Elegy for April (5 page)

 

“Isabel Galloway?” Quirke chuckled. “That’s fast, all right.”

 

They were crossing at the top of Merrion Street when a green double-decker bus appeared suddenly out of the fog, bearing down on them with a roar, and they had to skip in haste to the
safety of the pavement. A reek of porter from the doorway of Doheny & Nesbitts made Quirke’s stomach heave.

 

“So she might have gone to En gland, in that case,” Malachy said, and gave a little cough.

 

Quirke knew what “gone to En gland” was a euphemism for. “Oh, come on, Mal,” he said drily. “Wouldn’t she have got one of the likely lads at the hospital to help her with any little problem in that line?”

 

Malachy did not reply, and Quirke, amused, glanced at him and saw his mouth tightened in a deploring pout. Malachy was consultant obstetrician at the Hospital of the Holy Family and did not take kindly even to the suggestion that April Latimer or anyone else could have got an illegal abortion there.

 

At the Shelbourne, outside the revolving glass door, Quirke balked. “I’m sorry, Mal,” he muttered, “I can’t face it.” The thought of all that chatter and brightness in there, the winking glasses and the shining faces of the morning drinkers, was not to be borne. He was sweating; he could feel the wet hotness on his chest and on his forehead under the rim of his hat that was suddenly too tight. They turned and trudged back the way they had come.

 

Not a word was exchanged between them until they got to the Q and L. Quirke did not know why the shop was called the Q and L, and had never been curious enough to ask. The proprietor— or more properly the proprietor’s son, since the shop was owned by an ancient widow, bedridden these many years— was a fat, middle-aged fellow with a big moon face and brilliantined hair slicked flat. He always seemed dressed up for the races, in his accustomed outfit of checked shirt and bow tie and canaryyellow waistcoat, tweed jacket, and cream-colored corduroy slacks. He was prone to unpredictable, brief displays of skittishness— he might suddenly yodel, or grin like a chimp, and more than once Quirke had been present to witness him essay a few
dance steps behind the counter, clicking his fingers and stamping the heels of his chestnut-brown brogues. Today he was in undemonstrative mood, due to the dampening effects of the fog, perhaps. Quirke bought a Procea loaf, six eggs, butter, milk, two small bundles of kindling, a packet of Senior Service, and a box of Swan Vestas. The look of these things on the counter flooded him suddenly with a wash of self-pity.

 

“Thanky-voo,” the shopman said plumply, handing over change.

 

In the flat Quirke unplugged the electric fire— it had made little impression on the big, high-ceilinged room— and crumpled the pages of an ancient copy of the
Irish Independent
and put them in the grate with the kindling on top and lumps of coal from the scuttle and set a match to the paper and stood back and watched the flames catch and the coils of heavy white smoke snake upwards. Then he went into the kitchen and scrambled two eggs and toasted slices of bread under the gas grill. Malachy accepted a cup of tea but would eat nothing. “My God,” Quirke said, suspending the teapot in midpour, “look at us, like a pair of old biddies on pension day.” They had been married to two sisters. Quirke’s wife, Delia, had died in childbirth, having Phoebe; Malachy’s Sarah had succumbed to a brain tumor two years ago. Being a widower suited Malachy, or so it seemed to Quirke; it was as if he had been born to be bereaved.

 

Angelus bells were tolling from all quarters of the city.

 

Quirke sat down at the table, still in his overcoat, and began to eat. He could feel Malachy watching him with the melancholy shadow of a smile. A sort of intimacy, however uneasy, had developed between the two of them since Sarah’s death. They were indeed like two sexless cronies, Quirke reflected, two aging androgynes shuffling arm in arm down the wearying middle stretch of life’s long road. Malachy’s thoughts must have
been running on the same lines, for now he startled Quirke by saying, “I’m thinking of retiring— did I tell you?”

 

Quirke, teacup suspended, stared at him. “Retiring?”

 

“My heart is not in it anymore,” Mal said, lifting and letting fall his left shoulder, as if to demonstrate a deficiency of ballast on that side.

 

Quirke set down his cup. “For God’s sake, Malachy, you’re not fifty yet.”

