Vengeance: A Novel (Quirke) Read Online Free PDF

had to admit it was exciting to be in control, however fearfully, of such a powerful machine. She had been to Cork to see a new osteopath—they were called bonesetters, down here—whom Mrs. Hartigan had recommended. Mrs. Hartigan swore by him and declared him a miracle worker, but Sylvia had consulted him only out of politeness to the housekeeper, a tiresome woman at the best of times. Sylvia had a bad back. No one had ever been able to discover why she should be suffering such awful, chronic pain, and this new man had been no wiser than the others, though he had talked a lot of mumbo jumbo about frozen joints, and fused discs, and plates—he was very hot on plates, whatever they were supposed to be. A foolish, ignorant man, Sylvia judged. However, the evening was so lovely, with the sun flashing its burning arrows through the trees along the roadside and the wheat and barley in the fields beyond swayed and polished by the breeze, that her heart lifted, despite the motorcar’s slouching impatience and the ache in her lower spine—which, if she was not mistaken, the bonesetter had only made worse.
    Sylvia was English. This seemed increasingly to be, for herself as well as for others, the most significant fact about her. Yet by now she had spent more than half of her life in Ireland. It did not matter. They would be conscious of her Englishness until her dying day. Not that they expressed resentment or showed prejudice towards her. Indeed, they seemed to admire her pluck, to think her a good sport, for being undaunted enough to make her life among them. The response in general to the fact that she was English was a sort of amused fascination; people would look at her in that half-smiling, wondering way and say, “And you’re English, are you?” as if it were something outlandish, like being a racing driver, or a jungle explorer. She was a permanent curiosity. She could not resent this. Probably they perceived in a dim way the inner life she continued to live, which was mild, reasonable, tolerant, and self-mocking—which was, in a word, English, or what she thought of as being English, Englishness as she remembered it.
    Just as Sylvia knew Mona should not have married Victor Delahaye, so she knew that she should not have married Jack Clancy. Oh, she loved Jack, whatever that meant now, after all these years. At first, when they were young, certainly she had adored him. She had never met—no, she had never conceived of the possibility of there being a person such as Jack: charming, dangerous, darkly handsome, and given to a destructive gaiety that she had found immediately irresistible. These things, the charm, the danger, the satanic good looks, that impish, corrosive humor above all, these, she understood now, were the very things that should have warned her off him.
    She was taller than he was, taller by a good two or three inches. He had never seemed to mind this, and only made jokes about it. She, however, was acutely aware of the disparity, not for her own sake but for his, and in their first months together had devised a way of standing beside him with her chin lowered and her left leg drawn back a little way and her right knee surreptitiously flexed, which, if it did not reduce her height in any noticeable way, at least announced that she knew she was the one who must try to right the balance, and suffer the humiliation of not being able to do so. It was not that Jack was too short, but that she was too tall.
    She slowed the car and turned in at the gate of Ashgrove.
    Now her mind, going its own way as always, went back to the awful prospect of Mona’s party. Last year Davy had got into a scuffle with the son of some local grandee and had bitten off part of his ear. She rather thought the other boy had deserved what he had got, for obviously he was a brat, but still, getting into fights and biting people was not the kind of behavior she would have expected of a son of hers. But then, many things in her life had