Elegy for April (14 page)

 

He put his hat on the table and drew out one of the bentwood chairs. The table was round, with bowed legs the ends of which were carved in the shape of a lion’s claws. The top of it had a thick, dull sheen and was sticky to the touch. He offered the chair to the woman, and after a moment of distrustful hesitation
she sat down and leaned forward intently with her hands clasped one over the other on the knob of her stick.

 

“Have you seen her recently?” Hackett asked, taking a second chair for himself. “Miss Latimer, that is— Dr. Latimer?”

 

“How would I see her? I don’t go out.”

 

“You’ve never spoken to her?”

 

She put her head back and looked at him with incredulous disdain. “Of course I’ve spoken to her; how would I not have spoken to her? She lives down there below me. She does my shopping.”

 

He was not sure that he had heard her correctly. “Your shopping?”

 

“That’s why I have nothing in the house— I’m practically starving.”

 

“Ah, I see,” he said. “That’s because she’s been gone for the last while?”

 

“That, and the cold in here, I’m surprised I haven’t perished already.” Her clouded gaze had turned cloudier still. There was a lengthy silence, then she came back to herself. “What?”

 

In a corner of the room under a pile of what might be blankets there was a brief, violent scuffle accompanied by hissings and spittings. Hackett sighed again; he might as well give up; he would get nothing here. He took up his hat. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, rising. “I’ll be on my way and leave you in peace.”

 

She too stood up, with effortful, corkscrewing motions on the pivot of her stick. “I suppose she’s off with that fellow,” she said.

 

Hackett, who had begun to turn in the direction of the door, stopped. He smiled. “Which fellow would that be, now?” he asked softly.

 

It took a long time, and even then he did not really know what it was he had got hold of, or even if it was anything. Gradually it
became clear, if that was the word, that in the chaotic lumber room that was Miss St. John Leetch’s understanding, the fellow that April might have gone off with was not one but many. The words came out in a tumble. She was by turns indignant, mocking, aggrieved. There were names, a person called Ronnie, it seemed—”Ridiculous, awful!”— and figures coming and going at all hours of the day and night, men, women, too, shadowy and uncertain, a gallery of phantoms flitting on the stairs while she hid on the lightless landing, watching, listening. Yet one figure in particular she kept returning to, indistinct as the rest and yet to her, it seemed, singular.

 

“Creeping about and hiding from me,” she said, “thinking I would not see him, as if I were blind— pah! I was noted for my clear sight, always, always noted for it, my father used to boast of it,
My Helen
, he would say,
my Helen can see the wind
, and my father did not boast of his children lightly, I can tell you. Lurking there, down on the stairs, skulking in the shadows, I’m sure there were times when he took the bulb out of the socket so I could not turn on the light, but even when I didn’t see him I could smell him, yes, with that perfume he always wears, dreadful person, some kind of pansy I’m sure, trying to conceal himself in the space under the stairs, oh, quiet as a mouse, quiet as a mouse, but I knew he was there, the brute, I knew he was there—” Abruptly she stopped. “What?” She stared at Hackett in a puzzled fashion as if he too were an interloper who had suddenly materialized in front of her.

 

“Tell me, now,” he said, very softly, cajoling, as if to a child, “tell me who it was.”

 

“Who was who?”

 

She tilted her head to one side and squinted at him sidelong, her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. He could see the grime of years lodged in the wrinkles of her cheeks. He tried to picture her young, a long-boned beauty, walking under trees in
autumn, leading a bridled bay.
My Helen, my Helen can see the wind.
“Was it a boyfriend, do you think?” he asked. “Or maybe a relative?— a brother, maybe?— or an uncle, calling on her?”

 

She was still fixed on him with that sly, sideways regard, and now suddenly she laughed, in delight and derision. “A relative?” she said. “How could he be a relative? He was black!”

