Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) (16 page)

Samuel Delahaye sat slumped in the wheelchair with his chin sunk on his breast, glowering out into the garden. Mona went and stood beside him. He was the only one of them she had any time for. She had tried to get him to like her, and believed she had been successful, though of course he would never let on. He was such a grouch, shouting at everyone, insulting everyone. Often, when he was in one of his rages, she had an awful urge to laugh, but knew that if she did he would probably come rearing up out of that chair and slap her face. It would be interesting, to be hit like that. Old Sam was still handsome, and rather cruel-looking, like his grandsons only not weak like them; when he smiled, if what he did could be called a smile, he bared his lower teeth, just as Victor used to do.

Suddenly, at the thought of Victor, she felt sad. It was hard to grasp that he was actually gone, that he was in that wooden box, in the ground, already beginning to rot. She shivered. She had liked Victor. He had been handsome too, more handsome than his father, in fact, but in a different way:
softer around the edges,
she thought. Yes, that was it, softer around the edges.

He had known nothing about her, she knew that. She had preferred it that way. Being married to Victor had been like living inside a fine, sound, well-appointed house, a house that was not hers but that gave her shelter and protected her and yet left her free to come and go as she pleased, a little gold key safe in her palm. She recalled his smell, of tobacco and pomade and that special soap he used to wash his hands with—the skin of his hands was sensitive and chapped easily. She tried now to see those hands in her mind, and was slightly shocked to realize that she could not. Had she ever really looked at them? Had she ever paid genuine attention to her husband? These were not questions that troubled her, but it was odd to find herself asking them. She was always careful how she positioned herself in front of things, looking, and being looked at. Sometimes she thought of herself as a separate object, a figure outside herself that she could regard from a distance, appraising, approving, admiring.

Victor had thought she loved him. It would have been unfair to let him think otherwise.

“Look,” her father-in-law said suddenly, dragging himself up in the wheelchair and pointing beyond the window to the garden with a trembling finger. “Robin Redbreast! Aha, the wee warrior.”

*   *   *

It was nearly midnight when he left Bella’ s house, after his second visit. It was not two weeks since Victor had died, but it seemed far longer ago than that. Bella stood in the doorway watching him go. When he was turning the corner at the bottom of the road and glanced behind him she was still there, he could see her figure silhouetted in black against the light from the hall. He stopped, and stood looking back at her, hearing himself breathe. Why was she still there? The night was calm and mild, and the soft feel of the air made him think of summer nights in the past, and of himself walking away from some other girl’s door, smelling the dew on the privet and the salt reek of the sea and hearing the birds far out in the bay calling and crying. He had an urge suddenly to hurry back, before Bella closed the door, and make her take him inside again, and lie down with him and hold him in her arms. He did not want to be out here, alone.

He went on, and turned the corner.

There was a big moon shining above the bay, it seemed to him a huge gold eye watching him askew. He hoped Sylvia would be asleep, but probably she would not be. She knew he was in trouble, and that the trouble was connected with Victor Delahaye’s death. She had not challenged him, of course, had not made even the mildest inquiry. That was his wife’s way, ever careful, ever discreet.

He knew he should have told her what was going on, what he was up to, surely he had owed her that. Instead he had kept it all to himself. It was not that he did not trust her, only how could he have told her, what would he have said—how would he have phrased it?
Well, you see, dear, the thing is, over the past couple of years I’ve been positioning myself to elbow Victor aside and take over the jolly old firm—what do you think of that?
He knew what she would think of it. He knew very well. Would she leave him? She was English, and the English had a funny sense of what was right and proper and what was not. He could say to her it was just business—and what was it except business?—but she would throw that back in his face. Yet what did she expect? Did she think he should be content to spend the rest of his working life with his neck under Victor Delahaye’s boot—no, under the heel of his John Lobb penny loafer with the hand-stitched seams and scalloped tongue?

Victor Delahaye was what Sylvia would have called an ass: stupid, smug, conceited, and lazy. All his life Victor had coasted in the shelter of the business that both their fathers, Samuel Delahaye and his partner, Phil Clancy, had built up through hard work, shrewdness, and unremitting ruthlessness. Had Victor been in sole control, the thing would have done no more than drift and, who knows, might have foundered, if Jack had not been there to keep a firm grip on the tiller.

