Elegy For April

by Benjamin Black

  He crossed the street and let himself into the house, pausing with the key in his hand and glancing back both ways over his shoulders, just like a real felon. It was three o’clock in the morning, and not a soul was to be seen. He eased the key out of the lock silently, and silently closed the door behind him and crept along the pitch-black hall. Above all he must not disturb Mrs. Gilligan, who would surely call the Guards if she heard someone down here at this time of the morning. He crept up the stairs.

  In the room a hint of Phoebe’s fragrance lingered, though it was hard to smell anything over the sticky reek of paraffin from the stove. That was another thing about this country: how was it that people never tried to cope with the climate? In winter they were content to huddle over tiny fires of evil-smelling coke or smoldering turf, while at the first hint of summer they began immediately to complain of the heat. Mechanically he set about making the bed, then realized he would have to change the sheets, for he knew Mrs. Gilligan often came up and poked around during the day when he was out. He was suddenly assailed by the memory of Phoebe not half an hour ago lying here in his arms. Would it ever happen again? Would he ever see her again? He sat down on the bed and stared at the floor, trying to think and yet not to think.

  But this was no good; he could not allow himself to lose his nerve and feel sorry for himself like this. Wearily he lay down on the bed, stretching out his limbs. Yes, he was tired, very tired. His mind began to drift. A thought came to him, a thought of where he might go, of who might help him, but all at once he was too sleepy and could not hold on to what the thought was trying urgently to tell him.

  17

  IT WAS EIGHT O’CLOCK AND STILL NOT FULLY LIGHT WHEN QUIRKE woke enveloped in a hot and muggy haze of alcohol fumes and his own stale stink. At first he could not tell where he was. The bedroom and the bed he was lying on were not his, and yet not entirely unfamiliar. He remained some moments without stirring, wary even of lifting his head, which felt at once leaden and as breakable as a globe of crystal. He tried to summon up the previous night’s events. Dinner with Phoebe, wine, too much wine, and then…? He had been in a taxi, he remembered it driving him away from the Russell. Following that there was a blank, and the next thing he recalled, indistinctly, was being in another hotel. The Central, was it? No, Jury’s, in Dame Street; he remembered the stained-glass windows of the bar there. Then he had been in one of the rooms upstairs, where a party was going on. People had kept giving him drinks- who were they? He saw shiny red faces pressing forward, four or five of them bristling at him as if they shared only one neck, and heard booming laughter, and a woman’s voice saying something to him over and over. Then he was outside again, in another taxi- no, not a taxi, for he was driving this time, driving along the canal, with the window open, the air in his face as cold and sharp as a blade.

  He got out of bed, sliding himself sideways from under the sheet and straightening up cautiously. He was in his shirt and underpants, and was wearing his socks, too. He went to the window and drew back the curtain at one side. A gray dawn was breaking on the canal. It was cold, down there, with a whitish coating of frost on the roadway and floatings of ice on the unmoving surface of the water. The Alvis was parked at a sharp angle to the pavement. He heard a sudden, loud beating in the air and flinched instinctively, and two swans like intent and vehement ghosts went flying past, low and straight, their great wings thrashing on the air. He had seen them before, those birds.

  The bedroom door behind him opened. “Ah. Sleeping beauty has awoken at last.” Today Isabel Galloway wore not her silk wrap but an outsized pink wool dressing gown. She was smoking a cigarette. She leaned in the doorway and folded one arm into the crook of the other and regarded him with a faint, sardonic smile. “How do you feel, or need I ask?”

  “About as bad as I imagine I deserve to feel. Where are my trousers?”

  She pointed. “On the chair, behind you.” He pulled them on, then sat down on the edge of the bed. He was dizzy. Isabel came forward and put a hand on top of his head, pushing her fingers into his hair. “Poor you.”

  He looked up at her out of suffering eyes. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember much,” he said. “Was I very drunk?”

  “I’m not sure what you’d consider very drunk.”

  “Did I- did I disgrace myself?”

