Christine Falls: A Novele

by Benjamin Black

  “I’ll have one of them,” she said.

  She held the cigarette clumsily between two fingers and a thumb and bent to the flame of the lighter that Quirke was offering. He asked carefully:

  “So Dolly Moran came here, to collect babies?”

  The smoke of their cigarettes was a deep, dense blue in the misty air.

  “Aye,” she said, “for sending off to America.” Her look darkened. “They won’t get mine, that’s for sure.”

  Of course! That was the change in her: the swollen stomach. “When are you due?” he asked.

  She wrinkled her nose and her rabbit’s lip was drawn upwards again. “When am I what?”

  “The baby,” he said, “when will it be born?”

  “Oh.” She shrugged, glancing aside. “Not long.” Then she looked at him directly again, a sharp light dawning in those pale green eyes. “Why, what’s it to you?”

  He peered beyond her down the gray length of the yard; how long could he manage to keep her here before suspicion and fear drew her away?

  “Would they take your baby from you?” he said, trying to make his voice sound like the voices of the do-gooders who would occasionally turn up at Carricklea, asking about diet, and exercise, and how often the boys received the sacraments.

  Maisie gave another snort. “Wouldn’t they half!”

  He had not succeeded in deceiving her, any more than the do-gooders had deceived him. He said:

  “Tell me, how did you come to be here?”

  She gave him a pitying look. “My da put me in.”

  As if everyone should know that simple fact.

  “Why did he do that?”

  “He wanted me out of the way, like, in case I might tell on him.”

  “Tell what?”

  Her eyes grew purposely vague. “Ah, nothing.”

  “And the baby’s father?” She shook her head quickly and he knew he had made a mistake. He hastened on. “You say you won’t let them take the baby—so what will you do?”

  “I’ll run away, so I will. I have money saved.”

  He noted again, with a pang of pity, the laceless boots and bare, mottled legs, her work-roughened hands with their raw knuckles. He tried to picture her making her desperate escape but all he could conjure were images out of Victorian melodrama, of a shawled, stricken-faced girl hurrying along a snowy, rutted road with her precious bundle clutched to her breast and watched by a robin on a twig. The reality would be the mailboat and a rented room down a back street in some anonymous English city. If she got that far, which he very much doubted. Most likely she would not get beyond the gates of this place.

  He was about to speak again but she put up a hand to silence him and lifted her head to the side, listening. Somewhere a door creaked on its hinges and slammed shut. Hastily, with an expert flick of her thumb, she knocked the burning tip from her cigarette and hid the unsmoked half inside her smock and turned to go.

  “Wait,” he said urgently. “What’s wrong? Are you frightened?”

  “You’d be frightened,” she said darkly, “if you knew them crowd.”

  “What crowd?” he said. “What crowd, Mary?”

  “Maisie.” Her eyes were chips of glass now.

  He put a hand to his forehead. “Sorry, sorry—Maisie.” Again he scanned the long yard behind her. “It’s all right,” he said in desperation. “Look, there’s no one.”

  But it was too late, she was already turning away. “There’s always somebody,” she said simply. The distant, unseen door opened again, creaking. Hearing it, she crouched in stillness, a sprinter on the blocks. He fumbled the packet of cigarettes from his pocket and held it out to her. She threw him a look, cold and bleak and almost contemptuous, and snatched the cigarettes from his hand and stowed them in the pocket of her smock and was gone.

