Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

“I don’t see why we’re being so concerned,” Isabel Galloway said. “We all know what April is like.”

“It’s not like her to disappear,” Jimmy said sharply. There was always a mild friction between Jimmy and Isabel, who tossed her head now and gave a histrionic sigh.

“Who says she’s disappeared?” she asked.

“We told you, we went to her flat, Phoebe and I. It was obvious she hadn’t been there since Wednesday week, which was the last time Phoebe spoke to her.”

“Of course, she could just have gone away,” Phoebe urged, as she had urged so many times already, on the principle that she might be encouraged to believe it herself if she saw that the others did.

Jimmy gave her a scathing look. “Gone away where?”

“You’re the one who told me I was being hysterical,” Phoebe said, aware that she was flushing and annoyed at herself for it.

“But sweetheart, you were being hysterical,” he said in his Hollywood twang. He gave her one of his smiles, not the real, irresistible one, but the smirking mask he had learned to put on, to charm and cajole. She sometimes asked herself if she really liked Jimmy; he could be sweet and affecting, but there was something dour and surly in his nature, too.

No one spoke for a time, then Isabel said, “What about the sick-note she gave to the hospital?”

“We’ve all sent in sick-notes without being at death’s door,” Jimmy said, turning to her and letting the smile drop. His legs were so short that even though the chair in which he sat was of normal height his feet did not quite reach the floor. He turned to Patrick Ojukwu. “What do you think?” he asked, unable to suppress an edge of truculence in his voice.

It was April who had met Ojukwu first and introduced him to the little band. He had been accepted more or less readily; Jimmy had shown the least enthusiasm, of course, while Isabel Galloway, as April drily observed, had attempted to climb into his lap straight off. They were all, even Jimmy, secretly gratified to have among them a person so handsome, so exotic and so black. They liked the sense his presence in their midst gave to them of being sophisticated and cosmopolitan, though none of the four had ever traveled farther abroad than London. They welcomed too with grim satisfaction the looks they got when they were in his company, by turns outraged, hate-filled, fearful, envious.

“I do not know what to think,” Patrick said. He leaned forward and set his glass of orange juice on the table- he did not drink alcohol, in compliance with some unspecified religious or tribal prohibition- then sat back again and folded his arms. He was large, slow-moving, deep-voiced, with a great barrel chest and a round, handsome head. A student doctor at the College of Surgeons, he was the youngest of them yet was possessed of a grave and mysterious air of authority. Phoebe was always fascinated by the sharp dividing line along the sides of his hands where the chocolatey backs gave way to the tender, dry pink of the palms. When she pictured those hands moving over April Latimer’s pale, freckled skin something stirred deep inside her, whether in protest or prurience she could not tell. Perhaps it was her own skin she was imagining under that dusky caress. Her mind skittered away from the thought in sudden alarm. “I can’t understand,” Ojukwu said now, “why no one has spoken to her family.”

“Because,” Isabel Galloway said witheringly, “ her family doesn’t speak to her.”

Ojukwu looked to Phoebe. “Is it true?”

She glanced away, towards the fireplace, where a tripod of turf logs was smoldering over a scattering of white ash. Two old codgers were in a huddle there, seated in armchairs, drinking whiskey and talking about horses. She had a sense of the winter night outside hung with mist, the streetlights weakly aglow, and the nearby river sliding silently along between its banks, shining, secret, and black. “She doesn’t get on with her mother,” she said, “I know that. And she laughs about her uncle the Minister, says he’s a pompous ass.”

Ojukwu was watching her closely; it was a way he had, to gaze steadily at people out of those big protuberant eyes of his, which seemed to have so much more white to them than was necessary. “And her brother?” he asked softly.

“She doesn’t ever mention him,” Phoebe said.

Isabel gave her actor’s laugh, going ha ha ha! in three distinct, descending tones. “That prig!” she said. She was the oldest one of the little band- none of them knew her age and did not dare to guess- yet she was lithe and slim, unnaturally pale, with a sharply angled face; her hair was of a rich, dark, almost bronze color, and Phoebe suspected that she dyed it. She twirled the gin glass in her fingers and recrossed her famously long and lovely legs. “The Holy Father, they call him.”

