“Why, of course,” Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes said eagerly, and began plucking hats from all corners of the shop and strewing them along the counter like so many overblown lotus blossoms. Phoebe could see by the tightening of her nostrils that Rose found them all equally ugly; nevertheless she took up two models at random and went to the full-length mirror by the door and tried them on in turn. “Which is the least awful?” she asked of Phoebe, out of the side of her mouth.
Phoebe, standing close beside her, smiled. “You don’t have to buy anything, you know,” she murmured.
Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes, who was a little deaf, was watching them sharply.
In the end Rose decided on a rather severe black felt toque with a ruby pin. It looked very smart on her, Phoebe saw. Rose asked if she could pay with a traveler’s check, and Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes scuttled into her office to phone the bank to ask for guidance.
“So,” Rose said to Phoebe, putting the hat carelessly aside, “how are you, my dear?”
“I’m very well.”
“You’ve changed. You’re older.”
Phoebe laughed. “Not much older, I hope?”
“I worry about you.”
“Do you? Why?”
Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes came back, wheezing in distress. “I’m so sorry, the young man at the bank seemed to think it wouldn’t be-”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rose said. “I’ll go and get some cash and come back.” She smiled her toothed smile again. “Perhaps Miss Griffin here can show me the way to the American Express office?”
“Oh, it’s just down there at the bottom of the-”
“I meant, she could take me there? I get lost so easily in these dinky little streets.”
Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes began to make a further protest but then retreated a step, seeming to deflate. “Oh, well, yes, of course.”
The rain was stopping as Rose and Phoebe walked down Grafton Street. “I wanted,” Rose said, “to consult you about something.” She linked her arm in Phoebe’s. “It’s rather”- she gave a small, embarrassed laugh-”rather delicate, I suppose you’d say.”
Phoebe waited, breathless with curiosity. What could it possibly be that would make Rose Crawford behave so awkwardly? They came to the American Express office. “Here we are,” Phoebe said. “Tell me before we go in.”
Rose looked all about the street, as if fearing to be overheard, and bit her lip. For a moment she might have been half her age. “No,” she said, “let’s get my money first. I always feel more confident, somehow, with a wad of greenbacks in the back pocket of my blue jeans.”
It seemed to take forever to get the check cashed. Phoebe waited near the door, looking at the travel posters and reading the brochures. At last the business was done, and Rose came back, shutting her handbag. “All right,” she said, “let’s go and make your boss a happy woman.”
But Phoebe would not budge. “I’m not moving until you tell me what it is you want to ‘consult’ me about.”
Rose stood and gazed at her in smiling dismay. “O, Lordy!” she exclaimed. “Why did I start this?” She took Phoebe’s arm again and led her determinedly into the street, and there they halted again. Rose took a deep breath. “I wanted to ask you, my dear, how you would feel if I were to- well, if I were to marry into the family again.”
“Marry?”
Rose nodded, pressing her lips tightly together. Phoebe looked upwards. Between the rooftops the narrow strip of sky, flowing swiftly with gray and silver clouds, seemed for a moment a gorgeous, shining, inverted river.
“Of course,” Rose went on quickly, “he may not say yes. In fact, I’ll be- well, I’ll be pretty surprised if he does.”
“You mean, he hasn’t asked you? You’re going to ask him?”
“I’ve dropped hints. But you know how it is with Irishmen and hints. And your father, well-h e’s the Irishman’s Irishman, isn’t he?”
“But but but-”
Rose put a finger to the girl’s lips. “Ssh. Not another word, for now. I’ve embarrassed myself quite enough for one day. I need that hat, to hide my blushes under.”
And they set off up the street towards the Maison des Chapeaux and its expectant proprietress. Above their heads, Phoebe saw, that river of cloud flowed on in joyful spate.
WHEN ROSE HAD PAID FOR HER HAT AND LEFT, STILL LOOKING flustered, Phoebe asked Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes if she might use the telephone. This was a daring request, for the telephone was an object of reverence and some awe to its owner, and sat enshrined in state on the desk in the cubbyhole, making Phoebe think always of a pampered, pedigreed cat. But the hat that Rose had bought was so costly that Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes had not even bothered to bring it down until Rose spotted it on a high shelf and asked to see it, and after such a lavish sale how could she refuse the girl a phone call? She was itching to know who exactly Rose was, but Phoebe offered no account of her and the moment to insist on being told seemed to have passed. Mustering what grace she could, therefore, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes said of course, the phone was there, please feel free.
