He signaled to Sadie for another Jamaica red rum. He handed over a ten-shilling note and when she brought the change she gave him a queer sort of smile, her lips pressed together and one eyebrow arched, and he did not know what to make of it. Either she was telling him she knew his type and he was not to bother trying, or the opposite, that she liked the look of him and would listen to any offer he might care to make. If it was the latter, it would be impossible, down here. He had made that mistake once before, years ago-a cattle dealer’s wife over at Crosshaven, a redhead too, as it happened-and had got such a beating from the cattle dealer’s three brutes of sons that there were bones in his shoulders and his back that still ached when the weather turned wet. But surely Sadie must come up to the city sometimes, to shop, or whatever. He would slip her his phone number before he left.
A fellow he knew from the sailing club came in and Jack stood him a drink and they talked boats for a while. Jack loved being in a pub at this time of a summer evening, loved the sound of slow talk and the rich reek of whiskey, loved the look of sunshine the color of brass coming in at the open doorway and lighting up the lazy swirls of cigarette smoke in the dusky air. Being here was not being at Ashgrove, a pleasure in itself. And then there was Sadie, and the possibilities she might represent.
The sailing club fellow’s name was Grogan, a solicitor from Cork and, as Jack now belatedly remembered, a terrible bore. They had sailed together in the Slievemore regatta; Grogan in his Mermaid had taken the Commodore’s Cup this year. He was saying something now about a boat with two men in it having been found adrift off Slievemore Bay-there had been a report about it on the wireless, on the six o’clock news. Jack was watching Sadie, admiring the way her frock tightened over her bust when she drew the handle of the beer tap back and down in a slow, effortful arc. Yes, he would definitely suggest a drink next time she was in Dublin. What had he to lose?
“One chap dead, it seems,” Grogan said. “Sounds a funny business.”
Sylvia Clancy steered the big car onto the causeway below the village of Rosscarbery. She always liked to drive back from Cork along the coast road. Today, however, she had no eye for the scenery, for she was worried. This was not unusual. Being worried was Sylvia’s accustomed state of mind. How could it be otherwise? She was married to Jack Clancy and Davy Clancy was her son. Today, however, her specific concern was Mona Delahaye’s party, to be held on the following Saturday night. Mona was what could be described as a party person. Three years ago she had thrown-surely the right word-the first Ashgrove Bash, as she called it, and since then it had become an annual event and the talk of the county, if not of half the country.
Most people who gave parties, Sylvia supposed, gave them in the hope that their guests would enjoy themselves and go home happy. Evidently Mona’s intention was the opposite of this. She seemed to wish that everyone should have a good time, only she had a peculiar notion of what having a good time should involve. She did not want people standing about with drinks in their hands, chitchatting: arguments, insults, challenges, fights, even fistfights, these were the kinds of things Mona wished her parties to inspire. And if matters were not going her way-that is, if they were going peaceably and enjoyably-she was fully prepared to step in and set them awry. Mona had a genius for provocation. She stirred things up without seeming to, bestowing a smile here, a soft word there, inquiring, informing, advising. And as she progressed through the room there would spring up in her wake little conflagrations that were her doing but that yet appeared entirely unconnected with her. Then, reaching the far end of the room, she would turn and survey her handiwork with pleasure, her eyes narrowed and her thin mouth upturned at one corner.
Yet in her heart Sylvia felt sympathy for Mona. Mona was a child, really, with all a child’s avidity and incurable mischievousness. Whatever was going on, Mona had to have it, and if she could not have it she would spoil it for others. It was simply her way. Sylvia suspected that Mona, like her, felt secretly that she had strayed into the wrong family. The Delahayes were a formidable clan, as were the Clancys in their different way, and to have married into them was to be devoured, or as good as. Could poor Mona be blamed for asserting herself in the only way she knew how? Mischief-making was her declaration of independence, which was why she and her father-in- law, old Samuel Delahaye, were fond of each other, if fond was a word that could be fitted to either of these willful, reckless, and malicious creatures.
