over the years he had dealt with many people in various distraught states. In some cases, it was true, the bereaved, especially sons, behaved in what might have seemed a callous or uncaring fashion in the immediate aftermath of a death, but that was the result of bravado mixed with helplessness. For sorrow does baffle, especially the young. The Delahaye twins, as far as he could see, were not baffled, they were not helpless.

“Is it known,” Phoebe asked, “why their father killed himself?” She had been watching Quirke. She knew that look, of concentration and faint vexedness, as if he were trying to scratch an inner itch and failing. “Or do you think,” she said, “that it wasn’t suicide?”

He stirred, and turned to her. “Why do you ask?”

Sinclair held up the wine bottle, but Phoebe covered her glass and shook her head. He was lacking one of the fingers of his left hand, the result of his involvement last year with one of Quirke’s more calamitous attempts to scratch an itch.

“I ask,” she said to Quirke, “because I can see there’s something in this business that interests you. What is it?”

He put down his knife and fork and leaned back in his chair and smiled. “Ah, you know me too well,” he said. Their history together had been fraught-for most of her life he had denied she was his daughter and had let her be brought up by his adoptive brother and his wife-and only lately had Phoebe allowed them to come to some kind of laying down of arms. She loved him, she supposed, for all his shortcomings, all his sins. She took it that he in turn loved her, in his hesitant and fumbling fashion. She would assume it to be so. It was the best she could hope for, the best she could do. Quirke was not lavish with his emotions. “I can see you’re half involved already,” she said.

He looked away, and busied himself with his food. “I don’t like to leave questions unanswered,” he said.

“It’s you who ask them in the first place,” his daughter replied sharply.

David Sinclair leaned between them tactfully, like an umpire, pouring the wine. This time Phoebe did not cover her glass, and when she lifted it she realized her hand was trembling slightly. It rather appalled her, the almost instantaneous way in which she and her father could come to the edge of a fight. “I’d have thought,” she said, “your friend Inspector Hackett is the one who should be asking the questions and doing the investigating.”

Quirke said nothing to that, only went on mopping up the last of his peas and mashed potatoes. He cast a glance from under his brows at David Sinclair. Odd fellow, Sinclair, he thought. They had been working together for-what was it, five, six years? — but Quirke knew not much more about the young man now than he had at the start. He switched his glance to Phoebe. What were they to each other, he wondered, she and Sinclair? They had been going out together for more than a twelvemonth now, but what, these days, constituted going out? He looked at his daughter’s long pale hands, her dark head bent over her plate, her neat little jacket, like a toreador’s, the cameo brooch, the bit of white lace she always wore at her throat. There was something irredeemably old-fashioned about her, which he liked, but which he imagined might irk a boyfriend. Not that Sinclair was exactly a rake. Perhaps they were better suited to each other than it might seem. If so, how serious was it between them? Were they-he shrank mentally from the thought-sleeping together?

He did not know what young people expected of each other nowadays. In his time the rules had been rigid-a hand inside the blouse but outside the bra, a caress of the bare skin above the stocking tops but no farther, a French kiss on only the most special of occasions. What must it have been like for girls, to be constantly under siege? Had they found it flattering, funny, annoying? Had they found it humiliating? He glanced at Phoebe covertly again with a spasm of helpless affection. His feelings for her were an unpickable knot of confusion, doubt, bafflement.

“I suppose,” he said, “he must have been in some kind of trouble.” Both of them looked at him blankly. “Delahaye.”

Phoebe turned her gaze now to a spark of light glinting in the bottom of her wine glass. “Yes, he must have been, surely. People don’t kill themselves for nothing.”

“Sometimes they do,” Sinclair said. “Sometimes there’s no apparent reason. They just do it, on a whim. I had a cousin, when I was young, hanged himself in the stairwell one morning when my aunt was out shopping. He’d just got a place in college, was going to study medicine.”

“His poor mother,” Phoebe murmured.

“Yes,” Sinclair said, “it was her that found him, when she came home from the shops. My Aunt Lotte. It nearly killed her.”

A heavy silence fell. Quirke watched as his daughter touched Sinclair’s maimed hand again in a quick gesture of sympathy.

