Elegy For April

by Benjamin Black

  She stared at him, speechless for a moment. “Who would call him?” she asked, baffled. “Who would make that kind of phone call?”

  “Oh, Phoebe,” he said, with a pitying smile, shaking his head. “Don’t you know anything about this town, how it works?”

  “You mean her uncle, Mr. Latimer, the Minister, would telephone the Editor of a newspaper and order him not to publish a story, not even to follow it up?”

  “Listen, sweetheart, let me explain,” he said, putting on his Jimmy Cagney voice. “The Minister wouldn’t phone, and there would be no order. Someone from the Department would give a little tinkle, some flunky of the Minister’s, a super-Gael with a name like Maolseachlainn Mahoganygaspipe, and talk for ten minutes about the weather and the shocking price of spuds, and then, just as he was about to ring off, would say, Oh, by the way, Seanie, the Minister’s young one has gone off on a bit of an adventure and the family is trying to get her to come home- there’d be no use in the paper running any kind of a story on it, don’t you know, you’ d only end up with egg on your face, or should I say printing ink, ha ha ha. That’s how it’s done. The velvet word, the silken threat. Wise up, sister.”

  “And the Editor of a national newspaper would give in to a threat, just like that?”

  This was greeted with a whinny of laughter. “Threat?- where’s the threat? Friendly advice, a word to the wise, that’s all. And then there’s grace and favor- next time Seanie the Editor needs a bit of inside info he’ll call up Mr. Mahoganygaspipe and mention the little Service he did for the Minister and his family by keeping his newshounds on the leash that time when the Minister’s troublesome niece went off on her travels. See?”

  Now Phoebe, sitting by the black window, went over again all that Jimmy had said, trying to decide if it could be true, if it could be what had happened. But what of it, she thought then, even if it was? If the Latimers were using their influence to stop the newspapers reporting April’s disappearance, was that so terrible? Any family would do it, that had a wayward daughter and the power to keep stories about her out of the papers. Yet the thought of that pinched, insinuating voice on the telephone- Jimmy was a good mimic- whispering menaces into someone’s ear gave her the shivers.

  She must concentrate. Think. Remember. Summon up. Who is April Latimer?

  The milk in the mug had gone tepid, but she drank it anyway, drank it to the dregs, and got a raspberry pip, sharp and hard, stuck in a gap between two molars, making her think of childhood.

  Once, not very long ago, they had sat, she and April, on a bench by the pond in St. Stephen’s Green, watching the children and their mothers feeding the ducks. It was an afternoon in late summer; she remembered the trees soughing gently above them and the sunlight seeming to lift big flakes of gold from the surface of the water. April was smoking a cigarette in that way she did, holding it close in front of her face, leaning forward and hunched around herself as if she were cold. It was the way old women smoked, Phoebe remembered thinking, with a rush of fondness for her friend, a fondness both sweet and unsettling. She could not recall what it was they had been talking about, but at one point she realized that April had gone quiet, had retreated into herself, and was sitting there smoking and frowning and staring at the water with a strange, haunted look in her eyes. Phoebe too had fallen silent, instinctively respecting whatever private place it was that her friend had withdrawn into. At last April spoke.

  “The thing about obsession,” she said, still watching the spangled surface of the pond, “is that there’s no plea sure in it. You think at the start, if there is a start, that it’s the greatest delight you could know”- that word, delight, the way that she said it, had struck Phoebe as disturbing, almost indecent-”but after a while, when you’re caught in it and can’t get out, it’s a prison cell.” She had stopped then, for another interval of intent brooding and smoking, and then had described how, in this cell, you look up longingly at the barred window that is too high to reach, at the sunlight and the patch of blue sky there, and realize that you do not know what life is like, on the outside, where others are free.

