Christine Falls: A Novele

by Benjamin Black

  Quirke, irritated by her queenly plurals, had to admire the deftness with which she had brought the encounter to a close. As he turned away he glanced at Sister Anselm, but she was gazing grim-faced into a far corner of the ceiling and would not return his look. Father Harkins stepped forward, glistening with relief, and walked with him to the door. He seemed about to put a friendly hand on his shoulder but thought better of it. He said:

  “You’re not one of the Order yourself, I take it, Mr. Quirke?” Quirke looked at him. “The Knights, I mean? Of St. Patrick? Mr. Crawford is a lifelong member, I believe. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, a founding member.”

  “No,” Quirke said drily, “I’m sure you’re not mistaken.”

  The bucktoothed nurse opened the door for him, and swinging himself forward on his stick he yanked himself from the room, like an angry parent dragging away a stubbornly recalcitrant child.

  Seeing him come stumping down the steps Andy Stafford took his knees from the dashboard of the Buick and sat up hastily and donned his chauffeur’s cap. Quirke got into the car without a word, refusing his help. He seemed mad. Andy did not know what to think about that. What had happened in there? He could not get the suspicion out of his head that Quirke’s coming here had something to do with the kid. It was crazy, he knew, but there was still that feeling in his spine, like something cold rolling down inside it.

  They were on the driveway when Quirke tapped him on the shoulder and told him to stop. He had been looking back and had seen through the bare trees Sister Anselm come out by a side door of the orphanage. “Wait here,” he said, and got himself out of the car, grunting.

  Andy watched him poling himself back up the drive on his stick, and the nun stopping to wait for him, and the two of them turning and setting off along a path under the trees, the two of them limping.

  AT FIRST THE NUN WOULD TELL QUIRKE NOTHING, YET HE WAS SURE she had not appeared from that doorway by chance. They walked along together in silence, their breaths misting in the winter air. They had acknowledged, with no words but only from each of them simultaneously an ironic, diagonally directed glance, the melancholy comedy of their like conditions, his smashed knee, her twisted hip. There were ragged patches of snow under the trees. The path was paved with wood chips. The sharp, resinous odor of the chips reminded him of the pine woods behind the big stone house at Carricklea. All around them quick brown birds, seemingly unfrightenable, were pecking busily among the dead leaves. Grackles, were they? Choughs? He knew so little about this country, not even the names of its commonest birds. The sky among the tracery of branches was the color of dulled steel. His knee had begun to ache. The nun wore no coat over her habit. “Are you not cold, Sister?” he asked. She shook her head; she had her hands folded before her, using the broad sleeves of her habit as a muff. He tried to guess her age. Fiftyish, he thought. Her limp was not so much a limp as a toppling, sideways heave at every other step, as if the pivot that held her upright had suffered a corkscrew twist halfway along its length.

  “Please,” he said, “tell me about the child. I’ve no intention of doing anything. I simply want to hear what happened.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

  “You’re a doctor, right? Were you involved in the birth?”

  “No. That is, not directly. I’m a pathologist.”

  “I see.”

  He doubted that she did. He scuffed at the wood chips with the tip of his blackthorn stick. Out of nowhere a picture came to him of Philomena the nurse astride him in the wan light of a Dublin afternoon. To have been there, and then here; these things, he thought, that seem so straightforward and are not.

  “Tell me at least who the family was,” he said, “the family that adopted her.”

  The nun snorted.

  “Adopted!” she said. “We don’t bother with such legal niceties here at St. Mary’s.” She stopped on the path and turned to face him. Her lips were blue from the cold and her angry eyes were red-rimmed and teary. “How much do you know of what goes on here, Mr. Quirke?” she asked. “I mean here, and where you come from, too—the whole thing.”

  He braced the walking stick at an angle to the ground and gazed at it.

  “I know,” he said measuredly, “that Joshua Crawford finances a scheme for children from Ireland to be brought out here. I suspect Christine was one of them.”

  They walked on.

