Elegy For April Page 5

  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.

  Despite her misgivings, that night when she got home she called Oscar Latimer, from the telephone in the hallway. His office number was the only one she could find in the directory, and she was sure he would not be there, at eleven o’clock at night. She knew very well that she was calling him now in the certainty that she would not get him, and she was startled when the receiver was picked up after the first ring and a voice said softly, “Yes?” Her impulse was to hang up immediately, but instead she went on standing there with the phone pressed to her ear, hearing her own breath rustling in the mouthpiece, a sound like that of the sea at a great distance, the waves rising and falling. She thought it must be the wrong number she had dialed but then the voice again said, “Yes?” as softly as before, and added, “Oscar Latimer here. Who is this, please?” She could not think what to say. The hall around her suddenly seemed unnaturally quiet, and she was afraid that as soon as she began to speak the fat young man would come storming out of his flat to rail at her for making noise and disturbing him. She said her name and had to repeat it, more loudly, though still speaking barely above a whisper. There was another silence on the line- perhaps he did not recognize her name, for why should he?- then he said, “Ah. Yes. Miss Griffin. What can I do for you?” She asked if she could see him in the morning. After the briefest pause he said she might come at half past eight, that he could give her five minutes, before his first patient was due. He hung up without saying goodbye, and without asking what it was she wanted to see him about. She supposed he thought she must be in trouble; probably girls in trouble phoned him all the time, at all hours of day and night, since he was the best-known doctor, in his line, in town.

  She was halfway up the stairs when she stopped and came back down again, and fished more pennies out of her purse, and put them in the slot and dialed Quirke’s number. She could not think if there had been an occasion before in her life when, as now, she craved so much the sound of her father’s voice.

  ***

  NEXT MORNING AT TWENTY MINUTES AFTER EIGHT SHE ARRIVED on foot at the corner of Pembroke Street and Fitzwilliam Square and spotted the unmistakable figure of Quirke, enormous in his long black coat and black hat, waiting for her in the half-light of dawn. Got up like this, he always made her think of the blackened stump of a tree that had been blasted by lightning. He greeted her with a nod and touched a fin
gertip to her elbow through the sleeve of her coat, the only intimacy between them he ever seemed willing to permit himself. “You realize,” he said, “it’s not everyone I’d venture out for, at this hour of the morning, in this weather.” He turned, and together they set off diagonally across the road, the fog clutching wetly at their faces. “And to call on Oscar Latimer, into the bargain.”

  “Thanks,” she said drily. “I appreciate it, I’m sure.” She was remembering the look that Jimmy and Isabel had exchanged at the Dolphin last night, but she did not care; she needed Quirke with her today, to give her support and keep her from losing her nerve.

  They climbed the steps of the big four-story terraced house, and Quirke pressed the bell. While they waited Phoebe asked him if he had telephoned the hospital, and he looked blank. “To inquire about April,” she said, “the sick-note she sent in- did you forget?” He said nothing but looked stonily contrite.

  There was a smell of coffee in the hallway; Oscar Latimer not only had his consulting rooms but also lived here, Phoebe recalled now, in a bachelor apartment on the two top floors, in what April used to describe scornfully as unmarried bliss. Why had she not remembered that? It accounted of course for his answering the phone so late last night.

  The nurse who let them in had a long, colorless face and large teeth; her bloodless nose narrowed to an impossibly sharp, purplish tip that was painful to look at. When Quirke introduced himself she said, “Oh, Doctor,” and seemed for a second on the point of genuflecting. She showed them into a cold waiting room, where there was a large rectangular oak dining table with twelve matching chairs- Phoebe counted them. They did not sit. On the table were laid out the usual magazines, Punch, Woman’s Own, the African Missionary. Quirke lit a cigarette and looked about for an ashtray, coughing into his fist.

  “How are you?” Phoebe asked him.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know yet, it’s too early in the day.”

  “I mean, since you… since you came home.”

  “I bought a car.”

  “You did?”

  “I told you I was going to.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t believe you.”

  “Well, I did.” He looked at her. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

  “What is it?”

  The nurse with the nose put her head in at the door- it was as if a hummingbird had darted in its beak- and told them Mr. Latimer would see them now. They followed her up the stairs to the first floor, where her master had his rooms.

  “An Alvis,” Quirke said to Phoebe, as they climbed. “I suppose you’ve never heard of an Alvis.”

  “Have you learned to drive?”

  He did not answer.

  Oscar Latimer was a short, slight, brisk young man, smaller somehow than it seemed he should be, so that when she was standing in front of him, shaking his hand, Phoebe had the peculiar impression that she was seeing him at some distance from her, diminished by perspective. He had an air of extreme cleanliness, as if he had just finished subjecting himself to a thorough going-over with a scrubbing brush, and exuded a sharp, piney scent. His hand in hers was neat and warm and soft. He had freckles, like April, which made him seem far younger than he must be, and his boyish fair hair was brushed sharply away on both sides from a straight, pale parting. He had the beginnings of a mustache, it was no more than a few bristling, ginger tufts. He glanced at Quirke with faint surprise. “Dr. Quirke,” he said. “I didn’t expect you this morning. You’re well, I hope?” He had stepped back and with an adroit little dive had got in behind his desk and was already settling himself before he had stopped speaking. “So, Miss… Griffin,” he said, and she caught the slight hesitation; she had never considered abandoning the name Griffin and calling herself Quirke instead-why should she have, when Quirke had not given her his name in the first place? “What can I do for you?”