  Phoebe had not known what to say, how to respond. She did not think of April as a person who would be obsessed- there was another dark and troubling word- and she felt as if a curtain had been flicked aside for a moment to allow her a glimpse down a long, dim passageway murmurous with unseen presences, where the air that pressed back into her face was damp and dank and sweetly heavy. She remembered the shudder that had gone through her, glimpsing that dark place, even as she sat there in the park in the bright sunlight, amidst that summer scene. A flock of seagulls appeared, thrashing their wings and shrieking, intent on seizing the crusts of bread that the children were throwing to the ducks, and she shrank back in sudden fright. April, though, had roused herself at the sight of the scavengers descending, and laughed. “Oh, look at those!” she cried, “-those monsters!” She gazed at the ravening gulls with a smile of what seemed fierce approval, her small, white, even teeth bared a little and glistening and her eyes eagerly alight. That was a moment when Phoebe did not know her friend, did not recognize her. Had there been other such moments that she failed to notice as they went past, moments of awful insight she had forgotten or had chosen to forget? What did she know about her friend? What did she know-?

  She stood up from the table and almost fell over because her legs had gone stiff from the cold. Wrapping herself tight in the thin silk robe, she went into the living room and stood by the window there. She had not turned on the light. She did not mind the dark, had never been afraid of it, even as a child. The mist was down again, she saw, not dense enough to be called a fog, and the streetlight below had a gray halo around it. The street was silent. A prostitute had recently taken up her beat here, a sad creature, young and skinny, who always seemed to be freezing; Phoebe spoke to her sometimes, about the weather or an item in the news, and the girl would smile gratefully, glad not to be ogled or glared at, or called something filthy. She had even told Phoebe her name, which was Sadie. What must her life be like, Phoebe wondered, having to go with anyone who had a pound in his pocket? How would it feel to-?

  She started. There was someone in the street, someone she had not noticed until now, a person standing just outside the streetlamp’s ring of wettish light. She could not make out if it was a man or a woman, though she knew it was not Sadie. It was just a figure, standing there, quite still, looking up, it seemed, at this very window where she was looking down from. Whoever it was, would her see her, here in the dark? No. But what if she were to move forward, and stand right up against the glass, would she be visible then? She advanced a step, holding her breath. She put a hand to her throat. She was shivering; she did not know whether it was from the cold or from fright, or from something else. The figure did not stir- was it there at all, or was she just imagining it? This had happened before, when she lived in Harcourt Street, she had thought then that she was being watched, and had told herself then, too, that it was her imagination, but as it turned out she had not imagined it. She realized she had left the light on in the kitchen; whoever it was would know she was here, and not sleeping, perhaps had even seen her sitting at the table with her milk and her cake- would it have been possible to have been seen at that angle, from the street, if she was sitting down?- and was waiting for her now to come back into the light, in her flimsy silk wrap, with her hair undone, unsleeping and restless, worrying about her vanished friend.

  Abruptly she turned from the window and fairly raced to the kitchen and, without crossing the threshold, reached in and switched off the light. She waited a moment, then moved forward cautiously into the darkness, avoiding the outlines of the furniture yet managing to jar her hip on a corner of the stove, and peered down into the misty street. No one was there. Probably no one had been there in the first place; probably it had only been a shadow she had seen and thought it a person. Yet she did not believe that. There had been someone, standing in the darkness and the damp air, loo
king up, watching for her. But whoever it was that had been there was gone.

  13

  QUIRKE COULD NEVER QUITE ACCOUNT FOR HIS FONDNESS OF Inspector Hackett. After all, there were not many people he had a fondness for. Despite the many evident differences between them, they seemed to have something in common. Perhaps what he appreciated was the policeman’s amused, easygoing skepticism of the world in general. At one time Quirke had thought that Hackett, like him, must have spent his early years in an institution, but there was a pliancy to the detective’s personality, an essential amiability, that would not have survived a place such as Carricklea. The Quirkes and the Harknesses of this world were a closed and unwilling fraternity, whose secret handshake betokened not trust or fellowship, but suspicion, fear, coldness, remembered misery, unflagging rancor. Fellowship and trust, these were among the good things behind the cold glass of the great shop window against which they pressed their faces half in longing and half in angry contempt. The thing to do was to hide the damage. That was what they expected of each other, what they asked of each other, the maimed ones; that was their token of honor. What was it Rose Crawford had said to him once, a long time ago? A cold heart and a hot soul- that’s us, Quirke. And yet the fact remained that he was fond of Hackett- how was that?

