Black, Benjamin
Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke)
13
A light fine rain was falling when they left the city, but it soon lost heart and stopped, and a watery sun came out and put a blinding shine on the road in front of them. They went up by the canal, past lock after lock, the suburbs on their left becoming more tired and shabby with each mile they covered. Then they turned onto the Naas Road, and the trees on either side seemed to hold themselves averted, gazing off elsewhere.
“I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the car,” Rose Griffin said. “I’d much prefer to breathe.”
Quirke opened the window a little way and pushed his half-smoked cigarette out through the crack. They went on for a long way in silence after that, until Rose spoke again, asking if he thought there might be somewhere they could stop to eat lunch. Quirke stirred himself and said he had not thought about lunch. There was, he said, a hotel in Cashel that might be tolerable. “Tolerable!” Rose said faintly, and sighed.
They spoke of Malachy Griffin. Rose said she was worried about her husband, about how sedentary he was becoming. “Couldn’t you and he take up golf?” she asked. Quirke glanced at her sidelong. “No, I suppose not,” she said. “Pity,” she added, with wistful regret.
She was puzzled as to the purpose of this journey, and Quirke, it seemed, was not inclined to enlighten her. Although she would not have thought it possible, he was even more taciturn than usual today, shut far off inside himself. She had the impression that he was suffering, gnawing away at some inner hurt.
“The trouble with Malachy,” she said, “is that he’s just not assertive enough.”
Quirke made a noise that might have been laughter. “Who do you want him to assert himself against?”
“Oh, Quirke, you know what I mean! My Mal has so much to offer, but he holds back. It’s an almighty shame.”
Quirke wondered doubtfully what it might be that Mal had so much of, but he said nothing.
The damp green of summer fields rolled past. It was midday and they were almost alone on the long road south. They passed through melancholy villages, ramshackle towns. More than once they were forced to slow to a crawl behind a farmer driving his cows. Outside Kildare town they met in the middle of the road a ram with elaborately curled horns and strings of matted wool hanging down on all sides. Rose sounded the horn impatiently, but the ram just stood there, head lowered, glaring at them, and in the end Quirke had to get out and wave his arms and shout before the beast would move. When he got back into the car Rose was laughing. “Oh, Quirke, you should have seen yourself!”
The road seemed endless. Fields, trees, then ragged outskirts, then long streets with pubs and drapers’ shops and general stores, then outskirts again, then trees again, then fields again. They crossed a bridge over a river, a broad slow stretch of stippled silver, with bulrushes at both sides and a single swan afloat in the shallows. The huge sky over the Midlands was piled high with luminous wreckage. On a hairpin bend some small creature, rat or squirrel, ran out from the verge and under their wheels, and there was a quick bump, and Rose gave a little scream. “Oh, Quirke,” she wailed, beating the steering wheel with her palms, “tell me why we’re going down to Cork.”
They stopped in Cashel, at the Cashel Arms Hotel, which even in the lobby smelled of cooked cabbage. With sinking hearts they allowed themselves to be conducted to the dining room, where they were given a table by a window looking down into a cobbled yard. “Order a bottle of wine, for pity’s sake,” Rose said. They ate doubtful fish with mashed potato; the cabbage they had been smelling since they arrived made a soggy appearance. But the wine was good, a lustrous Meursault that in Quirke’s mouth tasted of gold coins and melons.
Rose began to feel better. “Tell me,” she said to Quirke, “how is that lady friend of yours, the actress?”
“She’s very well,” Quirke said, but would not meet her eye. “Very well.”
“Is it serious?”
Now he did look at her. “Is what serious?”
“You and your lady friend, of course.”
“You make it sound like an illness.”
Rose shook her head. “Quirke, Quirke, Quirke,” she said, “what are we to do with you?”
“I wasn’t aware that something needed to be done.”
“Well, exactly.”
They went on eating, in an ill-tempered silence. Then Rose tried again. “This trip, it’s to do with those two men who died, yes? Maggie’s brother, and then his partner? What was the outcome of all that?”
Half a minute elapsed before Quirke answered. “An outcome,” he said, “is still awaited.”
“That’s why you want to talk to Maggie?”
“That’s why I want to talk to Maggie.”
“You know she’s thinking of living permanently down there, in-what’s the place?”
“Slievemore.”
“That’s it. Fishing town, is it? Sounds like Scituate.” It was in Scituate, south of Boston, that Quirke had first met Rose Crawford, as she was then. “Why would she want to bury herself away down there?” She chuckled. “Maybe to get away from her family, especially that Mona Delahaye.”
She stopped. At the mention of Mona’s name she had felt something from across the table, a tiny tremor, and she looked hard at Quirke. Mona Delahaye. So that was it-Mona had got her talons into him. Well, that would smart, all right. Her gaze softened. Poor Quirke, he would never learn.
Outside, the afternoon had mellowed, and the air, laden with dust and midges, was the same soft gilded color as the Meursault they had drunk. They did not want to set off and instead strolled for a while in the town’s main street. The great gray ruin of the castle loomed above them on its crag against a sky of bird’s-egg blue. Rose had an urge to talk seriously to Quirke-it was probably the effect of the wine-to tell him he was frittering away his life on things that were not worthy of him. But somehow Quirke would not be spoken to like that, he would not allow it, and she held her peace, and felt cross. If he had indeed got himself entangled with Mona Delahaye then he was in for a deal of heartache, and serve him right. Rose and Quirke had gone to bed together, just once, many years before. It had not been a success, yet Rose remembered the occasion with a melancholy fondness. Scituate seemed very far away, now.
In Fermoy they stopped again, Quirke having run out of cigarettes, and while he was in the tobacconist’s Rose sat in the car and watched in dismay a man belaboring a cart horse with a stick. He was a coarse-looking fellow with a red face and a lantern jaw and a prominent forehead-he might have been modeled on a Punch cartoon-and he wore an old coat with a belt of plaited straw. The horse stood between the shafts of the cart, its head hanging, suffering the blows without flinching. Oh, my Lord, Rose thought, this poor benighted country!
Slievemore was a green hill above a turquoise bay. When they arrived, along the winding road from the north, the early-evening sunlight was tawny, and there was a breeze and the air was hazed with salt, and the blue water was flecked with ragged scraps of white. Ashgrove, the Delahayes’ house, was on the far side of the hill, and they had to drive along the harbor front, and climb another stretch of winding road for ten miles. Neither of them had been to the house before, and they had trouble locating it. When at last they pulled in at the gate the house rose before them, a gray granite mansion with arched windows and a steep roof angled in many planes, and there were even turrets. All that was missing, Quirke thought, was a flag, or pennant, flapping above the chimneys on a tall pole.
The house had a deserted look. No door opened, no face appeared at any window, no voice called a greeting. “Dear me,” Rose said, “it seems as if our trip has been in vain. Where can she be?”
They knocked at the front door, waited, knocked again. Then they walked along a gravel path round to the side of the house. French windows there stood open to the evening. They looked at each other, and went in.
Quirke was sensitive to the atmosphere in old houses. It was an instinctive memory, buried deep in his very bones, of Carricklea, the industrial school and reformatory in the west of Ireland where he had passed his childhood. He remembered the sounds, the thud of heels on polished floors, the hollow echoes of distant doors shutting, the whispers in the darkness.
