Christine Falls

She shrugged, giving up on him. He could feel the driver’s eye watching him in the mirror.

THEY CROSSED SOUTH BOSTON AND HEADED OUT ONTO THE HIGHWAY. North Scituate, where Josh Crawford had his mansion, was twenty miles down the coast, and soon after Quincy they were on narrow back roads where the sea mist hung under the trees and the lighted windows of isolated houses shone yellow and mysterious in the darkness. There had been snowdrifts still in Boston but down here, on the sea’s edge, even the verges were clear. They passed by a white-steepled church standing on a rise, ghostly and somehow anguished in its empty-windowed solitude. No one spoke, and Quirke, the brandy glow now turned to an ashen burn, had again the eerie sense of detachment that came over him so often these days: it was as if the big car, wallowing effortlessly around these bends on its plush suspension, had left the road and was being borne aloft on the dense, wet darkness toward some secret place where its passengers would be lifted from it and spirited silently away without trace. He pressed a finger and thumb to his eyes. His mind was not his own, tonight.

When they turned in at the gates of Moss Manor a pack of penned dogs began to howl somewhere on the grounds. Approaching along the drive they saw that the great front door of the house was standing open and someone was in the doorway, waiting to greet them. Quirke wondered how the precise time of their arrival had been made known to the household. Perhaps the car had been heard, or its lights seen, as it rounded some bend up the road. Andy the driver rolled the big machine in a sweeping half circle on the gravel and stopped. The person in the doorway, Quirke saw, was a woman, tall and slim, wearing a sweater and slacks. Phoebe and he stepped out of the car, the driver holding the door for Phoebe. A miasma of exhaust smoke lingered in the heavy, damp night air, and from far off came the hollow moan of a foghorn. The dogs had fallen silent.

“Welcome, voyagers,” the woman called to them, in a tone of dry amusement. They walked forward and she reached out and took both of Phoebe’s hands in her own. “My,” she said, in her low, husky, southern-accented drawl, “look at you, all grown up and pretty as a picture. Have you got a kiss for your wicked step- grandmother?”

Phoebe, delighted, kissed her swiftly on the cheek. “I don’t know what to call you,” she said, laughing.

“Why, you charming girl, you must call me Rose. But I suppose I mustn’t call you a girl.”

She had deliberately delayed turning to Quirke, giving him time, he guessed, to admire her flawless profile and the swept-back wings of her auburn hair, the high, unmarred brow, the noble line of the nose, the mouth turned down at the corners in an ironically regal, lazy smile. Now at last she delivered to him languidly a slim, cool hand, a hand, he noted, that was not as youthful-seeming as the rest of her. “You must be the famous Mr. Quirke,” she said, letting her eye wander over him. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

He sketched a swift, half-serious bow. “Good things, I hope?”

She smiled her steely smile. “’Fraid not.” She turned to Phoebe again. “My dear, you must be exhausted. Was it a dreadful journey?”

“I had Mr. Cheerful here to keep my spirits up,” Phoebe said, with a grimace of comical disgust.

They moved into the wide, high hall, and Andy the driver came in behind them with their bags. Quirke looked about at the animal heads on the walls, the broad staircase of carved oak, the dark-beamed ceiling. The atmosphere in the house had a faintly tacky feel, as if many coats of varnish had been applied a long time in the past and had not quite dried yet. Twenty years ago he had been impressed by the mock-Gothic awfulness of Moss Manor; now that ghastly splendor had to his eye a certain dinginess-was it the wear and tear of time, or just his general disenchantment, that had dimmed the former grandeur of the place? No, it was the years: Josh Crawford’s house had grown old along with its owner.

A maid in a dark-blue uniform appeared; she had mousy hair and mournful Irish eyes.

“Deirdre here will show you to your rooms,” Rose Crawford said. “When you’re ready please come down, we’ll have a drink before dinner.” She laid a hand lightly on Quirke’s sleeve and said with what seemed to him a smiling sarcasm, “Josh can’t wait to see you.”

They moved to the foot of the staircase, the maid padding before them; Andy the driver had already gone ahead with their suitcases.

“How is Grandpa?” Phoebe asked.

Rose smiled at her. “Oh, dying, I’m afraid, dear.”

