Elegy For April

cupped hands. They walked together up the lane to the lock-up garage where the Alvis waited in the darkness like a great black cat in its cage. Quirke had little trouble getting the car into the garage, but he needed Perry to maneuver it out again, for he had not yet mastered the art of reversing in confined spaces and feared scraping the paintwork or putting a dent in one of the wings, for which, he vaguely feared, some severe penalty would be exacted. Perry treated the machine with a kind of solicitous delicacy and tenderness. He pulled out neatly into the street and stopped there, and left the engine running. “Nothing like it, is there,” he said, swinging himself out from behind the wheel, “the smell of petrol fumes on a cold winter morning.”

Quirke was lighting a cigarette. He was in no hurry to get to the house on the canal, where he knew there could only be trouble waiting for him, though he did not know what it would be. The thought of April Latimer being there, at Isabel’s, filled him with a peculiar sense of panic. What would he say to her, what would they talk about? In these past weeks she had become for him almost a mythical figure, and now he was prey to what he could only think was an attack of crippling, monumental shyness.

He drove around the Pepper Canister and turned right on the canal. As he was passing by the house on Herbert Place he slowed down and peered up at the windows of April’s flat. In one of them a curtain rod had come away on one side, and the lace curtain hung down at a crooked angle. He drove on, staying in third gear.

Outside Isabel’s little house there were floatings of ice on the canal again, and water hens were fussing and splashing among the reeds. The morning had a raw edge. He was lifting his hand to the knocker when the door opened. Isabel was already dressed. She wore a dark skirt and a dark-blue cardigan. Her bronze-colored hair was tied back with a dark ribbon. She did not smile, only stood aside and gestured for him to come in.

He thought of that curtain in the window, hanging at a crazy angle on its broken rod.

The house had a stuffy, morning smell of bedclothes and bath soap and milky tea and bread that had been toasted under a gas flame. He paused, and Isabel went ahead, leading him along the short hall, through the living room, and into the kitchen. How slim she was, how slim and intense.

The first person he saw was Phoebe, standing by the stove in her overcoat. He realized he was holding his breath and seemed unable to release it. When he came in she, too, did not smile, and gave no greeting. A young man was sitting at the table. He was black, with a large, smooth-browed head and a flattened nose and eyes that swiveled like the eyes of a nervous horse, their whites flashing. He was wearing a loose jumper and no shirt, and a pair of baggy corduroy trousers; he looked cold and exhausted, sitting there with his shoulders drooping and his clasped hands pressed between his knees.

“This is Patrick Ojukwu,” Isabel said.

The young man regarded him warily. He did not stand up, and they did not shake hands. Quirke put his hat down on the table, where there were cups and smeared plates and a teapot under a woolen cozy. He looked from Isabel to Phoebe and back again. “Well?” he said. He was remembering the light that had been on in the window upstairs when he had brought Isabel back here last night, and of Isabel hurrying from the car and waving to him in that tense way before going inside.

“Would you like something?” she asked now. “The tea is probably cold, but I could-”

“No, nothing.” His eyes shied from hers. He could not make out what he was feeling, things were so jumbled up in him. Anger? Yes, anger, certainly, but something else, too, a hot thrill that seemed to be jealousy. He turned to Ojukwu- had he spent the night here? In a recess of his mind an image moved, of black skin on white. “Where’s April?” he asked.

The young man looked quickly at Phoebe and then at Isabel.

“He doesn’t know,” Isabel said.

Quirke gave a curt sigh and pulled back one of the chairs at the table and sat down. So far Phoebe had said nothing. “Why are you here?” he asked her.

“We’re all friends,” Phoebe said. “I told you.”

“So where’s the other one, then, the reporter?”

She said nothing and looked away.

“We’re all tired, Quirke,” Isabel said. “We’ve been up half the night, talking.”

Quirke was growing hot inside his overcoat, but for some reason he did not want to take it off. Isabel had gone to stand beside Phoebe, as if in solidarity. He turned back to Ojukwu. “So,” he said. “Tell me.”

The black man, still with his hands pressed between his knees, began to rock back and forth on the chair, staring at the floor in front of him with those huge eyes. He cleared his throat. “April telephoned me that day,” he said. “I was in college; they called me down to the reception place. She said she was in trouble, that she needed my help. I went to the flat. She did not come to the door, but I let myself in with the key. She was in the bedroom.”

He stopped. Quirke, on the other side of the table, watched him. There were marks of some kind in the skin over his cheekbones, small incisions the shape of slender arrowheads, made a long time ago- tribal markings, he supposed, made at birth with a knife. His close-cropped hair was a mass of tightly wound curls, like so many tiny, metal springs or metal shavings. “Were you and April- were you her lover?”

Ojukwu shook his head, still with his eyes fixed on the floor. “No,” he said, and Quirke saw the faint, brief start that Phoebe gave. “No,” Ojukwu said again, “not really.”

“What was she doing, in the bedroom?”

The silence in the room seemed to contract. The two women were fixed on Ojukwu, waiting for what would come next; they had heard it before and now would have to hear it again.

“She was in a bad state,” he said. “I thought at first she was unconscious. There was blood.”

“What kind of blood?” Quirke asked. As if he did not know already.

Ojukwu turned slowly and looked up at him. “She had… she had done something to herself. I did not know, I had not known, that she was”- he gave himself a shake, as he would shake someone in anger, accusingly-”that she was expecting a child.”

Isabel stirred suddenly. She snatched a cup from the table and brought it to the sink and rinsed it quickly and filled it with water and drank, her head back and her throat pulsing.

“She had aborted the child, yes?” Quirke said. He was furious, furious, he did not know at what, exactly, this fellow, yes, but other things too indistinct for him to identify. “Tell me,” he said, “had she aborted it?”

Ojukwu nodded, his shoulders sagging. “Yes,” he said.

“Not you- she did it herself.”

“I told you, yes.”

Don’t snarl like that at me, Quirke wanted to say. “And now she was bleeding.”

“Yes. It was bad; she had lost a lot of blood. I did not know what to do; I- I could not help her.” He frowned suddenly, remembering. “She laughed. It was so strange. I had helped her up and she was sitting on the side of the bed, the blood still coming out of her and her face so white- so white!- and still she laughed. Oh, Patrick, she said, you were my second-best chance!” He looked up at Quirke again, with a frown of bewilderment. “Why was that funny? My second-best chance. I did not know what she meant.” He shook his head. “She was such a strange person, I never understood her. And now I was afraid she would die, and I could not think what to do.”

There was a pause then, and the room seemed to relax with an almost audible creak, as if a wheel tensed on a spring had been released a notch. Quirke leaned back on the chair and lit a cigarette, and Isabel, having drunk another cup of water, filled the coffee percolator and set it on the stove. Phoebe came forward to the table and pointed to the packet of Senior Service that Quirke had put there, and asked if she could have one. When she had taken the cigarette and he had held up the lighter for her, she walked to the window and stood looking out, with her back to the room, smoking. Only Ojukwu remained as he had been, crouched and tense as if he were nursing an internal ache.

“If you weren’t lovers, you and April,” Quirke asked, “then what were you?”

“We were friends.”

Quirke sighed. “Then you must have been very intimate friends.”

Isabel came and set down a coffee cup and saucer in front of Quirke and brusquely said: “He’s lying- they were lovers. She took him away from me.” She did not look at Ojukwu but went back to the stove and stood, like Phoebe, with her back turned. Quirke could see her fury in the set of her shoulders.