Christine Falls: A Novele Read online

  “You frightened me, too,” he said. “I thought you were a corpse.”

  “Well,” she said, laughing, “I imagine you of all people should know the difference.”

  When she stepped from the ladder they found themselves facing each other in closer proximity than either of them had expected. He could feel the watery chill emanating from her flesh and even the blood heat behind it. Around them on the walls the water lights pranced and wallowed. She pulled off the bathing cap and shook her hair. “You won’t tell, will you?” she said, half seriously. “They don’t like the staff to use the pool.”

  She stepped past him and bent to pick up her towel. It struck him that he had not seen this much of her ever before. She was broad-hipped, with short, rather thick, shapely legs. A country girl, built for childbearing. He felt old suddenly. She would still have been in her cradle when he was frolicking here with the lovely Delia Crawford. One kiss, he reminded himself, that was all that was between them, him and this girl, one stolen, tipsy kiss at a party that night he had first heard the name Christine Falls. She came back with the towel, drying her shoulders. The look of a woman’s face washed of its makeup never failed to affect him. When she lifted her arm he saw the little smudge of dark wet hair underneath.

  “What happened to your face?” she said. “I noticed earlier. And you’re limping.”

  “Took a tumble.”

  She gazed into his face; he could see her not believing him. “Oh,” she said suddenly, “I’ve a drop on my nose!”

  She sniffed, and laughed, and buried her face in the towel. Quirke thought: All this has happened before somewhere.

  At the pool’s edge there were two cane armchairs on either side of a low bamboo table. Brenda put on a white terry-cloth robe and they sat down. The cane crackled like a fire of thorns under Quirke’s weight. He offered Brenda a cigarette but she shook her head. The reflections from the pool, calmer now that the water had calmed, moved in dreamy arabesques on wall and ceiling, reminding him vaguely of blood cells pressed between the glass slides of a microscope. Brenda said:

  “What are you doing up, anyway, at this hour?”

  He shrugged, and the chair made another loud complaint. “Can’t sleep,” he said.

  “I was like that for ages, when I first came. I thought I would go mad.”

  He seemed to hear a rasping something in her voice, a sorrowing catch. “Homesick, are you?” he asked.

  Again she shook her head. “I was sick of home, that’s why I left.” She gazed before her, seeing not here but there, not now but then. “No,” she went on, “it’s the place I can’t get used to. This house. Those bloody foghorns.”

  “And Josh Crawford?” he said. “Have you got used to him?”

  “Oh, I can handle the likes of Mr. Crawford.” She turned to him, lifting her legs and tucking her feet under her and stretching the robe over her smooth, round knees. He imagined putting his face between her thighs, his mouth finding the cold wet lips there and the burning hollow within. “I was surprised,” she said, “when I heard you were coming.”

  “Were you?”

  Their voices traveled out over the water and struck faint, marine echoes from the walls. She was still studying him. “You’ve changed,” she said.

  “Have I?”

  “You’re quieter.”

  “No more jokes.” He smiled glumly. “It’s something Phoebe said.”

  “She seems nice, Phoebe.”

  “Yes. She is.”

  They were silent, and the echoes fell. Distantly in the house a clock struck a single, silver note, and an instant later from farther off there came another chime, and yet another, farther off still, and then the silence settled again. Quirke said:

  “Tell me, what do you know about this charity work that Josh does?”

  “You mean the orphanage?”

  He looked at her. “What orphanage,” he asked slowly, “is that?”

  “St. Mary’s. It’s out in Brookline. He gives money to it.” A tremor of unease touched her like the tip of a needle. What was he after? To change the subject she said, “Mrs. Crawford has taken a shine to you.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “And how do you know that?”

  “I just know.”

  He nodded. “Your female intuition, is it?”

  She flinched at the sudden cold mockery in his tone. She stood up and pulled the robe tight around her and walked away amidst the capering, ghostly lights, dangling the black bathing cap by its strap from her finger.

  “Your niece was right,” she threw back over her shoulder. “No more jokes.”

  27

  HEAVY WAVES, BOXY AND THICK, ROLLED IN SLOW MOTION PAST THE lighthouse on its offshore rock and broke against the beach, lacing the air with ice-white spume. The coast sloped steeply here, diving off toward Provincetown and the vast Atlantic distances beyond. Quirke and Phoebe stood side by side on the concrete slipway, looking out to the horizon. A hard wind roaring in from the sea blew spray into their faces and whipped the flaps of their overcoats against their legs. Phoebe said something but Quirke could not hear her for the wind and the slushy clatter of the shingle rolling under the waves. He cupped a hand to his ear and she leaned close and shouted again, “I feel if I put out my arms I’d fly!” How young she was; the long and tedious journey from Ireland seemed not to have affected her at all, and her eyes sparkled and her cheeks glowed. Josh Crawford’s big Buick was parked behind them at an angle on the sandy track, humped and shining, like something huge that had slithered its way up out of the sea. Andy Stafford in his chauffeur’s greatcoat stood beside it, watching them narrowly, holding his smart peaked cap at his side, his oiled black hair blowing straight back and plastered against his skull. Slight of form in field-gray outfit and polished leggings he had the look of a boy soldier facing into the wind of battle.

