HE STAYED ANOTHER HOUR. SHE PREPARED PLATES OF SMOKED SALMON and salad and they ate without speaking, facing each other across the table in the gleaming light and silence of the unreal room. The refrigerator jolted into life and hummed away grumpily under its breath for a while, then abruptly switched itself off again with another, seemingly rancorous, jolt. A bubble of trapped air in a water pipe somewhere made a pinging sound. Their knives and forks rang sharply against their plates, their water glasses made joggling noises when they set them down on the Formica tabletop.
"I'm sorry," Kate White said, "about earlier."
"Earlier?"
"You know what I mean. Guzzling wine and throwing myself about. That's not me, really, or at least I hope it's not. I've been struck a blow and I don't know how to deal with it. I keep trying out other personalities, to see if I can find one that will work better, be more plausible, more persuasive than the one I'm stuck with." She smiled, her somehow bruised-looking, beautiful black eyes glistening in that teary way they did. "No luck, so far."
She rose and collected their plates and cutlery and carried them to the sink.
"Don't imagine," she said, "that I've forgotten the fact that I have no idea who you are or why you're here. I'm not in the habit of letting strange men into the house and treating them to smoked salmon and intimate revelations."
He put down his napkin. "I should be on my way."
"Oh, I didn't mean that, necessarily. I've quite enjoyed having you here. Not much company about, these days. Leslie and I never went in for friends and all that." She smiled again. "He's English. So am I. Did you know?"
"Yes. Your accent…"
"I thought I'd lost it. It's reassuring that I haven't. I wonder why? I mean, why reassuring." She ran the tap and stood pensive, waiting for the water to turn hot. Above the sink a square window gave onto a side garden with stands of African grass. The day was failing, growing shadowed. "Maybe I should go back," Kate said. "My mother had Irish blood, but I think I'm a London girl at heart. Bow Bells and all that. Winkles, skittles, the Pearly King and Queen." She gave a brittle little laugh. She began to wash the dishes, rinsing and stacking them on a plastic rack. He stood up and went to her side. "Is there a tea towel?"
"Oh, let them drain," she said. A pale, greenish radiance from the window touched her face. "Just stand about and look handsome, that will do."
He lit a cigarette. "You have a workshop, have you?" he said. "A design workshop?"
"Yes. I call it a factory-may as well be honest. We cut for the top designers. Irish girls make wonderful seamstresses. It's the training they get from the nuns." She smiled, not looking at him. "And yes, if you're wondering: I'm the breadwinner in the family, or was, when there was still a family. Leslie used to run a hairdressing business, until he ran it into the ground. That's why he went in with little Miss Swansdown. He thought he was her Svengali, but I bet she was the one doing the hypnotizing." She stopped and raised her face to the window again. "I wonder what he'll do now, old Leslie. Too late for him to become a gigolo. He used to be quite decorative, too-different type from you, of course, but dishy all the same, in his languid way. Lately the rot has set in. I suppose that's the main reason he took up with that poor little tart: she was young enough for him to feel flattered."
She went off to the den and came back after a moment with her wine glass and the remains of the wine from earlier. She put the almost empty bottle into the fridge and plunged the glass into the dishwater in the sink and shook it vigorously in the suds.
"We were quite well off, in London," she said. "My father made a lot of money out of the war-" She glanced at him sidelong. "Are you shocked? I think you should be. He was a bit of a crook, more than a bit, in fact-the black market, you know. So naturally he got on with Leslie. Then Leslie and I decided to come over here, much against Father's wishes-he wasn't very hot on the Irish, I'm afraid, despite Mother's Tipperary roots-and after that the Daddy Warbucks fund dried up. Leslie was terribly disappointed and blamed me, of course, though he tried not to show it, bless him. Then I opened the factory and the moolah started rolling in again and all seemed well. Until the Black Swan swam into our lives."
"How did they meet, your husband and Deirdre-Laura Swan?"
She turned her head slowly and gave him a long, smilingly quizzical look. "Are you sure you're not with the police? You have the tone of an interrogator." There was a muffled sound down in the dishwater-tok!-and she looked up quickly and gave a tiny gasp. "Oh, Christ, I think I've cut myself." She lifted her hand out of the suds. There was a deep gash, unnaturally clean and straight, on the underside of her right thumb close to the knuckle. The dilute blood raced with impossible swiftness down her wrist and along her arm. She stared aghast at the wound. Her face was paper-white. "The glass," she said tonelessly. "It broke."
He put a hand under her elbow.
"Come," he said, "come and sit down."
He led her to the table. She walked as in a trance. The blood had reached her elbow and was soaking into the rucked sleeve of her black sweater. She sat. He told her to hold her hand upright and made her grasp the ball of her sliced thumb with her other hand and squeeze hard to reduce the flow of blood.
"Have you a bandage?" he said. She gazed at him in frowning incomprehension. "A bandage," he said. "Or something I can cut up and use for one?"
"I don't know. In the bathroom?"
He took out his handkerchief and tried to rip it but the seam would not give. He asked if there was a scissors. She pointed to a drawer under the countertop by the sink. "There." She gave a brief, faintly hysterical laugh. He found the scissors and cut a strip of cotton and set to binding the cut. As he worked he felt her breath on the backs of his hands and the heat of her face beating softly against his cheek. He tried to keep his hands from shaking, marveling at how quickly, how copiously, the blood insisted on flowing. A dull-crimson stain had appeared already in the improvised bandage. "Will it need to be stitched?" she asked.
"No. It will stop soon." Or so he hoped; he really did not know what to do with living flesh, with freely running blood.
She said: "Do me a favor, will you? Look in my handbag, there are some aspirin." He went into the hall as she directed and took her black handbag from where it hung by its strap on the coat rack behind the front door and brought it to her. "You look," she said. "Don't worry, you won't find anything incriminating."
He rummaged in the bag. The lipstick-face-powder-perfume smell that came up from its recesses reminded him of all the women he had ever known. He found the aspirin bottle, shook out two tablets, and brought a tumbler to the sink and filled it and carried it back to the table. Kate White's good hand trembled as she lifted the glass to her lips. She was still holding her bandaged thumb aloft in a parody of jaunty affirmation. "Will I have to stay like this all day?" she asked, making her voice shake with comic pathos. He said the cut would seal and then the bleeding would stop. She glanced about the room. "Christ," she murmured, with vague inconsequence, "how I hate this house."