  She and Quirke had seated themselves on the two small chairs to the right and left in front of the desk. “It’s not about me that we’ve come,” she said.

  The little man looked sharply from her to her father and back again. “Oh? Yes?”

  “It’s about April.”

  Quirke was smoking the last of his cigarette, and Latimer with one finger pushed a glass ashtray forward to the corner of the desk. He was frowning. “About April,” he said slowly. “I see. Or rather I don’t see. I hope you’re not going to tell me she’s in trouble again.”

  “The thing is,” Phoebe said, ignoring the implications of that word again, “I haven’t heard from her, and none of her other friends have either, since a week from last Wednesday. That’s nearly… what is it?… nearly twelve days.”

  There was a silence. She wished that Quirke would say something to help her. He was studying a large photograph hanging among framed degrees on the wall behind the desk, showing Oscar Latimer, in a dark suit and wearing some kind of sash, shaking hands with Archbishop McQuaid. What was it Jimmy Minor had called McQuaid? That whited sepulchre in his palace out in Drumcondra. The Archbishop wore a sickly smile; his nose was almost as sharp and bleached as that of Latimer’s nurse.

  Oscar Latimer drew back the cuff of his jacket and looked pointedly at his watch. Sighing, he said, “I haven’t seen my sister since- well, I don’t remember when it was. She long ago cut herself off from the rest of us and-”

  “I know there was- there was tension between her and your mother,” Phoebe said, in an effort to sound conciliatory.

  Latimer gave her a look of cold distaste. “She as good as disowned her family,” he said.

  “Yes, but-”

  “Miss Griffin, I don’t think you understand what I’m telling you. As far as we’re concerned, I mean the family, April is a free agent, beyond our influence, outside of our concern. She’s gone twelve days, you say? For us, she left much longer ago than that.”

  The room was silent again. Quirke was still gazing distractedly at the photograph.

  “I didn’t say she was gone,” Phoebe said quietly, “only that I haven’t heard from her.”

  Latimer let fall another sharp little sigh and again consulted his watch.

  Quirke at last broke his silence. “We wondered,” he said, “if April might perhaps have been in touch with her mother. Girls tend to cleave to their mothers, in times of difficulty.”

  Latimer regarded him with amused disdain. “Difficulty?” he said, as if holding the word up by one corner to examine it. “What do you mean by that?”

  “As Phoebe says, your sister hasn’t been heard from, that’s all. Naturally her friends are worried.”

  Latimer fairly hopped where he sat. “Her friends?” he cried- it was almost a bleat. “Don’t talk to me about her friends! I know all about her friends.”

  Quirke let his gaze wander again over the walls and then refixed it on the little man behind the desk. “My daughter is one of those friends,” he said. “And your sister is not beyond their concern.”

  Latimer set his small, neat hands flat before him on the desk and took a long breath. “My sister, since she became an adult, and indeed for long before that, has caused nothing but distress to our family, and to her mother in particular. Whether she’s in difficulty, as you put it, or just off somewhere on one of her periodic romps I frankly don’t care. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a patient waiting.” He stood up, making two tripods of his fingers and pressing them to the desk and leaning forward heavily on them. “I’m sorry, Miss Griffin, that you’re worried, but I’m afraid I can’t help you. As I’ve said, my sister and her doings stopped being of any consequence to me a long time ago.”

  Quirke rose, turning his hat slowly in his hands. “If you do hear from her,” he said, “will you call us, either Phoebe or me?”

  Latimer looked at him again with that disdainful almost-smile. “I won’t be the one to hear from her,” he said purringly. “You can be certain of that, Dr. Quirke.”

  On the step outside, Phoebe violently pulled one glove and then the other. “Well,” she
said through her teeth to Quirke, “you were a great help. I don’t think you even looked at him.”

  “If I had,” Quirke said mildly, “I think I’d have picked up the little squirt and thrown him out of the window. What did you expect me to do?”

  They walked along the square under the silent, dripping trees. There was some morning traffic in the street now, and muffled office workers hurried past them. The dawn seemed to have staled before it had fully broken, and the gray light of day seemed more a dimness.

  “Is he a good doctor?” Phoebe asked.

  “I believe so. Good doctoring doesn’t depend on personality, as you’ve probably noticed.”

  “I suppose he’s fashionable.”

  “Oh, he’s that, all right. I wouldn’t care to have him pawing me, but I’m not a woman.”

  They stopped on the corner. “Malachy is going to give me a driving lesson today,” Quirke said. “In the Phoenix Park.”

  Phoebe was not listening. “What am I going to do?” she said.

  “About April? Look, I’m sure Latimer is right; I’m sure she’s off on an adventure somewhere.”

  She stopped, and after walking on a pace he stopped too. “No, Quirke,” she said, “something has happened to her, I know it has.”

  He sighed. “How do you know?”

  She cast about, shaking her head. “When we went in there first, into that room of his, I felt such a fool. The way he looked at me, I could see he thought I was just another hysterical female, like the ones I suppose he sees every day. But as he talked I became more and more- I don’t know- frightened.”

  “Of him?” Quirke sounded incredulous. “Frightened of Oscar Latimer?”

  “No, not of him. Just- I don’t know. I just had this feeling, I’ve had it all week, but in that room it became- it became real.” She looked down at her gloved hands. “Something has happened, Quirke.”