Elegy For April

by Benjamin Black

  “I’ve been away too,” he said.

  “Oh, yes?”

  “I was in St. John of the Cross.”

  “My-what’s that?”

  “A drying -out clinic.”

  “Yes, now that I think of it, Phoebe mentioned in one of her letters that you were in the bin. I thought she was exaggerating. What was it like?”

  “All right.”

  She smiled. “I’m sure.” The barman poured the champagne and set the sizzling glasses before them. Quirke looked at his, chewing on his lip. “Do you dare?” Rose asked, smiling with sweet malice. “I don’t want to be responsible for putting you back on the cross.”

  He picked up his glass and tipped the rim of it against hers. They drank. “Here’s to sobriety,” he said.

  She had reserved her favorite table, in the corner with a banquette, from where they had a view of the rest of the dining room. They ordered poached salmon. Mнcheбl and Hilton from the Gate were at a nearby table, lunching in what seemed an angry silence; Mнcheбl’s wig looked blacker and glossier than ever.

  “Tell me the news,” Rose said. “If there is any.”

  He sipped his champagne. It was a drink he did not care for, usually, finding even the best vintages too dry and acid; today, however, it tasted fine. He would drink one glass, he told himself, one glass only, and after that perhaps a glass of Chablis, and then would stop.

  “I wondered if you would come back,” he said. “I thought Boston might take you into its bosom and keep you there.”

  “Oh, Boston,” she said dismissively. “In fact, I was in New York, mostly. Now, there’s a town.”

  “But you returned nevertheless to dear, dirty Dublin.”

  “And you, Quirke, and you.”

  The waiter brought their fish, and Quirke ordered his glass of Chablis. Rose made no comment, only told the waiter she would keep to the champagne.

  “Have you spoken to Phoebe yet?” Quirke asked. “Since you got back, that is.”

  “No, Quirke dear, you were my first port of call, as always. How is the darling girl?”

  He told her about April Latimer, how she was missing and that no one knew where she was; he did not mention the blood that had been found beside her bed. Rose listened, watching him in her shrewd way. She was the second wife, now widow, of his father-in-law, Josh Crawford, Irish-American haulage giant, as the newspapers used to call him, and sometime crook. He had been much older than she, and had left her a rich woman. After he died she had moved to Ireland on a whim and bought a great house in Wicklow which she rarely visited, preferring what she called the coziness of her suite at the Shelbourne, where she had her bedroom, two reception rooms, two bathrooms, and a private dining room. Quirke and she had gone to bed together once, and once only, in turbulent times, a thing they never spoke of but which remained between them, something to be aware of, like a light shining uncertainly afar in a dark wood.

  “And what do you think has become of her,” she asked, “this young woman?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you have your suspicions.”

  He paused, setting down his knife and fork and gazing before him for some moments. “I have- fears,” he said at length. “It doesn’t look good. She’s wild, her family tell me, though Phoebe insists they’re exaggerating. I can’t say. She worked at the hospital, but I never came across her.”

  “Does Malachy know her?”

  “He must have had some dealings with her in the course of his days, but he says he can’t remember. You know Mal- she would need to sprout feathers and a tail before he noticed her.”

  “Oh, yes, Malachy,” she said. “How is he?”

  Quirke’s glass of Chablis seemed somehow to have become empty all by itself, without his noticing. He would not have another, no matter how loudly his blood clamored for it; no, he would not. “He says he’s going to retire.”

  “Retire? But he’s so young.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “He should marry again, before it’s too late.”

  “Who would he marry?”

  “Isn’t this country supposed to be thronged with women looking for a man?”

  He called the waiter and asked for another glass of wine. Rose lifted an eyebrow but made no remark.

  “By the way,” he said, “I bought a car.”

  “Well, you devil, you!”

  “It was very expensive.”

  “I should hope so. I can’t see you in a cheap jalopy.”