 

“I feel as if I was. I feel about eighty.”

 

“You’re still grieving.”

 

“After all this time?”

 

“It
takes
all this time. Sarah was …” He faltered, frowning; he did not know how to begin listing the things that Sarah had been. After all, they had loved her, Quirke as well as Malachy, each in his way.

 

Mal smiled miserably and looked up at the gray light in the window beside the small table where they sat. He sighed. “It’s not Sarah, Quirke, it’s me. Something has gone out of my life, something that’s more than Sarah— I mean, that’s different from Sarah. Something of
me
.”

 

Quirke pushed his plate away; his appetite was gone, not that it had been keen to start with. He sat back on the chair and lit a cigarette. Malachy had been reminding him of someone, and now he realized who it was: Harkness, but without the apostate Christian Brother’s invigorating bitterness and biting scorn.

 

“You have to hold on, Mal. This is all there is, this life. If something is gone out of it for you, it’s your job to replace it.”

 

Malachy was gazing at him, his eyes hardly visible behind those gleaming lenses; Quirke felt like a specimen being studied under a glass. Now Mal asked softly, “Don’t you ever just want it to be— to be done with?”

 

“Of course,” Quirke answered impatiently. “In the past couple
of months I thought at least once a day it might be best to go, or to be gone, at least— the going itself is the thing I don’t care for.”

 

Malachy considered this, smiling to himself. “Somebody asked, I can’t remember who,
How can we live, knowing that we must die?
”

 

“Or you could say, how can we
not
live, knowing that death is waiting for us? It makes just as much sense— more, maybe.”

 

Now Malachy laughed, or at least it was a sort of laugh. “I never knew you to be so enthusiastically on the side of life,” he said. “Doctor Death, they call you at the hospital.”

 

“I know that,” Quirke said. “I know what they call me.” He tipped the ash of his cigarette into his saucer and saw Malachy’s nostrils twitch in distaste. “Listen, Mal, I’m going to buy a car; why don’t you come and help me pick one out.”

 

Now it was Malachy’s turn to stare. He could not take it in. “But you can’t drive,” he said.

 

“I know I can’t,” Quirke answered wearily. “Everyone keeps telling me that. But I can learn. In fact, I’ve already decided the model I have my eye on.” He waited. “Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?”

 

Malachy was still staring at him owlishly. “But why?” he asked.

 

“Why not? I have a sack of money I’ve been accumulating all these years; it’s time I bought something with it, for myself. I’m going for an Alvis.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Best car the British ever built. Beautiful thing. I knew a fellow that had one— Birtwhistle, at college, remember, who died? Come on, we’ll go up to Crawford’s. There’s a chap there, Protestant, dependable. I did a P.M. last year on his aged mother, who unaccountably fell downstairs and broke her neck the day after she’d made her will.” He winked. “Shall we go?”

 

 

 

 

MALACHY DROVE THE HUMBER AS IF IT WERE NOT A MACHINE but a large, fuming, unpredictable beast he had been put in unwilling charge of, holding the steering wheel at arm’s length and groping about with his feet after the pedals down in the dark. He muttered to himself, under his breath, bemoaning the fog and the poor visibility and the recklessness of the drivers of the other vehicles they encountered along the way. At the corner of St. Stephen’s Green, as they were turning onto Earlsfort Terrace, they narrowly missed colliding with a CIE delivery cart drawn by a high-stepping Clydesdale, and were followed for twenty yards and more by the drayman’s bellowed curses.

 

“You know,” Malachy said, “I used to take pride in my job of helping mothers to bring their babies into the world. Now I look at the world and I wonder if I did more harm than good.”

 

“You’re a fine doctor, Mal.”

 

“Am I?” He smiled at the windscreen. “Then why can’t I heal myself?”

 

They went on a little way in silence, then Quirke said, “Isn’t despair one of the big mortal sins? Or do you not believe in that kind of thing anymore?”

 

Malachy said nothing, only smiled again, more bleakly than ever.

