Free Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) by Benjamin Black Page B

earlobes.” She pinched his right nipple. “Always the sweet talker, pretending to appreciate things no one else would bother to notice. Earlobes, indeed—it wasn’t earlobes you were after.”
    Whose opening had it been? He had no memory of it—he was not even sure he had ever been in the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery. Maybe she too was thinking of someone else. He felt a sudden sweet pang for the lost past, all those possibilities now gone, never to be offered again. He kneaded the plump flesh of her flank just below her ribs and she twisted away from him and laughed and told him to stop, that he knew how ticklish she was. He released her and stood up, then bent to find his jacket on the floor and the cigarettes in the pocket. Lighting one, he walked to the big picture window and stood there naked, smoking, squinting out at the sunlight.
    “Let me guess why you’re here,” she said.
    He glanced over his shoulder. She was lolling on her back on the chaise, the shawl covering her lap. He saw how her breasts, slacker than he remembered them, were slewed sideways, the nipples as if looking at him, endearingly cock-eyed. She was a handsome woman still, and he was sad to see the signs of how she was aging.
    “Guess away,” he said. “Why am I here?”
    “Because of what’s-his-name, your partner, Delahaye.”
    “Oh. You heard.”
    She laughed. “It was all over the papers!” She turned over onto her stomach, and the shawl slithered to the floor. She wriggled her behind. “What happened? The papers said it was an accident. Was it?”
    He turned back to the window and the overgrown garden. Those tangled roses looked sinister, he thought, like briars in a fairy tale. “You have convolvulus,” he said.
    “I have what ?”
    “Bindweed. That creeper, with the white flower. It’ll strangle everything if you don’t get it dug out.”
    “Jack Clancy, nurseryman,” she said, and laughed again, throatily. She rose and came and stood beside him, picking up the shawl and hitching it round her waist for a makeshift skirt. He caught her familiar smell: perfume, sweat, warmed flesh. She took the cigarette from his fingers, drew on it, and gave it back, blowing smoke in the direction of the ceiling. “Do you not want to talk about it?” she said.
    “Talk about what?” He was still eyeing the convolvulus.
    “All right, sulk.” She went to the pile of clothes and pulled on her knickers, her shirt, the tight black trousers. “He killed himself, didn’t he,” she said.
    “How do you know?”
    “When it’s a suicide, the papers have a certain way of reporting it. You can always tell. What was it? Was he sick?”
    “Not that I know of.”
    “Business in trouble?”
    “On the contrary. Business”—he gave a brief laugh—“is booming.”
    She stood a moment studying his back; he still had a nice bum, she thought, though it was scrawnier now than she remembered. “You don’t seem exactly heartbroken,” she said.
    He turned. “Don’t I?”
    She went on looking at him, slowly arranging the shawl about her shoulders and pinning it up again at one corner. “You know why he did it, don’t you,” she said; it was not a question. “You know, but you’re not saying.” She came to him and touched a fingertip to his face. He looked back at her blankly, his eyes gone dead. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you,” she said softly. “Aren’t you? You can tell me, you know. I’m the wild horses’ despair, I am.”
    He turned from her to the garden again. “You should get that convolvulus seen to,” he said. “It’s a killer, if you let it get established.”
    She went up the steps, and he heard her in the kitchen up there, opening drawers and cupboard doors. He got dressed; he felt as if he were putting on not his clothes but his troubles, the ones that had fallen from him earlier when Bella had wound her arms round him and whispered hotly in his ear. How long was it since he had been here last? Two years? Three?