  Quirke and Phoebe turned and set off walking along the sandy pathway in the lee of the low dunes. A few clapboard holiday homes stood some way back from the sea, their paint peeling and windows hazed over from the salt winds. Quirke on his walking stick had to go gingerly for the ground was uneven and shifting in places and the marram grass looked tough and wiry enough to wrap itself around his ankles and send him sprawling. Despite having to stump along clumsily like this he felt so giddily light in the head it seemed he too might be plucked up by the wind and whirled away into the tumultuous sky. He stopped and brought out his cigarettes but the wind was too strong and his lighter would not light. They went on.

  “I used to come here with Delia,” he said, and regretted it at once, for Phoebe pounced, of course.

  “What was she like, Delia?” she asked greedily, putting a hand on his arm and squeezing it. “I mean, really. I want to know, now that I’m here. I can almost feel her presence, in the house.”

  “Oh, exciting, I suppose.”

  Was it true? She had been wholly without scruples of any kind—her father’s daughter—and that had certainly excited him. But he had hated her, too. Curious, loving and hating, the two sides of the precious coin she had so casually handed him. Phoebe was nodding solemnly as if he had uttered a profound insight. This eagerness of hers to know what Delia had been really like—did she have some unconscious inkling of who Delia really was? She said:

  “I thought Mummy was supposed to be the exciting one.”

  “We were all different, then.” He sounded to himself like a fond old fool, maundering over the lost years. It occurred to him that he was sick of being Quirke, but knew there was no one else he could be. “I mean,” he said quickly, irritated, “we were all someone else, your father, Sarah, me—” He broke off. “Look, let’s go back, this wind is making my head ache.”

  But it was not only the wind that was tormenting him. When Phoebe spoke Delia’s name now he felt as an adulterer might feel when his wife makes casual mention of the family friend who is his secret lover. He knew that he should tell his daughter—his daughter!—the truth, should tell her who her real
parents were, but he did not know how to say it. It was too enormous to be put into words, a thing outside the commonplace run of life. It would not square, he told himself, with what they had been to each other up to now, the easy tolerance there had been between them, the freedom, the untaxing gaiety. It was absurd—how could he begin to be a father to her, after all these years, the so many years that made up the entirety of her life? Yet even as he went along here with her hand tugging at his arm he was convinced that he could feel the loss of her, the absence of her, from whatever hollow place it was in his heart that she would have filled, in those years. Since the moment in the mountains when Sarah had made her confession to him there had been gathering steadily in him, like a head of water behind a dam, something which if he released it would swamp his life and drown his peace of mind, and so he limped along, and smiled, and entertained his oblivious daughter’s chattering inquiries about the woman she did not know was her mother. Someday, he told himself, with almost a vindictive satisfaction, someday he would suffer for this laxity, this laziness of spirit, this cowardice. For that was what it was—plain funk. He might make all the excuses he wished, might talk of the tolerance there had been between them, the freedom and the gaiety that he must not put at risk, but he knew it was just an alibi he was attempting to construct, a front behind which he could go on as he had always done, in peace, being nobody’s father.

  Andy Stafford had climbed into the car and was just about to light a cigarette. He put it away hastily when he saw them turn back, Quirke swiveling abruptly on his stick like some sort of huge mechanical toy man. In the rearview mirror Andy caught a glimpse of his own reflection and was startled by what he saw, the somehow grimacing face with its dark, furtive eye. He studied Phoebe through the windshield as she approached, the wind molding her coat against her form. When she had got into the car he had tried to spread the tartan lap blanket over her knees but she had taken it from him without giving him even a glance and tossed it over her shoulder into the back window space. Now he listened idly to the two of them talking behind him as the car lurched down the track away from the dunes on its voluptuously squashy suspension.

  “How did you meet up,” Phoebe was asking, “the four of you?”

  Quirke, his hands set atop his stick, was watching the dwindling shore through the side window.

  “Your grandfather had fixed for Mal and me to work at the hospital,” he said. “Summer jobs, you know, with a view to something more permanent, if it worked out, which it didn’t, for various reasons.”

  “Delia being one of them?”

  He shrugged.

  “I might have stayed. Big bucks, even in those days. But then…” He let it drift away. He had the feeling that he was lying even though he was not; the secret that he carried was suddenly infecting everything. “Your grandmother was there, being treated, at the hospital. Sarah came to see her. She didn’t know her mother was dying. I was the one who told her. I think she was glad—to be told, I mean. Then we were a foursome for a while, Sarah, Delia, Mal, me.”

  He stopped. Big bucks. A foursome. What was it—was he hoping the momentum of mere talk would lead him to blurt out another, altogether different word, would lull him into telling her without his intending it the things he had not the nerve to utter straight out, the things it was her right to know? He saw she was no longer listening to him, but was gazing out blankly through the window on her side as the car gained the main road and turned in the direction of North Scituate. Quirke studied the back of Andy Stafford’s head, sleek as a seal’s and narrow at the neck, and pondered how unmistakable it was, the physiognomy of the poor, the low, the dispossessed. Phoebe’s voice startled him.

