[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.She was looking into the camera with a kind of amused lasciviousness, one perfect eyebrow arched.He knew that look: all through those love-drunk Boston months it used to spark in him such extremes of desire for her that his groin would ache and his tongue would throb at the root.And how she would laugh at him, as he writhed before her in his blissful anguish.They had thought they had all the time in the world.When the maid had gone, shutting the door soundlessly behind her, he sat down wearily on the bed, facing the chest of drawers, his hands hanging limply between his knees.The house was silent around him, though his ears were humming even yet from the relentless grinding drone of the aircraft’s engines.Delia’s sardonically tolerant eye calmly took him in, her expression seeming to say, Well, Quirke, what now? He brought out his wallet and took from it another photograph, much smaller than the one of Delia, badly creased and torn along one edge.It was of Phoebe, taken when she too was seventeen.He leaned forward and tucked it into a corner of the silver frame, and then sat back, his hands hanging as before, and gazed for a long time at the images of the two of them, the mother, and her daughter.WHEN HE CAME DOWN HE FOLLOWED THE SOUND OF VOICES TO A vast, oak-floored room that he remembered as Josh Crawford’s library.There were high, glass-fronted bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes that no one had ever opened, and in the middle of the floor a long reading table with a top that sloped on either side, and a huge, antique globe of the world on a wooden stand.In the fireplace that was the height of a man a wood fire was blazing on a raised, black metal grating.Rose Crawford and Phoebe were sitting together on a leather-covered couch.Opposite them, on the other side of the fireplace, Josh Crawford was slumped in his wheelchair.He wore a rich silk dressing gown and a crimson cummerbund, and Oriental slippers embroidered with gold stars; a shawl of Persian blue wool was draped over his shoulders.Quirke looked at the bald, pitted skull, the shape of an inverted pear, to the sides and back of which there clung yet a few lank strands of hair, dyed a pathetic shade of youthful black; at his loosely hanging, raw, pink eyelids; at the gnarled and rope-veined hands fidgeting in his lap, and he recalled the vigorous, sleek, and dangerous man that he had known two decades before, a latter-day buccaneer who had made a rich landfall on this still piratical coast.He saw that what Rose Crawford had said was true: her husband was dying, and rapidly.Only his eyes were what they had always been, shark-blue and piercing and merrily malignant.He lifted them now and looked at Quirke and said: “Well well, if it isn’t the bad penny.”“Hello, Josh.”Quirke came forward to the fire and Josh noted his limp and the bunched dead patch of flesh under his left eye where one of Mr.Punch’s or fat Judy’s steel-tipped toecaps had left its mark.“What happened to you?”“Had a fall,” Quirke said.He was growing weary of that same old pointless lie.“Oh?” Josh grinned on one side of his leathery face.“You should be more careful.”“So everyone tells me.”“So why don’t you take everyone’s advice?”Rose, Quirke could see, was entertained by this little tussle.She had changed into a sheath of scarlet silk and matching scarlet shoes with three-inch heels.She blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling and lifted her glass and waggled it, making the ice cubes chuckle.“Have a drink, Mr.Quirke,” she said, rising from the couch.“Whiskey?” She glanced at Phoebe.“What about you, my dear? Gin and tonic? If, that is”—turning to Quirke—“it’s permitted?”“Why are you asking him?” Phoebe said airily, and put out the tip of her tongue at Quirke.She too had changed, into her formal, blue satin dress.Quirke said to Rose:“Thank you for putting me into Delia’s room.”She looked back from the table where the drinks were, glass and bottle in hand.“Oh, dear,” she murmured vaguely, “was that hers?” She gave a shrug of regret that was patently fake, and then frowned.“There’s no ice, again.” She went to the fireplace and pressed the button of a bell that was set into the wall.“It’s fine,” Quirke said, “I don’t need ice.”She handed him the whiskey and lingered a moment, standing close in front of him.“My goodness, Mr.Quirke,” she murmured so that only he could hear, “when they told me you were big they did not exaggerate.” He smiled back at her smile, and she turned away with an ironic little twitch of her hips and went to the drinks table again and poured a gin for Phoebe, and another bourbon for herself.Josh Crawford from his wheelchair greedily watched her every movement, fiercely smiling.The maid came and Rose requested her brusquely to fetch more ice.It was plain the girl was terrified of her mistress.When she had gone Rose said to Crawford:“Honestly, Josh, these waifs and strays you make me take in.”Crawford only laughed.“Good Catholic girls,” he said.He winced at something happening inside him, then scowled.“This damned fire’s too hot—let’s go into the glasshouse.”Rose’s mouth tightened and she seemed about to protest, but meeting her husband’s look—the scowling jaw, those cold, fish eyes—she put her bourbon aside.“Whatever you say, darling,” she said, making her voice go soft and silky.They progressed, the four of them, along corridors cluttered with expensive, ugly furniture—oak chairs, brass-studded trunks, rough-hewn tables that might have come over on the Mayflower and, Quirke thought, most likely had—Quirke pushing Crawford in his chair and the two women following behind.“Well, Quirke,” Crawford asked, without turning his head, “come to see me die, have you?”“I came with Phoebe,” Quirke said.Crawford nodded.“Sure you did.”They arrived at the Crystal Gallery and Rose pressed a switch and banks of fluorescent lights high above them came on with a series of faint, muffled thumps.Quirke looked up past the lamps at the weight of all that darkness pressing on the huge glass dome that was stippled now with rain
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
