Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

The sofa felt as unsat on as it looked; the cushion under Quirke was plump and hard, and perched on it he had the sense of being borne swayingly aloft, like a child on a merry-go-round, or a mahout on his elephant. He sipped the tonic water; she was right, it was flat.

The dance tune on the radio came to an end, and the announcer said the next one would be a tango. “We could dance, if there was room,” Isabel said. She looked askance at him. “Do you dance, Dr. Quirke?”

“Not much.”

“I thought so.” She took a drink of her gin and laid her head back on the sofa, sighing. “God, I’ve been boozing all afternoon with those people; I’m sure I must be completely tiddly.” Again she gave him that sideways glance. “Mind you, don’t let that give you any ideas.”

There was a silver cigarette box on the table, and now she leaned forward and took two cigarettes and put them both in her mouth and lit them and handed one to him. “Sorry,” she said, “lipstick,” and Quirke remembered another woman doing that, turning from a mantelpiece, in snow-light, and handing him a cigarette and saying those same words.

“How did you know me?” he asked. “At the hotel, I mean.”

“I must have seen you, I suppose, with Phoebe.” She narrowed her eyes, still smiling. “Or maybe I saw you in front of the footlights all those times when you came to see me act, and remembered you.”

The tango music swirled, toffee-brown and smooth.

“Do you know Phoebe well?” he asked.

She heaved a sharp sigh, pretending to be vexed. “You keep asking me that. Does anyone know Phoebe well? Anyway, she’s really April’s friend- April Latimer?” Quirke nodded. “The rest of us I think she just tolerates.”

“The rest of you?”

“We’re a little band of friends, the Faubourg set, don’t you know. We meet once a week and drink too much and talk behind other people’s backs. Well, I drink too much, usually. You needn’t worry about Phoebe; she’s very careful.”

“April Latimer, then,” he said, “how well did you know her ?”

“Oh, I’ve known April forever. She stole a man from me, once.”

“Is that how you met her?”

“What? Oh, no. We’d known each other a long time when that happened.”

“So you were able to forgive her.”

She gave him a sharp look, suspecting mockery. “Well, of course. To tell the truth, he wasn’t much of a catch in the first place, as April soon found out. We had many a laugh behind his back, April and I.”

The tango ended and there was applause, tinny and remote, and the announcer came on to say that the news would be next. “Oh, turn that off, will you?” Isabel said. “Do you mind? I hate hearing of the day’s disasters.” She watched him get up and, craning her neck, followed him with her eye as he went to the set to switch it off. “You really are very big,” she said, putting on a lisping, little-girl voice. “I didn’t quite realize it at the hotel, but in this dinky little house you look like Gulliver.”

He returned to the sofa and sat down. “She was fond of men, was she, April?” he asked.

She gave him a wide-eyed stare. “You do come right out with it, don’t you?” she said. She laid her head back on the sofa and rolled it slowly from side to side. “I notice you speak of her in the past tense. You must have been talking to Phoebe, who thinks April has been done away with by Jack the Ripper.”

“And you – what do you think has become of her?”

“If her past behavior is anything to go by, right now she’ll be shacked up with some hunk in a nice cozy inn somewhere in… oh, let me see… in the Cotswolds, under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, dining by candlelight and sporting a Wool-worth’s wedding ring. What do you think, Dr. Quirke?”

He suggested she might call him by his first name. When she asked him what it was and he told her, she gave a little shriek of delight and incredulity, and immediately put a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t laugh. But I think I’ll stick to Quirke, if you don’t mind- even Phoebe calls you that, doesn’t she?”

“Yes,” he said flatly. “Everyone does.”

He finished his cigarette and was leaning forward to stub the end of it in the ashtray on the table when he felt her fingers on the back of his neck. “You have such a nice little corkscrew curl just there where your hair ends,” she said.

She allowed her hand to glide slowly down between his shoulder blades to his waist. He turned and put his hands on her shoulders- how delicate the bones were there!- and kissed her painted mouth. It was cool and tasted of gin. She drew back an inch and laughed softly into his mouth. “Oh, Dr. Quirke,” she murmured, “I really must be drunk.” But when Quirke put a hand on her breast she pushed him away. “Let’s have another drink,” she said, and sat up, touching her hair. She poured the gin and the last of the flat tonic water and handed him his glass. She looked at him closely. “Now you’re sulking,” she said. “I can see you are. What do you expect? Don’t you know what it’s like for a girl in this town?”

He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I made a mistake.”

Her look hardened. “Yes, obviously you did. I’m an actress, therefore I must be a tart, right? Be honest- that’s the mistake you think you made, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and stood up, brushing his hands down the front of his jacket. “I should go.”

He took up his coat and hat. Isabel did not rise but sat with her knees pressed together, gripping the gin glass tightly between her palms. He was stepping past her when she put out a hand and fumbled for one of his. “Oh, stop, you great lummox,” she said. “Come here.” She smiled up at him crookedly, pulling at his hand. “Maybe we can both get the wrong idea and see where it leads us.”

A CHURCH BELL FAR OFF WAS TOLLING THREE O’CLOCK WHEN HE slipped from the bed in the darkness and went and stood by the window. A crooked streetlamp was shedding a circle of light on the pavement outside. Behind him, Isabel, sleeping, was a tousle of dark hair on the pillow and one pale, gleaming arm flung across the sheet. The window was low, and he had to stoop to see out of it. The rain had stopped, and the sky, amazingly, was clear- it seemed to him weeks, months, even, since there had been a clear sky. A sliver of moon was suspended like a scimitar above the gleaming rooftops of the houses on the other side of the canal. A car sizzled past on this side, its headlights dimmed. It was cold, and he was naked, yet he lingered there, a stooped watcher of the night. He was calm, as if something, some perpetually turning motor in his head, had been switched to a lower, slower gear. How sweet it was for a little while not to think, merely to lean there, above the street, hearing the soft beating of his own heart, remembering the warmth of the bed that he would soon return to. Despite the stillness of the air the canal was moving, the water brimming at both banks and wrinkled like silver paper, and here came- look!-two swans, gliding sedately side by side, dipping their long necks as they moved, a pair of silent creatures, white as the moon and moving amidst the moon’s shattered, white reflections on the water.

IN THE MORNING, OF COURSE, IT WAS NOT AS EASY AS IT HAD BEEN in the night. Isabel had a hangover, though she tried to hide it behind a brightly brittle manner, and there was a knot of tension between her eyebrows and her skin had that gray, grainy pallor that was an unmistakable giveaway, as Quirke knew from many an ashen morning after a night before, glooming into the shaving mirror. She wore a silk tea gown with a floral print in crimsons and yellows, the design so busy he wondered how she could bear it. They sat at the table in the cramped kitchen by a window that looked out on a yard with a dustbin in it; a weak winter sun was shining out there, doing its best but not making much impression on anything. Isabel smoked with almost a fierce concentration, as if it were a task that had been set her, hard and wearisome, but one that she must not shirk. She had made coffee in a percolator with a glass top; the coffee was black and bitter and had a tarry taste, and made Quirke think unpleasantly of a monkey’s pelt. He wondered if he might tell her about the two swans on the canal in the moonlight but decided it would be better not to.