The Silver Swan

'Wasn't fooled about what?'

Suddenly he saw, for the first time, really, just how angry Billy was. Anger, he realized, was his permanent condition now. And that would never change. Not only his wife, but the whole world had wronged him.

'He knows it wasn't an accident,' Billy said.

'Knows? Knows for a fact, or is guessing?'

Billy's new pint arrived. He considered it, turning the glass round and round on its base.

'The coroner didn't believe it either, did he?' he said. 'I could see it in his eye. And yet he let it go.' Quirke said nothing, but Billy nodded, as if he had. 'What did you say to him?'

'You heard the evidence I gave.'

'And that was all?'

'That was all.'

'You didn't have a word with him beforehand?' Once more Quirke chose not to answer, and Billy nodded again. 'There wasn't anything in the papers,' he said.

'No.'

'Did you fix that, too?'

'I haven't got that kind of influence, Billy.'

Billy chuckled. 'I bet you have,' he said. 'I bet you have a cozy little arrangement going with the reporters. You're all the same, you crowd. A cozy gang.'

This time Billy sipped his pint instead of devouring it, pursing his mouth into a beak and dipping it delicately into the froth like a waterbird breaking the scummed surface of a rock pool. Then he wiped the back of a hand across his lips and frowned into the mirror before him, the surface of which had a faint, inexplicably pink-tinged sheen.

'That's the thing I can't understand,' he said. 'She would never have wanted to make a show of herself like that. Being found on the rocks, with no clothes on her.' He paused, thinking, remembering. 'I never saw her naked, you know, when she was alive. She wouldn't let me.'

Quirke coughed. 'Billy-'

'No no, it's all right,' Billy said, waving one of his great, square hands. He bent his face, waderlike again, over his pint, and drank, and again swabbed his lips with the back of his knuckles. 'That's the way she was, that's all. So I can't understand it, her doing what she did.' He looked at Quirke. 'Can you?'

Quirke was lighting a cigarette.

'I didn't know your wife, Billy,' he said. 'I'm sure she was…'

Billy was still looking at him. 'What?'

Quirke took a long breath. He had the strange and surely mistaken feeling that Billy was laughing at him. He drank his soda water. 'It doesn't do, Billy,' he said, 'to keep going over things. The past is the past. Death is death. It doesn't give up its secrets.'

For a moment Billy did not respond; then he made a muffled, snuffling sound which after a moment Quirke realized was indeed laughter. 'That's good,' Billy said, ''Death is death and doesn't give up its secrets.' Did you rehearse that, now, or make it up on the spot?'

Quirke felt himself flush. 'I meant-' he began, but Billy interrupted him by lifting that meaty hand again and laying it with complacent heaviness on his shoulder. Quirke flinched. He did not like to be touched.

'I know what you meant, Quirke,' Billy said. Again he twirled his glass slowly on its base. The cork mat it stood on had a cartoon of a pelican with a yellow beak. GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU, yes, and PLAYERS PLEASE. What an agreeable place the world might be, with merely a little adjusting. 'One of the things about being in my position,' Billy said, in a now seemingly relaxed, conversational tone, 'is the way people talk to you. Or I should say, the way they don't talk to you. You can see them watching every word they're saying, afraid they'll make some blunder and remind you of 'your loss,' as they call it, or 'your trouble,' then the next minute they'll suddenly blurt out some saying, or some proverb, you know-'she's in a better place,' or 'time is a great healer,' that sort of thing-which you're supposed to grateful for.' He nodded again, amused and sardonic. 'And the other thing is that you have to listen to all of them and pretend to be grateful, and not say anything back that might upset them. Because, of course, when someone has died on you, suddenly you must be the nicest, most forgiving, most understanding, most harmless person in the world.' He gripped his glass where it stood on the bar, and Quirke could see his knuckles whiten. 'But I'm not harmless, Quirke,' he said, with almost a sort of grim gaiety. 'I'm not harmless at all.'

They left shortly afterwards. Billy Hunt's mood had shifted again. A light had gone out in him and he had a hazed-over aspect. He looked, Quirke thought, sated, sated and-smug, was it?-as if he knew a thing that Quirke and everyone else did not. At the door of the pub they parted, and Billy shambled away in the direction of Baggot Street. Quirke crossed over the little stone bridge. The trees along the canal seemed to lean lower now, exhausted in the heat of the day, yet to Quirke the sunlight was dimmed, as if a fine dust had sifted into the air, thickening and sullying it.

7

DEIRDRE REALLY DID WISH SOMETIMES THAT LESLIE HAD NEVER SHOWN her those pictures. It was not that she was shocked by them-on the contrary, they fascinated her. And that was the trouble. It was the fascination that led her on to other things, things that she would not have thought herself capable of. For a start there were the letters that Leslie got her to write to him. Not that they were letters, really, more like those accounts of her dreams that she used to scribble down when she was a girl, because she had heard someone say that you could tell the future from your dreams. Only no girl would write the kind of things that she wrote for Leslie. He said she was to put down any thought that came into her head, any thought at all, so long as it was dirty. At first she had laughed and said she would do no such thing, but he kept on at her and would not take no for an answer. What she should do, he said, was imagine that he was a prisoner and she was the prisoner's girlfriend and that she was writing to him to keep his spirits up-'And not only his spirits,' he murmured, nuzzling her ear and softly laughing. In the end she said all right, that she would try, but that she was sure she would not be able to do it. It turned out that she was able, though, and more than able.

And the things she wrote! She carried a pad of pale-blue Basildon Bond writing paper everywhere with her in her handbag-and envelopes, too, for Leslie insisted they should be like real letters-and whenever she got the chance would take it out and start scribbling with an indelible pencil, not thinking of what she was writing only letting it pour out of her, blushing half the time and biting her lip, hardly able to keep the lines straight, hunched over the page like she used to do in school when the girl she shared a desk with was trying to copy off her. She took terrible risks; she seemed to have no fear. She wrote at her dressing table in the bedroom while Billy was in the bathroom shaving, or at the desk in the cubbyhole behind the treatment room in the Silver Swan when she was between clients. She wrote on park benches, in cafes, on the bus if there was nobody beside her. Once even she slipped into Clarendon Street church and sat hunched over in a pew at the back with the pad on her knee, panting almost in the midst of that holy hush, the waxy smell of burning penny candles reminding her of other and very different smells, night smells, Leslie smells. As she wrote she grew more and more excited, and almost frightened. It made her think of that time when she was working at the pharmacy and she went to confession and told the priest a screed of made-up sins, about sucking Mr. Plunkett's thing and doing it with an Alsatian dog, just to shock the old boy behind the grille and hear what he would say.

Were the things that she wrote down that day in the church filthier than usual, or did they only seem worse because of the surroundings? She got herself in such a state, her pencil flying over the page, that she had to stop writing and undo the button at the side of her skirt and put a hand inside her