Elegy For April

by Benjamin Black

  Quirke shook his head. “No, she’s not in En gland. Or if she is, it’s not for that reason. She was pregnant, but not anymore.”

  “She lost it?” He said nothing. “She got rid of it- here?” A thought struck her, and she looked at him more keenly, more searchingly. “How do you know these things?”

  “I went to her flat- Phoebe and I.”

  “Oh, yes, of course, Phoebe told me. You had a detective with you. What clues did he find, your Sherlock Holmes?”

  Quirke hesitated. “There was blood, on the floor, beside the bed.”

  “April’s bed? “

  “Yes.”

  She looked down at the table. “Oh, God,” she breathed. “How squalid. Poor April.”

  He waited and then asked, “Would she have told you?”

  She was shaking her head slowly, in dismay and disbelief, not listening to him, and now she looked up. “What?”

  “What sort of terms are you on with April? I mean, would she talk to you about- about intimate things?”

  “You mean, would she tell me she had got knocked up? God, I don’t know. She’s a funny one, our April. Acts extroverted and careless, a free spirit and all that, but she’s secretive, more so than anyone I know.” She thought for a moment, narrowing her eyes. “Yes, there’s something hidden deep down, there, under layers and layers.” She tapped her cigarette meditatively on the side of the tin ashtray. “You think what Phoebe thinks, don’t you? You think something has- something has happened to April.”

  He looked at her. Why did they have to be talking about April Latimer? Why could he not be allowed to sit here at ease, in the glow of her fascinatingly tarnished beauty, watching the weak sunlight gilding the yard, drinking her awful coffee?

  THE MORNING WAS WELL ADVANCED BY THE TIME HE GOT TO Mount Street. He should shave now and go to work, for which he was hours late already. Among the house post on the hall table there was a letter for him, delivered by courier; the brown envelope had a harp on it- who would be writing to him from the government? One of the legacies of his childhood was a dread of all officialdom, a dread that he could never rid himself of. He carried the letter upstairs to his flat and laid it down, unopened, on the table in the living room and went to put away his coat and his hat. He lit the gas fire, too, and made himself a drink with hot water and honey and lemon juice from a lemon-shaped plastic container. He felt swollen and feverish, as if he were the one with the hangover; perhaps he was getting something, the flu, perhaps. He was distracted by images of Isabel lying naked in his arms, her skin so pale it was almost phosphorescent in the darkness. The word Portobello kept going round and round in his head, like the title of some song.

  The letter, when at last he brought himself to open it, was from Dr. William Latimer, TD, who addressed him as A Chara. The Minister requested Dr. Quirke to call at the Minister’s office in Kildare Street this morning at eleven o’clock- he looked at his watch and saw it was already thirty minutes past the hour- to discuss further the matter on which they had recently spoken. It closed by assuring him Is mise le meas, and was signed pp with an indecipherable signature with many accents on the vowels. He was about to pick up the telephone to call Leinster House when the machine suddenly exploded into an urgent shrilling. He flinched- a ringing telephone, even when it was his own, always alarmed him- then picked up the receiver gingerly.

  “Hello,” the voice said, in a familiar drawl. “It’s Rose here- Rose Crawford. Is that you, Quirke? Yes, it’s Rose! I’m back.”

  TWO

  11

  QUIRKE ARRIVED AT NOON AT GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS, WHERE he was received by the Minister’s private secretary, an oddly implausible person by the name of Ferriter, plump and shabby, with lank black hair and pendulous jowls. Quirke made his apologies for being late, and Ferriter said yes, that it had been necessary to reschedule two important meetings, his oily smile not faltering, which made the rebuke seem all the more pointed. He led Quirke into a cavernous room with two tall, grimed windows overlooking Leinster Lawn and left him there. Public buildings, their jaded atmosphere and brooding, somehow disapproving silences, always made Quirke uneasy; rooms such as this reminded him of the visitors’ room at Carricklea. Why that institution needed a visitors’ room was a puzzle, since no one came to visit except now and then one of the school inspectors from Dublin, who hurried through the building with his head down and fled the place without a backwards glance.

  He squeezed the bridge of his nose between a thumb and fore-finger; it was the second time today he had been forced to think of Carricklea.

