The Silver Swan

her it only meant son of, but still. And the teachings of these wise men did not seem to her all that wise. They were so sure of themselves and sure that they were dispensing the greatest wisdom, but most of the things they said seemed to her obvious or even silly. I have never seen a man lost who was on a straight path or If you cannot stand a sting do not put your finger in a scorpion's nest or What may appear to you a clump of bushes may well be a place where a leopard is lurking-what was so clever or deep in such pronouncements? They were not much different from the kinds of thing her father and his cronies said to each other in the pub on a Saturday afternoon, hunched over their pints at the bar with the wireless muttering in the background and someone doing a crossword puzzle in the paper-It's a wise child that knows its father or There's more than one way to skin a cat or It's a long road that has no turning.

However, there was a saying by one of those Ibns that was uncontradictable, as she could ruefully attest after all those dizzying lectures from Dr. Kreutz, and that was a definition of Sufism itself as 'truth without form.' But to be fair, that was what Dr. Kreutz kept telling her over and over: that, or versions of it. 'My dear dear girl,' he said to her one day early in their acquaintance, 'you must ask for no answers, no facts, no dogmas like the ones your priests tell you that you must believe in. To be a Sufi is to be on the way always, without expectation of arrival. The journeying is all.' Well, it was certainly true that there was a lot of moving about the place involved in this religion, if it was a religion: the Sufis never seemed to stop in one spot for more than a day or two but then were off again on their travels. She supposed it was because it all happened in hot countries and desert places where there were nomads-that was a new word she had learned-who had to keep on the move in search of water and food and places where their camels and their donkeys could graze. She could not get over her amazement at being a part of this world that was so different from everything she had known up to now. And she was a part of it, even if she was not the totally convinced convert Dr. Kreutz thought she was.

She came to him most Wednesday afternoons and sometimes at the weekends, too, when Billy was away traveling. When he had a client with him-he never called the ones he treated patients-he would move the copper bowl from the low table to the windowsill as a signal for her that someone was there. Then she would have to pass the time strolling aimlessly up and down Adelaide Road until she saw the client leaving. As the winter went on she got friendly with the man who tended the gates of the Eye and Ear Hospital, and when it rained or was very cold he would invite her into his cabin, which was made of creosoted wood that smelled like Jeyes Fluid. His name, Mr. Tubridy, sounded funny to her; she was not sure why, except that he was a tubby little man, with a round, shiny face and a bald head across which were carefully combed a few long strands of oiled, lank hair. He had a kerosene stove, and smoked Woodbine cigarettes, and read the English papers, the People or the Daily Mail, out of which he would recount to her the juicier stories. He made tea for her, and sometimes she would try one of his cigarettes, though she was not a smoker. She felt, there in that little cabin, sitting at the stove with her coat pulled tight around her, as if she was back in childhood, not her real childhood in the Flats but a time of coziness and safety she had never known yet that was somehow familiar to her-a dream childhood. Then she would go out and walk up the road and look to see if the copper bowl was moved from the windowsill, and if it was she would open the iron gate and tap on the basement door and step into that other world, as exotic as the one in the cabin was ordinary.

Dr. Kreutz never spoke about his clients. They were all women, so far as she could see. That did not surprise her-what man would consult a spiritual healer? She longed to know something about these women, but she did not dare to ask. She supposed they must be rich, or well-off, anyway; more than once after a client had left she came in while Dr. Kreutz was still putting money away in the strongbox he kept in a locked filing cabinet in the hallway, and she saw many a five- and ten- and even twenty-pound note going on top of the thick wads that were already in the box.

Sometimes the clients left traces of themselves behind, a forgotten glove or a scarf, or even just a hint of expensive perfume. Oh, how she longed to meet one of them.

