Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

“Ask,” she said.

“You could- I feel you could- save me. From myself, I mean.” He turned his face away from her. In a small, round mirror on a shelf behind the sink he saw himself, one eye and an ear. He noticed the stains on the knees of his trousers; he must have fallen, somewhere, last night. “A doctor in St. John’s told me I drink to get away from myself. It wasn’t exactly news, but still.” Now he turned back and looked at her. “What shall we do,” he asked, “you and I?”

She thought a moment. “More or less what everybody else does, I suppose,” she said. “What do you think we’ll do?”

“What everybody else does- make each other unhappy.”

She found her cigarette and this time did not put it back on the ashtray, but lay there smoking, one eye half shut, looking at him. He could not tell what she was thinking. “Oh, Quirke,” she said.

He nodded, as if he were agreeing with some proposition she had offered. He took the limp cigarette from her fingers and took a drag on it and gave it back to her.

“You know that feeling that you have in dreams,” he said, exhaling smoke, “that something is happening and you can’t do anything to stop it, only stand by and watch as it goes on happening? That’s how I feel all the time.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

She sat up, making the water around her sway wildly, and stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “Give me that towel,” she said. She stood. Palely gleaming there, with bathwater running down between her breasts and along her legs, she seemed for a moment very young, a child, almost, skinny and vulnerable. He handed her the towel, and she wrapped herself in it, shuddering. “Dear God,” she said, “how I hate the fucking winter.” She led him by the hand to the bedroom. When they lay down together he pressed her in his arms and she was still damp. She put her mouth to his ear. “Warm me up, Quirke,” she said, with a low laugh. “Warm me up, there’s a dear.”

THE TELEPHONE WAS RINGING IN THE FLAT; QUIRKE COULD HEAR it as he came up the stairs. The sound provoked in him its usual, vague dread. He did not quicken his step; whoever it was could wait or call back. He plodded; he was tired. The phone was still ringing when he walked into the living room. He took off his overcoat and hung it up, and hung up his hat, too. He thought of going into the bedroom and crawling under the blankets. Still the thing went on, shrilling and shrilling, and there was nothing for it but to pick up the receiver. It was Phoebe. “What’s the matter,” he asked, “are you all right?” She said she had called him earlier, much earlier, in the middle of the night, in fact, and that she had been worried when he did not answer. Had he got home from the Russell all right? He said he had. He did not tell her about going out again, about the party at Jury’s; he did not tell her about Isabel Galloway. “ Are you all right?” she asked. He put up a hand and rubbed his eyes. Then she told him about the watcher in the street.

HE MIGHT HAVE WALKED TO HADDINGTON ROAD-IT WAS TEN minutes away, across the canal- but he drove instead, the car seeming to him even more sullen and obstinate than usual. Phoebe was wearing the silk dressing gown that had once belonged to Sarah. She said she had probably imagined it, that shadowy presence in the lamplight.

“When was this?” he asked.

“I told you, in the middle of the night. It must have been- I don’t know- three o’clock, four?”

“Why were you up so late?”

She went to the fireplace and took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from the mantelpiece. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. She blew a quick stream of smoke at the ceiling. “I often can’t sleep.”

He took off his overcoat and put it on the back of a chair. “I see you’re smoking again,” he said.

She held the cigarette away from her and looked at it as if she had not noticed it until then. “Not really,” she said. “Just once in a while. Good for the nerves, they say.”

He came to her and took the packet from her hand and looked at it. “Passing Cloud,” he said. “Your old brand.”

She puffed again and grimaced. “They’re so old they’re stale.”

He helped himself to one and lit it with her lighter. The gas fire was muttering in the grate; they sat down on either side of it.

“So,” Quirke said, “tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

She was smoothing the silk drape of the dressing gown over her knee. Not a dressing gown- what was it called? A tea gown? Sarah used to go and put it on after dinner, even when there were guests. He pictured her leaning back in the chair by the fireplace in the house in Rathgar, while the talk went on and Mal fussed with the drinks. Everything had seemed simpler, then.

He thought of Isabel Galloway, in her peignoir.

Phoebe was pale, and her temples seemed sunken, as if something had been pressing on them.

“You’re frightened,” Quirke said. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”

She picked up an ashtray from the grate and rolled the tip of the cigarette on it, sharpening it, like a pencil. “Do you want anything?” she asked. “Tea? Coffee?” He did not reply, only sat watching her. She gave a vexed shrug. “I just thought there was somebody down there, standing by the streetlamp.”

“Who do you think it was?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I’m not even sure there was anyone- I may have imagined it.”

“But it’s not the first time, is it?”

She compressed her lips and looked down into her lap. After a moment she gave a rapid shake of her head. “No,” she said, so quietly he could hardly hear her. “I thought there was someone there before, in the same place.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know- the other night.”

“You didn’t call the Guards?”

“No. What would I have told them? You know what they’re like; they never believe anything.”

He thought for a moment, then said, “I’ll talk to Hackett.”

“Oh, no, Quirke, please don’t,” she said wearily. “I don’t want him poking about here.”

“He can put someone on the street, a plainclothes man, to keep watch, for a night or two. If there’s anyone, they can collar him.”

She laughed. “Oh, yes, the way they did with-”

She looked away. That other nightwalker who had watched her window, no one had collared him, until it was too late. He reached for the ashtray, and she handed it to him, and he stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. “You’re right,” he said, “they are stale.”

She stood up and went out to the kitchen, where he heard her filling a kettle. “I’m going to make a cup of Bovril,” she called to him. “Do you want some?”

Bovril. That brown taste, the very taste of Carricklea Industrial School. “No,” he called back. “I suppose you wouldn’t have a drink, would you?” She pretended not to hear.

When she returned, carrying her mug, he had risen from the chair and was standing by the window, looking out. The air in the street was gray with frost-smoke, and there was ice on the windscreens of the cars parked on the other side of the road. The dusty smell of the cretonne curtain was a smell from the far past. “Have you settled in here?” he asked.

“I suppose so,” she said. “It’s not as nice as Harcourt Street, but it will do.” She was thinking how in any room Quirke always, eventually, headed for the window, looking for a way out. She sat down by the fireplace again, her knees pressed together and her shoulders hunched, clutching the steaming mug in both her hands. She was cold.

“You could come and live with me, you know,” Quirke said.

He turned from the window. She was staring at him. “In Mount Street?”