  When they finished their lunch he suggested they should go for a drive. Rose gave the Alvis barely a glance- Rose was not easily impressed, and when she was impressed she was careful not to show it-and when they had got in she would not let him drive off until he had put on the tie with the painted blonde on it. He laughed and said that if they were stopped by the Guards he would be arrested for causing a disturbance of the peace. “Add the fact that I have no driving license, and I’ll probably end up in jail.” His brain was fizzing pleasantly from the effects of the champagne and the two glasses of Chablis, and he felt almost skittish. He pulled down the mirror so he could see to knot the ridiculous tie. Rose sat sideways in the seat, watching him.

  “You’d like that,” she said.

  “What would I like?”

  “Being in jail. I can see you there, in your suit with the arrows on it, contentedly sewing mailbags and writing your memoirs in the evenings before lights-out.”

  He laughed. “You know me too well.” He smoothed the tie and readjusted the mirror and started up the engine. “I’m glad you’ve come back,” he said. “I missed you.”

  Now it was her turn to laugh. “No, you didn’t. But it’s nice of you to say so.”

  They went out by Rathfarnham and set off up into the mountains.

  “You didn’t drive, before,” Rose said, “did you?”

  “No. Mal taught me. It wasn’t difficult to get the hang of it.”

  “And you’ve bought yourself a brand-new, shiny car.” She patted the polished dashboard. “Very smart. I imagine it impresses the girls?”

  He did not answer that. The sunlight of earlier was gone now, and the day had turned iron-gray. Between them, too, unaccountably, something had darkened a little, and for a number of miles they did not speak at all. The mountainsides, burnt by frost, were ocher-colored, and there was ice at the sides of the road and patches of snow lay in the lee of rocks and in the long, straight furrows where turf had been cut. Below, to their right, a circular volcanic lake appeared, the water black and motionless, unreal-seeming. Winding higher and higher on the narrow road they felt the air growing steadily thinner and colder, and Quirke turned the heater on full. At Glencree there was a sudden squall of sleet, and the windscreen wipers had a hard time coping with it.

  “I used to come up here with Sarah,” Quirke said. “It was here one day, somewhere around here, that she told me Phoebe was my daughter, mine and Delia’s, not hers and Mal’s.”

  “But you knew that already.”

  “Yes. I’d always known and never told her I knew. God knows why. Cowardice, of course, there’s always cowardice.”

  Rose laughed again, softly. “Secrets and lies, Quirke, secrets and lies.”

  He gave her an account of his meeting that morning with the Latimers. She was fascinated. “He called you all together in his office, where the government is, this man- what’s his name?”

  “Bill Latimer. Minister of Health.”

  “Bizarre. What did he want you to do?”

  “Me? Nothing.”

  “You mean, nothing nothing?”

  “Exactly. He wants the fact of his niece’s disappearance kept under wraps, at least for the time being, so he says. He’s afraid of a scandal.”

  “Does he think he can keep it a secret forever? What if she’s dead?”

  “You can do anything in this country, if you’re powerful enough. You know that.”

  She nodded in grim amusement. “Secrets and lies,�
�� she said again, softly, in her southern drawl, almost singing it.

  The sleet shower passed, and they drove down into a long, shallow valley. Distantly the sea was visible, a line of indelible-pencil-blue on the horizon. There were blackish green clumps of gorse, and thornbushes raked by the wind into agonized, clawlike shapes; tatters of sheep’s wool fluttered on the barbed wire by the side of the road. “My God, Quirke,” Rose said suddenly, “this is a terrible place you’ve brought me to.”

  He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Up here? Terrible?”

  “So barren. If there’s a Hell, this is how I imagine it will be. No flames and all that, just ice and emptiness. Let’s go back. I like to be around people. I’m no cowgirl; the wide-open spaces frighten me.”

  He turned the car in a gateway, and they set off back towards the city.

