He glanced up at her face, then fixed his humid gaze again on what she was revealing to him. She held out the last of her cigarette. ‘Get rid of this, will you?’
He crushed the butt into a saucer on the draining board, beside the smouldering remains of his own cigarette.
‘That pan is burning,’ she said. ‘There’s smoke coming off it, look.’
He reached over and lifted the pan from the heat and dropped it on the floor with a clang.
‘And the stove is smoking too. We’ll be suffocated.’
‘I got it going, anyway,’ he said, ‘even if the wood was green.’
‘Oh, yes, you’re a genius.’
She had relaxed her thighs completely now, allowing them to fall slackly apart. The wings of her duffel coat were pushed back, and her skirt had ridden up to her hips. Fonsey’s brow was flushed, the pimples on it fairly glowing, and she could hear him breathing, not fast, but deeply, slowly. It seemed a kind of soft moaning. She thought of Strafford passing by her on the hillside, and of the sound of him panting, quick and hoarse.
Fonsey had taken on a strained look, almost as if he were in pain.
‘Kneel down,’ she commanded in a low voice, a little hoarse herself now. ‘Come on, down on your knees, oaf.’
Oaf. It was a word she had come across recently, in some book or other. She had known it already, it was a common word, but this time she had taken special note of it, and remembered it. She liked it. Oaf.
Fonsey heaved himself from the bunk and sank on to his knees in front of her. It wasn’t easy, there was hardly room for him, so narrow was the space between the bunks. She looked down at him as he thrashed about. She put one hand on top of his head, and dipped three fingers of the other into her glass and smeared the gin between her thighs. The alcohol stung her, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care about the sore on his lip, either. She didn’t care about anything. ‘Drink it,’ she commanded, her voice thickening. ‘Go on, lap – lap it up.’
He lowered his face past her knees and burrowed deep down between her thighs, like a terrier, she thought, digging in a foxhole. His hair was hot and ticklish against her skin. It was like being licked by an animal. She lifted languid eyes again to the twilight in the window. Oaf, she thought. Lap. Lap my lap. Lap my lap! She would have laughed, if she hadn’t been so close to coming. Star-like lights popped and fizzled in front of her eyes, and she thought of those cartoon creatures, Tom the Cat, was it, and that rabbit, what was he called? When they got hit on the head, stars whirled above them in circles, like Catherine wheels. Bugs Bunny, that was it! She could smell the rabbit on the table. He had said it smelled like her. Maybe it did? Lap, oaf, lap. Stars. His tongue was rough, a cat’s tongue. Tom the Cat, Tom cat, tomcat. Fizzles, fizzles. Fizzle.
Now Fonsey withdrew his head from between her thighs, and she leaned back, sighing, and drank the last few drops of gin in her glass. She often thought this was the best part of it all, these few lazy moments after it was over and her mind went fuzzy in that lovely way and she didn’t have to think about anything at all. Fonsey, her poor oaf, her poor wild man of the woods, knelt with his shoulders slumped against her knees, his great shaggy head resting on her thigh. They never kissed, she wouldn’t allow it, she wouldn’t ever allow it, even if he hadn’t got a sore on his mouth and pimples on his forehead and the taste of her on his lips. She just didn’t want to kiss him. She didn’t want to kiss anyone.
She put a hand against his shoulder and pushed him away.
‘Now you,’ she said.
He fumbled with the front of his dungarees, undoing the clasps and pulling it down, and she twined her legs around his neck, crossing her ankles at the back. She didn’t watch him, hunched over himself there, trembling and grunting. She never wanted to watch, it was too ugly, that big purplish thing sticking up, the top of it like a helmet, and his fist pumping in that awful spasmodic way – he might as well be milking a cow. At the end he made a surprisingly soft little mewling sound, like the sound a child would make in its sleep. Her legs were still around his neck, and he let his head slump sideways and forward and glued his mouth to the soft cool pearl-grey flesh behind her knee. It looked so strange, that big head with its mass of greasy red curls, propped there between her knees, like a severed head on a platter.
