Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (12 page)

Jack knew that Victor had never understood him, had taken him for granted. Victor treated him as he treated his twin sons, with a kind of easy, tolerant contempt. At board meetings Jack somehow always found himself at the far end of the table, with ten feet of gleaming mahogany between him and Victor up at the top, sitting in what used to be his father’s chair, directing the order of business with a lordly ease. Occasionally, for the look of the thing, Victor would ask for Jack’s opinion, and while Jack spoke he would sit back, with an index finger to his cheek, suppressing a smirk, or so it seemed to Jack, while the rest of the board members drummed their fingers and waited impatiently for him to finish. Victor made little jokes at Jack’s expense, delivered little digs. “Oh,” he would drawl, when some trivial topic was mentioned, “that would be Jack’s territory, not mine—isn’t that right, Jack?” And Jack would have to smile and squirm and take the mockery, as if he were an office boy brought in to be consulted on something too vulgar for Victor Delahaye to know anything about.

He looked up at the frontage of the house, at the glowing, buttery tiles, the rippled windowpanes, the tastefully painted sign over the door. He would never again cross the threshold here, all at once he knew it, and he turned aside quickly and walked away.

Jack wished he could forget his last meeting with Victor, but it kept returning to his mind, each time as vivid as if it were taking place all over again. Victor had called him into the boardroom. When Jack entered, Victor was standing at the window with his back turned, looking out at the brick chimneys of the distillery. Fury, accusations, recriminations—all that Jack could have coped with. But Victor had not shouted or threatened. He had seemed more tired than angry. His shoulders were sloped and his back looked crooked somehow, like Sylvia’s, as if he were in pain, like her. “My father spoke to me,” he said. Those were his words,
My father spoke to me
. It had sounded to Jack like something out of the Bible.
Depart from me, ye cursed …

Had he caused Victor to do what he had done? Would Victor have killed himself because he had learned his partner had been plotting to take control of the business? Would he? If so, it had been Victor’s ultimate dismissal of him, his final gesture of disdain for Jack and his secret plans. And now it was all gone. All the months of scheming, of planning, of putting the pieces into place, of hiding and watching, of waiting, of making himself wait—all gone. The twins, that pair of wastrels, would inherit the lot—them, and Victor’s bitch of a wife. They would have it, and he would have nothing—Maverley would make sure of that.

He turned into Smithfield. A rag-and-bone man on his cart went past, his nag’s hoofs clomping and the iron bands on the cartwheels harshing against the cobbles.

What now, Jack?
he asked himself.
What now?

He went out to the river and hailed a passing taxi. The driver wore a cap and did not try to make conversation, sitting in front of him sunk in his seat, his shoulders up and his big red ears sticking out. What would it be like, Jack wondered, to be him, rattling around all day in this old motor, picking up strangers and never saying a word to them? It might not be bad at all. It would require so little, just to exist. In the past Jack had rarely thought about other people’s lives. Now he seemed to be on the outside of his own life, suddenly; one minute he had been safely indoors, in the thick of things, the next he had been seized on roughly and hustled out and dumped on the pavement, like a character in a cartoon, with his shirt collar standing up and stars flying in a circle round his head.

Why
had Victor done it?
Why?
Was it really his fault, Jack thought, was he really to blame?

He told the driver to stop at Kenilworth Road and got out and set off walking towards the square. It was a habit he had fallen into; even when he drove himself he would stop short and park and go the rest of the way to the nursing home on foot. By that means he got an extra few minutes’ delay, an interval in which something might happen, in which some accident might occur, some sudden summons be delivered, so that he could turn back and cancel that day’s visit. Ridiculous, of course; nothing ever happened, and he would have to go on, at an increasingly leaden-footed pace, until despite everything he arrived at the front door and the four granite steps leading up, which might have been the steps to the gallows.

