The Silver Swan (14 page)

 

Of course, he did not try anything with her, nor even make a suggestive remark, as men always did, sooner or later. No, there was nothing like that with Dr. Kreutz.

 

He tried to teach her more about Sufism and gave her books and pamphlets to read, but she found it hard to learn. There were so many names, for a start, most of which she could hardly get her tongue around, and which confused her—half of them were called Ibn-this or Ibn-that, though he told her it only meant
son of
, but still. And the teachings of these wise men did not seem to her all that wise. They were so sure of themselves and sure that they were dispensing the greatest wisdom, but most of the things they said seemed to her obvious or even silly.
I have never seen a man lost who was on a straight path
or
If you cannot stand a sting do not put your finger in a scorpion's nest
or
What may appear to you a clump of bushes may well be a place where a leopard is lurking
—what was so clever or deep in such pronouncements? They were not much different from the kinds of thing her father and his cronies said to each other in the pub on a Saturday afternoon, hunched over their pints at the bar with the wireless muttering in the background and someone doing a crossword puzzle in the paper—
It's a wise child that knows its father
or
There's more than one way to skin a cat
or
It's a long road that has no turning
.

 

However, there was a saying by one of those Ibns that was uncontradictable, as she could ruefully attest after all those dizzying lectures from Dr. Kreutz, and that was a definition of Sufism itself as "truth without form." But to be fair, that was what Dr. Kreutz kept
telling her over and over: that, or versions of it. "My dear dear girl," he said to her one day early in their acquaintance, "you must ask for no answers, no facts, no dogmas like the ones your priests tell you that you must believe in. To be a Sufi is to be on the way always, without expectation of arrival. The journeying is all." Well, it was certainly true that there was a lot of moving about the place involved in this religion, if it was a religion: the Sufis never seemed to stop in one spot for more than a day or two but then were off again on their travels. She supposed it was because it all happened in hot countries and desert places where there were nomads—that was a new word she had learned—who had to keep on the move in search of water and food and places where their camels and their donkeys could graze. She could not get over her amazement at being a part of this world that was so different from everything she had known up to now. And she
was
a part of it, even if she was not the totally convinced convert Dr. Kreutz thought she was.

 

She came to him most Wednesday afternoons and sometimes at the weekends, too, when Billy was away traveling. When he had a client with him—he never called the ones he treated patients—he would move the copper bowl from the low table to the windowsill as a signal for her that someone was there. Then she would have to pass the time strolling aimlessly up and down Adelaide Road until she saw the client leaving. As the winter went on she got friendly with the man who tended the gates of the Eye and Ear Hospital, and when it rained or was very cold he would invite her into his cabin, which was made of creosoted wood that smelled like Jeyes Fluid. His name, Mr. Tubridy, sounded funny to her; she was not sure why, except that he was a tubby little man, with a round, shiny face and a bald head across which were carefully combed a few long strands of oiled, lank hair. He had a kerosene stove, and smoked Woodbine cigarettes, and read the English papers, the
People
or the
Daily Mail
, out of which he would recount to her the juicier stories. He made tea for her, and sometimes she would try one of his cigarettes, though she was not a smoker. She felt, there in that little cabin, sitting at the stove with her
coat pulled tight around her, as if she was back in childhood, not her real childhood in the Flats but a time of coziness and safety she had never known yet that was somehow familiar to her—a dream childhood. Then she would go out and walk up the road and look to see if the copper bowl was moved from the windowsill, and if it was she would open the iron gate and tap on the basement door and step into that other world, as exotic as the one in the cabin was ordinary.

 

Dr. Kreutz never spoke about his clients. They were all women, so far as she could see. That did not surprise her—what man would consult a spiritual healer? She longed to know something about these women, but she did not dare to ask. She supposed they must be rich, or well-off, anyway; more than once after a client had left she came in while Dr. Kreutz was still putting money away in the strongbox he kept in a locked filing cabinet in the hallway, and she saw many a five- and ten- and even twenty-pound note going on top of the thick wads that were already in the box.

