Christine Falls: A Novel

by Benjamin Black

  All at once she felt faint and had to stop for a moment, pressing her fingers down hard on the drinks table for support. Mal, watching from across the room, saw that she was having what Maggie the maid called, not without a touch of contempt, one of her turns. He felt a rush of something resembling grief, as if her unhappiness were an illness, one that would—he flinched to think it—kill her. He bowed his head and closed his eyes briefly, savoring for a moment the restful dark, then opened them again and turned to his father with an effort. “I haven’t congratulated you,” he said. “It’s a great thing, a papal knighthood.”

  The Judge, fiddling with his tobacco pipe, snorted. “You think so?” he said with scornful incredulousness, then shrugged. “Well, I suppose I have done the Church some service.”

  They were silent, each wishing to move away from the other but neither knowing how to manage it. Sarah, recovered, turned from the table and approached them, smiling tensely. “You two are looking very solemn,” she said.

  “I was congratulating him—” Mal began, but his father interrupted him with angry dismissiveness:

  “Arrah, he was trying to flatter me!”

  There was another awkward silence. Sarah could think of nothing to say. Mal cleared his throat. “Excuse me,” he murmured, and walked softly away.

  Sarah linked her arm through the old man’s and leaned against him fondly. She liked his staleish smell of tobacco and tweed and dry, aging flesh. Sometimes it seemed to her he was her only ally, but that thought made her feel guilty too, for why and against whom did she need an ally? But she knew the answer. She watched as Costigan put out a hand and took Mal by the arm and began to talk to him earnestly. Costigan was a thickset man with heavy black hair swept straight back from his forehead. He wore horn-rimmed spectacles that magnified his eyes.

  “I don’t like that man,” she said. “What does he do?”

  The Judge chuckled. “He’s in the export business, I believe. Not my favorite, either, I confess, among Malachy’s friends.”

  “I should go and rescue him,” she said.

  “No man more in need of it.”

  She gave him a smile of rueful reproof and unlinked her arm from his and set off across the room. Costigan had not noticed her approaching. He was saying something about Boston and our people over there. Everything that Costigan said sounded like a veiled threat, she had noticed that before now. She wondered again how Mal could be friends with such a man. When she touched Mal’s arm he started, as if her fingertips had communicated a tiny charge through the cloth of his sleeve, and Costigan smiled at her icily, baring his lower teeth, which were gray and clogged with plaque.

  When she had got Mal away she said to him, smiling to soften it: “Were you fighting with your father again?”

  “We don’t fight,” he said stiffly. “I lodge an appeal, he delivers a judgment.” Oh, Mal, she wanted to say, oh, my poor Mal! “Where’s Phoebe?” he asked.

  She hesitated. He had taken off his spectacles to polish them. “Not home yet,” she said.

  He halted. “What—!”

  With relief she heard, beyond the voices in the room, the sound of the front door opening. She walked away from him quickly, out to the hall. Phoebe was handing a man’s hat and coat to Maggie. “Where have you been?” Sarah hissed at the girl. “Your father is…” Then Quirke turned from the door, with an apologetic smile, and she stopped, feeling the blood surge up from her breast and burn in her cheeks. “Quirke,” she said.

  “Hello, Sarah.” How youthful and gauche he looked, leaning down at her, still smiling; a big blond overgrown boy. “I’m just delivering this black sheep home,” he said.

  Mal came into the hall then. Seeing Quirke he stopped, with that pop-eyed glare that made it seem as if something had become stuck in his throat. Maggie, grinning mysteriously to herself, made off for the kitchen without a sound.

  “Evening, Mal,” Quirke said. “I’m not staying—”

  “You most certainly are staying!” Phoebe cried. “Since they wouldn’t let me invite Conor Carrington I can at least have you!”

  She glared defiantly from one of the adults to the other, then blinked, her eyes swimming out of focus, and she turned, lurching a little, and stamped away up the stairs. Quirke was looking about for Maggie and his hat. “I’d better go,” he muttered.

  “Oh, but wait!” Sarah lifted a hand as if she would physically detain him, yet did not touch him. “The Judge is here—he’d never forgive me if you leave before you’ve at least said hello.” Without looking at Mal she took Quirke’s arm and turned him, mildly resisting, toward the drawing room. “When is it you were last here?” she said, speaking in a rush so that he might not interrupt. “Christmas, was it? It really is too bad of you, neglecting us like this.”

