Elegy For April

by Benjamin Black

  Phoebe felt as if she had struggled through a dense and thorny thicket and come out into an ashen, waste place. “So they were lovers,” she said flatly.

  “What?” Isabel stared and gave what sounded like a forced laugh. “Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word used in real life, outside the theater? Lovers, indeed!”

  “Well, weren’t they- aren’t they?”

  Isabel shrugged. “My dear,” she said in her jaded, worldly way, “you really have the most vivid imagination, for the convent girl you pretend to be. Patrick of course must be fairly bursting with primitive urges- but lovers? I can’t quite see it, can you? You know what April is like.”

  “What do you mean, what she’s like?”

  “Well, I rather think there’s a lot more talk there than action. In my experience the ones who seem the keenest goers turn out to be virgins in the end.” She patted her friend’s hand. “How quaint you are, darling Phoebe, quaint and adorably straitlaced. Are you jealous? You’re blushing- you are jealous. Mind you, I can understand it. He is quite a hunk of dusky manhood, isn’t he?” Her voice had hardened, and there was that cold, bitter light in her eyes again.

  “Yes,” Phoebe said, “yes, he’s very- he’s very beautiful.”

  Isabel looked at her. “For God’s sake,” she said sharply, “don’t say you’re smitten, too.”

  Phoebe would not weep; weeping would bring no comfort to her suddenly wrung heart. She was sure, what ever Isabel said, that April and Patrick had been lovers. The notion of it had often crossed her mind, but she had never really believed it; now she did. Once planted, the conviction would not weaken. And Isabel was right, she was jealous. But the worst of it was she did not know which of them she was jealous of, April or Patrick.

  No, she would not weep.

  ***

  AND THEN OF COURSE NEXT DAY SHE HAD TO GO AND MAKE A FOOL of herself. She knew she should not do it, but she went ahead and did. She reasoned that since it was her lunch hour she could pretend, if she had to, that she was out for a stroll. Ridiculous, of course; who would believe that anyone would stroll all the way from Grafton Street up to Christ Church in this weather? She had not really expected to see him; after all, what were the chances that he would be at home in the middle of the day? Not that she had any intention of calling on him. What, then, was she thinking of? It was childish; she was like a schoolgirl hanging about the streets hoping for a glimpse of some boy she had a crush on. She told herself to stop being stupid and turn back, yet on she went, through the foul, damp air, and when she turned from Christchurch Place into Castle Street there he was! She saw him walking towards her from the other direction, in his brown duffle coat and a woolen scarf, carrying a string bag of groceries. He did not spot her right away and she thought of turning on her heel and fleeing, but she knew it was too late; he would see her then, surely, running away, and would think her an even bigger fool, and furthermore she would know herself for a coward. So she went on, forcing herself to seem as surprised as he must be.

  “Phoebe!” he said, stopping, with that big smile of his. “How good to see you.”

  “I was- I was meeting someone,” she said. “Over at the cathedral. A friend of mine. I just left her.” She was babbling, she could hear herself. “I forgot you lived in this street. I’m on my way back to work.”

  Patrick was still smiling. He must know she was lying. What would he think she was doing here? Would he realize she must have been hoping he would be there and she would meet him? “Come in for a minute,” he said. “It’s so cold.”

  It was a shabby little house that he lived in, with a narrow front door painted in wavy lines and varnished to look like wood. He had the upstairs flat; she had never been in it before. His landlady occupied the ground floor. “She is out,” he said, “so there is no need to worry.” The hall was laid with cheap lino, and the stairs were steep and had a dank smell. He had done what he could to make the tiny, bleak living room seem homely, with colored posters on the walls and a bright-red blanket draped over the back of an old armchair. She was aware of the bed in the corner but would not allow herself to look at it. His desk was a folding card table set up under the window. On it, beside a green Olivetti portable typewriter and a stack of textbooks, stood a framed photograph of a middle-aged couple in tribal costume, the woman wearing an elaborate headdress. There was a telephone on the floor beside the bed; she noticed it was an old-fashioned one, like April’s, with that winder on the side.

