Elegy For April

Isabel was lighting a second cigarette from the butt of the first one. Phoebe wondered if she was imagining it, or were her friend’s hands shaking ever so slightly? Was she telling the truth about that night?

“And April stayed there?” Phoebe asked. “With Patrick?”

“Well, I’m sure it depends what you mean by stayed, darling.” Now at last she turned her face and looked full at Phoebe, as if defiantly, with an odd, hard light in her eyes. “Wouldn’t you say?”

It seemed to Phoebe that the lamps in the bar had suddenly dimmed. She tasted something sour at the back of her throat. How they wait to ambush us, our true emotions, she thought.

“I really do think,” Isabel was saying, in her husky, stage drawl, “that too much is made of these late-night incidents. No one is himself, half crazy on drink and looking for hidden significance in every littlest thing. Of course, I may have missed a lot, since at that time of night I’m usually so drained after two or three hours standing on a stage shrieking at people who do nothing but shriek back at me, the same thing, over and over, every night. All I ever want to do is crawl into bed with a hot water bottle, and the only stiff thing I want near me is a drink.”

Phoebe felt as if she had struggled through a dense and thorny thicket and come out into an ashen, waste place. “So they were lovers,” she said flatly.

“What?” Isabel stared and gave what sounded like a forced laugh. “Do you know, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word used in real life, outside the theater? Lovers, indeed!”

“Well, weren’t they- aren’t they?”

Isabel shrugged. “My dear,” she said in her jaded, worldly way, “you really have the most vivid imagination, for the convent girl you pretend to be. Patrick of course must be fairly bursting with primitive urges- but lovers? I can’t quite see it, can you? You know what April is like.”

“What do you mean, what she’s like?”

“Well, I rather think there’s a lot more talk there than action. In my experience the ones who seem the keenest goers turn out to be virgins in the end.” She patted her friend’s hand. “How quaint you are, darling Phoebe, quaint and adorably straitlaced. Are you jealous? You’re blushing- you are jealous. Mind you, I can understand it. He is quite a hunk of dusky manhood, isn’t he?” Her voice had hardened, and there was that cold, bitter light in her eyes again.

“Yes,” Phoebe said, “yes, he’s very- he’s very beautiful.”

Isabel looked at her. “For God’s sake,” she said sharply, “don’t say you’re smitten, too.”

Phoebe would not weep; weeping would bring no comfort to her suddenly wrung heart. She was sure, what ever Isabel said, that April and Patrick had been lovers. The notion of it had often crossed her mind, but she had never really believed it; now she did. Once planted, the conviction would not weaken. And Isabel was right, she was jealous. But the worst of it was she did not know which of them she was jealous of, April or Patrick.

No, she would not weep.

***

AND THEN OF COURSE NEXT DAY SHE HAD TO GO AND MAKE A FOOL of herself. She knew she should not do it, but she went ahead and did. She reasoned that since it was her lunch hour she could pretend, if she had to, that she was out for a stroll. Ridiculous, of course; who would believe that anyone would stroll all the way from Grafton Street up to Christ Church in this weather? She had not really expected to see him; after all, what were the chances that he would be at home in the middle of the day? Not that she had any intention of calling on him. What, then, was she thinking of? It was childish; she was like a schoolgirl hanging about the streets hoping for a glimpse of some boy she had a crush on. She told herself to stop being stupid and turn back, yet on she went, through the foul, damp air, and when she turned from Christchurch Place into Castle Street there he was! She saw him walking towards her from the other direction, in his brown duffle coat and a woolen scarf, carrying a string bag of groceries. He did not spot her right away and she thought of turning on her heel and fleeing, but she knew it was too late; he would see her then, surely, running away, and would think her an even bigger fool, and furthermore she would know herself for a coward. So she went on, forcing herself to seem as surprised as he must be.

“Phoebe!” he said, stopping, with that big smile of his. “How good to see you.”

“I was- I was meeting someone,” she said. “Over at the cathedral. A friend of mine. I just left her.” She was babbling, she could hear herself. “I forgot you lived in this street. I’m on my way back to work.”