How many dangers had Jack steered them past? There had been that strike the dockers went on after the war, the strike old Samuel thought he could break and that Jack had been left to fix, by paying off the union bosses and cracking the heads of a few hard chaws who would not be brought on board. And what about the time Clem Morrissy and his brothers had tried to set up that rival chain of garages and once again Jack had been called on to send in the muscle and keep the monopoly safe for Delahaye & Clancy? Always it was Jack who had done the dirty work, while Victor preened and boasted and played the gentleman. And then—

And then. Who would have thought Victor would have it in him to go out that way? Who would have thought it would affect him so disastrously, to discover himself sidelined? Who would have thought. There must have been something else; something else must have driven him to put a bullet through his heart, Jack was convinced of it. But what? If he could find out, maybe all was not lost, maybe something of all he had been working for could be saved.

Should he make one last try? Did he have it in him? He had always been a fighter, unlike Victor, who had everything handed to him on a silver platter. Yes, he would keep on, he would not be done down by that bastard Maverley and Victor’s wastrel sons. That was what would keep him going, the thought of the twins and Maverley using Victor’s death to defeat him. For they would get shot of him entirely if they could—oh, yes, they would. Already Maverley was putting the machinery in place that would grind him up and spit him out on the street. Did he imagine Jack had not seen him, after the funeral, sloping off for a quiet word with that detective, the one with the cow shit still on his boots, and his sidekick in the black suit? Jack could imagine the bookkeeper, with his gray jaw and his brown breath, counting out the insinuations like so many pounds, shillings, and pence, blackening the name of Jack Clancy, accusing him by innuendo and trying to undo by stealth all that he had put in place with such care, such finesse, such inventiveness.

The front was deserted, and yet, as he walked along, it seemed to him somehow that he was not alone. More than once he stopped, and turned, and peered back along the path beside the sea. Was it a shadow that had slipped behind that bush? He stood, his nerves tingling, and strained to see into the gloom, listening past the washing of small waves against the seafront wall. There was nothing to be seen, nothing to be heard.

The grass was silver in the moonlight. He walked on, wanting to hasten his steps yet dreading the thought of reaching home. He pictured himself at the front door, easing the key into the lock and wincing at the crunch it made, and then standing in the shadows in the hallway, taking the measure of the house, trying to guess if Sylvia was asleep or if Davy was in, and feeling, too, the lingering damp warmth in his groin. The guilt that he felt was part of the thrill, always had been, although being thrilled by his guilt made him feel guiltier still. Such a tangle his life had always been. But who was it that had made it tangled? Who was there to blame, but himself?

He came to the house and stopped, and stood with his hands on the coolly clammy top bar of the gate, looking up at his own bedroom window, where a faint light glowed. Sylvia would be awake, propped up in bed, with her spectacles on the end of her nose, reading, or at her sewing. Since Victor’s death she had been sleeping badly—well, who had not? She would know, of course, or guess what he had been up to tonight. She would not know the details—she was not aware of Bella’s existence, he was confident of that—but she would not need to. He sometimes thought she was glad to be rid of him for so much of the time. She had her own life. He was not a prime requirement in it.

He lit a cigarette, turning away in case the match flame might be visible from that far window, and then walked aimlessly on, musing on his wife, of whom, if truth were told, he knew so little. He had loved her, once, this cool pale slender distant woman. He had wanted her because she was so different from the women he had known before he knew her, and whom he continued to know, despite being married. And she had loved him—loved him still, probably. Despite everything.

He passed by the bandstand. It looked eerie, a filigreed iron gazebo standing in the moonlight, silent and brooding.

Stop. Listen. There was definitely someone behind him.

He was suddenly hot with fear, and the skin on the back of his neck crawled. He dared not turn, but then he did turn. Still there was no one to be seen, yet he knew there was someone, the same someone who had started up after him when he left Bella’s house. “Who’s there?” he called out softly, feeling foolish, his voice unsteady. “Who is it? Show yourself!”