THE UPPER FLOORS OF THE HOUSE WERE LESS OPPRESSIVE AND SELF-CONSCIOUSLY grand than the downstairs. Up here the hand of Rose Crawford was evident in the dark-pink walls and Empire furnishings. After they had deposited Phoebe in her room the maid led Quirke to his. He recognized at once where he was, and faltered on the threshold. “My God,” he muttered. On a chest of drawers of inlaid walnut stood a silver-framed photograph of Delia Crawford as a girl of seventeen. He remembered that picture, he had made her give him a copy of it. He lifted a hand to his forehead and touched the scars there, a habit he had developed. The maid was watching with some alarm his reactions of surprise and dismay. “I’m sorry,” he said to her, “this used to be my wife’s room, when she lived here.” The photograph had been taken at some debutante ball or other and Delia wore a tiara, and the high collar of her elaborate gown was visible. She was looking into the camera with a kind of amused lasciviousness, one perfect eyebrow arched. He knew that look: all through those love-drunk Boston months it used to spark in him such extremes of desire for her that his groin would ache and his tongue would throb at the root. And how she would laugh at him, as he writhed before her in his blissful anguish. They had thought they had all the time in the world.

When the maid had gone, shutting the door soundlessly behind her, he sat down wearily on the bed, facing the chest of drawers, his hands hanging limply between his knees. The house was silent around him, though his ears were humming even yet from the relentless grinding drone of the aircraft’s engines. Delia’s sardonically tolerant eye calmly took him in, her expression seeming to say, Well, Quirke, what now? He brought out his wallet and took from it another photograph, much smaller than the one of Delia, badly creased and torn along one edge. It was of Phoebe, taken when she too was seventeen. He leaned forward and tucked it into a corner of the silver frame, and then sat back, his hands hanging as before, and gazed for a long time at the images of the two of them, the mother, and her daughter.

WHEN HE CAME DOWN HE FOLLOWED THE SOUND OF VOICES TO A vast, oak-floored room that he remembered as Josh Crawford’s library. There were high, glass-fronted bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes that no one had ever opened, and in the middle of the floor a long reading table with a top that sloped on either side, and a huge, antique globe of the world on a wooden stand. In the fireplace that was the height of a man a wood fire was blazing on a raised, black metal grating. Rose Crawford and Phoebe were sitting together on a leather-covered couch. Opposite them, on the other side of the fireplace, Josh Crawford was slumped in his wheelchair. He wore a rich silk dressing gown and a crimson cummerbund, and Oriental slippers embroidered with gold stars; a shawl of Persian blue wool was draped over his shoulders. Quirke looked at the bald, pitted skull, the shape of an inverted pear, to the sides and back of which there clung yet a few lank strands of hair, dyed a pathetic shade of youthful black; at his loosely hanging, raw, pink eyelids; at the gnarled and rope-veined hands fidgeting in his lap, and he recalled the vigorous, sleek, and dangerous man that he had known two decades before, a latter-day buccaneer who had made a rich landfall on this still piratical coast. He saw that what Rose Crawford had said was true: her husband was dying, and rapidly. Only his eyes were what they had always been, shark-blue and piercing and merrily malignant. He lifted them now and looked at Quirke and said: “Well well, if it isn’t the bad penny.”

“Hello, Josh.”

Quirke came forward to the fire and Josh noted his limp and the bunched dead patch of flesh under his left eye where one of Mr. Punch’s or fat Judy’s steel-tipped toecaps had left its mark.

“What happened to you?”

“Had a fall,” Quirke said. He was growing weary of that same old pointless lie.

“Oh?” Josh grinned on one side of his leathery face. “You should be more careful.”

“So everyone tells me.”

“So why don’t you take everyone’s advice?”

Rose, Quirke could see, was entertained by this little tussle. She had changed into a sheath of scarlet silk and matching scarlet shoes with three-inch heels. She blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling and lifted her glass and waggled it, making the ice cubes chuckle.

“Have a drink, Mr. Quirke,” she said, rising from the couch. “Whiskey?” She glanced at Phoebe. “What about you, my dear? Gin and tonic? If, that is”-turning to Quirke-“it’s permitted?”

“Why are you asking him?” Phoebe said airily, and put out the tip of her tongue at Quirke. She too had changed, into her formal, blue satin dress.