“I don’t think,” Quirke said, “Victor Delahaye was the kind of man to do anything on a whim.”

They finished dinner soon after that. There was a wrangle over the bill, until Phoebe plucked it out of Quirke’s hand and passed it to Sinclair. He produced his wallet while she delved in her purse. “Don’t worry,” she said to Quirke, “we’re going halves.”

For a second Quirke saw himself and Phoebe’s mother, at this very table, a long time ago, bickering over something-what was it? He looked out at the trees, trying to remember.

When they were leaving the hotel, and Phoebe and Sinclair had gone through the revolving door, Quirke stood back to let someone come in. It was Isabel Galloway. She wore a slim blue suit and a pillbox hat pinned at a jaunty angle to the side of her head. They both halted, staring. “My God,” Isabel breathed, then quickly recovered herself. “Quirke!” she said brightly, and pressed her elbows into her sides as if to shore herself up. “You’re looking well.”

Quirke smiled queasily. “Isabel,” he said. “How are you? You look…” He fumbled after words but could not find them.

Isabel’s smile glittered. “Silver-tongued as ever,” she said, then frowned, annoyed with herself it seemed, and dropped her eyes and moved past him quickly and strode on into the lobby. He let her go, and stepped between the turning panels of the door, hearing behind him the familiar sharp clicking of her high heels on the marble floor.

Phoebe and Sinclair were waiting for him on the pavement. The last of the daylight was a greenish, crepuscular glow above the trees.

“Wasn’t that-?” Phoebe began, but stopped, seeing Quirke’s look.

Quirke realized he had left the Yeats book behind him, on the windowsill beside the table where they had sat. He turned back, muttering, and pushed his way through the heavy paneled door again.

Rose Griffin maintained a stoic view of life and the misfortunes that life piles upon what, in her best southern-belle drawl, she would describe as us poor lost creatures of the Lord. Not that she believed in the Lord, or disbelieved in Him, either. She rarely let her thoughts dwell on things beyond this world, this world being, as she felt, enough of a conundrum. She was intolerant of complainers, since, as she said, there was little to be gained from complaining, unless a body considered the pity of others a thing worth having. She felt pity for no one, on inclination as much as on principle. To pity people was to cheapen them, in her opinion. She realized this could make her seem hard-hearted, but she did not care. She was hard-what was wrong with that? Too much softness about, too much floppy, warm emotion. She had pointed it out once to Quirke, what they had in common: a cold heart and a hot soul.

She was shocked to discover that her friend Marguerite Delahaye was a blubberer. She would not have thought it of Maggie, whom she had always taken to be, underneath her spinster’s genteel veneer, as tough as she was herself. It was midafternoon and the two women were taking tea together in the drawing room of Rose’s large gaunt house on Ailesbury Road. It was a splendid day and they were seated in a splash of sunlight at a little table in the deep bay of a window that overlooked the front garden and the quiet street. To distract herself from Maggie’s sniffles, Rose was admiring the undulating spiral of steam rising from the spout of the teapot, and the pink roses painted on the dainty china cups, and the rich gleam of the antique silver cutlery. She could never understand why people seemed to pay so little regard to the small but, to her, essential pleasures of life-this knife, for instance, a fine old piece of Georgian silver, the blade worn thin from use and the handle solid and weighty as an ingot in the hand. She thought of all the people who had used it over the years, all of them gone now, while she was here.

“I’m sorry,” Maggie said, dabbing at her red-rimmed nose with an absurdly dainty handkerchief with a lace edging. “It’s just that I can’t believe that Victor is… I can’t believe he’s gone!”

“Yes, dear,” Rose said soothingly, “I understand.” Did she? She did sympathize, more or less-she had suffered her own losses-but she was not sure she understood. Maggie was behaving as if she had lost not a brother but a husband, or even a lover. Rose had siblings herself, but she rarely thought of them, and for long periods forgot about them altogether. Had she ever cared enough for her brothers that the loss of one of them would have reduced her to the kind of extravagant grief her friend was displaying? She thought it very unlikely. “Yes, I’m sure a sudden death like that is hard to accept,” she said. She paused. “They’re certain it was-I mean, they’re satisfied he was the one that pulled the trigger, yes?”

