The Silver Swan

his soiled and torn suit and wore her-or Sarah's-silk dressing gown with the dragons and birds on it, loosely closed over his concave and palely glimmering chest. She took his things, his shirt and underclothes, and washed them in the sink in the bathroom, averting her eyes from who knew what variety of stains. She had never before been called on to do someone else's laundry.

It was remarkable, though, how little difficulty she had adjusting to this unwonted male presence in her hitherto solitary domain. She did not stop being aware of the strangeness of him, of what he was, how different from her, yet even the difference and the strangeness she got used to. It really was as if some exquisite, half-wild, injured creature had attached itself to her and given itself into her care. She felt like one of those brocaded ladies in a tapestry with a unicorn at her feet. She could hardly remember how it had been when they were together in bed that afternoon, and what details she could recall seemed more dreamlike than real.

She tried to get him to allow her to call a doctor, a real doctor, this time, but he made a sound that was half groan, half laugh and flapped a long, pale hand bonelessly at her. 'No quacks!' he cried in a tone of exaggerated comic distress. 'No quacks, for pity's sake!' He said he knew there was nothing broken; his ribs ached, but they were sound, he was sure of it. When she helped him to the bathroom she felt as if she were supporting a sack of sticks. Yet to her puzzlement and mild consternation, it was his very frailty, his insubstantiality, that she found most arousing. What did that mean? This was, she reminded herself, a new landscape into which she had ventured. She had never lived in close contact before with a man who was not a relative. Propinquity, that was the word, sounding as it did like the name of a reserved sin out of the catechism: she had until now not lived in propinquity with a man. She smiled to herself and made a faint, involuntary, feline sound deep in her throat. Yes, this was sin, the real thing at last, and all unexpectedly. One hot and airless night when she had lain for what seemed hours sleepless on her bed with the sheet thrown aside, she rose with the dawn's first gray glimmer and went into the living room and lay down in her damp slip beside him on the sofa, and he woke and murmured something and turned, groaning a little, and took her in his arms, and she felt the heat of his bruised flesh burning against hers, and she closed her eyes and opened her lips and heard herself cry out, as if she were the one who was in pain.

Still she could not get him to eat properly. He subsisted mostly on Garibaldi biscuits-they reminded her of flypaper-and Gordon's gin, four bottles of which he had drunk in as many days. After the first one, which she had got in the pub at the end of the street, she had to go farther and still farther afield to buy replacements, afraid that if she went to the same pub she might be reported to the Guards as a dangerous drunkard. He had a craving for sweet things of all kinds, cake, chocolate, sugar-coated bonbons. He sent her out to buy Yorkshire Toffees and sucked away at them all day, like a schoolboy.

Was she afraid of him? Yes, she was. Even as she held him, burning, against her, with his hands in her hair and his mouth on hers and beads of sweat trickling down between her breasts, she could feel her fear, she could almost hear it, a sort of high-pitched whirring inside her. He was not physically strong, she knew, and the beating had left him weaker, but were not the weak ones often the most dangerous of all? She thought of Laura Swan and saw her floating dead under murky, bile-green water, her long, thick hair swaying about her featureless face like fronds of russet seaweed.

She went to see Rose Crawford at the Shelbourne. She knew she could not tell her about Leslie White-no one could be told about that-but just to be in her presence was somehow a comfort, and soothed for a while the confused racings of her mind. Rose, she felt, would not judge her if she were to reveal her secret; Rose in her casually amoral way would understand about Leslie.

They had lunch together in the hotel grill room. 'All I seem to do is sit here and eat,' Rose said with a jaded sigh. 'I no sooner finish breakfast than it seems time for lunch, then there's afternoon tea, and then'-she tucked in her chin and mimicked a headwaiter's booming bass-'dinner, madame!' She smiled. 'Oh, my dear, never get old.'

'You're not old,' Phoebe said.

'But I'm not young, either, which seems almost worse, in a way. You see that man over there, the one having lunch with his rich aunt?'

Phoebe looked. The man, pin-striped and shod in handmade brogues, was large and florid-faced, with hair parted in the middle and brushed back in two floppy wings at either side of his head. The woman opposite him was tiny and hunched, and the knife and fork in her trembling, mottled claws rattled when they touched her plate. 'Do you know him?'

'No,' Rose said. 'But I know an attentive and hopeful nephew when I see one. The point is, when we walked in here he turned to look at us. Or at you, rather. His eye glided over me without the slightest flicker.' She made a wry mouth. 'It was not ever thus, my dear.'

Rose ordered sole for them both, and a bottle of Chablis. The sun through the window made the linen tablecloth shine like bullion and laid a burning speck on the rim of each of their wine glasses.

'Where's that father of yours?' Rose demanded. 'I expected him to dance attendance on me, but I haven't seen him since the day I arrived. What does he think I do with myself all day long? I know no one in this city.'

'Why do you stay?'

Rose opened her eyes wide in exaggerated surprise. 'Why, my dear! Do you want to get rid of me?'

'Of course not. Only…'

'Oh, you're right-why do I stay? I don't know. Somehow your grim little country is growing on me. I never knew I was a masochist.'

Phoebe smiled one of her ghostly, melancholy smiles. 'Is it because of Quirke that you stay?'

Rose did not look at her. 'I shall ignore that, young lady,' she said.

The waiter came and, with a flourish, presented the wine bottle for Rose's inspection, like a conjurer showing a dove preparatory to making it disappear. When he had poured and gone she held up her glass to the light and asked, in her indolent drawl, 'And what are you up to, young lady?'

Phoebe had to bite her lip to keep herself from grinning like an idiot. This was what it must feel like to be pregnant, she thought, the same hot, thrilling, secretive sense of being all the time about to brim over. She stared innocently. 'Up to?'

'Yes. Don't try to fool me. You're up to something, I can tell.'

'How? How can you tell?' She could not keep the eagerness out of her voice. If only Rose would guess her secret, it would not be her fault, she would not be the betrayer, and then they could talk.

'Oh, I don't know,' Rose said. 'You have a glow-no, a glitter. There's quite a wicked light in your eye. I think you are having an adventure, aren't you?'

Phoebe looked down at the table. She did not often blush but felt she might be blushing now. She was glad when their sole arrived, swimming in brown butter on oval pewter platters. She did not care for fish, but Rose, in her blandly commanding way, had not consulted her before ordering. It did not matter: Phoebe rarely ate lunch and would probably not eat this one. She took a draught of the Chablis and felt it go straight to her head, like a flash of lemon-yellow light.

'There was a coincidence,' she said, measuring her words.

'A coincidence? What do you mean?'

'Somebody that Quirke knew came to him and asked him not to perform a postmortem.'

'Not to?'

'Yes.'

'On whom?'

'On his wife. This man's wife. She died.'

'Well, yes, I gathered that, if there was or wasn't going to be a postmortem. Who were, are, these people?'

'It doesn't matter. Just… people. I knew the wife-I mean, I didn't know her, but… She ran a beauty parlor; I bought things from her.'