  “You tried to get me into bed, if that’s what you mean. But then you toppled over, very slowly, rather like a tree being felled, and so my honor was preserved.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She heaved an exaggerated sigh and grasped a fistful of hair and tugged it. “I hope you’re not going to keep on apologizing, are you? Nothing is as annoying for a girl as a man in the morning saying sorry. Come down, there’s coffee on.”

  When she had gone he went into the tiny bathroom at the end of the hall and peered at himself in the mirror. It seemed for a moment that he was about to be sick, but then the nausea passed. He bathed his face in ice-cold water, gasping softly.

  In the kitchen Isabel was standing by the stove, waiting for the percolator to come to the boil. She saw him looking at her dressing gown. “The silk one was for effect,” she said. “My bottom was blue as a baboon’s by the time you left.” He looked at her socks, too; they were thick and gray. “My mother knits them for me,” she said. She turned back to the stove. “Yes, I have a gray-haired old mother, who knits for me. It’s all terribly banal, my little life.”

  He sat down at the table, bracing a hand on the back of the chair and easing himself down slowly. He was about to apologize again but stopped himself in time.

  She brought the coffee to the table and poured out cups for both of them. “The toast is cold,” she said. “Shall I make more?”

  “No, thank you, coffee will do. I don’t think I could eat anything.”

  She stood over him with the percolator in her hand, regarding him with a look of wry compassion. “Where were you drinking?”

  “A number of places, as far as I recall. I had dinner with Phoebe.”

  “Surely she didn’t let you get that drunk?”

  “No, I went on afterwards. Jury’s, I think. There was a party that I got invited to. Don’t ask me who the people were.”

  “All right, I won’t.” She sat down opposite him, setting the coffeepot on a cork mat. She folded her arms, sliding her hands into the sleeves of the dressing gown as if into a muff, and leaned there, studying him. “What a sorry mess you are, Quirke.”

  “Yes.” The gray light was strengthening in the window behind the sink. He felt cold and hot at the same time, and there was a rippling sensation in his innards, as a wave of something slow and foul and warm flowed through them. “I shouldn’t have come to you,” he said. “You shouldn’t have let me in.”

  “You were very insistent. And I didn’t want to give scandal to the neighbors. It was three o’clock in the morning. You can be very loud, you know, Quirke.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Let me make some toast for you.”

  “No. The coffee is working. I’ll be all right. It’s only a hangover, I’m used to it.”

  She leaned back on the chair, still with her arms folded and her hands hidden. “So you were with Phoebe,” she said. “How is she?”

  “All right. Better than all right, in fact. Has she got a new boyfriend or something?”

  “I don’t know. What made you think she might?”

  “She seemed- happy.”

  “Ah.” She nodded sagely. “That would be an indication, all right. Why didn’t you ask her?”

  “What? If she has a boyfriend?”

  “Would it be such a strange thing to do? She is your daughter, after all.”

  He frowned, and flexed his shoulders, dipping one and lifting the other. “We don’t- we don’t talk about things like that.”

  “No,” she said flatly, “I don’t suppose you do.” She refilled his cup. “I’m going to take a bath and then get dressed. I have a rehearsal this morning. Maeterlinck and f
airyland await me.” She stood up, drawing the dressing gown around her. As she was going past she paused and leaned down and kissed him quickly on the crown of his head. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Won’t you have to go to work, and so on?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “Don’t leave before I come down.”

  When she was gone he sat at the table for a long time, watching the wan light struggling to establish itself in the window. He was thinking about Phoebe. At dinner last night she had lied to him. When he told her what the woman in the flat had said to Hackett, about April and the black man, she had lied. He did not know it at the time, but he did now. She was a bad liar, always had been.