Maggie nodded, and a fresh spasm of sobbing made her shoulders shake.

When she had heard of Victor Delahaye’s death, Rose had first been surprised, and then not. Killing himself was just the sort of damn-fool thing that man would do, and the way he had done it-the boat, the deserted sea, the pistol, and young Clancy for a witness-was, of course, typically melodramatic and self-serving. He had entertained large notions of himself, had Victor. She had not known him well, had only met him a few times, on social occasions, but she had taken the measure of him straight off. Vain, pompous, humorless. Victor Delahaye had seen himself, preposterously, as a Renaissance figure, one of the great merchant princes, say, heir to a dynasty and father in turn to twin princelings who would carry on and embellish the grand family traditions. But inside every self-proclaimed great man there crouched in hiding a shivering boy terrified of being discovered and hauled out by the ear, wriggling and whimpering. Rose knew about these things: her first husband, the late Josh Crawford, had been one such great man.

Still, it was a puzzle. What had happened that had led Victor Delahaye to knock himself off his own pedestal? Something must have hit him where it hurt most, in his pride, or in his pocket, or maybe in both. No, his pride; he would not have killed himself over money. Something had damaged his estimate of himself. She pictured Mona Delahaye smiling, that thin scarlet mouth of hers turned up at the corner.

Maggie was talking again, between sniffs, about her brother, saying what a wonderful man he had been-a faithful husband, diligent father, loving sibling. An all-round saint, in fact. Rose suppressed an impatient sigh. The dead get so much more than their share of praise, she thought, and all just for being dead. “Come now, Maggie dear,” she said, “don’t upset yourself so-think of your asthma.”

She wondered what would happen now to Delahaye’s business. She doubted his partner, what’s-his-name, would be taking over. The company might be called Delahaye amp; Clancy, but everyone knew who it was that ran it. Nor did she think the Delahaye twins would be picking up the reins, at least not right away, while they were still busy planting their wild oats all over town. Those boys had a reputation, oh, they certainly did.

The Delahayes were Protestant, of course, while the Clancys were Catholics. That distinction, she knew, meant everything here. She had spent a deal of time in this country, over the years; Josh Crawford had been more Irish than American, and now she was married to a man who was one hundred percent a native son. All the same, there was an awful lot she still did not understand about life here, and probably never would understand, try though she might. The people’s fear of the priests, for instance, never failed to surprise her; also-and, you might say, on the other hand-their reverence for the Protestants. The Protestants were a tiny number, yet the Catholics had only to hear one of them speak, in that drawling, cut-glass accent, to start doffing their caps and tugging their forelocks and all the rest of such nonsense. This fascinated her, and pleased her, too, in a silly sort of way. It was as if, living here, she had gone back to an olden time, to a civilization that was both developed and primitive-Byzantium, somewhere like that? — where the mass of the people were held in thrall and ruled over by a secret, aristocratic caste whose power was so pervasive the members of it did not even have to reveal themselves except now and then, by certain offhand yet subtle signs. Yes, that was it: she felt like an anthropologist who had been magically transported through time to an archaic world of mysteries and strange laws, strange rituals and taboos.

She heard the front door opening and, after a moment, softly closing again. That would be Malachy; her husband’s quietness and diffidence of manner could be sensed even through walls. She called out to him-too shrilly, making Maggie jump-and he put his head in at the door, smiling in that vague and vaguely troubled way of his. He was tall, with a narrow head. He wore tweeds and a bow tie. His eyes behind the dully gleaming lenses of his spectacles were pale and slightly watery.

“Oh, don’t just dither there!” Rose called to him with humorous exasperation. “Come and sit down with us and have some of this good tea-it’s that kind you like, Lapsang Souchong, that smells of old Cathay.” Mal entered and closed the door behind him and came forward creakingly, his smile congealing into a slight queasiness. Rose supposed he could not remember exactly who her guest was; new people always worried him. “You remember Marguerite Delahaye,” she said, loudly, “my friend Maggie.”

“Ah, yes,” Mal said, relieved, his smile clearing. “Miss Delahaye. How are you?”