The front hall as always smelled of stewed tea and soiled mattresses. His father’s room—or cell, as Jack thought of it—was on the first floor. Up here the spacious Georgian rooms had been divided by means of partition walls into smaller units that were narrow and cramped but had absurdly lofty ceilings with cut-off plaster-cast borders at an angle to each other on two sides. There was a bed, a chair, a bedside locker. A copper beech tree outside loomed in the high sash window, darkening the room within and giving it an underwater look. Jack’s father inhabited this cisternlike space with the indolent furtiveness of an elongated, big-eyed, emaciated carp. Over time he had taken on protective coloring, so that always when Jack entered the room it took him a moment to make out the old man’s figure against the background of drab wallpaper and the brown blanket on the bed and the rusty light in the window.

“Hello, Dad,” he said, trying to appear cheerful but sounding, as always, alarmed and querulous.

His father, standing by the window, peered upwards, frowning, and put his head to one side, as if he had heard his son’s voice as a faint cry or call coming from a long way off. Jack sighed. What added to the torment of these visits was the eerie feeling he had that there was no one else here, that he was alone and talking to himself. His father seemed to feel the same thing, that he was alone yet being talked to, somehow. And so they would blunder through a painful half hour, the son shouting himself hoarse in an effort to penetrate the fog of his father’s senility, while his father grew increasingly agitated, thinking probably that spirit voices were speaking to him loudly but unintelligibly out of the ether.

As a young man Philip Clancy had been tall and thin and now he was stooped and gaunt. He had a small head with a domed forehead and a curiously pitted skull on which a few last stray hairs sprouted like strands of cobweb. His nose was huge and hooked, a primitive axe head, and his mouth, since he had given up wearing his dentures, was thin-lipped and sunken. The Delahayes had treated him negligently all his working life, and now that he was worn out there was not one of them who would come to visit him, here where he was held in captivity, vague and lost to himself and the world.

Jack walked to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out. Why would they not cut down that bloody tree, or prune it back, at least, and let in a bit of light? He had asked them often enough to do something about it and they had promised they would, but of course they never had. The fellow who ran the place was an oily type, ferret-eyed behind a fawning manner, while his washed-out wife had the dazed look of someone trying in vain to understand how she had ended up like this, running a home for the old and the sick and the mad.

Jack’s father was watching him with a wary surmise, running his eye all over him as if in search of a clue as to his identity. Somewhere in the house an electric alarm bell was ringing, an insistent buzzing that seemed to loop on itself slowly, over and over.

“I’m in trouble, Dad,” Jack said, still gazing out of the window. “I tried to take over the business and I failed. Or I was beaten. Suicide you can’t win against.” He paused, shaking his head slowly from side to side in bitter and angry regret. “I did it partly for you, you know,” he said. “To get back at them for the way they used you, all those years.” He stopped again. Was it true? It sounded fake, yet he so much wanted it to be true. He wanted to believe that there was, if not a nobler, then a higher motive for what he had done, what he had tried to do. He did not care to think it had all been for himself, to satisfy his own resentment and jealousy.

His father, standing there peering at him, made a sound, a sort of questioning click at the back of his throat. What went on in his head, Jack wondered, what shards and tail ends of thought were floating about in there, the splintered wreckage of a life? “Ah, Dad,” Jack said, feeling suddenly worn out. Something was happening in his throat, his sinuses, behind his eyes. He put a hand to his face, and all at once the tears came, and he opened his mouth and released a sound that was half a sob and half a wail. Still covering his eyes, he reached out his other hand blindly before him and, finding his father’s cold and bony arm, held on to it, and wept.

6

The night was too hot for sleeping but they would probably not have slept anyway. Quirke sat on the side of the bed, smoking a cigarette. He was naked, yet still he was sweating. It was strange, being here again in the little house in Portobello, in this low-ceilinged bedroom with the narrow bed and the Fragonard reproduction on the wall and that little square window looking out onto the canal.

The hour was past midnight but there was still a faint glow in the sky above the rooftops. He did not like this time of year, with its slow lethargic days and eerily short nights. In summer he always felt slightly unwell, with headaches and pains in his joints and a constant faint sensation of nausea. He thought he must have an allergy, that there must be some kind of pollen or dust in the air that his system could not cope with. He should have a test. He closed his eyes briefly. There were many things he should do.

