Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

“I forgot to ask you yesterday- did you see if April’s key was there, when you called round?”

“What?” she said. “What key?”

“The one she leaves under the broken flagstone at the front door, if she’s out and expecting someone to call.” Phoebe said nothing. How did Jimmy know about this arrangement with the key when she did not? Why had April never told her about it? “I’ll go over now and see if it’s there,” Jimmy was saying. “Want to come and meet me?”

She walked quickly up towards the bridge with her scarf wrapped round her face and covering her mouth. The fog had lightened, but a thin, cold mist persisted. Herbert Place was only one street over, on the other side of the canal. When she got to the house there was no sign of Jimmy. She climbed the steps, and pressed the bell in case he had arrived before her and had let himself in, but evidently he had not. She peered at the granite flagstones, trying to spot the one that was loose. Some minutes passed; she felt self-conscious and exposed, thinking someone might come up to her demanding to know why she was still there when obviously the person whose bell she had been ringing was not at home. She was relieved when she saw Jimmy hurrying along the towpath. He came up through the gap in the black railings and sprinted across the road, ignoring a motorcar that had to swerve to avoid him, bleating indignantly.

“Still no sign?” he said, joining her on the top step. He was wearing his plastic raincoat with the unpleasant, acid smell. With the heel of his shoe he pressed down on the edge of a flagstone beside the foot scraper and a broken corner of it lifted, and she saw the dull gleam of two keys on a key ring underneath.

The mist had penetrated the hall, and a faint swathe of it hung motionless like ectoplasm on the stairs. They climbed in silence to the second floor. Phoebe had trod these stairs countless times, but suddenly she felt like an intruder. She had not noticed before how worn the carpet was along the outer edge of each step or how the stair rods were tarnished, and missing at intervals. At the door to April’s flat they hesitated, exchanging a look. Jimmy rapped softly with his knuckles. They waited a moment, but no sound came from within. “Well?” he whispered. “Shall we risk it?”

The harsh sound of the key gouging into the lock made her flinch.

She did not know what she had expected to find inside, but of course there was nothing amiss, or nothing that she could see, anyway. April was not the tidiest person in the world, and the clutter in the place was familiar, and reassuring: how could anything really bad have happened to someone who had washed those nylons and left them draped there over the fireguard in front of the grate? And look at that cup and saucer on the coffee table- the rim of the cup marked with a crescent of scarlet lipstick- and that half-consumed packet of Marietta biscuits, so ordinary, so homely. All the same, there was something unignorable in the atmosphere, something tensed and watchful and sullen, as if their presence were being registered, and resented.

“Now what?” she said.

Jimmy was squinting suspiciously about the room, as usual playing the hard-bitten reporter; in a moment he would have his notebook and his pencil out. Phoebe could not remember exactly where she had met Jimmy, or when. It was strange; she seemed to have known him an impossibly long time, yet she knew almost nothing about him; she was not even sure where he lived. He was garrulous, and talked tirelessly on every subject except himself. She wondered at the fact that April had let him know about the door key under the stone. Had others been let in on this arrangement? It struck her that if she was the only one that April had not told, perhaps it was not so strange that her friend had stopped calling her; perhaps April did not think of her as a friend at all, only an acquaintance to be taken up or dropped according to whim. If that was the case, she did not need to be so concerned. She was beginning to feel enjoyably aggrieved, but then it occurred to her that Jimmy, whom April had told about the key and therefore must consider a true intimate, had not heard from her either, nor had anyone else in their circle, so far as she knew.

As if he had read her thoughts- sometimes he showed an uncanny knack of clairvoyance-he asked her now: “How well do you think you know her? April, I mean.”

They were standing in the middle of the room. It was cold, she still had her scarf wound round her throat, and although her hands were thrust deep in the pockets of her coat she could feel the chill tips of her fingers tingling. “As well as anyone, I think,” she said. “Or thought I did. We used to talk nearly every day, you know. That’s why I was worried not to hear from her in the first place.” He was still glancing about, nodding, and gnawing his upper lip at one corner. “What about you?” she asked.

“She was always a good contact.”

“A contact? “

“At the hospital. If there was a story going, some high-up knocking someone down when he was drunk or a suicide that was covered up, I could always depend on April to slip me the details.”

Phoebe stared. “April told you about things like that?” It was hardly credible. The April that she knew, that she had thought she knew, surely would not pass that kind of information to a reporter, even one who was her friend.

“It wasn’t anything confidential she was giving out,” Jimmy said defensively. “A call to her would save me time, that’s all. You don’t know what it’s like, working to deadlines.” It was not attractive, that whining, hard-done-by tone that he fell into sometimes. He walked to the window and stood looking out. Even from the back he had a vexed, resentful aspect. She knew of old how quick he was to take umbrage, she had seen it happen so often.

“You realize,” she said, “we’ve been talking about her all this time in the past tense?”

He turned, and they looked at each other.

“There’s the bedroom,” Jimmy said. “We haven’t looked there.”

They went in. The untidiness here was worse than in the living room. The wardrobe doors were open wide, the clothes inside crowded together and pulled about anyhow. Intimate items of clothing lay crumpled on the floor where they had been stepped out of and forgotten about. An old black Remington typewriter stood on a desk in the corner, and all around it were piled textbooks and papers and bulging ring binders, almost covering up the telephone, an old-fashioned model with a metal winder on the side for connecting up to the operator. There was a cup there, too, containing the dried and cracked dregs of coffee that even yet gave off a faint, bitter aroma. April was a coffee addict and drank it all day long, half the night, too, if she was on a late shift. Phoebe stood and looked about. She felt she must not touch anything, convinced that if she did, the thing she touched would crumble under her fingers; suddenly everything was breakable here. The smell of the week-old coffee, and of other things- face powder, dust, slept-in bed-clothes-that mingled, stale smell that bedrooms always have, made her feel nauseous.

Strangely, the bed was made, and to a hospital standard of neatness, the blanket and the sheets tucked in all round and the pillow as flat and smooth as a bank of snow.

Jimmy spoke behind her. “Look at this.” A narrow plywood door with louvered panels led into the tiny, windowless bathroom. He was in there, bending over the hand basin. He looked over his shoulder at her, and even as she came forward she felt herself wanting to hang back. The hand basin was yellowed with age and had stains the color of verdigris under each of the two taps. Jimmy was pointing to a faint, narrow, brownish streak that ran from the overflow slot at the back almost to the plug hole. “That,” he said, “is blood.”