A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black Page A

otherwise.”
    “Only children?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “ I feel different, always will. I suppose you’ll think that’s vanity, but it’s not. Can I have a cigarette?”
    He rose quickly from the chair, reaching into his pocket for the packet of Gold Flake. “I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly, his dark brow turning darker. “I didn’t think you smoked.”
    “I don’t. I used to, but I’ve given up.”
    She took a cigarette, and he snapped open his lighter and she leaned forward to the flame and touched a fingertip briefly to the back of his hand for balance. Behind the smoke he caught a faint breath of her perfume. She looked up at him, her eyelashes moving.
    He was suddenly aware of the night all around them, vast and still. “I should go soon,” he said.
    She leaned back, and folded one arm and cupped her palm under the elbow of the other. She picked a fleck of tobacco from her lower lip. He backed away, turned, walked to the armchair by the fireplace, and sat. “If I didn’t know better,” she said, in almost a conversational tone, “I’d say you were a little frightened of me.”
    He gazed at her owlishly, then suddenly laughed. “Well, of course I am,” he said. “What man isn’t frightened when a girl gets him into her room?”
    “Isn’t it supposed to be the other way about?”
    “Of course,” he said, “but it never is, really, as you know. We’re the weaker sex, after all.”
    “Yes,” she said, pleased, “you are. Aren’t you.”
    And so they sat for a long moment fairly beaming at each other, neither of them knowing what exactly had happened between them just now, but certain that something had.

5
     
    What the fates arranged, or what the fates in the form of Françoise d’Aubigny herself arranged, was, of all things, a party. She did not call it that: on the little gilt-edged invitation card it said Memorial Drinks, which to Quirke’s ear had an almost comical ring. The event was to be at five in the afternoon at Jewell’s—now Françoise d’Aubigny’s—town house at the top of St. Stephen’s Green. It was a very grand house, with a big graveled Japanese garden at the back, and here the guests were gathered. No one had known quite what to wear to such a bizarre occasion. The men were properly sober-suited, but the women had been forced to improvise, and there was a great deal of black silk on show, and many black feathers in night-blue toques, and one or two of the more mature ladies wore elbow-length black cotton gloves. Waiters in frock coats and white ties moved among the crowd bearing aloft silver trays of champagne in crystal flutes; a trestle table covered with a blindingly white tablecloth offered canapés and bowls of olives and pickled onions and, at its center, a mighty salmon, succulently, indecently pink, arranged on a nickel salver and dotted all over with dabs of mayonnaise and a glistening beady stuff that only a handful among the company were able to identify as best Beluga caviar.
    “C’est très jolie, n’est-ce pas,” Françoise d’Aubigny said behind him, and Quirke turned quickly, almost spilling his champagne.
    “Yes,” he said, “very jolly—very elegant, I mean.”
    She had on a cocktail dress of metallic-blue satin and wore no adornment of any kind, save a tiny diamond-encrusted watch on her left wrist. She touched the rim of her glass to his, making the faintest chime. “Thank you for coming,” she said quietly. Quirke made a polite response that came out as a sort of gurgle. He had spent so many days remembering her, imagining her, and now the sudden reality of her presence was overwhelming.
    She turned her head to scan the murmurous crowd. “Do you think I have shocked them, again?” she asked.
    “Well, they haven’t stayed away,” Quirke said. “The Irish love a wake, you know.”
    “A wake? Yes, of course, I suppose that is what they think this is.”
    “And isn’t it?”
    She was still looking about, with a faint