Elegy for April (33 page)

 

For the first time Latimer’s look hardened, and his mouth compressed itself into a narrow, bloodless line. “How dare you,” he said softly. He was behind the wheel now, with the door still open and one foot on the ground. “You think I’ll let her be anywhere, for you and the rest of her so-called friends to come and pretend to mourn her? She was mine, and she’ll stay mine. You were the ones who tried to take her from me, you and that Hottentot, and the guttersnipe reporter, and that other slut. But you couldn’t take her, and you can’t. She’s mine forever now.”

 

He drew in his foot and slammed the door, then rolled down the window. He was smiling again. “Really, this is such a nice car, Quirke,” he said. “I hope you aren’t too attached to it.” He winked then and turned to face the windscreen, and the engine roared as he trod on the accelerator and the great car leapt forward, over the frozen dust and through the gap in the low wall there. They walked forward, father and daughter, to the wall and stopped there and watched the Alvis bump and roll its way down the steep, slanting track. Then they heard the flat crack of a gunshot, and the car wallowed drunkenly to the right and the wheels on the driver’s side sank into the heather and the machine reared up sideways and seemed to hang for a long moment before pitching over on its roof and then turning in clumsy, lateral somersaults down the long, uneven slope, until they could see it no more. There were cliffs down there, and they waited, as if they might hear, from all that distance, the terrible splash of the car
going into the sea, but there was nothing, only the gulls crying and the man’s white dog way off there in the bracken, barking.

 

IT WAS HARD GOING ON THE HILLSIDE, AND QUIRKE AND INSPECTOR Hackett had scrambled only halfway down when they had to give up. The heather was slippery under the slushy snow, and there were hidden rocks that they knocked their ankles on and loose stones on which they slipped and slid. “Ah, let them young fellows at it,” Hackett said, stopping and lifting his hat to scratch his head. A long way down in front of them three young Guards in climbing gear and stout boots were negotiating the last steep stretch before the cliffs fell sheer away into the sea. The cuffs of Quirke’s trousers were soaked, and his shoes were wet through. Hackett sat down suddenly in the heather, his hat on the back of his head, and planted his elbows on his knees. There were flakes of snow in his eyebrows. “By God, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “this is a queer thing altogether.”

 

There were two Garda cars and a jeep parked above them, behind the low wall. Quirke had taken Phoebe down the hill road on the other side, to a café there. It was shut at this still early hour, but he had banged his fist on the door until a woman came and let them in. Quirke told her there had been an accident, that a car had gone over the cliffs, and he would have to telephone the Guards. His daughter was in shock, he said, and needed something hot to drink. The woman stared at them, then bade Phoebe to follow her out to the kitchen, where she would make tea for her and give her something to eat, she said. Phoebe, dull-eyed, did as she was told. At the door to the kitchen she stopped and turned to look back at Quirke, and he made himself smile, and nodded, and told her it would be all right, that everything would be all right. Then he went back up the hill to wait for Hackett and his men.

 

He had sat there on the wall, smoking, his overcoat buttoned to the throat and the brim of his hat pulled low against the randomly billowing snow. He did not know how much he should tell Hackett of what Latimer had told him. He thought of Celia Latimer sitting by the fire in her husband’s study with her hands folded in her lap, weeping for her lost child. Then he had heard the sirens in the distance.

 

Now Hackett from where he sat in the heather was squinting up at him with that lazy, shrewd eye of his. “You don’t make an easy time for yourself, do you, Dr. Quirke?” he said. He found a clump of tough grass among the heather and plucked a blade of it and put it in his mouth. Melted snow shone slick on the shoulder tabs of his American coat.

 

“None of this was my doing,” Quirke said.

 

Hackett grinned. “Sort of an innocent bystander, is that it?” He heaved himself to his feet, grunting. The snow, indecisive and sparse, was making the morning air soggy and coldly damp. Going up, they found a stony pathway through the heather. At the top, where the Garda cars were parked, the detective halted and stood with his hands on his hips, surveying the view of hill and sea and distant islands. “Isn’t it a grand spot?” he said. “Snow or no snow.”