Patrick was still smiling. He must know she was lying. What would he think she was doing here? Would he realize she must have been hoping he would be there and she would meet him? “Come in for a minute,” he said. “It’s so cold.”

It was a shabby little house that he lived in, with a narrow front door painted in wavy lines and varnished to look like wood. He had the upstairs flat; she had never been in it before. His landlady occupied the ground floor. “She is out,” he said, “so there is no need to worry.” The hall was laid with cheap lino, and the stairs were steep and had a dank smell. He had done what he could to make the tiny, bleak living room seem homely, with colored posters on the walls and a bright-red blanket draped over the back of an old armchair. She was aware of the bed in the corner but would not allow herself to look at it. His desk was a folding card table set up under the window. On it, beside a green Olivetti portable typewriter and a stack of textbooks, stood a framed photograph of a middle-aged couple in tribal costume, the woman wearing an elaborate headdress. There was a telephone on the floor beside the bed; she noticed it was an old-fashioned one, like April’s, with that winder on the side.

“Have you had your lunch?” Patrick asked. “I was going to make something.” Phoebe was gazing at a small bronze figure on the windowsill; it was of a big-eyed, fearsome-seeming warrior in a spiked helmet brandishing an elaborate spear or some sort of long, ornamental sword, broad at the tip. “From Benin,” Patrick said, following her gaze. “It is an oba- a king, or ruler. Do you know about the Benin bronzes?”

Phoebe shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, no need. Very few people up here know about Benin- African art can never be sophisticated in Europe an eyes. This piece is a copy, of course.”

He went into an alcove where there was a sink and a wall cupboard and, perched precariously on a shelf, a Baby Belling electric stove, hardly bigger than a hatbox, with a single cooking ring. He filled a kettle and put it on the ring to boil, and began to unpack the string bag on the draining board. “Would you like coffee or tea?” he asked. “I have cheese and bread and dates. Are you hungry?”

“I love dates,” she said, though she had never tasted them before.

He had no pot and made the coffee in a saucepan instead. The coffee was black and bitter and she could feel the grounds like sand between her teeth, yet she thought she had never tasted anything so wonderful and exotic, so redolent of elsewhere. They sat facing each other across a little low table, she in the armchair with the red blanket and he perched on a comical little three-legged stool. The dates were sticky and tasted like chocolate. Over the rim of the mug she watched Patrick’s hands. They were large and almost square, with very thick fingers that seemed to caress with elaborate tenderness the things they touched. Here, like this, in his own place, among his own things, he seemed younger than he did elsewhere, boyish, almost, and a little shy, a little vulnerable. “Would you like some cheese?” he asked. When he spoke the last word his lower lip was drawn down, and she glimpsed the pink inside of his mouth, more crimson than pink, a dark, secret, soft place. From the corner of her eye she saw that he had put her coat on the bed; it lay at an angle with one sleeve outflung. It might have been her, prostrate there.

“I lied,” she said. “I wasn’t meeting a friend. I wasn’t meeting anyone.”

“Oh?” He showed no surprise, only smiled again. When he smiled he had a way of dipping his large head quickly down to one side and up again, which made him seem awkward and happy at the same time.

“The truth is I came up here in the hope that I’d see you. And what a strange coincidence, meeting you in the street. I could hardly believe it when I saw you.”

“Yes, a coincidence. I decided to stay at home today”- he nodded towards the table with its pile of books-”to study.” He ate with small, deft, quick movements, strange to see in one so broad and solid, those big fingers bunched and lifting morsel after morsel to his lips, those lips that seemed dry, and were cracked, and yet looked soft, too, soft as some kind of dark, ripe fruit. “Why did you want to see me?” he asked.

She drank her coffee, holding the mug in both hands, huddled into herself. She continued trying not to see the coat on the bed, but there it was, sprawled there, at once blameless and suggestive. “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I wanted to talk about April. I keep thinking… oh, I don’t know. I keep thinking of the things that could