A Death in Summer

by Benjamin Black

  He found it peculiarly difficult to devise a satisfactory, or even plausible, answer to this perfectly reasonable question. “Well, I don’t think I’m either,” he said. “I only spoke to your father once, some time ago, although I’ve met your mother a number of times.”

  He frowned, and saw her absorbing this; it was obvious she considered his reply to be as unsatisfactory as he did. “Are you a detective?” she asked. She had the faintest, lisping trace of an accent.

  “No,” he said, laughing, “no, I’m a-I’m a sort of doctor. And you must be Giselle, yes?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said dismissively.

  She had a book open on her lap, a large volume with illustrations done in muted tones.

  “What are you reading?” he asked.

  “ La Belle et la Bete. Maman brought it back for me from Paris.”

  “Ah. And you read French, do you?”

  This question too she seemed to consider not worth replying to, and merely shrugged, as if to say again, Of course.

  Always in moments of social awkwardness Quirke became acutely aware of his bulk; standing there under the unblinking gaze of this small unnerving person he felt like the lumbering giant in a fairy tale. Now the child closed her book and pushed it firmly down between the cushion and the arm of her chair and stood up, smoothing the front of her gold frock. “Why aren’t you at the party?” she asked.

  “I was. But I came in to-to look at the house. I haven’t been here before. It’s a very nice house.”

  “Yes, it is. We have another one in the country, Brooklands-but you probably know that. And another one in France. Do you know the Cote d’Azur?”

  “Not very well, I’m afraid.”

  “Our place is in Cap Ferrat. That’s just outside Nice. Our house is on a hill above the bay at Villefranche.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I like it there.”

  She came forward until she was standing before him. She was not small for her age, yet the top of her head barely reached the level of his diaphragm. He caught her child’s smell; it was like the smell of day-old bread. Her hair was a deep gleaming black, like her mother’s. “Would you like to see my room?” she asked.

  “Your room?”

  “Yes. You said you came in to see the house, so you should see the upstairs, too.” He tried to think of a way of declining this invitation but could not. She was a strangely compelling personage. She put her right hand in his left. “Come along,” she said briskly, “this way.”

  She led him across the room and opened the door. She had to use both hands to turn the great brass doorknob. In the hall she took him by the hand again and together they climbed the stairs. Yes, that was what he felt like: the misunderstood ogre, monstrous and lumbering but harmless at heart.

  “How did you know who I was?” she asked. “Have you seen me before?”

  “No, no. But your mother told me your name and I thought you could not be anyone else.”

  “So you know maman quite well, then?”

  He thought about this for a moment before answering; somehow she compelled serious consideration. “No, not very well,” he said “We had lunch together.”

  “Oh, did you,” she said, without emphasis. “I suppose you met her when Daddy died, since you’re a doctor. Did you try to save his life?”

  Her hand was dry and cool and bony, and he thought of a fledgling fallen from the nest, but this was a fallen fledgling that would without doubt survive. “No,” he said, “I’m not that kind of doctor.”

  “What other kinds of doctor are there?”

  She was leading him now across a broad landing spread with a Turkish rug in various shades of red from rust to blood-bright.

  “Oh, all sorts,” he said.

  This answer she seemed to find sufficient.

  Her room was absurdly large, a great square space painted white all over, with a white ceiling and a spotless white carpet and even a white cover on the small narrow bed. It was alarmingly tidy, not a toy or an article of clothing in sight, and not a single picture on the walls. It might have been the cell of a deeply devotional but incongruously well-to-do anchorite. It made Quirke shiver. The only splash of color was in the single tall sash window opposite the door that gave onto Iveagh Gardens, a rectangle of blue and gold and lavish greens suspended in the midst of all that blank whiteness like a painting by Douanier Rousseau. “I spend a lot of time here,” the child said. “Do you like it?”

  “Yes,” Quirke said, lying. “Very much.”

  “There are not many people I invite to come up here, you know.”

  Quirke did his newly learned Frenchman’s bow. “I’m honored.”

