He steered the car left into Fitzwilliam Square and drew it to the curb and stopped. Phoebe turned to him. “Here?” she said. “Why?” He did not answer, only sat with his hands still braced on the steering wheel, looking out at the black, dripping trees behind the railings of the square. “What’s going on, Quirke, what do you know? Is April dead?”
“Yes,” he said, “I think so.”
“How? Did Patrick let her die?”
“No. But someone else did, I think. Let her die, or-” He stopped. There were coatings of white frost on the branches of the black trees. “Wait here,” he said, and opened the door and got out.
She watched him cross the street and climb the steps to the house and ring the bell. Then the door was opened, and he stepped inside. The nurse put her head out and looked across the road to where Phoebe was sitting in the car, then she followed Quirke inside and shut the door. It was some minutes before it opened again, and Quirke came out, putting on his hat. The nurse glared after him and this time slammed the door.
He got in behind the wheel again.
“What’s happening?” Phoebe asked.
“We’ll wait.”
“For what?”
“To find out what happened to April.”
The door of the house across the street opened again, and Oscar Latimer came out, with the nurse behind him helping him into his overcoat. He looked about, and saw the Alvis, and came down the steps. “Sit in the back,” Quirke told Phoebe, and got out and opened the rear door for her.
Latimer waited for a bread van to go past, then crossed the street. He got in at the passenger side, taking off his tweed cap, and Quirke once more got in behind the wheel. Latimer turned to Phoebe. “So,” he said, “it’s to be a family outing.”
Quirke started up the engine. “Where are we going?”
“Just drive,” Latimer said. “North, along the coast.” He seemed in high good humor and looked about him happily as they went down Fitzwilliam Street to Merrion Square and then on down to Pearse Street. “How are you today, Miss Quirke?” he asked. “Or Miss Griffin, I should say. I keep getting that wrong.” Phoebe did not reply. She realized that she was frightened. Latimer was looking back at her over his shoulder and smiling. “Quirke and daughter,” he said. “That’s a thing you never see over a shop, ‘Such-and-such and Daughter.’ And Son, yes, but never Daughter. Odd.” For a moment he looked to her so like April, with that pale, sharp, freckled face, that smile.
“Tell me where we’re going, Latimer,” Quirke said.
Latimer ignored him. He turned to face the windscreen again and folded his arms. “Fathers and daughters, Quirke, eh? Fathers and daughters, fathers and sons. So many difficulties, so many pains.” He glanced behind him again. “What do you think, Phoebe? You must have some thoughts on that subject?”
She looked back into his eyes, which were regarding her so merrily. He was, she saw now, quite mad. Why had she not realized it before? “Do you know where April is?” she asked him.
He put a hand on the back of his seat and leaned his chin on it, pulling his mouth far down at the corners, making a show of weighing up the question. “It’s hard to answer that,” he said. “There are too many variables, as the mathematicians say.”
“Latimer, I can’t just keep driving,” Quirke said. “Tell me where it is we’re going.”
“To-Howth,” Latimer said. He nodded. “Yes, good old Howth Head- Oops! Didn’t you see that man on the bicycle, Quirke?” He twisted about to look out of the back window. “He’s shaking his fist at you.” He laughed. “Yes, Howth,” he said again, resettling himself comfortably, “that’s where we’re bound. My father used to take us out there, April and me, on the tram. In fact, we could have taken the tram today, I suppose, made a jaunt of it- it’s the last line still operating, after all- but it might have made for awkwardness in the end. Imagine how the other passengers would have stared when I produced”- he reached inside his overcoat and brought out a large, black pistol with a long barrel-”this.” He held it upright by the butt, turning it this way and that as if for them to admire it. “It’s a Webley,” he said. “Ser vice revolver. Bit of a blunderbuss, I’ll grant you, but effective, I’m sure. I have it from my father, who took it off a dying British officer on Easter Monday 1916, or so he always said. He used to let me play with it when I was a lad, and would tell me about all the Black and Tans he had plugged with it. Then he had to go and turn it on himself.” He paused, and looked at Quirke, and turned his head and glanced at Phoebe, too, smiling again, almost mischievously. “Oh, yes,” he said lightly, “that’s another strand of the Latimer Legend that my mother and my uncle between them have managed to keep secret all these years. A heart attack, they said, and somehow got the coroner to back them up. Not such a large lie, when you think of it, seeing that he shot himself in the chest. Yes, anyone else would have put the gun to his temple, or even in his mouth, but not my Pa- too vain, didn’t want to spoil his broth-of-a-boy good looks.” He chuckled. “You’re lucky to be a foundling, Quirke. I’m sure you feel terribly sorry for yourself, having no Daddy that you know of, but you’re lucky, take it from me.”
