Elegy For April

by Benjamin Black

  The inmates were urged to pair off, like shy dancers at a grotesque ball. The theory was that sustained daily contact with a designated fellow sufferer, entailing shared confidences and candid self-exposure, would restore a sense of what was called in here mutuality and inevitably speed the pro cess of rehabilitation. Thus Quirke found himself spending a great deal more time than he would have cared to with Harkness-last-name terms was the form at St. John’s- a hard-faced, grizzled man with the indignantly reprehending aspect of an eagle. Harkness had a keen sense of the bleak comedy of what he insisted on calling their captivity, and when he heard what Quirke’s profession was he produced a brief, loud laugh that was like the sound of something thick and resistant being ripped in half. “A pathologist!” he snarled in rancorous delight. “Welcome to the morgue.”

  Harkness-it seemed not so much a name as a condition- was as reluctant as Quirke in the matter of personal confidences and at first would say little about himself or his past. Quirke, however, had spent his orphaned childhood in institutions run by the religious, and guessed at once that he was-what did they say?- a man of the cloth. “That’s right,” Harkness said, “Christian Brother. You must have heard the swish of the surplice.” Or of the leather strap, more like, Quirke thought. Side by side in dogged silence, heads down and fists clasped at their backs, they tramped the same paths that Quirke and Brother Anselm walked, under the freezing trees, as if performing a penance, which in a way they were. As the weeks went on, Harkness began to release resistant little hard nuggets of information, as if he were spitting out the seeds of a sour fruit. A thirst for drink, it seemed, had been a defense against other urges. “Let me put it this way,” he said, “if I hadn’t gone into the Order it’s unlikely I’d ever have married.” He chuckled darkly. Quirke was shocked; he had never before heard anyone, least of all a Christian Brother, come right out like this and admit to being queer. Harkness had lost his vocation, too-”if I ever had one”- and was coming to the conclusion that on balance there is no God.

  After such stark revelations Quirke felt called upon to reciprocate in kind, but found it acutely difficult, not out of embarrassment or shame- though he must be embarrassed, he must be ashamed, considering the many misdeeds he had on his conscience- but because of the sudden weight of tedium that pressed down on him. The trouble with sins and sorrows, he had discovered, is that in time they become boring, even to the sorrowing sinner. Had he the heart to recount it all again, the shambles that was his life- the calamitous losses of nerve, the moral laziness, the failures, the betrayals? He tried. He told how when his wife died in childbirth he gave away his infant daughter to his sister-in-law and kept it secret from the child, Phoebe, now a young woman, for nearly twenty years. He listened to himself as if it were someone else’s tale he was telling.

  “But she comes to visit you,” Harkness said, in frowning perplexity, interrupting him. “Your daughter- she comes to visit.”

  “Yes, she does.” Quirke had ceased to find this fact surprising, but now found it so anew.

  Harkness said nothing more, only nodded once, with an expression of bitter wonderment, and turned his face away. Harkness had no visitors.

  That Thursday when Phoebe came, Quirke, thinking of the lonely Christian Brother, made an extra effort to be alert to her and appreciative of the solace she thought she was bringing him. They sat in the visitors’ room, a bleak, glassed-in corner of the vast entrance hall- in Victorian times the building had been the forbiddingly grand headquarters of some branch of the British administration in the city- where there were plastic-topped tables and metal chairs and, at one end, a counter on which stood a mighty tea urn that rumbled and hissed all day long. Quirke thought his daughter was paler than usual, and there were smudged shadows like bruises under her eyes. She seemed distracted, too. She had in general a somber, etiolated quality that grew steadily more marked as she progressed into her twenties; yet she was becoming a beautiful woman, he realized, with some surprise and an inexplicable but sharp twinge of unease. Her pallor was accentuated by the black outfit she wore, black skirt and jumper, slightly shabby black coat. These were her work clothes- she had a job in a hat shop- but he thought they gave her too much the look of a nun.

  They sat opposite each other, their hands extended before them across the table, their fingertips almost but not quite touching.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “You look- I don’t know- strained?”

  He saw her deciding to decline his sympathy. She glanced up at the high window beside them where the fog was crowding against the panes like compressed gas. Their gray mugs of tea stood stolid on the tabletop before them, untouched. Phoebe’s hat was on the table too, a minuscule confection of lace and black velvet stuck with an incongruously dramatic scarlet feather. Quirke nodded in the direction of the hat. “How is Mrs. What’s-hername?”

  “Who?”

  “The one who owns the hat shop.”

  “Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes.”

  “Surely that’s a made-up name.”

  “There was a Mr. Wilkes. He died, and she began to call herself Cuffe-Wilkes.”

  “Is there a Mr. Cuffe?”

  “No. That was her maiden name.”

  “Ah.”

  He brought out his cigarette case, clicked it open, and offered it to her flat on his palm. She shook her head. “I’ve stopped.”

  He selected a cigarette for himself and lit it. “You used to smoke… what were they called, those oval-shaped ones?”

