Vengeance

6

The night was too hot for sleeping but they would probably not have slept anyway. Quirke sat on the side of the bed, smoking a cigarette. He was naked, yet still he was sweating. It was strange, being here again in the little house in Portobello, in this low-ceilinged bedroom with the narrow bed and the Fragonard reproduction on the wall and that little square window looking out onto the canal.

The hour was past midnight but there was still a faint glow in the sky above the rooftops. He did not like this time of year, with its slow lethargic days and eerily short nights. In summer he always felt slightly unwell, with headaches and pains in his joints and a constant faint sensation of nausea. He thought he must have an allergy, that there must be some kind of pollen or dust in the air that his system could not cope with. He should have a test. He closed his eyes briefly. There were many things he should do.

“I suppose you’ll be off now,” Isabel Galloway said, “having got what you came for.”

She was sitting up in the bed, propped against pillows, wrapped in the silk teagown he remembered, with red and yellow flowers printed on it. She was smoking too, with an ashtray in her lap. Although his back was turned to her, he could feel her angry eye fixed on him.

“Do you want me to go?” he asked.

“Oho no,” she said, with a bitter laugh, “don’t try that old trick-I’m not going to make it easy for you.”

He was squinting through the window out into the undark night. The streetlamp at the corner was casting a sulfurous sheen on the still surface of the canal. He thought of being out there, even saw himself, walking along the towpath in the calm mild air, moving between pools of lamplight, his long shadow shortening at his back and rising up swiftly and then the next moment falling out in front of him. To be alone, to be alone.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yes, of course you are.” Isabel spoke behind him, in a tone of angry sarcasm. “You’re always sorry, aren’t you.”

“I shouldn’t have come here.”

“No, you shouldn’t. And will you please turn around? I want to make sure you’re not smirking.” He half turned towards her, showing his face to her, his expression of weary melancholy. Their lovemaking had felt to him more like a surgical procedure. Isabel had thrust herself angrily against him, all elbows, ribs, and bared teeth. Now she sat there furious in her painted gown like an Oriental empress about to order his beheading. “You hurt me, Quirke,” she said, with a tremor in her voice that she could not suppress. “You broke my heart. I tried to kill myself over you.” She shook her head in rueful wonder. “What a fool.”

He tapped his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. “I should have telephoned,” he said. “I should have kept in contact. That was unforgivable.”

Her eyes blazed, glittering with unshed angry tears. “But of course you’re asking to be forgiven, aren’t you.”

He looked down. Somewhere nearby a church bell tolled once, marking the half hour. The chime hung for a second or two in the upper air, a trembling pearl of sound. “I thought,” he said, speaking very slowly, “I thought we might try again, you and I.”

Isabel stared at him steadily for a long moment, then flung herself from the bed and swept out of the room, her bare feet slapping on the polished wood floor. The bathroom door down the corridor slammed shut. He listened to the faint distant tinkle of her peeing. He put out a hand and felt the warm spot in the bed where she had sat. He saw clearly, like a forking path, the two possibilities that lay before him: either stay or get up now and hurry into his clothes and leave before she returned. He did not move.

They went downstairs, Quirke barefoot and in shirt and trousers. He sat on the sofa in the living room while she fetched glasses and a bottle from the kitchen. “I only have gin,” she said, holding up the bottle. She smiled wryly. “I am an actress, after all. And there’s no ice, as usual. The fridge is still not working.” This was how it had been the first night he had come here, the warm gin and the flat tonic in this airless, cramped little room.

Isabel sat down sideways to face him at the opposite end of the sofa. “Well,” she said, putting on a brisk and brittle tone, “shall we make small talk? You go first.”

He smiled, shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. Nothing notable ever happens to me.”

“Aren’t you at your sleuthing? You always enjoy that-murder and mayhem, all of it happening to other people.”

He had left his cigarettes upstairs. Isabel pointed to a silver box on the mantelpiece, one that he remembered, and he stood up and fetched it and offered her a cigarette and took one himself. Passing Cloud-Phoebe used to smoke them; did she still? He did not know. He thought perhaps she had given up. He settled himself on the sofa again. The warm gin tasted like perfume, cloying and slightly viscous. “Ever come across Victor Delahaye?” he asked.

