Elegy for April (18 page)

 

She switched on the bedside lamp and laid her head back on the damp, hot pillow and squeezed her eyes shut. She did not
want to be awake, but there would be no sleep now for a long time. Sighing, she got up and put on her silk dressing gown—
peignoir
was what it was properly called, she liked the word. It had belonged to the woman who for the first nineteen years of her life she had thought was her mother.

 

She went out to the kitchen. Night smells, she had often noticed, were different from day ones, were mustier, fainter, more insidious. She drew open the lapels of her silk gown and put her face into the hollow there and sniffed. Yes, her smell too was different, a babyish, secret staleness.

 

The thought came to her that she had never got used to being alive.

 

She took a half-full bottle of milk from the cupboard and shook it to make sure that it had not curdled— she had no refrigerator— and poured some into a blackened saucepan and set it on the gas ring to heat, adding a spoonful of raspberry jam. There was a slice of pound cake left from the piece she had bought two days ago to have after her dinner; it had gone hard and crumbly, but she needed to eat something. Behind her the milk begin to seethe, and she whipped it off the flame just as it was about to come to the boil. A wrinkled scum had formed, of course, and she had to lift it off as best she could with a teaspoon, trying not to let it break, a thing that always made her feel slightly sick. She poured the scalding, pink-tinged milk into a mug and unwrapped the cake from its greaseproof paper and put it on a plate and brought the mug and the plate to the table and sat down. She shut her eyes and sat motionless for a moment, then reopened them. She had not pulled down the blind— she hated blinds, they looked to her like unrolled sheets of pale-gray skin— and the window beside her was a tall rectangle of shining blackness. It was not very late, one o’clock, maybe, yet all outside was silent. She drank her milk with the
jam in it and ate the morsel of dry, sweet cake. Her heartbeat even yet was uneven, from the stress of the forgotten dream.

 

Her thoughts turned, of course, to April, as they always did in sleepless hours such as these, although she thought of her in the daytime, too. It was strange, the sense of helplessness she had about her friend. Indeed, it was like being in a dream, one in which there is something of great importance to be done— a warning to be delivered, a secret revealed—yet everybody else is relaxed and indifferent and there is no one who will bother to listen to the dire news that only she is in possession of. Even though no one else seemed to be as worried as she was, she had thought that Quirke surely would appreciate the awfulness of April’s disappearance— of her just being gone, without a word, without a trace left behind— for after all, another young woman whom she had known had disappeared last summer and Quirke had discovered her to have been murdered. Yet when he went with her and the detective to April’s flat, and then next day to see April’s brother, he had said hardly a word and had seemed not to care about April or what had become of her. But perhaps he was right and she was wrong; perhaps she was being fanciful and melodramatic about the entire thing. Or maybe, simply, it was true that he did not care. Did any of them, really, Isabel, Patrick, Jimmy Minor? They did not seem to be very worried, or not as worried as she was, anyway. She was filled with dread; she could not rid herself of it.

 

Odd, how clear and sharp the mind can be at this time of night, she thought. Is it just that there are so few distractions in the small hours, or does the brain make use then of energy that normally it would be storing to fuel the next day’s mental business? Thinking of April now, and the seemingly careless attitude of Quirke and the others, she, too, had a sense of estrangement, a sense of alienation, which, to her surprise, seemed to be allowing
her to consider her friend’s case with a new and calm dispassion. Somehow in her mind April became separated from all the things that together made up the image she had of her friend, and floated free, as sometimes in one’s consciousness a word floats free of the thing it is attached to and becomes something else, not just a noise, exactly, not a meaningless grunt or bark, but a mysterious, new entity, new and mysterious because it is itself only and not merely a means of signifying something.

 

Who
is
April? she asked herself. She had thought she knew her, but now she wondered if she had been wrong all along, if April was someone else entirely from the person she had always taken her to be. Instead of the frank and open friend that she had spoken to almost every day, had chatted and gossiped with, there appeared now in her mind a different creature altogether, secretive, guarded, one who hid her real self from Phoebe and maybe from everyone else, too. Yes, guarded, that was how April was, not open at all, but concealed. And behind this figure there was something else again, that was hidden too, or someone else, perhaps, always there in the background, some secret, all-pervasive presence. Yes. Someone there, always.