He drew up a chair and sat down. Only now did he notice Maggie’s red-rimmed eyes and the shine on her nose, and faint alarm spread over his face again, and he touched self-consciously the flesh-pink bulb of the hearing aid in his left ear.

“Maggie has had a bereavement,” Rose said, pronouncing each word distinctly, so that she could not help sounding overbearing and even a little cross. “Her brother-”

“Lord, yes, of course!” Mal said quickly, half rising from the chair but keeping his back and his long legs bent in a sitting position; what an endearingly absurd man he was, Rose thought, not by any means for the first time. “Of course,” he said. “Your-Mr. Delahaye-your brother.” Slowly he subsided onto the chair. “I’m very sorry for your trouble.”

It was not convention, he did seem genuinely sympathetic, and this set Maggie off again. Rose threw her eyes to the ceiling. “It’s very sad,” she said, somewhat shortly, “very tragic, of course.”

Mal was pouring himself a cup of tea. The tea smelled of straw and smoke. Rose watched him, his elaborately slow and deliberate movements, still feeling that exasperated fondness she always felt before the spectacle of Mal’s mole-like ways. Mal had been an obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family but was retired now. She often wondered what he did all day. He would leave the house in the morning, quite early sometimes, and come back in the afternoon looking, she always thought, ever so slightly shamefaced. In their early days together she used to ask him straight out what he had been up to, just for the sake of conversation, but he would take on a look of mousy alarm and say quickly that he had gone for a walk, or that he had met someone he knew. Somehow she never believed him. She had an image of him stalled on some street corner, and just standing there haplessly for hours, gazing at nothing, noticing no one and not being noticed, the passersby stepping around him as if he were a fire hydrant, or a tree that had somehow grown up on the spot overnight. It still surprised her that she had married him. Not that she regretted it, or was unhappy; only they were, as even she could see, a most unlikely couple, whiling away together the autumn of their lives.

He was asking Maggie if she would take another cup of tea, but she said no, and sat up on her chair and straightened her shoulders, and put the sodden hankie away in her bag and fastened the clasp with a decisive snap. She had a remarkably long neck, and now she extended it in a swanlike fashion, elevating her head and thrusting out her nose and her sharp little chin. Her already graying hair was untended, and had the look of a clump of steel wool, or an abandoned bird’s nest.

“I want to ask, Dr. Griffin,” she said, “I want to ask-” She stopped, and looked at her fingers fixed on the rim of the handbag in her lap. She tried again: “Do you think that he-do you think my brother-would he have suffered?”

Malachy frowned. Medical questions were the one thing that were sure to concentrate his attention. Yet Rose could see how torn he felt now, eager to discuss the likely details of Victor Delahaye’s suicide yet hesitant in the presence of the dead man’s close relative.

“It depends,” he said, “on where he-on where the bullet entered.” He clasped his hands, moving forward to the edge of his chair. “If the shot penetrates the heart, the person will experience first what we call a prodromal period, very short in duration, which is like the sensation before fainting, with lightheadedness and nausea, and after that there’ll be a neurocardiogenic syncope. Sorry-big words, I know. Most people’s blood pressure on fainting is restored by lying flat, but here, you see, this is impossible, as the pumping mechanism is destroyed. The person would have only moments after being shot before they fell over and exsanguinated-bled to death, that is. Some victims of attack say they didn’t even notice they had been stabbed or shot until they saw the blood. And then-”

“What he means,” Rose said heavily, “is that your brother would have died instantly.” She turned to her husband, signaling with her eyes. “Isn’t that the case, Malachy?”

Mal sat back on the chair and issued a soft, sighing sound, like that of a very small balloon very quietly deflating. “Yes,” he said meekly, “of course, that’s what I mean, that he would have died instantly,” then added, faintly, “or almost.”

Maggie gazed at him unhappily, trying to believe him, Rose saw, yet not succeeding. “It’s what I keep thinking of, you see,” she said, with a tremor in her voice. “I keep imagining him in agony, regretting what he’d done but knowing it was too late.” She was clutching the bag in her lap so tightly now the blood had drained from the joints of her fingers. “I suppose people don’t think, when they’re going to do something like that, of how it will feel, of what the pain will be like. I suppose they’re so desperate they just-” She shut her eyes and two fat shiny tears squeezed out between the lids and rolled down swiftly on either side of her nose. Malachy in alarm looked at his wife, and Rose reached out and covered Maggie’s clasped hands with one of her own.

