The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black Page B

side of the door that led to the kitchen. The room was lit dimly from above, like a boxing ring, and the off-pink walls lent a rosy, tired tinge to the heavy air.
     
"I saw Mal the other evening," Quirke said.
     
Phoebe did not look at him. "Oh, yes? And how is he, my erstwhile pa?"
     
"Rather sad."
     
"You mean sad sad or in a sad condition?"
     
"Both. That dog was a mistake."
     
"Brandy? I thought he was fond of the poor thing—he said he was."
     
"I don't think your—" He stopped himself; he had been about tosay your father , out of old habit. "—I don't think Mal is a dog person, somehow." He poured an inch of wine into her glass and his own; the bottle would have to last through dinner, that was the rule.
     
"He should remarry," Phoebe said.
     
Quirke glanced at her. To Quirke, Mal seemed to have arrived at the condition that was most natural to him, as if he had been born to be a widower.
     
Quirke said: "And what about you?"
     
"What about me?"
     
"Any romantic prospects on your horizon?"
     
She looked at him with one eyebrow arched, unsmiling, pursing her pale mouth. "Is that supposed to be a joke?"
     
He blenched before her steeliness; she was Delia's daughter, after all, and grew more like her every day. Delia had been the hardest woman he had ever known; Delia had been steel all the way through. It was what he had most loved in her, this exquisite tormented and tormenting woman.
     
"No," he said, "I'm not joking."
     
"I'm wedded to my job," Phoebe said, with mock solemnity. "Don't you realize that?"
     
She had taken a job in a hat shop on Grafton Street, wasting her talents, but Quirke had made no protest, knowing she would just set her jaw, that straight and lovely jaw which was another thing she had of Delia's, and pretend not to hear him.
     
Now she laid her knife and fork side by side across her plate—she had hardly touched her steak—and brought out a slim gold cigarette case and a cylindrical gold lighter, not much fatter than a pencil, that Quirke had not seen before. He felt a pang. She must have bought these things herself, for who else would have done so? He pictured her in the shop, poring over the glass cases, the shop assistant watching her with spiteful sympathy, a girl buying presents for herself. He looked at her wrists, at her sharp cheekbones, at the hollow of her throat: everything about her seemed deliberately thinned out, as ifshe were bent on refining herself steadily until at last there should be nothing of her left but a hair's-breadth outline sketched from a few black and silver lines.
     
"I had a funny experience today," she said. "Well, not funny, not funny at all, in fact, but strange. I can't stop thinking about it." She frowned while she selected a cigarette; Passing Cloud, he noticed, was still her brand. He went on studying her sidelong, covertly. The more he saw of her the more he saw her old, sitting in some shabby hotel dining room like this one, in her black dress, poised, wearied, desiccated, incurably solitary. She lit the cigarette and blew a thin stream of smoke and leaned on her elbows on the table, turning the lighter end over end in her fingers. "I called up someone in a place around the corner from the shop who had ordered something for me from America—Kiehl's rose water, you can't get it here. She wasn't there and so I telephoned her home number—she had given me her number and said to call her anytime I needed something. I'd been waiting for the thing and was surprised it hadn't come and I wondered what had happened to it. Her husband answered—at least, I assume it was her husband. He sounded very odd. He said she wasn't available. That's the way he said it: 'She's not available.' Then he hung up. I thought maybe he was drunk or something. By now I was intrigued, so I called her business partner, the man who runs the place with her. He wasn't at home either, but I got his wife. I said how I had been trying to get in touch with this person, and had