Elegy For April Page 4

  Angelus bells were tolling from all quarters of the city.

  Quirke sat down at the table, still in his overcoat, and began to eat. He could feel Malachy watching him with the melancholy shadow of a smile. A sort of intimacy, however uneasy, had developed between the two of them since Sarah’s death. They were indeed like two sexless cronies, Quirke reflected, two aging androgynes shuffling arm in arm down the wearying middle stretch of life’s long road. Malachy’s thoughts must have been running on the same lines, for now he startled Quirke by saying, “I’m thinking of retiring- did I tell you?”

  Quirke, teacup suspended, stared at him. “Retiring?”

  “My heart is not in it anymore,” Mal said, lifting and letting fall his left shoulder, as if to demonstrate a deficiency of ballast on that side.

  Quirke set down his cup. “For God’s sake, Malachy, you’re not fifty yet.”

  “I feel as if I was. I feel about eighty.”

  “You’re still grieving.”

  “After all this time?”

  “It takes all this time. Sarah was…” He faltered, frowning; he did not know how to begin listing the things that Sarah had been. After all, they had loved her, Quirke as well as Malachy, each in his way.

  Mal smiled miserably and looked up at the gray light in the window beside the small table where they sat. He sighed. “It’s not Sarah, Quirke, it’s me. Something has gone out of my life, something that’s more than Sarah- I mean, that’s different from Sarah. Something of me.”

  Quirke pushed his plate away; his appetite was gone, not that it had been keen to start with. He sat back on the chair and lit a cigarette. Malachy had been reminding him of someone, and now he realized who it was: Harkness, but without the apostate Christian Brother’s invigorating bitterness and biting scorn.

  “You have to hold on, Mal. This is all there is, this life. If something is gone out of it for you, it’s your job to replace it.”

  Malachy was gazing at him, his eyes hardly visible behind those gleaming lenses; Quirke felt like a specimen being studied under a glass. Now Mal asked softly, “Don’t you ever just want it to be- to be done with?”

  “Of course,” Quirke answered impatiently. “In the past couple of months I thought at least once a day it might be best to go, or to be gone, at least- the going itself is the thing I don’t care for.”

  Malachy considered this, smiling to himself. “Somebody asked, I can’t remember who, How can we live, knowing that we must die?”

  “Or you could say, how can we not live, knowing that death is waiting for us? It makes just as much sense- more, maybe.”

  Now Malachy laughed, or at least it was a sort of laugh. “I never knew you to be so enthusiastically on the side of life,” he said. “Doctor Death, they call you at the hospital.”

  “I know that,” Quirke said. “I know what they call me.” He tipped the ash of his cigarette into his saucer and saw Malachy’s nostrils twitch in distaste. “Listen, Mal, I’m going to buy a car; why don’t you come and help me pick one out.”

  Now it was Malachy’s turn to stare. He could not take it in. “But you can’t drive,” he said.

  “I know I can’t,” Quirke answered wearily. “Everyone keeps telling me that. But I can learn. In fact, I’ve already decided the model I have my eye on.” He waited. “Aren’t you going to ask me what it is?”

  Malachy was still staring at him owlishly. “But why?” he asked.

  “Why not? I have a sack of money I’ve been accumulating all these years; it’s time I bought something with it, for myself. I’m going for an Alvis.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Best car the British ever built. Beautiful thing. I knew a fellow that had one- Birtwhistle, at college, remember, who died? Come on, we’ll go up to Crawford’s. There’s a chap there, Protestant, dependable. I did a P.M. last year on his aged mother, who unaccountably fell downstairs and broke her neck the day after she’d made her will.” He winked. “Shall we go?”

  ***

  MALACHY DROVE THE HUMBER AS IF IT WERE NOT A MACHINE but a large, fuming, unpredictable beast he had been put in unwilling charge of, holding the steering wheel at arm’s length and groping about with his feet after the pedals down in the dark. He muttered to himself, under his breath, bemoaning the fog and the poor visibility and the recklessness of the drivers of the other vehicles they encountered along the way. At the corner of St. Stephen’s Green, as they were turning onto Earlsfort Terrace, they narrowly missed colliding with a CIE delivery cart drawn by a high-stepping Clydesdale, and were followed for twenty yards and more by the drayman’s bellowed curses.

  “You know,” Malachy said, “I used to take pride in my job of helping mothers to bring their babies into the world. Now I look at the world and I wonder if I did more harm than good.”

  “You’re a fine doctor, Mal.”

  “Am I?” He smiled at the windscreen. “Then why can’t I heal myself?”

  They went on a little way in silence, then Quirke said, “Isn’t despair one of the big mortal sins? Or do you not believe in that kind of thing anymore?”

  Malachy said nothing, only smiled again, more bleakly than ever.

  They parked on Hatch Street- it took Malachy fully five minutes to maneuver into a space twice the length of the Hum ber- and Quirke, shaken after the short but harrowing drive, was wondering if he should reconsider the idea of owning a car. On the pavement he put on his hat and turned up the collar of his coat. The sun somewhere was trying to shine, its weak glow making a sallow, urinous stain on the fog. As they walked towards the showrooms on the corner Malachy said worriedly, “This fellow’s mother, the one that fell downstairs- when you did the postmortem on her, you didn’t- I mean, you wouldn’t-?”

  Quirke heaved a sigh. “You never really did have much of a sense of humor, did you, Mal.”

  The showroom smelled of steel and leather, fresh paintwork, clean engine oil. A number of small, gleaming cars stood about the floor, looking self-conscious at the incongruity of being indoors but all the same conveying a bright and eager impression, like puppies in a pet shop. The salesman’s name was Lockwood, and he was indeed, Mal saw, every inch the image of a Protestant, which probably meant that he was not one at all. He was tall and painfully thin- it seemed his long bones must rattle when he moved- wearing a gray, chalk-striped, double-breasted suit and brown suede shoes with arabesques of holes punched in the toe caps. He had pale, poached eyes and a mustache that might have been painted on with an extrafine water-color brush; he was young but balding already, his high forehead giving him a startled, harelike look. “Good morning, Dr. Quirke,” he said, “though it’s not very good, I suppose, with that blessed fog that it seems will never lift.”

  Quirke introduced Malachy, then said without preamble, “I’m here to buy an Alvis.”

  Lockwood blinked, then a slow, warm light came into his eyes. “An Alvis,” he breathed, in a hushed tone, reverently. “Why, of course.” A very special model had come in just that week, he said, oh, very special. He led the way across the showroom floor, tensely chafing his long-boned hands; Quirke guessed he was calculating the commission he would earn on the sale and unable to believe his luck. “It’s a TC 108 Super Graber Coupe, one of only three manufactured so far, by Willowbrook of Loughborough- that’s right, three only. Hermann Graber, Swiss master designer. Six-cylinder, three-liter, hundred bhp. Independent front suspension, Burman F worm and nut steering box, top speed one-ohthree, nought to sixty in thirteen point five. Look at her, gentlemen- just look at her.”

  It was indeed a magnificent machine, black, gleaming, lowslung, displaying a restrained elegance in every line. Quirke, despite himself, was awed- was he really to become the possessor of this sleek, polished beast? As well take a panther home with him.

  Malachy, to Quirke’s surprise, had begun to ask questions that revealed an impressive knowledge of these machines and their attributes. Who would have thought old Mal would know about such things?
But here he was, gravely pacing around the car, stroking his chin and frowning, and talking about crankshafts and Girling shocks- Girling shocks?- and valve gears and pushrod overheads, with Lockwood following happily at his heels.

  “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.

  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 Pho
ebe. 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.