Snow

by John Banville

  ‘Father Lawless, you mean? Father Tom?’

  He tried not to seem surprised. Good God, had they been having an affair, she and the priest? Such a possibility had not occurred to him – how would it? Priests did not have love affairs with ladies from the Protestant landed gentry. It was unthinkable. And yet here he was, thinking it.

  ‘You mean,’ he said – ‘you mean he was fond of you? That you and he were—?’

  She shook her head quickly, frowning, as if at something absurd. Yet what else could she have meant, by saying she should have made him stay away?

  ‘Did he say anything to you?’ he asked. ‘Did he give you the impression that he was—?’

  ‘He talked to me one day. I think he’d been drinking already, and I gave him some sherry, which I shouldn’t have, and he drank that, glass after glass of it, I don’t think he was even aware. He was sitting there, just where you are now. His eyes were so strange, as if he was seeing something – I don’t know. Something awful.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He talked about how difficult it was, being a priest. He said I wouldn’t be able to understand, of course, but that priests had feelings like anybody else. He said he didn’t know what to do. He looked – he looked so strange, so agitated. He frightened me. I couldn’t think what to do, what to say.’

  She brought out the wadded handkerchief and blew her nose into it. Her nostrils were a delicate, almost translucent pink along their edges.

  ‘Had he ever talked like this to you before?’

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘And had you any idea how he felt about you? I mean, had you known before that day?’

  ‘Of course not,’ she said, wearily dismissive. ‘It was a complete surprise to me – and a shock. I thought priests were supposed to be – well, celibate. You know how the RCs go on about – well, sex, and all that. And I was afraid Geoffrey would barge in, the way he does, and what would I have said?’

  They were silent, busy with their thoughts. Strafford felt in some manner delicately captured and held fast, as if a net had been thrown over him, a net of steel yet so fine as to be invisible.

  ‘When did this happen?’ he asked. ‘I mean, when did he come here and say these things?’

  ‘I don’t know – not long ago. Weeks. He finished the sherry – he’d drunk a whole bottle, nearly – and went off. He drove back to Scallanstown. I was surprised he didn’t have an accident. I thought – I thought he might kill himself, that he might drive deliberately into a tree or something, he seemed so desperate. Then the next time he came it was as if nothing had happened. He was his usual self, joking with Mrs Duffy – by the way, wasn’t that her calling you, just now? – and talking to Geoffrey about horses, which is all they ever seemed to talk about, horses, and hunting, and those bloody, bloody hounds. I didn’t know what to think. I should have said something. I should have taken him aside and told him not to come to the house again, after the way he’d behaved, babbling on at me and drinking all that sherry. But I didn’t say anything. And now he’s dead.’

  She began to cry again, quietly this time, almost absent-mindedly, then stopped, dabbing the handkerchief to her nose and delicately sniffing. The rims of her nostrils were rawly inflamed by now. Strafford thought of a pet rabbit he had kept when a boy. One night the fox got it. In the morning all that was left were patches of dried blood, rather a lot of it, and a single tuft of fur.

  ‘And you think,’ he said, ‘you think his coming here, and talking to you the way he did that day – you think it had something to do with his death?’

  She stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You said it, a moment ago, that it was all your fault.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes, just now, when I came in, you said—’

  ‘Did I really? Sorry, my memory is terrible these days, I can’t remember a thing—’ She stopped suddenly, and stared at him again, wide-eyed. ‘You don’t think I’m suggesting my husband killed him, do you?’ She gave a choked little shriek of laughter, pressing the balled-up handkerchief to her mouth. ‘You poor man – what you must think of us all! We must seem like the characters in one of those novels about mad people in country houses.’ She laughed again, less shrilly this time. ‘Lettie says I’m mad, you know. Has she told you that?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Yes she has – I can see it in your face. I don’t care. She hates me. I’m the wicked stepmother, according to her. Have you got a cigarette, by the way?’

  ‘I’m sorry, no. I don’t smoke.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She looked about vexedly. ‘There’s never anything here when you want it,’ she muttered.

