Elegy For April

by Benjamin Black

  The minute was up. In Quirke’s breast another small tree flared and flamed.

  “What was he like, then?” Quirke asked, taking a second sip of whiskey and holding it in his mouth, savoring the scald of it.

  “He was a monster,” Latimer said, without emphasis. “Oh, not in the conventional sense. A monster of pride and determination and- and dauntlessness. Do you know what I mean? No, you don’t, of course. How I loved him, how we all did. I suppose I should have hated him. He was a big man, with a big heart, handsome, dashing, brave- all the things that I’m not.”

  He paused, gazing into the creamy dregs of his glass. Quirke’s whiskey glass was almost empty again, and he was measuring off another minute on his watch. “You’ve made a success of your life,” he said. “Look at the reputation you have, at- what age are you?”

  “Anyone can become a physician,” Latimer said dismissively, “but you have to be born a hero.” He turned to Quirke again. “I suppose my uncle told you how he and my father fought side by side in the General Post office in 1916? My father fought, all right, but Uncle Bill did nothing more than carry a few messages and was nowhere near the GPO that week. That didn’t stop him getting elected on the patriotic ticket. My father despised him. Little Willie, he used to call him, the man in the gap.”

  The minute had fled, and Quirke was gazing pensively at his reemptied glass. “How did he and April get on?”

  Latimer laughed. “You just won’t let the subject of poor April alone, will you?” He shrugged. “She loved him as I did, of course. His death was a disaster in both our lives. It’s as I say, Quirke, you wouldn’t understand that kind of closeness. And then my mother erected the monument to her beloved, lost husband. It was more like a totem pole, but carved out of the living tree and set solidly in the middle of the living room floor. It kept growing all the time, sending its branches along the hall and up the stairs into the bedrooms, and under its shade we clung to each other. The leaves never fell off those limbs.”

  His voice had grown husky, and Quirke wondered uneasily if he were going to weep.

  “Yes,” Quirke said, “I suppose it would be hard, living in the shadow of a man like your father.”

  Latimer sat quiet for a long moment, then, suddenly gone pale, he turned on Quirke a look of deep and furious scorn. “I don’t want your pity, Quirke,” he said. “Don’t you dare.”

  Quirke said nothing, only signaled for another drink.

  16

  THE EARLY DARK HAD FALLEN BY THE TIME HE GOT BACK TO the hospital. He descended with careful steps the grand marble staircase that led to nothing but the dim lower regions of the building. The pathology department was empty- Sinclair must have decided to let himself go home early. He went into his office and sat down in his overcoat at his desk and lit a cigarette, encountering a difficulty in aligning the tip of it with the match flame. He could hear the heavy sound of his own breathing. He scowled. He could not remember what it was he was supposed to be thinking about. It might be best, he thought, to lie down for a while. He took off his coat- was there rain, had he been walking in it?- and curled up on the old buttoned-down green leather sofa in the corner and at once pitched headlong into riotous sleep, in which he dreamt of being lured along endless, dark, and winding corridors by something he could not see but only sense, a catlike, purring presence retreating ahead of him, always around the next corner, and then the next. He woke with a muffled cry and did not know where he was. He had dribbled in his sleep, and his spit had dried and made his cheek stick to the leather of the sofa. He sat up, gouging the heels of his hands into his eyes. His mouth felt as if it had been reamed of two or three layers of protective membrane. His innards, too, were burning. Insult- the word came to him, reverberant-a gross insult to the system. It was a judgment he had handed down himself on many a cadaver.

  He fumbled with his sleeve, squinting at the face of his watch that refused to stay steady, but kept flicking sideways in a dizzy-making fashion. He had suddenly remembered his dinner date with Phoebe. He lowered his head, a throbbing gourd, into his cupped hands, and groaned.