Sylvia was driving the Delahayes’ Mercedes-Jack was off at the races in their own old Humber-feeling nervous and at the same time faintly thrilled, for the big car frightened her, with its brutishly square front and that emblem on the bonnet that looked to her like the sight of a gun. Yet she had to admit it was exciting to be in control, however fearfully, of such a powerful machine. She had been to Cork to see a new osteopath-they were called bonesetters, down here-whom Mrs. Hartigan had recommended. Mrs. Hartigan swore by him and declared him a miracle worker, but Sylvia had consulted him only out of politeness to the housekeeper, a tiresome woman at the best of times. Sylvia had a bad back. No one had ever been able to discover why she should be suffering such awful, chronic pain, and this new man had been no wiser than the others, though he had talked a lot of mumbo jumbo about frozen joints, and fused discs, and plates-he was very hot on plates, whatever they were supposed to be. A foolish, ignorant man, Sylvia judged. However, the evening was so lovely, with the sun flashing its burning arrows through the trees along the roadside and the wheat and barley in the fields beyond swayed and polished by the breeze, that her heart lifted, despite the motorcar’s slouching impatience and the ache in her lower spine-which, if she was not mistaken, the bonesetter had only made worse.
Sylvia was English. This seemed increasingly to be, for herself as well as for others, the most significant fact about her. Yet by now she had spent more than half of her life in Ireland. It did not matter. They would be conscious of her Englishness until her dying day. Not that they expressed resentment or showed prejudice towards her. Indeed, they seemed to admire her pluck, to think her a good sport, for being undaunted enough to make her life among them. The response in general to the fact that she was English was a sort of amused fascination; people would look at her in that half-smiling, wondering way and say, “And you’re English, are you?” as if it were something outlandish, like being a racing driver, or a jungle explorer. She was a permanent curiosity. She could not resent this. Probably they perceived in a dim way the inner life she continued to live, which was mild, reasonable, tolerant, and self-mocking-which was, in a word, English, or what she thought of as being English, Englishness as she remembered it.
Just as Sylvia knew Mona should not have married Victor Delahaye, so she knew that she should not have married Jack Clancy. Oh, she loved Jack, whatever that meant now, after all these years. At first, when they were young, certainly she had adored him. She had never met-no, she had never conceived of the possibility of there being a person such as Jack: charming, dangerous, darkly handsome, and given to a destructive gaiety that she had found immediately irresistible. These things, the charm, the danger, the satanic good looks, that impish, corrosive humor above all, these, she understood now, were the very things that should have warned her off him.
She was taller than he was, taller by a good two or three inches. He had never seemed to mind this, and only made jokes about it. She, however, was acutely aware of the disparity, not for her own sake but for his, and in their first months together had devised a way of standing beside him with her chin lowered and her left leg drawn back a little way and her right knee surreptitiously flexed, which, if it did not reduce her height in any noticeable way, at least announced that she knew she was the one who must try to right the balance, and suffer the humiliation of not being able to do so. It was not that Jack was too short, but that she was too tall.
She slowed the car and turned in at the gate of Ashgrove.
Now her mind, going its own way as always, went back to the awful prospect of Mona’s party. Last year Davy had got into a scuffle with the son of some local grandee and had bitten off part of his ear. She rather thought the other boy had deserved what he had got, for obviously he was a brat, but still, getting into fights and biting people was not the kind of behavior she would have expected of a son of hers. But then, many things in her life had turned out to be not as she had expected. Davy, she thought, was rather like this brute of a car, barely controllable, single-minded, and always eager to run ahead of himself. And now, all at once, a thought that had been lurking beneath her anxiety about the party came flashing to the surface of her mind and would not be pushed down again. It was the thought of that Somers girl. Tanya Somers had trouble written all over her. It always puzzled Sylvia that men could not see how calculating a girl like Tanya was, how all her effects were-not thought out, perhaps, but instinctive, measured, and sure. What if Davy tried to take her away from Jonas Delahaye? Yes, and what if-what if someone else were to attempt-? What if-?
She had stopped on the gravel in front of the house and was sitting behind the wheel, her appalled gaze fixed unseeing on the windscreen as she contemplated the possibilities for mayhem that Tanya Somers represented, when she heard what seemed to be the sound of someone crying in the house. She opened the door and stepped out onto the gravel and stood to listen. Yes, definitely, someone was crying, a woman: the sound was coming from
