The Silver Swan Read online

  She rose and collected their plates and cutlery and carried them to the sink.

  "Don't imagine," she said, "that I've forgotten the fact that I have no idea who you are or why you're here. I'm not in the habit of letting strange men into the house and treating them to smoked salmon and intimate revelations."

  He put down his napkin. "I should be on my way."

  "Oh, I didn't mean that, necessarily. I've quite enjoyed having you here. Not much company about, these days. Leslie and I never went in for friends and all that." She smiled again. "He's English. So am I. Did you know?"

  "Yes. Your accent…"

  "I thought I'd lost it. It's reassuring that I haven't. I wonder why? I mean, why reassuring." She ran the tap and stood pensive, waiting for the water to turn hot. Above the sink a square window gave onto a side garden with stands of African grass. The day was failing, growing shadowed. "Maybe I should go back," Kate said. "My mother had Irish blood, but I think I'm a London girl at heart. Bow Bells and all that. Winkles, skittles, the Pearly King and Queen." She gave a brittle little laugh. She began to wash the dishes, rinsing and stacking them on a plastic rack. He stood up and went to her side. "Is there a tea towel?"

  "Oh, let them drain," she said. A pale, greenish radiance from the window touched her face. "Just stand about and look handsome, that will do."

  He lit a cigarette. "You have a workshop, have you?" he said. "A design workshop?"

  "Yes. I call it a factory-may as well be honest. We cut for the top designers. Irish girls make wonderful seamstresses. It's the training they get from the nuns." She smiled, not looking at him. "And yes, if you're wondering: I'm the breadwinner in the family, or was, when there was still a family. Leslie used to run a hairdressing business, until he ran it into the ground. That's why he went in with little Miss Swansdown. He thought he was her Svengali, but I bet she was the one doing the hypnotizing." She stopped and raised her face to the window again. "I wonder what he'll do now, old Leslie. Too late for him to become a gigolo. He used to be quite decorative, too-different type from you, of course, but dishy all the same, in his languid way. Lately the rot has set in. I suppose that's the main reason he took up with that poor little tart: she was young enough for him to feel flattered."

  She went off to the den and came back after a moment with her wine glass and the remains of the wine from earlier. She put the almost empty bottle into the fridge and plunged the glass into the dishwater in the sink and shook it vigorously in the suds.

  "We were quite well off, in London," she said. "My father made a lot of money out of the war-" She glanced at him sidelong. "Are you shocked? I think you should be. He was a bit of a crook, more than a bit, in fact-the black market, you know. So naturally he got on with Leslie. Then Leslie and I decided to come over here, much against Father's wishes-he wasn't very hot on the Irish, I'm afraid, despite Mother's Tipperary roots-and after that the Daddy Warbucks fund dried up. Leslie was terribly disappointed and blamed me, of course, though he tried not to show it, bless him. Then I opened the factory and the moolah started rolling in again and all seemed well. Until the Black Swan swam into our lives."

  "How did they meet, your husband and Deirdre-Laura Swan?"

  She turned her head slowly and gave him a long, smilingly quizzical look. "Are you sure you're not with the police? You have the tone of an interrogator." There was a muffled sound down in the dishwater-tok!-and she looked up quickly and gave a tiny gasp. "Oh, Christ, I think I've cut myself." She lifted her hand out of the suds. There was a deep gash, unnaturally clean and straight, on the underside of her right thumb close to the knuckle. The dilute blood raced with impossible swiftness down her wrist and along her arm. She stared aghast at the wound. Her face was paper-white. "The glass," she said tonelessly. "It broke."

  He put a hand under her elbow.

  "Come," he said, "come and sit down."

  He led her to the table. She walked as in a trance. The blood had reached her elbow and was soaking into the rucked sleeve of her black sweater. She sat. He told her to hold her hand upright and made her grasp the ball of her sliced thumb with her other hand and squeeze hard to reduce the flow of blood.

  "Have you a bandage?" he said. She gazed at him in frowning incomprehension. "A bandage," he said. "Or something I can cut up and use for one?"

  "I don't know. In the bathroom?"