 

Sometimes the clients left traces of themselves behind, a forgotten glove or a scarf, or even just a hint of expensive perfume. Oh, how she longed to meet one of them.

 

And then one day when she came out of Mr. Tubridy's cabin she was in time to see a client leaving, and before she knew what she was doing she was following her. The client was a slimly built, dark-haired woman in her forties, expensively dressed in a midnight-blue costume with a fitted jacket and calf-length pencil skirt; she had a fox fur round her shoulders and wore a little black hat with a half veil. She walked rapidly in the direction of Leeson Street, her high heels tap-tapping along the pavement. There was something about the way she hurried along, with her head down, that made it seem as if she was nervous of being spotted by someone. Her car, a big shiny black Rover, was parked by the canal. The day was bright, with sharp sunlight glinting on the water and swoops of wind shaking the trees along the towpaths. The woman opened the car door but did not get in, and instead took a fur coat from the back seat and put it on and rewound the fox fur around her throat and locked the car
again and turned and set off walking towards Baggot Street. Deirdre continued to follow her.

 

The woman stopped at Parson's bookshop at Baggot Street Bridge and went inside. Deirdre stood at the window, pretending to look at the books on display there. Inside, through the confusingly reflecting glass, dimly, she saw the woman examining the stacks of books set out on tables, but it was obvious that she, too, was only pretending. Plainly she was nervous, and kept glancing towards the door. Then a man approached over the bridge from the direction of Baggot Street, a tall, slim man in a camel-hair overcoat with a belt loosely knotted. He was good-looking, though his eyes were set a little too close together and his hooked nose was too big. His hair was long and of a silvery shade that she had never seen before, in man or woman, though it was not dyed, she was sure of that. He stopped at the door of the bookshop and, having glanced carefully over one shoulder and then the other, slipped inside. Somehow she knew what was going to happen. She saw the woman registering his entrance but delaying for a moment before acknowledging him, and when she did she put on a show of being oh-so-surprised to see him there. Smiling down at her, he leaned sideways easily with a hip against the table of books where she was standing and undid the knotted belt of his overcoat. It was that gesture, the careless flick of his hand and the belt loosening and the coat falling open, that somehow told Deirdre just what the situation was, and she turned quickly and walked away.

 

There was a little green sports car parked outside a newsagent's in Baggot Street, and when she spotted it she knew, she just knew that it belonged to the silver-haired man.

 

What she had seen in the shop, the two of them there together and the woman trying to keep up the pretense of being surprised, gave her a shaky, slightly sick feeling. But why? It was only a man and a woman meeting by arrangement, after all. All the same, the woman was a good bit older than the man, and from the nervous way she put on a show of being surprised to see him it was obvious that they were not married—not married to each other, that is. But that was not
what had sickened her. What was sickening was the connection with Dr. Kreutz. She knew she was being silly. A woman who had been to see the Doctor had gone from there to meet her boyfriend, that was all. It did not mean the Doctor was involved in whatever was going on between those two—she had no reason whatever to think he even knew about them meeting up the way they did. And yet somehow a taint had crept into the fantasy she had worked up around the figure of Dr. Kreutz, a taint of reality: commonplace, underhand, soiled reality.

 

That was the first time it occurred to her to wonder what exactly "spiritual healing" might be. Up to then it had not mattered; suddenly now it did. She had assumed, when she had speculated about it, which was seldom, that these women brought him their troubles—a marriage on the rocks, problem children, the change of life, nerves—and that he talked to them much as he talked to her, about how they should try to put aside worldly things and concentrate on the spirit, which was the way to God and God's peace, as he was forever declaring in his soft, unsmiling, but amused and kindly way. Rich women had time on their hands and the money to find the means of making it pass. She was sure there was nothing wrong with most of them, that they were just indulging themselves by paying for an hour or two a week in the care of this beautiful, tranquil, exotic man. And thinking this, she realized that she was, of course, jealous. She pictured them together, Dr. Kreutz and the woman in the blue suit, she kneeling on a cushion on the floor, barefoot, with her eyes closed and her head back, and he standing behind her, caressing her temples, the warm pads of his fingertips barely touching the skin and yet making it tingle, as her own skin had tingled on the couple of occasions when he had massaged her like that, speaking to her in his purring voice about the wisdom of the ancient Sufi masters, who a thousand years ago, so he said, had written of things that the world was only now discovering and thinking it was for the first time.