“Oh, my dear, don’t,” she said. “You’re just tormenting yourself.”

“I know,” Maggie said, nodding like a child, with her chin tucked in and her eyes clamped shut and more tears squeezing out between the lids. “But I can’t help it-I can’t stop thinking of him out there in that boat, putting the gun to his chest, and-” She sobbed, her swollen lower lip shaking and the tears flowing down her face. Her breathing was becoming increasingly hoarse, and Rose hoped she was not going to suffer an asthmatic attack. Her first husband had died of emphysema, and she remembered that awful gasping and hooting he used to do at the end.

“Malachy,” she said, “why don’t you go and see if you can find something to give to Maggie.” He threw her another wild look, and she smiled patiently. “Some brandy, maybe? Brandy, or something like that?”

“Oh, no!” Maggie said hastily, like a child again, threatened this time with a dose of castor oil. “I’m all right, really.”

Mal rose silently and left the room, shutting the door so softly behind himself the catch did not even click.

“When will the funeral be held?” Rose asked. She was bored now, and wished her friend would drink up her tea and go.

“Tomorrow,” Maggie said. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through it.”

“Oh, you’ll manage,” Rose answered brusquely, and smiled to soften the harshness of her tone.

There was a pause, and, as if to mark it, the shadow of a cloud swept across the garden outside, and in the room the daylight dimmed for a moment as though a switch had been pressed. Rose was trying to recall when it was she had last seen Victor Delahaye. Was it at that reception at the embassy last year, to do with some yacht race or other-the America’s Cup? — that somehow she and Malachy had been lured to, although Rose had never been to sea on anything much smaller than the Queen Mary. Quirke had been at the reception too, she recalled-what had he been doing there, other than soaking up the Ambassador’s bourbon?

Rose had found herself at one point standing by a window in a small circle of people that included Victor Delahaye and his baby-doll wife. Delahaye had been pronouncing on some point of nautical etiquette. What a donkey he had seemed to Rose, in his navy blue blazer and gray slacks and his slip-on shoes gleaming like mahogany, standing there pontificating about tides and currents and knots and God knows what all. Good-looking, though, in a somehow artificial sort of way, with that craggy profile and his tastefully graying hair swept back from his temples. His wife, standing beside him, had looked as bored as Rose had felt. Rose guessed she must be a good fifteen years younger than her husband, maybe twenty, even. What was her name? Mona. Mona Delahaye. The name suited her. Cat eyes, a mean mouth. Was it she who had caused Delahaye to load up his pistol and take himself out to sea, never to return? Rose had known finer and more sensible men than Victor Delahaye who had been ruined by their women. Used to happen a lot, that kind of thing, where she came from; the noble code of the Southland.

“I’m sorry, I seem to have driven Malachy away,” Maggie said, managing to sound aggrieved. Rose gave her a look. She had not realized how tedious her friend could be. How was it they had become friendly in the first place? Rose did not make friends easily, or without due consideration. The two women had met through one of the charities Rose’s late husband had supported, the Glentalbot Trust, which had its headquarters in a drafty old house in the Wicklow Mountains. Rose was on the board of the Trust, and so was Marguerite Delahaye, who had taken over the seat once occupied by Victor Delahaye’s first wife, now deceased. Rose had paid scant attention to Maggie, the token Protestant on the board, until that now infamous emergency meeting at which Rose had demanded the resignation of the director of Glentalbot House, a drunken incompetent. Maggie, to everyone’s surprise, had supported her, and between them the two women had won the day and routed the director’s party. After the meeting Rose had sent her car and driver back to town and had taken a lift in Maggie’s rattly old Morris Oxford. On the way in they had stopped at a hotel in Enniskerry and drunk a bottle of wine together to celebrate their victory. That day Rose had seemed to see, piercing through Maggie’s prim and proper manner, a hard cold gleam of steel. Looking at her now, sitting before her sunk in a puddle of sorrow and self-pity, Rose wondered if she had been mistaken, if what she had seen in Maggie was simply something she had wanted to see, a reflection only of her own glinting toughness.

