Christine Falls: A Novele by Benjamin Black Read Free Book Online

forbearance she asked Maggie if the soup might be ready sometime soon—“They’ve eaten all the sandwiches, I’m afraid”—but Maggie, still bent over the steaming pot, only muttered something under her breath. Sarah sighed, and turned on the hot-water tap. Quirke watched her with a tipsily unfocused smile.
    “I wish,” she said quietly, not looking at him, “you wouldn’t take Phoebe to places like McGonagle’s. Mal is right, she’s too young to be in pubs, drinking.”
    Quirke put on a repentant expression. “I shouldn’t have come here either, I suppose,” he said, hanging his head, but looking up at her from a corner of his eye.
    “Not straight from that place, no.”
    “I wanted to see you.”
    She turned a quick glance in Maggie’s direction. “Quirke,” she murmured, “don’t start.”
    The hot water from the tap blurted into the sink, throwing up clouds of steam. Sarah put on an apron and took a soup tureen down from a shelf, shaking her head at the dusty state of it, and washed it with a sponge. Quirke was gratified to see how agitated she was. She carried the tureen to the stove and Maggie poured the soup into it. “Will you serve it, Maggie, please?” Quirke lit another cigarette. The smoke, the smell of the soup, the whiskey fumes all combined to promote in him a feeling of faint, sweet regretfulness. All this might have been his, had he done differently, he thought—this fine house, the band of friends, the family retainer, and this woman in her scarlet gown and elegant high-heeled shoes and those silk stockings with such straight seams. He watched her as she held the door for Maggie to pass through with the soup. Her hair was the color of rain-wet wheat. He had chosen her sister, Delia Crawford; Delia the dark one; Delia who died. Or was it he who had been chosen?
    “Do you know,” he said, “what it was that struck me first about you, all those years ago, in Boston?” He waited, but she made no response, and would not turn to look at him. He whispered it: “Your smell.”
    She gave a short, incredulous laugh. “My what ? My perfume, do you mean?”
    He shook his head vigorously. “No no no. Not perfume—you.”
    “And what did I smell of?”
    “I’ve told you—you. You smelled of you. You still do.”
    Now she did look at him, smiling in a strained, unsteady way, and when she spoke her voice had a feathery quality, as if she were faintly in pain. “Doesn’t everybody smell of themselves?”
    Again he shook his head, gently this time.
    “Not like you,” he said. “Not with that—that intensity.”
    Quickly she turned her attention back to the sink. She knew she was blushing. She could smell him, now, or not smell but feel him, rather, the fleshy heat of him pressing against her like the air of a midsummer day thick with the threat of thunder. “Oh, Quirke,” she said with an effort at gaiety, “you’re just drunk!”
    He swayed a little, and righted himself. “And you’re beautiful,” he said.
    She closed her eyes for a second and seemed to waver. She was holding on to the rim of the sink. Her knuckles were white.
    “You shouldn’t talk to me like this, Quirke,” she said in an undertone. “It isn’t fair.” He had leaned so close to her from where he was standing that it seemed he might put his face into her hair at the side, or kiss her ear or her pale, dry cheek. He swayed again, smiling emptily. Suddenly she turned to face him, her eyes shining with anger, and he reared back from her unsteadily. “This is what you do, isn’t it,” she said, her lips whitening. “You play with people. You tell them how nice they smell, and that they’re beautiful, and all just to see their reaction, just to see if they’ll do something interesting, to relieve your boredom.”
    She began to weep, making no sound, big, shining tears squeezing out between her shut eyelids and her mouth clenched and dragged down at the corners. The door behind her opened and Phoebe