  “A scheme, yes,” she said. “A scheme that has been going on for twenty years—did you know that? Yes, twenty years. Can you imagine how many children that is? How many babies taken over here and handed out like…like…” She could find no word sufficiently encompassing. “They call it charity, but that’s not what it is. It’s power, just naked power.”

  Somewhere behind them a bell began to clang with a hectic urgency.

  “Power?” Quirke said. “What kind of power?”

  “Power over people. Over their souls.”

  Souls. The word had a ring to it, urgent and dark like the peals of the bell. A planter of souls, Josh Crawford had said.

  They did not speak for the space of half a dozen paces. Then the nun said:

  “They care nothing for the children. Oh, they think they do, but they don’t. Their only interest is to see them grow up and take their place in the structure they’ve devised.” She paused, and gave a meager laugh. “St. Mary’s, Mr. Quirke, is a forcing house for the religious. The children are delivered to us, some no more than a few weeks old. We make sure they’re healthy—that’s my job, by the way, I’m a physician”—again she laughed thinly—“and then they’re…distributed.” The bell had stopped. The birds, at some sound in the aftermath of the pealing that only they could hear, flew up in a flock, their wings whirring, then quickly settled again. “We hand them out to good Catholic homes, people we can trust—the respectable poor. Then when the children are old enough they are taken back and put into seminaries and convents—whether they want to be or not. It’s a machine for making priests, for making nuns. Do you see?”

  She looked at him sidelong. He was frowning.

  “Yes,” he said, “I see. Only…”

  She nodded. “But it doesn’t seem so bad, right? Taking in orphans, finding them good homes—”

  “I was an orphan, Sister. I was glad to get out of the orphanage.”

  “Ah,” she said, and nodded once more. They had come again in sight of the Buick; the engine was going, and pallid wisps of smoke were trailing from the exhaust pipe. They stopped. “But you see, it’s unnatural, this thing, Mr. Quirke,” the nun said. “That’s the point. When bad folk take it on themselves to do what are supposed to be good works it makes a sulfurous smell. I think you’ve had a whiff of it, that smell.”

  “Tell me about the child,” he said. “Tell me about Christine Falls.”

  “No. I’ve told you too much already.”

  He thought: Just like Dolly Moran did.

  “Please,” he said. “Things have happened, wicked things.” She cast a glance inquiringly at the walking stick. “Yes, this,” he said, “but worse, too. Far worse.”

  She looked down. “It’s cold, I have to go back.” Yet still she stood, gazing at him thoughtfully. Then she came to a decision. “What you should do, Mr. Quirke,” she said, “is ask the nurse, the one who looks after Mr. Crawford.”

  “Brenda?” He stared. “Brenda Ruttledge?”

  “Yes, if that’s her name. She knows about the child, about little Christine. She can tell you, some of it, anyway. And listen, Mr. Quirke.” She was looking past him to where the Buick waited on the drive. “Watch out for yourself. There are people—there are people who are not what they seem, who are more than they seem.” She smiled at him, this huge man standing stooped before her, asking his awkward questions. Yes, she thought: an orphan. “Good-bye, Mr. Quirke,” she said. “I wish you well. From the little I’ve seen of you, I think you’re a good man, if only you knew it.”

  29


  MOSS MANOR WHEN QUIRKE GOT BACK TO IT GAVE THE IMPRESSION OF having been flung wide open, like a door. There was an ambulance outside and a pair of automobiles, and in the entranceway two grave, sober-suited men were engaged in a hushed conversation; they paused and looked at him with curiosity as he entered but he ignored them and went through into the house and lurched from room to room. He was angry again, he was not sure why, exactly, for what he had learned from Sister Anselm had not been news to him, not really. He had begun to consider the possibility that this unfocused anger would be the condition of his life from now on, that he would have to keep bouncing along before it helplessly forever, like a piece of litter buffeted by an unceasing wind. In the main drawing room he came upon the mousy maid, he could not remember her name, arranging dried flowers in a vase on the lid of the grand piano on which he was certain no one had ever played a note. A great fire of logs was burning in the fireplace. The maid quailed before him. He asked her where Miss Ruttledge was. She looked blank. “The nurse,” he said, beginning to shout, and thumping his stick on the floor, “Mr. Crawford’s nurse!” She told him Brenda was with Mr. Crawford now, and that Mr. Crawford was very poorly, and her lower lip trembled. He turned from her and hauled himself up the staircase, cursing the dead weight of his leg. At what he knew to be Josh Crawford’s room he knocked perfunctorily and pushed open the door.