  THEY WENT TO THE RUSSELL. THE PLACE WAS SOMBER AND SILENT as it always was. After lunching with him here one day Rose Crawford had refused to return, saying the dining room reminded her of a funeral parlor. The waiter who showed him to his table was fascinatingly ugly, with a square, blue jaw and deeply sunken eyes under a jutting brow. Quirke remembered that his name, improbably, was Rodney. He saw with relief that Phoebe had not arrived; he had forgotten what time they had agreed to meet, and he had assumed he would be late. While Rodney was drawing back his chair for him he caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the gilt-framed looking-glass on the wall behind the table. Tousled and wild of eye, he was a dead ringer for the escaped convict in a Hollywood prison picture. “Now, sir,” the waiter said, pronouncing it surr. Quirke sat down, turning his back on the mirror.

  He had walked from the hospital in his still-damp, heavy overcoat and his droop-brimmed hat. The whiskey he had drunk with Oscar Latimer had left him with a hollowed-out, ashen sensation, and lingering fumes of alcohol swirled in a hot fog in his head. That sleep on the couch had not helped, either, and he was groggy. Would he drink a glass of wine with Phoebe- should he?

  Phoebe when she arrived was wearing a dark-blue silk dress and a blue silk stole. As she walked across the room, making her way between the tables in Rodney’s wake, she looked so like her mother that Quirke felt a catch in his heart. She had tied her hair back in that complicated way that Delia used to do, and carried a small black purse pressed against her breast, and that, too, was Delia to the life.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, seating herself quickly, “have you been here long?”

  “No, no, just arrived. You look very nice.”

  She set the velvet purse beside her plate. “Do I?” she said. Quirke was normally not one for compliments.

  “Is that a new dress?”

  “Oh, Quirke.” She made a smiling grimace. “You’ve seen me in it a dozen times.”

  “Well, it looks different on you this time. You look different.”

  She did. Her face glowed, ivory with the faintest tinge of pink, and her eyes shone. Had she met someone? Was she in love? He longed for her to be happy; it would release him from so much.

  “That waiter,” she said in a whisper, indicating Rodney, where he stood just inside the door, blank-faced as a statue, with a napkin draped over his wrist, off in some idle dream of his own. “He’s a dead ringer for Dick Tracy in the comics.”

  Quirke laughed. “You’re right, he is.”

  They ate sole fried in butter. “Has it ever struck you,” Phoebe said, “that you and I always order the same thing?”

  “It’s simple. I wait to see what you’re having and then ask for the same.”

  “Do you really?”

  “Yes.”

  She gazed at him, and something happened to her smile, a sort of crimpling at the edges of it, and her eyes grew liquid. He lowered his gaze hastily to the tablecloth.

  The wine waiter arrived. Quirke had ordered a bottle of Chablis. It was good they were having fish, since white wine was hardly a drink at all, and so he would be safe. The waiter, a sleek-haired, acned youth, poured out a sip for Quirke to taste and while he waited let his pale eye wander appreciatively over Phoebe, all ivory glow in her night-blue frock. She smiled up at him. She was happy; she had been absurdly happy all afternoon, since that moment with Rose Crawford outside the American Express office. She had read somewhere that there are insects that travel from continent to continent suspended individually in tiny bubbles of ice borne along by air currents at an immense height; that was how she had been, sailing aloft in a frozen cocoon, and now the ice was melting, and soon she would come sailing down happily to earth. Quirke and Rose; Mr. and Mrs. Quirke; the Quirkes. She saw them, the three of them, standing at the rail of a white ship cleaving its way through waters as blue as summer, the sea wind soft in their faces, on t
heir way to a new world.

  What age was Rose? she wondered. Older than Quirke, certainly; it would not matter; nothing would matter.

  “Tell me about Delia,” she said.

  Quirke looked at her over the rim of his wine glass in startlement and alarm. “Delia?” he said, and licked his lips. “What- what do you want me to tell you?”

  “Anything. What she was like. What you did together. I know so little about her. You’ve never told me anything, really.” She was smiling. “Was she very beautiful?”

  In panic he fingered his napkin. The steaming fish lay almost menacingly on the plate before him. His headache was suddenly worse. “Yes,” he said, hesitantly, “she was- she was very beautiful. She looked like you.” Phoebe blushed and dipped her head. “Elegant, of course,” Quirke went on, desperately. “She could have been a model, everybody said so.”

