Elegy for April (20 page)

 

Quirke put his mug back on the tray, the tea undrunk. “I know very little about her, except what my daughter tells me. And in fact I’m not sure how much my daughter knows, herself. April Latimer was— is—a very private person, so I gather.”

 

Hackett nodded, pouting his lower lip. “That seems to be the case, all right. And so are the family— private sorts of persons. I’d say they wouldn’t be too happy to hear of young April consorting with— a foreigner. Would you?”

 

“Would I say so, or would I be unhappy if it were so?”

 

“Well, think if it was your daughter we were talking about.”

 

“I’m afraid I don’t have much say, where my daughter is concerned. She lives her own life.”

 

Hackett let fall a little cough; he knew of Quirke’s and Phoebe’s troubled past and their still strained relations. “Aye, I’ve been wondering about my own lads,” he said. “They’re both over there in America now, you know, making a life for themselves. What if one of them came home one day in the company of a fine big black woman and said,
Da, this is the lady I’m going to marry
?”

 

“Well, what
would
you do?”

 

“I doubt there’d be anything I could do— none of us have much of a say, these days, where the youngsters are concerned.” He finished his tea and heaved his foot off the desk and sat forward in his chair again and put aside the mug and planted his elbows on the desk and leaned on them. “But I’ll tell you this,” he said, “I can imagine what Mrs. Celia Latimer and her brother-in-law the Minister, not to mention Mr. Oscar Latimer of Fitzwilliam Square— I can well imagine what those folks would say if young Dr. Latimer was to turn up with a big strapping black lad on her arm and introduce him all round as her intended.”

 

“From the little that I know of her,” Quirke said, “April Latimer wasn’t the marrying kind.”

 

They were silent, listening to the hollow drumming of the rain on the window.

 

“I wonder, though,” Hackett said softly, “if the family did know about this colored fellow, and if they did, what they decided to do
about it.” He chuckled. “You and I, Dr. Quirke, mightn’t have much say in such matters, but by God, the Latimers would make it their business to say everything that was on their minds, and a good bit more.”

 

Quirke considered this. “You think they may have got her out of the country? That they’re putting on a show of not knowing where she is or what’s become of her?” Hackett said nothing, only leaned there, toadlike, gazing stolidly across the desk. “It wouldn’t be so easy, even for the Latimers,” Quirke said thoughtfully. “I doubt April would have gone quietly, no matter how much pressure they put on her.”

 

“But go she would, in the end— and go she seems to have gone. The Latimers of this world are not to be balked, wouldn’t you say, Dr. Quirke?”

 

They sat again in silence, gazing off in opposite directions, thinking.

 

“I’ll talk to Phoebe,” Quirke said at last. “I’ll ask her about this black man, if she knows of him.”

 

“She might not,” Hackett said, “but that wouldn’t mean he doesn’t exist. Oh, and speaking of knowing people”—he had drained his mug and was peering into it now as if to read the runes of the tea leaves in the bottom—”did you ever hear your daughter talk of someone by the name of Ronnie?”

 

“No. Why?”

 

“Her ladyship, Miss Leetch, mentioned someone going by that name. I could get no sense out of her on the subject. It doesn’t sound like what a black man would be called, does it?” They looked at each other, and Hackett sighed. “The only Ronnie I’ve ever heard of is Ronnie Ronalde— the fellow on the wireless, you know, that whistles.”

 

“No,” Quirke said, “no, I don’t think I know him. He
whistles
?”

 

“ ‘Mocking-Bird Hill,’ that’s one of his tunes. ‘If I Were a
Blackbird’ is his best-known one, though. Amazing— you’d swear he was the bird itself.”

 

Quirke stood up. “I think, Inspector,” he said, “I’ll be on my way.”

 

Going down the stairs he heard behind him, from on high, the faint sound of Hackett’s voice raised in warbling melody.

 

 

If I were a blackbird, I’d whistle and sing—!

