The Silver Swan

by Benjamin Black

  When she put the phone down she had to run upstairs, into the bathroom, and sat on the lavatory with the pee gushing out of her, just gushing and gushing, she could not think how there could be so much of it inside her. When she touched her face it felt as dry as dead leaves-no, not leaves but ashes, yes, and her throat was so constricted she could hardly swallow, and her eyelids were burning and even her hair pained her, if that was possible. Despite all this, the fright and the panic and the helpless peeing, she was not surprised. This, she suddenly saw, this was what she had been waiting for all along, since that very first day in the pub on Baggot Street when she had sat at the bar listening to Leslie White telling the barman exactly how he wanted their hot whiskeys prepared-"Hot water, mind, not boiling, and no more than three cloves in each glass"-and she had been so excited to be in a pub in the middle of the afternoon drinking with this beautiful, silver-haired creature that she had been afraid she might fall off the stool in a swoon straight into his arms. For what had made it all so thrilling, in its horrible way, she realized now, was not the success of the salon or the money, not Leslie's playful talk or the intoxicating feel of his fingers on her skin, no, not even love, but the unacknowledged prospect of this, the telephone call at nine in the morning of an ordinary day, the call to announce that the catastrophe had come. That was strange.

  The interview with Hardiman passed for her in a hot blur. She had been wrong about him: he was not the weedy, dry stick she had pictured but a big, white-haired, red-faced, worried man in a blue suit who leaned forward intently with his elbows on the desk and his huge, meaty hands clasped before him, telling her in a voice resonant with sadness how Leslie White had ruined the business. She did not understand, she could not take it in. It seemed that for every pound she had earned Leslie had spent two. He had used the salon as security to raise a mortgage with another bank, but that was spent, too. There were checks that had not been "made good," Hardiman said. She stared at him, slack-jawed, and he looked down at his hands and then back at her and sighed and said, "Bounced, Mrs. Hunt. The checks bounced." But where had the money gone, she asked, pleading for enlightenment, what had Leslie spent it on? Mr. Hardiman lifted his big, blue-clad shoulders and let them fall again, as if the weight of the world was on them. "That's something the bank is not privy to, Mrs. Hunt," he said, and when she went on gazing at him helplessly he blinked and frowned and said harshly, "I mean, we don't know what he spent it on. Perhaps that's a question"-he checked himself, and softened his tone-"perhaps it's a question you should ask him, Mrs. Hunt."

  She walked out into the summer morning feeling as if she were the sole survivor of a huge and yet entirely soundless disaster. The sunlight had a sharp, yellowish cast and hurt her eyes. A coal merchant's cart went past, the black-faced coalman standing up on the board with the reins in one hand and his whip in the other and the big horse's nostrils flaring and its lips turned inside out and foam flying back from them. A bus blared, a newsboy shouted. The world seemed a new place, one that she had never seen before, only cunningly got up to look like the old, familiar one. She stepped into a phone box and fumbled in her bag for coppers. She had none. She went to a newsagent's and bought a newspaper, but the change was in silver and she had to ask for pennies, and the newsagent scowled at her and said something under his breath but gave her the coins anyway. She telephoned the salon, but there was no reply. She had not expected Leslie to be there, of course, but there was a tiny comfort in dialing the familiar numbers, and hearing the phone ring in the empty room. Then, before she knew what she was doing, she called his home. Home. The word stuck in her heart like a splinter of steel. His home. His wife. His other life; his real life.

  Kate White answered. The English accent was a surprise, though it should not have been. It seemed so strange to her now that they had never met, she and Leslie's wife. At first she could not speak. She stared through the grimy panes of the phone box at the street, the passing cars and buses sliding sinuously through the flaws in the glass.

  "Hello," Kate said. "Who is this?" Bossy; in charge; used to being obeyed, to her word being hopped to.

  "Is Leslie there?" she asked, and sounded to herself like a little girl, a schoolgirl afraid of the nuns, afraid of the priest in the confession box, afraid of Margy Rock the school bully, afraid of her father. There was a silence. She knew Kate knew who she was.

  "No," Kate said at last, coldly, "my husband is not here." She asked again: "Who is this?"

  She could not bring herself to say her name. "I'm his partner," she said. "I mean, I work with him, at the Silver Swan."

  At that Kate snickered. "Do you, now?" she said.

  Another silence followed.

  "I need to talk to him," she said, "urgently. It's about the business. I've been to the bank. The manager spoke to me. It's all…" What could she say? How could she describe it? The thing was so vast, so terrible, so hopeless, and so shaming.

  "In trouble again, is he?" Kate said, with a sort of trill in her voice, a mixture of bitterness and angry amusement. "That doesn't surprise me. Does it surprise you? Yes, I should think it would. You haven't as much experience of him as I have, whatever you might think. Well, I hope he doesn't imagine I'm going to bail him out again." She paused. "You're in this together, you know, you and him. As far as I'm concerned, you can sink or swim. Can you swim, Deardree?" And she hung up.