She frowned, and shook her head. “No. Should I?”

“He died. It was in the papers. He-” He stopped.

“He what?” Isabel asked.

“Killed himself.”

“Did he, now.” She watched him narrowly, with amusement. “I do believe you’re blushing, Quirke.”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t need to be.” Her smile was as bright as steel. “I’ve got used to thinking of myself as a failed suicide, so there’s no reason to be embarrassed and avoid the subject. Tell me about this man-what did you say his name was?”

Quirke took a long swallow of his drink, and winced again at the glutinous texture. “Delahaye,” he said. “Victor Delahaye. Business family-Delahaye and Clancy, shipping, coal, timber, garages, I don’t know what else.”

“And why did he kill himself?” She gave her mouth a twist. “Not for love, I imagine.”

“No one seems to know. Or no one is saying, anyway.”

“Aha-and your little gray cells are working overtime, are they?” She sipped her drink, watching him over the edge of her glass. “You really are a strange person, Quirke. Tell me, why did you decide to be a pathologist?”

Why? He could not recall, now. “I don’t know that I decided,” he said. “I think I just drifted, as everyone does.”

“Your morbid streak led you on, did it?”

“That’s it. My morbid streak.”

For a reason that neither of them could understand this little exchange lightened the atmosphere between them, and Isabel extended a foot and caressed his bare ankle with her toes. “Poor Quirke,” she said fondly, “you’re such a mess.” He was about to reply when she sat up straight suddenly. “I know what’s the matter with me,” she said. “I’m hungry. And do you know what I want? Chips! I want a bag of chips and one of those disgusting rissoles they make out of mashed-up seagull.” She stood up, extending her hand. “Come on, get your shoes on, we’re going out.” She hurried ahead of him up the narrow stairs, singing.

Despite himself, he was glad he had stayed.

They had to go all the way to Ringsend to find a chip shop that was still open. Isabel had a little car now, a Fiat, bright red and glossy, like a ladybird. Quirke was touched to see how proud of it she was. He had briefly owned an Alvis, and was secretly relieved to be rid of it. They drove down by the canal, under the dark and motionless trees. The roads were empty at this hour. There was a childish excitement in the car, as if, Quirke thought, the two of them had slipped out together in the dark, hand in hand, bent on adventure.

Isabel, crouched over the steering wheel, kept shooting him sidelong glances with her eyebrows lifted and her lips mischievously pursed. “Oh, God, Quirke,” she said with a laughing groan, “I have to admit it, I’m glad you’re back.”

And he? Was he glad, really? He made himself smile at her. He felt as if he had been sheltering under a stone and now the stone had been lifted, exposing him to the sudden glare of the sun. He did not deserve such kindness, if kindness it was. He had let nearly a year go past without ringing Isabel even once, if only to ask how she was faring. Was he to be forgiven this easily? It seemed to him almost a scandal.

The chip shop was a box of harsh white light behind a big square plate-glass window. The metal counter was chest-high-why were chip shop counters always high like that? Quirke wondered-and the owner, a dour fellow with a paunch and a lazy eye, had the look of a former boxer. His wife, thin as a whippet, kept to the background, tending the cauldrons of seething fat. Quirke and Isabel were the only customers. They stood at the counter waiting for their order to be prepared. Despite the late hour and the dinginess of the surroundings there was for some reason a sense of comedy in the situation, and Isabel kept giving off waves of muffled hilarity, so that Quirke, conscious of the shopman’s drooping and suspicious eye, had to work hard at maintaining an expression of stern solemnity. When the food was ready they took it to eat in the car, and sat with all four windows wound fully down to let out the fatty fumes. “My God,” Isabel said happily, “this rissole really is revolting, isn’t it?” She grinned at him. There was a smear of grease on her chin. “You see, Quirke?” she said. “Being happy for the odd moment now and then isn’t so difficult.”