Silence, with the sense in it of stifled, jeering laughter. He slipped into the bandstand and stood in the webbed shadows there under the wrought-iron canopy. The concrete floor gave off a mingled smell of piss and fag ends. He thought with desperate yearning of how it would have been here earlier, when the mail boat was getting ready to set out, the passengers hurrying and people shouting farewells, the porters bumping luggage up the gangplank and the ship sounding its grave, portentous note. He could have lost himself in all that bustle, could have slipped away, and been safe.

A woman was approaching along the pavement. He shrank back into the shadows. Why had he come in here? The bandstand offered no protection, it was open on all sides. He turned his head this way and that. The woman’s footsteps were closer now. He seemed to hear his name spoken, very softly, but thought he must have imagined it. He was looking all around, trying to see in all directions. He almost laughed to think of himself, like a wooden doll, his head spinning and his eyes starting in fright. Always, behind everything, there was a part of him that stood back skeptically. Now he told himself he was being ridiculous, that there was no one after him, that all this fear and foreboding was the product of a fevered and guilty mind.

The woman had drawn level with the bandstand. He stepped forward, lifting a hand, ready to speak to her. He knew her! What was she doing here, at this hour? He began to say her name. The blow landed behind his right ear. He felt it distinctly, a dull shock without pain, and thought of a felled tree crashing to the ground. As he pitched forward he saw the moon slide sideways down the sky and disappear in darkness.

8

It turned out the Delahaye twins were at the party. Phoebe and Sinclair met one of them coming down the stairs just after they arrived. He was with his girlfriend—Phoebe recognized her but did not remember her name—and they stopped to talk, although they could hardly hear themselves above the din. The house was on a cobbled back street in the North Strand with an iron railway bridge running over it. It was a funny little tumbledown place, with everything on a miniature scale, the tiny windows, the low front door, the narrow staircase leading up to two cramped bedrooms and a bathroom hardly bigger than a cupboard. Whenever a train went past the entire place wobbled and shook like a jelly out of its mold. Breen, the fellow whose house it was, had been at college with Sinclair, and fitted well with the place, being short and stout, with a shock of black curls and rimless glasses that kept sliding down the glistening, concave bridge of his snub nose.

Neither Phoebe nor Sinclair cared much for parties, and they had come to this one only because they had worried no one else would, since poor Breen was not exactly known as a social magnet. To their surprise they found the house throbbing with people and noise. Breen came bustling to meet them, sweaty and shiny and snuffling with happy laughter. He took the bottle of Bordeaux they had brought and glanced appreciatively at the label and said there was wine open in the kitchen. He gestured with pride at the heaving mass of people around them. “The joint,” he said, “is jumping.” He wore plimsolls and checked tweed trousers hoist at half-mast by a pair of bright red braces and a shirt of emerald green with a floppy collar. He used to profess a desire to be a painter, Sinclair recalled. He worked in the Coombe hospital, delivering babies, “by the yard, like sausages,” as he said.

Now he plunged off, with their bottle of claret under his arm, and the last they saw of him was his tweed-clad, Bunteresque backside disappearing into the crowd. They looked at each other, smiling in dismay. Phoebe took Sinclair’s hand and they set off upstairs, where it might be less crowded, and met the Delahaye twin and his girlfriend coming down. “Don’t bother,” Delahaye said, or yelled, rather, “it’s bedlam up there!”

They went together, the four of them, down the short hall to the back of the house. Phoebe plucked at Sinclair’s sleeve and put her mouth close to his ear.
“Which one of them is it?”
she asked, but Sinclair only lifted his hands helplessly and shook his head.

In the crowded kitchen they found paper cups and sloshed them full of Mooney’s Spanish Burgundy and went on out to the garden, where the soft night air was a sudden balm. The garden was really no more than a walled yard, smelling of drains and dustbins, with a square of weed-choked clay and in one corner a privy with a broken door. There was a crowd of people out here, too, smoking and drinking. A couple were kissing in the shadow of the privy. Beyond the back wall the moon was perched on a distant chimney pot.