He began to say something but she stopped him. ‘Don’t!’ she said in a fierce whisper, grabbing him by one ear and twisting it hard. ‘Don’t start with the love business. You don’t love me and I don’t love you. Nobody loves anybody. Right? Got that?’ He mumbled something, trying to nod, and she let go of his ear, which glowed bright red.
She wasn’t sure where the stuff he had pumped out of himself had gone to – it had spilled on the floor, she supposed, or splattered against the side of the bunk. On one of their afternoons together she had taken up a drop of it on her finger and tasted it, just the tiniest taste, with the very tip of her tongue, out of curiosity. It had a strange flavour, like salt and sawdust soaked in milk.
Imagine having globs of that goo inside you, sticky and hot, and those tiny little tadpoles squirming out of it and racing each other up along your tubes.
She had never let anyone do it to her, though more than a few had tried, including Jimmy Waldron, at a party at the Athertons’ the previous Christmas. He was grown up now and studying to be a teacher or something, and played rugby. He seemed to have forgotten having trapped her in the lavatory, that day long ago when they were children. But she had remembered. Oh, yes, she had remembered. He had to be taken home from the Athertons’, after being sick on the floor in the conservatory when she drove her knee with all her strength into his crotch. Maybe that would teach him to keep his hands out of places where they weren’t wanted.
Fonsey had done up his dungarees and hauled himself back to the other bunk, and he leaned there now on his elbow again, looking at her with a half-witted grin. She pushed the heavy stuff of the skirt down over her knees. A pity she couldn’t let the White Rabbit know what her stepdaughter had got up to in it just a minute ago. Next time maybe she’d make Fonsey shoot his stuff all over the front of it, then she could hang it back in the wardrobe and give the bitch something to wonder about.
‘When are you going back to school?’ Fonsey asked, lighting up another cigarette.
‘I’m not,’ she answered.
‘Oh? Why not?’
‘I’m just not, that’s all.’
‘Your Da will have something to say about that.’
‘Yes, well, my “Da” can say what he likes.’
She had been a boarder for four years at a school in South Wales, a ghastly dump outside a town with a name she had never learned to pronounce properly, since it had about twelve consonants in it and hardly any vowels. She had told no one except Dominic that she wouldn’t be going back after the Christmas holidays, and she hadn’t told him why. The fact was, she had been expelled – Matron had caught her with a fellow, a townie, at the back gate one night, she with his thing in her hand – it reminded her of the rubber grip on the handlebar of a bike – and he with a hot paw halfway up her gymslip.
She might have got away with it, except that it was one more, and the most serious, in the long list of her depravities, so-called. She hadn’t enjoyed the interview with Miss Twyford-Healy, the headmistress, but that was a small price to pay for the gift of freedom that had so suddenly been bestowed on her. Tee-Hee, which was what everyone called Miss Twyford-Healy, had written to her father, saying his daughter wouldn’t be allowed to return after the Christmas break. She had managed to intercept the letter, though – so many mornings she had spent crouched on the landing, chilled to the bone in her nightdress, while she watched through the banisters for the post to come – and now she lay for what seemed hours in bed, sleepless, every night, wondering what exactly to say to her father, when the time came for her to go back to school and she had to tell him she’d been given the boot.
Funny, with so much on her mind, how something as triv
ial as being kicked out of school weighed so heavily on her thoughts. There was no accounting for herself, that was a fact.
12
Strafford found Dominic Osborne in the drawing room. Ballyglass was built on generous Victorian lines, and must have boasted twenty-five or thirty rooms, but over the years the family had hollowed out of it a compact bourgeois dwelling, consisting of little more than the kitchen, the dining room, one halfway habitable drawing room, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a separate, undependable lavatory, while the rest of the place was allowed to sink into a state of timeless fixity, like the unvisited rooms in a museum where were kept the exhibits no one cared to look at any more. Strafford’s father had effected an even more radical reduction of Roslea House, and these days hardly ventured beyond what used to be his study but which gradually he had transformed into an all-purpose bolthole, installing in it a double bed, the one he and his wife had slept in during the years of their brief marriage, a gas burner, a paraffin stove, as well as a number of decorated chamber pots, part of a collection assembled by a forgotten forebear.