  Still in his overcoat he went and stood at a window and gazed out on the lawn. Ferriter, making unctuous small talk, had claimed to detect a touch of spring in the air. If there was, it was lost on Quirke. Even the sunlight on the grass out there, pallid and uncertain, looked cold to his eye.

  Presently Ferriter came back to fetch him. They walked along airless corridors where their footfalls made hardly a sound on the thick carpeting. The few other officials that they passed by either avoided Ferriter’s eye or greeted him with obsequious smiles; he was clearly a man to be feared.

  Latimer’s office was paneled in dark wood and smelled of dust and mildewed papers. A tiny coal fire that was smoldering in an enormous grate was having little effect on the chilly, damp air. The window beside the desk looked out on a brick wall. Latimer sat behind his desk with his head bent over a document that he was pretending to read. Ferriter cleared his throat softly, and Latimer looked up in feigned surprise and bustled to his feet, extending a hand. Quirke apologized again for his lateness. “Not at all, not at all,” Latimer said distractedly. He seemed nervous, and there was a sickly tinge to his smile. “Sit down, please. Throw your coat on that chair.” He glanced at Ferriter. “That’ll be grand, Pierce,” he said, and the secretary padded away, silently shutting the high white door behind him.

  Latimer opened the lid of a lacquered box of fat, stubby cigarettes and turned the box towards Quirke. “The Turkish consulate sends them round,” he said. Quirke looked doubtfully at the cigarettes. “Yes, filthy things,” Latimer said. “I can’t stand the smell of them.” Quirke produced his own silver case and offered it across the desk, and they lit up. “Well,” the Minister said, leaning back in his chair, “this is a damned bad business and getting worse.”

  “You spoke to Inspector Hackett?”

  “He called me up, yes. That was a call I could have done without. I swear to God, I knew that girl would get us all into trouble someday.”

  Quirke studied the tip of his cigarette. “What did Hackett say?”

  “That blood he found under her bed, it’s hers, all right. They did tests- same blood type, type O, I think.” He stood up from the desk with an almost violent twist of his body and went to a small wooden cabinet in a corner and brought out a bottle of Jameson Redbreast and two cut-glass tumblers. “Will you have a drop, early as it is?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Well, I hope you won’t mind if I do. I need one, after that telephone call.”

  He set the glasses on the desk and filled one of them halfway and took a swallow of whiskey and grimaced. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head, “what a mess.” He sat down again and set his glass on the blotter before him and glared at it for a moment in angry silence. Then he lifted his eyes and looked hard at Quirke. “You know what this could do to me, Dr. Quirke, maybe even to the government?”

  “I’m not sure that I know what ‘this’ is,” Quirke said. “Have you news of April? Has she turned up? Have you heard from her?”

  Latimer waved his cigarette dismissively. “No, no. There’s no news of her. Christ knows where she is. And I’ll tell you this, wherever it is she’s gone to, I hope she intends staying there for a good long while. Either stays there or comes back quietly and keeps her mouth shut. If this gets into the papers-” He broke off and cast a glance wildly about the room, as if he could read the headlines already, written in stark black capitals on the
air.

  “Has Hackett set up an official investigation?” Quirke asked.

  “No, not yet-not official. I told him to hold off for a bit.” He took another sip of his whiskey. “If it wasn’t for that blood, God help us, I’d have made him lay off altogether.” He fixed his angry gaze on the glass again. Quirke waited. “Will you tell me, Quirke,” Latimer burst out, pained and angry, “why the hell did you bring a detective to her flat in the first place?”

  “We were worried,” Quirke said.

  “ We?”

  “My daughter and I.”

  “Aye-and are you any less worried now, the two of you?”

  Quirke had finished his cigarette and lit another. “Dr. Latimer,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, “I wonder if you’ve considered all the implications of what Inspector Hackett found in your niece’s bedroom? Are you aware of the particular kind of blood it was?”

  “Yes, I know, I know- Hackett told me. I’m shocked, but I’m not surprised.” He lifted his glass to drink again but instead set it back on the blotter and rose and went to the window and stood with one hand in a jacket pocket, looking out at the blank brick wall. “What does your daughter say about April?” he asked, without turning. “Does she know what sort of a girl she is?”

