Elegy For April

by Benjamin Black

  As if he had read her thoughts- sometimes he showed an uncanny knack of clairvoyance-he asked her now: “How well do you think you know her? April, I mean.”

  They were standing in the middle of the room. It was cold, she still had her scarf wound round her throat, and although her hands were thrust deep in the pockets of her coat she could feel the chill tips of her fingers tingling. “As well as anyone, I think,” she said. “Or thought I did. We used to talk nearly every day, you know. That’s why I was worried not to hear from her in the first place.” He was still glancing about, nodding, and gnawing his upper lip at one corner. “What about you?” she asked.

  “She was always a good contact.”

  “A contact? “

  “At the hospital. If there was a story going, some high-up knocking someone down when he was drunk or a suicide that was covered up, I could always depend on April to slip me the details.”

  Phoebe stared. “April told you about things like that?” It was hardly credible. The April that she knew, that she had thought she knew, surely would not pass that kind of information to a reporter, even one who was her friend.

  “It wasn’t anything confidential she was giving out,” Jimmy said defensively. “A call to her would save me time, that’s all. You don’t know what it’s like, working to deadlines.” It was not attractive, that whining, hard-done-by tone that he fell into sometimes. He walked to the window and stood looking out. Even from the back he had a vexed, resentful aspect. She knew of old how quick he was to take umbrage, she had seen it happen so often.

  “You realize,” she said, “we’ve been talking about her all this time in the past tense?”

  He turned, and they looked at each other.

  “There’s the bedroom,” Jimmy said. “We haven’t looked there.”

  They went in. The untidiness here was worse than in the living room. The wardrobe doors were open wide, the clothes inside crowded together and pulled about anyhow. Intimate items of clothing lay crumpled on the floor where they had been stepped out of and forgotten about. An old black Remington typewriter stood on a desk in the corner, and all around it were piled textbooks and papers and bulging ring binders, almost covering up the telephone, an old-fashioned model with a metal winder on the side for connecting up to the operator. There was a cup there, too, containing the dried and cracked dregs of coffee that even yet gave off a faint, bitter aroma. April was a coffee addict and drank it all day long, half the night, too, if she was on a late shift. Phoebe stood and looked about. She felt she must not touch anything, convinced that if she did, the thing she touched would crumble under her fingers; suddenly everything was breakable here. The smell of the week-old coffee, and of other things- face powder, dust, slept-in bed-clothes-that mingled, stale smell that bedrooms always have, made her feel nauseous.

  Strangely, the bed was made, and to a hospital standard of neatness, the blanket and the sheets tucked in all round and the pillow as flat and smooth as a bank of snow.

  Jimmy spoke behind her. “Look at this.” A narrow plywood door with louvered panels led into the tiny, windowless bathroom. He was in there, bending over the hand basin. He looked over his shoulder at her, and even as she came forward she felt herself wanting to hang back. The hand basin was yellowed with age and had stains the color of verdigris under each of the two taps. Jimmy was pointing to a faint, narrow, brownish streak that ran from the overflow slot at the back almost to the plug hole. “That,” he said, “is blood.”

  They stood and stared, hardly breathing. But was it so remarkable, after all, a tiny bit of blood, in a bathroom? Yet to Phoebe it was as if an innocuously smiling person had turned to her and opened a palm to show her something dreadful. She was feeling definitely sick now. Images from the past teemed in her mind, flickering as in an old newsreel. A car on a snowy headland and a young man with a knife. An old man, mute and furious, lying on a narrow bed between two tall windows. A silver-haired figure impaled, still twitching, on black railings. She would have to sit down, but where, on what? Anything she leaned her weight on might open under her and release horrors. She felt as if her innards were turning to liquid, and suddenly she had a piercing headache and seemed to be staring into an impenetrable red fog. Then, unaccountably, she was half sitting, half lying in the bathroom doorway with the louvered door at her back, and one of her shoes had come off, and Jimmy was squatting beside her, holding her hand.

  “Are you all right?” he asked anxiously.

