Christine Falls: A Novel Page 7

  “That night of the party at your house—I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, that seems an age ago, now. Besides, you were drunk. I always know you’re drunk when you tell me how fond of me you are.”

  “I wasn’t apologizing for that. I meant I shouldn’t have taken Phoebe to the pub.”

  She laughed unsteadily. “Yes, Mal was terribly angry, at both of you, but you especially.”

  He sighed his irritation.

  “I brought her for a drink,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to sell her into the white slave trade.” Rebuked, she was silent. “Anyway,” he said, softening his tone, “what is all this about Mass? You weren’t always so devout.”

  “Perhaps it’s desperation,” she said. “Aren’t people always supposed to turn to God in desperation?”

  He did not answer, but turned his head and looked at her, and found that she was already looking at him, smiling distressfully with lips compressed, and it was as if they had come suddenly to a secret door and she had pushed it open a little way and turned to see if he would go with her into the darkness beyond. He felt himself draw back; there were places he would not enter. Two swans on the water came from behind and drew level with them, bearing aloft their strange, masked heads. He said:

  “This young man of hers, this Conor Carrington—is she serious about him?”

  “I hope not.”

  “What if she is?”

  “Oh, Quirke—is anyone serious at that age?”

  “We were.” He said it so quickly, with such seeming conviction, that it made her start. She looked down at the path. He was acting, she knew, but what a good actor he was; so good that on occasion, she felt sure, he managed to convince even himself. “Please, Quirke,” she said. “Don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “You know very well.”

  The swans were still swimming beside them, and now one made a sound deep in its breast, a subdued yet plaintive hoot; it seemed to Sarah a sound she might have made herself. They came to the bridge at Baggot Street. The sawmill on the opposite bank was shut because it was Sunday but still they caught a faint waft of its resinous smell. They stood below the bridge, side by side, facing the water. The swans, too, had paused in their progress.

  “My father is very ill,” Sarah said. “I thought of paying the priest at Haddington Road to say a Mass for him.” Quirke laughed briefly and she turned her serious eyes on him. “Do you really not believe in God, Quirke?”

  “I believe in the Devil,” he answered. “That was one thing they taught us to believe in, at Carricklea.”

  She nodded. He was acting again, now.

  “Carricklea,” she said. “I’ve heard you say that name so often, and always in the same way.”

  “It’s the kind of place that stays with you.”

  She laid a hand on his arm, but he made no response and she took it back. What if he did pose and pretend? He had suffered, she was sure of that, even if his sufferings were long in the past.

  “I came along this way on purpose,” she said, “I suppose you know that. I’m not good at covering up. Luckily, you don’t change your habits.” She paused, gathering her words. “Quirke, I want you to talk to Mal.”

  He glanced at her, his eyebrows lifting. “What about?”

  She walked to the water’s edge. The two swans turned and swam towards her, etching a closing V on the flawless surface of the water. They must think she had food, and why not? Everyone expected something of her.

  “I want you and Mal to stop fighting,” she said. “I want you to be…reconciled.”

  She laughed self-consciously at the word, the florid sound of it. Still he looked at her, but he was frowning now, his brows drawn down.

  “Did Mal ask you to come here?” he asked suspiciously.

  Now it was her turn to stare.

  “Of course not!” she said. “Why would he?”

  But Quirke would not relent.

  “Tell him,” he said evenly, “I’ve done all I can for him. Tell him that.”

  The swans before her were turning from side to side slowly on their own reflections, growing impatient with her failure to produce whatever it was that her stopping and standing like this had seemed to promise, this woman in her blood-colored coat and archer’s hat. She paid the birds no heed. She was looking at Quirke, not understanding what he meant, and saw she was not expected to understand. But what could it be that Quirke had done for Mal, Quirke of all people, Mal of all people?

  “I’m pleading with you, Quirke,” she said, appalled at herself, at the abjectness she was reduced to. “I’m begging you. Talk to him.”

  “And I’m asking you: what about?”

  “Anything. Phoebe—talk about Phoebe. He listens to you, even though you think he doesn’t.”

  The swan again made its peculiar hoot, calling to her querulously.