  “I don’t know. What sort of a girl is she?”

  “Well, Dr. Quirke, the sort, I suppose, that would leave blood like that on her bedroom floor. Oh, I don’t claim she’s bad all the way through. And anyway, she didn’t beg, borrow, or steal it, for she’s not the first wild one in the family.” He returned to the desk and sat down, looking weary suddenly. He put his face in his hands for a moment, shaking his head, and then looked up again. “Her father was in the GPO in 1916,” he said, “fought beside Pearse and Connolly.”

  “I know,” Quirke said.

  “Of course you do- doesn’t everyone?” Quirke caught the note of bitterness in his voice. “Conor Latimer, the man they couldn’t kill. And it was true; the British would have shot him but for who he was. Friend of Oliver Gogarty and George Bernard Shaw, Yeats and Lady Gregory- Lady Lavery, too, though we don’t mention that particular connection too often in the family, if you know what I mean. Were you aware that Bertrand Russell made a plea for clemency when the court-martial found him guilty?”

  “You were in the Rising too, weren’t you?”

  “Oh, I was, yes. I was no more than a lad and hardly knew one end of a rifle from the other. Conor had been in training for months, up in the Dublin Mountains.” He paused. “He was a hard man, Dr. Quirke, a mad Fenian without respect for God or man. He was my older brother and I loved him, but by Jesus I was afraid of him, too. It was like being around some kind of half-tamed animal; you could never tell what he would do next. And it’s from him that April got her wild streak. She’s the dead spit of him, the dead spit.” He drank off the last of the whiskey in the glass and helped himself to another splash. “And she never got over the loss of him, either. She adored him. When he died, although she was only a child at the time, something broke in her, that was never healed.” He sighed. “And now, God only knows what kind of trouble she’s after getting herself into. And as for her poor mother-”

  There was a light tap on the door, and Ferriter entered. As he crossed the room he seemed to trot somehow on tiptoe, stealthily. He leaned down and spoke into the Minister’s ear.

  “My sister-in-law and her son are here,” Latimer said to Quirke. “I asked them to come in; I hope you don’t mind.” He nodded to Ferriter, who once more withdrew, as silent as a shadow.

  Celia Latimer was as meticulously groomed as she had been the last time that Quirke had seen her, in Dun Laoghaire, but today, behind the calmness of manner and the queenly smile, he detected something drawn and anxious. She wore a mink coat and a little hat the size and blackness of a bat, held in place with a pearl pin. “Dr. Quirke,” she said, extending a gloved hand. “Very nice to see you again.”

  Quirke looked at the proffered hand; from the way she held it out to him, extended flat with the fingers dipped, it seemed she expected him to kiss it; instead he shook it briefly, feeling again that momentary, suggestive pressure. Oscar Latimer kept close behind his mother, bobbing busily from one side to the other, his face appearing now at her left shoulder, now at her right, as if she were a life-size doll that he was holding upright and walking along in front of him, as camouflage, or a shield. He nodded curtly to Quirke.

  “I asked Dr. Quirke to come along here today,” Bill Latimer said, “to be with us, because of his connection with April- I mean, his daughter’s connection. He’s as concerned as we are to know what’s going on with April.”

  Oscar Latimer and his mother turned their heads and gazed at Quirke with blank inquiry. He returned their look, saying nothing. He wondered if they knew about the blood in April’s bedroom. If they did, it would account for those fan-shaped clusters of worry lines at the outer edges of Celia Latimer’s eyes, and for the rabbity twitching of her son’s upper lip, where that ginger mustache, which surely must itch, looked more halfhearted and incongruous than ever. Oscar drew up a chair for his mother and placed another beside it and sat down. Now he and his mother and Quirke were set in a half circle in front of the desk.

  “Yes,” Celia Latimer was saying to her brother-in-law, in an acid tone, “I’ve no doubt Dr. Quirke is concerned.” She was looking pointedly at the whiskey glass standing on the blotter, and Latimer snatched it up guiltily and carried it to the cabinet in the corner and put it away. His sister-in-law turned to Quirke again. “Have you heard something of April, Dr. Quirke?”