  “Yes, but what was she like? I mean as a person.”

  What she was like? How was he to tell her that? “She was kind,” he said, casting down his gaze again and fixing anew on the napkin, somehow accusing in its whiteness, its mundane purity. “She took care of me.” She was not kind, he was thinking; she did not take care of me. Yet he had loved her. “We were young,” he said, “or at least I was.”

  “And did you hate me,” she asked, “did you hate me when she died?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. He forced himself to smile; his cheeks felt as if they were made of glass. “Why would I hate you?”

  “Because I was born and Delia died, and you gave me to Sarah.”

  She was still smiling. He sat and gazed at her helplessly, clutching his knife and fork, not knowing what to say. She reached across the table and touched his hand. “I don’t blame you anymore,” she said. “I don’t know that I ever did, only I felt I should. I was angry at you. I’m not now.”

  They sat in silence for a minute. Quirke filled their glasses; his hand, he saw, was a little shaky. They ate. The fish was cold.

  “I saw Inspector Hackett today,” Quirke said. He looked at the empty wine bottle lolling in its bucket of half-melted ice. Would he order another? No, he would not. Definitely not. He turned and signaled to the pimpled waiter. “I talked to her brother, too.”

  “Why?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you want to talk to him again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re like me- you can’t let it go.”

  The waiter came with the second bottle, but before he could begin again the tasting ritual Quirke motioned him impatiently to pour. Phoebe put a hand over her glass, smiling again at the waiter. When he had filled Quirke’s glass and gone, she said, “You think what I do, don’t you, that April is dead.” Quirke did not reply and would not look at her. “What did he say, Oscar Latimer?”

  Quirke drank his wine. “He talked about families. And obsession.”

  She looked at him quickly. “April talked about that too, one day, about being obsessed.”

  “What did she mean?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t understand her. April was- was strange, sometimes. I’ve come to think I didn’t know her at all. Why do people make life so difficult, Quirke?”

  Quirke had emptied his glass and was filling it again for himself, drops of ice water falling from the bottle onto the tablecloth and forming gray stains the size of florins. He was making himself drunk, she could see. She thought she should say something. He planted his elbows on the table and rolled the glass between his palms.

  “Hackett went to see the woman in the flat above April’s,” he said. “A Miss St. John Somebody- did you ever meet her?”

  She shook her head. “I saw her once or twice, lurking on the stairs. April sometimes brought things up to her, a bowl of soup, biscuits, things like that. What did she say to Inspector Hackett?”

  “He couldn’t get much out of her.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Mind you, she seems to have kept a watch on things. Saw people come and go.”

  “What sort of people?” Blue-jawed Rodney approached and inquired if they wished to see the dessert menu. They shook their heads, and he withdrew. As he padded away Phoebe noticed how shiny the seat of his trousers was; she always felt sorry for waiters, they had such a disappointed and melancholy air. She looked back at Quirke. His steadily blearing gaze was fixed on the wine glowing in the bottom of his glass. “What sort of people did she see?” she asked again.

  “Oh, people who came to see her. Visitors. Gentlemen callers, I suppose.”

  “Such as?”

  She felt a tingling at the base of her spine. She did not want to hear his answer.

  “One of them, it seems, one of the gentlemen callers, was black. Or so Miss Whatsit claims. Does April know any black men?”

  She was holding on tightly to the stem of her empty glass, pressing and pressing. The tingle in her spine ran all the way up, and for a second, absurdly, she had an image of one of those fairground test-your-strength machines, the sledgehammer striking on the pad and the weight shooting up along its groove and banging into the bell. Oh, no, she was thinking, oh, no.

  She shook her head, and a strand of her hair came loose and fell across her cheek and she pushed it quickly away again. “I don’t think so,” she said, trying to keep the wobble out of her voice.

  Quirke was looking round for the waiter, to order a glass of brandy.

  Phoebe put a hand on the velvet purse beside her plate, feeling the soft black fabric. She was thinking of the skin on the backs of Patrick’s hands, the ripple and gleam of it.