It was her father Phoebe called, inviting him to invite her to dinner. Like her employer, what could he say but yes?
15
QUIRKE HIMSELF HAD BEEN ABOUT TO MAKE A TELEPHONE CALL, though he was not at all sure that he should. He was in his office and had been thinking of April Latimer. He had never met the young woman, had never even seen her, as far as he knew, though he might have passed her by in a corridor of the hospital, yet the thought of her kept coming back to his mind. It was as if he had glimpsed a figure in the fog and were stumbling in pursuit of it, though it maintained a maddeningly constant distance in front of him and at times disappeared altogether amidst the deceptive, gray billowings. The recollection of that day in Bill Latimer’s office with Latimer and April’s mother and her brother nagged at him; it had felt unreal, like an amateur theatrical per formance put on just for him. Someone there knew something more than had been said.
Oscar Latimer answered the phone himself, on the first ring.
They had agreed to meet by the canal at Huband Bridge. Quirke was early and went down to the towpath and sat on the old iron bench there, huddled in his coat. The rain had stopped and it was damp and misty, with a great stillness everywhere, and when a drop fell from one of the branches of the plane tree above him and landed with a thwack on the brim of his hat it made him start. Ghosts lingered in this place, the ghost of Sarah, poor, lost Sarah, and even the ghost of himself, too, as he was then, when she was alive and they used to walk on days like this beside the water here. Today moorhens paddled among the reeds, as they had then, and that same willow trailed its finger-tips in the shallows, and a double-decker bus that might have been the prototype of all green buses went past up there at Baggot Street, lumbering over the hump-backed bridge with the ungainly grace of some large, loping creature of the forest.
He should have married Sarah when he had the chance, should not have let her turn in her disappointment of him to Mal, who was not worthy of her. Vain thoughts, vain regrets.
He lit a cigarette. The smoke that he exhaled lingered in the moist air, vague and uncertain, with not a breath of breeze to disperse it. He held the match before his eyes and watched the flame burn steadily along the wood. Should he let it scorch his fingers? In his life he craved some strong, irresistible sensation, of pain, of anguish, or of joy. It would take more than a match flame to furnish that.
Oscar Latimer arrived from the direction Quirke was not looking in, from Lower Mount Street. Quirke heard his light, rapid footsteps and turned, and stood up from the bench and threw away his half-smoked cigarette and squared his shoulders. Why should he be nervous of this dapper, pent-up little man? Perhaps it was precisely because of what it was that was pent up in him, all that indignation, that anger, that sense he gave of an insulted self raging for release and never finding it. He wore a short, herringbone tweed overcoat and a tweed cap. He kept his hands in his pockets and stood before Quirke and looked up at him with an expression of di
staste and sour skepticism. “Well?” he said. “Here I am- what have you to say to me?”
“Let’s walk along for a bit, shall we?” Quirke said.
Latimer shrugged, and they set off on the path. Quirke was thinking what a contrast they must make, the two of them, him so large and Latimer so little. A dun-colored duck rose up out of the grass verge and waddled ahead of them for a little way along the path and then flopped into the water.
“I haven’t been here since I was a child,” Oscar Latimer said. “I had an aunt who lived in Baggot Street; she used to take us over here to fish for minnows. What was it we called them? There was an Irish name, what was it?”
“Pinkeens?” Quirke said. “Or bardуgs was another word.”
“Bardуgs? I don’t remember that. We put them in jam jars. Horrible things, they were, just two big eyes with a tail attached, but we were thrilled to catch them. My aunt used to make handles for the jam jars out of string. She had a special knack; I could never see how she did it. She’d wrap the string tight under the neck of the jar and then tie a special knot that let the string loop over two or three times to form the handle.” He shook his head wonderingly. “It seems so long ago. An age.”
The fellow could be no more than thirty-five, Quirke was thinking. “Yes,” he said, “the past wastes no time becoming the past, all right.”
