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What the fates arranged, or what the fates in the form of Francoise d’Aubigny herself arranged, was, of all things, a party. She did not call it that: on the little gilt-edged invitation card it said Memorial Drinks, which to Quirke’s ear had an almost comical ring. The event was to be at five in the afternoon at Jewell’s-now Francoise d’Aubigny’s-town house at the top of St. Stephen’s Green. It was a very grand house, with a big graveled Japanese garden at the back, and here the guests were gathered. No one had known quite what to wear to such a bizarre occasion. The men were properly sober-suited, but the women had been forced to improvise, and there was a great deal of black silk on show, and many black feathers in night-blue toques, and one or two of the more mature ladies wore elbow-length black cotton gloves. Waiters in frock coats and white ties moved among the crowd bearing aloft silver trays of champagne in crystal flutes; a trestle table covered with a blindingly white tablecloth offered canapes and bowls of olives and pickled onions and, at its center, a mighty salmon, succulently, indecently pink, arranged on a nickel salver and dotted all over with dabs of mayonnaise and a glistening beady stuff that only a handful among the company were able to identify as best Beluga caviar.
“C’est tres jolie, n’est-ce pas,” Francoise d’Aubigny said behind him, and Quirke turned quickly, almost spilling his champagne.
“Yes,” he said, “very jolly-very elegant, I mean.”
She had on a cocktail dress of metallic-blue satin and wore no adornment of any kind, save a tiny diamond-encrusted watch on her left wrist. She touched the rim of her glass to his, making the faintest chime. “Thank you for coming,” she said quietly. Quirke made a polite response that came out as a sort of gurgle. He had spent so many days remembering her, imagining her, and now the sudden reality of her presence was overwhelming.
She turned her head to scan the murmurous crowd. “Do you think I have shocked them, again?” she asked.
“Well, they haven’t stayed away,” Quirke said. “The Irish love a wake, you know.”
“A wake? Yes, of course, I suppose that is what they think this is.”
“And isn’t it?”
She was still looking about, with a faint considering smile. “Perhaps I should have offered whiskey, not champagne,” she said. “That is what people drink at an Irish wake, yes?”
“And stout, you forgot the stout, and bottles of black porter, and crubeens in a bucket.”
“Crubeens?”
“Pigs’ trotters- pieds de porc. ”
She laughed softly, ducking her head. “I’m afraid I am a very poor hostess. They will say terrible things about me, afterwards.”
“Even crubeens wouldn’t stop them saying terrible things. This is Dublin.”
“You are very”-she searched for the word-“ cynique, Dr. Quirke.” She was smiling.
“Cynical? I hope not. Realistic, I’d rather say.”
“No, I know the word for you: disenchanted. A beautiful word, but sad.”
He conceded, and inclined his head in a little bow-he was quite getting the hang of the Gallic bow-and stopped a passing waiter and exchanged his empty glass for a full one. Two must be the limit, he told himself; he was already feeling sufficiently derange in the presence of this intoxicating woman.
“Do eat something, Dr. Quirke,” she said. “I’m sure you will not miss the feet of the pig. Now I must-what do you say?-circulate.” She began to turn away, and paused, and laid two fingers flat on his wrist. “Don’t leave before we speak again, yes?”
She walked off in that rapidly stepping way that she did, her head bowed and the champagne glass clutched to her breast in both hands. Beside him a ginkgo tree, no taller than he was, hardly more than a slender shoot, trembled and trembled in all its leaves.
