Elegy For April

Tentatively he stepped inside. He had a glimpse of a darkened kitchen with lurking furniture shapes and a tall sash window, curtainless. The air was very cold and felt damp. He hovered uncertainly. “In there, in there!” she said, pointing. “Go on!”

She shuffled after him into what he supposed was the living room and turned on the light. The place was a chaos. Things were dumped everywhere, clothes, pairs of shoes, outmoded hats, cardboard boxes overflowing with jumbles of ancient stuff. There was a strong smell of cat, and when he looked closely he saw a sort of slow billowing in a number of places under the dumped rags, where stealthy creatures crept. When he turned he was startled to find the woman standing immediately at his shoulder, scrutinizing him. “You’re not a detective,” she said with broad contempt. “Tell the truth- what are you, some sort of a salesman? Insurance, is it?” She scowled. “You’re not a Jehovah’s Witness, I hope?”

“No,” he said patiently, “no, I’m a policeman.”

“Because they come here, you know, knocking at the door and offering me that magazine- what is it?- The Tower? I took it once, and the fellow had the cheek to ask me to pay sixpence for it. I told him to be off or I’d call the police.”

He took out his wallet and showed her his dog-eared identity card. “Hackett,” he said. “Inspector Hackett. You see?”

She did not look at the card but went on peering at him with deep suspicion. Then she pressed something into his hand. It was a box of matches. “Here,” she said, “I’ve been trying to get that blasted fire going; you can do it for me.”

He crossed to the fireplace and crouched by the gas fire and struck a match and turned the spigot. He looked up at her. “There’s no gas,” he said.

She nodded. “I know, I know. They turned it off.”

He got to his feet. He realized he had not taken off his hat, and did so now. “How long have you lived here, Miss Leetch?”

“I can’t remember. Why do you want to know?”

A scrawny black-and-white tomcat came slinking out from under a pile of yellowed newspapers and wrapped itself sinuously around his ankle, making a deep gurgling sound.

“Did you- do you know Miss Latimer,” he asked, “in the flat below? Dr. Latimer, I mean.”

She was looking past him at the dead gas fire, scowling. “I could die,” she said. “I could die of the cold, and then what would they do?” She started, and stared at him, as if she had forgotten he was there. “What?” Her eyes were black and had a piercing light.

“The young woman,” he said, “in the flat downstairs. April Latimer.”

“What about her?”

“Do you know her? Do you know who I mean?”

She snorted. “Know her?” she said. “Know her? No, I don’t know her. She’s a doctor, you say? What kind of a doctor? I didn’t know there was a surgery in this house.”

Rain had begun to fall again; he could hear it hissing faintly in the trees across the road. “Maybe,” he said gently, “we could sit down for a minute?”

He put his hat on the table and drew out one of the bentwood chairs. The table was round, with bowed legs the ends of which were carved in the shape of a lion’s claws. The top of it had a thick, dull sheen and was sticky to the touch. He offered the chair to the woman, and after a moment of distrustful hesitation she sat down and leaned forward intently with her hands clasped one over the other on the knob of her stick.

“Have you seen her recently?” Hackett asked, taking a second chair for himself. “Miss Latimer, that is- Dr. Latimer?”

“How would I see her? I don’t go out.”

“You’ve never spoken to her?”

She put her head back and looked at him with incredulous disdain. “Of course I’ve spoken to her; how would I not have spoken to her? She lives down there below me. She does my shopping.”

He was not sure that he had heard her correctly. “Your shopping?”

“That’s why I have nothing in the house- I’m practically starving.”

“Ah, I see,” he said. “That’s because she’s been gone for the last while?”

“That, and the cold in here, I’m surprised I haven’t perished already.” Her clouded gaze had turned cloudier still. There was a lengthy silence, then she came back to herself. “What?”

In a corner of the room under a pile of what might be blankets there was a brief, violent scuffle accompanied by hissings and spittings. Hackett sighed again; he might as well give up; he would get nothing here. He took up his hat. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, rising. “I’ll be on my way and leave you in peace.”

She too stood up, with effortful, corkscrewing motions on the pivot of her stick. “I suppose she’s off with that fellow,” she said.

Hackett, who had begun to turn in the direction of the door, stopped. He smiled. “Which fellow would that be, now?” he asked softly.

It took a long time, and even then he did not really know what it was he had got hold of, or even if it was anything. Gradually it became clear, if that was the word, that in the chaotic lumber room that was Miss St. John Leetch’s understanding, the fellow that April might have gone off with was not one but many. The words came out in a tumble. She was by turns indignant, mocking, aggrieved. There were names, a person called Ronnie, it seemed-”Ridiculous, awful!”- and figures coming and going at all hours of the day and night, men, women, too, shadowy and uncertain, a gallery of phantoms flitting on the stairs while she hid on the lightless landing, watching, listening. Yet one figure in particular she kept returning to, indistinct as the rest and yet to her, it seemed, singular.

“Creeping about and hiding from me,” she said, “thinking I would not see him, as if I were blind- pah! I was noted for my clear sight, always, always noted for it, my father used to boast of it, My Helen, he would say, my Helen can see the wind, and my father did not boast of his children lightly, I can tell you. Lurking there, down on the stairs, skulking in the shadows, I’m sure there were times when he took the bulb out of the socket so I could not turn on the light, but even when I didn’t see him I could smell him, yes, with that perfume he always wears, dreadful person, some kind of pansy I’m sure, trying to conceal himself in the space under the stairs, oh, quiet as a mouse, quiet as a mouse, but I knew he was there, the brute, I knew he was there-” Abruptly she stopped. “What?” She stared at Hackett in a puzzled fashion as if he too were an interloper who had suddenly materialized in front of her.

“Tell me, now,” he said, very softly, cajoling, as if to a child, “tell me who it was.”

“Who was who?”

She tilted her head to one side and squinted at him sidelong, her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. He could see the grime of years lodged in the wrinkles of her cheeks. He tried to picture her young, a long-boned beauty, walking under trees in autumn, leading a bridled bay. My Helen, my Helen can see the wind. “Was it a boyfriend, do you think?” he asked. “Or maybe a relative?- a brother, maybe?- or an uncle, calling on her?”

She was still fixed on him with that sly, sideways regard, and now suddenly she laughed, in delight and derision. “A relative?” she said. “How could he be a relative? He was black!”

10

QUIRKE PARKED THE ALVIS AT THE CORNER OF THE GREEN AND was halfway across the road when he remembered that he had not locked it, and had to go back. As he approached the car he had the distinct impression, as he frequently had, that it was regarding him with a baleful and accusatory aspect. There was something about the set of the headlamps, their cold, alert, unblinking stare, that unnerved him and made him feel defensive. No matter how respectfully he treated the machine, no matter how diligently he strove to make himself familiar with its little ways- the slight yaw that it did on sharp right turns, the extra pressure on the accelerator it called for when going into third- the thing resisted him, maintaining what seemed to him a sullen obstinacy. Only on occasion, on certain open stretches of the road, did it forget itself and relinquish its hauteur and leap forward with