  24

  HE WANTED TO GO TO THE MOUNTAINS. EVERY DAY ON HIS WALKS HE looked longingly at them, they seemed to be just beyond the bridge at Leeson Street, snow-clad and as if afloat, like mountains in a dream. It was Sarah who offered to drive him there, and arrived at his door one afternoon in Mal’s leather-upholstered Jaguar. To Quirke’s nose the car inside had what he was sure must be its owner’s smell, thin, sharp, and medicinal. Sarah drove with nervous intensity, pressing her back against the seat and holding the steering wheel at arm’s length, her hands clamped close together on the top quadrant; on left turns she leaned so far to the side that Quirke felt stray tendrils of her hair touch his cheek like filaments of charged electric wire. She was quiet, and he could sense her brooding on something, and he was conscious of a stirring of his own unease. She had said on the telephone that she wanted to talk to him. Was she going to tell him what she knew about Mal? For by now Quirke was certain that she did know, that she had somehow found Mal out. Or perhaps he had broken down and confessed all to her. But whatever all was, Quirke did not want her to tell it to him, did not want to hear those things, in her mouth, did not want to have to sympathize, did not want to take her hand and look into her eyes and tell her how much he cared for her; that was gone, now, there would be no more hand-holding, no more soulful gazing in her eyes, no more of anything. He had gone beyond Sarah, into another, darker place, a place of his own behind another doorway like the doorway through which often in the past she had invited him, in vain, to enter with her.

  THEY WENT BY WAY OF ENNISKERRY AND GLENCREE. THE HIGH BOGS were hidden under snow but already there were newborn lambs on the slopes, spindly, dazed-looking scraps of white and black with stumpy, clockwork tails; even through the rubber-sealed windows of the car their plaintive bleatings could be thinly heard. The mountain roads had been cleared but there were patches of black ice, and on a steep bend approaching a narrow stone bridge the back end of the big car slewed sideways and with cowlike stubbornness refused to straighten until they were across the bridge, the parapet of which the left mudguard missed by what Quirke, wildly looking back, saw had been no more than an inch or two. Sarah steered the machine to the side of the road and stopped, and closed her eyes and leaned her forehead in the space between her hands on the rim of the steering wheel.

  “Did we hit anything?” she murmured.

  “No,” Quirke said. “We would have known, if we had.”

  She gave a low, groaning laugh. “Thank God,” she said. “His precious car.”

  She switched off the ignition and they sat for a while listening to the cooling engine ticking and plinking. Gradually the wind, too, made itself heard, faint and fitful, whistling in the car’s front grille and thrumming in the limp strands of rusted barbed wire beside the road. Sarah lifted her head from the wheel and leaned it on the seat-back, still with her eyes closed. Her face was drawn and paper-pale, as if the blood had all drained out of it; this could not be solely the effect of the near miss on the bridge. Quirke’s unease deepened. His leg, too, began to ache, because of the thinned air up here, he supposed, or the cold that was seeping into the car now that the heater was off, or perhaps just because of the cramped position he had been forced to hold it in during the journey up from the city. He suggested that they should get out and walk a little, and she asked if he would be able, and he said impatiently that of course he would, and was already opening the door and lowering his leg with grunts and curses to the ground.

  They had stopped on the edge of a long, shallow sweep of mountainside at the foot of which there was a black lake, its surface an unmoving sheet of steely shards. Beside them was a low, rounded hill, snowed over and seeming to crouch, somehow, against a stone-dark sky. Snared tufts of soiled wool fluttered on the barbed wire, and here and there a gorse bush or a clump of heather showed starkly through the snow. A turf cutter’s track led slantwise up the hill, and this they followed, Quirke on his stick stepping cautiously over the ice-ribbed, stony ground with Sarah at his side, her arm firmly linked in his. The cold burned in their nostrils and made their lips and eyelids feel glassy. Halfway up the track Sarah said they should turn back, that they must be
mad, coming up here, him with his leg in a cast and she in these ridiculous shoes, but Quirke set his jaw and went on, tugging her with him.

  He asked after Phoebe.

  “She goes to Boston next week,” Sarah answered. “Her ticket is booked. She’ll fly to New York, then on by train.” She spoke with a willed calmness, keeping her eyes fixed on the track.

  “You’ll miss her,” he said.

  “Oh, dreadfully, of course. But I know it will be good for her. She needs to get away. She’s furious about Conor Carrington—I’m afraid what she might do. I mean,” she went on quickly, “she might make some awful mistake—girls often do, when they’re thwarted in love.”

  “Thwarted?”

  “You know what I mean, Quirke. She could throw herself at the next young guy who comes along, and lose everything.” She was silent for a moment, walking along with her arm in his and holding her wrist with her other hand. She wore black silk gloves, and the shoes, slimly elegant, that were so incongruous in this wild place. “I wish,” she said suddenly, hurrying the words, “I wish you’d go with her, Quirke.” She glanced at him, smiling tensely, then looked away again.