  She gave a small sigh and said matter-of-factly, “You don’t mean that.”

  He did not try to contradict her. They walked together to the window.

  “I like to watch the people in the gardens,” she said. “All kinds of people come. They walk about. Some of them have dogs, but not all. They bring picnics, sometimes. And there’s an old man, I believe he lives there, I see him all the time, going along the pathways or sitting on the grass. He has a bottle in a brown paper bag. I tried waving to him once but he couldn’t see me.”

  She stopped. Quirke tried to think of something to say, but could not. He pictured her here, leaning at this window, silent, looking out through her big spectacles at life going by.

  “Would you like to play a game?” she asked.

  She was standing very close to him, looking up at him gravely, those round lenses shining and the heavy braids hanging down. She had a very immediate physical presence, or, rather, she created a strongly tangible sense of the physical, for in fact it was not her nearness that pressed in on him, he realized, but the sense of his own fleshliness, the blood-heat of himself. “What kind of game?” he asked warily.

  “Any kind. What games did you play, when you were little?”

  He laughed, though it did not sound to him like a laugh, but more a sort of nervous gasp. “You know,” he said, “I can’t remember. It’s such a long time ago. What games do you play, with your friends?”

  Something passed behind those shining lenses, a brief flash of irony and amusement that made her look much older than her years, and for the first time he saw a resemblance in her to her mother. “Oh, the usual,” she said. “You know.” He felt himself mocked.

  She was still gazing up at him, standing with one foot resting on the instep of the other and swaying her meager hips slightly. He could not think what might be going through her head.

  “Hide-and-seek,” he said, somewhat desperately, “that’s one game I remember.”

  “Yes, Daddy and I used to play that. He was too good at it, though, and always found me, no matter where I hid.”

  There was a silence, in which she seemed to be waiting for some particular and marked response. The carpet under his feet might have been a sheet of creaking ice. Should he try to say something to her about her father, try to offer some comfort, or just give her the opportunity to go on talking about him? He was an orphan; he did not know what it would be like to lose a parent, suddenly and violently, yet this child’s calmness and self-possession seemed to him unnatural. But then, children to him were a separate species, as unfathomable as cats, say, or swans.

  “There is one thing you could do for me,” she said.

  “Yes?” he said, eagerly.

  “There’s a thing that Daddy gave me that I can’t find. You might look on top of that wardrobe”-she pointed-“and see if it’s there. I’m sure you’re tall enough.”

  “What kind of thing is it?”

  “Just a toy. A glass globe, you know, with liquid in it, and snow.”

  She was watching him with a keener light now, curious, it seemed, to see what he would do, how he would respond to her request. He went to the wardrobe she had indicated-it was made of some almost white wood, birch or ash-and ran a hand around the top outer edge of it. He felt nothing, not even dust. “There’s nothing, I think,” he sa
id. “A snow globe, you say? Is there a little town in it-?”

  “It might be at the back. You haven’t searched at the back.”

  “It’s too high,” he said. “I can’t reach.”

  “Stand on this chair.” She brought it to him. It had curved legs and a white satin seat. He looked at it doubtfully. “Go on,” she said, “stand on it. If you dirty it the maid will clean it.”

  He could not think how to put a stop to this… this what, exactly? Was it a game she was playing, was she making sport of him? The look in her eye was almost avid now, and he felt more than ever mocked. He lifted his right foot-no part of him had ever looked so large or inappropriate to its surroundings-and set it on the chair and prepared to hoist himself aloft. At that moment the door opened and Francoise d’Aubigny put her head round it, saying her daughter’s name. All froze into a tableau, the woman at the door with her hand on the doorknob, the man teetering on one foot, the little girl standing before him with her hands clasped demurely before her. Then Francoise d’Aubigny said something in French; the words had an angry, even a violent sound. Quirke took his foot from the seat of the chair and lowered it to the carpet as if it were not his own but something burdensome that had been fastened to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, not knowing what it could be, exactly, that he was apologizing for, but the woman brushed his words aside.

