The Silver Swan: Quirke 2 by Benjamin Black

Author:Benjamin Black [Black, Benjamin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330471930
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Published: 2007-10-30T11:00:00+00:00

3

WHEN PHOEBE WAS a little girl, her parents, or the couple who at the time she thought of as her parents, used to take her in July each year for a two-week stay in a house in Rosslare Strand that was lent to them by friends of Sarah’s, theatre people, as she recalled. This holiday by the sea was made out to be a great thing, but the truth was that none of the three of them really enjoyed it, down there in what was called the Sunny South-east. Mal fretted at being away from his work, and Sarah had nothing to do and, although she tried not to show it, was bored most of the time. As for Phoebe herself, she did not care for the seaside. She hated showing herself half naked on the beach—she was skinny and knock-kneed, and her pale skin refused to tan no matter how long she spent in the sun—and she had no talent for making friends. Besides, she was afraid of the sea. One year, when she was nine, or ten, she was walking by herself on the broad strip of thorns and tough grass that ran between the village and the beach, known for some reason as the Burrow, when she stumbled, literally stumbled, on a hare’s nest with two baby hares in it. She had never seen such a thing before. It appeared that the mother hare had fashioned the nest by turning and turning herself around in the grass to form a smooth, tightly braided hollow, in which now the leverets lay coiled against one another head to tail, each a mirror image of the other, so that they looked, she thought, like an emblem on a flag, or on a coin. They were very young, for their eyes were hardly open, and they seemed not so much to breathe as throb, faintly and fast, as if they were already exhausted at the very prospect of all the desperate running they would have to do in their lives. She decided immediately, although she knew in her heart it was not true, that they had been abandoned, and that therefore it was up to her to save them. So she picked them up—how soft they were, and so hot!—and made a pouch of her cardigan at the front and carried them home that way, and lodged them in the long grass in the corner by the rain barrel behind the house, where no one would see them. She knew, though she would not admit it, that she should not have taken them, and when she came down next morning and they were gone she experienced a surge of panic and shameful guilt that almost made her be sick there on the spot. She tried to tell herself that the mother hare had somehow been able to follow the babies’ scent and had come and taken them away again in the night, but she could not make herself believe it. She

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