Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke)

by Benjamin Black

  “I’m sorry, I seem to have driven Malachy away,” Maggie said, managing to sound aggrieved. Rose gave her a look. She had not realized how tedious her friend could be. How was it they had become friendly in the first place? Rose did not make friends easily, or without due consideration. The two women had met through one of the charities Rose’s late husband had supported, the Glentalbot Trust, which had its headquarters in a drafty old house in the Wicklow Mountains. Rose was on the board of the Trust, and so was Marguerite Delahaye, who had taken over the seat once occupied by Victor Delahaye’s first wife, now deceased. Rose had paid scant attention to Maggie, the token Protestant on the board, until that now infamous emergency meeting at which Rose had demanded the resignation of the director of Glentalbot House, a drunken incompetent. Maggie, to everyone’s surprise, had supported her, and between them the two women had won the day and routed the director’s party. After the meeting Rose had sent her car and driver back to town and had taken a lift in Maggie’s rattly old Morris Oxford. On the way in they had stopped at a hotel in Enniskerry and drunk a bottle of wine together to celebrate their victory. That day Rose had seemed to see, piercing through Maggie’s prim and proper manner, a hard cold gleam of steel. Looking at her now, sitting before her sunk in a puddle of sorrow and self-pity, Rose wondered if she had been mistaken, if what she had seen in Maggie was simply something she had wanted to see, a reflection only of her own glinting toughness.

  As if she had sensed Rose’s disenchanted musings, Maggie now stood up, saying she should go. She went to the mirror over the fireplace and looked at herself with a faint cry of dismay, and took a compact from her bag and dabbed powder on her cheeks and on the sides of her inflamed nose, with not much effect. Rose turned on her chair to regard her, and before she knew she was going to say it said, “And you really don’t know why he did it?”

  Maggie stopped and stood very still, facing the mirror, the powder puff suspended. “Oh, Rose,” she said, “there are things I can’t allow myself to think about, not yet.”

  Rose looked at her friend’s haggard face reflected in the mirror. There was something about Maggie, something faintly but definitely strange. It was as if she had an emotional squint. You felt when she looked at you that she was not seeing you straight. She had odd ways, odd tics. She was given to sudden pauses, sudden halts in the midst of things, when she would stand for five or ten seconds gazing before her with a stricken expression, as if she were seeing horrors. Then she would blink, and give herself a shake, and be quite normal again, or as near to normal as she ever got. Poor Maggie. She should have married. But then, who would have married her?

  Malachy came back, bearing a dusty bottle with an inch of cherry brandy in the bottom. “Sorry,” he said, “this was all I could find.”

  The two women looked at him.

  * * *

  Jack Clancy stood at the bottom of Bow Street smelling the warm, rancid stink of fermenting barley from behind the beetling walls of Jameson’s distillery. He always thought it funny that old Samuel Delahaye, a teetotaler and a zealous promoter of the temperance movement, should have chosen this place, so close to the distillery, as the site for the offices of Delahaye & Clancy. Nor could he have welcomed the proximity of the Capuchin friary round the corner in Church Street. Samuel was an old-style Unionist whose people had originated in the black hills of Antrim, and he did not take kindly to Catholics, even though he had brought in one of them, Jack’s father, to be his business partner. To Jack all that seemed immensely far off now, as if it had happened hundreds of years past, and not just a generation ago.

  He set off walking slowly, over the cobbles. This street was strange, always had been, so hushed and secretive, with a silence all of its own, flat yet echoing. It was because of the height of the walls on either side, he supposed, and the narrowness between them; the cobbles, too, probably acted on sounds in some deadening way. As a child he had always been frightened when his father brought him here, to the office, and they walked along where he was walking now, hearing their own footsteps. Yet when had his father brought him here, and why? He would not have wanted him about the office, under his feet, and anyway he would have been afraid of what Samuel Delahaye would say, for old Samuel, the senior boss, certainly was not fond of children. Yet Jack saw in his mind the two of them walking along here, hand in hand, the stooping man, only in his thirties and in failing health already, and himself in short trousers and a peaked cap with a button in the crown. Was he remembering or imagining?

  He stopped at the squarish brick mansion opposite Duck Lane. It was of modest size, somewhat squat, with two windows to either side of the front door and five more above, on the second floor. The bricks were pale brown with flecks of yellow, as if butter had been mixed into them. The afternoon sun shone kindly on them. The front door too was squat, with a heavy black knocker and a glass fanlight above it where the name of the firm was painted in discreet, gilt lettering:

  DELAHAYE & CLANCY LTD.

  IMPORT EXPORT

  He realized, with a curious shock, how fond he was of this house, solid and foursquare as it was. It seemed to him suddenly an old friend he had neglected for a long time but who now had stepped forward diffidently to offer him—to offer him what? Reassurance? Forgiveness? Shelter? He thought of the people inside. A few days ago he had been one of them, a man in an office, quietly working. Now it seemed to him something he had dreamed, another life, commonplace yet fantastical.

