Elegy for April (6 page)

 

“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.

 

 

 

 

 

5

 

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.

 

“I don’t see why we’re being so concerned,” Isabel Galloway said. “We all know what April is like.”

 

“It’s not like her to disappear,” Jimmy said sharply. There was always a mild friction between Jimmy and Isabel, who tossed her head now and gave a histrionic sigh.

 

“Who says she’s disappeared?” she asked.

 

“We told you, we went to her flat, Phoebe and I. It was obvious she hadn’t been there since Wednesday week, which was the last time Phoebe spoke to her.”

 

“Of course, she could just have gone away,” Phoebe urged, as she had urged so many times already, on the principle that she might be encouraged to believe it herself if she saw that the others did.

 

Jimmy gave her a scathing look. “Gone away where?”

 

“You’re the one who told me I was being hysterical,” Phoebe said, aware that she was flushing and annoyed at herself for it.

 

“But sweetheart, you
were
being hysterical,” he said in his Hollywood twang. He gave her one of his smiles, not the real, irresistible one, but the smirking mask he had learned to put on, to charm and cajole. She sometimes asked herself if she really liked Jimmy; he could be sweet and affecting, but there was something dour and surly in his nature, too.

 

No one spoke for a time, then Isabel said, “What about the sick-note she gave to the hospital?”

 

“We’ve all sent in sick-notes without being at death’s door,” Jimmy said, turning to her and letting the smile drop. His legs were so short that even though the chair in which he sat was of normal height his feet did not quite reach the floor. He turned to Patrick Ojukwu. “What do you think?” he asked, unable to suppress an edge of truculence in his voice.

 

It was April who had met Ojukwu first and introduced him to the little band. He had been accepted more or less readily; Jimmy had shown the least enthusiasm, of course, while Isabel
Galloway, as April drily observed, had attempted to climb into his lap straight off. They were all, even Jimmy, secretly gratified to have among them a person so handsome, so exotic and so black. They liked the sense his presence in their midst gave to them of being sophisticated and cosmopolitan, though none of the four had ever traveled farther abroad than London. They welcomed too with grim satisfaction the looks they got when they were in his company, by turns outraged, hate-filled, fearful, envious.

 

“I do not know what to think,” Patrick said. He leaned forward and set his glass of orange juice on the table— he did not drink alcohol, in compliance with some unspecified religious or tribal prohibition— then sat back again and folded his arms. He was large, slow-moving, deep-voiced, with a great barrel chest and a round, handsome head. A student doctor at the College of Surgeons, he was the youngest of them yet was possessed of a grave and mysterious air of authority. Phoebe was always fascinated by the sharp dividing line along the sides of his hands where the chocolatey backs gave way to the tender, dry pink of the palms. When she pictured those hands moving over April Latimer’s pale, freckled skin something stirred deep inside her, whether in protest or prurience she could not tell. Perhaps it was her own skin she was imagining under that dusky caress. Her mind skittered away from the thought in sudden alarm. “I can’t understand,” Ojukwu said now, “why no one has spoken to her family.”

 

“Because,” Isabel Galloway said witheringly, “ her family doesn’t speak to her.”

 

Ojukwu looked to Phoebe. “Is it true?”

 

She glanced away, towards the fireplace, where a tripod of turf logs was smoldering over a scattering of white ash. Two old codgers were in a huddle there, seated in armchairs, drinking whiskey and talking about horses. She had a sense of the winter night outside hung with mist, the streetlights weakly aglow, and
the nearby river sliding silently along between its banks, shining, secret, and black. “She doesn’t get on with her mother,” she said, “I know that. And she laughs about her uncle the Minister, says he’s a pompous ass.”

 

Ojukwu was watching her closely; it was a way he had, to gaze steadily at people out of those big protuberant eyes of his, which seemed to have so much more white to them than was necessary. “And her brother?” he asked softly.

 

“She doesn’t ever mention him,” Phoebe said.

 

Isabel gave her actor’s laugh, going
ha ha ha!
in three distinct, descending tones. “That prig!” she said. She was the oldest one of the little band— none of them knew her age and did not dare to guess— yet she was lithe and slim, unnaturally pale, with a sharply angled face; her hair was of a rich, dark, almost bronze color, and Phoebe suspected that she dyed it. She twirled the gin glass in her fingers and recrossed her famously long and lovely legs. “The Holy Father, they call him.”

 

“Why?” Ojukwu asked.

 

Isabel inclined languidly towards him, smiling with imitation sweetness, and patted the back of his hand. “Because he’s a mad Catholic and famously celibate. The only poking Doctor Oscar ever does is—”

 

“Bella!” Phoebe said, giving her a look.

 

“They’re
all
prigs, the lot of them!” Jimmy Minor broke in, with a violence that startled them all. His forehead had gone white, as it always did when he was wrought. “The Latimers have a stranglehold on medicine in this city, and look at the state of the public health. The mother with her good works, and the brother whose only concern is to keep French letters out of the country and the maternity hospitals full. And as for Uncle Bill, the Minister of so-called Health, sucking up to the priests and that whited sepulchre in his palace out in Drumcondra—! Crowd of hypocrites!”

 

An uneasy silence followed this outburst. The pair of horse fanciers by the fireplace had stopped talking and were looking over with a mixture of curiosity and disapproval.

 

“I still think,” Patrick Ojukwu said, “that someone should speak to Mrs. Latimer or to April’s brother. If there is disagreement between them and April, and she does not keep in touch, they may not know she has not been heard from.”

 

The other three exchanged uneasy glances. The Prince was right, the family should be alerted. Then Phoebe had an idea. “I’ll ask my father,” she said. “He probably knows the Minister, or Oscar Latimer, or both. He could speak to them.”

 

Isabel and Jimmy still looked doubtful and exchanged a glance. “I think one of the four of us should do that,” Jimmy said, avoiding Phoebe’s eye. “April is our friend.”

 

Phoebe looked at him narrowly. They all knew where Quirke had been for the past six weeks. They knew too of her and Quirke’s history together, or not together, rather. Why should they trust him to approach the Latimers? “Then
I’ll
phone her brother,” she said stoutly, looking round as if inviting them to challenge her. “I’ll call him tomorrow and go to see him.”

 

She stopped. She did not feel half as brave or decisive as she was pretending to be. The thought of confronting the famously prickly Oscar Latimer made her quail. And from the way Jimmy and Isabel shrugged and looked away it seemed they were no more enthusiastic for her to talk to him than they had been when she offered her father as a spokesman. Of the three, Patrick Ojukwu had the most enigmatic expression, smiling at her in a strange way, broadening his already flat, broad nose and drawing back his lips to show her those enormous white teeth of his all the way to the edges of gums that were as pink and shiny as sugarstick. He might almost have been mocking her. Yet behind that broad smile he, too, she sensed, was uneasy.