As if she had sensed Rose’s disenchanted musings, Maggie now stood up, saying she should go. She went to the mirror over the fireplace and looked at herself with a faint cry of dismay, and took a compact from her bag and dabbed powder on her cheeks and on the sides of her inflamed nose, with not much effect. Rose turned on her chair to regard her, and before she knew she was going to say it said, “And you really don’t know why he did it?”

Maggie stopped and stood very still, facing the mirror, the powder puff suspended. “Oh, Rose,” she said, “there are things I can’t allow myself to think about, not yet.”

Rose looked at her friend’s haggard face reflected in the mirror. There was something about Maggie, something faintly but definitely strange. It was as if she had an emotional squint. You felt when she looked at you that she was not seeing you straight. She had odd ways, odd tics. She was given to sudden pauses, sudden halts in the midst of things, when she would stand for five or ten seconds gazing before her with a stricken expression, as if she were seeing horrors. Then she would blink, and give herself a shake, and be quite normal again, or as near to normal as she ever got. Poor Maggie. She should have married. But then, who would have married her?

Malachy came back, bearing a dusty bottle with an inch of cherry brandy in the bottom. “Sorry,” he said, “this was all I could find.”

The two women looked at him.

Jack Clancy stood at the bottom of Bow Street smelling the warm, rancid stink of fermenting barley from behind the beetling walls of Jameson’s distillery. He always thought it funny that old Samuel Delahaye, a teetotaler and a zealous promoter of the temperance movement, should have chosen this place, so close to the distillery, as the site for the offices of Delahaye amp; Clancy. Nor could he have welcomed the proximity of the Capuchin friary round the corner in Church Street. Samuel was an old-style Unionist whose people had originated in the black hills of Antrim, and he did not take kindly to Catholics, even though he had brought in one of them, Jack’s father, to be his business partner. To Jack all that seemed immensely far off now, as if it had happened hundreds of years past, and not just a generation ago.

He set off walking slowly, over the cobbles. This street was strange, always had been, so hushed and secretive, with a silence all of its own, flat yet echoing. It was because of the height of the walls on either side, he supposed, and the narrowness between them; the cobbles, too, probably acted on sounds in some deadening way. As a child he had always been frightened when his father brought him here, to the office, and they walked along where he was walking now, hearing their own footsteps. Yet when had his father brought him here, and why? He would not have wanted him about the office, under his feet, and anyway he would have been afraid of what Samuel Delahaye would say, for old Samuel, the senior boss, certainly was not fond of children. Yet Jack saw in his mind the two of them walking along here, hand in hand, the stooping man, only in his thirties and in failing health already, and himself in short trousers and a peaked cap with a button in the crown. Was he remembering or imagining?

He stopped at the squarish brick mansion opposite Duck Lane. It was of modest size, somewhat squat, with two windows to either side of the front door and five more above, on the second floor. The bricks were pale brown with flecks of yellow, as if butter had been mixed into them. The afternoon sun shone kindly on them. The front door too was squat, with a heavy black knocker and a glass fanlight above it where the name of the firm was painted in discreet, gilt lettering:

DELAHAYE and CLANCY LTD.

IMPORT EXPORT

He realized, with a curious shock, how fond he was of this house, solid and foursquare as it was. It seemed to him suddenly an old friend he had neglected for a long time but who now had stepped forward diffidently to offer him-to offer him what? Reassurance? Forgiveness? Shelter? He thought of the people inside. A few days ago he had been one of them, a man in an office, quietly working. Now it seemed to him something he had dreamed, another life, commonplace yet fantastical.

He did not suppose the twins would be at their desks. They rarely were. They dropped in once in a while, nonchalantly, to sign a few letters and collect their expenses. Such behavior would not have been tolerated in old Samuel’s day. Maverley, the head bookkeeper, had tried once or twice to discipline them but they had laughed at him. Maverley was the one Jack had always worried about, the one he knew would find him out, if anyone would, and now he had. He should have got Maverley on his side, should have brought him in on the plan, should have involved him in the grand and secret strategy he had been working on for years. But Jack had been afraid to show his hand to anyone, and that, he saw now, had been his weakness. For what he had been doing could not be done successfully by one man alone. He should have taken a partner.

