Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) Read Online Free PDF Page A

open doorway and lighting up the lazy swirls of cigarette smoke in the dusky air. Being here was not being at Ashgrove, a pleasure in itself. And then there was Sadie, and the possibilities she might represent.
    The sailing club fellow’s name was Grogan, a solicitor from Cork and, as Jack now belatedly remembered, a terrible bore. They had sailed together in the Slievemore regatta; Grogan in his Mermaid had taken the Commodore’s Cup this year. He was saying something now about a boat with two men in it having been found adrift off Slievemore Bay—there had been a report about it on the wireless, on the six o’clock news. Jack was watching Sadie, admiring the way her frock tightened over her bust when she drew the handle of the beer tap back and down in a slow, effortful arc. Yes, he would definitely suggest a drink next time she was in Dublin. What had he to lose?
    “One chap dead, it seems,” Grogan said. “Sounds a funny business.”
    *   *   *
     
    Sylvia Clancy steered the big car onto the causeway below the village of Rosscarbery. She always liked to drive back from Cork along the coast road. Today, however, she had no eye for the scenery, for she was worried. This was not unusual. Being worried was Sylvia’s accustomed state of mind. How could it be otherwise? She was married to Jack Clancy and Davy Clancy was her son. Today, however, her specific concern was Mona Delahaye’s party, to be held on the following Saturday night. Mona was what could be described as a party person. Three years ago she had thrown—surely the right word—the first Ashgrove Bash, as she called it, and since then it had become an annual event and the talk of the county, if not of half the country.
    Most people who gave parties, Sylvia supposed, gave them in the hope that their guests would enjoy themselves and go home happy. Evidently Mona’s intention was the opposite of this. She seemed to wish that everyone should have a good time, only she had a peculiar notion of what having a good time should involve. She did not want people standing about with drinks in their hands, chitchatting: arguments, insults, challenges, fights, even fistfights, these were the kinds of things Mona wished her parties to inspire. And if matters were not going her way—that is, if they were going peaceably and enjoyably—she was fully prepared to step in and set them awry. Mona had a genius for provocation. She stirred things up without seeming to, bestowing a smile here, a soft word there, inquiring, informing, advising. And as she progressed through the room there would spring up in her wake little conflagrations that were her doing but that yet appeared entirely unconnected with her. Then, reaching the far end of the room, she would turn and survey her handiwork with pleasure, her eyes narrowed and her thin mouth upturned at one corner.
    Yet in her heart Sylvia felt sympathy for Mona. Mona was a child, really, with all a child’s avidity and incurable mischievousness. Whatever was going on, Mona had to have it, and if she could not have it she would spoil it for others. It was simply her way. Sylvia suspected that Mona, like her, felt secretly that she had strayed into the wrong family. The Delahayes were a formidable clan, as were the Clancys in their different way, and to have married into them was to be devoured, or as good as. Could poor Mona be blamed for asserting herself in the only way she knew how? Mischief-making was her declaration of independence, which was why she and her father-in-law, old Samuel Delahaye, were fond of each other, if fond was a word that could be fitted to either of these willful, reckless, and malicious creatures.
    Sylvia was driving the Delahayes’ Mercedes—Jack was off at the races in their own old Humber—feeling nervous and at the same time faintly thrilled, for the big car frightened her, with its brutishly square front and that emblem on the bonnet that looked to her like the sight of a gun. Yet she