 

 

 

 

 

10

 

QUIRKE PARKED THE ALVIS AT THE CORNER OF THE GREEN AND was halfway across the road when he remembered that he had not locked it, and had to go back. As he approached the car he had the distinct impression, as he frequently had, that it was regarding him with a baleful and accusatory aspect. There was something about the set of the headlamps, their cold, alert, unblinking stare, that unnerved him and made him feel defensive. No matter how respectfully he treated the machine, no matter how diligently he strove to make himself familiar with its little ways— the slight yaw that it did on sharp right turns, the extra pressure on the accelerator it called for when going into third— the thing resisted him, maintaining what seemed to him a sullen obstinacy. Only on occasion, on certain open stretches of the road, did it forget itself and relinquish its hauteur and leap forward with eagerness, almost it seemed with joy, setting up that distinctive, muffled roar under the bonnet that made people’s heads turn. Afterwards, however, when he pulled up at the garage in Herbert Lane, the idling engine seemed to him to be smoldering with renewed, pent-up rancor. He was not good enough to be an Alvis owner; he knew it, the car knew it, and
there was nothing to do but gloomily acknowledge the fact and take care that the damned thing did not turn on him and kill him.

 

Could it be this evening that the car was aware he was in a more than usually vulnerable state of mind? It was the end of his first, dried-out day back at work, and it had not been easy. Sinclair, his assistant, had been unable to hide his displeasure at his boss’s return and the consequent eclipsing of the powers that he had wielded, and enjoyed wielding, in these past two months. Sinclair was a skilled professional, good at his job— brilliant, in some ways— but he was ambitious, and impatient for advancement. Quirke had felt like a general returning to the battlefield after an emergency spell of rest and recuperation who finds not only that his second-in-command has been running the campaign with ruthless efficiency but that the enemy has been thoroughly routed. He had walked in that morning confidently enough, but somehow his helmet no longer quite fitted him and his sword would not come out of its scabbard. There had been slips, vexations, avoidable misunderstandings. He had carried out a postmortem— his first in many months— on a five-year-old girl and had failed to identify the cause of death as leptomeningitis, hardly a subtle killer. It was Sinclair who had spotted the error and had stood by, coolly silent, examining his nails, while Quirke, swearing under his breath and sweating, had rewritten his report. Later he had shouted at one of the porters, who went into a sulk and had to be elaborately apologized to. Then he cut his thumb on a scalpel— a new one and unused, luckily— and had been compelled to suffer the smirks of the nurse who bandaged the wound for him. No, not a good day.

 

In the Russell Hotel as always a mysterious quiet reigned. Quirke liked it here, liked the stuffy, padded feel of the place, the air that seemed not to have been stirred for generations, the blandishing way the carpets deadened his footsteps, and, most
of all, the somehow pubic texture of the flocked wallpaper when his fingers brushed against it accidentally. Before he had gone on the latest drinking bout, when he was supposed not to be taking alcohol in any form, he used to take Phoebe to dinner here on Tuesday nights and share a bottle of wine with her, his only tipple of the week. Now, in trepidation, he was going to see if he could take a glass or two of claret again without wanting more. He tried to tell himself he was here solely in the spirit of research, but that fizzing sensation under his breastbone was all too familiar. He wanted a drink, and he was going to have one.

 

He was glad to find himself the only customer in the bar, but no sooner had he got his glass of Médoc and settled himself at a table in one of the dimmer corners of the room— it was not, he told himself, that he was hiding, only that wine drunk in a shadowed, cool place somehow gained in depth— than a party of four came in, making a commotion. They had been drinking already, by the look and sound of them. There were three men and a woman. They gathered at the bar and began at once to call for gins and vodkas and bloody marys. Two of the men were the famous Hilton and Mícheál, the queer couple who ran the Gate; the third was a handsome, hopeful youth with curls and a sulky mouth. The woman was smoking a cigarette in a long ebony holder, with which she made much ostentatious play. Quirke opened wide his newspaper and slid down behind it in his chair.

 

His mind soon drifted away from reports of the latest fears of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and the horrors of foreign wars. Idly he pondered the distinction between solitude and loneliness. Solitude, he conjectured, is being alone, while loneliness is being alone among other people. Was that the case? No, something incomplete there. He had been solitary when the bar was empty, but was he lonely now that these others had appeared?

