The Delahayes were Protestant, of course, while the Clancys were Catholics. That distinction, she knew, meant everything here. She had spent a deal of time in this country, over the years; Josh Crawford had been more Irish than American, and now she was married to a man who was one hundred percent a native son. All the same, there was an awful lot she still did not understand about life here, and probably never would understand, try though she might. The people’s fear of the priests, for instance, never failed to surprise her; also-and, you might say, on the other hand-their reverence for the Protestants. The Protestants were a tiny number, yet the Catholics had only to hear one of them speak, in that drawling, cut-glass accent, to start doffing their caps and tugging their forelocks and all the rest of such nonsense. This fascinated her, and pleased her, too, in a silly sort of way. It was as if, living here, she had gone back to an olden time, to a civilization that was both developed and primitive-Byzantium, somewhere like that? — where the mass of the people were held in thrall and ruled over by a secret, aristocratic caste whose power was so pervasive the members of it did not even have to reveal themselves except now and then, by certain offhand yet subtle signs. Yes, that was it: she felt like an anthropologist who had been magically transported through time to an archaic world of mysteries and strange laws, strange rituals and taboos.
She heard the front door opening and, after a moment, softly closing again. That would be Malachy; her husband’s quietness and diffidence of manner could be sensed even through walls. She called out to him-too shrilly, making Maggie jump-and he put his head in at the door, smiling in that vague and vaguely troubled way of his. He was tall, with a narrow head. He wore tweeds and a bow tie. His eyes behind the dully gleaming lenses of his spectacles were pale and slightly watery.
“Oh, don’t just dither there!” Rose called to him with humorous exasperation. “Come and sit down with us and have some of this good tea-it’s that kind you like, Lapsang Souchong, that smells of old Cathay.” Mal entered and closed the door behind him and came forward creakingly, his smile congealing into a slight queasiness. Rose supposed he could not remember exactly who her guest was; new people always worried him. “You remember Marguerite Delahaye,” she said, loudly, “my friend Maggie.”
“Ah, yes,” Mal said, relieved, his smile clearing. “Miss Delahaye. How are you?”
He drew up a chair and sat down. Only now did he notice Maggie’s red-rimmed eyes and the shine on her nose, and faint alarm spread over his face again, and he touched self-consciously the flesh-pink bulb of the hearing aid in his left ear.
“Maggie has had a bereavement,” Rose said, pronouncing each word distinctly, so that she could not help sounding overbearing and even a little cross. “Her brother-”
“Lord, yes, of course!” Mal said quickly, half rising from the chair but keeping his back and his long legs bent in a sitting position; what an endearingly absurd man he was, Rose thought, not by any means for the first time. “Of course,” he said. “Your-Mr. Delahaye-your brother.” Slowly he subsided onto the chair. “I’m very sorry for your trouble.”
It was not convention, he did seem genuinely sympathetic, and this set Maggie off again. Rose threw her eyes to the ceiling. “It’s very sad,” she said, somewhat shortly, “very tragic, of course.”
Mal was pouring himself a cup of tea. The tea smelled of straw and smoke. Rose watched him, his elaborately slow and deliberate movements, still feeling that exasperated fondness she always felt before the spectacle of Mal’s mole-like ways. Mal had been an obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family but was retired now. She often wondered what he did all day. He would leave the house in the morning, quite early sometimes, and come back in the afternoon looking, she always thought, ever so slightly shamefaced. In their early days together she used to ask him straight out what he had been up to, just for the sake of conversation, but he would take on a look of mousy alarm and say quickly that he had gone for a walk, or that he had met someone he knew. Somehow she never believed him. She had an image of him stalled on some street corner, and just standing there haplessly for hours, gazing at nothing, noticing no one and not being noticed, the passersby stepping around him as if he were a fire hydrant, or a tree that had somehow grown up on the spot overnight. It still surprised her that she had married him. Not that she regretted it, or was unhappy; only they were, as even she could see, a most unlikely couple, whiling away together the autumn of their lives.
He was asking Maggie if she would take another cup of tea, but she said no, and sat up on her chair and straightened her shoulders, and put the sodden hankie away in her bag and fastened the clasp with a decisive snap. She had a remarkably long neck, and now she extended it in a swanlike fashion, elevating her head and thrusting out her nose and her sharp little chin. Her already graying hair was untended, and had the look of a clump of steel wool, or an abandoned bird’s nest.
“I want to ask, Dr. Griffin,” she said, “I want to ask-” She stopped, and looked at her fingers fixed on the rim of the handbag in her lap. She tried again: “Do you think that he-do you think my brother-would he have suffered?”
Malachy frowned. Medical questions were the one thing that were sure to concentrate his attention. Yet Rose could see how torn he felt now, eager to discuss the likely details of Victor Delahaye’s suicide yet hesitant in the presence of the dead man’s close relative.
“It depends,” he said, “on where he-on where the bullet entered.” He clasped his hands, moving forward to the edge of his chair. “If the shot penetrates the heart, the person will experience first what we call a prodromal period, very short in duration, which is like the sensation before fainting, with lightheadedness and nausea, and after that there’ll be a neurocardiogenic syncope. Sorry-big words, I know. Most people’s blood pressure on fainting is restored by lying flat, but here, you see, this is impossible, as the pumping mechanism is destroyed. The person would have only moments after being shot before they fell over and exsanguinated-bled to death, that is. Some victims of attack say they didn’t even notice they had been stabbed or shot until they saw the blood. And then-”
“What he means,” Rose said heavily, “is that your brother would have died instantly.” She turned to her husband, signaling with her eyes. “Isn’t that the case, Malachy?”
Mal sat back on the chair and issued a soft, sighing sound, like that of a very small balloon very quietly deflating. “Yes,” he said meekly, “of course, that’s what I mean, that he would have died instantly,” then added, faintly, “or almost.”
Maggie gazed at him unhappily, trying to believe him, Rose saw, yet not succeeding. “It’s what I keep thinking of, you see,” she said, with a tremor in her voice. “I keep imagining him in agony, regretting what he’d done but knowing it was too late.” She was clutching the bag in her lap so tightly now the blood had drained from the joints of her fingers. “I suppose people don’t think, when they’re going to do something like that, of how it will feel, of what the pain will be like. I suppose they’re so desperate they just-” She shut her eyes and two fat shiny tears squeezed out between the lids and rolled down swiftly on either side of her nose. Malachy in alarm looked at his wife, and Rose reached out and covered Maggie’s clasped hands with one of her own.
“Oh, my dear, don’t,” she said. “You’re just tormenting yourself.”
“I know,” Maggie said, nodding like a child, with her chin tucked in and her eyes clamped shut and more tears squeezing out between the lids. “But I can’t help it-I can’t stop thinking of him out there in that boat, putting the gun to his chest, and-” She sobbed, her swollen lower lip shaking and the tears flowing down her face. Her breathing was becoming increasingly hoarse, and Rose hoped she was not going to suffer an asthmatic attack. Her first husband had died of emphysema, and she remembered that awful gasping and hooting he used to do at the end.