Elegy For April Page 11

  His mind soon drifted away from reports of the latest fears of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and the horrors of foreign wars. Idly he pondered the distinction between solitude and loneliness. Solitude, he conjectured, is being alone, while loneliness is being alone among other people. Was that the case? No, something incomplete there. He had been solitary when the bar was empty, but was he lonely now that these others had appeared?

  Had April Latimer been lonely? It did not seem probable, from everything he had heard of her so far. Had there been anyone with her when her child miscarried, or was aborted? Had there been one to hold her hand, wipe her brow, murmur words of solace in her ear? He did not know very much about women and their ways. That side of their lives especially, the having of babies and the rest of it, was a mystery into which he had no wish to be initiated. He could not understand how his brother-in-law had chosen to make a career among all that messy and transient melodrama- all that hysteria. Give me the dead, he thought, the dead whose brief scenes on the stage are done with, for whom the last act is over and the curtain brought down.

  If the baby had been aborted, had April done it herself? She was a doctor; he supposed she would know how to do it. But would she have taken such a risk? It would depend on how anxious she was to conceal the fact that she had been pregnant. Surely she would have gone to someone for help, or at least to confide in. If she did, might that someone, he wondered, have been Phoebe? At the thought he sat upright suddenly in the chair and held the newspaper tighter, making the pages crackle. Was that why Phoebe was so sure her friend had come to harm? Were there things she knew that she had not told him and Hackett? Phoebe was a damaged soul astray in the world. How much of this he was responsible for he did not care to measure. He had not loved her when she needed to be loved. He was a bad father; there was no getting away from that sad, awkward, and painful fact. If she was in trouble now, if she knew the truth about April Latimer and did not know whom to turn to, then it was his moment to help her. But how? He could feel himself beginning to sweat.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  He looked up from his paper, startled and at once wary. She stood before him, lightly smiling, with the cigarette holder in one hand and a gin and tonic in the other. She wore a clinging dress of red wool under an overcoat with a fur collar and fur trimming. Her face was narrow and wonderfully delicate and pale, and her dark-red hair had a rich metallic gleam. He felt a vague panic- was she someone he should know? She seemed faintly familiar. He was not good at remembering faces. He stood up, and the woman, suddenly lowered over, gave a faint laugh, and took a tottering step backwards. “I know you’re Phoebe’s father,” she said. “I’m a friend of hers- Isabel Galloway.”

  Of course. The actress.

  “Yes,” he said. “Miss Galloway. Hello.” He offered his hand, but she glanced at the cigarette holder on one side and the gin glass on the other, amusedly pointing out her helplessness. “Phoebe often speaks of you,” he said. “And of course I’ve seen your- I’ve seen you on the stage.”

  “Have you?” she said, opening wide her eyes in a simulacrum of surprise and plea sure. “I wouldn’t have thought you were the theatergoing type.”

  She was slightly tipsy. Behind her, the others at the bar were making a point of not being in the least interested in who it was she was speaking to.

  “Well, it’s true,” he said, “I don’t go very often. But I’ve seen you, in- in a number of things.” She said nothing, only waited, pointedly, leaving him no choice but to invite her to join him. “Sit down, won’t you?” he said, feeling the soft snap of something closing on him.

  Later he would not remember if he saw, that first time, how lovely she was, in her sly, languid, feline way. He was too busy adjusting himself to the steady light of her candid regard; as she sat and gazed at him he felt like a slow old moose caught in the crosshairs of a polished and very powerful rifle. Her self-possession alarmed him; it was the result, he imagined, of her actor’s training. She seemed to be amused at something large and ongoing, a marvelously absurd cavalcade, of which, he suspected, he was just now a part.