  The scene within had the unreally dramatic composition of a painting, a genre scene of a deathbed with attendant mourners. Josh Crawford lay on his back as on a high, white catafalque, his arms resting by his sides over the covers, the jacket of his pajamas thrown open to reveal his huge, heaving chest all furred over with steel-gray hair. An oxygen mask was strapped to his face, and his breaths came in long, laborious rattlings, as if he were hauling on a chain inside him, link by painful link. Phoebe sat on a chair by the bed, leaning forward and holding one of her grandfather’s hands in both of hers. Brenda Ruttledge stood close behind her, stylized in her white outfit and her jaunty little hat, the painter’s very model of a nurse. On the other side of the bed Rose Crawford stood with one arm folded and a hand lifted to her chin, another stylized figure, representing something certainly unsuitable to her, such as patience, or fidelity, or wifely calm. Hearing him at the door Brenda Ruttledge turned, and with a jerk of his head he signaled to her to come out into the corridor. She did so, and closed the door softly behind her. She was about to speak but he cut her off with a chopping gesture of his hand and demanded:

  “Was it you who brought the child?” She frowned, and there came into her face a sliver of guilty fear. “Come on,” he said harshly, “tell me.”

  “What child?”

  “What child, what child! Christine, her name was. Did they make you bring her over here with you?”

  She stared at him, shaking her head.

  “I don’t know what—”

  The door opened and Phoebe leaned out, ignoring Quirke.

  “Quick,” she said to Brenda, “you’re needed.”

  She stepped back inside the room and Brenda hurried after her. Before the door was shut, however, Rose Crawford slipped out in her place.

  “Come on,” she said to Quirke in a deadened voice, “I need a cigarette.”

  He followed her downstairs, to the drawing room. He expected to find the maid still loitering there, but she was gone. Rose walked to the fireplace and took two cigarettes from a lacquered box on the mantelpiece and lit both of them and handed one to Quirke.

  “Lipstick,” she said. “Sorry.”

  He went and stood at the window. Outside, scant snow was falling in soft, flabby flakes. From here he could see a flank of the Crystal Gallery, a cliff of glass rising sheer against the leaden sky.

  “I’m sorry,” Quirke said. She looked at him inquiringly. “It can’t be easy for you,” he said, “waiting for the end.”

  He was trying to remember what it was called, that labored breathing of the dying; there was, he knew, a technical name for it. He had forgotten so many things.

  Rose shrugged.

  “Yes. Well.” She touched a log in the fire with the tip of her shoe. “Phoebe has been very good with him,” she said. “I would not have thought she had it in her. She’s in his will, you know.”

  “Oh?” He turned from her to the window, a sort of flinching. It was not news to him and yet it rankled to hear her say it; Quirke had made no will for anyone to be in.

  “Yes. He’s left her a lot of money.”

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  She threw up her head and laughed without sound.

  “Oh, I feel fine,” she said. “Don’t worry, I get the bulk of the dough, if that’s what you mean—and God knows there’s plenty of it. But she’ll be a rich girl, will Phoebe.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Why—don’t you want her to be an heiress?”

  “I want her to have an ordinary life.”

  She gave him a sardonic, sideways glance. He looked out at the snow again; half of the flakes seemed to be falling upward.

  “Is there such a thing as an ordinary life?” she asked.

  “There could be, for her.”

  “If?”

  “If you don’t try to hold on to her.”

  She laughed again, a soundless protest.

  “‘Hold on to her’! Why, Mr. Quirke, the things you do say!”

  He studied the burning tip of his cigarette.