  “Passing Clouds.”

  “That’s it. Why did you give up?”

  She smiled, wryly. “Why did you?”

  “Why did I give up drink, you mean? Oh, well.”

  They both looked away, Phoebe to the window again and Quirke sideways, at the floor. There were half a dozen couples in the place, all sitting at tables as far separated from the others as possible. The floor was covered with large, black-and-white rubber tiles, and with the people in it placed just so, the room seemed set up for a silent, life-size game of chess. The air reeked of cigarette smoke and stewed tea, and there was a faint trace too of something medicinal and vaguely punitive. “This awful place,” Phoebe said, then glanced at her father guiltily. “Sorry.”

  “For what? You’re right, it is awful.” He paused. “I’m going to check myself out.”

  He was as startled as she was. He had not been aware of having taken the decision until he announced it. But now, the announcement delivered, he realized that he had made up his mind that moment when, in the grounds that day, under the stark trees, speaking of Quirke’s daughter, Harkness had turned aside with that bitter, stricken look in his aquiline eye. Yes, it was then, Quirke understood now, that he had set out mentally on the journey back to something like feeling, to something like- what to call it?- like life. Brother Anselm was right; he had a long trek ahead of him.

  Phoebe was saying something. “What?” he said, with a flash of irritation, trying not to scowl. “Sorry, I wasn’t listening.”

  She regarded him with that deprecating look, head tilted, chin down, one eyebrow arched, that she used to give him when she was little and still thought he was her sort-of uncle; his attention was a fluctuating quantity then, too. “April Latimer,” she said. Still he frowned, unenlightened. “I was saying,” she said, “she seems to be- gone away, or something.”

  “Latimer,” he said, cautiously.

  “Oh, Quirke!” Phoebe cried- it was what she called him, never Dad, Daddy, Father-”my friend April Latimer. She works at your hospital. She’s a juinior doctor.”

  “Can’t place her.”

  “Conor Latimer was her father, and her uncle is the Minister of Health.”

  “Ah. One of those Latimers. She’s missing, you say?”

  She stared at him, startled; she had not used the word missing, so why had he? What had he heard in her voice that had alerted him to what it was she feared? “No,”
she said firmly, shaking her head, “not missing, but- she seems to be- she seems to have- left, without telling anyone. I haven’t heard a word from her in over a week.”

  “A week?” he said, deliberately dismissive. “That’s not long.”

  “Usually she phones every day, or every second day, at the least.” She made herself shrug, and sit back; she had the frightening conviction that the more plainly she allowed her concern to show the more likely it would be that something calamitous had happened to her friend. It made no sense, and yet she could not rid herself of the notion. She felt Quirke’s eye, it was like a doctor’s hand on her, searching for the infirm place, the diseased place, the place that pained.

  “What about the hospital?” he said.

  “I telephoned. She sent in a note, to say she wouldn’t be in.”

  “Until when?”

  “What?” She gazed at him, baffled for a moment.

  “How long did she say she’d be out?”

  “Oh. I didn’t ask.”

  “Did she give a reason not to turn up?” She shook her head; she did not know. She bit her lower lip until it turned white. “Maybe she has the flu,” he said. “Maybe she decided to go off on a holiday- they make those juinior doctors work like blacks, you know.”

  “She would have told me,” she muttered. Saying this, with that stubborn set to her mouth, she was again for a second the child that he remembered.

  “I’ll phone the people there,” he said, “in her department. I’ll find out what’s going on. Don’t worry.”

  She smiled, but so tentatively, with such effort, still biting her lip, that he saw clearly how distressed she was. What was he to do, what was he to say to her?

  He walked with her down to the front gate. The brief day was drawing in and the gloom of twilight was drifting into the fog and thickening it, like soot. He had no overcoat and he was cold, but he insisted on going all the way to the gate. Their partings were always awkward; she had kissed him, just once, years before, when she did not know he was her father, and at such moments as this the memory of that kiss still flashed out between them with a magnesium glare. He touched her elbow lightly with a fingertip and stepped back. “Don’t worry,” he said again, and again she smiled, and nodded, and turned away. He watched her go through the gate, that absurd scarlet feather on her hat dipping and swaying, then he called out to her, “I forgot to say- I’m going to buy a car.”

  She turned back, staring. “What? You can’t even drive.”

  “I know. You can teach me.”

  “I can’t drive either!”

  “Well, learn, and then I’ll learn from you.”

  “You’re mad,” she said, shaking her head and laughing.