  He took out his handkerchief and tried to rip it but the seam would not give. He asked if there was a scissors. She pointed to a drawer under the countertop by the sink. "There." She gave a brief, faintly hysterical laugh. He found the scissors and cut a strip of cotton and set to binding the cut. As he worked he felt her breath on the backs of his hands and the heat of her face beating softly against his cheek. He tried to keep his hands from shaking, marveling at how quickly, how copiously, the blood insisted on flowing. A dull-crimson stain had appeared already in the improvised bandage. "Will it need to be stitched?" she asked.

  "No. It will stop soon." Or so he hoped; he really did not know what to do with living flesh, with freely running blood.

  She said: "Do me a favor, will you? Look in my handbag, there are some aspirin." He went into the hall as she directed and took her black handbag from where it hung by its strap on the coat rack behind the front door and brought it to her. "You look," she said. "Don't worry, you won't find anything incriminating."

  He rummaged in the bag. The lipstick-face-powder-perfume smell that came up from its recesses reminded him of all the women he had ever known. He found the aspirin bottle, shook out two tablets, and brought a tumbler to the sink and filled it and carried it back to the table. Kate White's good hand trembled as she lifted the glass to her lips. She was still holding her bandaged thumb aloft in a parody of jaunty affirmation. "Will I have to stay like this all day?" she asked, making her voice shake with comic pathos. He said the cut would seal and then the bleeding would stop. She glanced about the room. "Christ," she murmured, with vague inconsequence, "how I hate this house."

  SHE ASKED HIM TO TURN THE GAS ON UNDER THE COFFEEPOT, AND when it was hot she poured a cupful for herself, and tasted it, and grimaced. They went back to the den and she sat on the sofa with her legs tucked under her and looked at him over the rim of the coffee cup. "You're quite the Good Samaritan, aren't you," she said. "Have you had a lot of practice?" He did not answer. He went and stood by the window, where she had stood earlier, and put his hands in his pockets and contemplated the garden. The evening would soon turn into night. Above the trees small puffs of pink cloud sailed against a band of tender, greenish sky. "Tell me," she said, "what's your interest in the Swan woman? The truth, now."

  "I told you-her husband telephoned me."

  "You said."

  "He asked me not to do a postmortem."

  "Why?"

  He went on studying the garden. In the dimming air the trees, glistening yet from the long-ceased rain, were ragged globes of radiance. "He didn't like the idea of it, he said."

  "But you didn't believe him. I mean, you didn't believe that was why he was asking you not to do it."

  "I had no reason to doubt him."

  "Then why are you here?"

  He turned to her at last, still with his hands in his pockets. "As I say, I was curious."

  "Curious to do what? To get a look at the betrayed wife?" She smiled.

  "I really must be going," he said. "Thank you for seeing me, Mrs. White."

  "Kate. And thank you for binding my wounds. You did it expertly, like a real doctor." She set the coffee cup beside the telephone on the glass table and stood up. When she was on her feet she swayed a little, and put a hand, the unbandaged one, weakly to her forehead. "Oh dear," she said, "I feel quite woozy."

  In the hall she lifted his hat from the peg where she had hung it and handed it to him. He was at the door but she put a hand on his arm, and as he turned back she stepped up to him swiftly and kissed him full on the mouth, digging urgent fingers into his wrist through the stuff of his jacket.
He tasted a trace of lipstick. On her breath behind the smell of coffee there persisted a faint sourness from the wine. The tips of her breasts lightly brushed against his shirtfront. She released him and drew away. "Sorry," she said again. "As I say, I'm not myself." Then she stepped swiftly back and shut the door.