  Was she? She still had that piercing headache, as if a red-hot wire had been pushed in through the center of her forehead. “I’m sorry,” she said, or tried to say. “I must have-I must-”

  “You fainted,” Jimmy said. He was looking at her closely, with what seemed to her a faintly skeptical light, as if he half suspected her swoon had been a pretense, a bit of attention-seeking histrionics.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  She struggled up and stumbled forward on her knees and huddled over the lavatory bowl with her hands braced on the seat. Her stomach heaved, but nothing happened save a dry retching. When had she eaten last? For a moment she could not remember. She drew back and sat down suddenly on the floor, her legs folding themselves awkwardly under her.

  Jimmy went out to make tea in the alcove next to the living room that passed for a kitchen, from where she heard him filling the kettle and taking crockery out of the cupboard. She wanted to lie down on the bed but could not bring herself to do it- it was April’s bed, after all, and besides, the severity with which it had been made up was forbidding- and instead sat on the chair in front of the piled-high desk, shaking a little still, with a hand to her face. The pain behind her forehead had spread downwards and was pressing now on the backs of her eyes. “The milk was off,” Jimmy said, setting a cup and its saucer before her on the desk. “There’s plenty of sugar, though. I put in three spoonfuls.”

  She sipped the scalding, bittersweet tea and tried to smile. “I feel a fool,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever fainted before.” She looked at Jimmy over the steaming rim of the cup. He was standing before her with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, his head on one side, watching her. He was still wearing that smelly raincoat. “What shall we do?” she said.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Go to the Guards?”

  “And say what?”

  “Well, that- that April hasn’t been heard of, that we went into her flat and it was empty, that there was a bloodstain in the sink.” She stopped. She could hear herself how weak it sounded, weak and fanciful.

  Jimmy turned away and paced the floor, weaving a path among April’s scattered underthings. “She could be anywhere,” he said, almost impatiently. “She could be on a holiday- you know how impulsive she is.”

  “But what if she’s not on a holiday?”

  “Look, she could have got sick and gone home to her mother.” Phoebe snorted. “Well, she could,” he insisted. “When a girl is sick her first instinct is to fly back to the nest.” Where, she wondered, was the nest that Jimmy would fly home to, if he was sick, or in trouble? She imagined it, a cramped, whitewashed cottage down an unpaved road, with a mountain behind, and a dog at the gate growling, and a figure in an apron wavering uncertainly in the dimness of the doorway. “Why don’t you call her?” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Her mother. Mrs. Latimer, old ironsides.”

  It was, of course, the obvious thing to do, the thing she should have done first, but the thought of speaking to that woman daunted her. “I wouldn’t know what to say,” she said. “Anyway, you’re right, April could be anywhere, doing anything. Just because she hasn’t called us doesn’t mean she’s- doesn’t mean she’s missing.” She shook her head and winced as the pain pulsed anew behind her eyes. “I think we should meet, the four of us, you, me, Patrick, Isabel.”

  “A conference, you mean?” he said. “An emergency council?” He was laughing at her
.

  “Yes, if you like,” she said stoutly, undeterred. “I’ll call them and suggest we meet up to night. The Dolphin? Seven thirty, as usual?”

  “All right,” he said. “Maybe they’ll know something; maybe one of them will even have heard from her.”

  She rose and went out to the kitchen, carrying the teacup. “Who knows,” she said over her shoulder, “they might have gone off somewhere together, the three of them.”

  “Without telling us?”

  Why not? she thought. Anything is possible- everything is. After all, April had not told her about the key under the stone. What else might she have kept secret from her?

  4

  QUIRKE’S FLAT HAD THE SHEEPISH AND RESENTFUL AIR OF AN unruly classroom suddenly silenced by the unexpected return of the teacher. He put down his suitcase and walked through the rooms, peering into corners, examining things, not knowing what he expected to find, and found everything as it had been on the morning of Christmas Eve when the taxi had come to take him, sweating and shaking, to St. John’s. This was obscurely disappointing; had he been hoping for some outrageous violation, the windows smashed, his belongings plundered, his bed overturned and the sheets shat on? It did not seem right that all here should have remained intact and unaffected while he was away suffering such trials. He returned to the living room. His overcoat was still buttoned. There had been no fire lit in the flat for nearly two months, and the air felt colder in here than it had outside. He plugged in the one-bar electric fire, hearing himself grunt as he leaned down to the socket; immediately there was a scorched smell as the reddening coil burned off the weeks of dust that had accumulated on it. Then he went into the kitchen and turned all four burners of the gas stove on to full, and lit the oven, too, and set it to high. Malachy Griffin had not ventured past the front doorway, where he stood now framed with the landing behind him, in his gray mackintosh and woolen muffler, watching Quirke grimly claiming back his territory. Malachy was tall and gaunt with thinning hair; his rimless spectacles gave to his eyes a teary shine.