And then one day when she came out of Mr. Tubridy's cabin she was in time to see a client leaving, and before she knew what she was doing she was following her. The client was a slimly built, dark-haired woman in her forties, expensively dressed in a midnight-blue costume with a fitted jacket and calf-length pencil skirt; she had a fox fur round her shoulders and wore a little black hat with a half veil. She walked rapidly in the direction of Leeson Street, her high heels tap-tapping along the pavement. There was something about the way she hurried along, with her head down, that made it seem as if she was nervous of being spotted by someone. Her car, a big shiny black Rover, was parked by the canal. The day was bright, with sharp sunlight glinting on the water and swoops of wind shaking the trees along the towpaths. The woman opened the car door but did not get in, and instead took a fur coat from the back seat and put it on and rewound the fox fur around her throat and locked the car again and turned and set off walking towards Baggot Street. Deirdre continued to follow her.

The woman stopped at Parson's bookshop at Baggot Street Bridge and went inside. Deirdre stood at the window, pretending to look at the books on display there. Inside, through the confusingly reflecting glass, dimly, she saw the woman examining the stacks of books set out on tables, but it was obvious that she, too, was only pretending. Plainly she was nervous, and kept glancing towards the door. Then a man approached over the bridge from the direction of Baggot Street, a tall, slim man in a camel-hair overcoat with a belt loosely knotted. He was good-looking, though his eyes were set a little too close together and his hooked nose was too big. His hair was long and of a silvery shade that she had never seen before, in man or woman, though it was not dyed, she was sure of that. He stopped at the door of the bookshop and, having glanced carefully over one shoulder and then the other, slipped inside. Somehow she knew what was going to happen. She saw the woman registering his entrance but delaying for a moment before acknowledging him, and when she did she put on a show of being oh-so-surprised to see him there. Smiling down at her, he leaned sideways easily with a hip against the table of books where she was standing and undid the knotted belt of his overcoat. It was that gesture, the careless flick of his hand and the belt loosening and the coat falling open, that somehow told Deirdre just what the situation was, and she turned quickly and walked away.

There was a little green sports car parked outside a newsagent's in Baggot Street, and when she spotted it she knew, she just knew that it belonged to the silver-haired man.

What she had seen in the shop, the two of them there together and the woman trying to keep up the pretense of being surprised, gave her a shaky, slightly sick feeling. But why? It was only a man and a woman meeting by arrangement, after all. All the same, the woman was a good bit older than the man, and from the nervous way she put on a show of being surprised to see him it was obvious that they were not married-not married to each other, that is. But that was not what had sickened her. What was sickening was the connection with Dr. Kreutz. She knew she was being silly. A woman who had been to see the Doctor had gone from there to meet her boyfriend, that was all. It did not mean the Doctor was involved in whatever was going on between those two-she had no reason whatever to think he even knew about them meeting up the way they did. And yet somehow a taint had crept into the fantasy she had worked up around the figure of Dr. Kreutz, a taint of reality: commonplace, underhand, soiled reality.

That was the first time it occurred to her to wonder what exactly 'spiritual healing' might be. Up to then it had not mattered; suddenly now it did. She had assumed, when she had speculated about it, which was seldom, that these women brought him their troubles-a marriage on the rocks, problem children, the change of life, nerves-and that he talked to them much as he talked to her, about how they should try to put aside worldly things and concentrate on the spirit, which was the way to God and God's peace, as he was forever declaring in his soft, unsmiling, but amused and kindly way. Rich women had time on their hands and the money to find the means of making it pass. She was sure there was nothing wrong with most of them, that they were just indulging themselves by paying for an hour or two a week in the care of this beautiful, tranquil, exotic man. And thinking this, she realized that she was, of course, jealous. She pictured them together, Dr. Kreutz and the woman in the blue suit, she kneeling on a cushion on the floor, barefoot, with her eyes closed and her head back, and he standing behind her, caressing her temples, the warm pads of his fingertips barely touching the skin and yet making it tingle, as her own skin had tingled on the couple of occasions when he had massaged her like that, speaking to her in his purring voice about the wisdom of the ancient Sufi masters, who a thousand years ago, so he said, had written of things that the world was only now discovering and thinking it was for the first time.

But why had her jealousy been stirred by seeing the woman with the