Over the following half hour he conversed with various people; a minimum of socializing was unavoidable, although he would have avoided it if he could. He wanted to be alone to play over again in his mind, without distraction, those moments he and Francoise d’Aubigny had shared beside the trestle table with its coy little bowls of glistening savories and its shameless salmon. There was an ancient judge who had known his adoptive father, whom he had to stop and listen to for a painful five minutes-the old boy was deaf, and spoke in bellowing tones as if everyone else shared his disability-and an Abbey actress who gave him a playfully reproving eye and inquired in a voice dripping with saccharine sweetness why Isabel Galloway was not with him. Now and then, when a gap opened among the gabbling heads, he had a tantalizing glimpse of Francoise-in his mind he had at last been able to drop the formality of the surname-but maneuver his way as he might through the crowd, he somehow could not manage to put himself directly in her vicinity. He drank a third glass of champagne, and then took a fourth, and stepped through the french windows with it and wandered into the house.
He entered a big modern kitchen, where he was ignored by the hired-in catering staff, busy at their work, and then a long passageway that in stages, through two successive green baize doors, widened to become the front hall. This part of the house seemed deserted. He noted paintings-a couple of insipid Paul Henrys and a dubious oil portrait of a prissy fellow in a periwig-and an antique oak side table with, over it, a big gilt-framed mirror that leaned out at an angle from the wall and gave an impression of vigilance and faint menace. To right and left two tall white doors faced each other. The one on the right, to his vague surprise, was locked. The other opened onto a square high-ceilinged drawing room ablaze with early evening sunlight. He stepped inside.
Here two enormous windows looked across the road to the Green and its trees, and the light pouring in through them had a leafy verdant tinge. A big old grandfather clock with a ponderous and hesitant tick stood against one wall. On a sideboard there rested a bowl of glowing yellow roses. He went and stood at one of the windows; lifting his face, he bathed in the sky’s calm soft radiance. The champagne had set up a mild and not unpleasant buzzing in his head. Disenchanted, she had said. Yes, it was a beautiful word, and yes, it carried a weight of sadness, but there was something hard in it, too, hard and unyielding. He pondered the dark fact that it was due to a violent death that he was here, tipsy on the dead man’s champagne and overflowing at the brim with infatuation for that man’s enchanting and dangerous widow. He knew the perils of the situation he had blundered into, and he accepted them, more than accepted them-what was passion without risk, without transgression? Although he knew himself guilty of many unforgivable lies and evasions in his life, he had never tried to hide from himself his taste for the hazard of sin. And that was what Francoise d’Aubigny represented for him now.
He began to notice a faintly uncomfortable sensation in the back of his head. He turned. A slight, pale, plain little girl with a long narrow face and circular steel-framed spectacles was regarding him from an armchair by the fireplace. The chair was expensively upholstered in yellow silk with a subtle fleur-de-lys pattern, and yellow too, or gold, rather, was the girl’s dress, an unsuitably formal gown with bows and flounces suggestive of the eighteenth century, which made her look like a grown-up woman viewed from the wrong, too distant perspective. Her hair was done in two heavy black braids tied at the ends with gold ribbon that matched her dress. She seemed quite composed, and her gaze was direct and unblinking, and he felt, standing there in the suddenly hard-edged, green-tinged light, like a specimen set up and arranged specifically for her scrutiny.
“Hello,” he said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud under the lofty ceiling.
The girl did not respond at once, but continued examining him, the lenses of her glasses two rounds of opaque light. At last she spoke. “Are you one of Daddy’s people,” she asked, “or are you a friend of maman?”
He found it peculiarly difficult to devise a satisfactory, or even plausible, answer to this perfectly reasonable question. “Well, I don’t think I’m either,” he said. “I only spoke to your father once, some time ago, although I’ve met your mother a number of times.”
He frowned, and saw her absorbing this; it was obvious she considered his reply to be as unsatisfactory as he did. “Are you a detective?” she asked. She had the faintest, lisping trace of an accent.
“No,” he said, laughing, “no, I’m a-I’m a sort of doctor. And you must be Giselle, yes?”
“Yes, of course,” she said dismissively.
She had a book open on her lap, a large volume with illustrations done in muted tones.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“ La Belle et la Bete. Maman brought it back for me from Paris.”
“Ah. And you read French, do you?”