 

She had seen Jimmy Minor last evening. They had met in O’Neill’s in Wicklow Street. The pub had been crowded and noisy— Trinity students were celebrating a win in some match or other—and they could hardly hear themselves speak. She had suggested they go somewhere that would be more quiet, but of course someone only had to suggest something to Jimmy for him to dig his heels in and resist, and instead of agreeing to move to another pub he had ordered drink and lit up a cigarette. He was telling her something about April and his newspaper. She could not believe her ears the first time and made him say it again: he had gone to the Editor and told him that April was missing.

 

“Oh, Jimmy, you didn’t!” she cried.

 

He looked at her in hurt surprise. “I’m a reporter,” he said,
holding up his miniature hands in a show of simple sincerity. “Someone is missing, I report it.” Anyway, the Editor, it seemed, had not been interested in April Latimer, or had pretended not to be, and had told him to drop the story. “I said to him, ‘Do you know who she is, who she’s related to?’ That only made him put on his stony-faced look— he doesn’t like what my old fellow used to call backchat. I kept on, mentioning the Minister her uncle and her brother the Fitzwilliam Square consultant, but it was no good, there was no—”

 

A raucous cheer went up from the crowd of red-faced young men at the bar, and she missed the rest of it. “But did he know something about it?” she asked. “Did he already know April was missing?”

 

“I told you, all I got was the stony face. But yes, I had the impression someone had been on the blower to him, telling him to keep the lid on any stories about missing girls.”

 

She stared at him, speechless for a moment. “Who would call him?” she asked, baffled. “Who would make that kind of phone call?”

 

“Oh, Phoebe,” he said, with a pitying smile, shaking his head. “Don’t you know anything about this town, how it works?”

 

“You mean her uncle, Mr. Latimer, the Minister, would telephone the Editor of a newspaper and order him not to publish a story, not even to follow it up?”

 

“Listen, sweetheart, let me explain,” he said, putting on his Jimmy Cagney voice. “The Minister wouldn’t phone, and there would be no order. Someone from the Department would give a little tinkle, some flunky of the Minister’s, a super-Gael with a name like Maolseachlainn Mahoganygaspipe, and talk for ten minutes about the weather and the shocking price of spuds, and then, just as he was about to ring off, would say,
Oh, by the way, Seanie, the Minister’s young one has gone off on a bit of an adventure and the family is trying to get her to come home— there’d be no
use in the paper running any kind of a story on it, don’t you know, you’ d only end up with egg on your face, or should I say printing ink, ha ha ha
. That’s how it’s done. The velvet word, the silken threat. Wise up, sister.”

 

“And the Editor of a national newspaper would give in to a threat, just like that?”

 

This was greeted with a whinny of laughter. “Threat?— where’s the threat? Friendly advice, a word to the wise, that’s all. And then there’s grace and favor— next time Seanie the Editor needs a bit of inside info he’ll call up Mr. Mahoganygaspipe and mention the little Service he did for the Minister and his family by keeping his newshounds on the leash that time when the Minister’s troublesome niece went off on her travels. See?”

 

Now Phoebe, sitting by the black window, went over again all that Jimmy had said, trying to decide if it could be true, if it could be what had happened. But what of it, she thought then, even if it was? If the Latimers were using their influence to stop the newspapers reporting April’s disappearance, was that so terrible? Any family would do it, that had a wayward daughter and the power to keep stories about her out of the papers. Yet the thought of that pinched, insinuating voice on the telephone— Jimmy was a good mimic— whispering menaces into someone’s ear gave her the shivers.

 

She must concentrate. Think. Remember. Summon up.
Who is April Latimer?

 

The milk in the mug had gone tepid, but she drank it anyway, drank it to the dregs, and got a raspberry pip, sharp and hard, stuck in a gap between two molars, making her think of childhood.