  They spoke of Phoebe. He asked her how long she had known his daughter, and she waved the cigarette holder in a great circling gesture, like a magician twirling a flaming hoop. “Oh,” she said in that creamy voice of hers, “she’s too young for me to have known her for long. But I’m very fond of her. Very fond.” He drank his wine; she drank her gin. Smiling, she gazed at him. He felt as if he was being patted all over by someone searching for something hidden on his person. He put down his glass. He said he would have to go. She said it was time for her to go, too. She bent that gaze on him again, tilting her head a fraction to one side. He asked if he could give her a lift. She said, why, that would be wonderful. He frowned and nodded. They paused as they were passing by the trio at the bar, and she introduced Quirke.

  “Oh, my dear fellow,” the painted actor manager said, “by the size of you, I thought you must be a policeman at least.”

  When they came out into the street it was night, and raining.

  “My God,” Isabel Galloway said, “is that your car?”

  Quirke sighed.

  SHE LIVED IN A TINY TERRACED HOUSE OF PINK AND OCHER BRICKS on the canal at Portobello. Inside, it was curiously impersonal and reminded Quirke of a jewel box from which all the more intimate pieces had been removed. In the miniature living room almost the entire space was filled by two chintz-covered armchairs and a chintz-covered sofa that looked as if it had never been sat on. There were china and porcelain figurines on the mantelpiece, dogs and shepherdesses and a ballerina in a tutu hard and sharp-edged as coral. As soon as Isabel came in, and before she had even taken off her coat, she went and switched on the big wireless set that stood on a shelf beside the sofa; when after some moments it had warmed up it began at once to play dance music at a low volume, lush and swoony, though the signal was bad and there was static.

  “Make yourself at home,” Isabel said, with a faint, ironical flourish, and went off into another room, the kitchen, it must be, from the sounds that came out of clinking glasses and a running tap.

  Quirke draped his rain-grayed overcoat on one of the armchairs and laid his hat on top of it. He considered the sofa but found it too intimidating and stood instead, waiting for her to return. The ceiling could not have been more than six inches higher than the crown of his head. He felt like Alice after she had eaten the magic cake and grown huge.

  “I’ve only gin, I’m afraid,” Isabel said, coming in with a tray of glasses and bottles and shutting the door behind her with a deft back kick of her heel. She set the tray on a low, rectangular table in front of the sofa and poured a generous splash of gin into one of the glasses, but Quirke put his hand over the mouth of the second one. “Just tonic, for me,” he said. “I don’t drink.”

  She stared. “Yes you do. You were drinking wine in the hotel; I saw you.”

  “That was by way of an experiment.”

  “Ah.” She shrugged. “Yes. Phoebe told me you were- that you had a problem.” He said nothing, and she poured the tonic into his glass. She was a little tipsy still, he could see. “There’s no ice,” she said, “since the bloody fridge stopped working. It does it every winter- I think it thinks it should be let have a holiday when the weather turns cold. Here you are.” She handed him the glass, her cool fingers brushing against his hand. “It’s a bit flat. Chin-chin.” He was trying to place her accent. Had Phoebe said that she was English? “Think we might sit,” she said, “or do you prefer to go on looming?”

  The sofa felt as unsat on as it looked; the cushion under Quirke was plump and hard, and perched on it he had the sense of being borne swayingly aloft, like a child on a merry-go-round, or a mahout on his elephant. He sipped the tonic water; she was right, it was flat.

  The dance tune on the radio came to an end, and the announcer said the next one would be a tango. “We could dance, if there was room,” Isabel said. She
looked askance at him. “Do you dance, Dr. Quirke?”

  “Not much.”

  “I thought so.” She took a drink of her gin and laid her head back on the sofa, sighing. “God, I’ve been boozing all afternoon with those people; I’m sure I must be completely tiddly.” Again she gave him that sideways glance. “Mind you, don’t let that give you any ideas.”

  There was a silver cigarette box on the table, and now she leaned forward and took two cigarettes and put them both in her mouth and lit them and handed one to him. “Sorry,” she said, “lipstick,” and Quirke remembered another woman doing that, turning from a mantelpiece, in snow-light, and handing him a cigarette and saying those same words.

  “How did you know me?” he asked. “At the hotel, I mean.”