 

They turned in the direction of the squad cars. A Guard got out of one of them. He wore a cape and a cap with a shiny peak. It was the bony-faced sergeant from Pearse Street. He gave Quirke a hard look. “I hope you got the insurance fixed up,” he said, “on that car of yours.”

 

The Inspector looked at Quirke and grinned, and together they turned and gazed off through the snow down the hillside, towards the steadily graying sea.

 

 

 

 

 

23

 

THERE WERE ONLY THE THREE OF THEM NOW, PHOEBE, ISABEL, Jimmy Minor. They met in the Dolphin Hotel at half past seven as usual, though everything else was different and would never be the same again. Patrick Ojukwu had been deported. Inspector Hackett, under instructions from the Department of External Affairs, and accompanied by a second plainclothes man and a civil servant, had escorted him to the airport that morning and put him on a flight for London, from where he would travel on direct to Lagos. None of them had been allowed to see him before he went. He had gone back from Isabel’s house to his flat in Castle Street, where he was picked up by the Guards and brought to the Bridewell station and held in a cell there overnight. There had been no question of an appeal. Patrick was gone and would not return.

 

Phoebe felt strange. She was calm, despite everything that had happened, calm to the point of numbness. It was like the feeling she would have if she had not slept for many nights. Everything around her seemed unreally clear and defined, as if bathed in a sharp, strong light. She had sat in the kitchen of the café in Howth for an hour, drinking cup after cup of horribly
strong, sweet tea, and then Quirke had driven her home. He had wanted her to come with him to the flat in Mount Street and rest there, but she had preferred to be in her own place, among her own things. She had walked through the day in a sort of dream. She could not remember now how she had filled the hours. She had not gone to work but had phoned Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes and told her she was sick. Then she had sat by the window for a long time, she remembered that, looking down into the street. She had not realized before how interesting it could be just to watch the world as the day slowly passed by. People came and went, house wives going to the shops and returning again, schoolchildren trudging along with their satchels, mysterious, shabby old men about their feckless doings. A Guinness dray had come and delivered barrels of stout to the pub across the way, the big brown-and-white horse standing in harness and now and then stamping one hoof, and lifting it again and setting it down on its tip as delicately as a ballet dancer. Though it was an overcast day the light underwent many subtle, almost surreptitious changes, through all the shades of gray from pearl to lead.

 

For a long time she did not think about April at all, or about April’s brother. It was as if her mind had set up a barrier, a cordon sanitaire, to protect her. The worst thing of all, now, was not knowing for certain if April was dead or alive. Was Oscar Latimer to be believed? He was a madman and could have been making it all up. It was true that Patrick had seen poor April after she had done that terrible thing to herself and had described what a perilous state she was in, but that did not necessarily mean that she was going to die. Maybe Oscar had been able to stop the bleeding—he was an expert doctor, after all— and then had taken her somewhere and hidden her until she recovered and was well enough to go away, to En gland, maybe, or— or America, or— or anywhere. She could be there now, on
the other side of the world, embarking on a new life. April would be capable of that, Phoebe was sure of it. April could cut herself off from everyone and everything she had known and not look back once.

 

Phoebe thought of the watcher below her window. Oscar Latimer had denied it was he who had stood there on the edge of the lamplight, night after night. If it was not Latimer, who was it, then?

 

Now, in the Dolphin, she did not tell the other two that she had been in the car with Quirke and April’s brother. She might have confided in Isabel, but not Jimmy; she did not trust Jimmy anymore. For his part, Jimmy said he was sure she knew what had happened on Howth Head, and was furious that she would not tell him. How was it Oscar Latimer had been in Quirke’s car? Did Oscar know where April was or what had happened to her, had he said? Phoebe stayed silent; she owed it to April to keep her secrets. She could feel Isabel watching her, though; Isabel was not fooled.

 

Jimmy Minor complained violently about Patrick for keeping silent all that time and not telling them what he knew of April and the trouble she had got herself into. He believed that Patrick was the father of April’s child, and Phoebe said nothing to enlighten him. She watched him as he sat there, his little legs dangling, going over and over and over it all, or all of it that he knew, and it came to her that what he felt for Patrick was not, in fact, hatred but something else entirely. She received this illumination calmly, almost with indifference; nothing, she felt, would surprise her ever again.

