“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 said. “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?”