  “Must be the female,” Quirke said. Sarah, baffled, frowned. He pointed to the birds behind her. “They mate for life, so it’s said. She must be the female.” He smiled his crooked smile. “Or the male.”

  She shrugged aside the irrelevance.

  “He’s under a great deal of strain,” she said.

  “What sort of strain?”

  He was, she realized, becoming bored, she could hear it in his voice. Patience, tolerance, indulgence, these had never been among Quirke’s anyway not numerous virtues.

  “Mal doesn’t confide in me,” she said. “He hasn’t, for a long time.”

  Again she had pushed at that door into the darkness, again he declined her invitation to enter with her.

  “You think he’d confide in me?” he said, with intended harshness.

  “He’s a good man, Quirke.” She lifted her hands to him in a gesture of pained supplication. “Please—he needs to talk to someone.”

  He in turn lifted his great shoulders, let them fall again. There were moments, such as when he flexed his great broad frame like this, that he seemed made not of flesh and bone but of some more dense material, hewn and carved.

  “All right, Sarah,” he said in a voice cavernous with weary impatience. The swans, discouraged at last, turned and glided serenely, disdainfully, away. “All right,” he said, a deeper fall. “All right.”

  HE INVITED MAL TO LUNCH AT JAMMET’S. THE CHOICE, HE WAS WELL aware, was a mild piece of mischief on his part, since fine food was not among the rich things that Mal coveted, and he was uncomfortable amidst the restaurant’s down-at-heel splendeurs. He sat vigilantly on a chair that was as spindly as his own frame, with his long neck protruding from his white shirt collar and the fingers of both hands—a strangler’s delicate, shapely hands, Quirke always thought—clamped on the table edge as if he might leap up at any moment and hurry out of the place. He wore his habitual pinstripes and bow tie. Despite the elegant cut of his clothes he never seemed quite squared up in them; it was as if someone else had dressed him with fussy care, as a mother would dress her unwilling son in his Confirmation suit. The maître d’ descended on them flutteringly and offered M’sieur Kweerk and his guest an aperitif, and Mal sighed heavily and looked at his watch. Quirke enjoyed seeing him trapped like this; it was part of the payment, part of the recompense, that he exacted from his brother-in-law—his almost-brother—for the advantages he enjoyed, although what those advantages were, had he been challenged, Quirke could not have said, exactly, except that there was the obvious one, which was, of course, Sarah.

  Quirke chose an expensive claret and made an ostentatious show of swirling a splash of it in his glass, sniffing, and tasting, and frowning in approval to the wine waiter, while Mal looked away, controlling his impatience. He would not take even a glass of the wine, saying he had work to do in the afternoon. “Fine,” Quirke snapped. “All the more for me, then.” The elderly waiter in his shiny black tailcoat tended them with the unctuous solemnity of an usher at a funeral service. After Quirke had ordered salmon in aspic and a roasted grouse Mal asked for chicken soup and a plain omelette. “For
God’s sake, Mal,” Quirke said under his breath.

  Their conversation was even more strained than usual. Only a couple of other tables in the place were occupied and everything above a murmur could be heard halfway across the room. They talked desultorily of hospital matters. Quirke’s jaws ached from the effort of not yawning, and presently his mind too began to ache. He was both impressed and irritated by Mal’s capacity to be engrossed, or at least to give a convincing impression of being engrossed, in the minutiae of the administration of the Holy Family Hospital, even the name of which, in all its bathos, always provoked in Quirke a shudder of embarrassment and loathing. Listening to Mal stolidly expounding on what he kept referring to as the hospital’s overall financial position, he asked himself if he were lacking in an essential seriousness: but he knew, of course, that by asking this he was really only congratulating himself for not being dull and dogged like his brother-in-law. He found Mal to be a continuing mystery, but not thereby impressive. Mal was for Quirke a version of the Sphinx: high, unavoidable, and monumentally ridiculous.