 

They parked on Hatch Street— it took Malachy fully five minutes to maneuver into a space twice the length of the Hum ber— and Quirke, shaken after the short but harrowing drive, was wondering if he should reconsider the idea of owning a car. On the pavement he put on his hat and turned up the collar of his coat. The sun somewhere was trying to shine, its weak glow making a sallow, urinous stain on the fog. As they walked towards the showrooms on the corner Malachy said worriedly, “This fellow’s mother, the one that fell downstairs— when you did the postmortem on her, you didn’t— I mean, you wouldn’t—?”

 

Quirke heaved a sigh. “You never really did have much of a sense of humor, did you, Mal.”

 

The showroom smelled of steel and leather, fresh paintwork, clean engine oil. A number of small, gleaming cars stood about the floor, looking self-conscious at the incongruity of being indoors but all the same conveying a bright and eager impression, like puppies in a pet shop. The salesman’s name was Lockwood, and he was indeed, Mal saw, every inch the image of a Protestant, which probably meant that he was not one at all. He was tall and painfully thin— it seemed his long bones must rattle when he moved— wearing a gray, chalk-striped, double-breasted suit and brown suede shoes with arabesques of holes punched in the toe caps. He had pale, poached eyes and a mustache that might have been painted on with an extrafine water-color brush; he was young but balding already, his high forehead giving him a startled, harelike look. “Good morning, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “though it’s not very good, I suppose, with that blessed fog that it seems will never lift.”

 

Quirke introduced Malachy, then said without preamble, “I’m here to buy an Alvis.”

 

Lockwood blinked, then a slow, warm light came into his eyes. “An Alvis,” he breathed, in a hushed tone, reverently. “Why, of course.” A very special model had come in just that week, he said, oh, very special. He led the way across the showroom floor, tensely chafing his long-boned hands; Quirke guessed he was calculating the commission he would earn on the sale and unable to believe his luck. “It’s a TC 108 Super Graber Coupe, one of only three manufactured so far, by Willowbrook of Loughborough— that’s right, three only. Hermann Graber, Swiss master designer. Six-cylinder, three-liter, hundred bhp. Independent front suspension, Burman F worm and nut steering box, top speed one-ohthree, nought to sixty in thirteen point five. Look at her, gentlemen— just look at her.”

 

It was indeed a magnificent machine, black, gleaming, lowslung, displaying a restrained elegance in every line. Quirke, despite himself, was awed— was he really to become the possessor of this sleek, polished beast? As well take a panther home with him.

 

Malachy, to Quirke’s surprise, had begun to ask questions that revealed an impressive knowledge of these machines and their attributes. Who would have thought old Mal would know about such things? But here he was, gravely pacing around the car, stroking his chin and frowning, and talking about crankshafts and Girling shocks— Girling shocks?— and valve gears and pushrod overheads, with Lockwood following happily at his heels.

 

“Maybe you should buy it, not me,” Quirke said, trying not to sound peeved, and failing.

 

“I used to be interested,” Malachy said diffidently, “when I was young— don’t you remember? All those motoring magazines you used to try to steal from me.”

 

Quirke did not remember, or did not care to. He looked at the car again and felt alarmed and giddy— what was he letting himself in for?— as if he had been enticed out on a tightrope and had frozen in fright midway across. Yet there was no going back. He wrote out the check, holding his breath as he filled in all those naughts, but managed all the same to hand it over with something of a flourish. Lockwood tried to maintain his salesman’s professional smoothness, but little smiles kept breaking out on his long face, and when Quirke made a weak joke about
driving a hard bargain
the young man lost all control and giggled like a schoolgirl. It was not every day of the week, or every year of the decade, for that matter, that a customer walked in off the street and bought an Alvis TC 108 Super Graber Coupe.

 

Quirke, who had not admitted to Lockwood that he did not know how to drive, was relieved to hear that the car would not
be ready for the road until it had been given a “thorough looksee under her skirts,” as Lockwood put it, by the company’s engineers. Quirke had a vision of these men, advancing like a troop of surgeons, white-coated and wearing rubber gloves, each one carrying a clipboard and gripping a brand-new, shiny spanner. He could collect the car the following day, Lockwood said. The fog was pressed like lint against the showroom’s broad, plateglass windows.