Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

“Hello,” Isabel Galloway said, sounding tense and guarded. “It’s me.”

“Yes,” he said drily, “I recognized your voice, believe it or not.”

“What? Oh, yes. Good.” She paused. “How are you?”

“I’m all right. Something of a sleepless night.”

“Why was that?”

“I’ll tell you another time.”

“Listen, Quirke-” Again she stopped, and he had the impression of her taking a deep breath. “There’s someone here who needs to talk to you.”

“Where are you?”

“At home, of course.”

“Who is it- who’s there with you?”

“Just-someone.”

The lather drying on his face gave his skin an unpleasant, crawling sensation. “Is she there?”

“What?”

“April-is she with you?”

“Just come, Quirke, will you? Come now.”

She hung up, and he stood for a moment looking at the receiver; there was a smear of shaving soap on the earpiece.

He was not sure that Perry Otway would be at the garage yet, so he killed ten minutes by going round to the Q & L for cigarettes. The morning was frosty and the air seemed draped with transparent sheets of muslin, and his footsteps rang as if the pavement were made of iron. In Baggot Street the old tinker woman in her tartan shawl was out already, waylaying passersby. Quirke gave her a sixpenny piece, and she moaned her thanks, calling down on him the blessings of God and His Holy Mother and all the Saints. The Q & L had just opened; the shopman was still putting away the shutters. He seemed in almost a fever of good cheer this morning. His eyes shone with a peculiar light, and his cheeks and chin were scraped to a polished gleam, as if he had shaved himself at least twice. The check pattern of his jacket looked even louder than usual, and he sported a Liberty tie with parrots on it. His mother, he confided, had died the previous night. He beamed as if from pride at the old woman’s achievement. “She was ninety-three,” he said, in a tone of malicious satisfaction.

Perry Otway too had just opened for business. He was at the back of the workshop, where he had hung up his sheepskin coat and was pulling on his oil-caked overalls. “Brass-monkey weather, eh?” he said, blowing into his cupped hands. They walked together up the lane to the lock-up garage where the Alvis waited in the darkness like a great black cat in its cage. Quirke had little trouble getting the car into the garage, but he needed Perry to maneuver it out again, for he had not yet mastered the art of reversing in confined spaces and feared scraping the paintwork or putting a dent in one of the wings, for which, he vaguely feared, some severe penalty would be exacted. Perry treated the machine with a kind of solicitous delicacy and tenderness. He pulled out neatly into the street and stopped there, and left the engine running. “Nothing like it, is there,” he said, swinging himself out from behind the wheel, “the smell of petrol fumes on a cold winter morning.”

Quirke was lighting a cigarette. He was in no hurry to get to the house on the canal, where he knew there could only be trouble waiting for him, though he did not know what it would be. The thought of April Latimer being there, at Isabel’s, filled him with a peculiar sense of panic. What would he say to her, what would they talk about? In these past weeks she had become for him almost a mythical figure, and now he was prey to what he could only think was an attack of crippling, monumental shyness.

He drove around the Pepper Canister and turned right on the canal. As he was passing by the house on Herbert Place he slowed down and peered up at the windows of April’s flat. In one of them a curtain rod had come away on one side, and the lace curtain hung down at a crooked angle. He drove on, staying in third gear.

Outside Isabel’s little house there were floatings of ice on the canal again, and water hens were fussing and splashing among the reeds. The morning had a raw edge. He was lifting his hand to the knocker when the door opened. Isabel was already dressed. She wore a dark skirt and a dark-blue cardigan. Her bronze-colored hair was tied back with a dark ribbon. She did not smile, only stood aside and gestured for him to come in.

He thought of that curtain in the window, hanging at a crazy angle on its broken rod.

The house had a stuffy, morning smell of bedclothes and bath soap and milky tea and bread that had been toasted under a gas flame. He paused, and Isabel went ahead, leading him along the short hall, through the living room, and into the kitchen. How slim she was, how slim and intense.

The first person he saw was Phoebe, standing by the stove in her overcoat. He realized he was holding his breath and seemed unable to release it. When he came in she, too, did not smile, and gave no greeting. A young man was sitting at the table. He was black, with a large, smooth-browed head and a flattened nose and eyes that swiveled like the eyes of a nervous horse, their whites flashing. He was wearing a loose jumper and no shirt, and a pair of baggy corduroy trousers; he looked cold and exhausted, sitting there with his shoulders drooping and his clasped hands pressed between his knees.

“This is Patrick Ojukwu,” Isabel said.

The young man regarded him warily. He did not stand up, and they did not shake hands. Quirke put his hat down on the table, where there were cups and smeared plates and a teapot under a woolen cozy. He looked from Isabel to Phoebe and back again. “Well?” he said. He was remembering the light that had been on in the window upstairs when he had brought Isabel back here last night, and of Isabel hurrying from the car and waving to him in that tense way before going inside.

“Would you like something?” she asked now. “The tea is probably cold, but I could-”

“No, nothing.” His eyes shied from hers. He could not make out what he was feeling, things were so jumbled up in him. Anger? Yes, anger, certainly, but something else, too, a hot thrill that seemed to be jealousy. He turned to Ojukwu- had he spent the night here? In a recess of his mind an image moved, of black skin on white. “Where’s April?” he asked.

The young man looked quickly at Phoebe and then at Isabel.

“He doesn’t know,” Isabel said.

Quirke gave a curt sigh and pulled back one of the chairs at the table and sat down. So far Phoebe had said nothing. “Why are you here?” he asked her.

“We’re all friends,” Phoebe said. “I told you.”

“So where’s the other one, then, the reporter?”

She said nothing and looked away.

“We’re all tired, Quirke,” Isabel said. “We’ve been up half the night, talking.”

Quirke was growing hot inside his overcoat, but for some reason he did not want to take it off. Isabel had gone to stand beside Phoebe, as if in solidarity. He turned back to Ojukwu. “So,” he said. “Tell me.”

The black man, still with his hands pressed between his knees, began to rock back and forth on the chair, staring at the floor in front of him with those huge eyes. He cleared his throat. “April telephoned me that day,” he said. “I was in college; they called me down to the reception place. She said she was in trouble, that she needed my help. I went to the flat. She did not come to the door, but I let myself in with the key. She was in the bedroom.”

He stopped. Quirke, on the other side of the table, watched him. There were marks of some kind in the skin over his cheekbones, small incisions the shape of slender arrowheads, made a long time ago- tribal markings, he supposed, made at birth with a knife. His close-cropped hair was a mass of tightly wound curls, like so many tiny, metal springs or metal shavings. “Were you and April- were you her lover?”

Ojukwu shook his head, still with his eyes fixed on the floor. “No,” he said, and Quirke saw the faint, brief start that Phoebe gave. “No,” Ojukwu said again, “not really.”