It was dark by now. The curtains had been drawn and the electric lamps switched on. The Osborne heir was settled in a deep armchair by the fire, with a tray with tea things on a small table beside him, and a medical textbook open on his lap – he was a second-year medical student at Trinity College in Dublin. The Labrador that earlier had shaken itself and sprayed the hall with drops of melted snow was stretched out at the young man’s feet, as fat and torpid as a seal. The fire was burning busily, and the air was heavy with the scent of flaming birch logs.
Looking up as Strafford entered, the young man frowned. The dog too lifted its big square head.
‘Ah, I’ve been looking for you,’ Strafford said. ‘Not disturbing you, I hope?’
Dominic shut the book and put it on the floor beside his chair. ‘I’m not disturbed. I suppose you want to – what do they say? – to grill me about Father Tom?’
‘Well, grill is hardly the word,’ Strafford answered. ‘That’s only in the pictures.’
‘A light roasting, then?’
Strafford smiled. He approached the fire and held his hands out to the flames. ‘That’s only what the big boys do to the little boys at boarding school.’
‘I won’t be of any help to you,’ Dominic said coldly. ‘I heard nothing of what happened in the night. I’m a deep sleeper.’
‘Yes, so is everyone else in the house, it seems, except your mother’ – the young man stared – ‘sorry, I mean your stepmother.’
‘Yes, she creeps about a lot, in the wee hours.’
‘I don’t sleep well myself, usually, so I sympathise with her.’
‘I’m sure she’d be very gratified to know that,’ Dominic said, with pointed sarcasm.
Seen close to, he was not as convincingly handsome as he had appeared when Strafford had looked down on him that morning from the banisters at the top of what everyone in the house referred to as the back stairs. He was good-looking, certainly, with that straight jaw and his father’s chill blue eyes, but there was something uncertain about him, something incomplete and evasive. What was he, twenty, twenty-one? Trinity had given him a swagger that still wasn’t quite convincing, and possibly never would be. No, he was not quite the thing, this young man.
He was dressed like his father, indeed markedly so, in tweed jacket, cavalry twill trousers, checked shirt and spotted bow tie. The toecaps of his shoes gleamed in the firelight like chestnuts fresh out of their husks. Any day now, if he hadn’t already done so, he would take to pipe-smoking, and getting drunk with the chaps from the rugby club on Saturday nights. He would drive a two-seater, and talk disparagingly of girls, and shoot crows in the copse, wherever it was, and plight his half-hearted troth to some landed family’s horsey daughter. None of that would entirely convince, either. In Dominic Osborne, something, some undefinable finish, would always be lacking. There would always be something amiss.
On the other hand, he was a medical student, Strafford reminded himself, and as such he would know just where the jugular was. Could it have been a scalpel that did for the Reverend Thomas J. Lawless?
‘Mind if I sit down?’ Strafford asked of the young man, and without waiting for an answer settled himself in an armchair on the other side of the hearth. ‘It’s proving to be a long day.’
‘Is it? Not for Father Tom, it’s not.’
‘Well, no.’ A log fell silently asunder in the fireplace, producing a burst of sparks. ‘I suppose you’ve known him most of your life, yes?’
Dominic gave a languid shrug. ‘I wouldn’t say that. I’m not sure I knew him at all, really. He was always round the place, of course.’
‘“Round the place”?’
‘Daddy – my father – liked him, or liked him being here, anyway. He was company, I suppose. They had interests in common – huntin’ and shootin’, all that.’
‘Not to your taste, that kind of thing?’
‘Is it to yours?’
‘I live in the city now. Not much opportunity.’
‘Maybe not for hunting, but for shooting, surely? You are a detective, after all.’
Strafford smiled. ‘Unarmed.’
‘Hmm.’
The log in the fireplace shifted again, putting on another little fireworks display. Strafford thought of the frost-bound world beyond the house, of the snow-covered fields and the bare black trees, all suspended in a vast and frozen silence. And then, of course, he thought of death.
‘Did you know your mother?’ he asked.