  Nevertheless, when the telephone rang and he picked it up and heard the detective’s drawn-out, Midlands vowels, his heart sank. April Latimer, again. Quirke was in his office at the hospital, in his white coat, leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk. Through the big plate-glass window of the dissection room he could see his assistant Sinclair working on a cadaver, busy with saw and scalpel. “Is there something new, Inspector?” he asked, wearily.

  “Well now,” Hackett said, and Quirke pictured him, in his cubbyhole on the top floor of the barracks in Pearse Street, putting his head on one side and squinting up at the tobacco-colored ceiling, “it’s new, all right, but whether it’s a thing or not I’m not so sure.” Sinclair, Quirke noticed for the first time, had a peculiar way of approaching a corpse, sidewise, with his head tilted and his tongue stuck in a corner of his mouth, like a hunter stalking his prey. “I went around again to the house in Herbert Place,” Hackett said. “There’s a person there that lives in the top-floor flat, a very queer sort of a woman altogether. A Miss Helen St. John Leetch, no less.” He chuckled. “Isn’t that a grand name?”

  “What had she to say?”

  “I’d venture she’s a bit touched, the unfortunate creature, but she’s watchful, too, in her way, and doesn’t miss a thing.”

  “And what did she see, on her watch?”

  There was a wheezing sound on the line, which after a moment or two of puzzlement Quirke recognized as laughter. “You’re a very impatient man, Dr. Quirke,” the policeman said at last, “do you know that? I’ll tell you what, why don’t you jump in that grand new car of yours and drive down here and we’ll go out for a bite to eat? What do you say?”

  “I can’t,” Quirke lied. “I already have a lunch engagement.”

  “Ah, do you say a lunch engagement?” He liked the sound of that, it seemed, and there was another interval of wheezing. “Well, could you spare me ten minutes before you repair to your luncheon? Would that be at all a possibility, do you think?”

  Quirke grudgingly said yes, that he would call at the Inspector’s office, but that it was too late now, it would have to be after lunch.

  He put the phone down and sat for a long time leaning back with his hands behind his head, looking at Sinclair at work, but not seeing him. Isabel Galloway was still haunting his thoughts. The image of her, the cool, long, pale length of her, preyed on him. She was not like the women he was accustomed to. After that night in her house at Portobello, with the two swans gliding on the moonlit waters of the canal, something in him that had been locked all his life had begun to loosen, grinding and groaning, like a glacier on the move, or an iceberg breaking.

  Now when he called her and gave his name she let a silence hang, then said, “Well, if it isn’t you. And I thought my one-night stand had been stood down.”

  “I wondered,” he said cautiously, “if we might meet.”

  “What were you thinking of?”

  “I thought we might have lunch.”

  “Yes, you like your lunch, don’t you?”

  He held the receiver to one side and frowned at it, then put it back to his ear. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “A rather large and painted bird-two rather large birds, in fact- told me they spotted you in Jammet’s in the company of a femme mysterieuse, a lady d’un certain age but handsome withal, and, my two chickadees surmised, moneyed, to boot.”

  Although he was in the basement of the building he knew that it was raining outside; he could sense rather than hear it, a sort of far-off, general, moist humming. “Her name,” he said, “is Rose Crawford. She used to be married to my father-in-law.”

  “Ah. Complicated. So she would be your… what? Your stepmother-in-law?” She laughed softly.

  “She lives here now,” he said. “In Wicklow. She has fallen for the romance of the place- the wind in the heather, the rain on the crag, that kind of thing.” With his free hand he eased a cigarette out of the packet on the desk and fumbled in the pocket of his white coat for his lighter. “I’m angling for a mention in her will.”

  “From what my feathered friends had to say, she’s far from on her last legs. In fact dear Mнcheбl- who, surprisingly, has an eye for these things- remarked particularly on the shapeliness of the lady’s ankle.” She gave another low laugh. “You wouldn’t try to deceive a simple player-lass on the nature of your relations with this in-law, would you?”