  3

  WHEN SHE HEARD THE TELEPHONE RINGING PHOEBE SOMEHOW knew the call was for her. Although the house was divided into four flats there was only one, public phone, down in the front hall, and access to it was a constant source of competitiveness and strife among the tenants. She had been living here for six months. The house was gaunt and shabby, much less nice than the place where she had been before, in Harcourt Street, but after all that had happened there she could not have stayed on. She had her things with her here, of course, her photographs and ornaments, her raggedy, one-eyed teddy bear, and even some of her own furniture that the landlord had let her bring with her, but still she pined for the old flat. There, she had felt herself to be in the busy heart of the city; here, in Haddington Road, it was almost suburbia. There were days when, turning the corner from Baggot Street bridge, she would look down the long, deserted sweep towards Ringsend and feel the loneliness of her life opening under her like a chasm. She was, she knew, too much alone, which was another reason not to lose a friend like April Latimer.

  When she came out onto the landing the fat young man from the ground-floor flat was standing at the foot of the stairs glaring up at her. He was always the first to get to the phone, but none of the calls ever seemed to be for him. “I shouted up,” he said crossly. “Did you not hear?” She had heard nothing; she was sure he was lying. She hurried down the stairs as the young man went back into his flat and slammed the door behind him.

  The telephone, coin-operated, was a black metal box bolted to the wall above the hall table. When she lifted the heavy receiver to her ear she was convinced a whiff of the fat young man’s carious breath came up out of the mouthpiece.

  “Yes?” she said, softly, eagerly. “Yes?”

  She had been hoping, of course, hoping against hope that it would be April, but it was not, and her heart that had been beating so expectantly fell back into its accustomed rhythm.

  “Hello, Pheeb, it’s Jimmy.”

  “Oh. Hello.” He had not written a story about April- she had checked the Mail- and now she felt guilty, and foolish, too, for having suspected that he would.

  “I forgot to ask you yesterday- did you see if April’s key was there, when you called round?”

  “What?” she said. “What key?”

  “The one she leaves under the broken flagstone at the front door, if she’s out and expecting someone to call.” Phoebe said nothing. How did Jimmy know about this arrangement with the key when she did not? Why had April never told her about it? “I’ll go over now and see if it’s there,” Jimmy was saying. “Want to come and meet me?”

  She walked quickly up towards the bridge with her scarf wrapped round her face and covering her mouth. The fog had lightened, but a thin, cold mist persisted. Herbert Place was only one street over, on the other side of the canal. When she got to the house there was no sign of Jimmy. She climbed the steps, and pressed the bell in case he had arrived before her and had let himself in, but evidently he had not. She peered at the granite flagstones, trying to spot the one that was loose. Some minutes passed; she felt self-conscious and exposed, thinking someone might come up to her demanding to know why she was still there when obviously the person whose bell she had been ringing was not at home. She was relieved when she saw Jimmy hurrying along the towpath. He came up through the gap in the black railings and sprinted across the road, ignoring a motorcar that had to swerve to avoid him, bleating indignantly.

  “Still no sign?” he said, joining her on the top step. He was wearing his plastic raincoat with the unpleasant, acid smell. With the heel of his shoe he pressed down on the edge of a flagstone beside the foot scraper and a broken corner of it lifted, and she saw the dull gleam of two keys on a key ring underneath.

  The mist had penetrated the hall, and a faint swathe of it hung motionless like ectoplasm on the stairs. They climbed in silence to the second floor. Phoebe had trod these stairs countless times, but suddenly she felt like an intruder. She had not noticed before how worn the carpet was along the outer edge of each step or how the stair rods were tarnished, and missing at intervals. At the door to April’s flat they hesitated, exchanging a look. Jimmy rapped softly with his knuckles. They waited a moment, but no sound came from within. “Well?” he whispered. “Shall we risk it?”

  The harsh sound of the key gouging into the lock made her flinch.

  She did not know what she had expected to find inside, but of course there was nothing amiss, or nothing that she could see, anyway. April was not the tidiest person in the world, and the clutter in the place was familiar, and reassuring: how could anything really bad have happened to someone who had washed those nylons and left them draped there over the fireguard in front of the grate? And look at that cup and saucer on the coffee table- the rim of the cup marked with a crescent of scarlet lipstick- and that half-consumed packet of Marietta biscuits, so ordinary, so homely. All the same, there was something unignorable in the atmosphere, something tensed and watchful and sullen, as if their presence were being registered, and resented.

  “Now what?” she said.

  Jimmy was squinting suspiciously about the room, as usual playing the hard-bitten reporter; in a moment he would have his notebook and his pencil out. Phoebe could not remember exactly where she ha
d met Jimmy, or when. It was strange; she seemed to have known him an impossibly long time, yet she knew almost nothing about him; she was not even sure where he lived. He was garrulous, and talked tirelessly on every subject except himself. She wondered at the fact that April had let him know about the door key under the stone. Had others been let in on this arrangement? It struck her that if she was the only one that April had not told, perhaps it was not so strange that her friend had stopped calling her; perhaps April did not think of her as a friend at all, only an acquaintance to be taken up or dropped according to whim. If that was the case, she did not need to be so concerned. She was beginning to feel enjoyably aggrieved, but then it occurred to her that Jimmy, whom April had told about the key and therefore must consider a true intimate, had not heard from her either, nor had anyone else in their circle, so far as she knew.