Maverley would have been the obvious choice, but Jack had not considered it for a moment, and that had been his downfall. Maverley was a weasel, but weasels have sharp teeth. The bookkeeper, it turned out, had been watching him for months, watching his every move. Jack had secretly set up dummy companies, in Belfast, in Jersey, on the Isle of Man, to buy shares in Delahaye amp; Clancy-a daring and damn clever thing, even if he said so himself-and he had been on the brink of becoming the major shareholder when Maverley struck. Maverley had not been man enough to confront Jack directly, but had gone instead to Samuel Delahaye and told him everything. And the old bastard, of course, had told Victor.

Jack knew that Victor had never understood him, had taken him for granted. Victor treated him as he treated his twin sons, with a kind of easy, tolerant contempt. At board meetings Jack somehow always found himself at the far end of the table, with ten feet of gleaming mahogany between him and Victor up at the top, sitting in what used to be his father’s chair, directing the order of business with a lordly ease. Occasionally, for the look of the thing, Victor would ask for Jack’s opinion, and while Jack spoke he would sit back, with an index finger to his cheek, suppressing a smirk, or so it seemed to Jack, while the rest of the board members drummed their fingers and waited impatiently for him to finish. Victor made little jokes at Jack’s expense, delivered little digs. “Oh,” he would drawl, when some trivial topic was mentioned, “that would be Jack’s territory, not mine-isn’t that right, Jack?” And Jack would have to smile and squirm and take the mockery, as if he were an office boy brought in to be consulted on something too vulgar for Victor Delahaye to know anything about.

He looked up at the frontage of the house, at the glowing, buttery tiles, the rippled windowpanes, the tastefully painted sign over the door. He would never again cross the threshold here, all at once he knew it, and he turned aside quickly and walked away.

Jack wished he could forget his last meeting with Victor, but it kept returning to his mind, each time as vivid as if it were taking place all over again. Victor had called him into the boardroom. When Jack entered, Victor was standing at the window with his back turned, looking out at the brick chimneys of the distillery. Fury, accusations, recriminations-all that Jack could have coped with. But Victor had not shouted or threatened. He had seemed more tired than angry. His shoulders were sloped and his back looked crooked somehow, like Sylvia’s, as if he were in pain, like her. “My father spoke to me,” he said. Those were his words, My father spoke to me. It had sounded to Jack like something out of the Bible. Depart from me, ye cursed…

Had he caused Victor to do what he had done? Would Victor have killed himself because he had learned his partner had been plotting to take control of the business? Would he? If so, it had been Victor’s ultimate dismissal of him, his final gesture of disdain for Jack and his secret plans. And now it was all gone. All the months of scheming, of planning, of putting the pieces into place, of hiding and watching, of waiting, of making himself wait-all gone. The twins, that pair of wastrels, would inherit the lot-them, and Victor’s bitch of a wife. They would have it, and he would have nothing-Maverley would make sure of that.

He turned into Smithfield. A rag-and-bone man on his cart went past, his nag’s hoofs clomping and the iron bands on the cartwheels harshing against the cobbles.

What now, Jack? he asked himself. What now?

He went out to the river and hailed a passing taxi. The driver wore a cap and did not try to make conversation, sitting in front of him sunk in his seat, his shoulders up and his big red ears sticking out. What would it be like, Jack wondered, to be him, rattling around all day in this old motor, picking up strangers and never saying a word to them? It might not be bad at all. It would require so little, just to exist. In the past Jack had rarely thought about other people’s lives. Now he seemed to be on the outside of his own life, suddenly; one minute he had been safely indoors, in the thick of things, the next he had been seized on roughly and hustled out and dumped on the pavement, like a character in a cartoon, with his shirt collar standing up and stars flying in a circle round his head.

Why had Victor done it? Why? Was it really his fault, Jack thought, was he really to blame?