  “I must have seen you, I suppose, with Phoebe.” She narrowed her eyes, still smiling. “Or maybe I saw you in front of the footlights all those times when you came to see me act, and remembered you.”

  The tango music swirled, toffee-brown and smooth.

  “Do you know Phoebe well?” he asked.

  She heaved a sharp sigh, pretending to be vexed. “You keep asking me that. Does anyone know Phoebe well? Anyway, she’s really April’s friend- April Latimer?” Quirke nodded. “The rest of us I think she just tolerates.”

  “The rest of you?”

  “We’re a little band of friends, the Faubourg set, don’t you know. We meet once a week and drink too much and talk behind other people’s backs. Well, I drink too much, usually. You needn’t worry about Phoebe; she’s very careful.”

  “April Latimer, then,” he said, “how well did you know her?”

  “Oh, I’ve known April forever. She stole a man from me, once.”

  “Is that how you met her?”

  “What? Oh, no. We’d known each other a long time when that happened.”

  “So you were able to forgive her.”

  She gave him a sharp look, suspecting mockery. “Well, of course. To tell the truth, he wasn’t much of a catch in the first place, as April soon found out. We had many a laugh behind his back, April and I.”

  The tango ended and there was applause, tinny and remote, and the announcer came on to say that the news would be next. “Oh, turn that off, will you?” Isabel said. “Do you mind? I hate hearing of the day’s disasters.” She watched him get up and, craning her neck, followed him with her eye as he went to the set to switch it off. “You really are very big,” she said, putting on a lisping, little-girl voice. “I didn’t quite realize it at the hotel, but in this dinky little house you look like Gulliver.”

  He returned to the sofa and sat down. “She was fond of men, was she, April?” he asked.

  She gave him a wide-eyed stare. “You do come right out with it, don’t you?” she said. She laid her head back on the sofa and rolled it slowly from side to side. “I notice you speak of her in the past tense. You must have been talking to Phoebe, who thinks April has been done away with by Jack the Ripper.”

  “And you – what do you think has become of her?”

  “If her past behavior is anything to go by, right now she’ll be shacked up with some hunk in a nice cozy inn somewhere in… oh, let me see… in the Cotswolds, under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, dining by candlelight and sporting a Wool-worth’s wedding ring. What do you think, Dr. Quirke?”

  He suggested she might call him by his first name. When she asked him what it was and he told her, she gave a little shriek of delight and incredulity, and immediately put a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I shouldn’t laugh. But I think I’ll stick to Quirke, if you don’t mind- even Phoebe calls you that, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes,” he said flatly. “Everyone does.”

  He finished his cigarette and was leaning forward to stub the end of it in the ashtray on the table when he felt her fingers on the back of his neck. “You have such a nice little corkscrew curl just there where your hair ends,” she said.

  She allowed her hand to glide slowly down between his shoulder blades to his waist. He turned and put his hands on her shoulders- how delicate the bones were there!- and kissed her painted mouth. It was cool and tasted of gin. She drew back an inch and laughed softly into his mouth. “Oh, Dr. Quirke,” she murmured, “I really must be drunk.” But when Quirke put a hand on her breast she pushed him away. “Let’s have another drink,” she said, and sat up, touching her hair. She poured the gin and the last of the flat tonic water and handed him his glass. She looked at him closely. “Now you’re sulking,” she said. “I can see you are. What do you expect? Don’t you know what it’s like for a girl in this town?”

  He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I made a mistake.”

  Her look hardened. “Yes, obviously you did. I’m an actress, therefore I must be a tart, right? Be honest- that’s the mistake you think you made, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said again, and stood up, brushing his hands down the front of his jacket. “I should go.”

  He took up his coat and hat. Isabel did not rise but sat with her knees pressed together, gripping the gin glass tightly between her palms. He was stepping past her when she put out a hand and fumbled for one of his. “Oh, stop, you great lummox,” she said. “Come here.” She smiled up at him crookedly, pulling at his hand. “Maybe we can both get the wrong idea and see where it leads us.”