  The Judge was standing with a group of guests, talking volubly and gesturing with his pipe. When he caught sight of Quirke he gave an exaggerated start, throwing up his hands and opening wide his eyes. “Well, will you look who’s here!” he cried, and hurried forward, the abandoned guests smiling tolerantly after him.

  “Hello, Garret,” Quirke said.

  Sarah released him and took a step back, and the Judge tapped him on the breast fondly with a fist. “I thought you couldn’t come tonight, you rascal?”

  Quirke rolled his shoulders, smiling and biting his lip. He was, the Judge could see, three sheets over, or two, anyway.

  “Phoebe insisted,” Quirke said.

  “Aye, she’s a persuasive girl, that one.”

  The two men surveyed each other, watched by Sarah, smiling, and Mal, expressionless.

  “Congratulations, by the way,” Quirke said, with restrained irony.

  The Judge flapped a hand before him bashfully. “Go on out of that,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to take these things too seriously. Though, mind you, I’m hoping it will help my entry bid when I get to the Pearly Gates.”

  Quirke was tapping a cigarette on this thumbnail. “Count Garret Griffin,” he said. “It has a ring to it.”

  Mal coughed. “It’s Garret Count Griffin. That’s the proper form of address. Like John Count McCormack.”

  A brief silence followed this. The Judge twisted his lips in a sour smile. “Malachy, my boy,” he said, and laid an arm about Quirke’s shoulders, “would you ever go and fetch this thirsty man a drink?”

  But Sarah said she would get it. She was afraid that if she went on standing there she would break out in a shriek of hysterical laughter. When she returned with the whiskey Mal had moved away, and the Judge was telling Quirke a story about a case he had tried long ago when he was in the District Courts, something about a man selling a goat, or buying a goat, and falling down a well; she had heard the story before, many times, yet she could never remember the details. Quirke was nodding and laughing excessively; he too had heard the oft-told tale. He took the drink from her without offering thanks.

  “Well,” he said, lifting the glass to the Judge, “here’s to the purple.”

  “Oho!” the old man crowed. “It’s far from grand titles we were reared.”

  Phoebe came into the room, looking pale and slightly dazed. She had changed into slacks and a black pullover that was too tight at the bust. Sarah offered her a drink, saying there was lemonade, but the girl ignored her and went to the drinks table and splashed gin into a tumbler.

  “Well now, Malachy,” the Judge called across the room to his son, in a voice that was all innocence, “I didn’t know you were letting that young lady at the hard stuff?” Mal went a whiter shade of white, as those around him fell silent and looked at him. The Judge ostentatiously put a hand to his mouth and said to Quirke sideways in a stage whisper, “Indeed, by the look of her she’s had a few already.”

  Mal crossed the room and spoke to Phoebe in an undertone, but she turned aside from him as if he were not there. He hesitated a moment, clenching his fists—Mal was, Quirke thought, the kind of man who really does clench his fists—then whirled about and
bore down grimly on Quirke and the Judge. Sarah made a movement as if to intercept him, and Quirke held up a hand. “Yes, Mal, yes,” he said, “I confess, I was the occasion of sin. She made me take her to McGonagle’s.”

  Mal, his forehead pale and glistening, was about to spit out a violent word but Sarah spoke up quickly. “Shall we have something to eat?” she said, with desperate brightness. She turned to the guests, who had been watching avidly, while trying to seem not to, this little succession of familial confrontations. There was not always such rich entertainment to be had at the Griffins’. “If everyone will step into the dining room,” Sarah said loudly, her voice cracking a little, “we can start the buffet.”

  But Mal persisted. “Do you think,” he said to Quirke in quiet fury, “that it’s funny to bring a girl of her age to a pub?”