He told the driver to stop at Kenilworth Road and got out and set off walking towards the square. It was a habit he had fallen into; even when he drove himself he would stop short and park and go the rest of the way to the nursing home on foot. By that means he got an extra few minutes’ delay, an interval in which something might happen, in which some accident might occur, some sudden summons be delivered, so that he could turn back and cancel that day’s visit. Ridiculous, of course; nothing ever happened, and he would have to go on, at an increasingly leaden-footed pace, until despite everything he arrived at the front door and the four granite steps leading up, which might have been the steps to the gallows.

The front hall as always smelled of stewed tea and soiled mattresses. His father’s room-or cell, as Jack thought of it-was on the first floor. Up here the spacious Georgian rooms had been divided by means of partition walls into smaller units that were narrow and cramped but had absurdly lofty ceilings with cut-off plaster-cast borders at an angle to each other on two sides. There was a bed, a chair, a bedside locker. A copper beech tree outside loomed in the high sash window, darkening the room within and giving it an underwater look. Jack’s father inhabited this cisternlike space with the indolent furtiveness of an elongated, big-eyed, emaciated carp. Over time he had taken on protective coloring, so that always when Jack entered the room it took him a moment to make out the old man’s figure against the background of drab wallpaper and the brown blanket on the bed and the rusty light in the window.

“Hello, Dad,” he said, trying to appear cheerful but sounding, as always, alarmed and querulous.

His father, standing by the window, peered upwards, frowning, and put his head to one side, as if he had heard his son’s voice as a faint cry or call coming from a long way off. Jack sighed. What added to the torment of these visits was the eerie feeling he had that there was no one else here, that he was alone and talking to himself. His father seemed to feel the same thing, that he was alone yet being talked to, somehow. And so they would blunder through a painful half hour, the son shouting himself hoarse in an effort to penetrate the fog of his father’s senility, while his father grew increasingly agitated, thinking probably that spirit voices were speaking to him loudly but unintelligibly out of the ether.

As a young man Philip Clancy had been tall and thin and now he was stooped and gaunt. He had a small head with a domed forehead and a curiously pitted skull on which a few last stray hairs sprouted like strands of cobweb. His nose was huge and hooked, a primitive axe head, and his mouth, since he had given up wearing his dentures, was thin-lipped and sunken. The Delahayes had treated him negligently all his working life, and now that he was worn out there was not one of them who would come to visit him, here where he was held in captivity, vague and lost to himself and the world.

Jack walked to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out. Why would they not cut down that bloody tree, or prune it back, at least, and let in a bit of light? He had asked them often enough to do something about it and they had promised they would, but of course they never had. The fellow who ran the place was an oily type, ferret-eyed behind a fawning manner, while his washed-out wife had the dazed look of someone trying in vain to understand how she had ended up like this, running a home for the old and the sick and the mad.

Jack’s father was watching him with a wary surmise, running his eye all over him as if in search of a clue as to his identity. Somewhere in the house an electric alarm bell was ringing, an insistent buzzing that seemed to loop on itself slowly, over and over.

“I’m in trouble, Dad,” Jack said, still gazing out of the window. “I tried to take over the business and I failed. Or I was beaten. Suicide you can’t win against.” He paused, shaking his head slowly from side to side in bitter and angry regret. “I did it partly for you, you know,” he said. “To get back at them for the way they used you, all those years.” He stopped again. Was it true? It sounded fake, yet he so much wanted it to be true. He wanted to believe that there was, if not a nobler, then a higher motive for what he had done, what he had tried to do. He did not care to think it had all been for himself, to satisfy his own resentment and jealousy.

His father, standing there peering at him, made a sound, a sort of questioning click at the back of his throat. What went on in his head, Jack wondered, what shards and tail ends of thought were floating about in there, the splintered wreckage of a life? “Ah, Dad,” Jack said, feeling suddenly worn out. Something was happening in his throat, his sinuses, behind his eyes. He put a hand to his face, and all at once the tears came, and he opened his mouth and released a sound that was half a sob and half a wail. Still covering his eyes, he reached out his other hand blindly before him and, finding his father’s cold and bony arm, held on to it, and wept.