“Is that what you think of me?”
“Oh, yes, I forgot-you’re an artist.” He had not meant it to sound so sour.
“Dear me,” she said, “we are on edge today.” She put the bottle on the floor again and sat back, holding her glass in both hands and nursing it against her breast. “Were you that fond of your late partner?”
He did not respond, only drank his wine and gazed before him, frowning. “David was on the boat with him,” he said.
“Who?”
“My son, Davy.”
She stared. “My God. Why?”
“He asked him to go with him-Victor, that is, asked Davy. The night before, when we were all in the pub, he invited him to come out. Davy hates the sea, but he went, all the same.”
“My God,” Bella said again, more softly this time, more wonderingly. “Did he-did he see him do it? Did he see him shoot himself?”
Jack watched one last, anxious-seeming bubble crowding at the brim of his glass. “Yes,” he said, “he saw it.”
“But-but why?”
“Why did he take Davy with him? I don’t know. Maybe to get back at me.”
“For what?”
The wine bubble burst.
“I don’t know.”
She was watching him, staring at his profile. “I think you do know,” she said, in a voice that made her suddenly sound sober. “I think you’re lying.”
He put a hand over his eyes and massaged his temples at either side with a finger and a thumb. “There was a-there was a problem, in work. In the business.”
“What sort of problem?”
He took the hand away from his face and turned towards the window. She saw the pulse working in his jaw. He was still good-looking, with that small neat head, that strong nose, those broad lips that had a twist to them at once humorous and sly. There used to be something about him, something weak and furtively vulnerable. Now that was gone, that youthful defenselessness, but what had come in its place was not strength, only hardness. She put her glass on the floor beside the wine bottle. She should not drink so early in the evening; it always went straight to her head. It was not an occasion to be tipsy; a girl had to watch herself around Jack Clancy.
“He could never let go of anything,” he said, with a distant look now, talking to himself. “He could never relent. Always had to be top dog, and have everyone around him acknowledge it. Got that from his father, of course, Old Ironsides himself. A pair of them in it-overbearing and ruthless yet still expecting the rest of us to treat them like proper gentlemen of the old school. And all the time they’d cut your heart out for a farthing.”
He stopped. She had an urge to put her finger to that pulse in his jaw to stop it twitching. “Did you know?” she asked.
“What?”
“Did you know he was going to do it?”
“No. How could I? If I had, do you think I’d have let Davy go out with him? Do you think I’d have let my own son’s life be put at risk?”
She picked up her glass again from the floor-what good would staying sober do? “Tell me what was going on in the business,” she said. “Were you fiddling the books?”
He said nothing for a moment, then laughed harshly. “Fiddling the books? For Christ’s sake, Bella.”
“Then what was this ‘problem’ that you’re so concerned about?”
He shrugged, and looked away from her again. “Nothing,” he said. “Forget I mentioned it.”
“Had he found out about it, your partner, Delahaye-had he found out what you were up to, whatever it was?”
He shook his head as if amused. “What I was ‘up to’-as if I was an office boy, stealing the tea money.” He lay back against the sofa, suddenly weary-seeming. “You don’t know what it’s like, having something going round and round in your head, round and round. I don’t sleep, I just lie there, thinking.”
She waited, but he had lapsed into silence. His eyes were closed. She could hear him breathing; he might have been in a fever, or asleep and having a bad dream. She felt sorry for him, but she was apprehensive, too. She realized that she did not want to know what it was that was going round and round in his head. Some things it was better not to know, especially when they were things that Jack Clancy knew. It had been a long time since they had seen each other but it might have been yesterday, so familiar was the sense she had of his resentment and pent-up anger. He was a dangerous person. Not violent, not menacing, even, yet in some way dangerous, all the same. That was why she had let him go, before; he had been too much for her. She stood up, not looking at him. She wanted him to leave. Something had come into the house with him, the presence of which she felt only now; it was as if some animal had loped in silently behind him and hidden itself and now was getting ready to spring out at her. She felt suddenly vulnerable. It was catching, whatever it was that was tormenting him.
“I have to change,” she said. “I’m going out.”
“Where?”
“Just out.”
“A date.”
“Yes. A date.”
It was a lie, but it did not matter, he was not listening. A dense shadowy glow had come into the window now, as it always did at this time of day. She felt like shivering. That strange light was on Jack’s face, a phosphorescent sheen. What did you do, Jack? What did you do that made your partner shoot himself?
5
Quirke had no birthday. He had been an orphan-he was an orphan still, he supposed, though it was odd to think so-and his records, if there had been any, were lost. Not knowing his date of birth, and therefore having no particular day on which to celebrate the annual crossing over as others did, was not something that troubled him. He knew his age, more or less accurately, though he did not know how he knew it. Someone, at some time, long ago, when he was a child, must have told him, and the figure must have impressed itself on his mind, though he could not remember being told, or having been told. It was just there, an accumulating number, as meaningless as any other, and as lacking in significance for him. Each New Year’s Day he took down mentally another used-up calendar from his inner wall, and lifted a glass in a sardonic toast to himself. It amused him, especially when he was in his cups, to picture his gravestone and the lopsided legend on it: a blank, a dash, and then a date. Of course, they could count back, his relicts, and put in a notional year of birth, but it would not be certain they were right: whoever it was who had told him how old he was might have lied, or might have been mistaken.
Phoebe, of course, insisted he should have a birthday, and would pick a date each year and surprise him with it. This year she chose a random day in June, just because it was summer and the sun was shining. She and David Sinclair, Quirke’s assistant and her boyfriend, took him to dinner at the Shelbourne Hotel. She had reserved his favorite table, in the corner by the window to the left that looked across the street to the trees in St. Stephen’s Green. The evening was overcast and muggily warm, but Quirke nevertheless was in his black suit, the jacket fastened tightly and his white shirt cuffs on show. Phoebe wished he would let her take him over and smarten him up a bit, get him fitted for a good three-piece tweed suit in Brown Thomas and buy him a shirt or two of some shade other than white. It was not that he did not spend money on his clothes-that suit was Italian, his shoes were handmade-but he always managed to look dusty, somehow. Not dirty, or unlaundered, or shabby, even, but as if he had been standing for too long in some spot where a very fine silt had settled on him, out of the air, without his noticing. Her present to him this year was a tie of shimmering green silk. She apologized for being so unimaginative, but he said no, it was very handsome-he took it out of its cellophane wrapper and held it up to the light from the window and turned it this way and that, an emerald snake, and thought of Mona Delahaye-and besides, he said, he had been in need of a tie for ages, most of the ones he had being old and greasy by now. Sinclair had bought him a book, Yeats’s Autobiographies in the handsome new Macmillan edition in its smart cream jacket. Quirke, to hide how touched he was, pored over it for so long, with his head bent, that Phoebe in the end had to take it away from him.