This question too she seemed to consider not worth replying to, and merely shrugged, as if to say again, Of course.
Always in moments of social awkwardness Quirke became acutely aware of his bulk; standing there under the unblinking gaze of this small unnerving person he felt like the lumbering giant in a fairy tale. Now the child closed her book and pushed it firmly down between the cushion and the arm of her chair and stood up, smoothing the front of her gold frock. “Why aren’t you at the party?” she asked.
“I was. But I came in to-to look at the house. I haven’t been here before. It’s a very nice house.”
“Yes, it is. We have another one in the country, Brooklands-but you probably know that. And another one in France. Do you know the Cote d’Azur?”
“Not very well, I’m afraid.”
“Our place is in Cap Ferrat. That’s just outside Nice. Our house is on a hill above the bay at Villefranche.” She frowned thoughtfully. “I like it there.”
She came forward until she was standing before him. She was not small for her age, yet the top of her head barely reached the level of his diaphragm. He caught her child’s smell; it was like the smell of day-old bread. Her hair was a deep gleaming black, like her mother’s. “Would you like to see my room?” she asked.
“Your room?”
“Yes. You said you came in to see the house, so you should see the upstairs, too.” He tried to think of a way of declining this invitation but could not. She was a strangely compelling personage. She put her right hand in his left. “Come along,” she said briskly, “this way.”
She led him across the room and opened the door. She had to use both hands to turn the great brass doorknob. In the hall she took him by the hand again and together they climbed the stairs. Yes, that was what he felt like: the misunderstood ogre, monstrous and lumbering but harmless at heart.
“How did you know who I was?” she asked. “Have you seen me before?”
“No, no. But your mother told me your name and I thought you could not be anyone else.”
“So you know maman quite well, then?”
He thought about this for a moment before answering; somehow she compelled serious consideration. “No, not very well,” he said “We had lunch together.”
“Oh, did you,” she said, without emphasis. “I suppose you met her when Daddy died, since you’re a doctor. Did you try to save his life?”
Her hand was dry and cool and bony, and he thought of a fledgling fallen from the nest, but this was a fallen fledgling that would without doubt survive. “No,” he said, “I’m not that kind of doctor.”
“What other kinds of doctor are there?”
She was leading him now across a broad landing spread with a Turkish rug in various shades of red from rust to blood-bright.
“Oh, all sorts,” he said.
This answer she seemed to find sufficient.
Her room was absurdly large, a great square space painted white all over, with a white ceiling and a spotless white carpet and even a white cover on the small narrow bed. It was alarmingly tidy, not a toy or an article of clothing in sight, and not a single picture on the walls. It might have been the cell of a deeply devotional but incongruously well-to-do anchorite. It made Quirke shiver. The only splash of color was in the single tall sash window opposite the door that gave onto Iveagh Gardens, a rectangle of blue and gold and lavish greens suspended in the midst of all that blank whiteness like a painting by Douanier Rousseau. “I spend a lot of time here,” the child said. “Do you like it?”
“Yes,” Quirke said, lying. “Very much.”
“There are not many people I invite to come up here, you know.”
Quirke did his newly learned Frenchman’s bow. “I’m honored.”
She gave a small sigh and said matter-of-factly, “You don’t mean that.”
He did not try to contradict her. They walked together to the window.
“I like to watch the people in the gardens,” she said. “All kinds of people come. They walk about. Some of them have dogs, but not all. They bring picnics, sometimes. And there’s an old man, I believe he lives there, I see him all the time, going along the pathways or sitting on the grass. He has a bottle in a brown paper bag. I tried waving to him once but he couldn’t see me.”
She stopped. Quirke tried to think of something to say, but could not. He pictured her here, leaning at this window, silent, looking out through her big spectacles at life going by.
“Would you like to play a game?” she asked.