  They heard Mrs Duffy calling Strafford’s name again, in a tone of mounting grievance. He thought of the omelette waiting for him. He was really quite hungry, as a matter of fact. A lock of hair had fallen across his forehead, and he pushed it away.

  ‘You were a friend of Colonel Osborne’s wife, weren’t you? – the first Mrs Osborne?’

  The woman’s tears seemed suddenly forgotten. She took a powder compact out of her purse and opened it and peered into the little mirror in the lid. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘look at me!’ She dabbed powder around her eyes and at the glowing pink sides of her nose. ‘The first Mrs Osborne – it sounds like something by one of the Brontës, doesn’t it? I wasn’t her friend – my mother was. She used to bring me here, on visits, when I was a child. Then she died – my mother, I mean – and I started coming on my own, and Millicent sort of adopted me.’

  ‘Millicent? That’s Mrs Osborne?’

  ‘Yes. Mrs Osborne – funny, you know, to think of her as that, now, when I’m also Mrs Osborne.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘The Second Mrs Osborne, starring Vivien Leigh. You can almost see it, can’t you? The fog swirling around the dark old house, the peacocks shrieking on the lawn—’

  Strafford touched a finger to her arm, giving it almost a poke.

  ‘You were here the night she died, weren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, of course!’ she snapped. ‘I was always here.’ She applied the powder puff to her throat this time, then shut the lid of the compact. ‘God, I’d kill for a cigarette.’

  ‘Shall I go and see if I can find some for you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, please, don’t bother.’ She frowned. ‘That was Mrs Duffy calling you again, wasn’t it? Why does she want you so urgently?’

  ‘She was cooking something for me. An omelette.’

  ‘Why don’t you go and have it?’ A far-off note of agitation had come into her voice. ‘You should. She’ll be cross at me, for keeping you. Go and eat it now. It’ll probably be cold, mind you, but cold omelettes are quite nice, I find.’ She glanced about. ‘Doctor Hafner was here,’ she said. ‘He’s probably gone by now. He sent Lettie to get my prescription. I suppose she stayed in town, with those awful friends of hers. She goes about with all sorts, you know. The sooner she’s back at school the better.’ She blinked. ‘I’ve such a headache. Are you sure you haven’t any cigarettes? Oh, but I forgot, you don’t smoke. Pity.’

  He had moved to the fireplace, to get a safe distance from her, but he came back now and sat beside her again.

  ‘Can you tell me something about that night, the night that Mrs Osborne died?’

  She looked at him distantly for a moment, as if she had forgotten who he was, her head wobbling a little, so that it seemed in danger of toppling off of the pinion of her long, pale neck. The skin between her eyebrows was knotted in an effort of concentration.

  ‘Well, there’d been a fight, as usual,’ she said, ‘and, as usual, she was drunk.’

  ‘Millicent?’

  ‘What? Yes, Millicent, of course. Who else?’

  ‘So she was an alcoholic?’

  She considered, twisting up her mouth at one corner.

  ‘I don’t know about that, but she was drunk every night, practically. Is that what it means to be an alcoholic?’
r />   ‘And who had she fought with?’

  ‘Geoffrey, of course. They were always at it, hammer and tongs. Or she was. He would just sit there, looking miserable and staring at his plate, while she went on and on at him. He was a bit afraid of her. Well, more than a bit – everyone was. She was a big woman, you know, enormous shoulders and a great square jaw, like a man’s. She always dressed in the most ridiculous girlish things, like a flapper, or something, out of the twenties. Her people were very grand, or thought they were – the Ashworths, of Ashworth Castle. It’s in the west, on Lough Corrib. I was there, once. Ugly great place, fake Tudor, with battlements and round towers and things. And the food! It amazed me that anybody ate it. I certainly didn’t. For all the time I was there I survived on chocolate bars and biscuits that I got from the shop in the post office in the village. I was dreadfully sick afterwards.’

  Strafford nodded. He knew the Ashworths, or had known them – he had stayed at the castle on the lake himself, once. They were what his father, in that straight-faced ironical way of his, which many dim people mistook for pomposity, would describe as ‘a notable family’.

