“Know about you?”
“Yes. Where I’m from, for instance. Can you tell from my accent?” He had not noticed an accent. “Maybe I’ve lost it,” she said.
She brought their drinks and gave him his and sat down again beside him.
“We’ll both be drunk,” Quirke said.
She folded one leg under herself with balletic grace. “Yes,” she said gaily, “that’s my aim.” She clinked her glass against his. “Bottoms up.”
The whiskey this time burned his throat. He needed to eat something. He was beginning to hear himself breathe, and that was always a bad sign. Drink seemed not to affect Mona Delahaye, except to lend her expression a brightly impish gleam.
“So,” he said, “where are you from?”
“You really can’t tell? I don’t know whether to be glad or not-I mean about having lost my accent. I’m from South Africa. My name, my”-she giggled-“my maiden name, used to be Vanderweert.” Quirke nodded. He could not imagine this woman ever having been a maiden. “I was born in Cape Town,” she said. “Ever been there? Very beautiful.”
“You’re a long way from home, then.”
Her look became pensive. “Yes, I suppose so. Though it’s hardly home, anymore.” She glanced at him, smiling. “I suppose you’re thinking of diamond mines, and kaffirs being flogged, and so on, while I loll on the verandah in the cool of evening drinking something tall with ice in it and admiring the sun setting behind Table Mountain. Not like that, I’m afraid, not like that at all. My father was-is-a civil servant, third class, as they say. I grew up in a bungalow in Parow.”
“Where’s that?”
“Suburb of Cape Town. Not the loveliest spot on earth.”
“How did you meet your husband?”
“Victor?” she said, as if she had forgotten that she had once had a husband. “He was visiting Cape Town, pretending to be on business-he loved to travel about the world, being the high-powered executive-and I was working as a typist in the office of one of the firms he called in to. He took me to dinner, we danced, the moon rose, and by morning the deal was clinched.” She was watching him, ironical and amused. “The way things really happen is always grubby, isn’t it. I could have lied to you, you realize that. I could have said I was a De Beers heiress, and that Victor had to plead for my hand with my father the plutocrat, and you wouldn’t have known any better. But I thought you’d prefer the truth. I thought you deserved the truth, dull as it is.” She chuckled. “Victor would be furious-he liked to pretend I was the daughter of some grand colonial family. Poor Victor.”
She looked convincingly sad for a moment. Quirke had an urge to take her hand; he must not drink any more, he must not. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I never properly offered you my condolences.”
She brightened. “Oh, how sweet!” she said. “But really, it’s all right. In fact, at times like this you need someone absolutely heartless around, to buck you up.” She turned her head and peered at him, looking deep into his eyes. “You do want to go to bed with me, don’t you?” she said. “I wasn’t wrong about that, was I?”
He did not know how to reply. The feline candor of her gaze both unnerved and excited him. He was sweating a little. He was glad of the commonplace things around them, the room, the sunlight in the garden, the presence of other people in the house. Surely she was teasing him, being scandalous to see how he would take it.
“Tell me what you think about Jack Clancy,” he said, to be saying something.
“What I think about him?” she said. The light in her eye was more erratic now, and when she frowned it was as if she had lost the thread of something and was having trouble finding it again. The gin having its effect at last; he was faintly relieved.
“About what happened to him, in the boat,” he said.
“Don’t you know? I thought you knew everything, you and your detective friend.”
He leaned forward and put his glass carefully on the floor and clasped his hands before him. He could clearly hear the air rushing in his nostrils, in his chest, and knew he was drunk. Not seriously drunk, not drunk drunk, but drunk, all the same.
“Jack Clancy drowned,” he said, “but before he did, someone or something hit him on the head.”
“Oh, yes?” she said absently. He was not sure she had been listening. She leaned down to pick up his glass from where it stood on the carpet between his feet. He moved to stop her. “Come on,” she said, “just one more, and then we can go and see if there’s anything to eat for lunch.”
He would not let her have his glass, but took hers and walked with both to the sideboard. He had intended to leave them firmly there, yet found himself refilling them. Just one more, as she had said; a last one. The skin of his forehead had tightened alarmingly, and there seemed a very faint mist in front of his eyes that would not clear no matter how often he blinked. He carried the glasses back to the sofa. Something was scratching at the back of his mind, insistently, but he ignored it. Just this one, and then he would leave.
He realized he was leaning over her, she seated and he standing, grinning, and swaying a little. A great wash of happiness, childish and vacant, swept through him like a thrilling gust of wind. Quirke, he told himself, you are a damned fool.
He woke with a start and did not know where he was. The light in the room was shadowed, but there was a rich warm tint to it of old gold. High ceiling, a plaster cornice on four sides, the walls painted apple green. Two windows, lofty, the curtains of heavy yellow silk, drawn, with sunlight in them. Wardrobe, dressing table, a hinged screen, silk again, swooping birds painted on it. He lay amid tangled sheets, under a satin eiderdown, much too hot. There was sweat on his upper lip and in the hollow above his clavicle. His tongue burned, whiskey-raw. He remembered, of course. Oh, Lord.
She lay at his side, her back turned to him, her hair splashed like a rich dark stain on the pillow. She was snoring softly. He eased himself out of the bed, sliding his legs sideways under the eiderdown and setting his feet cautiously on the floor, and crossed the room at a crouch, looking for his clothes.
“Going already?” she said behind him. He straightened, turned, his heart sinking. She was lying on her back now, with an arm under her head, looking at him along the lumpy length of the eiderdown. “Give us a fag before you go,” she said.
When he bent to pick up his clothes from where he had discarded them on the floor something began beating angrily in his head. He pulled on his trousers. His jacket was draped over the back of a little gilt chair in front of the dressing table. He found his cigarettes and his lighter and returned with them to the bed. Mona still lay with her head resting on her arm. One pale small breast was exposed.
“Sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“I should be at the hospital.”
“Oh, of course you should. Busy busy busy.” She pulled herself up in the bed, leaning on her elbows. He put a cigarette between her lips and held the lighter for her. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m used to men creeping out of my bed.” She laughed, a subdued little hoot. “That sounds awful, doesn’t it. What a slut I must seem.” She peered more closely at him in the curtained gloom. “You are a big fellow, aren’t you,” she said. “All muscle and fur. Come back to bed-come on.”
He brought an ashtray from the dressing table and put it on the bed where she could reach it. Her breasts, palely pendent, made him think of a small soft big-eyed animal-a lemur, was it? He sat down and the mattress springs gave a faint, distant jangle of protest. She had scrambled higher still in the bed and was lying back against a mound of pillows, watching him-no, surveying him, he thought-as if she were measuring him against a model in her head and finding him sadly though perhaps not hopelessly wanting. The ashtray bore the legend HOTEL METROPOLE MONTE CARLO. She saw him looking. “Stolen,” Mona said. “By me. I like to steal things. Nothing valuable, just things that take my fancy. People’s husbands, for instance.”