  Quirke took a breath, but the Judge put an arm around his shoulders again and turned him firmly out of the line of Mal’s anger, saying: “McGonagle’s, is it?” He chuckled. “Lord, I haven’t set foot in that den of iniquity since I don’t know when…”

  QUIRKE DID NOT EAT, BUT DRANK MORE WHISKEY INSTEAD. SUDDENLY he found himself in the kitchen, with Maggie. He looked about in dazed surprise. He seemed to have come to, somehow, just at that moment, leaning against the cupboard beside the sink, with his ankles crossed, nursing his whiskey glass to his midriff. What had happened to the intervening time, from when he was standing with the Judge to now? Maggie, bustling about, was speaking to him, apparently in reply to something he had said, though what it might have been he could not think. Maggie looked like the witch in a fairy tale, stooped and wizened, with a hooked nose and a tangled nest of steel-colored hair; she even had a cackling laugh, on the rare occasions when she did laugh.

  “Anyway,” Quirke said, thinking to start the conversation afresh, “how are you getting on, Maggie?”

  She paused by the stove and glanced at him, grinning archly on one side of her face. “You’re a terrible man,” she said. “You’d drink it off a sore leg.”

  He lifted the whiskey glass before his eyes and looked from it to her and back again with a mock-offended air, and she shook her head at him and went on with her work. She was cooking something in a steaming pot, into which she peered now, screwing up her face. Grimalkin, he thought: was that a witch’s name? From the drawing room came the sound of the Judge’s voice; he was making a speech to the company. “…And I hope you’ll believe me when I say that I consider myself unworthy of this great honor that the Holy Father has bestowed on me, and on my family. You all know where, and what, I came from, and how fortunate I’ve been, both in public and in private life…”

  Maggie gave a low, sardonic snort. “I suppose you’re here about the girl,” she said.

  Quirke frowned. “Phoebe?”

  “No!” Maggie said, with another snort. “The one that’s after dying.”

  There was a burst of applause outside as the Judge finished his speech. Sarah entered carrying a stack of used plates. Seeing Quirke she hesitated, then came and set the plates on the table among the other piles of washing-up waiting to be done. With weary forbearance she asked Maggie if the soup might be ready sometime soon—“They’ve eaten all the sandwiches, I’m afraid”—but Maggie, still bent over the steaming pot, only muttered something under her breath. Sarah sighed, and turned on the hot-water tap. Quirke watched her with a tipsily unfocused smile.

  “I wish,” she said quietly, not looking at him, “you wouldn’t take Phoebe to places like McGonagle’s. Mal is right, she’s too young to be in pubs, drinking.”

  Quirke put on a repentant expression. “I shouldn’t have come here either, I suppose,” he said, hanging his head, but looking up at her from a corner of his eye.

  “Not straight from that place, no.”

  “I wanted to see you.”

  She turned a quick glance in Maggie’s direction. “Quirke,” she murmured, “don’t start.”

  The hot water from the tap blurted into the sink, throwing up clouds of steam. Sarah put on an apron and took a soup tureen down from a shelf, shaking her head at the dusty state of it, and washed it with a sponge. Quirke was gratified to see how agitated she was. She carried the tureen to the stove and Maggie poured the soup into it. “Will you serve it, Maggie, please?” Quirke lit another cigarette. The smoke, the smell of the soup, the whiskey fumes all combined to promote in him a feeling of faint, sweet regretfulness. All this might have been his, had he done differently, he thought—this fine house, the band of friends, the family retainer, and this woman in her scarlet gown and elegant high-heeled shoes and those silk stockings with such straight seams. He watched her as she held the door for Maggie to pass through with the soup. Her hair was the color of rain-wet wheat. He had chosen her sister, Delia Crawford; Delia the dark one; Delia who died. Or was it he who had been chosen?

  “Do you know,” he said, “what it was that struck me first about you, all those years ago, in Boston?” He waited, but she made no response, and would not turn to look at him. He whispered it: “Your smell.”

  She gave a short, incredulous laugh. “My what? My perfume, do you mean?”

  He shook his head vigorously. “No no no. Not perfume—you.”

  “And what did I smell of?”

  “I’ve told you—you. You smelled of you. You still do.”

  Now she did look at him, smiling in a strained, unsteady way, and when she spoke her voice had a feathery quality, as if she were faintly in pain. “Doesn’t everybody smell of themselves?”

  Again he shook his head, gently this time.

  “Not like you,” he said. “Not with that—that intensity.”

  Quickly she turned her attention back to the sink. She knew she was blushing. She could smell him, now, or not smell but feel him, rather, the fleshy heat of him pressing against her like the air of a midsummer day thick with the threat of thunder. “Oh, Quirke,” she said with an effort at gaiety, “you’re just drunk!”

