Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

“Is that where you’re from,” she asked, “from Benin?”

“No,” he said, “no, I am an Igbo. I was born in a small village, on the Niger, but I grew up in Port Harcourt. Not a very pretty place.”

She did not care where he was born, what city or cities he had lived in. She felt all at once bereft by his talk of these so far-off places, where she would never be, which she would never know. The rain whispered against the window, as if it, too, had a story to tell her.

“Do you miss it, your home?” she asked, trying not to let him hear the woe in her voice.

“I suppose I do. We all miss our home, don’t we, when we leave it.”

“Oh, but you haven’t left, have you?” she said quickly. “I mean, you’ll go back. Surely they need doctors in Nigeria?”

He gave her a sharp, sly glance, and his smile turned chilly. “Of course- we need everything. Except missionaries, maybe. Of them, we have enough.”

She did not know what to say to this; she supposed she had offended him, it seemed so easy to do. He put the figure back on the sill carefully, in the spot where it had been- was it a holy thing for him, reaching down to the deep roots of his past?-and came back and sat down opposite her again on the wooden stool.

“You know that’s a milking stool,” she said. “I can’t think where you got it from.”

“It was here when I came. Perhaps Mrs. Gilligan was a milkmaid when she was young.” He laughed. “Mrs. Gilligan is my landlady. If you knew her, you would see the joke. Hair curlers, headscarf, cigarette. The cows would not like her, I think.” He picked up a crumb of cheese in that way that he did, bunching his thick fingers, and put it thoughtfully into his pink mouth. “Sometimes,” he said, and his tone was suddenly changed, “sometimes it’s hard, here, for me. I get tired- tired of the way I am looked at, tired of the scowls, the muttered remarks.”

“You mean, because you’re… because of your color?”

He plucked up another morsel from his plate. “It does not relent, that is what is the worst of it. I forget sometimes, about my”- he smiled, making a little bow of acknowledgment- “my color, but not for long. There is always someone to remind me of it.”

“Oh!” she said, appalled. “I didn’t mean… I mean I-”

“Not you,” he said. “Not my friends. I’m lucky to have such friends- you cannot know how lucky.”

There was a long silence. They listened to the sibilant sound of the rain on the windowpanes.

“I’m sorry I asked you that about April,” Phoebe said. “About your being- about her-”

“About my being ‘in love’ with her?” He did that little bob of his head again, smiling. “I could not afford to love someone like April. There is April herself, what she is like, and then there is, too, my ‘color.’ “

“I’m sorry,” she said again, in a small voice, looking down.

“Yes,” he said, almost as softly, “so am I.”

When, five minutes later, she came out into the street- Patrick stood in the doorway looking after her as she walked away- she felt more confused than ever. While she was sitting with him and he was talking to her, she had thought she understood, in some way beyond the actual words he had spoken, what he was saying, but now she realized that she had understood nothing. It was strange- what was there to understand? What had she expected him to say, what had she wanted him to say? She had wanted him to tell her, to reassure her, that he and April had not gone to bed together that night after the drinks at the Shakespeare, not that night or any other, but he had not told her that. Perhaps it was her fault, perhaps she had asked the wrong question, or asked the right one but framed it in a mistaken way; yes, perhaps that was it. Yet what other words could she have used?

The fine rain fell and gleamed on the cobbles with what seemed a malignant intent, and she had to pick her way along carefully for fear that she would lose her footing and fall. But she was falling. She felt something opening inside her, dropping open like a trapdoor, creaking on its hinges, and all underneath was darkness and uncertainty and fear. She did not know how she knew, but she did know, now, without any remaining shadow of doubt, that April Latimer was dead.