They were in North Strand now, and before they came to the bridge they had to stop at traffic lights. Latimer laid the gun across his lap, with his finger crooked around the trigger and the barrel pointed in the general direction of Quirke’s liver. “For God’s sake, Latimer,” Quirke said under his breath.
Phoebe’s palms were damp. She tried not to look at the little man with the gun, tried not to see him, feeling like an infant hiding its eyes and thinking itself invisible.
“I’ve no doubt,” Latimer said, “that you’re both feverishly scheming in your minds to think of some way of getting out of here, maybe at traffic lights like this, or maybe if you see a Guard on the road and pull over and shout, officer, officer, he’s got a gun! I hope, I really do hope, that you won’t attempt anything like that.- Ah, there’s the green light. On, James, and don’t spare the horses!”
Quirke caught Phoebe’s eye in the driving mirror. They both looked away quickly, as if in embarrassment.
They passed through Clontarf, and then they were on the coast road. The tide was out, and wading birds were picking their way about the mudflats under a low, mauve sky that threatened snow; a cormorant was perched on a rock, its wings spread wide to dry. On Bull Island the sand grass was a vivid green. Everything is perfectly normal, Phoebe thought, the world out there just going about its ordinary business, while I am here.
“You couldn’t leave it alone, Quirke, could you?” Latimer said. “You had to interfere; you had to bring in that detective and all the rest of it. And now here you are, you and your inconvenient daughter, trapped in this very expensive car by a madman with a gun. The things that happen, eh?”
“What did happen, Latimer?” Quirke said. “Tell us. It was you that she got Ojukwu to call, wasn’t it, that night, when she was bleeding and knew she was dying. What did you do? Did you go round there? Did you try to help her?”
Latimer, the gun still resting negligently in his lap, had turned sideways in the seat now in order to look out past Quirke at the seascape going by. He seemed not to have been listening. “How did you know?” he asked. “How did you know it was me?”
“You were seen at the flat,” Quirke said. “The old lady there, the one who lives upstairs.”
“Ah.”
“She remembered your mustache.”
“Not so unusual for a brother to call on his sister now and then, surely?”
“Perhaps she didn’t know you were her brother.”
Latimer nodded. He seemed calm, reflective. “Yes,” he said, taking up Quirke’s earlier question, “Mr. Ojukwu telephoned to tell me that my sister had performed an abortion on herself and was hemorrhaging badly. What she was thinking of I don’t know. She has a doctor, after all, she should have had more sense. And why didn’t she call me in the first place? It’s not as if we had any secrets from each
other. Although I suppose she would have felt a certain reluctance, sitting there in that house of shame in a swamp of her own blood with her black lover boy in attendance.”
“What did you do?” Quirke asked again.
Latimer, with one hand on the pistol, slipped the other inside the breast-flap of his coat and put on a Napoleonic frown, pretending to work hard at remembering. “First of all, I told Sambo to make himself scarce, if he knew what was good for him. He didn’t need telling twice, believe me. Gone like a shadow into the night, he was. I should have brought Big Bertha here”- he hefted the gun-”and shot the fellow, as my father would have done, but I missed that opportunity. Anyway, I was distracted, trying to patch up my unfortunate sister. She was very poorly, as you can imagine. She’d made a surprisingly awful hash of things, given her training and experience. But there you are, people will dabble in specialisms they know nothing about.”