  ‘You must have been very upset, when she died.’

  She fixed him again with her wobbly stare. She had a way of extending her already long neck and lifting her chin high that gave her something of the look of a haughty and petulant swan. She was the very model of those willowy young women with diaphanous complexions and vague stares, the daughters of county families, whom he used to fall for when he was young, but never had the nerve even to address.

  ‘I wouldn’t say I was upset, exactly,’ Mrs Osborne said thoughtfully. ‘I was shocked, of course. Even if she was drunk, it must have been awful to go tumbling down the stairs like that, head over heels, with your suspenders showing and everything. Mind you, it was bound to happen, or something like it, sooner or later.’

  She drew back the blanket under which she was sitting and scratched her ankle. She was barefoot, and wore no stockings. There was a chilblain on her little toe, delicately pink and shiny, like her nostrils. Her skin had two shades, milk, and strawberries crushed in milk.

  ‘By that stage I hated her, of course. She kept me as a sort of unpaid lady’s companion, making me run her bath and iron her things and run errands for her. Every Saturday I had to take the bus into Walker’s in Wexford to fetch her weekly supply of gin. I had to clear up after her, too. She used to throw her things down any old where. Honestly, she was a dreadful cow. One morning I came in to wake her and she had’ – she grimaced – ‘she had dirtied herself, in the night, in bed, from being so drunk.’

  She shivered, and said she was cold, and thrust her hands into the pockets of her cardigan. Then suddenly she brightened. ‘Look!’ She took her right hand out of her pocket and held up in triumph a single, crumpled cigarette. ‘I found one! Be a sweetheart and fetch me a match, will you? There’s some over there on the mantelpiece.’

  He found the box of Swan Vestas and came back to the sofa.

  ‘Damn,’ she said, showing him the cigarette, ‘it’s broken in the middle. Why do fags have to be so breakable? I’ll have to smoke it in two goes.’ She tore the two halves carefully apart and put one of them between her lips. He struck a match, and she leaned down to the flame, lifting her eyes to his as she did so.

  Jenkins! He had forgotten about Jenkins. He wondered if he had returned yet, from wherever it was he had taken himself off to. Maybe Hackett was right, maybe he had gone into a pub somewhere – the Sheaf of Barley itself, even – to escape the weather and warm himself up. But he didn’t really think that was the case. No, he didn’t think so at all. He felt the first touch of real alarm, cold as the snowflake that had settled on his forehead outside the Archbishop’s house.

  ‘It’s funny she died the way she did,’ Sylvia Osborne said pensively. ‘I used to have a fantasy about pushing her down the stairs, you know – really, I did. I could see myself running up behind her, on tiptoe, without a sound, and putting my hands against her shoulder blades and just pushing, like that, not hard, but firmly.’ She mimed it for him, dropping cigarette ash down the front of her cardigan. ‘I’d imagine how it would feel, watching her fall. Though I didn’t think of her as falling, but rather of launching out, slowly, gracefully, the way high divers do, with her head down and her hands joined in front of her, swooping out in an arc and then smashing on to the tiles in the hall below, like a bird against a windowpane.’ She stopped, and blinked, and looked at him, lengthening her neck. ‘Isn’t that terrible?’

  He thought of taking her hand, the one that wasn’t holding the cigarette, but didn’t.

  ‘She must have been very unhappy,’ he said. ‘Was she?’

  She was still gazing at him, her head trembling faintly on that slender stalk of neck.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I never thought about it. I suppose she must have been. Some people make it their life’s work, being unhappy. And making everyone around them unhappy too, of course. It probably begins as a kind of game, in order not to be bored, or something, and then it just sort of hardens into a way of life, and you don’t notice any more that you’re doing it to yourself.’ She paused, gazing blankly before her. ‘There isn’t very much to do, when you live in the country.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know.’

