“I suppose,” he said, “he must have been in some kind of trouble.” Both of them looked at him blankly. “Delahaye.”
Phoebe turned her gaze now to a spark of light glinting in the bottom of her wine glass. “Yes, he must have been, surely. People don’t kill themselves for nothing.”
“Sometimes they do,” Sinclair said. “Sometimes there’s no apparent reason. They just do it, on a whim. I had a cousin, when I was young, hanged himself in the stairwell one morning when my aunt was out shopping. He’d just got a place in college, was going to study medicine.”
“His poor mother,” Phoebe murmured.
“Yes,” Sinclair said, “it was her that found him, when she came home from the shops. My Aunt Lotte. It nearly killed her.”
A heavy silence fell. Quirke watched as his daughter touched Sinclair’s maimed hand again in a quick gesture of sympathy.
“I don’t think,” Quirke said, “Victor Delahaye was the kind of man to do anything on a whim.”
They finished dinner soon after that. There was a wrangle over the bill, until Phoebe plucked it out of Quirke’s hand and passed it to Sinclair. He produced his wallet while she delved in her purse. “Don’t worry,” she said to Quirke, “we’re going halves.”
For a second Quirke saw himself and Phoebe’s mother, at this very table, a long time ago, bickering over something-what was it? He looked out at the trees, trying to remember.
When they were leaving the hotel, and Phoebe and Sinclair had gone through the revolving door, Quirke stood back to let someone come in. It was Isabel Galloway. She wore a slim blue suit and a pillbox hat pinned at a jaunty angle to the side of her head. They both halted, staring. “My God,” Isabel breathed, then quickly recovered herself. “Quirke!” she said brightly, and pressed her elbows into her sides as if to shore herself up. “You’re looking well.”
Quirke smiled queasily. “Isabel,” he said. “How are you? You look…” He fumbled after words but could not find them.
Isabel’s smile glittered. “Silver-tongued as ever,” she said, then frowned, annoyed with herself it seemed, and dropped her eyes and moved past him quickly and strode on into the lobby. He let her go, and stepped between the turning panels of the door, hearing behind him the familiar sharp clicking of her high heels on the marble floor.
Phoebe and Sinclair were waiting for him on the pavement. The last of the daylight was a greenish, crepuscular glow above the trees.
“Wasn’t that-?” Phoebe began, but stopped, seeing Quirke’s look.
Quirke realized he had left the Yeats book behind him, on the windowsill beside the table where they had sat. He turned back, muttering, and pushed his way through the heavy paneled door again.
Rose Griffin maintained a stoic view of life and the misfortunes that life piles upon what, in her best southern-belle drawl, she would describe as us poor lost creatures of the Lord. Not that she believed in the Lord, or disbelieved in Him, either. She rarely let her thoughts dwell on things beyond this world, this world being, as she felt, enough of a conundrum. She was intolerant of complainers, since, as she said, there was little to be gained from complaining, unless a body considered the pity of others a thing worth having. She felt pity for no one, on inclination as much as on principle. To pity people was to cheapen them, in her opinion. She realized this could make her seem hard-hearted, but she did not care. She was hard-what was wrong with that? Too much softness about, too much floppy, warm emotion. She had pointed it out once to Quirke, what they had in common: a cold heart and a hot soul.
She was shocked to discover that her friend Marguerite Delahaye was a blubberer. She would not have thought it of Maggie, whom she had always taken to be, underneath her spinster’s genteel veneer, as tough as she was herself. It was midafternoon and the two women were taking tea together in the drawing room of Rose’s large gaunt house on Ailesbury Road. It was a splendid day and they were seated in a splash of sunlight at a little table in the deep bay of a window that overlooked the front garden and the quiet street. To distract herself from Maggie’s sniffles, Rose was admiring the undulating spiral of steam rising from the spout of the teapot, and the pink roses painted on the dainty china cups, and the rich gleam of the antique silver cutlery. She could never understand why people seemed to pay so little regard to the small but, to her, essential pleasures of life-this knife, for instance, a fine old piece of Georgian silver, the blade worn thin from use and the handle solid and weighty as an ingot in the hand. She thought of all the people who had used it over the years, all of them gone now, while she was here.
“I’m sorry,” Maggie said, dabbing at her red-rimmed nose with an absurdly dainty handkerchief with a lace edging. “It’s just that I can’t believe that Victor is… I can’t believe he’s gone!”
“Yes, dear,” Rose said soothingly, “I understand.” Did she? She did sympathize, more or less-she had suffered her own losses-but she was not sure she understood. Maggie was behaving as if she had lost not a brother but a husband, or even a lover. Rose had siblings herself, but she rarely thought of them, and for long periods forgot about them altogether. Had she ever cared enough for her brothers that the loss of one of them would have reduced her to the kind of extravagant grief her friend was displaying? She thought it very unlikely. “Yes, I’m sure a sudden death like that is hard to accept,” she said. She paused. “They’re certain it was-I mean, they’re satisfied he was the one that pulled the trigger, yes?”
Maggie nodded, and a fresh spasm of sobbing made her shoulders shake.
When she had heard of Victor Delahaye’s death, Rose had first been surprised, and then not. Killing himself was just the sort of damn-fool thing that man would do, and the way he had done it-the boat, the deserted sea, the pistol, and young Clancy for a witness-was, of course, typically melodramatic and self-serving. He had entertained large notions of himself, had Victor. She had not known him well, had only met him a few times, on social occasions, but she had taken the measure of him straight off. Vain, pompous, humorless. Victor Delahaye had seen himself, preposterously, as a Renaissance figure, one of the great merchant princes, say, heir to a dynasty and father in turn to twin princelings who would carry on and embellish the grand family traditions. But inside every self-proclaimed great man there crouched in hiding a shivering boy terrified of being discovered and hauled out by the ear, wriggling and whimpering. Rose knew about these things: her first husband, the late Josh Crawford, had been one such great man.
Still, it was a puzzle. What had happened that had led Victor Delahaye to knock himself off his own pedestal? Something must have hit him where it hurt most, in his pride, or in his pocket, or maybe in both. No, his pride; he would not have killed himself over money. Something had damaged his estimate of himself. She pictured Mona Delahaye smiling, that thin scarlet mouth of hers turned up at the corner.
Maggie was talking again, between sniffs, about her brother, saying what a wonderful man he had been-a faithful husband, diligent father, loving sibling. An all-round saint, in fact. Rose suppressed an impatient sigh. The dead get so much more than their share of praise, she thought, and all just for being dead. “Come now, Maggie dear,” she said, “don’t upset yourself so-think of your asthma.”
She wondered what would happen now to Delahaye’s business. She doubted his partner, what’s-his-name, would be taking over. The company might be called Delahaye amp; Clancy, but everyone knew who it was that ran it. Nor did she think the Delahaye twins would be picking up the reins, at least not right away, while they were still busy planting their wild oats all over town. Those boys had a reputation, oh, they certainly did.