 

But why had her jealousy been stirred by seeing the woman with the silver-haired man? It should have been the opposite; she should
have been glad to know that the woman was in love with someone else and not with the Doctor. It was confusing.

 

She wished she had someone to talk to about all this. She could not mention any of it to Billy—she could just imagine what Billy would say. She had not told him about Dr. Kreutz. He would not understand, and besides, it was her secret.

12

 

 

LESLIE WHITE HAD GIVEN PHOEBE A PHONE NUMBER WHERE SHE could contact him, which he hoped—
sincerely
, as he said—that she would do, soon. And, to her surprise, she did. She knew she could expect nothing from him but trouble. But perhaps trouble was precisely what she wanted. When he answered the phone and she said her name he seemed not at all surprised. She supposed it had never crossed his mind that she would not call, that any girl would not call him, the silver-haired Leslie White. He was staying in temporary digs, he told her, "due to a contretemps on the domestic front." He said that his wife had thrown him out of the house, for reasons that he did not specify. She liked his frankness. She supposed it was due to the fact of his being English. No Irishman, she knew, would admit so lightly, so gaily, almost, to having been kicked out of the family home by his wife. When she said this to him he pretended to be surprised and fascinated, as if it were some piece of anthropological lore she had imparted. It was one of the tricks he had, to put on a show of astonished interest at the most mundane of observations—"Gosh, that's amazing!"—and even though she knew it was a trick, still it pleased her. She was taken by his boyishness, or his pretense of it. He had a repertoire of exclamations—
gosh, crikey, crumbs
—that she
supposed he had got from Billy Bunter books or the like, for these words and his way of tossing them about so casually were the stuff of public-school life, and Leslie White, she felt sure, had never seen the inside, or possibly even the outside, of such an institution.

 

He took her for tea to the Grafton Café, above the cinema. They had a table by the window looking down on Grafton Street. It was Saturday and the street was busy with shoppers. After the thunderstorms of the previous day the fine weather had returned, and below them the sun was making inky shadows from the awnings above the shops. Leslie wore a light-brown corduroy suit today, and suede shoes, and sported a silver kerchief in his top pocket to match his silver cravat and, of course, his silver hair. "How he admires himself," she thought with faint amusement, "it's almost lovable, his self-love." She was surprised to be here with him. He was, she very well knew, what the nuns at her convent school used to warn against, a "bad companion," and his company was certainly an "occasion of sin." The truth was, she was not sure why she had called him in the first place. She was not in the habit of phoning up men she barely knew; but then, she was not in the habit of phoning men, known or not, and men did not phone her, at least not the kind of man that Leslie White so obviously was.

 

She smoked a cigarette and gazed into the street. She could feel him studying her. He asked: "Do you always wear black?"

 

"I don't know. Do I? It's required at the shop, and I suppose I've got into the habit."

 

He laughed. "'Habit' is about right."

 

She raised an eyebrow. "You think I look like a nun?"

 

"I didn't say that, did I?"

 

"I haven't much interest in clothes, I'm afraid."

 

He smiled to himself as at a private joke.

 

"I hope you don't mind my saying," he said, "but you don't really look or sound like a shopgirl, either."

 

"Oh? What do I look and sound like?"

 

"Hmm. Let me think." He put his head on one side and narrowed
his eyes and considered her from brow to foot. She suffered his scrutiny with unruffled calm. She was wearing a black skirt and a black sweater and cardigan; her only adornment was a loop of pearls which had been her mother's, that is, Sarah's. She had no doubt that Leslie White would be interested to know—"Golly, I should say so!"—that the pearls were genuine, and quite valuable. He was still looking her up and down and rubbing a hand judiciously back and forth on the side of his chin. "I would guess you were," he said, "a well-brought-up and very proper young lady."