“I suppose you’ll be off now,” Isabel Galloway said, “having got what you came for.”

She was sitting up in the bed, propped against pillows, wrapped in the silk teagown he remembered, with red and yellow flowers printed on it. She was smoking too, with an ashtray in her lap. Although his back was turned to her, he could feel her angry eye fixed on him.

“Do you want me to go?” he asked.

“Oho no,” she said, with a bitter laugh, “don’t try that old trick—I’m not going to make it easy for you.”

He was squinting through the window out into the undark night. The streetlamp at the corner was casting a sulfurous sheen on the still surface of the canal. He thought of being out there, even saw himself, walking along the towpath in the calm mild air, moving between pools of lamplight, his long shadow shortening at his back and rising up swiftly and then the next moment falling out in front of him. To be alone, to be alone.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yes, of course you are.” Isabel spoke behind him, in a tone of angry sarcasm. “You’re always sorry, aren’t you.”

“I shouldn’t have come here.”

“No, you shouldn’t. And will you please turn around? I want to make sure you’re not smirking.” He half turned towards her, showing his face to her, his expression of weary melancholy. Their lovemaking had felt to him more like a surgical procedure. Isabel had thrust herself angrily against him, all elbows, ribs, and bared teeth. Now she sat there furious in her painted gown like an Oriental empress about to order his beheading. “You hurt me, Quirke,” she said, with a tremor in her voice that she could not suppress. “You broke my heart. I tried to kill myself over you.” She shook her head in rueful wonder. “What a fool.”

He tapped his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. “I should have telephoned,” he said. “I should have kept in contact. That was unforgivable.”

Her eyes blazed, glittering with unshed angry tears. “But of course you’re asking to be forgiven, aren’t you.”

He looked down. Somewhere nearby a church bell tolled once, marking the half hour. The chime hung for a second or two in the upper air, a trembling pearl of sound. “I thought,” he said, speaking very slowly, “I thought we might try again, you and I.”

Isabel stared at him steadily for a long moment, then flung herself from the bed and swept out of the room, her bare feet slapping on the polished wood floor. The bathroom door down the corridor slammed shut. He listened to the faint distant tinkle of her peeing. He put out a hand and felt the warm spot in the bed where she had sat. He saw clearly, like a forking path, the two possibilities that lay before him: either stay or get up now and hurry into his clothes and leave before she returned. He did not move.

They went downstairs, Quirke barefoot and in shirt and trousers. He sat on the sofa in the living room while she fetched glasses and a bottle from the kitchen. “I only have gin,” she said, holding up the bottle. She smiled wryly. “I am an actress, after all. And there’s no ice, as usual. The fridge is still not working.” This was how it had been the first night he had come here, the warm gin and the flat tonic in this airless, cramped little room.

Isabel sat down sideways to face him at the opposite end of the sofa. “Well,” she said, putting on a brisk and brittle tone, “shall we make small talk? You go first.”

He smiled, shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you. Nothing notable ever happens to me.”

“Aren’t you at your sleuthing? You always enjoy that—murder and mayhem, all of it happening to other people.”

He had left his cigarettes upstairs. Isabel pointed to a silver box on the mantelpiece, one that he remembered, and he stood up and fetched it and offered her a cigarette and took one himself. Passing Cloud—Phoebe used to smoke them; did she still? He did not know. He thought perhaps she had given up. He settled himself on the sofa again. The warm gin tasted like perfume, cloying and slightly viscous. “Ever come across Victor Delahaye?” he asked.

She frowned, and shook her head. “No. Should I?”

“He died. It was in the papers. He—” He stopped.

“He what?” Isabel asked.

“Killed himself.”

“Did he, now.” She watched him narrowly, with amusement. “I do believe you’re blushing, Quirke.”

“Sorry.”

“You don’t need to be.” Her smile was as bright as steel. “I’ve got used to thinking of myself as a failed suicide, so there’s no reason to be embarrassed and avoid the subject. Tell me about this man—what did you say his name was?”