The Silver Swan by Benjamin Black Page B

months and months and months, and surely by now had earned one drink, one miserable little drink?
     
In Harcourt Street he rang the bell of Phoebe's flat and heard faintly its electric buzzing from high above him on the fourth floor. He waited, looking down the broad sweep of the street to the corner of the Green and the glimpse afforded there of crowding, dejected leafage. A hot breeze blew against his face, bearing a dusty mix of smells, the exhausted breath of summer. He remembered the trams in the old days trundling along here, clanging and sparking. He had lived in this city for most of his life and yet felt a stranger still.
     
Phoebe did not try to hide her surprise; it was a part of the unspoken understanding between them, the father-daughter contract—treacherous father, injured daughter—that he would not call on her unannounced. Her hair was held back with a band, and she was wearing black velvet pointed-toed slippers and a peignoir of watered silk with an elaborate design of dragons and birds that had once belonged, he realized, to Sarah. "I was about to take a bath," she said. "Everything feels so filthy in this weather." Side by side they plodded up the long flights of stairs. The house was shabby and dim and in the stairwell there hung the same grayish smell as in the house that he lived in, on Mount Street. He imagined other, similar houses all over the city, each one a warren of vast, high-ceilinged rooms turned into flats and bed-sitters for the likes of him and his daughter, the homeless ones, the chronically unhoused.
     
Once inside the door of the flat she asked him for a shilling for the gas meter. "Lucky you came," she said. "Hot and horrible as it is, I don't fancy a cold bath."
     
She made tea and brought it into the living room. They sat, with their cups on their knees, facing each other on the bench seat under the great sash window, the lower half of which was opened fully onto the stillness of the evening. The workers in the offices roundabout had all gone home by now and the street below was empty save for theodd motorcar or a green double-decker bus, braying and smoking and spilling its straggle of passengers onto the pavement. Behind them the room stood in dumb stillness; the light from the window reflected in the mirror of a sideboard at the back wall seemed a huge, arrested exclamation. "I'm keeping you from your bath," Quirke said. She continued gazing into the street as if she had not heard. The old-gold light falling from above lit the angle of her jaw and he caught his dead wife's very image.
     
"A detective came to see me," he said. A faint frown tightened the pale triangle between her eyebrows but still she did not look at him. "He was asking about Deirdre Hunt—or Laura Swan, whichever."
     
"Why?"
     
"Why?"
     
"I mean, why was he asking you ?"
     
"I did a postmortem on her."
     
"That's right. You said."
     
She picked at a thread in the rough covering of the window seat. In her silk gown she had the look of one of the fragile figures in a faded oriental print. He wondered if she would be considered pretty. He could not judge. She was his daughter.
     
"Tell me," he said, "how well did you know this woman?"
     
"I told you already—I bought some stuff from her, hand lotion, that sort of thing."
     
"And the fellow who was in business with her, Leslie White—did you know him?"
     
"I told you that, too. He gave me his card one day. I have it somewhere."
     
He studied her. So it was true: she had been with Leslie White before he saw the two of them in Duke Lane going their separate ways. He turned his head and looked about the room. She had impressed herself hardly at all on the place. The few oversized pieces of furniture had probably been there for a century or more, relics of an oppressively solid, commodious world that was long gone. The mantelpiece bore a few knickknacks—a Meissen ballerina, a brass piggy bank, twominiature china dogs facing each other from either end—and