  When she got home she decided, although she was not hungry-she thought she might never be hungry again-that she must eat something, to keep her strength up. She made a ham sandwich, but had got only half of it down when she had to scamper to the bathroom and throw it back up. She sat on the side of the bath, shivering, and a cold sweat sprang out on her forehead. The nausea passed and she went downstairs again and got out the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed the carpet in the parlor, pushing the brush back and forth violently, like a sailor on punishment duty swabbing a deck. It had never struck her before that it was not possible to get anything completely clean. No matter how long or how hard she worked at this carpet there would be things that would cling stubbornly in the nap, hairs and bits of lint and tiny crumbs of food, and mites, millions and millions of mites-she pictured them, a moving mass of living creatures so small they would be invisible even if she were to kneel and put her face down until her nose was right in among the fibers.

  She remembered the bottle of whiskey that someone had given them for Christmas. It had never been opened. She had put it on the top shelf in the airing cupboard, along with the mousetraps and the caustic soda and the old black rubber gas mask left over from when the war was on and everybody expected the Germans to invade. She turned off the vacuum cleaner and left it there in the middle of the floor, for the mites to crawl over, if they wanted.

  The whiskey seemed to her to have a brownish tinge. Did whiskey go off? She did not think so-they were always talking about it being better the older it was. This one had been twelve years old when it was bottled, the same age as the gas mask, the same age as she was when she turned on her Da at last and threatened to tell Father Forestal in St. Bartholomew's about the things he had been doing to her since the time she had learned to walk. Never the same in the flat again after that. The strangest thing was how furious her Ma was at her-her Ma, who should have been protecting her all those years. How she wished, then, that she knew where Eddie was, Eddie her brother who had run away from school and gone to sea when he was still only a boy. At night in bed, listening with a sick feeling for her father's step on the landing, she would make up stories about Eddie, about him coming home, grown up, in a sailor's vest and bell-bottom trousers and a hat like Popeye's on the back of his head, Eddie smiling and showing off his muscles and his tattoos and asking her how she was, and her telling him about Da, and him going up to his father and showing him his fist and threatening to knock his block off if he ever again so much as laid a finger on his little sister. Stories, stories. She drank off a gulp of whiskey straight from the bottle. It burned her throat and made her gag. She
drank again, a longer swallow. This time it burned less.

  It was late in the afternoon when Kate White came. When she heard the bell she thought it must be Leslie, and she ran to the door, her heart going wildly, from the whiskey she had drunk as much as from excitement and sudden hope. He had come to apologize, to explain, to tell her it was all a misunderstanding, that he would fix it up with the bank, that everything would be all right. When she opened the door Kate looked at her almost with pity. "My God," she said, "I can see what he's done to you." She led the way into the parlor. Kate looked at the vacuum cleaner, and Deirdre picked it up and put it behind the sofa. She could not speak. What was there to say?

  Kate paced the floor with her arms folded across her chest, smoking a cigarette in fast, angry little puffs. She had found the photographs, and the letters. Leslie had left them in the bag under his bed-their bed. She gave a furious laugh. "Under the fucking bed, for God's sake!" She supposed he had wanted her to find them, she said. He had wanted an excuse to leave, and this way it would be she who would have to throw him out. She laughed again. "He always liked to leave decisions to someone else." She did not know where he had gone. She said she supposed the two of them had a love nest-he would probably move in there. She stopped pacing suddenly. "Have you somewhere?" Deirdre told her yes, they had a room, but she would not say where it was. Kate snorted. "Do you think I care where you did your screwing? By the way"-she looked up at the ceiling-"did you ever do it here? I'm interested to know."

  Deirdre lowered her eyes and gave the barest of nods. Yes, she said, Leslie had stayed one night when her husband was away, in Switzerland. Kate stared, and she had to explain that Billy sometimes had to go to Geneva, for conferences at the head office of the firm he worked for. "Conferences?" Kate said, with another snort. "Your husband went to conferences?" The idea seemed to amuse her. "The poor fool."

  But Kate, she could see, was not as angry now as she had been when she had arrived. She supposed Kate felt sorry for her, or maybe it was just some feeling of solidarity between the two of them. After all, Leslie had done wrong to them both, to her as much as to Kate. Now Kate, as if thinking the same thought, stopped pacing again and looked at her closely, for the first time. "Are you drunk?" she asked. She said no, she was not drunk, but she had been drinking whiskey, and she was not used to it. "I'll give you a piece of advice," Kate said. "Don't take to drink." Abruptly she sat down on the sofa with her knees together and her fists pressed on her knees. "Christ almighty," she said, "look at us, taken in by that… that rat." And amazing as it was, Deirdre at that felt a protest rising in her throat, a cry of denial and defense. In that moment, for the first time in this long day, she was pierced by the inescapable realization of all that she was losing. Not money, not the business, not her new car and her frocks and next year's mink coat-none of that mattered-but Leslie, Leslie who she loved, as she had never loved anyone before and never would love again. She felt something shrivel in her, shrivel and crumble, as the photographs had crumbled into ash when she had burned them in the grate that day in Percy Place.