  They were out of the mountains before Rose spoke again. “Maybe I should marry Malachy,” she said. “It could be my mission in life, to cheer him up.” She looked sideways at Quirke. “Aren’t you lonely?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course,” he said simply. “Isn’t everyone?”

  She did not answer for a moment and then chuckled. “You’re nothing if not predictable, Quirke.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s not bad or good. It’s just you.”

  “A hopeless case, is that it?”

  “Hopeless. Maybe Malachy isn’t the one I should marry.”

  “Who, then?” Quirke asked lightly; then the lightness drained from him, and he frowned, and kept his eyes on the windscreen.

  Rose laughed. “Oh, Quirke,” she said. “You look like a little boy who’s been told he may have to go and live with his grandma for the rest of his life. By the way,” she said, turning her head quickly to look back-”aren’t you supposed to stop when someone steps out on one of those- what do you call them?- those zebra crossings?”

  He delivered her to the Shelbourne. She said she still had to unpack and then rest awhile. She suggested that he and Phoebe might join her for dinner. He was back in his flat before he realized that he was still wearing the lewd tie she had given him. He looked at himself in the mirror. There were shadows under his eyes. He wished he had not drunk that glass of champagne; he could taste its sourness still. He took off the tie and went into the kitchen and threw it in the waste bin with the kitchen slops.

  12

  PHOEBE LAY RIGID, STARING INTO THE DARKNESS. IT WAS OFTEN like this; she would go to sleep and then after an hour or two would start awake from a nightmare not a single detail of which had stayed with her. Somehow this was what was most terrifying, the way the dream just vanished, like an animal scuttling down a hole and leaving nothing behind but an aura of horror and filth. So many dreadful things had happened in her life and surely they were what she dreamed of, yet how was it she forgot everything as soon as she woke? Were the visions in her dreams so terrible that her mind, feeling itself about to wake, whipped them away and hid them from her? If so, she was not glad of it; she would rather know than not know. She had woken lying on her back with her fists clenched against her throat and her teeth bared and her rib cage heaving. It was as if she had been fleeing headlong from something and at last had made her escape, although the thing, what ever faceless thing it was, was still out there, hiding in the dark, waiting for another night to come creeping out again and terrorize her.

  She switched on the bedside lamp and laid her head back on the damp, hot pillow and squeezed her eyes shut. She did not want to be awake, but there would be no sleep now for a long time. Sighing, she got up and put on her silk dressing gown- peignoir was what it was properly called, she liked the word. It had belonged to the woman who for the first nineteen years of her life she had thought was her mother.

  She went out to the kitchen. Night smells, she had often noticed, were different from day ones, were mustier, fainter, more insidious. She drew open the lapels of her silk gown and put her face into the hollow there and sniffed. Yes, her smell too was different, a babyish, secret staleness.

  The thought came to her that she had never got used to being alive.

  She took a half-full bottle of milk from the cupboard and shook it to make sure that it had not curdled- she had no refrigerator- and poured some into a blackened saucepan and set it on the gas ring to heat, adding a spoonful of raspberry jam. There was a slice of pound cake left from the piece she had bought two days ago to have after her dinner; it had gone hard and crumbly, but she needed to eat something. Behind her the milk begin to seethe, and she whipped it off the flame just as it was about to come to the boil. A wrinkled scum had formed, of course, and she had to lift it off as best she could with a teaspoon, trying not to let it break, a thing that always made her feel slightly sick. She poured the scalding, pink-tinged milk into a mug and unwrapped the cake from its greaseproof paper and put it on a plate and brought the mug and the plate to the table and sat down. She shut her eyes and sat motionless for a moment, then reopened them. She had not pulled down the blind- she hated blinds, they looked to her like unrolled sheets of pale-gray skin- and the window beside her was a tall rectangle of shining blackness. It was not very late, one o’clock, maybe, yet all outside was silent. She drank her milk with the jam in it and ate the morsel of dry, sweet cake. Her heartbeat even yet was uneven, from the stress of the forgotten dream.

