Snow (St. John Strafford, #2)

by John Banville

Strafford had already cast a skeptical eye on the architecture of the place. Arts-and-Crafts fakery, he had thought straight off, with a mental sniff. He wasn’t a snob, not exactly, only he liked things to be left as they were, and not got up as what they could never hope to be.

He was balding on top, with a few strands of sandy hair heavily oiled and brushed fiercely away from the temples and meeting at the back of his skull in a sort of spiked ruffle, like the tip of the tail of an exotic bird.

Marguerite was a person of few words. Her face said more than any words would have expressed. She should have been a mime artist, Strafford often thought, not without a flare of malice, sharp and brief as a match flame.

“A person acting on impulse can be lucky. He’ll strike out without thinking, and afterward everything looks natural, because it is. But a plan always has something wrong with it. There’s always a flaw. Our job is to find it.”

Mrs. Duffy had returned from her sister’s, and now she bustled in from the pantry. She, too, like everybody else Strafford had so far encountered at Ballyglass House, had the look of a character actor hired that morning, and fitted the part altogether too convincingly.

Reck stopped the van and the two men sat stranded amid a moving sea of dirty gray fleece. Strafford idly studied the milling animals, admiring their long aristocratic heads and the neat little hoofs, like carved nuggets of coal, on which they trotted so daintily.

He peered more keenly at Strafford now, quickly registering the tribal markings—the good but shabby suit, the gold watch chain, the narrowly knotted tie. How easily one was spotted, Strafford gloomily reflected. For all their dissimilarities, they were, the two of them, of a class apart.

He knew Harbison’s kind, the minor blackguards in overly good suits tailored in London, speaking in the cut-glass accent of their caste and upbringing, masquerading as hard-riding gentlemen, scions of the few decent families that had stayed on in this benighted country after independence. Clubbable chaps who would do you a favor when they could, and then make sure you spent the rest of your life paying for it. Frequenters of the race course and the annual Royal Dublin Society Horse Show, fixed ornaments of the city’s better hotel bars and Jammet’s restaurant on Nassau Street. The gay blades who ran up bills with Mitchells the wine merchants and Smyths on the Green, grocers to the gentry, that gentry of which they considered themselves the last fine flowering.

Strafford sipped his tea. As usual, he took it black, without sugar. He had noticed Jenkins noticing, and not being pleased. Jenkins had a keen sense of the class divide, the signs of which were of the tiniest moment, tea with or without milk, the buttoning of a waistcoat, the pronunciation of a name.

The sky was loaded with a swag of mauve-tinted clouds, and the air was the color of tarnished pewter. It wasn’t snowing, but there had been the fresh fall in the night that Jenkins had mentioned. The land all around was smooth and plump as a pillow. The gnarled bare boughs looked as if they had been blackened in fire. Strafford watched his breath smoke in the air. Summer was unimaginable.