“Why?” Ojukwu asked.

Isabel inclined languidly towards him, smiling with imitation sweetness, and patted the back of his hand. “Because he’s a mad Catholic and famously celibate. The only poking Doctor Oscar ever does is-”

“Bella!” Phoebe said, giving her a look.

“They’re all prigs, the lot of them!” Jimmy Minor broke in, with a violence that startled them all. His forehead had gone white, as it always did when he was wrought. “The Latimers have a stranglehold on medicine in this city, and look at the state of the public health. The mother with her good works, and the brother whose only concern is to keep French letters out of the country and the maternity hospitals full. And as for Uncle Bill, the Minister of so-called Health, sucking up to the priests and that whited sepulchre in his palace out in Drumcondra-! Crowd of hypocrites!”

An uneasy silence followed this outburst. The pair of horse fanciers by the fireplace had stopped talking and were looking over with a mixture of curiosity and disapproval.

“I still think,” Patrick Ojukwu said, “that someone should speak to Mrs. Latimer or to April’s brother. If there is disagreement between them and April, and she does not keep in touch, they may not know she has not been heard from.”

The other three exchanged uneasy glances. The Prince was right, the family should be alerted. Then Phoebe had an idea. “I’ll ask my father,” she said. “He probably knows the Minister, or Oscar Latimer, or both. He could speak to them.”

Isabel and Jimmy still looked doubtful and exchanged a glance. “I think one of the four of us should do that,” Jimmy said, avoiding Phoebe’s eye. “April is our friend.”

Phoebe looked at him narrowly. They all knew where Quirke had been for the past six weeks. They knew too of her and Quirke’s history together, or not together, rather. Why should they trust him to approach the Latimers? “Then I’ll phone her brother,” she said stoutly, looking round as if inviting them to challenge her. “I’ll call him tomorrow and go to see him.”

She stopped. She did not feel half as brave or decisive as she was pretending to be. The thought of confronting the famously prickly Oscar Latimer made her quail. And from the way Jimmy and Isabel shrugged and looked away it seemed they were no more enthusiastic for her to talk to him than they had been when she offered her father as a spokesman. Of the three, Patrick Ojukwu had the most enigmatic expression, smiling at her in a strange way, broadening his already flat, broad nose and drawing back his lips to show her those enormous white teeth of his all the way to the edges of gums that were as pink and shiny as sugarstick. He might almost have been mocking her. Yet behind that broad smile he, too, she sensed, was uneasy.

Despite her misgivings, that night when she got home she called Oscar Latimer, from the telephone in the hallway. His office number was the only one she could find in the directory, and she was sure he would not be there, at eleven o’clock at night. She knew very well that she was calling him now in the certainty that she would not get him, and she was startled when the receiver was picked up after the first ring and a voice said softly, “Yes?” Her impulse was to hang up immediately, but instead she went on standing there with the phone pressed to her ear, hearing her own breath rustling in the mouthpiece, a sound like that of the sea at a great distance, the waves rising and falling. She thought it must be the wrong number she had dialed but then the voice again said, “Yes?” as softly as before, and added, “Oscar Latimer here. Who is this, please?” She could not think what to say. The hall around her suddenly seemed unnaturally quiet, and she was afraid that as soon as she began to speak the fat young man would come storming out of his flat to rail at her for making noise and disturbing him. She said her name and had to repeat it, more loudly, though still speaking barely above a whisper. There was another silence on the line- perhaps he did not recognize her name, for why should he?- then he said, “Ah. Yes. Miss Griffin. What can I do for you?” She asked if she could see him in the morning. After the briefest pause he said she might come at half past eight, that he could give her five minutes, before his first patient was due. He hung up without saying goodbye, and without asking what it was she wanted to see him about. She supposed he thought she must be in trouble; probably girls in trouble phoned him all the time, at all hours of day and night, since he was the best-known doctor, in his line, in town.