Latimer was not listening. “We were happy, April and I, here, with our fishing nets. Life was suddenly- simple, for a few hours.”
A workman in shiny black waders was standing hip-deep in the canal, cutting reeds with a knife. They paused a moment to watch. The knife had a long, thin, hooked blade. The man eyed them warily. “That’s a dirty old day,” he said. Quirke wondered if he was a Council worker or if he was gathering the reeds for himself, to fashion something from them. But what? Baskets? Mats? He made the cutting of the stiff, dry stalks seem effortless. Quirke felt a twinge of envy. How would it be, to live so simple a life?
They walked on.
“Where’s your daughter today?” Latimer asked. “I presume it’s again about April you wanted to speak to me, yes?”
“And I suppose you’re going to tell me again that it’s none of my business.”
Latimer gave a brief, dismissive laugh. “Do I need to?”
They came to Baggot Street bridge and climbed the steps to the street. Across the way, the poet Kavanagh, in overcoat and cap, was sitting in the window of Parsons Bookshop, among the books laid out there, with his elbows on his knees and the holes in the soles of his cracked shoes on display, intently reading. Passersby took no heed of him, being accustomed to the sight.
“Have you had lunch?” Latimer asked. “We might get a sandwich somewhere.” He looked doubtfully in the direction of the Crookit Bawbee.
“There’s Searsons, down the way,” Quirke said.
The place was crowded with lunchtime drinkers, but they found two stools by the bar at the back. Quirke ordered a cheese sandwich, fearing the worst, and Latimer asked for a ham salad and a half-pint of Guinness. Quirke said he would take a glass of water. The barman knew him, and gave him a quizzical look.
The sandwich was all that Quirke had expected; he opened it up and slathered Colman’s Mustard on the shiny slice of bright-orange, processed cheese. “You know about the blood on the floor beside April’s bed,” he said, “don’t you?”
When he was at school at St. Aidan’s there was a boy, he could not remember his name, that he used to beat up regularly, an odd, fey little creature with slicked-down, dandruffy hair and an overlapping front tooth. Quirke had nothing in particular against him. It was just that nothing, not even repeated punchings, could ruffle the little twerp’s composure and air of self-possession. He almost seemed to like being hit; it seemed, infuriatingly, to amuse him. Latimer was like that, detached and slyly smiling and mysteriously untouchable. For a time now he went on calmly eating and might not have heard what Quirke had said. Then he spoke. “I don’t find it appropriate to discuss this kind of thing with you, Quirke. It’s a family matter, and you’re not even a policeman.”
“That’s true,” Quirke said, “I’m not. Only the police, too, have been told that your sister’s disappearance is a family matter. And frankly, Mr. Latimer, I don’t think it is.”
Latimer was smiling thinly to himself. He put a forkful of moist, pale-pink ham into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully for a minute, then took a delicate sip of his stout. “You keep saying she has disappeared. How do you know that?”
Quirke had bitten into his sandwich, and now he put it back on the plate and pushed the plate aside and drank a deep draught of water from his glass; the water tasted faintly of tar. “Your sister hasn’t been seen in three weeks,” he said. “I’d say disappeared is the right word.”
“By whom?”
“What?”
“She hasn’t been seen by whom in three weeks?” He spoke as if to a child, or to one of his patients, spacing the words deliberately, giving each one an equal emphasis.
“Have you seen her?” Quirke asked. “Have you heard from her?”
Latimer touched a finger to his stubbly, sparse mustache and again smiled faintly. He ate his food and drank his drink, with a contented air. His hands, freckled on the back, were tiny, pale, and deft. He wiped his lips on a paper napkin and turned on the stool, putting an elbow on the bar, and gazed at Quirke for a long moment, as if measuring him. “I’ve asked around about you,” he said. “About your background, where you come from.”
“And what did you find out?”
“You come from nowhere, apparently. Some orphanage here in the city, then an industrial school over in the west, from where you were sprung- I think that’s the right word?- by Judge Garret Griffin, who brought you up in his home as if you were his own son. You and Malachy Griffin, like brothers. All very colorful, I must say.” He chuckled. “Like something you’d read in a cheap novelette.”