  Yet what was he to make of this business of Christine Falls? It could not be, he had decided, a question of professional negligence—Mal was never negligent. But what, then? Quirke would have had no doubt of the answer to that question had the man involved been anyone other than Malachy Griffin. Girls like Chrissie Falls were traps for the unwary, but Mal was the wariest man that Quirke had ever known. And yet, watching him now, plying his soup spoon with finical little swoops and lifts—those hands again, slow and somewhat clumsy despite their slender lines; in the delivery room he had a reputation for being too quick to reach for the forceps—Quirke wondered if throughout all these years he might have been underestimating his brother-in-law, or perhaps overestimating would be the better word. What went on behind that bony, coffin-shaped face, those prominent, washed-blue eyes: what illicit hungers lurked there? No sooner had he begun to think this thought than his mind turned aside from it queasily. No: he did not want to speculate on Mal’s secret predilections. The girl had died and he had covered up the sordid circumstances—surely that was all there was to it. These things happened, more often than was imagined. Quirke thought of Sarah standing on the canal bank, looking at the swans and not seeing them, her eyes brimming with troubles. He’s under a great deal of strain, she had said; was the strain all to do with Christine Falls, and if so, did Sarah know about her? And what did she know? He had done, he told himself, the right thing: the registry file was safely rewritten, and that coward Mulligan would keep his mouth shut. The girl was dead—what else was of consequence? And besides, he had an advantage on his brother-in-law now. He did not think he would ever need or want to use it, but it gratified him to know that it was there, available to him, even though, knowing it, he felt the faintest twinge of shame.

  The salmon was tasteless and faintly slimy in texture, and the grouse when it came was dry. A youngish, plump woman at the table nearest to them was looking at Mal and saying something about him to her companion; a patient, no doubt, another matron the great Mr. Griffin would have had a hand in. Quirke grinned covertly, and then before he could stop himself he heard himself say:

  “Sarah asked me to do this, you know.”

  Mal, who had got on to the subject of budgets for the coming fiscal year, fell silent and sat quite still, gazing at the last forkful of omelette on his plate, his head inclined sideways a little as if he were hard of hearing or had water trapped in an ear.

  “What?” he said, tonelessly.

  Quirke was lighting a cigarette and had to speak out of the side of his mouth. “She asked me if I would talk to you,” he said, blowing an accidental but perfect smoke ring. “Frankly, it’s the only reason I’m here.”

  Mal laid aside his knife and fork with slow deliberation and again put his hands palm down on the table on either side of his plate in that way that made it seem he might be about to push himself violently to his feet. “You’ve refused Sarah before now,” he said.

  Quirke sighed. It had always been like this between them, this childish tussling, Mal dourly dogged and Quirke wanting to be offhand and gay but annoyed instead and blurting things.

  “She thinks you’re in trouble,” Quirke said shortly. He twiddled the cigarette irritably in his fingers.

  “Did she say that?” Mal asked. He sounded genuinely curious to hear if it was so.

  Quirke shrugged. “Not in so many words.” He sighed again angrily, then leaned forward, lowering his voice for effect. “Listen, Mal, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s about that girl, Christine Falls. I got her back from the morgue and did a P.M. on her.”

  Mal exhaled a long, silent breath, as if he were a large balloon that had been pricked by a tiny pin. The woman at the other table looked his way again and, seeing his expression, stopped chewing. “Why did you do that?” he inquired mildly.

  “Because you lied to me,” Quirke said. “She wasn’t down the country. She was lodging in a house in Stoney Batter—Dolly Moran’s house. And she didn’t die of a pulmonary embolism.” He shook his head and almost laughed. “Honestly, Mal—a pulmonary embolism! Could you not have thought of something more plausible?”

  Mal nodded slowly and turned his head aside again and, catching the eye of the woman at the next table, mechanically assumed for a second his blandest smile, the smile, it struck Quirke, more of an undertaker than that of a man whose profession it was to guide new life into the world.

  “You’ve kept this to yourself,” Mal murmured, barely moving his lips, still looking not at Quirke but at the room.

  “I told you,” Quirke said, “I bear you no ill will. I don’t forget that you did me a favor, once, and kept it to yourself.”

  The funereal waiter—all was death today—came and removed the remains of their lunch. When he offered coffee neither man responded and he glided away. Mal sat sideways on the little chair with one leg crossed on the other, drumming his fingers again absently on the tablecloth.

