The Silver Swan

'Aren't you going to close up, dear?' Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes said. Her frock was a gauzy concoction of lemon-yellow chiffon, and above her right ear was perilously perched one of her own creations, a tiny pillbox in white and gold, with a spindly wire filament rising from it tipped with a tuft of silk shaped like an orchid, and pierced through by a long, pearl-headed pin. 'That young chap of yours will be getting impatient.' It was one of Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes's fancies to insist that Phoebe must have a young man whose identity she was withholding and, indeed, whose very existence she denied, out of an incurable shyness.

Phoebe said: 'I was waiting for you to go before I locked up.'

'Well, I'm off now, so you're free to put him out of his misery.'

She smiled teasingly-thirty years fell from her face with that smile-and shimmered forth into Grafton Street.

Phoebe lingered in the sudden desertedness of the shop. She put away some toques she had been showing earlier to an elderly, vague woman who obviously had no intention of making a purchase and had come in merely to while away a little part of another long and lonely day. Phoebe was always patient with such non-customers, the 'afternoon callers,' as Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes witheringly dubbed them, the aged ones, the solitaries, the dotty, the bereft. Now she stood for a long moment looking vacantly out at the street of slanted shadows. There were times, such as this, when it was as though she had lost herself, had misplaced the self that she was and become a thing without substance, a mote adrift in motionless light. Now she blinked, and shook her head, and sighed at herself impatiently. Things would have to change; she would have to change. Yes-but how?

When she had locked the shop, making sure the dead bolt was in place, she turned in the direction of Anne Street. The old flower seller at the corner by Brown Thomas's was dismantling her stall. She greeted Phoebe, as she did every evening, and presented her with a leftover bunch of violets. As Phoebe walked on she held the flowers to her nostrils. They had begun to fade already and only the faintest trace of their scent remained, but she did not really mind since flowers, to her, always smelled disturbingly of cats.

She stopped opposite the optician's shop and looked up at the window on the first floor and the sign painted there in metallic lettering:

THE SILVER SWAN

BEAUTY AND BODY CARE

The window had a blank, deserted look, but she supposed that was only because she knew whom it had been deserted by, and in what manner. Strange, she thought again, this business of people dying. It happened all the time, of course, it was as commonplace as people being born, but death was surely a far deeper mystery than birth. To not be here and then to be here was one thing, but to have been here, and made a life in all its variousness and complexity, and then suddenly to be gone, that was what was truly uncanny. When she thought of her own mother-of Sarah, that is, whom she still regarded as her mother, just as, with somewhat less conviction, she considered Mal to be her father-she felt, along with the constant ache of loss and grief, a kind of angry puzzlement. The world for her had seemed so much larger and emptier after Sarah died, like an enormous auditorium from which the audience had departed and where she was left to wander lost and, yes, bereft.

The narrow door beside the optician's shop opened and Leslie White came out, walking backwards with a large cardboard box in his arms. It struck her again how well his colorless, androgynous name suited him. He was very tall and very thin-willowy was the word that came to her-and his large hooked nose had a way of seeming always to be detecting a faint, displeasing smell. He had on a pale-blue striped blazer and white duck trousers and two-tone shoes and, of course, his silver cravat; his gleaming hair-in sunlight it had the quality, she thought, of burning magnesium-was bohemianly long, falling foppishly to his collar. She supposed he would be considered handsome, in a pale, jaded sort of way. He pulled the door shut with his foot; he was gripping a set of keys in his teeth. He put the box down on the step and locked the door, then dropped the keys into his jacket pocket and had picked up the box again and was turning to go when he caught sight of her regarding him from the other side of the street. He frowned, then bethought himself and quickly smiled, even though, as she could plainly see, he did not remember her; Leslie White, she felt sure, would always have a ready smile for the girls.

She was crossing the road. What are you doing? she asked herself, but she knew very well it was in hope of seeing him that she had come to loiter here. The man hesitated, his smile faltering; girls, smiled at or not, would be, she supposed, as often a source of trouble as of promise for the Leslie Whites of this world. 'Hello there,' he said brightly, rapidly scanning her face for a clue to her identity. What should she say? Her mind was a blank-but then he rescued her. 'Listen,' he said, 'will you do me a favor?' He turned sideways to her, hefting the box higher against his midriff. 'The keys are in my pocket, the car is round the corner. Would you-?'

She fished for the keys-what a shivery sensation, delving in someone else's pocket!-while he smiled down at her, confident now that even though he could not place her he must know her, or confident at any rate that he soon would. She saw him noticing the flowers she was still clutching-she could not think how to get rid of them-though he made no comment. They walked to the corner and turned into Duke Lane. She was aware that she had not yet spoken a word to him, but he seemed not to mind it or think it odd. He was one of those people, she guessed, who could maintain a perfectly easy silence in any situation, no matter how awkward or delicate. His car was an apple-green Riley, rakish and compact, absurdly low to the ground, and fetchingly a little battered about the bumpers. The top was down. He tumbled the box into the passenger seat, saying 'Ouf!,' and turned to her with a hand out for the keys. 'Very kind of you,' he said. 'Don't know what I'd have done.' She smiled. What help she was supposed to have been to him she did not know, since the car had not needed to be unlocked. He held her gaze with his. He had that way all attractive men have, with their crooked, half-apologetic smiles, of seeming at once brazen and bashful. 'Let me buy you a drink,' he said, and before she could reply went on: 'We'll go in here, where I can keep a watch on the car.'

The interior of the pub was dark and the atmosphere as close as in a cave. They approached the narrow bar and she sat on a high stool. When she asked for a gin and tonic he beamed and said, 'That's my girl,' as if she had passed a test, one that he had prepared especially for her. He offered her a cigarette from a gunmetal case and beamed more broadly when she took one; the test had multiple parts, it seemed. He held his lighter for her. 'The name is White, by the way. Leslie White.' He spoke the name as if he were imparting to her something of great and intimate value. His plummy accent was put on; she could detect clearly the hint of cockney behind it.

'Yes,' she said, turning her head and blowing the cigarette smoke sideways, 'I know.'

He raised his eyebrows. His skin really was extraordinarily pale, silver almost, like his hair. 'Now, I'm sure I should know,' he said, laughing apologetically, 'but you are…?'

'Phoebe Griffin. I was a customer, in the shop.'

'Ah.' His look darkened. 'You'll have known Laura, then.'

'Yes. You gave me your card, once.'

'Of course I did, I remember now.' He was lying, of course. He took a sip of his gin. The evening sunlight in the doorway was a wedge of solid gold. 'Did you know what happened to her- Laura, I mean?'

'Yes.' She felt ridiculously giddy, as if she had already consumed half a dozen drinks.

'How did you hear?'

'Someone told me.'

'Ah. I was afraid there might have been a story in the papers. I'm glad there wasn't. It would have been unbearable, seeing it in cold print.' He looked at his shoes. 'Christ. Poor Laura.' He knocked back the last of his drink and caught the barman's eye and waggled his empty glass. He looked at hers and said, 'You're not drinking.'

'I don't, really.'

He gazed at her for a moment in silence, smiling, then asked suddenly,