Christine Falls: A Novele Read online

  At the top of Dawson Street Quirke crossed the road and went through the side gate into the green. Smells of leaves, grass, damp earth assailed him. He thought of his dead wife, so long gone under the ground and yet so vividly remembered. Strange. Perhaps he had cared for her more than he knew, had cared for what she was, that is, and not just for what she had been to him. He frowned: in his befuddlement he did not understand what he meant by that, but it seemed to mean something.

  He would go and see Dolly Moran again. He would ask her once more what had become of the child, and this time he would force the truth out of her. He slowed his steps as he approached the gates of the university. Phoebe came out, among a band of students. Her coat was open, and she wore ankle socks and flat pumps and a tartan skirt fastened at the side with a giant safety pin; her dark, lustrous hair—her mother’s hair—was tied back in a ponytail. Not seeing him, she moved away from her companions, smiling back over her shoulder, then turned and set off swiftly across the road, head down, her books pressed to her breast. He was about to call out her name when he spotted on the opposite pavement a tall, slim young man in a dark suit and a Crombie overcoat stepping forward to meet her. Arriving, she nudged against him, catlike and shy-seeming, pressing the side of her cheek down into the hollow of his shoulder. Then they turned, arm in arm, and set off in the direction of Hatch Street, and Quirke, having watched them for a moment, turned too, in the opposite direction, and walked away.

  6

  DOLLY MORAN KNEW STRAIGHT OFF WHO THEY WERE. SHE HAD SEEN them before. She had heard tell of them, too, around the neighborhood, and knew what they did. She was sure, although she could not say why, that she was the reason they were there, standing at the corner of the street, pretending to be doing nothing. Were they waiting for it to be dark? She spotted them first when she started to go out for milk and the evening paper. She had her coat and hat on but stopped on the step when she saw them. One was thin, with dirty black hair coming down in a widow’s peak on his forehead; his cheeks were a peculiar, high shade of red, and he had a huge hooked nose. The other one was fat, with a big chest and a bigger belly and a head the size of a football; a rough mop of hair hung down to his shoulders in rats’ tails. It was the one with the hooked nose that frightened her most. They deliberately did not look in her direction, although there was not another soul to be seen in the street. She stood there, frozen, holding the door partway open behind her. She did not know what to do. Should she shut the door and just walk down past them, not giving them a glance, showing them she was not afraid? But she was, she was afraid. She would retreat back inside—in her mind she saw herself, as if she were doing it already, slamming the door shut and locking it—and wait to see if they would go away.

  She had not been surprised to see them; shocked, and frightened, too, but not surprised, not after Quirke had come knocking at her door again demanding to know what had become of Chrissie’s child. She would not let him in—she thought he might be a bit drunk—and would only speak to him through the letter box. She could not bear to see his face again. She knew she had said too much already, that day in the pub when he had poured all that gin into her and soft-soaped her into talking about Chrissie and the rest of it. Today he got angry when she would not tell him what he wanted to know. He thought the child had died, and asked her where it was buried. She would say nothing, standing behind the door with a knuckle pressed against her mouth, shaking her head to herself, her eyes squeezed shut. Had those two been there already, at the corner, had they seen him, had they heard him asking about the child? By then he was shouting at her, almost, and they would easily have heard what he was saying. In the end he gave up and went away, and after a while, when she was calm enough, she had started again to go to the shop for the bottle of milk and the paper and there they were, waiting for her.

  Now she was upstairs, at the window in the front room, still in her coat and hat. She had to put her cheek right up against the casement and look out at the edge of the curtain to see down to the corner. They were still there. The fat one was holding a match cupped in his hands and the other one, the one with the nose, was leaning down to get a light from it for his cigarette. She could feel a pulse ticking in her temple. She heard herself breathing, with a flutter at the end of each breath that she could not control. She went downstairs to the poky kitchen, where there was always a smell of damp and gas, and stood for a long time motionless beside the oilcloth-covered table, trying to get her mind to work, to concentrate, to tell her what to do. She took down an enameled tin marked Sugar from a shelf behind the gas stove and opened the lid and extracted a rolled-up school jotter with a yellowy-orange cover, and took it into the front room and leaned down at the fireplace and put it into the grate. She could not find the matches. She closed her eyes for a moment, and in the dark behind her eyelids felt a sudden blaze of anger. No! She thought of poor Chrissie throwing her head from side to side on the pillow and crying for her mammy, with blood and stuff everywhere, and no one to help her. No, she would not let Chrissie down a second time.

  The post office closed at five, she knew she would have to hurry. She could find no envelope except the old one she kept her Tontine Society books in; it would do. The glue had worn off the flap and she had to seal it as best she could with a bit of sticking plaster. She could barely write the address, she was in such a rush and her hands were shaking so badly. For all her haste she was dreading the moment when she would have to open the front door again and step into the street. What would she do if that pair was still out there, loitering at the corner, pretending not to see her? She was not sure that she had the courage to walk past them. Maybe she could go the other way, up the street, away from the corner, and around by Arbour Hill? But that would take longer, the post office would be shut when she got there, and anyway there was nothing to stop them following her still.