IT WAS IN THE AFTERNOON WHEN INSPECTOR HACKETT TELEphoned. “Wouldn’t February make you want to emigrate?” he said, and did his gurgling laugh. Quirke, in his flat, had been asleep on the sofa with a book open on his chest. How unfair it was, he thought, with a warm rush of self-pity, that even though he had not taken a drink in weeks he still found himself falling into what might be drunken dozings, from which he would wake with all the symptoms of a hangover. “Did I disturb you?” the policeman asked, with amusement. “Were you in the middle of something, as they say?” He paused, breathing. “ The lads from the forensics gave me their report. That was blood, all right. A couple of weeks old, too. There must have been a big splash that someone mopped up.”

Quirke rubbed his eyes until they smarted. “How big?”

“Hard to say.”

“What about the bed- how is it there were no bloodstains on it?”

“There were, if you looked close enough, which apparently I didn’t. Only on the side, a few little specks. Must have been a rubber sheet or something under her.”

“Oh, Lord.” He was picturing the girl, a faceless figure in a shift, with one shoulder strap fallen down, sitting on the edge of the bed with her head hanging and legs splayed and the blood falling on the floor, drop by frightening drop.

For a time neither spoke. Quirke gazed at the window, at the rain, at the already darkening day.

“What’s significant,” Hackett said, “is the kind of blood it was.”

“Oh, yes? What kind was it?”

“They have some technical name for it, I can’t remember- it’s written down here somewhere.” There was the sound of papers being riffled through. “Can’t find the blasted thing,” the policeman muttered. “Anyway, it’s the kind that would be there after a miscarriage, or…” He paused.

“Or?”

“What would you medical men call it- a termination, is that the word?”

INSPECTOR HACKETT HAD ALWAYS BEEN INQUISITIVE, TOO MUCH so, as he sometimes thought and as it sometimes proved. He supposed it had to be a good trait in a policeman- he often thought it was the thing that had led him into the Force in the first place- but it had its drawbacks, too. “Snoop” had been his nickname when he was at school, and sometimes he would get a punch in the face or a kick in the backside for poking too eagerly into what was none of his business. It was not that he particularly wanted to get hold of secrets for their own sake, or to find out things that would give him an edge over those whose secrets they were. No, the source of his itch to know was that the world, he was sure, was never what it seemed, was always more than it appeared to be. He had learned that early on. To take reality as it presented itself was to miss an entirely other reality hidden behind.

He clearly remembered the moment he was first given a glimpse into the veiled and deceptive nature of things. He could not have been more than eight or nine at the time. He was walking down an empty corridor one day in school and glanced into a classroom and saw a Christian Brother alone there, sitting at a desk, crying. Long ago as it was, he could still call up the entire scene in his memory, and it would be as if he were there again. It was morning, and the sun was shining in through all the big windows along the corridor; he remembered the way the sunlight fell on the floor in parallelograms with skewed, slender crosses inside them. Why there was no one around except for him and the Christian Brother, or why he was there or what he was doing, he did not recall. There must have been a football match or something on, and someone had sent him back to the school on an errand. He saw himself walking along and coming up to the open doorway of the classroom and looking in and glimpsing the Brother sitting there all by himself, not at his own desk at the top of the class but at one of the boys’ desks in the front row, although it was much too small for him. He was crying, bitterly, in silence, with his mouth slackly open. It was shocking, but fascinating, too. The Brother was one of the easier masters, young, with red hair brushed straight back like a cock’s comb, and he wore black, horn-rimmed glasses. He was holding something in his hand- a letter, was it?- and the tears were streaming down his face. Maybe someone had died, though he would hardly have got the news of a death by letter. Or was it a tele gram, maybe? Later, at the lunch break, he saw the same Brother in the school yard, supervising the boys, and he seemed as he always did, smiling and joking and making pretend swipes at fellows with the leather strap. How had he recovered his composure so readily, with not a sign of his earlier sorrow? Was he still grieving inside and covering it up, or had the tears been just the result of a passing weakness, and were they forgotten now? Either way, it was strange. It was disturbing, too, of course, but it was the strangeness that stayed with him, the out-of-the-ordinariness of the spectacle of a grown man sitting there at the too-small desk, crying his heart out, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary morning.