  He swayed a little, and righted himself. “And you’re beautiful,” he said.

  She closed her eyes for a second and seemed to waver. She was holding on to the rim of the sink. Her knuckles were white.

  “You shouldn’t talk to me like this, Quirke,” she said in an undertone. “It isn’t fair.” He had leaned so close to her from where he was standing that it seemed he might put his face into her hair at the side, or kiss her ear or her pale, dry cheek. He swayed again, smiling emptily. Suddenly she turned to face him, her eyes shining with anger, and he reared back from her unsteadily. “This is what you do, isn’t it,” she said, her lips whitening. “You play with people. You tell them how nice they smell, and that they’re beautiful, and all just to see their reaction, just to see if they’ll do something interesting, to relieve your boredom.”

  She began to weep, making no sound, big, shining tears squeezing out between her shut eyelids and her mouth clenched and dragged down at the corners. The door behind her opened and Phoebe stepped into the room and stopped, staring first at her mother’s bowed back and then at Quirke, who unseen by Sarah lifted high his eyebrows and his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug of bewildered innocence. The girl hesitated a moment, a faint fear coming into her face, then soundlessly withdrew and as soundlessly closed the door.

  The spectacle of another female in tears, the second this evening, was rapidly making Quirke sober. He offered Sarah his handkerchief, but she fumbled in a pocket of her frock and brought out one of her own and held it up for him to see. “I always keep a handkerchief handy,” she said, “just in case.” She gave a congested laugh and blew her nose, then braced her hands on the sink again and lifted her face to the ceiling with a hoarse, infuriated groan. “Look at me, my God! Standing in my own kitchen, crying. And for what?” She turned and contemplated him, shaking her head. “Oh, Quirke, you’re hopeless!”

  Encouraged by her tearful smile Quirke lifted a hand to touch her cheek, but she twitched her head aside, no longer smiling. “Too late, Quirk
e,” she said, in a hard, tight voice. “Twenty years too late.”

  She tucked the handkerchief into the sleeve of her dress and took off the apron and set it on the sideboard and stood for a moment with her hand resting on the cloth as if on a child’s head, her eyes downcast and blank. Quirke watched her; she was stronger than he was, in the end, far stronger. Again he moved to touch her, but again she flinched from him and he let fall his hand. Then she gave herself a faint shake and turned and walked out of the room.

  Quirke stayed where he was for a minute, gazing into his glass. It puzzled him, how with people nothing ever went as it seemed it should, or as it seemed it might. He sighed. He had the hot and guilty sense of having tinkered with something too delicately fine for his clumsy fingers. He put down his glass, telling himself to leave and not say another word to anyone. He was halfway to the door when it was pushed open brusquely and Mal came in. “What did you say to her?” he demanded. Quirke hesitated, willing himself not to laugh; Mal looked so perfectly, so theatrically, the part of the irate husband. “Well?” he snapped again.

  “Nothing, Mal,” Quirke said, trying to sound both blameless and contrite. Mal watched him narrowly. “You’re a troublemaker, Quirke,” he said, in an unexpectedly mild and almost matter-of-fact tone. “You come to my house, drunk, on this night when my father—”

  “Look, Mal—”

  “Don’t Look, Mal me!”

  He stepped forward and planted himself in front of Quirke, breathing loudly down his nostrils, his eyes bulging behind his spectacles. Maggie appeared in the doorway, in a repeat of Phoebe’s appearance earlier. Seeing the two men confronting each other she, too, quickly withdrew, with a gleeful look.

  “You have no place here, Quirke,” Mal said, speaking evenly. “You may think you have, but you haven’t.”

  Quirke made to step past him but Mal put a hand against his chest. Quirke leaned backwards, teetering on his heels. He had a sudden vision of the two of them grappling clumsily, grunting and swaying, their arms thrown about each other in a furious bear hug. The urge to laugh was stronger than ever. “Listen, Mal,” he said, “I was bringing Phoebe home, that’s all. I shouldn’t have taken her to the pub in the first place. I’m sorry. All right?” Mal was clenching his fists again; he now looked like the thwarted villain in a silent film. “Mal,” Quirke said, trying to put conviction into his voice, “you have no reason to hate me.”