Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

What age was Rose? she wondered. Older than Quirke, certainly; it would not matter; nothing would matter.

“Tell me about Delia,” she said.

Quirke looked at her over the rim of his wine glass in startlement and alarm. “Delia?” he said, and licked his lips. “What- what do you want me to tell you?”

“Anything. What she was like. What you did together. I know so little about her. You’ve never told me anything, really.” She was smiling. “Was she very beautiful?”

In panic he fingered his napkin. The steaming fish lay almost menacingly on the plate before him. His headache was suddenly worse. “Yes,” he said, hesitantly, “she was- she was very beautiful. She looked like you.” Phoebe blushed and dipped her head. “Elegant, of course,” Quirke went on, desperately. “She could have been a model, everybody said so.”

“Yes, but what was she like ? I mean as a person.”

What she was like? How was he to tell her that? “She was kind,” he said, casting down his gaze again and fixing anew on the napkin, somehow accusing in its whiteness, its mundane purity. “She took care of me.” She was not kind, he was thinking; she did not take care of me. Yet he had loved her. “We were young,” he said, “or at least I was.”

“And did you hate me,” she asked, “did you hate me when she died?”

“Oh, no,” he said. He forced himself to smile; his cheeks felt as if they were made of glass. “Why would I hate you?”

“Because I was born and Delia died, and you gave me to Sarah.”

She was still smiling. He sat and gazed at her helplessly, clutching his knife and fork, not knowing what to say. She reached across the table and touched his hand. “I don’t blame you anymore,” she said. “I don’t know that I ever did, only I felt I should. I was angry at you. I’m not now.”

They sat in silence for a minute. Quirke filled their glasses; his hand, he saw, was a little shaky. They ate. The fish was cold.

“I saw Inspector Hackett today,” Quirke said. He looked at the empty wine bottle lolling in its bucket of half-melted ice. Would he order another? No, he would not. Definitely not. He turned and signaled to the pimpled waiter. “I talked to her brother, too.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why did you want to talk to him again?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re like me- you can’t let it go.”

The waiter came with the second bottle, but before he could begin again the tasting ritual Quirke motioned him impatiently to pour. Phoebe put a hand over her glass, smiling again at the waiter. When he had filled Quirke’s glass and gone, she said, “You think what I do, don’t you, that April is dead.” Quirke did not reply and would not look at her. “What did he say, Oscar Latimer?”

Quirke drank his wine. “He talked about families. And obsession.”

She looked at him quickly. “April talked about that too, one day, about being obsessed.”

“What did she mean?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t understand her. April was- was strange, sometimes. I’ve come to think I didn’t know her at all. Why do people make life so difficult, Quirke?”

Quirke had emptied his glass and was filling it again for himself, drops of ice water falling from the bottle onto the tablecloth and forming gray stains the size of florins. He was making himself drunk, she could see. She thought she should say something. He planted his elbows on the table and rolled the glass between his palms.

“Hackett went to see the woman in the flat above April’s,” he said. “A Miss St. John Somebody- did you ever meet her?”

She shook her head. “I saw her once or twice, lurking on the stairs. April sometimes brought things up to her, a bowl of soup, biscuits, things like that. What did she say to Inspector Hackett?”

“He couldn’t get much out of her.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

“Mind you, she seems to have kept a watch on things. Saw people come and go.”

“What sort of people?” Blue-jawed Rodney approached and inquired if they wished to see the dessert menu. They shook their heads, and he withdrew. As he padded away Phoebe noticed how shiny the seat of his trousers was; she always felt sorry for waiters, they had such a disappointed and melancholy air. She looked back at Quirke. His steadily blearing gaze was fixed on the wine glowing in the bottom of his glass. “What sort of people did she see?” she asked again.

“Oh, people who came to see her. Visitors. Gentlemen callers, I suppose.”

“Such as?”

She felt a tingling at the base of her spine. She did not want to hear his answer.

“One of them, it seems, one of the gentlemen callers, was black. Or so Miss Whatsit claims. Does April know any black men?”

She was holding on tightly to the stem of her empty glass, pressing and pressing. The tingle in her spine ran all the way up, and for a second, absurdly, she had an image of one of those fairground test-your-strength machines, the sledgehammer striking on the pad and the weight shooting up along its groove and banging into the bell. Oh, no, she was thinking, oh, no.

She shook her head, and a strand of her hair came loose and fell across her cheek and she pushed it quickly away again. “I don’t think so,” she said, trying to keep the wobble out of her voice.

Quirke was looking round for the waiter, to order a glass of brandy.

Phoebe put a hand on the velvet purse beside her plate, feeling the soft black fabric. She was thinking of the skin on the backs of Patrick’s hands, the ripple and gleam of it.

Oh, no.

SHE HAD TO HELP QUIRKE TO A TAXI. THE SKY HAD CLEARED AND A hard frost was falling, she could see it in the air, an almost dry, gray, grainy mist. He had said he would walk home, that it was no distance, that they could go together and he would see her over to Haddington Road and then return across the canal to his flat. “You’re not walking anywhere,” she said. “There’s ice on the ground already, look.” She had an image of him on a bridge, and then a great dark plummeting form, and then the splash. The doorman blew his whistle and the cab came rattling up, but still Quirke resisted, and in the end she had almost to shove him inside. He scrabbled at the door, trying to get out again, then rolled down the window and began to protest. “Go home, Quirke,” she said, reaching in and patting his hand. “Go home now, and sleep.” She told the driver the address and the taxi pulled away from the curb, and she saw Quirke in the rear seat topple backwards in his overcoat like a huge, jointless manikin, and then she could see him no more. She gave the doorman a shilling, and he thanked her and pocketed the coin and tipped a finger to the brim of his cap, and turned back into the yellow-lighted lobby, rubbing his hands. The night’s icy silence settled about her.

She set off to walk. She could have gone in the taxi and delivered Quirke to Mount Street and then taken it on to her own place in Haddington Road, but it had not occurred to her. It seemed she was not going home. She thought of her room, the cheerless cold of it, the emptiness, waiting for her.

At York Street she turned left. It was very dark in this steep, narrow defile, and the sound of her own footsteps on the pavement seemed unnaturally loud. The tenement houses were all unlighted, and there was no one abroad. A cat on a windowsill watched her with narrow-eyed surmise. Before her, low in the velvet darkness of the sky, a star was suspended, a sparkling, silver sword of icy light. In Golden Lane a tramp slouching in a doorway croaked something at her, and she hurried on. She supposed she should be frightened, all alone in the empty city in the hour before midnight, but she was not.