She was standing very close to him, looking up at him gravely, those round lenses shining and the heavy braids hanging down. She had a very immediate physical presence, or, rather, she created a strongly tangible sense of the physical, for in fact it was not her nearness that pressed in on him, he realized, but the sense of his own fleshliness, the blood-heat of himself. “What kind of game?” he asked warily.
“Any kind. What games did you play, when you were little?”
He laughed, though it did not sound to him like a laugh, but more a sort of nervous gasp. “You know,” he said, “I can’t remember. It’s such a long time ago. What games do you play, with your friends?”
Something passed behind those shining lenses, a brief flash of irony and amusement that made her look much older than her years, and for the first time he saw a resemblance in her to her mother. “Oh, the usual,” she said. “You know.” He felt himself mocked.
She was still gazing up at him, standing with one foot resting on the instep of the other and swaying her meager hips slightly. He could not think what might be going through her head.
“Hide-and-seek,” he said, somewhat desperately, “that’s one game I remember.”
“Yes, Daddy and I used to play that. He was too good at it, though, and always found me, no matter where I hid.”
There was a silence, in which she seemed to be waiting for some particular and marked response. The carpet under his feet might have been a sheet of creaking ice. Should he try to say something to her about her father, try to offer some comfort, or just give her the opportunity to go on talking about him? He was an orphan; he did not know what it would be like to lose a parent, suddenly and violently, yet this child’s calmness and self-possession seemed to him unnatural. But then, children to him were a separate species, as unfathomable as cats, say, or swans.
“There is one thing you could do for me,” she said.
“Yes?” he said, eagerly.
“There’s a thing that Daddy gave me that I can’t find. You might look on top of that wardrobe”-she pointed-“and see if it’s there. I’m sure you’re tall enough.”
“What kind of thing is it?”
“Just a toy. A glass globe, you know, with liquid in it, and snow.”
She was watching him with a keener light now, curious, it seemed, to see what he would do, how he would respond to her request. He went to the wardrobe she had indicated-it was made of some almost white wood, birch or ash-and ran a hand around the top outer edge of it. He felt nothing, not even dust. “There’s nothing, I think,” he said. “A snow globe, you say? Is there a little town in it-?”
“It might be at the back. You haven’t searched at the back.”
“It’s too high,” he said. “I can’t reach.”
“Stand on this chair.” She brought it to him. It had curved legs and a white satin seat. He looked at it doubtfully. “Go on,” she said, “stand on it. If you dirty it the maid will clean it.”
He could not think how to put a stop to this… this what, exactly? Was it a game she was playing, was she making sport of him? The look in her eye was almost avid now, and he felt more than ever mocked. He lifted his right foot-no part of him had ever looked so large or inappropriate to its surroundings-and set it on the chair and prepared to hoist himself aloft. At that moment the door opened and Francoise d’Aubigny put her head round it, saying her daughter’s name. All froze into a tableau, the woman at the door with her hand on the doorknob, the man teetering on one foot, the little girl standing before him with her hands clasped demurely before her. Then Francoise d’Aubigny said something in French; the words had an angry, even a violent sound. Quirke took his foot from the seat of the chair and lowered it to the carpet as if it were not his own but something burdensome that had been fastened to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, not knowing what it could be, exactly, that he was apologizing for, but the woman brushed his words aside.
“What are you doing!” she said. “Why are you here?” Her blazing eye was fixed on Quirke-it seemed to him she had not so much as glanced at the child. He did not try to speak again-what would he have said? She strode forward from the door and set a hand clawlike on the girl’s shoulder, but still all her attention was directed at Quirke. “For God’s sake!” she hissed. He realized he still had the champagne glass in his hand, though it was empty now; was he perhaps a little drunk, was that what she was so angry about? She had become transformed on the instant into a harpy, her narrow face as white as the walls, her mouth a vermilion slash. What had he done, what outrage did she think him guilty of? The situation she had surprised him in was surely no more than absurd. He took a step forward, lifting a placatory hand, but Francoise d’Aubigny quickly turned, and turned the child with her, and marched her off to the door. There the girl hung back for a second and turned her head and threw back at Quirke a glance of what seemed to him pure, smiling malice. And then she was gone, and he stood, baffled and shaken, making a goldfish mouth.