“When did she die?” Quirke asked, keeping his eyes on the road ahead.
There was a pause. Latimer, still looking out at the sea, frowned, and twisted up his mouth at one side, still making a pretense of racking his memory. “We made a great effort, both of us. A wonderful girl, April. Wonderfully strong. In the end, though, not strong enough. I think perhaps she wanted not to be saved. I can understand that.” He shifted on the seat, grimacing, as if something had suddenly begun to pain him mildly. “I told you, didn’t I, Quirke, that you knew nothing about families- I said it to you, I said, you’ve no experience of such things. The closeness of people in a family. April and I were close, you know. Oh, very close. When we were little we used to say that we’d marry each other when we grew up. Yes, we’d marry, we agreed, and get away from Pa.” He sighed, almost dreamily, and laid his head back on the seat. “Fathers and sons, Quirke,” he said again, “fathers and daughters. He loved us very much, our Pa, first me, and then April. What games he used to play with us, under the sheets. He was so handsome, so- dashing, as the English say. He was pleased as Punch when April came along; he had so wanted a girl, and now he had one. He was growing tired of me, you see, I knew that. I tried to warn April, when I thought she was old enough to understand. I said to her, He’s fed up with me, and besides, you’re a girl, he’ll go for you, now. But she was too young, too innocent. She was six or seven, I think, when Pa turned his affections on her.” He paused. When he spoke again his voice had changed, had become distant. “I used to hear her in the night, crying, waiting for him to come creeping along and slide into bed with her. She was so small, so young.” Latimer started up. “Really, Quirke, for Heaven’s sake!” he cried. “That light was red! You’ll kill the lot of us if you keep on like this- where did you learn to drive?”
Phoebe closed her eyes. She thought of April sitting on the bench in Stephen’s Green that day, smoking, remembering, and then the way she laughed when the gulls came swooping down, flailing and screeching.
“I tried to tell our dear Ma what was going on. Of course, she couldn’t take it in. I don’t blame her; it was simply beyond her comprehension.” He nodded to himself. “Yes, beyond her. So then, since there was no help there, I had to take action myself. What age was I? I must have been- what?-fifteen? Why did I leave it so long? Fright, I suppose, and that awful… that awful embarrassment, that shame. Children blame themselves in these cases, you know, and feel they must keep silent. But April, my poor April- I couldn’t let it go on. So I plucked up my courage and went to Uncle Bill”- he turned to Phoebe-”that’s William Latimer, the Minister. I went to him and told him what was going on. At first he wouldn’t believe it, of course-w ho would, after all?- but in the end he had to. Then I went to Pa and told him what I had done, and said that Uncle Bill was going to go to the Guards, though I have to say I’m not sure he would have, thinking what a scandal there would be; Little Willie, as Pa used to call him, was already well on his way up the greasy pole and had no intention of sliding down again. It didn’t matter. The fact that I had told someone- anyone-set me free in an odd way. Can you understand that? So I confronted him, confronted Pa. We were in the garden, by the summer house. I was crying, I couldn’t stop, it was so strange, the tears just kept flowing down my face, though I didn’t feel in any way sad, but angry, more like, and- and outraged. Pa said nothing, not a word. He just stood there, looking away. I remember a vein in his temple, beating- no, fluttering, as if there were something under the skin there, a butterfly or a wriggly worm. It was in the summer house that Ma found him, late that evening. The weather was so beautiful, I remember, high summer, and a golden haze, and the midges in it like champagne bubbles going up and down.” He picked up the revolver and looked at it. “I wonder why we didn’t hear the shot,” he said. “You’d think we’d have heard it, a gun this size, going off.”
They were on the long curve towards Sutton. Now and then a single snowflake would come flickering haphazardly through the air and melt at once to water on the windscreen. Phoebe had drawn herself into the corner of the seat with her arms crossed tightly, clinging onto herself.