 

Had April Latimer been lonely? It did not seem probable,
from everything he had heard of her so far. Had there been anyone with her when her child miscarried, or was aborted? Had there been one to hold her hand, wipe her brow, murmur words of solace in her ear? He did not know very much about women and their ways. That side of their lives especially, the having of babies and the rest of it, was a mystery into which he had no wish to be initiated. He could not understand how his brother-in-law had chosen to make a career among all that messy and transient melodrama— all that hysteria. Give me the dead, he thought, the dead whose brief scenes on the stage are done with, for whom the last act is over and the curtain brought down.

 

If the baby had been aborted, had April done it herself? She was a doctor; he supposed she would know how to do it. But would she have taken such a risk? It would depend on how anxious she was to conceal the fact that she had been pregnant. Surely she would have gone to someone for help, or at least to confide in. If she did, might that someone, he wondered, have been Phoebe? At the thought he sat upright suddenly in the chair and held the newspaper tighter, making the pages crackle. Was that why Phoebe was so sure her friend had come to harm? Were there things she knew that she had not told him and Hackett? Phoebe was a damaged soul astray in the world. How much of this he was responsible for he did not care to measure. He had not loved her when she needed to be loved. He was a bad father; there was no getting away from that sad, awkward, and painful fact. If she was in trouble now, if she knew the truth about April Latimer and did not know whom to turn to, then it was his moment to help her. But how? He could feel himself beginning to sweat.

 

“I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

 

He looked up from his paper, startled and at once wary. She stood before him, lightly smiling, with the cigarette holder in
one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. She wore a clinging dress of red wool under an overcoat with a fur collar and fur trimming. Her face was narrow and wonderfully delicate and pale, and her dark-red hair had a rich metallic gleam. He felt a vague panic— was she someone he should know? She seemed faintly familiar. He was not good at remembering faces. He stood up, and the woman, suddenly lowered over, gave a faint laugh, and took a tottering step backwards. “I know you’re Phoebe’s father,” she said. “I’m a friend of hers— Isabel Galloway.”

 

Of course. The actress.

 

“Yes,” he said. “Miss Galloway. Hello.” He offered his hand, but she glanced at the cigarette holder on one side and the gin glass on the other, amusedly pointing out her helplessness. “Phoebe often speaks of you,” he said. “And of course I’ve seen your— I’ve seen you on the stage.”

 

“Have you?” she said, opening wide her eyes in a simulacrum of surprise and plea sure. “I wouldn’t have thought you were the theatergoing type.”

 

She was slightly tipsy. Behind her, the others at the bar were making a point of not being in the least interested in who it was she was speaking to.

 

“Well, it’s true,” he said, “I don’t go very often. But I’ve seen you, in— in a number of things.” She said nothing, only waited, pointedly, leaving him no choice but to invite her to join him. “Sit down, won’t you?” he said, feeling the soft snap of something closing on him.

 

Later he would not remember if he saw, that first time, how lovely she was, in her sly, languid, feline way. He was too busy adjusting himself to the steady light of her candid regard; as she sat and gazed at him he felt like a slow old moose caught in the crosshairs of a polished and very powerful rifle. Her self-possession alarmed him; it was the result, he imagined, of her
actor’s training. She seemed to be amused at something large and ongoing, a marvelously absurd cavalcade, of which, he suspected, he was just now a part.

 

They spoke of Phoebe. He asked her how long she had known his daughter, and she waved the cigarette holder in a great circling gesture, like a magician twirling a flaming hoop. “Oh,” she said in that creamy voice of hers, “she’s too young for me to have known her for long. But I’m very fond of her. Very fond.” He drank his wine; she drank her gin. Smiling, she gazed at him. He felt as if he was being patted all over by someone searching for something hidden on his person. He put down his glass. He said he would have to go. She said it was time for her to go, too. She bent that gaze on him again, tilting her head a fraction to one side. He asked if he could give her a lift. She said, why, that would be wonderful. He frowned and nodded. They paused as they were passing by the trio at the bar, and she introduced Quirke.

 

“Oh, my dear fellow,” the painted actor manager said, “by the size of you, I thought you must be a policeman at least.”