 

 

 

 

 

14

 

THE LITTLE BAND HAD NOT MET SINCE THE NIGHT IN THE DOLPHIN Hotel that seemed so long ago now, that night when Phoebe had come home and telephoned Oscar Latimer. Since then she had seen them all, but separately, Patrick at his flat, Isabel in the Shakespeare, and Jimmy Minor in O’Neill’s when he told her how his Editor had ordered him to stay away from the story of April’s disappearance. He told her something else, too, that night, something that came back to her now, as if there were one connection, one that she could not at all make out, between what Jimmy had said and the phantom figure in the lamplight.

 

They had come out of O’Neill’s and were standing on the corner there while Jimmy finished his cigarette. Rain was falling, the kind that was so fine it was barely felt but that could wet through to the skin in a minute. She was anxious to get away— the last buses were already departing, and she did not welcome the prospect of having to walk home on such a night— but Jimmy had drunk three pints of stout and was in an even more than usually loquacious mood and would not let her go. He began to talk about Patrick Ojukwu, as he almost always did when he had drink taken.

 

“Of course,” he said, and sniggered, “if you met him coming along here on a dark night like this you wouldn’t be able to see him unless he was grinning.” Phoebe did not understand. Jimmy put on a clownish grin. “The black skin, the white teeth? Get it, yes?”

 

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about him like that, behind his back,” Phoebe said. “You’re supposed to be his friend. Why do you dislike him? Is it because he’s black?”

 

Jimmy scowled and drew hard on the butt of his cigarette; he held it sheltered in the hollow of his hand, like, she thought, a corner boy. “I’m not the only one,” he muttered, looking down towards the lights of Dame Street.

 

“Not the only one
what
?” she demanded. “Not the only one that hates him because of the color of his skin?”

 

“It’s nothing to do with color,” he snapped.

 

She sighed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jimmy. And it’s late, I’ve got to go for my bus.”

 

He was giving her one of his pitying looks. “You never take notice of anything, do you?” he said. “You just sail on blithely as if everything was nice and comfy and uncomplicated.”

 

She felt like stamping her foot. “Tell me what you mean, Jimmy, or let me go. The last bus will be passing the gates of Trinity down there in ten minutes. And
don’t
light another cigarette, for Heaven’s sake!”

 

He put the cigarette, unlit, into the top pocket of his tweed jacket and pulled the wings of the plastic coat around him. Even in the dark she could see how blue his lips were from the cold. He does not take care of himself, she thought, he could get pleurisy, or TB, even. He seemed to her suddenly so small, and frail, and unhappy. She took him by the arm and drew him with her back into the shelter of the doorway of the pub.

 

“You knew Bella and him were having it off,” he said. “You knew that much, didn’t you?”

 

She said nothing; she would not give him the satisfaction of showing how pathetically little she did know. He was right, she did not care to see too deeply into other people’s business, into other people’s hearts. In that, at least, she was her father’s daughter.

 

“What if they were?” she said. “What about it?” “And did you know that April took him away from her?” She looked down, to avoid his fiercely glaring, slightly drunken eye. “No,” she said, surrendering, “no, I didn’t know that.”

 

“I thought you didn’t,” he said in a tone of sour satisfaction. “There’s an awful lot about April that you don’t know— an awful lot.”

 

She could hear from inside the pub the drunken students beginning to sing and the barmen shouting at them to stop, that the place would be raided if there was singing and they would all be arrested. It was the same every night, the fellows drunk and the girls wanting to go home, and then the place emptying, and fights in the street, and later on the fumbling in the back laneways and the front seats of motorcars. She was sick of this city, sick of it. Maybe Rose Crawford would offer to take her to America again. No place had ever seemed so far away as America seemed to her at that moment.

 

“And what about Isabel?” she asked. “Was she very upset?” “What do you think? Isabel and the Prince, what a combination! She saw herself as Desdemona, without the stabbing bit at the end. And then April crooked her finger and His Majesty was off, his tail feathers twitching. I’d say it’s a close thing as to which of them she hates the more, His Negritude or April the cruelest—”

 

She would not listen to any more of this and stepped past him out of the doorway of the pub and walked rapidly down to the traffic lights and ran along Dame Street to the bus stop. The bus
was just about to pull away and she had to jump on and grasp the rail to keep from falling backwards, and the conductor swore at her. It was only when she went inside and sat down that she felt the tears on her face, and realized that she had been crying since she walked away from Jimmy, and she could not stop.

