The Silver Swan

'What sort of things?'

'Just face cream, hand lotion, you know. And then…' She stopped. She had a sensation of helpless, slow, not wholly unpleasurable falling, as in a dream. Her hand, she noticed, was shaking; she was afraid that if she let it, her knife, too, like the old lady's, would rattle against the ridiculous pewter plate. 'She killed herself,' she said. How stark it sounded, how matter-of-fact. She used to think of death as a mysterious, a mystical thing; not anymore.

Rose had stopped eating and was watching her with a bright, bird-like stare; Rose recognized the moment when mere talk turned into something else.

'Phoebe,' she said, 'has Quirke got himself involved in more trouble?'

She wondered, Phoebe, when last, if ever, she had heard Rose call her by her name. But then, she reflected, Rose was not really on first-name terms with the world in general. And she had missed the point here; Quirke was not the one who was in trouble. She lifted her glass and looked at it but did not drink. Rose was still watching her with a raptor's eye.

'Trouble?' she said. 'No, I don't think Quirke is in trouble.'

The unctuous waiter glided up and refilled their glasses, and when he had done so Rose, without looking at him, motioned him away with an impatient flick of an index finger. She took a sip of her wine. The glint of concern in her look was waning, and suddenly Phoebe knew, suddenly and certainly, that Rose was indeed in love with Quirke. She was surprised not to be surprised.

'You mentioned a coincidence,' Rose said.

'This woman, the one who died, Laura Swan-I knew her partner, too.'

'What sort of a partner?'

'He was in the business with her, the beauty parlor business. Leslie White is his name.' Had there been a tremor in her voice when she said it? She hastened on. 'Quirke seems to think there was something odd, I mean something odd about her death, Laura Swan's, or about her husband coming to him…'

She faltered into silence. Her voice must have quivered when she said Leslie's name, for Rose's attention had snagged on it.

'Leslie White,' she said slowly, looking at her, and made a low, humming sound behind pursed lips. 'Is that what he's called, your adventure?'

'Oh, no, no. No, I mean, he, that is, Quirke, he-he can't seem to leave anything alone.'

Rose nodded. 'That's certainly true.' She turned her attention to her plate and speared a fragment of fish. Phoebe watched in peculiar fascination the morsel of white flesh with its broken threads of bright-pink vein passing into Rose's painted, blood-red mouth. There were tiny striations on her upper lip, as if the skin there had been stitched all along with a marvelously fine, transparent filament.

'How is it, between you and your father?' she asked.

Phoebe always experienced a pause, a mental stumble, when she heard Quirke referred to as her father.

'All right,' she said neutrally. 'He buys me dinner once a week.'

'And has his glass of wine.' Rose's smile was as dry as the Chablis.

'Our lives don't really… cross,' Phoebe said, looking at her plate again.

'Hmm. Except when there's a coincidence, like this one with-what's his name again? Leslie who?' Phoebe, looking resolutely down, did not answer. Rose crossed her knife and fork on her plate and leaned her elbows on the table and folded one hand into the other and laid her lips a moment against the knuckle of a forefinger. 'Did you know,' she asked slowly, 'about all the things that happened that time, in Scituate, and before that, here, in Dublin? About Judge Griffin and your father-Quirke, I mean-and the girl who died-I've forgotten what she was called, too.'

'Christine Falls,' Phoebe said, surprised at herself-how had she remembered that name, so surely and so quickly?

'Well, then, obviously you did know,' Rose said. 'Who told you?'

'Sarah.'

'Ah.'

'But I had guessed a lot of it.'

'You know Quirke tried to destroy the Judge's career? Your grandfather, who has just died.'

'Yes. I know. But it was all hushed up.'

Rose sniffed. 'And quite rightly, too. It was a nasty business. That's why I asked you if Quirke was getting himself into more trouble. I think he's still a little bruised from all that-I wouldn't like to think of him becoming embroiled again, in some new scandal. He's not exactly the knight in shining armor that he thinks he is.' A soft breeze swooped down on them from the tall, open window beside their table, bringing a scent of trees and grass from the park across the road, and the dry hay-stink of the cabstand where the jarveys in their battered top hats waited on the lookout for moneyed tourists. 'You should forgive him, you know,' Rose said. Phoebe gazed at her steadily. 'Oh, I know it's no business of mine. But, my dear, you owe it to yourself, if not to him.' She looked up brightly, smiling. 'Don't you think?' Still Phoebe said nothing, and Rose gave the faintest of shrugs. 'Well now,' she said, 'why don't we have some of this delicious-sounding strawberry shortcake, and then take a stroll in the park over there.'

'I have to go back to work,' Phoebe said.

'Can't you take a little time off, to promenade with your lonely old stepgrandmother?' At times, for no apparent reason, Rose exaggerated her Confederate accent- Cain't yu taike?-while laughing a little at herself, an unlikely southern belle. Phoebe shook her head. Rose sighed, lifting her narrow, penciled eyebrows. 'Well, then, have some coffee at least, and we'll call it quits.' She considered the young woman before her for a moment, her head tilted at a quizzical angle. 'You know, my dear,' she said, in the friendliest fashion, 'I don't think you like me much, do you.'

Phoebe considered. 'I admire you,' she said.

At that Rose threw back her head and laughed, a sharp, brittle, silvery sound.

'Oh, my,' she said. 'You certainly are your father's daughter.'

SHE DID NOT GO STRAIGHT BACK TO THE SHOP, BUT WALKED ACROSS the Green and up Harcourt Street, and let herself into the unaccustomed early-afternoon silence of the house. Today she did not hurry on the stairs, but plodded slowly, gripping the banister rail as she went. Somehow she knew, even before she opened the door of the flat, that Leslie was gone. The blanket and the cushion were still on the sofa, and there were empty sweet papers on the carpet, and his gin glass and a crumpled copy of last evening's Mail were on the coffee table. She stood for a long time, her mind slowly emptying, like a drain. She saw again the baby hares panting in their nest of grass. No fox or weasel would have got Leslie; there was that, at least, though who knew what other dangers might be lying in wait for him. She heard herself sob, almost perfunctorily, heard it as from a distance, as if it were not she who had made the sound but someone in an adjacent room. She put her purse on the table beside the glass-there was still a bluish drop of gin in the bottom of it-then went and lay down on the sofa, fitting her head into the head-shape he had left in the cushion, and pulled the blanket up to her cheek, and closed her eyes, and gave herself up, almost luxuriously, to her tears.

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