‘What?’ Dominic stared at him again. ‘Did I know her? Of course I knew her.’
‘What age were you when—?’
‘I was twelve. You’re aware that she fell down the back stairs, the same one that—?’
‘Yes—’ He had been about to remark on the coincidence, but stopped himself. It would hardly be in good taste.
The young man turned away and gazed into the fire. The dog at his feet had fallen heavily asleep, and began to twitch and whimper. Strafford was always struck by the fact that dogs should dream. How could they, since they were supposed to have no memory?
‘I was the one who found her,’ the young man said, still facing the fire. The leaping flames were reflected in the pupils of his eyes, making them appear deep black. ‘It was night that time, too, with everyone asleep.’
‘But not you.’
‘What?’
‘You must have been awake. You heard her fall.’
‘Yes, I heard her.’ He shifted in the chair abruptly and looked directly at the detective. ‘Are you going to ask how it was, then, that I didn’t hear the priest when he went tumbling down the same stairs, while I was in the same bed as that other night long ago?’
‘No.’ Strafford sighed. The fire was making him feel drowsy. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe he fell.’
‘Oh?’
‘He was still on his feet, until he made it into the library.’
‘A different sound entirely, then,’ Dominic said. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the back of his chair. When he spoke again his voice resonated strangely, as if it were coming up out of some deep, echoing chamber.
‘We were on a train once,’ he said, ‘years ago, in France, the four of us, my mother and father, my sister and me. It was one of those new diesel ones, very fast – an express, I suppose – travelling from Paris all the way down to the south. We were approaching Lyons, I think it was Lyons, when we hit something on the line. It made an extraordinary noise, a sort of clattering all along beneath the carriages. I thought we’d run into a level crossing, and that it was the noise of the wooden gate splintering and the broken bits tumbling under the wheels. The driver must have taken his foot off the – what do you call it, the dead man’s brake? – because after the collision we just coasted for, oh, it must have been a mile or two, going more and more slowly, until finally we drifted to a stop. I shall never forget the silence that fell then. It
was almost as ominous as the sound of whatever it was that had broken up underneath us.’
He rose from the chair and fed another log into the flames. He remained there, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket, gazing down into the fire, remembering.
‘We had to wait for hours until another train came and collected us and took us on to Nice. Next day it was in the papers – two girls in a town the train was passing through had made a suicide pact and stepped out in front of the speeding engine. It was their bones that we’d heard, breaking up and spinning along the track, under the wheels.’
He stopped, and sat down again, and leaned his head back against the chair once more, and once more closed his eyes. ‘It’s a thing I’ll never forget. I can hear it still, the sound of those bones, rattling along the track like skittles.’
The dreaming dog was giving sharp little high-pitched barks and fluttering its lips like a horse in a lather.
‘I’m sorry,’ Strafford said.
‘For what? – for the girls who killed themselves, or for my mother?’ He leaned an arm down and patted the sleeping dog’s fat flank. Strafford watched him.
‘Were you close, you and your mother?’ he asked.
The young man gave an ugly little laugh. ‘Haven’t you read Freud? Aren’t all sons close to their mothers?’
‘Not all of them. Not always.’
‘What about you, have you got one? – a mother, I mean.’ Dominic leaned forward with his fingers laced together in his lap, studying the detective. ‘I suspect you lost yours early too, like me. Am I right?’
Strafford nodded. ‘Yes. Cancer. I was younger than you – I was nine.’
They fell silent. They were both gazing into the fire now. Strafford thought of his mother. Strangely, he didn’t think of her very often, not as often, certainly, as he thought of his father. But then, his father was still living, and the living require more thought.
She had died, his mother, at this time of the year, in a downstairs room, much like this one, where a sofa had been turned into a makeshift bed for her. She would watch the birds outside on the lawn for hours on end, the thrushes and blackbirds and robins. The magpies in particular fascinated her, with their strange, clicking cries. She would smile and declare that they were all greedy beggars, the robins especially. ‘Imagine being a worm,’ she would say, in her reedy voice – the cancer was eating steadily into her oesophagus – and shake her head in sympathy for all weak and crawling creatures.
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