  “Have you had your lunch?” Patrick asked. “I was going to make something.” Phoebe was gazing at a small bronze figure on the windowsill; it was of a big-eyed, fearsome-seeming warrior in a spiked helmet brandishing an elaborate spear or some sort of long, ornamental sword, broad at the tip. “From Benin,” Patrick said, following her gaze. “It is an oba- a king, or ruler. Do you know about the Benin bronzes?”

  Phoebe shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, no need. Very few people up here know about Benin- African art can never be sophisticated in Europe an eyes. This piece is a copy, of course.”

  He went into an alcove where there was a sink and a wall cupboard and, perched precariously on a shelf, a Baby Belling electric stove, hardly bigger than a hatbox, with a single cooking ring. He filled a kettle and put it on the ring to boil, and began to unpack the string bag on the draining board. “Would you like coffee or tea?” he asked. “I have cheese and bread and dates. Are you hungry?”

  “I love dates,” she said, though she had never tasted them before.

  He had no pot and made the coffee in a saucepan instead. The coffee was black and bitter and she could feel the grounds like sand between her teeth, yet she thought she had never tasted anything so wonderful and exotic, so redolent of elsewhere. They sat facing each other across a little low table, she in the armchair with the red blanket and he perched on a comical little three-legged stool. The dates were sticky and tasted like chocolate. Over the rim of the mug she watched Patrick’s hands. They were large and almost square, with very thick fingers that seemed to caress with elaborate tenderness the things they touched. Here, like this, in his own place, among his own things, he seemed younger than he did elsewhere, boyish, almost, and a little shy, a little vulnerable. “Would you like some cheese?” he asked. When he spoke the last word his lower lip was drawn down, and she glimpsed the pink inside of his mouth, more crimson than pink, a dark, secret, soft place. From the corner of her eye she saw that he had put her coat on the bed; it lay at an angle with one sleeve outflung. It might have been her, prostrate there.

  “I lied,” she said. “I wasn’t meeting a friend. I wasn’t meeting anyone.”

  “Oh?” He showed no surprise, only smiled again. When he smiled he had a way of dipping his large head quickly down to one side and up again, which made him seem awkward and happy at the same time.

  “The truth is I came up here in the hope that I’d see you. And what a strange coincidence, meeting you in the street. I could hardly believe it when I saw you.”

  “Yes, a coincidence. I decided to stay at home today”- he nodded towards the table with its pile of books-”to study.” He ate with small, deft, quick movements, strange to see in one so broad and solid, those big fingers bunched and lifting morsel after morsel to his lips, those lips that seemed dry, and were cracked, and yet looked soft, too, soft as some kind of dark, ripe fruit. “Why did you want to see me?” he asked.

  She drank her coffee, holding the mug in both hands, huddled into herself. She continued trying not to see the coat on the bed, but there it was, sprawled there, at once blameless and suggestive. “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I wanted to talk about April. I keep thinking… oh, I don’t know. I keep thinking of the things that could have happened to her.” She looked at him almost beseechingly. “Do you think she’ll come back?”

  He said nothing for a while. Outside, a bell chimed the hour, and a moment later another bell rang, farther off, from St. Patrick’s.
Only this city, she thought, would have two cathedrals within a few hundred yards of each other, and both of them Protestant. At last Patrick said, “Did anyone talk to her family?”

  “My father and I went to see her brother. He knew nothing, he said, and cared nothing, either. They always hated each other, he and April.”

  “And Mrs. Latimer?”

  “Yes, my father went to see her, too. He went with a detective.”

  Patrick stared at her, his eyes, the orbs themselves, seeming to grow larger, the whites swelling. “A detective?” he said. “Why?”

  “My father knows him- I do, too, sort of. His name is Hackett. It’s all right, he’s very- discreet.”

  Patrick looked aside, nodding slowly, thinking. “And what did she say, Mrs. Latimer?”

