Mr. Flood's Last Resort(57)

With a clank of the mechanism she lifts her slender wrists and passes her hands across the crystal ball. The two fat chaffinches shake their wings and the cat opens and shuts its eyelids.

“The birds sang once,” Cathal says. “And the cat purred, would you believe?”

With a terrible grinding, Madame Sabine’s head drops forwards and she regards me with a sudden awful scrutiny, her black irises glistening. Her hands make one last pass and drop lifeless back onto the counter. Her head yanks up with a clinking of her veil.

A card is dropped into a recess below and the curtains fitfully draw themselves closed.

I pick up the card.

Madame Sabine says:

If you meet a squinting woman be sure to give her the time of day lest MISFORTUNE befall you.

I frown at it until Cathal takes the card and ushers me through double doors into a large interconnecting room. A garden swing seat, complete with sun canopy, occupies a central position surrounded by saucers of lapped and sour milk. At least four cats sway on worn cushions and tangled sheets.

“You don’t sleep on that, do you?” I say incredulously.

“I do. It’s lovely. Go on, try it.”

“I will not. I bet it’s crawling. When did you last change your sheets?”

“Now, that I can’t remember, Drennan.”

I follow him through the room and out into the conservatory. He has the painting covered.

“I was hoping to see it.”

“At the end you will.”

I sit on the chair and he tells me to move my arm, my head. He looks down at me.

“Your hair is wrong.”

“You told me to wear it up.”

“I did not,” he says. “May I?”

I nod, surprising myself.

He carefully, gently removes the pins. “That’s better. It softens the line of your iron jaw.” He shakes out my hair then tucks a strand behind my ear. “Grand so.”

“Get on with it then, Rembrandt.”

He pats me on the shoulder and goes over to the easel. He uncovers the canvas. “You’ll be wanting a story, no doubt?”

“To pass the time.”

I watch him shambling backwards and forwards in front of the canvas. He has a wayward veer to him today; I wonder if he’s been at the turpentine.

I look at the painting of Mary in her yellow dress and Gabriel walking next to her, with his sketchy scowling face. “Tell me about Gabriel, as a boy.”

He squints at the canvas. “For fuck’s sake.”

After a while he speaks. “He was an all-round sneaky shit. Hiding, slinking, spying. Like a chameleon, changing his spots to stripes to blend in.”

I wonder if he inherited this trick from his father.

Cathal pulls a grim face. “And torturing. He enjoyed maiming things.”

“Aren’t all boys like that? What about yourself and the wasps?”

Cathal looks at me. “They are and they’re not. Gabriel was cruel. And hard. You could shake him until his teeth rattled and he’d admit to nothing. You could belt him all shades of blue and he’d stay silent.”

I frown.

“But Mary thought the sun shone out of his arse.”

“They were close?”

He glances at me. “No. He hated her as much as she loved him. He took every chance to be spiteful to his mother, playing tricks, hiding things or breaking them. Causing accidents about the house.”

“Gabriel caused accidents?”

“I caught him at it a few times and gave him a good clatter. Mary wouldn’t hear anything against him; she always took his word over mine.”

Overhead the sun goes in behind the clouds and the conservatory darkens. It is quiet but for the shuffling sound of Cathal’s slippers and the faint hiss of air sucked through his dentures.

A picture begins to grow in my mind, of Mary, rolling down the stairs.

A young Gabriel stands on the landing, watching her fall; it’s a long way down from top to bottom. She goes headlong. Her face a mask of panic, her legs, arms, the base of her spine hitting the steps, one sickening thump after another. Little round vowel sounds come out of her, along with funny squeaks, like the sounds of a bagpipe being tuned. On the turn of the stair her head hits the balustrade. She is quiet for the last stretch of steps.

Or maybe Gabriel had nothing to do with it.

Mary and Cathal argue at the top of the stairs; she has a newspaper cutting in her hand. He moves towards her, looming large on the landing . . .

I close my eyes and listen to the slap and rasp of brush on canvas.

At the bottom of the staircase Mary Flood has survived the fall, but only just. She lies on her side. Her fingers twitch; her breathing is ragged. A red peony flowers on her temple. She mouths a name. As Mary loses consciousness perhaps she was reunited with her daughter. It is said that the dead always come to the dying, to help them cross into their world.

Perhaps she met Maggie too.

The smell of earth comes up through the floor of the conservatory to vie with the smell of turpentine. The clouds move overhead. Silence falls over us, so that when I finally speak my voice sounds unfamiliar and overloud.

“Tell me about Marguerite.”

Cathal stops painting.

“You had a daughter, Cathal.”

He starts to paint again. I wait.