  She drew open the door and stepped out, hardly daring to look in the direction of the corner. But they were gone. She scanned the street from end to end. There was no one, except the old Tallon one opposite, who opened her front door an inch and stuck out her nose, pretending to be looking to see what the weather was doing. Nice calm evening. That was the thing to be, calm, nice and calm. Ma Tallon withdrew inside and shut the door softly. Would she have seen the pair on the corner? Not much happened in the street that Ma Tallon missed. But so what if she had seen them? No help there. She bit her lip and tightened her grip on her bag. She saw the dung stain on the path outside No. 12 and remembered her walk home through the soft darkness when she had linked her arm with Quirke’s. Should she call him, as he had urged her to do? For a second she considered it, her heart lifting. But no: Quirke was the last one she would call.

  She got to the post office five minutes before it was supposed to close but the young fellow behind the grille was already shutting up shop, and scowled when she came in. He was like the rest of them around here, and she was used to being scowled at; sometimes they even called her names, muttering the words out of the sides of their mouths as she was going past. She did not care twopence for any of them. When she put the envelope in the box it was a weight dropping from her conscience, and she felt better; it was like going to Confession, although she could not remember when she had last done that.

  She decided she would go to Moran’s and treat herself to a gin and water, just the one. She had three, however, in quick succession, and then another, more leisurely, and then a last one, for the road. As she walked home through the smoky dusk she began to feel a doubt: had she been too hasty in posting the envelope? Maybe those two were not who she thought they were, and even if they were, maybe it was not her they were watching. There were always things going on around here, thieving, and fights, and men found lying in the street with their teeth kicked in. If it was all no more than her imagination, Jesus, what had she done? Should she return to the post office and see if she could get back the envelope? But the place would be shut and the scowling clerk long gone, and anyway the post ha
d probably been collected from the box by now. She belched, and a fiery tang of gin flooded the back of her throat. So what, anyway, if the thing was delivered? Let them suffer a bit, she thought, let them see what life is like down here.

  Because of the gin she had drunk she had to search with the key for the keyhole. In the hall she felt a draft from the back of the house but took no notice. Even when she heard the wireless playing softly in the kitchen—the Ink Spots crooning “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie”—she supposed it must have been on when she went out and in her hurry she had forgotten to turn it off. She hung up her coat and went into the living room. Here, too, the air had an unaccustomed chill; she must think of getting an electric fire put in before the winter, one of those ones with the red light in them that looked like logs burning. She was on her knees on the hearth, stacking up kindling in the grate and wondering where she could have put those matches, when she heard them behind her. When she looked over her shoulder they were standing in the kitchen doorway. Everything slowed down suddenly, as if a huge engine that she was inside of had switched into its lowest gear. She was struck by the things she noticed—that the fat one’s hair was a coarse, rusty color in the electric light and that his shapeless sweater was hand-knitted, and that the one with the hooked nose was redder than ever in the face and that the cigarette he was holding between a tobacco-stained finger and thumb was a roll-up. She saw too, perfectly clearly, what she knew she could not be seeing, the smashed pane of glass in the corner of the back door just above the latch, and felt the cold black night air pouring in through the hole. And why had they turned on the wireless? For some reason that was the most frightening thing, the wireless playing, those black fellows singing in their falsetto voices. “Evening, Dolly,” the hooked-nosed one said affably, and she felt what was at first no more than a tickling sensation between her thighs, but then the sudden, scalding gush of liquid ran down the insides of her legs and spread its dark stain around her on the rug where she was kneeling.

  THE TAXI WAS AN ANCIENT FORD THAT WHEEZED AND SHUDDERED. The ill-lit, smoky streets were silent. Quirke should have been used to this kind of thing, the late-night summons, the journey through the darkness, then the ambulance at the curb, the slewed police cars, and the lighted doorway where large, vague men loomed. One of them, in a long raincoat and a slouch hat, stepped forward to greet him. “Mr. Quirke!” he said, sounding pleased and surprised. “Is it yourself?”

  Hackett. Inspector. Big, broad-shouldered, slow, with a merrily watchful eye. It was he who had telephoned.

  “Inspector,” Quirke said, shaking a hand the size of a shovel. “Is Miss Moran here?” he asked, flinching inwardly at the fatuous sound of it.

  Hackett fairly twinkled. “Dolly?” he said. “Oh, she is, she is.”

  He led the way into the hall, squeezing past two boffins from forensics dusting for prints. Quirke knew them, but could not remember their names; they nodded to him, with that expression forensics always had, po-faced and blank, as if they were covering up a private joke. The living room was a chaos of overturned chairs, spilt drawers, a disemboweled sofa, papers torn and strewn. A guard in uniform and cap, young, with acne and a prominent, triangular adam’s apple, was positioned by the kitchen doorway; he was a little green in the face. Beyond him there was more disorder, indecent in the glow of a single, bare bulb. The smell was so familiar Quirke barely registered it.

  “There she is,” Hackett said, adding with a gleam of irony, “your Miss Moran.”

  She had been tied to a kitchen chair, bound at the ankles with her own stockings and at the wrists with lengths of electric wire. The chair had overturned and she lay on the floor on her right side. She had worked one arm free of its bonds. Quirke was struck by the pose, the flexed knees and upflung arm: another mannequin.