  “She told me,” he said, “that you asked her to stay here, in Boston.”

  “And you don’t think she should?”

  He walked to the fireplace and flicked the remains of the cigarette into the flames. She took a step forward and suddenly they were standing close together, face-to-face. There was a tiny flaw in the iris of her left eye, he saw, a splinter of white piercing the lustrous black.

  “Look, Mrs. Crawford—”

  “Rose.”

  He drew a breath.

  “I came here, to Boston, because Sarah asked me to come. She asked me to look after Phoebe.”

  She tilted her head to the side and squinted up at him from under her eyelashes.

  “Ah,” she said, “Sarah, of course—Sarah who hates me.” He blinked. He had never thought to wonder what Sarah might feel about this woman, hardly older than she was, who had married her father and who was therefore, absurdly, her stepmother. She moved even closer to him, gazing directly, big-eyed now, into his face. “Mr. Quirke,” Rose said in her soft drawl, “you may disapprove of me, and frankly I don’t care that you do, but at least you’ll grant I’m not a hypocrite.”

  Behind her the log that she had touched with her foot made its delayed, ashy collapse. She was studying him as if she were committing his face to memory. They heard her name called urgently, but for fully half a dozen seconds she made no move to answer the summons. Then, as she turned, he caught the smell of her perfumed skin, the faint, thrilling rankness of it.

  IT WAS EVENING WHEN JOSH CRAWFORD DIED. THE HOUSE WENT silent. The ambulance departed, unneeded, followed by the two somber men, each in his own automobile. Quirke had not learned the identity of this pair; perhaps they were Rose’s lawyers, there to authenticate her husband’s demise—he would not put it past her. Dinner was served but there was no one to eat it; Rose and Phoebe closeted themselves in Rose’s room, and Quirke found Brenda Ruttledge and brought her again to the swimming pool. She sat in one of the cane chairs, staring into the water. Something seemed poised above them in the swaying air, among the echoes, a large, liquid vagueness. Quirke offered her a cigarette and this time she took it. He saw the inexpert way she held it tilted between stiff fingers, the way she swigged the smoke and blew it out again in puffs, unswallowed. Someone else smoked like that—was it Phoebe? When she moved her feet the rubber soles of her nurse’s white shoes squeaked on the tiles. Quirke asked her:

  “Who arranged it?”

  She pouted, pushing out her lower lip, and for a moment was a stubborn child. Then she s
hrugged.

  “Matron.”

  “At the hospital—at the Holy Family?”

  “She knew Mr. Griffin had fixed up the job for me here, looking after Mr. Crawford. She said there was a favor I could do in return. She said I’d be paid. I thought, what harm, to take care of the poor little thing?” She looked at the cigarette she was holding in her fingers and frowned. “What am I doing?” she murmured to herself. “I don’t even smoke.”

  “Did she tell you whose the child was—I mean, who the parents were, who the father was?”

  She bent and placed the half-smoked cigarette on the tiles between her feet and trod it carefully under the sole of her shoe, then picked up the flattened stub and hid it away carefully in a pocket of her uniform, and Quirke briefly thought of red-haired Maisie whose child was probably born by now, and perhaps taken away from her, too, for all he knew.

  “She said I didn’t need to know any of that, that it would be better if I didn’t know. I thought the father must be someone…you know, someone big, someone important.”

  “Such as?”

  She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked herself forward and back in the chair.

  “I’m telling you,” she said, “I don’t know!”

  “But you have a suspicion.”

  Now she unwrapped her arms and banged her fists on her knees and glared at him.

  “What do you want me to say?” she cried. “I don’t know who the father was. I don’t know!”

  He sat back in the chair, expelling a long breath, and a ripple of creaks and crackles ran through the woven canes. He said:

  “When did Mr. Griffin arrange the job for you?”

  She looked away.

  “Early last summer.”

  “Six months ago? More? And you didn’t tell me.”

  Again she glared at him.

  “Well, you didn’t ask, did you.”

  He shook his head.

  “All these secrets, Brenda. I’d never have thought it of you.”