  He got to his feet and pushed back the chair, making its legs squeal on the tiled floor. The wave rippling through his insides had suddenly broken. He made for the back door and wrenched it open and stumbled into the yard and leaned over the drain there as the coffee he had drunk came gushing back up his throat and spilled out in a hot cascade, spattering his trousers. He waited, panting, then retched again, but this time there was nothing to come up; he had vomited up the sole already, during the party in the hotel, he remembered now. He straightened and leaned against the pebble-dashed wall. The cold air was like a hand laid comfortingly against his forehead. He put his head back and gazed up at a sky as flat and dully white as pipe clay. The cold was striking through his shirt and gripping at his throat. He went inside and rinsed his mouth at the sink with water from the tap that tasted of metal. Then he climbed the narrow stairs, and knocked at the bathroom door, and went in.

  Isabel was lying full-length in the bath, reading a magazine. It was a worn bath, yellowed with age, and there were brownish streaks in the enamel behind the taps. Fine wreaths of steam moved in the air, billowing in the draft from the doorway. “Do come in,” she said, glancing up at him. “I’d ask you to join me, but I’m afraid you’d swamp the house.” She wore a plastic cap over her hair, which made her face seem all the more slender, narrowing to the delicately cleft point of her chin. Her nakedness glimmered under the greenish water. A cigarette was smoking in an ashtray beside her head, and now she reached up to it with one dry hand and took a draw of it and set it down again. She tossed the magazine over the side of the bath, and it flopped on the floor, the pages splaying in a multicolored fan. “I used to read good books,” she said, “but they always got so soggy I gave up. What do you do in the bath, Quirke? I suppose you don’t do anything. I suppose you’re like all men, you dive in and have a quick sluice and then out again. Women are true sybarites when it comes to bathing, don’t you find? It’s one of our only real self-indulgences, despite what people say. I can quite see myself in ancient Egypt, up to my neck in asses’ milk, with dusky handmaids fanning me with palms.” She stopped and made a face, twisting her mouth upwards at one side. “What is it, Quirke?” she asked. “Tell me.”

  “I was sick,” he said. “It’s all right, I got to the yard in time. It was just the coffee, anyway.” She waited, watching him. He sat down on the edge of the bath. “I wanted to say- I wanted to ask”- he rolled his shoulders again helplessly-”I don’t know.”

  “Ask,” she said.

  “You could- I feel you could- save me. From myself, I mean.” He turned his face away from her. In a small, round mirror on a shelf behind the sink he saw himself, one eye and an ear. He noticed the stains on the knees of his trousers; he must have fallen, somewhere, last night. “A doctor in St. John’s told me I drink to get away from myself. It wasn’t exactly news, but still.” Now he turned back and looked at her. “What shall we do,” he asked, “you and I?”

  She thought a moment. “More or less what everybody else does, I suppose,” she said. “What do you think we’ll do?”

  “What everybody else does- make each other unhappy.”

  She found her cigarette and this time did not put it back on the ashtray, but lay there smoking, one eye half shut, looking at him. He could not tell what she was thinking. “Oh, Quirke,” she said.

  He nodded, as if he were agreeing with some proposition she had offered. He took the limp cigarette from her fingers and took a drag on it and gave it back to her.

  “You know that feeling that you have in dreams,” he said, exhaling smoke, “that something is happening and you can’t do anything to stop it, only stand by and watch as it goes on happening? That’s how I feel all the time.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  She sat up, making the water around her sway wildly, and stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “Give me that towel,” she said. She stood. Palely gleaming there, with bathwater running down between her breasts and along her legs, she seemed for a moment very young, a child, almost, skinny and vulnerable. He handed her the towel, and she wrapped herself in it, shuddering. “Dear God,” she said, “how I hate the fucking winter.” She led him by the hand to the bedroom. When they lay down together he pressed her in his arms and she was still damp. She put her mouth to his ear. “Warm me up, Quirke,” she said, with a low laugh. “Warm me up, there’s a dear.”