  “Nothing either, I think. Her brother-in-law was there, April’s uncle, the Minister. The family is uniting to protect itself, my father says. I suppose they think April has done something that will harm their precious reputation, which is probably all they care about.” Why was she speaking like this, so bitterly, with such resentment, suddenly? What business was it of hers what the Latimers said or did not say, what they did or did not do? None of that would bring April back. And then, the next moment, she was shocked to find herself looking into Patrick’s great, broad, flat-nosed face and asking, “Do you love her?”

  At first she thought he was not going to answer, that he would pretend she had not spoken or that he had not heard or understood her. He blinked slowly; there were times when he seemed to exist at a different pace from everything around him.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said simply, his voice very deep and deliberate. “Do you mean, am I in love?” She nodded, with lips compressed. He smiled and opened his hands wide before her, showing her those broad, pink palms. “April is wonderful,” he said, “but I think it would not be easy to be in love with her.”

  “People don’t expect being in love to be easy, do they?” she said. “I wouldn’t expect it to be easy- I wouldn’t want it to be.”

  Patrick lowered his head and flexed his shoulders slowly, as if he felt something being drawn in around him.

  “It’s all right,” Phoebe said, and had to stop herself from reaching out and touching his hand. “It’s none of my business. Tell me about the Benin bronzes.”

  He put down his coffee mug and rose and walked to the window. How lightly he moved, in a swaying prance, big and yet strangely delicate, like, she realized, yes, like her father. He took up the bronze figure from the sill and weighed it in his hands. Outside, she saw, it had begun to rain, in an absentminded sort of way.

  “Benin was a great city,” he said, “at the heart of a great empire. The Bini people were ruled from earliest times by the Ogisos, the sky-kings. Ekaladerhan, son of the last Ogiso, was banished and lived among the Yoruba people, where he changed his name and became the great Oduduwa, ruler of the city of Ife. When the elders of the Bini people sent to plead with Oduduwa to return and be their oba, he sent his son instead, and the dynasty continued. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to come, then the Dutch, and then, of course, the British. At the end of the last century a handful of British representatives were killed in the city, and the famous Punitive Expedition was launched, the palace of the last oba was sacked, and its treasures were destroyed or stolen. Most of the bronzes from the palace are now in”- he gave a brief, d ismissive laugh- “the British Museum.” He stopped, still hefting the warrior thoughtfully, his eyes hooded. She could tell it was a tale he had often told, and had become a kind of performance, a kind of chant. She imagined April sitting here where she was sitting, watching him at the window with the bronze figure in his hand. What did she know about April or about this man from Africa? What did she know about her friend Isabel Galloway, for that matter, or Jimmy Minor- what did she know? Everyone, she thought, is a stranger.

  “Is that where you’re from,” she asked, “from Benin?”

  “No,” he said, “no, I am an Igbo. I was born in a small village, on the Niger, but I grew up in Port Harcourt. Not a very pretty place.”

  She did not care where he was born, what city or cities he had lived in. She felt all at once bereft by his talk of these so far-off places, where she would never be, which she would never know. The rain whispered against the window, as if it, too, had a story to tell her.

  “Do you miss it, your home?” she asked, trying not to let him hear the woe in her voice.

  “I suppose I do. We all miss our home, don’t we, when we leave it.”

  “Oh, but you haven’t left, have you?” she said quickly. “I mean, you’ll go back. Surely they need doctors in Nigeria?”

  He gave her a sharp, sly glance, and his smile turned chilly. “Of course- we need everything. Except missionaries, maybe. Of them, we have enough.”

  She did not know what to say to this; she supposed she had offended him, it seemed so easy to do. He put the figure back on the sill carefully, in the spot where it had been- was it a holy thing for him, reaching down to the deep roots of his past?-and came back and sat down opposite her again on the wooden stool.

  “You know that’s a milking stool,” she said. “I can’t think where you got it from.”