  “Rose wants me to stay here.”

  She spoke in a sort of sighing fall, pretending weary indifference.

  “Here?” he said.

  She glanced at him archly. With his hands folded like that on the handle of the walking stick he had the distinct look of Grandfather Griffin.

  “Yes,” she said, “here. In America. In Boston.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What do you mean, Hmm?”

  He looked again at the back of the driver’s head, uncannily motionless in the moving car. He lowered his voice but spoke with a deliberate emphasis.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “And why not?” she inquired.

  He thought for a moment. What was he to say? After all, why should she not stay here? Why should she not do anything she wanted? Who was he to advise her how to live her life?

  “What about home?” he said. “What about Conor Carrington?”

  She made a wry face and turned to look out her window again. There was the church with the white spire they had passed by last night in the mist-hung darkness; today it looked ordinary and even a little sheepish, as if its ghostly nocturnal springing up were a prank it was ashamed to be reminded of in daylight.

  “Home,” Phoebe said quietly, “feels very far away, here. I don’t mean just in miles.”

  “It is far away,” Quirke said, “in miles and everything else. That’s the point.” He paused, floundering, then tried again. “I promised your—I promised Sarah I’d look after you. I don’t think she’d want you to stay here. In fact, I know she wouldn’t.”

  “Oh?” she said, turning again to stare at him superciliously down her nose, and for a second he saw how she would look when she was middle-aged, a slightly less hard-eyed, less imperious Delia. “Just how do you know she wouldn’t?”

  He felt a pressure inside his chest—was it anger?—and had to pause again. He was acutely aware now of the back of Andy Stafford’s head, which seemed to have become a bulbed and shiny listening device. He made his voice go lower still.

  “There are things you don’t know, Phoebe,” he said. She was still fixing him with that ingenuously haughty stare.

  “What things?” she said scoffingly. “What sort of things?”

  “About your mother. About your parents.” He looked away. “About me.”

  “Oh, you,” she said, softening suddenly, and laughed. “What’s there to know about you?”

  WHEN THEY CAME INTO THE VILLAGE HE TOLD ANDY STAFFORD TO stop and levered himself on his stick out of the car, saying there was a place he wanted to find, a bar, where he used to drink when he first came here. Phoebe said she would come with him but he waggled his stick impatiently and told her no, that she should go on to the house and send the car back for him in an hour, and he slammed the door. She watched him lurch away, his long coat billowing and his hat in his hand and his hair shaking in the icy wind. Andy Stafford said nothing, letting the engine idle. The quiet in the car seemed to broaden, and something unseen began to grow up out of it and spread its indolent fronds.

  “Take me somewhere,” Phoebe said crisply. “Anywhere.”

  He palmed the gearshift and she felt a greased meshing as he let out the clutch and the car glided away from the curb with an almost feline stealth, purring to itself. She had turned aside to look out her window but she could feel him watching her in the mirror, and she was careful not to let her eye meet his. They whispered along the empty broad main street of the icebound village—Joe’s Diner, Ed’s Motors, Larry’s Tackle and Bait: it seemed the men owned everything here—and then they were on the coast road again, from which despite its designation she could catch only occasional glimpses of the sea, iron-blue and somehow tilted up toward the horizon. She did not like the sea, its unnatural uniform flatness, its worrisome smells. Untidy, tracklike roads led down to it, the continent petering out along this ragged eastern coastline. She experienced a sudden flush of weariness, and for a second her head nodded unstoppably and her eyelids came down like two curved, leaden flanges that had suddenly been attached to her eyes. She snapped herself upright, blinking. The driver was looking at her again in the mirror—should she tell him please to concentrate on the road? She wondered if his eyes, small and glossy brown, like a squirrel’s, she thought, and much to
o close together, were particularly lacking in expression, or if everybody’s eyes looked like that in isolation from the face’s other features. She leaned forward to check her own reflection but quickly sat back again, shaken by the sight of their two faces in the glass, suddenly beside each other but in different perspectives.

  “So,” he said, “how do you like Boston?”

  “I haven’t seen it, yet.” She had been determined to maintain a frosty distance, and was disconcerted to hear herself adding, “Maybe you’d take me there, sometime.” She faltered, and sat upright quickly, clearing her throat. “I mean, you might take Mr. Quirke and me, to see the sights, some afternoon.” She told herself: Shut up, you dope! “If my grandfather can spare you, that is.”

  She could feel him being amused.

  “Sure thing,” he said easily. “Anytime.” He paused, calculating how much he might risk. “Mr. Crawford don’t have much use for the car, him being sick and all, and Mrs. Crawford, well…” The very back of his head seemed to smirk. She wondered what that well might mean and thought it was probably best not to inquire. “You want to go to New York,” he said. “Now, there’s a real town.”

  She asked his name. “Stafford?” she said. “That’s Irish, isn’t it?”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “I guess.” He did not much care for the idea of being Irish, even though she was not like any of the Irish over here that he knew.