  “I probably would,” he said.

  “You don’t have to be so frank, you know. Frankness is a much overrated quality, in my opinion.”

  “So what about it?- lunch, I mean.”

  “Yes. But not Jammet’s, I think. Too many associations already.”

  She said she would meet him in the Gresham Hotel. “I’m rehearsing, darling. It’ll be just a tripping step for me from here”- where now in the somber, mock grandeur of the place, Quirke felt ill at ease. Some film star was expected from the airport, and the place was abuzz with reporters and flash photographers and dozens of what must be fans milling outside on the pavement despite the wind and the scudding rain. Isabel was waiting for him in the bar. “It’s Bing,” she said, indicating the crowd outside. “They’re mad for a crooner.” She had her stage makeup on-”It’s a full-dress rehearsal, Gawd help us”- and was wearing a mackintosh which she had not unbuttoned. She had not had time to change out of her costume, she said, and made a pained face. “We’re doing Maeterlinck, The Blue Bird. I’m afraid I’m a fairy.”

  She was drinking Campari and soda. He said he would settle for a soda by itself, and lit a cigarette. He must have been staring at her, for she blushed a little now and lowered her long eyelashes. “You make me self-conscious,” she murmured, smiling. “Imagine that, an actress, and self-conscious-have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  He would have liked to be in bed with her now, this minute, while she was like this, not brittle and smart, but shy, confused, almost defenseless.

  “Do you know what his full name is, Maeterlinck’s?” she said, looking into her drink and pretending to be busy stirring it with a plastic cocktail stick. “Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard, Count Maeterlinck.” She looked at him from under those lowered lashes. “What do you think of that?”

  He took the cocktail stick from her and put it on the bar. “You’ve been on my mind,” he said. “I don’t know what to- I don’t know how to-” He shrugged. “I’m not good at this.”

  She leaned forward and kissed him, lightly, on the cheek. “As if,” she whispered, “anyone is.”

  “Why don’t you open your coat,” he said, “and let me see your fairy costume.”

  In the lobby there was cheering; Bing had arrived at last.

  SITTIN
G IN HACKETT’S OFFICE QUIRKE MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN THE wheel house of a trawler battling its way through a stormy sea. The stunted window behind the detective’s desk was grimy at the best of times, but on this day of wind and driving rain the daylight itself had to fight its way through the streaming, misted panes. There was a coal fire burning in the grate, and the air in the room was hot and leaden. Now and then a backdraft would send a ball of smoke rolling across the threadbare carpet, to mingle with the general fug of cigarette smoke. Hackett was in his shirtsleeves, with his tie loosened and his collar-stud undone. The upper half of his forehead, usually hidden by his hat, was baby-pink and soft-looking, and his hair, pomaded with what seemed to be boot polish, was brushed fiercely back; it was, Quirke noted, beginning to go gray around the edges.

  “That girl of yours,” the policeman said, “seems to attract trouble.”

  For a giddy moment Quirke thought he meant Isabel Galloway, and wondered how he could possibly know about her; then he realized his mistake. “Oh, Phoebe,” he said. “Trouble seems to find her, you mean- not quite the same thing.”

  Hackett nodded, doing his froggy grin. “Either way, she keeps herself busy- and keeps me busy, too. I suppose there’s been no word of her friend?”

  “Not that I know of. And I’m coming to believe there won’t be.”

  This time Hackett sighed, and riffled through the papers that cluttered his desk, a sign of frustration, as Quirke well knew. “It’s a fine old mess, so it is,” the policeman said.

  “Yes, that’s what her uncle says.”

  “He’d know a mess when he sees one, all right.”

  Quirke watched the crowding raindrops on the windowpanes shaking and shivering in the pummeling gusts of wind. “The woman in the flat above April’s, what did she say?”

  “Miss Helen St. John Leetch,” Hackett said, rolling it on his tongue. “I never knew before the right way to pronounce that name St. John. Queer.”