  “It was here when I came. Perhaps Mrs. Gilligan was a milkmaid when she was young.” He laughed. “Mrs. Gilligan is my landlady. If you knew her, you would see the joke. Hair curlers, headscarf, cigarette. The cows would not like her, I think.” He picked up a crumb of cheese in that way that he did, bunching his thick fingers, and put it thoughtfully into his pink mouth. “Sometimes,” he said, and his tone was suddenly changed, “sometimes it’s hard, here, for me. I get tired- tired of the way I am looked at, tired of the scowls, the muttered remarks.”

  “You mean, because you’re… because of your color?”

  He plucked up another morsel from his plate. “It does not relent, that is what is the worst of it. I forget sometimes, about my”- he smiled, making a little bow of acknowledgment- “my color, but not for long. There is always someone to remind me of it.”

  “Oh!” she said, appalled. “I didn’t mean… I mean I-”

  “Not you,” he said. “Not my friends. I’m lucky to have such friends- you cannot know how lucky.”

  There was a long silence. They listened to the sibilant sound of the rain on the windowpanes.

  “I’m sorry I asked you that about April,” Phoebe said. “About your being- about her-”

  “About my being ‘in love’ with her?” He did that little bob of his head again, smiling. “I could not afford to love someone like April. There is April herself, what she is like, and then there is, too, my ‘color.’ “

  “I’m sorry,” she said again, in a small voice, looking down.

  “Yes,” he said, almost as softly, “so am I.”

  When, five minutes later, she came out into the street- Patrick stood in the doorway looking after her as she walked away- she felt more confused than ever. While she was sitting with him and he was talking to her, she had thought she understood, in some way beyond the actual words he had spoken, what he was saying, but now she realized that she had understood nothing. It was strange- what was there to understand? What had she expected him to say, what had she wanted him to say? She had wanted him to tell her, to reassure her, that he and April had not gone to bed together that night after the drinks at the Shakespeare, not that night or any other, but he had not told her that. Perhaps it was her fault, perhaps she had asked the wrong question, or asked the right one but framed it in a mistaken way; yes, perhaps that was it. Yet what other words could she have used?

  The fine rain fell and gleamed on the cobbles with what seemed a malignant intent, and she had to pick her way along carefully for fear that she would lose her footing and fall. But she was falling. She felt something opening inside her, dropping open like a trapdoor, creaking on its hinges, and all underneath was darkness and uncertainty and fear. She did not know how she knew, but she did kn
ow, now, without any remaining shadow of doubt, that April Latimer was dead.

  IT WAS IN THE AFTERNOON WHEN INSPECTOR HACKETT TELEphoned. “Wouldn’t February make you want to emigrate?” he said, and did his gurgling laugh. Quirke, in his flat, had been asleep on the sofa with a book open on his chest. How unfair it was, he thought, with a warm rush of self-pity, that even though he had not taken a drink in weeks he still found himself falling into what might be drunken dozings, from which he would wake with all the symptoms of a hangover. “Did I disturb you?” the policeman asked, with amusement. “Were you in the middle of something, as they say?” He paused, breathing. “ The lads from the forensics gave me their report. That was blood, all right. A couple of weeks old, too. There must have been a big splash that someone mopped up.”

  Quirke rubbed his eyes until they smarted. “How big?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “What about the bed- how is it there were no bloodstains on it?”

  “There were, if you looked close enough, which apparently I didn’t. Only on the side, a few little specks. Must have been a rubber sheet or something under her.”

  “Oh, Lord.” He was picturing the girl, a faceless figure in a shift, with one shoulder strap fallen down, sitting on the edge of the bed with her head hanging and legs splayed and the blood falling on the floor, drop by frightening drop.

  For a time neither spoke. Quirke gazed at the window, at the rain, at the already darkening day.

  “What’s significant,” Hackett said, “is the kind of blood it was.”

  “Oh, yes? What kind was it?”

  “They have some technical name for it, I can’t remember- it’s written down here somewhere.” There was the sound of papers being riffled through. “Can’t find the blasted thing,” the policeman muttered. “Anyway, it’s the kind that would be there after a miscarriage, or…” He paused.