  “Can I get anything for you?” he asked.

  Quirke turned. “What?” He was at the big kitchen window, with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. He had a lost, vague look. Fogged light fell down on him from the window, a thin, silvery misting.

  “You’ll need provisions. Milk. Bread.”

  “I’ll go up in a while to the Q and L.”

  A faintly desperate silence fell. Quirke wished his brother-in-law would either leave or come inside and shut the door. Yet at the same time he did not want him to go, not yet; even Malachy’s company was preferable to being left alone with himself in these suddenly estranged and sullen surroundings. He began to open a cupboard door, then stopped. He laughed. “Christ, I was about to pour us both a drink!”

  “Why don’t we go to the Shelbourne?” Malachy said. “You probably didn’t have any breakfast, did you?” He was thinking how Quirke’s largeness- that great head, those massive shoulders- made him seem all the more vulnerable now.

  “I don’t eat much, these days. The metabolism changes when the booze is taken away. Like a baby that’s been weaned, I suppose.”

  The gas jets hissed and spluttered, spreading a faint, flabby warmth on the air.

  “All the same,” Malachy said, “you have to-”

  “Don’t say I have to keep my strength up.”

  There was another silence, this time offended a little on Malachy’s side. Quirke waved a hand in irritated apology, shaking his head. He turned off the gas. “All right, let’s go,” he said.

  The atmosphere outdoors had the texture of wetted, cold cotton. Malachy’s car was parked at the curb; although Malachy had picked him up in it from St. John’s, it was only now that Quirke recognized it, with a dull shock, as the big old black Humber once owned by Judge Garret Griffin, his adoptive father. The Judge, now dead, was Malachy’s natural father; he had done them both great wrong. Why was Malachy driving the wicked old man’s motorcar- what was it, a gesture of forgiveness and filial piety?

  Quirke suggested that they walk. They set off along Mount Street, their footsteps rising up a beat late behind them. There was coal dust from the city’s fireplaces suspended in the fog; they could feel the grit of it on their lips and between their teeth. At the corner of Merrion Square they turned left in the direction of Baggot Street.

  “By the way,” Quirke said, “do you know that young one at the hospital, Conor Latimer’s daughter?”

  “Latimer? Which department is she in?”

  “I don’t know. General, I imagine. She’s a junior.”

  Malachy pondered; Quirke could almost hear the sound of his brain working, as if he were flicking through a set of file cards; Malachy prided himself on his memory for detail, or used to, before Sarah died and he lost interest in such things. “Latimer,” he said again. “Yes. Alice Latimer- no, April. I’ve seen her about. Why?”

  The traffic lights at the corner of Fitzwilliam Street, turning red, pierced through the mist with an unnatural and almost baleful brightness.

  “Phoebe knows her. They’re friends.” Malachy was silent. Mention of Phoebe always made for constraint between the two men; after all, Phoebe had grown up thinking Malachy, not Quirke, was her father. “It seems,” Quirke said, clearing his throat, “she hasn’t been heard from for some time.”

  Malachy did not look at him. “Heard from?”

  They turned right onto Baggot Street. A tinker woman in a tartan shawl accosted them, doing her piteous whine; Quirke gave her a coin, and she gabbled a blessing after them.

  “Phoebe is worried,” Quirke said. “It seems they’re in the habit of speaking every day on the phone, she and the Latimer girl, but it’s been a week or more since she had a call from her.”

  “Has she been at work, April Latimer?”

  “No-sent in a sick-note.”

  “Well then.”

  “Phoebe is not convinced.”

