Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

Learning to drive, however, turned out to be disappointingly easy. At first he had trouble operating the pedals and more than once mistook the accelerator for the brake- the engine’s howled rebuke quickly taught him the distinction- and getting the hang of the knight’s move on the gear stick when shifting into third was tricky, but he soon mastered it. Of course, Malachy cautioned, in a faintly aggrieved tone, he would not find it all such smooth going when he had to deal with traffic. Quirke said nothing. His hour of excited anticipation and anxiety was over; now he was a driver, and the car was just a car.

They came to the Castleknock Gate, and Malachy instructed him in how to make a three-point turn. As they drove back the way they had come they passed by another learner driver, whose car was executing a series of jumps and lurches, like a bucking horse, and Quirke could not suppress a smug smile and then felt more childish still.

“When are you coming back to work?” Malachy asked.

“I don’t know. Why- have there been mutterings?”

“Someone asked a question at a board meeting the other day.”

“Who?”

“Your chap Sinclair.”

“Of course.” Sinclair was Quirke’s assistant and had been running the department on his own for the past half year while Quirke was first drinking and then drying out. “He wants my job.”

“You’d better come back and make sure he doesn’t get it, then,” Mal said, with a faint, dry laugh.

They came to the gates again and Malachy said it would be best if he were to take over and drive them back to Mount Street, but Quirke said no, he would go on, that he needed experience of real road conditions. Had he a license, Malachy inquired, was the car insured? Quirke did not answer. A bus had swerved out of the CIE garage on Conyngham Road and was bearing down on them at an angle from the right. Quirke trod on the accelerator, and the car seemed to gather itself on its haunches for a second and then leapt forward, snarling.

The mist was dispersing over the river, and there was even a watery gleam of sunlight on the side of the bridge at Usher’s Island. Quirke was considering the dilemma of what he was to do with the car now that he had bought it and mastered the knack of driving. He was hardly going to use it in the city, he who loved to walk, and for whom one of life’s secret pleasures was luxuriating in the back of taxis on dark and rain-smeared winter days. Perhaps he would go for spins, as people always seemed to be doing. Come on, old girl , he would hear a driver say to his missus, let’s take a spin out to Killiney, or up to the Hellfire Club or the Sally Gap. He could do that; he rather thought not, though. What about abroad, then, put the old motor on a ferry and pop over to France? He pictured himself swishing along the Cфte d’Azur, with a girl by his side, her scarf rippling in the warm breeze from the open window, he blazered and cravatted and she sparkling and pert, smiling at his profile, as in one of those railway posters.

“What are you laughing at?” Malachy asked, suspiciously.

At College Green a white-gauntleted Guard on point duty was waving them on with large, stylized beckonings. The car sped into the turn at Trinity College, the tires shrieking for some reason. Quirke noticed Malachy’s hands clasped in his lap, the knuckles white.

Quirke said, “Did you ask at the hospital about April Latimer?”

“What?” Malachy sat as if mesmerized, his eyes wide and fixed on the road. “Oh, yes. She’s still out sick.”

“Did you see the note?”

“Note?”

“The sick-note that she sent in.”

“Yes, it said she has the flu.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

“Did it indicate how long she’d be out for?”

“No, it just said she had the flu and wouldn’t be in. That was a red light, by the way.”

Quirke was busy negotiating that tricky change into third gear. “Typed or handwritten?”

“I can’t remember. Typed, I think. Yes, typed.”

“But signed by hand?”

Malachy pondered, frowning. “No,” he said, “now that you mention it, it wasn’t. Just the name, typed out.”

At the corner of Clare Street a boy with a schoolbag on his back stepped off the pavement into the street. When he heard the blare of the horn he stopped in surprise and turned and watched with what seemed mild curiosity as the sleek black car bore down on him with its nose low to the ground and its tires smoking and the two men gaping at him from behind the windscreen, one of them grimacing with the effort of braking and the other with a hand to his head. “God almighty, Quirke!” Malachy cried as Quirke wrenched the steering wheel violently to the right and back again.

Quirke looked in the mirror. The boy was still standing in the middle of the road, shouting something after them. “Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “it wouldn’t do to run one of them down; they’re probably all counted, in these parts.”

HE CONSIDERED TAKING THE CAR ROUND TO PHOEBE’S FLAT TO show it off to her and Hackett but thought better of it and walked instead. It was dark now, and the air was again thickening with mist. A pair of early whores were loitering under the side wall of the Pepper Canister. One of them spoke to him softly as he went past, and when he did not reply she called him an obscene name and both the young women laughed. The light from the lamp on Huband Bridge was a soft, gray globe streaming outwards in all directions. It glimmered on the stone arch and made a ghost of the young willow tree leaning on the canal bank there. He was remembering Sarah, as he always did when he passed by this spot. They used to meet here sometimes, Quirke and she, and walk along the towpaths, talking. Strange to think of her in her grave. Dimly for a moment he seemed to catch the babbling voices of all of his dead. How many corpses had passed under his hands, how many bodies had he cut up, in his time? I should have done something else, been something else, he thought- but what? “A racing driver, maybe,” he said aloud, and heard his own sad laughter echo along the empty street.

Phoebe was waiting for him on Haddington Road, standing on the step outside the house where she lived. “I came down because my bell isn’t working,” she said. “It hasn’t been for weeks. I can’t get the landlord to fix it, and when anyone knocks, the bank clerk in the ground-floor flat looks daggers at me.” She linked her arm in his, and they set off up the road. She asked if he had remembered to inquire about April at the hospital. He lied and said he had seen the sick-note and described it as Malachy had told him. “Then anyone could have written it,” she said.

“Yes-but why?”

Hackett was pacing by the canal railings. His hat was on the back of his head, and his hands were clasped behind him, and there was a cigarette wedged in the corner of his wide, thin-lipped, froggy mouth. He greeted April warmly. “Miss Griffin,” he said, taking her hand in both of his and patting it, “you’re a sight for sore eyes, on such a damp and dismal evening. Tell me, are you well in yourself?”

“I am, Inspector,” Phoebe said, smiling. “Of course I am.”

They crossed the road, the three of them, and climbed the steps to the house, and Phoebe lifted the broken corner of the flagstone and took the keys out of the hole. The hall was in darkness, and she had to feel along the wall for the light switch. The light when it came on was feeble and seemed to grope among the shadows, as if the single bulb dangling from the ceiling had grown weary long ago of trying to penetrate the gloom. The brownish yellow shade might have been fashioned from dried human skin.

“It seems to be a very quiet house,” Inspector Hackett said as they climbed the stairs.