  Kate stood up. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know why I should be, but I am. I came here to scream at you for stealing my husband. I had fantasies of hitting you, of scratching out your eyes, all those things you imagine you'll do at a time like this. But all I feel is sadness." She stepped forward and lifted a hand as if indeed to strike, but instead merely touched her lightly, fleetingly, on the cheek with her fingertips. "You poor, stupid bitch," she said. And then she left.

  The day wore on, grindingly. The air in the house was suffocating yet she did not dare go outside, even into the back garden; she did not know why, except that the outdoors now seemed a hostile place, smoky and sulfurous. She went into the kitchen, still hugging the whiskey bottle, and got a glass and sat at the table and filled the glass to the brim, so full that she had to lean down to take the first sip from the rim. Her eyes felt like live coals and her tongue and the insides of her lips were raw and pulpy. She drank on. Then she slept for a while, still sitting at the table, with her head on her arms. When she woke it was twilight. Where had the day gone? It seemed such a short time ago that she had been at the bank, with Mr. Hardiman. The house was unnaturally silent; she sat motionless for a long time, listening, but heard no sound except a steady, dull hum that she knew was only in her head. Her skin itched under her clothes. She felt unclean-not dirty, but just that, unclean. She took the bottle and went upstairs, pressing it to her chest and supporting herself with an elbow along the banister rail. At the top of the stairs she saw herself like that in the full-length mirror on the wall outside the bathroom, with her elbow out and her fist with the bottle in it turned in against her breast, as if she had the palsy or was crippled or something.

  In the bathroom she set the bottle carefully on the shelf at the head of the bath and got down the toothglass. When she leaned forward to put in the bath plug she almost toppled over headlong. She took off her clothes, shedding them about her like so many swatches of sloughed skin. The sharp non-smell of steam stung her nostrils. She climbed into the water-it was so hot it was hardly bearable-and lay down with a sigh. She looked at her pale body under the water, its shifting lines, its wavering planes. Then she kneeled up and poured the last of the whiskey into the glass-had she really drunk the whole bottle?-and lay down again up to her neck in the water, holding the glass between her sluggishly buoyant breasts. Her mind wandered in vague distress over scenes of her past life, the Christmas when her Da brought her the present of the bicycle, the day she knocked out Tommy Goggin's tooth, the glorious morning when she marched into the pharmacy and told that dirty old brute Plunkett that she was resigning and off to start up a business of her own. She dozed for a while, until the bathwater went cold and she woke up shaking. She wrapped herself in a towel and went into the bedroom, staggering in the doorway and hurting her shoulder against the door-jamb. It was dark by now but she did not bother to put on the light. The shaking had lessened but her teeth were chattering. She drew back the bedcovers and, still wrapped in the damp towel, lay down and pulled the sheet to her chin. There was a full moon shining in the window, watching her like a fat and gloating eye. She cried for a while, the shivering making hiccups of her sobs. What was she crying for-what good would crying do? Everything had fallen asunder.

  She watched the moon, and suddenly saw herself, so clear, in radiant light, standing those summer evenings at the window in the flat when she was a girl, smelling the lovely smell from the biscuit factory and listening to the bird singing on the black wire. She had stopped crying. Maybe something was still possible, maybe something could be salvaged from the wreck that Leslie had made of things. "Yes," she said aloud, "maybe we can save something, after all." Then she remembered Kate White touching her face with her fingers, so gently. She had liked her, despite everything. They might have been friends, if things had been different. They might even have gone into business together, might have started up another salon, without Leslie. Thinking these consoling thoughts she sighed, and smiled into the moonlit darkness, and closed her eyes. And closed her eyes.

  THREE

  1

  LESLIE WHITE COULD NOT THINK WHY HE HAD ABANDONED A PERfectly good billet at the girl's flat after less than a week and holed up instead by himself in the room in Percy Place. What had he been thinking of? First of all there were so many things in the Percy Place room to remind him of Deirdre-starting with the bed-poor bloody dead Deirdre, and he could certainly have done without that. He missed her, he definitely missed her. She had been a good girl, and a hot little number, God knows. In the end of course she had to go, and go she did. He could not pretend to be heartbroken. After all, if you wanted to talk about billets, she was the cause of his being kicked out of the best one he had ever had, when Kate found the photos and, worse, the dirty letters. Funny, though, how after those bastards had beaten him up he had gone instinctively to the girl's place, never doubting she would give him shelter and look after him. And
as it happened he could not have done better, for although she looked and acted like the ice maiden, she had melted pretty quick. In fact, she had turned out to be a hot little number herself, though obviously not much experienced, a condition that by the end of the few days they spent together he had gone a good way to curing, despite his bruises and his aching ribs. So why had he left?

  But he knew he could not have stayed with her for long. She was that type, sex-starved and nervy and too bright for her own or anybody else's good, who, given encouragement, would cling, and before he knew it would be moaning about love and all the rest of it. He had been with a few such in his time; they were the devil to get rid of if you hung about for more than a few days. So he had made a run for it, and now here he was in Percy Place-what a name, it still made him laugh-hiding behind the dusty net curtains and nursing himself back to health and vigor as best he could. It was not easy.