  She lit the second half of the cigarette from the glowing end of the first, which she crushed into the ashtray. She dug her hands into the pockets of her cardigan again, and smiled at him crookedly. He noticed that her left eye was set lower than the right. It was what gave her face that slightly lopsided look. He recalled that the Greeks deplored symmetry, and considered beautiful only things that were a degree or two out of kilter. Mrs Osborne wasn’t beautiful, exactly, and yet—

  ‘I think you want to kiss me,’ she said suddenly, breaking in on his thoughts. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Mrs Osborne, I—’

  She took the cigarette out of her mouth, crawled along the short length of the sofa on hands and knees and put her mouth to his. Her lips were cold. He felt the brief touch of the sharp little tip of her tongue. She drew back, but remained for a moment on all fours, peering closely at him and frowning, like an anaesthetist, he thought, waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect. Then she moved away and sat down again and drew the blanket over her knees.

  ‘Try to get the fire going, will you?’ she said. ‘I’m absolutely perished.’

  He squatted in front of the hearth and fiddled with the embers. They were grey and powdery on the outside but still red within. He found some bits of kindling and pushed them deep into the glowing ash. He sat back on his heels.

  ‘It will light,’ he said, ‘I think.’

  He should have held her in his arms and kissed her properly – wasn’t that what she had wanted him to do? Women don’t kiss you without expecting you to kiss them back. He was a hopeless case, clumsy and inept. He had an image for a second of his father’s eye fixed on him disparagingly.

  Sylvia Osborne held the stub of the half cigarette between the tips of a finger and thumb and sucked from it the last of the smoke. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I think we’re quite alike, you and me. Neither of us has a clue who we are. Don’t you think? I try on versions of myself the way I’d try on dresses in a shop.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed,’ he said.

  ‘Have you? – Ow!’ The cigarette had burned her fingers, and she dropped the last of it into the ashtray and watched as it sent up a tall straight plume of grey-blue smoke. ‘And what about you?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t you the same?’

  ‘Me? Well, I suppose I’ve hit on the version of myself that I prefer, or that I think will do, for the present. I mean’ – he smiled – ‘until something more plausible comes along.’

  She made a sour face. ‘Lucky you.’ She lifted her arm and peered closely – was she short-sighted? – at the little silver watch strapped to her wrist. ‘Where is that blasted Lettie, with my prescription?’ She looked at Strafford, wher
e he stood by the fire. The kindling suddenly caught, and a pale flame leaped up. ‘Come and kiss me again, will you?’ she said. ‘The first one didn’t quite take.’

  It was only afterwards, when he had left her, that he remembered all the further questions he had meant to ask her, in particular about her brother, the black sheep Freddie Harbison. Did he come to the house the night the priest died? If so, it would have been she who let him in. He felt he should go back and confront her, but he couldn’t face returning to that humid chocolate box of a room.

  21

  He ate his omelette cold. Mrs Duffy, in a sulk because he hadn’t come when she called him, rattled pots and pans loudly in the sink, then took up a straw broom and began to sweep the floor while he was still eating, stirring up dust and making him lift his feet so that she could get the broom under them. Kathleen, the skivvy, poked her head out of the scullery to have a look at him – it was the first time she had seen him – and withdrew hurriedly when the housekeeper glared at her.

  Jenkins hadn’t come back. Strafford wasn’t really worried yet, not really – Jenkins was tougher than he looked, and would be able to look after himself – but all the same, it wasn’t like him to be gone for so long, without leaving word of where he had gone to.

  Colonel Osborne came in from the stables, bringing with him a whiff of hay and horse dung, and sat down at the table opposite the detective and drank a mug of tea. Strafford felt his brow grow hot. Here was her husband facing him, and all he could think of was the touch of Sylvia Osborne’s lips on his, the fragile, underwater paleness of her skin, the taste of her smoky breath, the fragrance of the excitingly cloying, musky perfume that she wore, and that had enveloped him and made him feel dizzy when they kissed a second time. Madness, madness.

  ‘Your chap still missing?’ the Colonel enquired. ‘Hope he has boots and a warm overcoat – there’s going to be more snow, the wireless says. A blizzard is in store, it seems.’ He paused. ‘How are they treating you, at the Sheaf of Barley? Reck is quite a fellow, isn’t he? You don’t meet many butchers who have read all of Shakespeare and can quote you reams of stuff from the Bible.’