The Silver Swan

each of us, to warm us up.'

She stopped and unhooked her arm from his and faced him squarely. 'Oh, is that so, now?'

He laughed, looking down at his feet and shaking his head, then reached out and grasped her firmly by the upper arms. 'Listen,' he said, 'we could stand here exchanging pleasantries if you like, telling each other about our past lives and what we had for breakfast this morning, but since we've already been introduced, and since it's bloody cold, can we just go to the pub, where you can stand on your dignity, if you must, but I, at least, can have a drink?'

She had been hoping he would have his car, she would have liked a go in it, but he said Old Mother Riley, as he called it, was sick and in the car hospital. So they walked down the long avenue, under the tall windows of the houses where already the electric lights were coming on, past the square with its leafless, dripping trees, and into Baggot Street. Grainy drifts of sleet had gathered in the corners of the tiled porch of the pub, but inside there was a coke fire burning and the lamps on the bar shed a warm yellow glow. They were the only customers. There were tables with low chairs, but they chose to sit on two stools at the bar. 'It's friendlier, don't you think?' Leslie White said, moving his stool nearer to hers. 'Besides, if I sit in one of those chairs my knees will be jammed under my chin.'

As she was climbing onto the stool she had seen him trying to look up her skirt, but he had seen her seeing and only grinned into her face; he had done it, glancing down and up, not in the dirty way that fellows often did in pubs, leering and licking their lips, but openly, unashamedly, and with a kind of invisible twirl, somehow, like one of those singers in an opera gaily twirling a straw hat or the waxed ends of a mustache. He called the barman and gave his order, telling him exactly how the drinks should be made-'Hot water, mind, not boiling, and no more than three cloves in each glass'-and then offered her a cigarette, which she was going to take but then thought better of it, afraid she would cough and splutter and make a show of herself, for she did not smoke and had only ever in her life taken a couple of puffs. The stool was high and when she crossed her legs she felt herself teetering for a second, and it almost seemed she might fall forward, swooningly, so that he would have to hold her up in his arms. When the steaming whiskeys came her head was already spinning.

He asked her how she had come to know Dr. Kreutz. She made up a story about Mr. Plunkett sending her to Adelaide Road to deliver something that the Doctor had ordered, but it was plain from his half-suppressed smirk that he did not believe her.

'Want to watch him, old Kreutzer,' he said, getting rid of the ash on his cigarette by rolling it on the edge of the ashtray until the smoldering tip was pointed like a pencil. 'They call him the Wog with the Wandering Hands, you know.'

She wondered who they were, or were they really only Leslie White? She wanted to ask him how he had got to know him, but she supposed he would only lie, as, of course, she had done herself. It was strange, but she had to admit there was something about the Doctor that would make a person wary of being completely frank in talking about him. Why was that? Anyway, there were things about Leslie White, she was sure, more and murkier things, that would make frankness seem entirely out of the question.

They stayed in the pub for the best part of two hours-it was a good thing Billy was on the road and not waiting for her at home, to smell the whiskey on her breath. Later, she had only the haziest recollection of what they had talked about, she and Leslie. It was not the alcohol that had affected her memory-though goodness knows she was not used to drinking whiskey in the afternoon, or at any other time of day or night, for that matter-but she had felt so giddy that she had not been able to concentrate properly. She thought of the hoop she had one summer when she was a child-it was only a rusty old bicycle wheel with no tire and half the spokes broken or missing-which she used to bowl with a bit of stick along the pathway that ran all the way round the yard outside the Flats, and which, when she grew too tired to run along with it anymore, would roll off by itself for a little way, upright and really fast at first, then more slowly, until at last it began to wobble before falling over. That was just how she felt now, as if she was slowing down and wobbling, unable to control herself. It was not at the end of something that she was, though, but at the start.

After the third drink she held up a hand and told him not to order another, that she would have to go home, and lied and said that her husband would be expecting her. She was not sure why she had mentioned her husband-was it to put this fellow in his place, because he was so cocksure of himself, or was it, as she dimly suspected, some kind of challenge to him? But what would she be challenging him to do? He was watching her, his eyes roving all over her so that she could almost feel them on her skin, like a blind man's fingertips. She saw herself lying back on Dr. Kreutz's sofa with not Dr. Kreutz but this silvery, slender-limbed man leaning over her, lifting away layer after layer of some gauzy stuff that was all that was covering her, lifting and softly lifting, pushing aside her ever more feeble protests, until she lay naked before him, naked and trembling and damp. The picture was so strong in her mind that this time she really did lose her balance briefly, and had to close her eyes for a moment and concentrate hard to keep from toppling off the stool.

Afterwards she could not stop thinking about him. He haunted her mind, a sort of debonair, cheerful, and all too real ghost. In the shop the next morning she found herself more than once being glared at by Mr. Plunkett, having drifted off into a dream while she was in the middle of serving a customer. Her head was still buzzing from the lingering effects of those three unaccustomed whiskeys, but that was not the real cause of her inattention, and she knew it.

She liked the neat way he did things, Leslie White: little, inconsequential things that he seemed not to notice himself doing, like sharpening the ashy tip of his cigarette that way on the side of the ashtray, or making little lattices out of spent matches, or stacking his change in separate piles on the bar, ha'pennies, pennies, threepenny bits, the edges all perfectly lined up. He could do that thing with a coin, too, rolling it over and over along the knuckles of his hand, so fast that the one coin seemed multiplied into three or four, spinning and flashing. And he dressed well. She was not sure if the shades he favored, white and off-white and metallic gray, were right for his coloring, but the cut of the things he wore was good, she could see, for she had an eye for fine tailoring. Maybe he would take her advice if she offered it. He would look grand in blue or, even better, black, a good black suit, maybe double-breasted, which would show off his slim figure, or even a three-piece, with a gold watch chain across the waistcoat. She saw herself on his arm, him all silver and jet and she in something pale and flowing… 'Deirdre!' Mr. Plunkett muttered furiously, making her jump, and she had difficulty focusing on the old biddy in front of the cash register holding out her trembling shilling.

She felt guilty, not towards Billy, of course, but-and this was very strange-because she felt as if she was betraying Dr. Kreutz. She told herself she was stupid to think this way-what had she done, after all, except go for a drink with a man, and not even at night, at that, but in the afternoon? But try as she would to make little of what had happened, even she was not convinced. For something had happened, and something more would happen, and soon, she was sure of it.

But first there was another and altogether unexpected thing, a thing that made her see Dr. Kreutz in an entirely new, lurid light.

3

WHEN PHOEBE WAS A LITTLE GIRL, HER PARENTS, OR THE COUPLE WHO at the time she thought of as her parents, used to take her in July each year for a two-week stay in a house in Rosslare Strand that was lent to them by friends of Sarah's, theater people, as she recalled. This holiday by the sea was made out to be a great thing, but the truth was that none of the three of them really enjoyed it, down there in what was called the Sunny Southeast. Mal fretted at being away from his work, and Sarah had nothing to do and, although she tried not to show it, was bored most of the time. As for Phoebe herself, she did not care for the seaside. She hated showing herself half naked on the beach-she was skinny and knock-kneed, and her pale skin refused to tan no matter how long she spent in the sun-and she had no talent for making friends. Besides, she was afraid of the sea. One year, when she was nine or ten, she was walking by herself on the broad strip of thorns and tough grass that ran between the village and the beach, known for some reason as the Burrow, when she stumbled, literally stumbled, on a hare's nest with two baby hares in it. She had never seen such a thing before. It appeared