  He watched her profile. “To Boston?”

  She nodded, setting her lips tight together. “I’d like to think,” she said, choosing the words carefully, “that there was someone there to look after her.”

  “She’ll be with her grandfather. She won’t be throwing herself at any young men with old Josh there to frighten them off.”

  “I meant, someone I could trust. I don’t want her to—I don’t want her to become one of them.”

  “Them?”

  “My father, all that. Their world.” She twisted her mouth into a bitter smile. “The Crawford clan.”

  “Then don’t let her go.”

  Her grip on his arm tightened. “I’m not strong enough. I can’t fight them, Quirke. They’re too much for me.”

  He nodded. “What about Mal?” he said.

  “What about him?” Suddenly there was the coldness of steel in her voice.

  “Does he want Phoebe to go?”

  “Who knows what Mal wants? We don’t discuss these things. We don’t discuss anything, anymore.”

  He stopped, and made her stop with him. “What’s wrong, Sarah?” he said. “Something has happened. You’re different. Is it Mal?”

  Her answer this time came like the snap of a tautened wire. “Is what Mal?”

  They walked on. Quirke felt the ice under his feet, the treacherous smoothness of it. What if he were to slip and fall here? He would not be able to get himself to his feet again. Sarah would have to go for help. He might die. He entertained the thought with equanimity.

  They came to the crest of the hill. Before them was another long valley, the floor of which was hidden under a haze of frost. They stood and gazed into that glowing gray immensity as if it were the very heart of desolation.

  “Will you go to America?” Sarah asked, but before he could answer a shiver ran through her, he felt the force of it in her arm that was still linked in his, and with a sort of swooning sigh she let all her weight collapse against him, so that he thought his knee might give way. “Oh, God,” she whispered in distress and terror. Her eyes were closed, the lids fluttering like moth wings. “Sarah,” he said, “what is it?” She took a deep, trembling breath. “Sorry,” she said, “I thought I…” He wedged the walking stick under his elbow for support and held both of her hands in his. Her fingers were icy. She tried to smile, shaking her head. “It’s all right, Quirke. I’m fine, really.”

  He led her away from the track, the frozen snow snapping like glass under their shoes, to a large, round rock standing in self-conscious isolation on the barren hillside. He brushed the snow from the top of the rock and made her sit. A little color was coming back into her face. She said again she was all right, that it was just her dizzy feeling. She laughed weakly. “One of my turns, as Maggie calls them.” A nerve in her cheek twitched, giving her a bitter aspect. “One of my turns,” she said again.

  Nervously he lit a cigarette. At this high altitude the smoke cut into his lungs like a flung handful of blades. A large gray crow with a sharpened chisel of a beak alighted near them on a fence post and uttered a derisive croak. Sarah was looking at her hands clasped in her lap. “Quirke,” she said, “I have something to tell you. It’s about Phoebe. I don’t know how to say it.” In her distress she lifted her hands, still clasped, and shook them before her in a curious gesture, like a dice player preparing to throw but knowing the throw will fail. “She’s not mine, Quirke. She’s not Mal’s, either.” Quirke stood so still he might have been made of the same stuff as the stone on which she sat. Sarah shook her head slowly from side to side in a kind of disbelieving amazement. “She’s yours,” she said. “Yours and Delia’s. You didn’t know she lived, but she did. Delia died and Phoebe lived. The Judge, Garret, he phoned us in Boston that night, to tell us Delia was dead. I couldn’t believe it. He asked if Mal and I would look after the baby—for a while, he said, until you were over your shock. There was a nun coming out from Dublin. She brought Phoebe with her.” She sighed, and cast about her as if vaguely in search of some way by which she might escape, some passageway or hollow in the snow down which she might drop. “I shouldn’t have kept her,” she said, “but I told myself it was for the best. You were already drinking so much, because of Delia, because she wasn’t what you had hoped she’d be. And then she was dead, and there was Phoebe.” He turned, a stone man, and took some steps over the snow, leaning his weight on his stick, and stopped, looking away from her, down again into the frozen valley far below. The bird on the post ducked its head and flexed one wing and this time gave a low, rattling squawk that might have been of entreaty, or mildly regretful deprecation. Sarah sighed again. “I wanted something of you, you see,” she said to Quirke’s enormous, hunched back. “Something that was yours. Terrible of me, I know.” She laughed briefly, as if amazed again, at herself, at what she was saying. “All these years…” She rose to her feet, clenching her fists and holding them at her sides. “I’m sorry, Quirke,” she called to him, making her voice loud, for it seemed to her that when she had stood up the air had somehow grown too thin to carry mere words, and that anyway he was, over on that bare mountain rim, almost beyond hearing her. He would not turn, only stood there in his crow-black coat with his back to her and his head bowed. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and this time it was as if she were saying it to herself.