  A CHURCH BELL FAR OFF WAS TOLLING THREE O’CLOCK WHEN HE slipped from the bed in the darkness and went and stood by the window. A crooked streetlamp was shedding a circle of light on the pavement outside. Behind him, Isabel, sleeping, was a tousle of dark hair on the pillow and one pale, gleaming arm flung across the sheet. The window was low, and he had to stoop to see out of it. The rain had stopped, and the sky, amazingly, was clear- it seemed to him weeks, months, even, since there had been a clear sky. A sliver of moon was suspended like a scimitar above the gleaming rooftops of the houses on the other side of the canal. A car sizzled past on this side, its headlights dimmed. It was cold, and he was naked, yet he lingered there, a stooped watcher of the night. He was calm, as if something, some perpetually turning motor in his head, had been switched to a lower, slower gear. How sweet it was for a little while not to think, merely to lean there, above the street, hearing the soft beating of his own heart, remembering the warmth of the bed that he would soon return to. Despite the stillness of the air the canal was moving, the water brimming at both banks and wrinkled like silver paper, and here came- look!-two swans, gliding sedately side by side, dipping their long necks as they moved, a pair of silent creatures, white as the moon and moving amidst the moon’s shattered, white reflections on the water.

  IN THE MORNING, OF COURSE, IT WAS NOT AS EASY AS IT HAD BEEN in the night. Isabel had a hangover, though she tried to hide it behind a brightly brittle manner, and there was a knot of tension between her eyebrows and her skin had that gray, grainy pallor that was an unmistakable giveaway, as Quirke knew from many an ashen morning after a night before, glooming into the shaving mirror. She wore a silk tea gown with a floral print in crimsons and yellows, the design so busy he wondered how she could bear it. They sat at the table in the cramped kitchen by a window that looked out on a yard with a dustbin in it; a weak winter sun was shining out there, doing its best but not making much impression on anything. Isabel smoked with almost a fierce concentration, as if it were a task that had been set her, hard and wearisome, but one that she must not shirk. She had made coffee in a percolator with a glass top; the coffee was black and bitter and had a tarry taste, and made Quirke think unpleasantly of a monkey’s pelt. He wondered if he might tell her about the two swans on the canal in the moonlight but decided it would be better not to.

  In the early hours they had lain awake and talked. Isabel had smoked then, too, and there had been something intimate in the way the red glare from the tip of her cigarette would burgeon in the darkness with each deep draw that she took and then fade again. She had been born in London, to an Irish mother a
nd an English father. “Or did you think,” she said, “I was born in a trunk?” Early on, her father had run off, and she had come to Ireland with her mother to live with her mother’s parents. Isabel had loathed the elderly couple, her grandmother especially, who slapped her when her mother was not looking, and threatened to give her to the tinkers if she did not do as she was told. She had heard no more of her father, who might be dead for all she knew. She laughed softly in the darkness. “It all sounds so theatrical, when I hear myself tell it,” she said. “Like a bad piece of social realism at the Abbey. But such is life, I suppose- much less colorful, darling, than at the Gate.”

  Then it was Quirke’s turn to recount his story, though he did not want to. She pressed him, and turned on her side and leaned on an elbow, attending intently. He told her of the orphanage, the years at the industrial school at Carricklea, then rescue by Malachy Griff n’s father. After a while he pretended to have fallen asleep, and soon she slept, too. She was a snorer. He lay awake in the dark, listening to her snuffings and snorkelings, and thought about the past, and how it never lets go its hold.

  Now, at morning, they were awkward together. He wanted to be gone but did not know how to go.

  “Did you know April Latimer was pregnant?” he asked.

  She stared at him. “You’re joking,” she said. She threw herself back on the chair with a happy cry of laughter. “My God! I didn’t think April would be so- so banal.” Then she nodded. “Of course- that’s where she is, then, gone to En gland to have it fixed.”