Benjamin Black - Elegy For April

“Maybe you should buy it, not me,” Quirke said, trying not to sound peeved, and failing.

“I used to be interested,” Malachy said diffidently, “when I was young- don’t you remember? All those motoring magazines you used to try to steal from me.”

Quirke did not remember, or did not care to. He looked at the car again and felt alarmed and giddy- what was he letting himself in for?- as if he had been enticed out on a tightrope and had frozen in fright midway across. Yet there was no going back. He wrote out the check, holding his breath as he filled in all those naughts, but managed all the same to hand it over with something of a flourish. Lockwood tried to maintain his salesman’s professional smoothness, but little smiles kept breaking out on his long face, and when Quirke made a weak joke about driving a hard bargain the young man lost all control and giggled like a schoolgirl. It was not every day of the week, or every year of the decade, for that matter, that a customer walked in off the street and bought an Alvis TC 108 Super Graber Coupe.

Quirke, who had not admitted to Lockwood that he did not know how to drive, was relieved to hear that the car would not be ready for the road until it had been given a “thorough looksee under her skirts,” as Lockwood put it, by the company’s engineers. Quirke had a vision of these men, advancing like a troop of surgeons, white-coated and wearing rubber gloves, each one carrying a clipboard and gripping a brand-new, shiny spanner. He could collect the car the following day, Lockwood said. The fog was pressed like lint against the showroom’s broad, plateglass windows.

“Tomorrow, right,” Quirke said. “Right.” But tomorrow he would not be any more capable of driving than he was today.

PEREGRINE OTWAY WAS A SON OF THE MANSE. HE SAID IT OF himself, frequently, with a comical and self-mocking shrug. He seemed to consider it the most pertinent fact there was to know about him. If he made a blunder, forgot to change the sump oil or left a broken windscreen wiper unfixed, he would say, “What else can you expect, from a son of the manse?” and then would do his fat, gurgling laugh. His parents had sent him to one of the minor English public schools, and he had retained the accent: “Very useful, when you’re running a backstreet garage- everyone thinks you’re a duke in disguise, slumming it.” His premises, in a mews off Mount Street Crescent beside the Pepper Canister Church, round the corner from Quirke’s flat, consisted of a low, cavelike space, reeking of oil and old exhaust smoke, barely big enough for a car and room to work on it; he had excavated a hole in the floor the length and depth of a grave, that afforded what he called “underbody access,” a formulation from which he derived much innocent glee. At the front there was a single petrol pump, which he locked with a giant padlock at night. He was large and soft and fresh-faced, with a shock of dirty-blond hair and babyishly candid eyes of a remarkable shade of palest green. Quirke had never seen him in anything other than a boilersuit caked with immemorial oil and rubbed to a high, putty-colored shine, shapeless and roomy yet painfully tight-fitting under the arms.

Wondering how on earth the new car was to be collected, Quirke had thought at last of Perry Otway, and on his return from the showrooms, when Malachy had departed, he went round to see him.

“An Alvis?” Perry said, and gave a long, expiring whistle.

Quirke sighed. He had begun to feel like a plain man married to a famously beautiful wife; the purchase of the car was thrilling at first and conducive to quiet pride, but the owning of it was already, before he had even driven it, becoming a burden and a worry. “Yes,” he said, with an attempt at airiness, “a TC 108 Super- ehm-Super-” He had forgotten what the damned thing was called.

“Not a Graber?” Perry said breathlessly, with a look almost of anguish. “A Graber Super Coupe?”

“You know the model, then.”

Perry did his other laugh, the one that sounded like an attack of hiccups. “I know of it. Never seen one, of course. You know there are only-”

“-three of them in the world, yes, I know that, and I’ve just bought one of them. Anyway, the thing is, I need someone to collect it for me, from the showrooms”- Quirke could see Perry getting ready to ask the obvious question and went on hur-riedly-”since I haven’t renewed my license. And then I need somewhere to keep it.” He looked doubtfully past Perry’s shoulder into the interior of the workshop, which was lit by a single naked bulb suspended on a tangled flex from the ceiling.

“I have a couple of garages along here,” Perry said, pointing up the lane with his thumb. “I’ll do you a good price on the rent, of course. We can’t leave an Alvis sitting out on the street to be ogled and pawed at by any Tom, Dick, or Harry, can we, now.”

“Then I’ll phone them and say you’ll be up to fetch it. When?”

Perry took an oil-soaked rag from the kangaroo pouch at the front of his boilersuit and wiped his hands. “Right now, old man,” he said, laughing. “Right now!”

“No, no- the fellow up there said they’d have to check it over and so on, and let me have it tomorrow.”

“That’s rot. I’ll toddle up and get it- they know me at Crawford’s.”

Quirke did not go with him, certain that if he did he would be shown up this time for the fraud that he was. Instead he went to his flat and made another pot of tea. Over the past weeks he had come to detest the taste of tea with a passion which it would not have seemed so harmless and commonplace a beverage could call forth. What he wanted, of course, was a good stiff drink, Jameson whiskey for preference, although in the latter weeks of his most recent binge he had developed a craving for Bushmills Black Label, which was a Northern brand not easy to find down here in the South. Yes, a smoky dive somewhere, with a turf fire and dim men talking together in the shadows, and a tumbler of Black Bush in his fist, that would be the thing.

Time passed, and with a start he came to and realized that he had been standing in a sort of trance beside the kitchen table for fully five minutes, dreaming of drink. He was angry with himself. Was it not disgust with what drink had done to him that had convinced him to check himself into St. John’s, disgust and shame at the bruiser and brawler he had become, reeling through the streets in search of a pub that he had not already been barred from? At eight in the morning on Christmas Eve he had ended up at the Cattle Markets in an awful dive packed with drovers and buyers, everyone drunk and shouting, including him. He had looked up and found himself confronting his reflection in the pockmarked mirror behind the bar, hardly recognizing the bleared and bloodshot, gray-faced hulk, slumped there with his hat clamped on the back of his head, with his fags and his rolled-up newspaper and his ball of malt, the drinker’s drinker-

The doorbell buzzed, making him jump. He went to the window and looked down into the street. It was Perry Otway, of course, with the Alvis.

THE DOLPHIN HOTEL ON ESSEX STREET IN TEMPLE BAR HAD BEEN the little band’s meeting place from the start. No one remembered which of them it was that had first chanced on it, but given the nature of the establishment it was probably Isabel Galloway. The Dolphin was a well-known watering place among the theatrical crowd, but the people who frequented it were mostly of a previous generation, blue-suited old boys with carbuncular noses and well-preserved women of a certain age in fauvist lipstick and too much rouge. The wood-paneled bar was rarely crowded, even on Saturday nights, and the restaurant was not bad, if they felt like eating there and were in funds. Phoebe in her heart thought the little band a little pretentious- when had they started calling themselves by that Proustian label?- yet she was glad of her place among them. They were not the Round Table and the Dolphin was not the Algonquin, but they, and it, would do, for this small city, in these narrow times. There were five of them, exclusively five: Patrick Ojukwu, the Prince; Isabel Galloway, the actress; Jimmy Minor; April Latimer; and Phoebe. To night, however, they were four only, a subdued quartet.