  He did not suppose the twins would be at their desks. They rarely were. They dropped in once in a while, nonchalantly, to sign a few letters and collect their expenses. Such behavior would not have been tolerated in old Samuel’s day. Maverley, the head bookkeeper, had tried once or twice to discipline them but they had laughed at him. Maverley was the one Jack had always worried about, the one he knew would find him out, if anyone would, and now he had. He should have got Maverley on his side, should have brought him in on the plan, should have involved him in the grand and secret strategy he had been working on for years. But Jack had been afraid to show his hand to anyone, and that, he saw now, had been his weakness. For what he had been doing could not be done successfully by one man alone. He should have taken a partner.

  Maverley would have been the obvious choice, but Jack had not considered it for a moment, and that had been his downfall. Maverley was a weasel, but weasels have sharp teeth. The bookkeeper, it turned out, had been watching him for months, watching his every move. Jack had secretly set up dummy companies, in Belfast, in Jersey, on the Isle of Man, to buy shares in Delahaye & Clancy—a daring and damn clever thing, even if he said so himself—and he had been on the brink of becoming the major shareholder when Maverley struck. Maverley had not been man enough to confront Jack directly, but had gone instead to Samuel Delahaye and told him everything. And the old bastard, of course, had told Victor.

  Jack knew that Victor had never understood him, had taken him for granted. Victor treated him as he treated his twin sons, with a kind of easy, tolerant contempt. At board meetings Jack somehow always found himself at the far end of the table, with ten feet of gleaming mahogany between him and Victor up at the top, sitting in what used to be his father’s chair, directing the order of business with a lordly ease. Occasionally, for the look of the thing, Victor would ask for Jack’s opinion, and while Jack spoke he would sit back, with an index finger to his cheek, suppressing a smirk, or so it seemed to Jack, while the rest of the board members drummed their fingers and waited impatiently for him to finish. Victor made little jokes at Jack’s expense, delivered little digs. “Oh,” he would drawl, when some trivial topic was mentioned, “that would be Jack’s territory, not mine—isn’t that right, Jack?” And Jack would have to smile and squirm and take the mockery, as if he were an office boy brought in to be consulted on something too vulgar for Victor Delahaye to know anything about.

  He looked up at the frontage of the house, at the glowing, buttery tiles, the rippled windowpanes, the tastefully pain
ted sign over the door. He would never again cross the threshold here, all at once he knew it, and he turned aside quickly and walked away.

  Jack wished he could forget his last meeting with Victor, but it kept returning to his mind, each time as vivid as if it were taking place all over again. Victor had called him into the boardroom. When Jack entered, Victor was standing at the window with his back turned, looking out at the brick chimneys of the distillery. Fury, accusations, recriminations—all that Jack could have coped with. But Victor had not shouted or threatened. He had seemed more tired than angry. His shoulders were sloped and his back looked crooked somehow, like Sylvia’s, as if he were in pain, like her. “My father spoke to me,” he said. Those were his words, My father spoke to me. It had sounded to Jack like something out of the Bible. Depart from me, ye cursed …

  Had he caused Victor to do what he had done? Would Victor have killed himself because he had learned his partner had been plotting to take control of the business? Would he? If so, it had been Victor’s ultimate dismissal of him, his final gesture of disdain for Jack and his secret plans. And now it was all gone. All the months of scheming, of planning, of putting the pieces into place, of hiding and watching, of waiting, of making himself wait—all gone. The twins, that pair of wastrels, would inherit the lot—them, and Victor’s bitch of a wife. They would have it, and he would have nothing—Maverley would make sure of that.

  He turned into Smithfield. A rag-and-bone man on his cart went past, his nag’s hoofs clomping and the iron bands on the cartwheels harshing against the cobbles.

  What now, Jack? he asked himself. What now?

  He went out to the river and hailed a passing taxi. The driver wore a cap and did not try to make conversation, sitting in front of him sunk in his seat, his shoulders up and his big red ears sticking out. What would it be like, Jack wondered, to be him, rattling around all day in this old motor, picking up strangers and never saying a word to them? It might not be bad at all. It would require so little, just to exist. In the past Jack had rarely thought about other people’s lives. Now he seemed to be on the outside of his own life, suddenly; one minute he had been safely indoors, in the thick of things, the next he had been seized on roughly and hustled out and dumped on the pavement, like a character in a cartoon, with his shirt collar standing up and stars flying in a circle round his head.

  Why had Victor done it? Why? Was it really his fault, Jack thought, was he really to blame?

  He told the driver to stop at Kenilworth Road and got out and set off walking towards the square. It was a habit he had fallen into; even when he drove himself he would stop short and park and go the rest of the way to the nursing home on foot. By that means he got an extra few minutes’ delay, an interval in which something might happen, in which some accident might occur, some sudden summons be delivered, so that he could turn back and cancel that day’s visit. Ridiculous, of course; nothing ever happened, and he would have to go on, at an increasingly leaden-footed pace, until despite everything he arrived at the front door and the four granite steps leading up, which might have been the steps to the gallows.