  Oh, no.

  SHE HAD TO HELP QUIRKE TO A TAXI. THE SKY HAD CLEARED AND A hard frost was falling, she could see it in the air, an almost dry, gray, grainy mist. He had said he would walk home, that it was no distance, that they could go together and he would see her over to Haddington Road and then return across the canal to his flat. “You’re not walking anywhere,” she said. “There’s ice on the ground already, look.” She had an image of him on a bridge, and then a great dark plummeting form, and then the splash. The doorman blew his whistle and the cab came rattling up, but still Quirke resisted, and in the end she had almost to shove him inside. He scrabbled at the door, trying to get out again, then rolled down the window and began to protest. “Go home, Quirke,” she said, reaching in and patting his hand. “Go home now, and sleep.” She told the driver the address and the taxi pulled away from the curb, and she saw Quirke in the rear seat topple backwards in his overcoat like a huge, jointless manikin, and then she could see him no more. She gave the doorman a shilling, and he thanked her and pocketed the coin and tipped a finger to the brim of his cap, and turned back into the yellow-lighted lobby, rubbing his hands. The night’s icy silence settled about her.

  She set off to walk. She could have gone in the taxi and delivered Quirke to Mount Street and then taken it on to her own place in Haddington Road, but it had not occurred to her. It seemed she was not going home. She thought of her room, the cheerless cold of it, the emptiness, waiting for her.

  At York Street she turned left. It was very dark in this steep, narrow defile, and the sound of her own footsteps on the pavement seemed unnaturally loud. The tenement houses were all unlighted, and there was no one abroad. A cat on a windowsill watched her with narrow-eyed surmise. Before her, low in the velvet darkness of the sky, a star was suspended, a sparkling, silver sword of icy light. In Golden Lane a tramp slouching in a doorway croaked something at her, and she hurried on. She supposed she should be frightened, all alone in the empty city in the hour before midnight, but she was not.

  At the corner of Werburgh Street, opposite the cathedral, clandestine, late drinkers were being let out through the side door of a pub. They loitered on the pavement, befuddled and muttering. One of them went and stood in a doorway to urinate; another began to sing in a hoarse, quavering voice.

  I dreamt that I dwe-elt in ma-arble halls…

  She hung back in the darkness, wa
iting for them to disperse. She thought of Quirke again, lolling helplessly in the taxi, looking back at her wild-eyed. He always seemed frightened when he was drunk. Soon he would be drinking again in earnest; she knew the signs. But Rose would put a stop to that.

  She walked forward quickly and passed by the drunks, telling herself not look at them. They took no notice of her. She turned into Castle Street.

  – That you loved me, lo-oved me still the same!

  There was a light on in the window of the upstairs flat, printing on the glass the pattern of the lace curtain inside. The cathedral bell began to toll, unnervingly loud, making the air shake around her. She stood and gazed up at the glowing window. Her toes and the tips of her fingers were going numb from the cold. Her breath flared before her in the frosted air. What would she say to him, how would she form the questions that were crowding in her mind? How was she even to let him know she was here? If she knocked on the door, she would alert his landlady. The bell finished tolling, and the last beats of sound faded on the air. Go! a voice inside her head urged her, go now! Instead she dug into her purse and found a ha’penny and, taking careful aim, flung it up at the window. She missed the first time, and the second- what a ringing noise the coins made when they fell back on the road!- then she had no more ha’pennies left and had to use a penny. This time she hit the target. There was such a sharp pang! of copper on glass that she thought everyone in the houses roundabout must hear it. She waited. Perhaps he was not there; perhaps he had gone out and forgotten to turn off the light. A courting couple, their arms linked, went past. The fellow gave her a speculative look from under the peak of his cap, but his girl only said good night. She looked up at the window again. The curtain had been pulled back, and Patrick was there, peering down into the street. She moved quickly into a circle of lamplight so that she would be more clearly visible. She could not make out his expression. Would he recognize her- could he even see her? He let the curtain fall back into place, and a minute later the front door opened a little way and a hand beckoned her in.