  “You called me at home,” Quirke said, still bending over the corpse with his hands on his knees. “Did the hospital give you my number?”

  Hackett showed the piece of white pasteboard, clipped by its four corners in the hollow of his palm like a conjuror’s playing card.

  “It seems,” he said easily, “you left your calling card, on some previous social visit.”

  7

  A YOUNG NUN WITH PROMINENT TEETH OPENED THE DOOR AND STOOD aside and motioned her to enter. At the sight of the long, gaunt room something inside her shrank back, and for a moment she was a child again, quaking on the threshold of Mother Superior’s office. Massive mahogany table, six high-backed chairs that no one had ever sat on, glass-fronted bookcases, a coatless coat rack; in a wall niche a three-quarters-life-sized statue of the Virgin stood disconsolate in pale blue and white, holding between two fingertips and a thumb, in an attitude of dainty misgiving, a large white lily, sign of her purity. At the other end, under a muddy picture of some sainted martyr, there was an antique desk with lamp and leather-bound blotter and two telephones—why two? Somehow, without her noticing, the young nun had left, shutting the door behind her without a sound. She stood in the midst of silence, the child in her arms asleep in its blanket. The trees outside the windows were unfamiliar, or did they only seem so? Everything here seemed strange to her, still.

  Another door, one that she had not noticed, flew open as if a wind were behind it. What entered was a tall nun, high-shouldered as a man, with a narrow, stark, pale face. She came forward quickly, both hands held out, her heavy black habit audibly displacing air, her face smiling and seeming at the same time surprised at itself, as if smiles were strangers to it. This was Sister Stephanus.

  “Miss Ruttledge,” she said, taking Brenda’s free hand in both of hers, “welcome to Boston, and St. Mary’s.”

  She had the usual nun’s musty smell. Brenda could not stop herself recalling the stories that were told at the convent when she was a girl about the sisters being forbidden ever to be naked and having to wear a special sort of swimming costume in the bath.

  “I’m very glad to be here, Sister,” she said, in a voice that annoyed her by its seeming meekness. She was no longer a child, she told herself, and this nun had no authority over her. She drew up her shoulders and stared back stoutly into the woman’s coldly beaming face. “Boston is very nice,” she added. That, too, sounded weak and silly. The baby kicked her in the side through its blanket, as if demanding to be introduced; quite the little miss already. The nun’s brittle smile slid downwards.

  “And this must be the baby,” she said.

  “Yes,” Brenda said, and held aside the rim of the blanket with her finger to show the tiny, livid face with its rosebud mouth and permanently startled blue eyes. “This is little Christine.”

  8

  CLAIRE STAFFORD WAS WONDERING IF THE DRESS SHE HAD CHOSEN was suitable for the occasion. You never knew, with nuns. It was green, with white trimming on the hem, and a scalloped neckline—not low, but maybe showing too much of her throat and the freckled slope under her collarbone. She would keep the green scarf wrapped loosely around her neck, and even keep her coat on, if she was allowed. She had not wanted to ask Andy for an opinion; you never knew with Andy, either. Mostly he did not notice what she was wearing, then suddenly, when she least expected it, he would turn on her and say something, some mean remark, mostly. Once he had told her she looked like a whore. She would never forget it. They were living at the time in the rooming house on Scranton Street. She was wearing jeans and white mules and a scarlet blouse knotted at the waist. He had come in after a long drive down from Albany, looking hot and tired and mad, and walked right past her into the galley kitchen and grabbed a beer from the icebox and said it to her over his shoulder. “Honey, you look like a ten-dollar whore.” He pronounced it hoor, just like her daddy did. She would not let herself cry; that would have made him even madder. Even in her hurt she saw yet again how beautiful he was, leaning against the icebox in his boots and work pants and stained white sweatshirt, his rodeo rider’s forearms gleaming and that lock of hair black as a crow’s wing falling across his forehead. The most beautiful boy she
had ever known.

  Today he was wearing a pair of pressed dark pants over his cowboy boots, a white shirt with a woollen knit tie, and a sport jacket in tan checks with broad lapels. She had told him he looked nice but he had scowled and said he felt like Bozo the Clown. Now as they walked up the driveway to St. Mary’s he kept running a finger around the inside of his shirt collar and jerking up his chin and sighing. He was nervous, she could see that. He had talked nonstop in the cab, complaining about the pay he was losing by having to come here with her, but now he was silent, squinting up through the fall sunlight at the high, flat front of the orphanage that seemed to grow steadily higher the nearer they got to it. She, too, was a little scared, but not of the place. For she knew St. Mary’s, knew it like a home.

  The door was opened by a young nun she did not recognize. Her name was Sister Anne. She would have been pretty but for her buckteeth. She led them across the wide entrance hall and down the corridor toward Sister Stephanus’s office. The familiar smells—floor polish, carbolic soap, institutional cooking, babies—stirred in Claire an excited mixture of emotions. She had been happy here, or not unhappy. Somewhere high above, a choir of children was signing a hymn in ragged unison.