  “What are you doing!” she said. “Why are you here?” Her blazing eye was fixed on Quirke-it seemed to him she had not so much as glanced at the child. He did not try to speak again-what would he have said? She strode forward from the door and set a hand clawlike on the girl’s shoulder, but still all her attention was directed at Quirke. “For God’s sake!” she hissed. He realized he still had the champagne glass in his hand, though it was empty now; was he perhaps a little drunk, was that what she was so angry about? She had become transformed on the instant into a harpy, her narrow face as white as the walls, her mouth a vermilion slash. What had he done, what outrage did she think him guilty of? The situation she had surprised him in was surely no more than absurd. He took a step forward, lifting a placatory hand, but Francoise d’Aubigny quickly turned, and turned the child with her, and marched her off to the door. There the girl hung back for a second and turned her head and threw back at Quirke a glance of what seemed to him pure, smiling malice. And then she was gone, and he stood, baffled and shaken, making a goldfish mouth.

  Presently he was descending the stairs, stopping on every third or fourth step to listen down into the house, he did not know for what-recriminations, tears, the pained cries of a child being beaten? But he heard nothing except the distant buzz of voices from outside, where that grotesque memorial party was continuing. He was walking past the drawing room when the door opened and Francoise d’Aubigny was there, looking no longer angry but haggard and spent. “Please, don’t go,” she said, stepping back and opening the door wider and motioning him to enter. He hesitated, feeling a flicker of angry resistance-was he to forget how not three minutes ago she had flared at him in fury as if he were an interloper or, worse, some sort of child molester? Yet he could not make himself pass by; the draw of her beauty, of her-yes-her magnificence was too strong for him. When he stepped through the doorway he was relieved to see that the child was not there, though he spied her book still lodged down the side of the armchair where she had left it. The sunlight had shifted in the window, was thinned now to a blade of deepest gold.

  Francoise d’Aubigny walked to the fireplace, wringing a lace handkerchief spasmodically in her hands. “Forgive me,” she said. “You must think me a terrible person, to speak to you like that.”

  “No, I’m the one who should apologize. I didn’t mean to invade the privacy of your home. It didn’t feel like that, when I was doing it. Your daughter is very charming.”

  She glanced at him quickly. “Do you think so?” It seemed a real question, requiring a real answer.

  “Yes, of course,” he said lamely, lying again. “Charming and… irresistible.” He tried out a winning smile, not knowing what there was to be won. “She insisted on showing me her room.”

  Francoise appeared to have stopped listening. She stood by the mantelpiece, gazing into the empty marble fireplace with a haunted expression. “It has been so difficult,” she murmured, as if speaking to herself, “so difficult, this past week. What does one say to a child whose father has-has gone, so suddenly, in such a terrible way?”

  “Children are resilient,” Quirke said, aware how lumpish and banal it sounded. “They get over things that would kill us.”

  She went on staring wide-eyed into the grate, then came back to herself with a start and turned to him. “Do they?” she said.

  He faltered. “So I’m told.”

  “You have no children?”

  “No-I mean yes. I had-I have a daughter. She’s grown up. I didn’t really know her when she was a child.”

  She began to weep, without preamble, without fuss, making no sound, her shoulders shaking. He did not hesitate, but crossed to where she stood and took her in his arms. She was so thin and, suddenly, so frail, a tall, bereft bird. Through the satin stuff of her dress he could feel the twin sharp flanges of her shoulder blades; her sobs made them twitch like tensely folded wings. At his approach she had pressed her fists against each other with the handkerchief between them and held them to her breast, and now they were against his breast, too, though they were not a barrier, he felt, but on the contrary a sign of need, a gesture of supplication. Somehow he found her mouth, and tasted her tears, hot and sharp. He kissed her, but she did not kiss him back, only suffered his lips on hers, unwilling, it seemed, or perhaps even unnoticing. She might have been a sleepwalker, bumping up against him in the dark and not waking. She detached herself from his embrace and took a step back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, although he was not.

