The Silver Swan

HE DID NOT KNOW WHY HE HAD TOLD HER. HE WAS NOT SURE THAT HE had even meant to. He thought it might be because, for a brief moment, there on the quayside, with the couples strolling, the dog barking, and this bright, full, warm woman leaning on his arm, there had seemed the possibility of happiness. For there was another version of him, a personality within a personality, malcontent, vindictive, ever ready to provoke, to which he gave the name 'Carricklea.' Often he found himself standing back, seemingly helpless to intervene, as this other he inside him set about fomenting some new enormity. Carricklea could not be doing with mere happiness or the hint of it. Carricklea had to poke a stick into the eye of this fine, innocent, blue-and-gold summer evening that Quirke was spending by the sea in the company of a handsome and probably available woman. Carricklea did not go on dates, or not willingly, and now, when it had been forced to, it was making sure to have its revenge.

The journey back from Howth was fraught and wordless. That was how it always was when Carricklea had done its worst, a pall of rancorous silence over everything and all concerned hot and tight-lipped and grim. Quirke had hailed a taxi outside the station and this time Kate had not protested. In the back seat they sat side by side but apart, Leslie White and the many things that he entailed squatting between them, invisible yet all too palpable. Kate was deep in thought; he could almost hear the ratchets of her mind meeting and meshing. Had he spoken to her of Phoebe before now? Had he even mentioned her? He thought not. Why then was she not plying him with questions? Through the window beside him he watched the dusty, sun- resistant facades of Raheny and Killester sliding past and sighed. The questions, he was sure, would come. The questions were what her mind was working on, even now.

At the door of the house on Castle Avenue they both hesitated, and then Kate, not looking at him, asked if he would like to come in, and presently he found himself sitting at his unease among the cuboid furnishings of-what had she called it?-the den, smoking a cigarette and sipping at a cup of coffee that had, for him, no taste. He watched Kate doing the things that women all seemed to do at moments such as this, vigorously plumping up a cushion, picking up a hairpin from the carpet, standing before the window and frowning at the garden as if something were seriously amiss out there that only she could see. At last, chafing under the weight of the room's silence, he put down his coffee cup on the tiny glass table beside him and said: 'Look, I'm sorry.'

He had agreed with himself that if she pretended not to know what he was apologizing for he would get up at once and leave. But all she said was 'Yes,' vaguely, letting her voice trail off. Then, suddenly brisk, she sat down opposite him on the white sofa, her shoulders hunched and her hands clasped together on her knees, and gazed at him for a long moment, holding her head to one side in that way she had, as if he were an example, a specimen of some special, rare, or hitherto unknown kind that she had been directed to evaluate.

'Why did you come here, that day?' she asked calmly, in a spirit of pure inquiry, it might be, with not a hint of challenge or resentment detectable in her tone. 'What were you after, really?'

He did not hesitate. 'I don't know,' he said. It was the truth. 'I told you, I'm curious.'

'Yes, so you said. 'I suffer from an incurable curiosity,' those were your very words.'

'And you didn't believe me.'

'Why would I not believe you? Besides, I was three-quarters drunk. Otherwise I'm sure I wouldn't have let you in the house.'

He looked away from her unsettlingly scrutinizing gaze. It was growing late and the air in the garden had turned a luminous gray. Everything out there seemed touched with an inexplicable, sweetish melancholy, as in a dream. He thought of Deirdre Hunt dead on the slab, her chest cut open and folded back on both sides like the flaps of a ragged and grotesquely bulky, bloodstained jacket.

'It's not just curiosity.' He paused. 'A couple of years ago,' he said slowly, 'I became involved in something that never got finished.'

'What sort of something?'

'Oh, a scandal. A young woman died, and then another one was killed. People close to me were involved. It was hushed up afterwards.'

She waited. He felt in his pockets for his mechanical pencil, but then remembered that he seemed to have lost it, somewhere, somehow.

'I see,' she said. He studied her. Did she? Did she see? She said: 'You've sniffed another scandal, and this time you want to make sure it's not hushed up but brought out into the open. Yes?'

'No. The opposite.'

'The opposite?'

'I want it to stay hidden.'

''It'?'

'Whatever it is. Whoever is involved.'

'Why-why do you want to keep it hidden?'

'Because I'm tired of'-he shrugged-'I'm tired of dealing with people's filth. I've spent my life plunged to the elbows in the secrets of others, their dirty little sins.' He looked to the window again and the graying light. 'One of the first P.M.s I ever did was on a child, a baby, six months old, a year, I can't remember. It had been beaten black and blue and then strangled. Its father's thumbprints were on its throat. Not just the mark of his thumbs, but the actual prints, engraved into the skin.' He stopped. 'What does it matter what people do? I mean, when it's done it's done. I nailed that bastard for strangling his child, but that didn't bring the child back.' He stopped again, and touched a hand to his brow. 'I don't know what I mean. Look'-he stood up suddenly-'I should go.'

She did not move, but lifted her eyes to his. 'I wish you'd stay.'

'I can't.'

'It's not an offer I make to every strange man who comes to the house asking mysterious questions.' He said nothing. He was on his way to the door. Still she stayed as she had been, sitting there on the edge of the sofa with her hands clasped together and resting on her knees. He walked out to the hall. His hat was on the peg behind the door. He took it down and ran a finger around the brim. His throat felt constricted, as if something were welling up in him, a bubble of bile. Why had Phoebe been with Leslie White? That was the question he wanted to ask. But of whom could he ask it, who would have the answer? When he turned, Kate was standing in the doorway behind him, just as she had stood the first time he saw her, one arm lifted against the jamb and her head tilted to one side.

'If you leave,' she said, 'I won't ask you back.' He was still fingering his hat. She turned her face violently aside, as if she might spit. 'Oh, go then.'

HE WALKED DOWN TO THE FRONT AND CROSSED THE ROAD AND STOOD by the seawall. The day was at an end and the sea was lacquered with streaks of sapphire and leek green and lavender gray under a violet dome of sky. On the other side of the bay-was that Dun Laoghaire?-the lights were flickering on, and farther off the mountains had lost a dimension and seemed painted flat, as on a backdrop. Vague brownish bundles of cloud hugged the horizon, where night was gathering. His thoughts were a blank, were not thoughts at all. He had a sense of being bereft, bereft not of some definite thing but in general. But what had he lost? What had there been for him to lose? A light winked far out to sea: a boat? a lighthouse? He turned and walked back over the grass margin to the road.

When she opened the door she was wearing a blue calico nightgown and was barefoot. She showed no surprise to find him there. She said: 'Kismet revisited.' She did not smile. 'I was going to have a bath.'

'I thought you had one earlier,' he said.

'I did. I was going to have another. But now I won't.'

He sat at the kitchen table, smoking, while she cooked. The window above the sink grew glossy with darkness. She fed him a lamb chop and tomatoes and asparagus with mayonnaise. He asked why she was not eating and she said she had eaten already, and though he did not believe her he said no