Quirke rotated the water glass on its base, round and round, as if he were trying to screw it into the wood of the counter. “That about sums it up,” he said. “As a matter of interest, who were your informants?”
“Oh, various people. You know what this town is like; everyone knows everyone else’s business.”
Malachy, Quirke was thinking- would Malachy have spoken to this vehement little man? What if he had? None of what Latimer had said was a secret. He gazed along the length of the bar. The light indoors was brownish, dim, and outside it was gray. He felt he was in a cave, far at the back, crouched and watching.
“I mention all this,” Latimer said, “to make the point that you can’t possibly know anything about families. How could you? There are ties you wouldn’t feel- blood ties.”
“Blood ties? I thought we dispensed with stuff like that when we left the caves.”
“Ah, but there, you see? The very fact that you say that shows your ignorance, your lack of experience in these things. The family is the unit of society and has been since the very beginning, when we were still going on all fours- you know that much, at least, surely. Blood is blood. It binds”- he clenched one of those little hands into a fist and held it up before Quirke’s face-”it holds.”
Quirke signaled to the barman and asked for a whiskey- Bushmills Black Label- slurring the words as if to pretend he was not really speaking them. The barman gave him another look, more knowing than the first one, more complicit.
Latimer was picking up crumbs from his plate rapidly with the wetted tip of a finger and putting them into his mouth. His head was small, too small even for that neat little body. A tomtit, Quirke thought, that is what he is like, a tomtit bird, quick, bright, hungry, watchful.
“Tell me the truth,” Quirke said quietly. “Tell me where April is.”
Latimer widened his eyes, putting on a look of large, mild innocence. “What makes you think I know?”
The barman brought the whiskey, and Quirke drank off half of it in one swallow. The feeling of it spreading through his chest made
him think of a small, many-branched tree bursting slowly into hot, bright flames.
“Your sister disappears, vanishes without trace,” he said, shifting his weight on the stool. “There’s blood on the floor beside her bed that someone has cleaned up. It’s a very particular type of blood. Her family’s reaction is to hush up the whole thing-”
“Hush up!” Latimer said, with an ugly laugh. “You make us sound like the Borgias.”
Quirke said nothing to that. “I think you know where she is,” he said in a harsh undertone. “I think you all know- you, your mother, your uncle.”
“They don’t.”
“What?” Quirke turned to look at him. “What do you mean, they don’t? Does that mean that you do? Tell me.”
Latimer calmly drank the last of his drink, then wiped a fringe of foam from his silly mustache with a busy finger, more like a cat now than a bird. “I mean,” he said, “that none of us knows.” He chuckled again, shaking his head as if at something childish. “You’re quite wrong about all this, you know, Quirke. It’s what I said earlier, you don’t understand families, and especially you don’t understand a family such as ours.” Quirke too had finished his drink, and Latimer signaled to the barman to bring him another one. “Tell me, what, really, do you know about the Latimers, Dr. Quirke?”
Quirke was watching the barman reaching for the Bushmills. “I only know,” he said, “what everyone else does.” There is, he was thinking, something special about the way light congregates inside a whiskey bottle, the way it glows there, tawny and dense, as it does nowhere else; something almost sacramental.
“To belong to a family like mine,” Latimer said, tapping the tip of an index finger on the bar for emphasis, “is like being a member of a secret society- no, a secret tribe, one that has accepted all that’s demanded of it by the invading mercenaries and missionaries but on the quiet still keeps to its own ways, its own customs, its own gods- especially its own gods. Outside, in the world, we look like everyone else, we talk like everyone else, we might be everyone else- in other words, we blend in. But among ourselves we’re a breed apart. It comes, I suppose, from being obsessed with ourselves- I mean with each other.” He paused. Quirke’s whiskey arrived. He had determined he would not touch it until a full minute had gone by. He looked at the blood-red second hand of his watch making its round, steadily and, so it seemed to him, smugly. “My father,” Latimer said, “was a very proud man. Everybody knew him for a hell-raiser and all that, but it was only a front. Inside the house he was nothing like the image the world had of him.”
Elegy For April Page 16