 

Now, today, it was raining again, hard, and there was a gale blowing, tearing through the streets and shaking the bare trees along the canal. Despite the weather she had decided to walk to work. It was easier to think when she was walking. She had tried opening her umbrella, but at once the wind had caught it and would have turned it inside out if she had not let it down straight away. Anyway, she did not mind the rain. Even such stormy mornings as this were a presage of spring, for her. She was thinking of America again, of the rain on Boston Common and the trees along Commonwealth Avenue thrashing in the wind; it was a way of trying not to think of April, of Isabel, of Patrick Ojukwu.

 

She could see from Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes’s smile, all dentures and treacly sweetness, that she was furious at her; not only was she late, but she was wet and bedraggled and her shoes were muddy from the towpaths.

 

“You really should be more careful, my dear,” Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes said in her steeliest voice. “You could catch your death walking in the rain like that.”

 

“The bus was delayed, and I thought it would be quicker if I walked.”

 

“And was it?”

 

“No, Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes. I’m sorry.”

 

The woman had stopped pretending to smile, and her face was puffing up, her cheeks and forehead all pink and shiny, in that awful way that it did when she was about to lose her temper. Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes’s anger fed on itself and could go on whipping itself up throughout a morning. Phoebe retreated to
the back room and took off her wet coat and hung it on a chair and set it in front of the gas fire; at once it began to give off a strong smell of sheep. The soles of her stockings were soaked too, and she took them off, hoping her employer would not notice. At least the hood of her coat had kept her hair from getting wet; Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes would not have stood for wet hair in the shop.

 

The morning dragged. There were few customers, because of the weather. It would be nearly impossible to see in from the street, for the window was streaming with rain on the outside and was becoming steamed up on the inside. Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes, still in an angry sulk, kept to the cubbyhole she called her office, whence at intervals there issued long, trembling, put-upon sighs and faint, vexed mutterings. Phoebe tried not to watch the hands crawling over the face of the clock. She tried too not to think about her friends, her so-called friends, and all the things she was finding out she had not known about them. Was Jimmy telling the truth about April taking Patrick Ojukwu away from Isabel, and about Isabel hating the two of them for it? Because if he was, then Isabel had lied to her in the Shakespeare that night when she laughed at her for thinking April and Patrick were lovers. And Patrick, he would have been lying, too, in his flat that lunchtime when she asked him straight out about April and he denied that he was in love with her, or at least that he had been in love with her. Or had he denied it? She tried to remember what exactly he had said, how he had answered when she asked him,
Do you love her?
These lies, these pretenses, these coverings-up—she hated all that. It had started, for her, when Jimmy told her so casually about the key that April left under the stone, the key that April had never told her about. What was she to believe, what was she to take as the truth of anything anyone said to her? Had not everyone lied to her, from the very first moments of her life?

 

The pinging of the little brass bell over the door roused her from these bitter thoughts. Rose Crawford had come into the shop.

 

Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes was at once surprised, charmed, and suspicious. She had ignored the doorbell, thinking it was just some ordinary customer entering, but when she heard that languid American drawl, suggestive as it was of transatlantic gullibility and a Bergdorf Goodman bag bursting with dollars, she came hurrying out of her cubbyhole like a large, overpainted cuckoo popping out of its clock. Rich American visitors were only expected in the summertime, but here, in the depths of winter, was what was certainly an American, and obviously a rich one, at that. Rose wore a Burberry raincoat that showed no more than a few light raindrops on the shoulders— not only had the taxi man walked her to the door of the shop, he had escorted her there under his own umbrella— and beneath it what Mrs. Cuffe-Wilkes’s practiced eye saw at once was a Chanel suit in light-pink wool.

 

“My dear,” Rose was saying to Phoebe, releasing her from a light, deft embrace, “look at you, all in black as usual, like a Mafia widow.”

 

Phoebe introduced her employer, then hesitated— how was she supposed to explain her relationship to Rose?— but Rose immediately rescued her, putting on her most glittering smile and extending an expensively manicured hand. “Rose Crawford,” she said. “Delighted, I’m sure.”