  “Tell me about the girl,” Quirke said.

  Mal shrugged. “There’s precious little to tell,” he said. “She was going out with some fellow and”—he lifted a hand and let it fall again—“the usual. We had to let her go, of course.” We. Quirke said nothing, and Mal went on. “I arranged for the Moran woman to look after her. I got a call in the middle of the night. I sent an ambulance. It was too late.”

  There was the sense between them on the table of something slowly falling, as Mal’s hand had fallen, listlessly, ineffectually.

  “And the baby?” Mal’s only reply was a faint shake of the head. There was a pause. “You weren’t tampering with Christine Falls’s file that night,” Quirke said with sudden certainty. “You were writing it, weren’t you? And then, after I challenged you, you took it away and destroyed it.”

  Mal uncrossed his legs and turned back to the table with a low, weary grunt.

  “Look—” he said, and stopped, and sighed. He had the jaded air of one compelled to explain something that should have been perfectly obvious. “The fact is, I did it for the family.”

  “What family?”

  “The girl’s. Bad enough they should lose a daughter, without having to know of the baby as well.”

  “And what about the father?” Mal peered at him, perplexed. “Her boyfriend,” Quirke said impatiently, “the child’s father.”

  Mal cast about him, looking at the floor to one side of the table and then the other, as if the identity of Christine’s missing seducer might somehow be written there, plain for all to see. “Some fellow,” he said, shrugging again. “We didn’t even know his name.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  Mal laughed coldly. “Why should I care whether you believe me or not?”

  “And the child?”

  “What about her?”

  Quirke gazed at him for a moment in stillness.

  “Her?” he said softly, and then, “How did you know it was a girl, Mal?”

 
Mal would not meet his eye.

  “Where is she?”

  “Gone,” Mal said. “Stillborn.”

  There seemed nothing more to say after that. Quirke, disconcerted and feeling obscurely confounded, finished the inch of claret in his glass and called for the bill. His head was buzzing from the wine.

  In Nassau Street a pale sun was shining and the air was mild. Quirke’s palate recalled the salmon with a qualm. Mal was buttoning his overcoat. He had an absent look, his mind already at the hospital, donning stethoscope and chivvying his students. Quirke was irritated all over again. He said:

  “By the way, Dolly Moran has it all written down, you know. Christine Falls, the child, who the father was, God knows what else.”

  A bus trundled past in the street, swaying. Mal had gone very still, and his fingers paused in the act of doing up the last button of his coat. “How do you know that?” he said, sounding, again, as if all this were a matter of only the mildest interest.

  “She told me,” Quirke said. “I went to see her and she told me. It seems she kept some sort of journal. Not her kind of thing at all, I would have thought, but there you are.”

  Mal nodded slowly. “I see,” he said. “And what’s she going to do with it, this journal?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  Mal was still nodding, still thinking. “I wish her well of it,” he said.

  They parted then, and Quirke walked along to Dawson Street and turned up towards St. Stephen’s Green, glad of the sun’s faint warmth on his face. There was work waiting for him, too, but he told himself a stroll would clear his head. In his mind he went back over the conversation with Mal, recalling it now in almost a skittish light, thanks, he supposed, to the continuing effect of the wine. What a wonder it would be if old Mal had got a girl in the family way! Quirke had suffered through some scares himself in that quarter, and on one occasion had been forced to call on the services of an old medical school pal who was working at a dodgy clinic in London; that had been a bad business, and the girl had never spoken to Quirke again. But he could not believe the same thing would have happened to Mal. Would he really have walked, as Quirke to his continuing discomfiture had done, into a trap that any first-year medical student would have known how to avoid? Yet the startling fact remained that Mal had falsified the records of a postpartum death. What was Christine Falls’s family to him that he would take such a risk—had he destroyed the original death cert, too, if there had ever been one?—to spare them the pain of a scandal no one but he and they were ever likely to know about? No, it must be himself Mal was saving, from something or other. Christine Falls must have been his patient—not his mistress, surely not!—and the mistake he had made must have been a medical one, despite all his professional diligence and care.