  Her thoughts turned, of course, to April, as they always did in sleepless hours such as these, although she thought of her in the daytime, too. It was strange, the sense of helplessness she had about her friend. Indeed, it was like being in a dream, one in which there is something of great importance to be done- a warning to be delivered, a secret revealed-yet everybody else is relaxed and indifferent and there is no one who will bother to listen to the dire news that only she is in possession of. Even though no one else seemed to be as worried as she was, she had thought that Quirke surely would appreciate the awfulness of April’s disappearance- of her just being gone, without a word, without a trace left behind- for after all, another young woman whom she had known had disappeared last summer and Quirke had discovered her to have been murdered. Yet when he went with her and the detective to April’s flat, and then next day to see April’s brother, he had said hardly a word and had seemed not to care about April or what had become of her. But perhaps he was right and she was wrong; perhaps she was being fanciful and melodramatic about the entire thing. Or maybe, simply, it was true that he did not care. Did any of them, really, Isabel, Patrick, Jimmy Minor? They did not seem to be very worried, or not as worried as she was, anyway. She was filled with dread; she could not rid herself of it.

  Odd, how clear and sharp the mind can be at this time of night, she thought. Is it just that there are so few distractions in the small hours, or does the brain make use then of energy that normally it would be storing to fuel the next day’s mental business? Thinking of April now, and the seemingly careless attitude of Quirke and the others, she, too, had a sense of estrangement, a sense of alienation, which, to her surprise, seemed to be allowing her to consider her friend’s case with a new and calm dispassion. Somehow in her mind April became separated from all the things that together made up the image she had of her friend, and floated free, as sometimes in one’s consciousness a word floats free of the thing it is attached to and becomes something else, not just a noise, exactly, not a meaningless grunt or bark, but a mysterious, new entity, new and mysterious because it is itself only and not merely a means of signifying something.

  Who is April? she asked herself. She had thought she knew her, but now she wondered if she had been wrong all along, if April was someone else entirely from the person she had always taken her to be. Instead of the frank and open friend that she had spoken to almost every day, had chatted and gossiped with, there appeared now in her mind a different creature altogether, secretive, guarded, one who hid her real self from Phoebe and maybe from everyone else, too. Yes, guarded, that was how April was, not open at all, but concealed. And behind thi
s figure there was something else again, that was hidden too, or someone else, perhaps, always there in the background, some secret, all-pervasive presence. Yes. Someone there, always.

  She had seen Jimmy Minor last evening. They had met in O’Neill’s in Wicklow Street. The pub had been crowded and noisy- Trinity students were celebrating a win in some match or other-and they could hardly hear themselves speak. She had suggested they go somewhere that would be more quiet, but of course someone only had to suggest something to Jimmy for him to dig his heels in and resist, and instead of agreeing to move to another pub he had ordered drink and lit up a cigarette. He was telling her something about April and his newspaper. She could not believe her ears the first time and made him say it again: he had gone to the Editor and told him that April was missing.

  “Oh, Jimmy, you didn’t!” she cried.

  He looked at her in hurt surprise. “I’m a reporter,” he said, holding up his miniature hands in a show of simple sincerity. “Someone is missing, I report it.” Anyway, the Editor, it seemed, had not been interested in April Latimer, or had pretended not to be, and had told him to drop the story. “I said to him, ‘Do you know who she is, who she’s related to?’ That only made him put on his stony-faced look- he doesn’t like what my old fellow used to call backchat. I kept on, mentioning the Minister her uncle and her brother the Fitzwilliam Square consultant, but it was no good, there was no-”

  A raucous cheer went up from the crowd of red-faced young men at the bar, and she missed the rest of it. “But did he know something about it?” she asked. “Did he already know April was missing?”

  “I told you, all I got was the stony face. But yes, I had the impression someone had been on the blower to him, telling him to keep the lid on any stories about missing girls.”