  11

  SHE DID NOT KNOW WHAT SHE WANTED FROM DR. KREUTZ, OR WHAT she expected from him; she was not sure that there was anything for her to expect. At first she was pleased-she was thrilled-simply to have been noticed by him. It was true, plenty of people noticed her, men especially, but the Doctor's was a unique kind of noticing, in her experience. He did not seem to be interested in her because of her looks or of what he might think he could persuade her to do for him. It was a long time before he even touched her, and when he did, his touch was special, too. And it was strange, but she was never wary of him, as she had learned to be wary of other men. In a curious way she did not think of him as a man at all. Oh, he was attractive-he was the most attractive, the most exquisite human being she had ever encountered in her life-but when she thought about him she did not imagine him kissing her or holding her in his arms or anything like that. It was not that kind of attraction he had for her. The nearest thing she could think of was the way, when she was a little girl, she used to feel sometimes about an actor in the pictures. She would sit at matinees in the sixpenny seats with her hands joined palm to palm and pressed between her knees-an upside-down attitude of prayer, it struck her, though it was certainly not God she was praying to here-and her face lifted to the flickering silver-and-black images of John Gilbert or Leslie Howard or the fellow who played Zorro in the follyeruppers, as if one of them might suddenly lean down from the screen and kiss her softly, quickly, gaily on the lips before turning back to join in the action again. This was how it would be with Dr. Kreutz, she was convinced, this magical, this luminous, this infinitely tender leaning down, when he would eventually judge the time was right to show her how he really felt about her.

  Of course, he did not try anything with her, nor even make a suggestive remark, as men always did, sooner or later. No, there was nothing like that with Dr. Kreutz.

  He tried to teach her more about Sufism and gave her books and pamphlets to read, but she found it hard to learn. There were so many names, for a start, most of which she could hardly get her tongue around, and which confused her-half of them were called Ibn-this or Ibn-that, though he told her it only meant son of, but still. And the teachings of these wise men did not seem to her all that wise. They were so sure of themselves and sure that they were dispensing the greatest wisdom, but most of the things they said seemed to her obvious or even silly. I have never seen a man lost who was on a straight path or If you cannot stand a sting do not put your finger in a scorpion's nest or What may appear to you a clump of bushes may well be a place where a leopard is lurking-what was so clever or deep in such pronouncements? They were not much different from the kinds of thing her father and his cronies said to each other in the pub on a Saturday afternoon, hunched over their pints at the bar with the wireless muttering in the background and someone doing a crossword puzzle in the paper-It's a wise child that knows its father or There's more than one way to skin a cat or It's a long road that has no turning.

  However, there was a saying by one of those Ibns that was uncontradictable, as she could ruefully attest after all those dizzying lectures from Dr. Kreutz, and that was a definition of Sufism itself as "truth without form." But to be fair, that was what Dr. Kreutz kept telling her over and over: that, or versions of it. "My dear dear girl," he said to her one day early in their acquaintance, "you must ask for no answers, no facts, no dogmas like the ones your priests tell you that you must believe in. To be a Sufi is to be on the way always, without expectation of arrival. The journeying is all." Well, it was certainly true that there was a lot of moving about the place involved in this religion, if it was a religion: the Sufis never seemed to stop in one spot for more than a day or two but then were off again on their travels. She supposed it was because it all happened in hot countries and desert places where there were nomads-that was a new word she had learned-who had to keep on the move in search of water and food and places where their camels and their donkeys could graze. She could not get over her amazement at being a part of this world that was so different from everything she had known up to now. And she was a part of it, even if she was not the totally convinced convert Dr. Kreutz thought she was.

  She came to him most Wednesday afternoons and sometimes at the weekends, too, when Billy was away traveling. When he had a client with him-he never called the ones he treated patients-he would move the copper bowl from the low table to the windowsill as a signal for her that someone was there. Then she would have to pass the time strolling aimlessly up and down Adelaide Road until she saw the client leaving. As the winter went on she got friendly with the man who tended the gates of the Eye and Ear Hospital, and when it rained or was very cold he would invite her into his cabin, which was made of creosoted wood that smelled like Jeyes Fluid. His name, Mr. Tubridy, sounded funny to her; she was not sure why, except that he was a tubby little man, with a round, shiny face and a bald head across which were carefully combed a few long strands of oiled, lank hair. He had a kerosene stove, and smoked Woodbine cigarettes, and read the English papers, the People or the Daily Mail, out of which he would recount to her the juicier stories. He made tea for her, and sometimes she would try one of his cigarettes, though she was not a smoker. She felt, there in that little cabin, sitting at the stove with her coat pulled tight around her, as if she was back in childhood, not her real childhood in the Flats but a time of coziness and safety she had never known yet that was somehow familiar to her-a dream childhood. Then she would go out and walk up the road and look to see if the copper bowl was moved from the windowsill, and if it was she would open the iron gate and tap on the basement door and step into that other world, as exotic as the one in the cabin was ordinary.