Presently he was descending the stairs, stopping on every third or fourth step to listen down into the house, he did not know for what-recriminations, tears, the pained cries of a child being beaten? But he heard nothing except the distant buzz of voices from outside, where that grotesque memorial party was continuing. He was walking past the drawing room when the door opened and Francoise d’Aubigny was there, looking no longer angry but haggard and spent. “Please, don’t go,” she said, stepping back and opening the door wider and motioning him to enter. He hesitated, feeling a flicker of angry resistance-was he to forget how not three minutes ago she had flared at him in fury as if he were an interloper or, worse, some sort of child molester? Yet he could not make himself pass by; the draw of her beauty, of her-yes-her magnificence was too strong for him. When he stepped through the doorway he was relieved to see that the child was not there, though he spied her book still lodged down the side of the armchair where she had left it. The sunlight had shifted in the window, was thinned now to a blade of deepest gold.
Francoise d’Aubigny walked to the fireplace, wringing a lace handkerchief spasmodically in her hands. “Forgive me,” she said. “You must think me a terrible person, to speak to you like that.”
“No, I’m the one who should apologize. I didn’t mean to invade the privacy of your home. It didn’t feel like that, when I was doing it. Your daughter is very charming.”
She glanced at him quickly. “Do you think so?” It seemed a real question, requiring a real answer.
“Yes, of course,” he said lamely, lying again. “Charming and… irresistible.” He tried out a winning smile, not knowing what there was to be won. “She insisted on showing me her room.”
Francoise appeared to have stopped listening. She stood by the mantelpiece, gazing into the empty marble fireplace with a haunted expression. “It has been so difficult,” she murmured, as if speaking to herself, “so difficult, this past week. What does one say to a child whose father has-has gone, so suddenly, in such a terrible way?”
“Children are resilient,” Quirke said, aware how lumpish and banal it sounded. “They get over things that would kill us.”
She went on staring wide-eyed into the grate, then came back to herself with a start and turned to him. “Do they?” she said.
He faltered. “So I’m told.”
“You have no children?”
“No-I mean yes. I had-I have a daughter. She’s grown up. I didn’t really know her when she was a child.”
She began to weep, without preamble, without fuss, making no sound, her shoulders shaking. He did not hesitate, but crossed to where she stood and took her in his arms. She was so thin and, suddenly, so frail, a tall, bereft bird. Through the satin stuff of her dress he could feel the twin sharp flanges of her shoulder blades; her sobs made them twitch like tensely folded wings. At his approach she had pressed her fists against each other with the handkerchief between them and held them to her breast, and now they were against his breast, too, though they were not a barrier, he felt, but on the contrary a sign of need, a gesture of supplication. Somehow he found her mouth, and tasted her tears, hot and sharp. He kissed her, but she did not kiss him back, only suffered his lips on hers, unwilling, it seemed, or perhaps even unnoticing. She might have been a sleepwalker, bumping up against him in the dark and not waking. She detached herself from his embrace and took a step back.
“I’m sorry,” he said, although he was not.
She blinked; he could see her making herself concentrate. “No, no,” she said, “please, do not keep apologizing. I’m glad. It was”-she smiled with an effort, the tears still shining on her cheeks-“inevitable.”
Strange, how for him all the uncertainty and doubt, all that feeling of adolescent fumbling, how it was all gone, rid of in an instant, replaced by something deeper, darker, of far more weight, as if that kiss had been the culmination of a ceremony he had not been aware of as it unfolded, and that had ended by their sealing, there by the cold hearth, a solemn pact of dependence and fraught collaboration, and it was not the nearness of the fireplace, he knew, that was giving to his mouth a bitter taste of ashes.