The Silver Swan

one end of the big white sofa with her back to the garden. She crossed her legs, affording him a glimpse of a smooth length of thigh clad in taut nylon, and the start of a stocking top. Outside the window the sun had broken through big-bellied clouds, and the drenched trees sparkled.

'So,' she said. 'You were a friend of what's-her-name's.'

'No, not really.'

She took this with seeming indifference.

'Glad to hear it,' she said. He brought out his cigarettes. She leaned down to the low table and pushed forward a square cut-glass ashtray. 'So who are you?'

'I'm a pathologist.'

She laughed incredulously. 'You're a what?'

'I knew-that is, I used to know her husband, Deirdre Hunt's.'

She gave him a long look, then sipped her wine. 'And what exactly is it that you want from me, Mr…? Sorry, I've forgotten.'

'Quirke.' He paused, looking at his hands. 'Frankly, Mrs. White-'

'Call me Kate.'

'Frankly, I don't know what I want.'

She gave another soft snort of laughter. 'That makes a change, for a man.' Her glass was almost empty again.

'Did you know her,' Quirke asked, 'Deirdre Hunt?'

'She was called Laura, in this house. Laura Swan.' Again a snort. 'The former ugly duckling.'

'Your husband was in business with her.'

'That's what he called it. Some business. Unlike you, he knew what he wanted.' She frowned. 'By the way, how did you know where he lived- used to live?'

'I looked him up in the phone book.'

Her frown deepened and turned suspicious. 'The husband, the Swan woman's husband, did he send you?'

'No. Why would he?'

She poured yet another go of wine into her glass; the bottle was two- thirds empty by now. She said: 'I don't know-you tell me.' In the garden a gust of wind shook the trees, scattering handfuls of diamond drops. She was studying him again over the rim of her glass. 'A pathologist,' she said. 'Are you with the police?' He shook his head. 'But you're some kind of investigator or something, are you?'

'No. I'm a consultant pathologist. I work at the Hospital of the Holy Family. Deirdre Hunt's husband called me. That was how I knew about her death.'

She suddenly smiled. It was a startlingly candid, accommodating smile, and it transformed her for a moment from the hard-eyed virago she was pretending to be into something else. 'I'm thinking, Mr. Quirke, that I'm sitting here, alone in my house in the middle of the afternoon with a complete stranger, drinking too much wine-shouldn't I be worried?'

'Worried?'

'Well, that you might try to take advantage of me, for instance.' She gave him that ambiguous smile again. It made her eyes go moist and puckered the skin around them so that it seemed she might be about to cry, even as she was smiling. 'Happens all the time, I'm told,' she went on. 'Gullible housewives let in people who say they're traveling salesmen or insurance brokers and the next thing they're on their backs battling for their honor.' She laughed, making a gurgling sound deep in her throat, and leaned forward and grasped the neck of the bottle and filled her glass again. She spilled a few drops of wine on the white cushion where she sat-'Oops! clumsy me'-and wiped at the stain with her fingers and then put her fingers to her mouth and licked the tips of them, one by one, watching him from under her eyelashes. She drank, sat back, sighed. 'I probably drove the little slut to it, you know,' she said complacently. She waited for him to react and pouted when he did not. 'I phoned her. I'd discovered some things, incriminating things-letters, photographs. I rang her up and told her what I'd found. I'm afraid'-again that movie vamp's fluttering glance from under black-caked lashes-'I'm afraid I gave her a piece of my mind. As you can imagine. It's quite upsetting, you know, when a woman suddenly finds out that someone is having an affair with her husband.' She stopped, and looked into her glass again, pursing her lips and slowly blinking. He could hear her breathing. 'I think I must be a little drunk,' she murmured, in a tone of vague surprise.

She put the glass down carefully on the low table and pulled herself up from the sofa and walked to the window and stood there with her back to him, her hands on her hips.

'I'm glad the trollop is dead,' she said. She let her arms drop to her sides and turned her head and looked at him. 'I suppose you think I'm a prize bitch, Mr… What was your name again? Quirke, yes, sorry. And I suppose I am-a bitch, I mean. But she was no better than a whore, and, frankly, I'm happy she's gone.'

She frowned then, and tilted her head as if she were listening to something inside herself, then excused herself and brushed past him quickly and left the room. He heard her hurrying upstairs, and a door slamming. He was sitting on a square white chair with his hands on his knees. Slowly the silence congealed around him. The house was like an overgrown dollhouse, with its pale walls and paler furniture, its dainty tables and cubic chairs. The air smelled of nothing. It was like a house that had not been lived in yet. He gazed out at the wet, wind-tossed garden, where the afternoon sunlight dazzled. Upstairs a lavatory flushed, and water gurgled along a grid of pipes. He crept into the hall and was heading for the front door when she appeared above him at the top of the stairs. She had changed into a black polo-necked sweater and black slacks. He stopped, and she came down to him. She had removed her makeup, and her face now had a raw, chalky texture. 'Making a break for it, were you?' she asked with an attempt at brightness, then looked aside. 'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I'm not much of a drinker.'

She brought him into the kitchen. Here too all was white plastic and glass and matte-gray steel. He sat on a high stool, leaning an elbow on the tiled countertop while she spooned coffee into a metal percolator with a glass dome and put it on a ring of the gas stove to brew. She had managed somehow to sober up, and in her severe black outfit, which threw her features into sharp relief, she was a different person from the one who had sat draped on the sofa taunting him with her big-boned beauty and almost bragging of the deluge of dirt that had overwhelmed her life.

The water in the percolator came to the boil and began to splutter into the little glass dome. Kate stood with her arms folded, leaning her hip against the stove and studying the toes of the black pumps she had put on in place of the Egyptian sandals. He offered her a cigarette, but she did not take it.

'Have you ever been jealous, Mr. Quirke?' she asked. 'I mean really jealous? Jealous not just of something you suspect but of a definite, identifiable person, a face, a body that you know as real, that you can picture, on a bed, doing things. It makes you feel sick, that kind of jealousy, I mean physically sick, all the time, sick like with the worst hangover you ever had. Have you had the misfortune ever to find yourself in that state?'

He had a sudden image of his wife, Delia, before they were married, walking away from him wearing only high-heeled slippers and a pearl necklace and turning to look at him over her shoulder with that cat smile of hers, the barest tip of a pink tongue showing between her scarlet-painted lips.

'No,' he said. He noticed he had taken out his mechanical pencil and was fiddling with it. 'Not like that.'

'What they don't warn you about, the books and so on, is the loneliness. Jealousy makes you feel you're the only person suffering in the entire world, the only person suffering like this, like having a red-hot knife blade lodged in your side, the side where your heart used to be.' She smiled that wet-eyed, weepy smile at him again. He pictured himself reaching out and pressing his fingers to her temples and drawing her