 

Once, not very long ago, they had sat, she and April, on a bench by the pond in St. Stephen’s Green, watching the children and their mothers feeding the ducks. It was an afternoon in late summer; she remembered the trees soughing gently above them
and the sunlight seeming to lift big flakes of gold from the surface of the water. April was smoking a cigarette in that way she did, holding it close in front of her face, leaning forward and hunched around herself as if she were cold. It was the way old women smoked, Phoebe remembered thinking, with a rush of fondness for her friend, a fondness both sweet and unsettling. She could not recall what it was they had been talking about, but at one point she realized that April had gone quiet, had retreated into herself, and was sitting there smoking and frowning and staring at the water with a strange, haunted look in her eyes. Phoebe too had fallen silent, instinctively respecting whatever private place it was that her friend had withdrawn into. At last April spoke.

 

“The thing about obsession,” she said, still watching the spangled surface of the pond, “is that there’s no plea sure in it. You think at the start, if there is a start, that it’s the greatest delight you could know”— that word,
delight
, the way that she said it, had struck Phoebe as disturbing, almost indecent—”but after a while, when you’re caught in it and can’t get out, it’s a prison cell.” She had stopped then, for another interval of intent brooding and smoking, and then had described how, in this cell, you look up longingly at the barred window that is too high to reach, at the sunlight and the patch of blue sky there, and realize that you do not know what life is like, on the outside, where others are free.

 

Phoebe had not known what to say, how to respond. She did not think of April as a person who would be obsessed— there was another dark and troubling word— and she felt as if a curtain had been flicked aside for a moment to allow her a glimpse down a long, dim passageway murmurous with unseen presences, where the air that pressed back into her face was damp and dank and sweetly heavy. She remembered the shudder that had gone through her, glimpsing that dark place, even as she sat
there in the park in the bright sunlight, amidst that summer scene. A flock of seagulls appeared, thrashing their wings and shrieking, intent on seizing the crusts of bread that the children were throwing to the ducks, and she shrank back in sudden fright. April, though, had roused herself at the sight of the scavengers descending, and laughed. “Oh, look at those!” she cried, “—those
monsters
!” She gazed at the ravening gulls with a smile of what seemed fierce approval, her small, white, even teeth bared a little and glistening and her eyes eagerly alight. That was a moment when Phoebe did not know her friend, did not recognize her. Had there been other such moments that she failed to notice as they went past, moments of awful insight she had forgotten or had chosen to forget? What did she know about her friend? What did she know—?

 

She stood up from the table and almost fell over because her legs had gone stiff from the cold. Wrapping herself tight in the thin silk robe, she went into the living room and stood by the window there. She had not turned on the light. She did not mind the dark, had never been afraid of it, even as a child. The mist was down again, she saw, not dense enough to be called a fog, and the streetlight below had a gray halo around it. The street was silent. A prostitute had recently taken up her beat here, a sad creature, young and skinny, who always seemed to be freezing; Phoebe spoke to her sometimes, about the weather or an item in the news, and the girl would smile gratefully, glad not to be ogled or glared at, or called something filthy. She had even told Phoebe her name, which was Sadie. What must her life be like, Phoebe wondered, having to go with anyone who had a pound in his pocket? How would it feel to—?

 

She started. There was someone in the street, someone she had not noticed until now, a person standing just outside the streetlamp’s ring of wettish light. She could not make out if it was a man or a woman, though she knew it was not Sadie. It
was just a figure, standing there, quite still, looking up, it seemed, at this very window where she was looking down from. Whoever it was, would her see her, here in the dark? No. But what if she were to move forward, and stand right up against the glass, would she be visible then? She advanced a step, holding her breath. She put a hand to her throat. She was shivering; she did not know whether it was from the cold or from fright, or from something else. The figure did not stir— was it there at all, or was she just imagining it? This had happened before, when she lived in Harcourt Street, she had thought then that she was being watched, and had told herself then, too, that it was her imagination, but as it turned out she had not imagined it. She realized she had left the light on in the kitchen; whoever it was would know she was here, and not sleeping, perhaps had even seen her sitting at the table with her milk and her cake— would it have been possible to have been seen at that angle, from the street, if she was sitting down?— and was waiting for her now to come back into the light, in her flimsy silk wrap, with her hair undone, unsleeping and restless, worrying about her vanished friend.