  Quirke suddenly found himself thinking about the smell of Isabel Galloway’s skin. It was a warm, soft smell, with an undertone of what must be greasepaint; it had reminded him of something, and now he realized what it was. He saw himself as a boy, sitting cross-legged on a rug before a fireplace with sheets of paper strewn around him. The sheets were written on, and he was using the back of them for drawing paper. He must have been in Judge Griff n’s study, where often he was allowed to play while the Judge was working there; the sheets of paper he was drawing on must have been discarded drafts of judgments. The day outside was cold, a day like this one, in the depths of winter, but the fire was hot, and there were chilblain diamonds on his legs, and his forehead was burning in a way that he could just bear but that was pleasurable, too. Never such happiness since then, never such safety. He was drawing with crayons, and it was the waxen smell of them that he must have been remembering when in the bedroom in her little house by the canal Isabel Galloway put her face close to his, her face that seemed to be burning too, as his had burned that day, long ago, in front of the fire, in Judge Griff n’s room.

  He blinked. “What?” he said. “I’m sorry?”

  “I said, have you heard something of April?” Celia Latimer asked again. “Has she been in touch with your daughter?”

  He leaned forward to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray on the corner of Latimer’s desk. “No,” he said, “I’m afraid not.”

  She looked to her brother-in-law, returning to his chair. “And what do the Gardai say, William?” she asked.

  Latimer did not look at her. “The Gardai, as such, aren’t involved, only this man Hackett, the detective you met at the house that day. In fact”- he glanced darkly in Quirke’s direction-”I’m not sure why he was brought into it in the first place.”

  Quirke returned his look with a level stare. He disliked this large, truculent, stupid man. He wanted to be elsewhere. He thought of the sunlight outside, shining so wanly, so tentatively, on the grayed lawn. Portobello.

  Oscar Latimer, who so far had been silent, now gave himself a sort of angry shake, clasping his hands on the wooden arms of his chair as if he were about to leap up and do something violent. “It’s disgraceful,” he said, his voice cracking. “First, strangers knowing our business, then the Guards! Next it’ll be the newspapers- that will be a fine thing. And all because my sister couldn’t be trust
ed to run her life in any sort of responsible fashion.” His mother put a restraining hand on his arm, and he stopped talking and pressed his lips shut. There were spots of color high on his cheekbones. He had, Quirke thought, the striving, hindered air of a man elbowing his way through a seething mob.

  Bill Latimer turned to his sister-in-law again. “I’ve told Hackett, the detective, that discretion is paramount. I presume”- he gave Quirke another hard glance-”we’re all agreed on that?”

  Quirke had been puzzled and now suddenly was not. He realized at last what was taking place here, and why he had been summoned to be part of it. A ceremony of banishment was being enacted. April Latimer was being tacitly but definitively thrust by her family out of its midst. She was being disowned. Her brother, her uncle, even her mother, would no longer be held accountable for her actions, not even for her being. And Quirke was the neutral but necessary witness, the one whose seal, whether he offered it or not, would be put upon the covenant. And what, he asked himself, if she were dead? That possibility too, he realized, was to be incorporated in the anathema.

  ROSE CRAWFORD WAS WAITING FOR HIM IN THE BACK BAR AT JAMmet’s. There was a bottle of Bollinger in an ice bucket on the table before her. She had gone back to America before Christmas to attend to her financial affairs, and had returned on the Queen Mary, which had docked in Cobh that morning. She complained of the train from Cork, saying it was cold and dirty and without a dining car. “I had almost forgotten,” she said, “what this country is like.” She had brought him a box of Romeo y Julietas and a novelty tie with a half-naked blonde with an enormous bust and cherry-pink nipples painted on it. She was wearing a blue silk suit and a silk scarf loosely knotted at her throat. Her hair, in which she was letting some of the silver show, was done in a new style, parted in the center and drawn back sweepingly at both sides. She appeared crisp and fresh, and her manner as usual was one of dark and skeptical amusement. “You look very well,” she told Quirke, and signaled to the barman to open the champagne. “Certainly better than the last time I saw you.”