 

She finished her drink and said she would have to go, that she was to have dinner with her father and Rose Crawford. She could see they believed she was lying. Isabel said she too would have to leave shortly, that she was on in the second act and would be in trouble already and would get shouted at for not
being there for the first. She was pale, paler even than usual, and looked tired and disconsolate. She had sat for the past half hour nursing her gin and tonic and saying nothing of April, or Patrick, or of any of it. Phoebe knew there had been something between Isabel and her father, and she supposed it was over now, and that Isabel was sad.

 

They knew, all three of them, that this was the last time they would meet here like this, that the little band was not only diminished in number but was no more.

 

WHEN SHE CAME OUT OF THE HOTEL IT WAS SNOWING STILL, NOT heavily, though the street already had a thin, frail coating of white. She decided to walk to the Shelbourne. Her hat, the black velvet one with the scarlet feather, would be ruined, but she did not care. The lights from the shop windows shone on the snow, making her think of Christmas. There would be real Christmases again, now, Rose Crawford would make sure of that. Phoebe pictured the three of them, her and Rose and her father, sitting round a table with a turkey on it, the crystal sparkling and a big bowl of holly in the middle, its polished leaves reflecting the fairy lights on the tree. When she tried to imagine her father’s face, though, the expression on it, she felt a prick of doubt in her heart.

 

The doorman at the Shelbourne scolded her with mock seriousness for venturing out into the snow with those thin shoes and that poor little hat, the feather of which was thoroughly bedraggled by now. She went up in the lift to the top floor, and through the door with the green baize on it that led to Rose Crawford’s suite. A waiter in a tailcoat let her in and escorted her to the sitting room. Rose was there, and Quirke, and Malachy Griffin, too. Rose came to meet her and kissed her on the
cheek. “My Lord”— she pronounced it
Lawd
—”but you’re cold, darling! And look at your shoes! Take them off at once, while I find you some slippers.”

 

Quirke wore a black suit and a red silk tie, and his shirt was starched and very white. When he got dressed up like this he seemed to her very young, a big schoolboy, scrubbed and awkward, out for a treat with the grown-ups. She noticed he was drinking water with ice and a slice of lime— at least, she hoped it was water, and not gin. He would need to be on his best behavior to night, for she was sure it was to night that Rose would make her announcement, that this was the reason they were here, the four of them. Rose went off to one of the bedrooms to search for a pair of slippers, and the waiter came and asked Phoebe, in that confidential way that waiters did, what she would like to drink. Nervously she asked for a sherry, and when he brought it to her she spilled some of it because her hands were unsteady. She was so excited she felt that she was herself a glass filled to the brim that she had been given to carry and which she was terrified she would let spill or drop. Malachy asked her if she was all right, and she said yes, and he said that Quirke had told them what had happened on Howth Head. She turned quickly to her father— how much of it had he told?— but he would not meet her eye.

 

“Yes,” Rose Crawford said, coming back into the room, “that poor man, killing himself like that. What was the matter with him? Was he so upset about his sister disappearing?”

 

“You’re lucky he didn’t take you with him,” Malachy said.

 

“And your lovely car!” Rose cried.

 

Quirke looked into his glass.

 

For dinner they were served roast pheasant, which Phoebe did not like but which she made herself eat, determined to do nothing that might impede in the slightest way the steady progress
of the evening towards the moment that she knew would come, when Rose would put down her glass and look about the table, and smile, and begin to speak—

 

“More potatoes, Miss?” the tailcoated waiter murmured, leaning down at her shoulder. He smelled of hair oil.

 

Time dragged. Rose talked of her visit to America. “Boston looks so bare in wintertime, the grass on the Common turned to straw by the cold and the pond iced over. I always feel sorry for the ducks; they look so puzzled, slipping and sliding on the ice, not able to understand what’s happened to the water.” She turned to Phoebe. “My dear, everyone, but everyone, asked after you and told me to be sure to give you their love, especially”— she put her head on one side and arched a mischievous eyebrow—”that nice young Mr. Spalding from the Chase Manhattan, you remember him?” She glanced at the two men. “