  Dr. Kreutz never spoke about his clients. They were all women, so far as she could see. That did not surprise her-what man would consult a spiritual healer? She longed to know something about these women, but she did not dare to ask. She supposed they must be rich, or well-off, anyway; more than once after a client had left she came in while Dr. Kreutz was still putting money away in the strongbox he kept in a locked filing cabinet in the hallway, and she saw many a five- and ten- and even twenty-pound note going on top of the thick wads that were already in the box.

  Sometimes the clients left traces of themselves behind, a forgotten glove or a scarf, or even just a hint of expensive perfume. Oh, how she longed to meet one of them.

  And then one day when she came out of Mr. Tubridy's cabin she was in time to see a client leaving, and before she knew what she was doing she was following her. The client was a slimly built, dark-haired woman in her forties, expensively dressed in a midnight-blue costume with a fitted jacket and calf-length pencil skirt; she had a fox fur round her shoulders and wore a little black hat with a half veil. She walked rapidly in the direction of Leeson Street, her high heels tap-tapping along the pavement. There was something about the way she hurried along, with her head down, that made it seem as if she was nervous of being spotted by someone. Her car, a big shiny black Rover, was parked by the canal. The day was bright, with sharp sunlight glinting on the water and swoops of wind shaking the trees along the towpaths. The woman opened the car door but did not get in, and instead took a fur coat from the back seat and put it on and rewound the fox fur around her throat and locked the car again and turned and set off walking towards Baggot Street. Deirdre continued to follow her.

  The woman stopped at Parson's bookshop at Baggot Street Bridge and went inside. Deirdre stood at the window, pretending to look at the books on display there. Inside, through the confusingly reflecting glass, dimly, she saw the woman examining the stacks of books set out on tables, but it was obvious that she, too, was only pretending. Plainly she was nervous, and kept
glancing towards the door. Then a man approached over the bridge from the direction of Baggot Street, a tall, slim man in a camel-hair overcoat with a belt loosely knotted. He was good-looking, though his eyes were set a little too close together and his hooked nose was too big. His hair was long and of a silvery shade that she had never seen before, in man or woman, though it was not dyed, she was sure of that. He stopped at the door of the bookshop and, having glanced carefully over one shoulder and then the other, slipped inside. Somehow she knew what was going to happen. She saw the woman registering his entrance but delaying for a moment before acknowledging him, and when she did she put on a show of being oh-so-surprised to see him there. Smiling down at her, he leaned sideways easily with a hip against the table of books where she was standing and undid the knotted belt of his overcoat. It was that gesture, the careless flick of his hand and the belt loosening and the coat falling open, that somehow told Deirdre just what the situation was, and she turned quickly and walked away.

  There was a little green sports car parked outside a newsagent's in Baggot Street, and when she spotted it she knew, she just knew that it belonged to the silver-haired man.

  What she had seen in the shop, the two of them there together and the woman trying to keep up the pretense of being surprised, gave her a shaky, slightly sick feeling. But why? It was only a man and a woman meeting by arrangement, after all. All the same, the woman was a good bit older than the man, and from the nervous way she put on a show of being surprised to see him it was obvious that they were not married-not married to each other, that is. But that was not what had sickened her. What was sickening was the connection with Dr. Kreutz. She knew she was being silly. A woman who had been to see the Doctor had gone from there to meet her boyfriend, that was all. It did not mean the Doctor was involved in whatever was going on between those two-she had no reason whatever to think he even knew about them meeting up the way they did. And yet somehow a taint had crept into the fantasy she had worked up around the figure of Dr. Kreutz, a taint of reality: commonplace, underhand, soiled reality.