Having eaten their food, they drove out to Sandymount and walked along the front to calm their queasy stomachs. The night air was still, and a vast and slightly crazy-looking moon hung at what seemed a crooked angle above the horizon, laying a thick trail of gold across the water. “Look at that,” Isabel said, “like a road you could walk on.” Quirke was thinking of her in her hospital bed a year ago, with her face turned to the wall, and him standing helpless in the room, not knowing what to say. “Don’t brood,” she said, as if she had read his thoughts. She linked her arm in his and pressed herself against him and shivered.

“It’s chilly,” she said. “Let’s go home. I mean, let’s go back.”

When they got to the house Isabel sent Quirke to sit on the sofa while she was in the kitchen preparing tea. The rissole, a glistening lozenge of grayish meat mixed with grain, had left a coating of slime on the roof of his mouth that would not be dislodged. He smoked a cigarette but even that would not take away the taste. There was what sounded like a party going on somewhere nearby-he could hear talk and laughter and the tinny wail of a record player.

“Tell me about what’s-his-name,” Isabel called from the kitchen. “Delahaye.”

He rose and went to the kitchen doorway and stood with his hands in his pockets. He had taken off his shoes again and the floor was pleasantly cool under his stockinged feet. Isabel, who had changed into her silk gown, was measuring spoonfuls of tea into a willow-pattern pot. “What do you want me to tell you?” he asked.

“Tell me why you think there’s something funny going on-because you do, I know you do. I know that look.”

He pondered, gazing at the floor. “Well, from what I know of Victor Delahaye, he wasn’t the kind of person to kill himself.”

“Is there that kind of person?”

She carried the teapot past him and set it on a cork mat on the little table in front of the sofa. He watched her, admiring the glimmer of a pale breast in the opening of her gown, the full curve of her thigh pressing against the silk. She was a handsome woman, russet-haired, long-limbed, and slim. He wished… He did not know what he wished.

“He took his partner’s son with him, in the boat,” he said.

He went and sat on the sofa again. Isabel handed him his tea and offered the milk jug. “What age is he-the son?” she asked, settling herself beside him.

“I don’t know. A young twenty-five?”

“Were they close, him and Delahaye?”

“I doubt it.”

“Then why did he choose him to take with him?”

“That’s what everyone wants to know.” He sipped his tea. It seemed only to add another coating of scum to his mouth. “I suppose he wanted a witness.”

Isabel was gazing before herself with narrowed eyes, holding the cup and saucer close under her chin. “People usually don’t want other people watching at a time like that,” she said quietly. She gave a faint laugh. “A private moment, if ever there was one.”

Quirke thought it best to let this pass. He waited for a beat, watching the curl of steam above his cup. “Delahaye was a vain man,” he said.

“And yet he shot himself. In front of his partner’s son.”

“So it seems.”

They sat in silence. From where the party was there came a woman’s screams of laughter, and a new song started up.

“There is something fishy, isn’t there,” Isabel said. “Even I can sense it.”

Quirke was lighting a cigarette. “Yes,” he said, “there is.”

“Did the young man do it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then he did kill himself.”

“Yes. But what I want to know is why. He was vain and pompous and full of his own importance. He had to have been driven to it.”

Down the street, the record twanged and wailed.

She took the cigarette from his fingers, drew on it, gave it back, slightly stained with lipstick. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m trying to give up. They’re saying now they cause cancer.”

“Life causes cancer.”

She refilled his cup and her own and leaned back on the sofa, balancing the saucer against her bosom. She studied him, smiling a little. “Well, Dr. Quirke,” she said. “What’s next, for us?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” It was the truth.

“What about your French amour? Is she gone for good?”

Francoise d’Aubigny. He said the name to himself and felt a click of pain, as if a tiny bone in his breast had snapped. He had loved Francoise, despite all she had done, despite all that she had turned out to be. “Gone, yes,” he said, tonelessly. “Gone for good.”

“And you’re back.”

She was still smiling but the smile had a flaw in it, like a crack across a mirror.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m back.”

What else could he say?