  “Yes,” Malachy said after a pause, “but Phoebe does worry.” It was true; for one so young, Phoebe had known a disproportion of misfortune in her life- betrayal, rape, violent deaths- and how would she not fear the worst? “What about the family?” Malachy asked. “Bill Latimer would be her uncle, yes? Our esteemed Minister.” They both smiled grimly.

  “I don’t know,” Quirke said, “I don’t think Phoebe has spoken to them.”

  “And the brother? Hasn’t he rooms in Fitzwilliam Square?”

  “Oscar Latimer- is he her brother?”

  “I think so.” Malachy was brooding again. “She has a bit of a reputation, so I hear,” he said, “the same Miss or I should say Doctor Latimer.”

  “Yes? A reputation for what?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual. Drinks a bit, goes about with a fast crowd. There’s a fellow at the College of Surgeons, I forget his name. Foreigner.” He paused, frowning. “And that one from the Gate, the actress, what do you call her?- Galway?”

  “Isabel Galloway?” Quirke chuckled. “That’s fast, all right.”

  They were crossing at the top of Merrion Street when a green double-decker bus appeared suddenly out of the fog, bearing down on them with a roar, and they had to skip in haste to the safety of the pavement. A reek of porter from the doorway of Doheny & Nesbitts made Quirke’s stomach heave.

  “So she might have gone to En gland, in that case,” Malachy said, and gave a little cough.

  Quirke knew what “gone to En gland” was a euphemism for. “Oh, come on, Mal,” he said drily. “Wouldn’t she have got one of the likely lads at the hospital to help her with any little problem in that line?”

  Malachy did not reply, and Quirke, amused, glanced at him and saw his mouth tightened in a deploring pout. Malachy was consultant obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family and did not take kindly even to the suggestion that April Latimer or anyone else could have got an illegal abortion there.

  At the Shelbourne, outside the revolving glass door, Quirke balked. “I�
��m sorry, Mal,” he muttered, “I can’t face it.” The thought of all that chatter and brightness in there, the winking glasses and the shining faces of the morning drinkers, was not to be borne. He was sweating; he could feel the wet hotness on his chest and on his forehead under the rim of his hat that was suddenly too tight. They turned and trudged back the way they had come.

  Not a word was exchanged between them until they got to the Q and L. Quirke did not know why the shop was called the Q and L, and had never been curious enough to ask. The proprietor- or more properly the proprietor’s son, since the shop was owned by an ancient widow, bedridden these many years- was a fat, middle-aged fellow with a big moon face and brilliantined hair slicked flat. He always seemed dressed up for the races, in his accustomed outfit of checked shirt and bow tie and canaryyellow waistcoat, tweed jacket, and cream-colored corduroy slacks. He was prone to unpredictable, brief displays of skittishness- he might suddenly yodel, or grin like a chimp, and more than once Quirke had been present to witness him essay a few dance steps behind the counter, clicking his fingers and stamping the heels of his chestnut-brown brogues. Today he was in undemonstrative mood, due to the dampening effects of the fog, perhaps. Quirke bought a Procea loaf, six eggs, butter, milk, two small bundles of kindling, a packet of Senior Service, and a box of Swan Vestas. The look of these things on the counter flooded him suddenly with a wash of self-pity.

  “Thanky-voo,” the shopman said plumply, handing over change.

  In the flat Quirke unplugged the electric fire- it had made little impression on the big, high-ceilinged room- and crumpled the pages of an ancient copy of the Irish Independent and put them in the grate with the kindling on top and lumps of coal from the scuttle and set a match to the paper and stood back and watched the flames catch and the coils of heavy white smoke snake upwards. Then he went into the kitchen and scrambled two eggs and toasted slices of bread under the gas grill. Malachy accepted a cup of tea but would eat nothing. “My God,” Quirke said, suspending the teapot in midpour, “look at us, like a pair of old biddies on pension day.” They had been married to two sisters. Quirke’s wife, Delia, had died in childbirth, having Phoebe; Malachy’s Sarah had succumbed to a brain tumor two years ago. Being a widower suited Malachy, or so it seemed to Quirke; it was as if he had been born to be bereaved.