  She blinked; he could see her making herself concentrate. “No, no,” she said, “please, do not keep apologizing. I’m glad. It was”-she smiled with an effort, the tears still shining on her cheeks-“inevitable.”

  Strange, how for him all the uncertainty and doubt, all that feeling of adolescent fumbling, how it was all gone, rid of in an instant, replaced by something deeper, darker, of far more weight, as if that kiss had been the culmination of a ceremony he had not been aware of as it unfolded, and that had ended by their sealing, there by the cold hearth, a solemn pact of dependence and fraught collaboration, and it was not the nearness of the fireplace, he knew, that was giving to his mouth a bitter taste of ashes.

  6

  When the hospital receptionist called to say he had a visitor, Quirke at first did not recognize the name. Then he remembered. “Tell her I’ll come up,” he said, and slowly replaced the receiver.

  It was usually cool down here in his basement office, but the heat of this day reached even to these depths. He took a last quick couple of puffs at his cigarette and crushed the stub in the glass ashtray on his desk and stood up. He had not been wearing his white coat but now he put it on; it was as good as a mask, that coat, lending anonymity and authority. He walked along the curving green-painted corridor, then climbed the outlandishly grand marble staircase that led up to the entrance lobby of the hospital-the place had been built to house government offices in a past century, when governments could still afford that kind of thing.

  She was waiting by the reception desk, looking nervous and a little lost.

  “Mrs. Maguire,” he said. “How are you?”

  She wore an ugly little hat held at an angle on the left side of her head with a pearl pin. On her arm she carried a caramel-colored leather handbag. Quirke noted the cheap sandals.

  She spoke in a rush. “Dr. Quirke, I hope you don’t mind me coming here like this, only I wanted to talk to you about-”

  “It’s all right,” he said quietly, touching a fingertip to Sarah Maguire’s elbow to move her out of earshot of the two receptionists, who were eyeing her with frank spe
culation. He had intended to bring her to the canteen but now decided it would be better to get her away from the building altogether-there was a touch of hysteria to her manner, and he did not relish the prospect of a scene. He took off and folded his white coat and asked one of the receptionists to look after it until his return. “Come along,” he said to Mrs. Maguire. “You look like a person who could do with a cup of tea.”

  ***

  He walked her out into the noise and heat of midafternoon. The air had a blue tint to it and felt leaden and barely breathable. Buses brayed and the humped black roofs of cars gave off a molten sheen. They stopped at the Kylemore cafe on the corner. There were few customers at that hour, women, mostly, taking a break from shopping and looking hot and cross. Quirke led the way to a table in a shaded corner. He had a cigarette going before they were seated. The waitress in her chocolate-brown uniform came and he ordered a pot of tea with biscuits and a glass of soda water for himself. Mrs. Maguire in her chair shrank back into the corner, looking much like a mouse crouching in the dim entrance to its hole. There was a cold sore at one corner of her mouth. Her eyes were so pale it would have been hard to say what color they were; Quirke thought of those marbles made of milky glass that were much prized when he was a boy.

  “So,” he said, “tell me what it is you want to talk to me about.”

  As if he did not know.

  “It’s about William, my husband. He-”

  Suddenly, when she said the name, Quirke remembered. How was it he had forgotten, when Jimmy Minor told him of Maguire having served a sentence in Mountjoy, that he had given medical evidence at the trial? Billy Maguire-of course. Ten years ago, it was-more, fifteen. A cattle dealer killed in a brawl after a fair day in Monasterevin. Blow of a fist to the throat, the carotid artery crushed, and then as if that were not enough the fellow had fallen back and smashed his skull on a curbstone. Billy Maguire had not known his own strength or, it seemed, his uncontrollable temper. The court had pitied him, this desolate and frightened young man slumped in the box day after day in his Sunday suit, trying to follow the proceedings of the trial like the slowest child in the classroom. Five years he got, three, as it turned out, with good behavior. Had Dick Jewell known of the conviction when he hired him to run the yard at Brooklands? Quirke thought not. Jewell the social philanthropist was largely a skillfully got up figment of the imaginations of the Clarion ’s color writers.