“This is terrible, Latimer,” Quirke said, “a terrible thing to hear.”
“Yes, it is,” Latimer agreed, in a throwaway tone. “Terrible is the word. We were bereft, of course, April and I. Despite everything, we loved our father- does that seem strange? Ma didn’t count, of course, we took no notice of her, she might as well not have been there.” He heaved a whistling sigh. “But it was wonderful, then, what April and I developed between us. Pa had trained us for it, you see, and we were grateful to him for that. True, the world would have frowned on our- our union, if it had known about it, but somehow that made it all the more precious for us, all the more- sweet.” He broke off. “Have you ever loved, Quirke? I mean, really loved? I know what you feel about your”- he cupped a hand beside his mouth and lowered his voice to a stage whisper, as if to keep Phoebe from hearing- “about your darling daughter here.” He coughed, resuming a normal tone. “What I’m talking about is love, a love that is everything, a love that pushes everything else aside, a love that consumes- a love, in short, that obsesses. This is nothing like the stuff you read about in novels or nice poems. And poor April, I really think she was not up to it. It was too much for her. She tried to escape, but of course she couldn’t. It wasn’t just that I wouldn’t let her go- I paid for the rent in her flat, did you know that? oh, yes, I paid for all sorts of things- but that she couldn’t free herself. Some bonds are just too strong”- he glanced back at Phoebe-”don’t you think so, my dear?”
At Sutton Cross he directed Quirke to turn right, and they began the long ascent of the hill. There were cows in frosty fields and people trudging along at the side of the road in hats and heavy coats, like refugees fleeing a winter war. The flakes of snow were multiplying now, flying horizontally, some of them, while others seemed to be falling upwards.
“So the child was yours,” Quirke said.
Behind them Phoebe made a small, sharp sound and put a hand to her mouth. Latimer turned to her again.
“Are you shocked, Miss Griffin?” he asked. “Well, I suppose it is shocking. But there you are. God allows certain things to happen, seems even to want them to happen, and who are we, mere mortals, to deny a divine wish?”
“Did you know she was pregnant?” Quirke asked. He was leaning forward, peering hard past the clicking windscreen wipers into the snow.
“No,” Latimer said, “I didn’t know, but I can hardly say I was surprised, given my training. I could have done something to prevent it, I suppose, but somehow one doesn’t think clearly in the throes of such passion. Do I feel guilty? you’ll ask me. Guilt is not the word. There is no word for it. That was the thing, with April and me, there were no words adequate enough- ah, here were are!” They had gained the summit and pulled into the parking place. The dusty ground was whitened here and there with frost, and before them and on two sides the sea stretched away, pockmarked and pistol-gray. “You can stop here,” Latimer said. “This will do- no, leave the car facing that
way, the view is so nice.”
Quirke brought the car to a stop and did not switch off the engine. Phoebe suddenly needed very badly to pee. She said nothing, only cowered back farther into the corner of the seat, her hands clasped in her lap and her elbows pressed to her sides. She shut her eyes; she thought she might scream but knew that she must not.
Quirke turned to Latimer. “What now?”
Latimer seemed not to have heard; he was gazing down the hillside, nodding to himself. “This is where I brought her, that night,” he said. “I stopped the car just here and lifted her out of the backseat, wrapped in a blanket. She felt so light, so light, as if all the blood she lost was half her weight. You’ll laugh at me, I know, Quirke, but the moment had a strong sense of the religious, of the sacramental, though in a pagan sort of way; I suppose I was thinking of Queen Maeve and the thunder on the stones and all that. Silly, I suppose, but then I can hardly have been in my right mind, can I, given all that had happened in the previous few hours- all that had happened, indeed, in all those years when April and I had only each other, and when it was enough.”
When he stopped speaking they could hear the wind outside, a faint, vague moaning.
Quirke said, “You went back and mopped up the blood, made the bed.”
“Yes. That too was a religious ceremony. I felt April’s presence very close-s he was with me- she’s with me still.”
Elegy For April Page 24