  18

  THE TELEPHONE WAS RINGING IN THE FLAT; QUIRKE COULD HEAR it as he came up the stairs. The sound provoked in him its usual, vague dread. He did not quicken his step; whoever it was could wait or call back. He plodded; he was tired. The phone was still ringing when he walked into the living room. He took off his overcoat and hung it up, and hung up his hat, too. He thought of going into the bedroom and crawling under the blankets. Still the thing went on, shrilling and shrilling, and there was nothing for it but to pick up the receiver. It was Phoebe. “What’s the matter,” he asked, “are you all right?” She said she had called him earlier, much earlier, in the middle of the night, in fact, and that she had been worried when he did not answer. Had he got home from the Russell all right? He said he had. He did not tell her about going out again, about the party at Jury’s; he did not tell her about Isabel Galloway. “ Are you all right?” she asked. He put up a hand and rubbed his eyes. Then she told him about the watcher in the street.

  HE MIGHT HAVE WALKED TO HADDINGTON ROAD-IT WAS TEN minutes away, across the canal- but he drove instead, the car seeming to him even more sullen and obstinate than usual. Phoebe was wearing the silk dressing gown that had once belonged to Sarah. She said she had probably imagined it, that shadowy presence in the lamplight.

  “When was this?” he asked.

  “I told you, in the middle of the night. It must have been- I don’t know- three o’clock, four?”

  “Why were you up so late?”

  She went to the fireplace and took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from the mantelpiece. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. She blew a quick stream of smoke at the ceiling. “I often can’t sleep.”

  He took off his overcoat and put it on the back of a chair. “I see you’re smoking again,” he said.

  She held the cigarette away from her and looked at it as if she had not noticed it until then. “Not really,” she said. “Just once in a while. Good for the nerves, they say.”

  He came to her and took the packet from her hand and looked at it. “Passing Cloud,” he said. “Your old brand.”

  She puffed again and grimaced. “They’re so old they’re stale.”

  He helped himself to one and lit it with her lighter. The gas fire was muttering in the grate; they sat down on either side of it.

  “So,” Quirke said, “tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  She was smoothing the silk drape of the dressing gown over her knee. Not a dressing gown- what was it called? A tea gown? Sarah used to go and put it on after dinner, even when there were guests. He pictured her leaning back in the chair by the fireplace in the house in Rathgar, while the talk went on and Mal fussed with the drinks. Everything had seemed simpler, then.

  He thought of Isabel Galloway, in her peignoir.

  Phoebe was pale, and her temples seemed sunken, as if somethi
ng had been pressing on them.

  “You’re frightened,” Quirke said. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

  She picked up an ashtray from the grate and rolled the tip of the cigarette on it, sharpening it, like a pencil. “Do you want anything?” she asked. “Tea? Coffee?” He did not reply, only sat watching her. She gave a vexed shrug. “I just thought there was somebody down there, standing by the streetlamp.”

  “Who do you think it was?”

  “I don’t know. I told you, I’m not even sure there was anyone- I may have imagined it.”

  “But it’s not the first time, is it?”

  She compressed her lips and looked down into her lap. After a moment she gave a rapid shake of her head. “No,” she said, so quietly he could hardly hear her. “I thought there was someone there before, in the same place.”

  “When was that?”

  “I don’t know- the other night.”

  “You didn’t call the Guards?”

  “No. What would I have told them? You know what they’re like; they never believe anything.”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “I’ll talk to Hackett.”

  “Oh, no, Quirke, please don’t,” she said wearily. “I don’t want him poking about here.”

  “He can put someone on the street, a plainclothes man, to keep watch, for a night or two. If there’s anyone, they can collar him.”

  She laughed. “Oh, yes, the way they did with-”

  She looked away. That other nightwalker who had watched her window, no one had collared him, until it was too late. He reached for the ashtray, and she handed it to him, and he stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. “You’re right,” he said, “they are stale.”

  She stood up and went out to the kitchen, where he heard her filling a kettle. “I’m going to make a cup of Bovril,” she called to him. “Do you want some?”

  Bovril. That brown taste, the very taste of Carricklea Industrial School. “No,” he called back. “I suppose you wouldn’t have a drink, would you?” She pretended not to hear.