  THREE

  25

  ANDY STAFFORD FELT LIKE HE WAS ON TRIAL. THEY WERE IN SISTER Stephanus’s office, he and Claire, sitting side by side on two straight chairs in front of the big oak desk behind which Sister Stephanus was seated. At her back, standing, was the red-haired priest, Harkins, the one who had called at the house that day to spy on them. Another nun, he could not remember her name—she was a doctor, she had a stethoscope around her neck—was standing by the window looking out at the brilliant day, her face lit by the light reflected from the snow. He had explained to them, again, what had happened, how he had found the baby having a fit or something and had given her—he just managed in time to stop himself saying it—a shake to try to get her to snap out of it, and how she had died instead. It was all a misunderstanding, an accident. He had been drunk, he had not tried to deny it; that was probably part of the reason why it had happened, that the kid had died. So yes, he admitted it, it was sort of his fault, if an accident could ever be anyone’s fault. Even though she was sitting down, Sister Stephanus looked taller than everyone else in the room. At last she stirred herself, and sighed and said:

  “You must try as best you can, both of you, to put this terrible thing behind you. Little Christine is with God now. It was His will.”

  The other nun turned from the window and looked at Claire, who gave no response. The young woman had not moved or said a word since they had sat down. She was white-faced and hunched, as if she were cold, and her hands, the palms turned
upward, lay lifeless in her lap. Her gaze was fixed on the floor in front of the desk, and she was frowning in concentration, trying to make out, it seemed, something in the pattern of the carpet.

  Sister Stephanus went on:

  “Andy, your task now is to help Claire. You’ve both had a loss, but hers is the greater. Do you understand?”

  Andy nodded vigorously, to show how eager he was, and how determined, to try to undo what had been done. “I understand, Sister,” he said, “yes, I understand. Only…” He jerked his chin up and ran a finger around the inside of his shirt collar. He was wearing his tan checked sport jacket and dark pants, and he had even put on a tie, to make a good impression.

  Sister Stephanus was watching him with her wide-open, glistening, slightly staring eyes, eyes that looked as if they had been frozen. “Only?” she said.

  Andy took a heavy breath, lifting his chin again. “I was wondering if you’d talked to Mr. Crawford about a job for me. I mean a different job, one that would keep me nearer home.”

  Sister Stephanus glanced over her shoulder to where the priest was standing. He lifted his eyebrows but said nothing. The nun turned back to Andy. “Mr. Crawford is very ill,” she said. “Gravely ill.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Andy said, a little too slickly, he realized. He hesitated, getting himself ready. Now was the moment. “Must be tough,” he said in his slow drawl, “Mr. Crawford being sick and all. I suppose the rest of you”—he looked from her to Harkins and back again—“have to take up the slack. Funny, a big operation like the one you have going, yet you never see anything about it in the newspapers.”

  There was another silence, then the priest said in that twangy harp accent of his: “A lot of things don’t get into the newspapers, Andy. Even serious accidents aren’t reported, sometimes.”

  Andy ignored him. “Trouble is, see,” he said to the nun, “I’ll have my hands full helping Claire here to get over her loss. Have to turn down those long runs up to Canada and the Lakes. There’s the overtime, I’ll lose that.”