  The front hall as always smelled of stewed tea and soiled mattresses. His father’s room—or cell, as Jack thought of it—was on the first floor. Up here the spacious Georgian rooms had been divided by means of partition walls into smaller units that were narrow and cramped but had absurdly lofty ceilings with cut-off plaster-cast borders at an angle to each other on two sides. There was a bed, a chair, a bedside locker. A copper beech tree outside loomed in the high sash window, darkening the room within and giving it an underwater look. Jack’s father inhabited this cisternlike space with the indolent furtiveness of an elongated, big-eyed, emaciated carp. Over time he had taken on protective coloring, so that always when Jack entered the room it took him a moment to make out the old man’s figure against the background of drab wallpaper and the brown blanket on the bed and the rusty light in the window.

  “Hello, Dad,” he said, trying to appear cheerful but sounding, as always, alarmed and querulous.

  His father, standing by the window, peered upwards, frowning, and put his head to one side, as if he had heard his son’s voice as a faint cry or call coming from a long way off. Jack sighed. What added to the torment of these visits was the eerie feeling he had that there was no one else here, that he was alone and talking to himself. His father seemed to feel the same thing, that he was alone yet being talked to, somehow. And so they would blunder through a painful half hour, the son shouting himself hoarse in an effort to penetrate the fog of his father’s senility, while his father grew increasingly agitated, thinking probably that spirit voices were speaking to him loudly but unintelligibly out of the ether.

  As a young man Philip Clancy had been tall and thin and now he was stooped and gaunt. He had a small head with a domed forehead and a curiously pitted skull on which a few last stray hairs sprouted like strands of cobweb. His nose was huge and hooked, a primitive axe head, and his mouth, since he had given up wearing his dentures, was thin-lipped and sunken. The Delahayes had treated him negligently all his working life, and now that he was worn out there was not one of them who would come to visit him, here where he was held in captivity, vague and lost to himself and the world.

  Jack walked to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out. Why would they not cut down that bloody tree, or prune it back, at least, and let in a bit of light? He had asked them often enough to do something about it and they had promised they would, but of course they never had. The fellow who ran the place was an oily type, ferret-eyed behind a fawning manner, while his washed-out wife had the dazed look of someone trying in vain to understand how she had ended up like this, running a home for the old and the sick and the mad.

  Jack’s father was watching him with a wary surmise, running his eye all over him as if in search of a clue as to his identity. Somewhere in the house an electric alarm bell was ringing, an insistent buzzing that seemed to loop on itself slowly, over and over.

  “I’m in trouble, Dad,” Jack said, still gazing out of the window. “I tried to take over the business and I failed. Or I was beaten. Suicide you can’t win against.” He paused, shaking his head slowly from side to side in bitter and angry regret. “I did it partly for you, you know,” he said. “To get back at them for the way they used you, all those years.” He stopped again. Was it true? It sounded fake, yet he so much wanted it to be true. He wanted to believe that there was, if not a nobler, then a higher motive for what he had done, what he had tried to do. He did not care to think it had all been for himself, to satisfy his own resentment and jealousy.

  His father, standing there peering at him, made a sound, a sort of questioning click at the back of his throat. What went on in his head, Jack wondered, what shards and tail ends of thought were floating about in there, the splintered wreckage of a life? “Ah, Dad,” Jack said, feeling suddenly worn out. Something was happening in his throat, his sinuses, behind his eyes. He put a hand to his face, and all at once the tears came, and he opened his mouth and released a sound that was half a sob and half a wail. Still covering his eyes, he reached out his other hand blindly before him and, finding his father’s cold and bony arm, held on to it, and wept.

  6

  The night was too hot for sleeping but they would probably not have slept anyway. Quirke sat on the side of the bed, smoking a cigarette. He was naked, yet still he was sweating. It was strange, being here again in the little house in Portobello, in this low-ceilinged bedroom with the narrow bed and the Fragonard reproduction on the wall and that little square window looking out onto the canal.

  The hour was past midnight but there was still a faint glow in the sky above the rooftops. He did not like this time of year, with its slow lethargic days and eerily short nights. In summer he always felt slightly unwell, with headaches and pains in his joints and a constant faint sensation of nausea. He thought he must have an allergy, that there must be some kind of pollen or dust in
the air that his system could not cope with. He should have a test. He closed his eyes briefly. There were many things he should do.

  “I suppose you’ll be off now,” Isabel Galloway said, “having got what you came for.”

  She was sitting up in the bed, propped against pillows, wrapped in the silk teagown he remembered, with red and yellow flowers printed on it. She was smoking too, with an ashtray in her lap. Although his back was turned to her, he could feel her angry eye fixed on him.

  “Do you want me to go?” he asked.

  “Oho no,” she said, with a bitter laugh, “don’t try that old trick—I’m not going to make it easy for you.”

  He was squinting through the window out into the undark night. The streetlamp at the corner was casting a sulfurous sheen on the still surface of the canal. He thought of being out there, even saw himself, walking along the towpath in the calm mild air, moving between pools of lamplight, his long shadow shortening at his back and rising up swiftly and then the next moment falling out in front of him. To be alone, to be alone.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Yes, of course you are.” Isabel spoke behind him, in a tone of angry sarcasm. “You’re always sorry, aren’t you.”