Elegy for April (2 page)

 

“Wen,” Phoebe said.

 

“What?”

 

“It’s a wen, not a wart.”

 

Jimmy had finished his cigarette, and now he lit a new one. No one smoked as much as Jimmy did; he had once told Phoebe that he often found himself wishing he could have a smoke while he was already smoking, and that indeed on more than one occasion he had caught himself lighting a cigarette even though the one he had going was there in the ashtray in front of him. He leaned back on the chair and crossed one of his sticklike little legs on the other and blew a bugle-shaped stream of smoke at the ceiling. “So what do you think?” he said.

 

Phoebe was stirring a spoon round and round in the cold dregs in her cup. “I think something has happened to her,” she said quietly.

 

He gave her a quick, sideways glance. “Are you really worried? I mean, really?”

 

She shrugged, not wanting to seem melodramatic, not giving him cause to laugh at her. He was still watching her sidelong, frowning. At a party one night in her flat he had told her he thought her friendship with April Latimer was funny, and added, “Funny peculiar, that’s to say, not funny ha ha.” He had been a little drunk and afterwards they had tacitly agreed to pretend to have forgotten this exchange, but the fact of what he had implied
lingered between them uncomfortably. And laugh it off though she might, it had made Phoebe brood, and the memory of it still troubled her, a little.

 

“You’re probably right, of course,” she said now. “Probably it’s just April being April, skipping off and forgetting to tell anyone.”

 

But no, she did not believe it; she could not. What ever else April might be she was not thoughtless like that, not where her friends were concerned.

 

The waitress came with Jimmy’s order. He bit a half-moon from his sandwich and, chewing, took a deep draw of his cigarette. “What about the Prince of Bongo-Bongoland?” he asked thickly. He swallowed hard, blinking from the effort. “Have you made inquiries of His Majesty?” He was smiling now but there was a glitter to his smile and the sharp tip of an eyetooth showed for a second at the side. He was jealous of Patrick Ojukwu; all the men in their circle were jealous of Patrick, nicknamed the Prince. She often wondered, in a troubled and troubling way, about Patrick and April— had they, or had they not? It had all the makings of a juicy scandal, the wild white girl and the polished black man.

 

“More to the point,” Phoebe said, “what about Mrs. Latimer?”

 

Jimmy made a show of starting back as if in terror, throwing up a hand. “Hold up!” he cried. “The blackamoor is one thing, but Morgan le Fay is another altogether.” April’s mother had a fearsome reputation among April’s friends.

 

“I should telephone her, though. She must know where April is.”

 

Jimmy arched an eyebrow skeptically. “You think so?”

 

He was right to doubt it, she knew; April had long ago stopped confiding in her mother; in fact, the two were barely on speaking terms.

 

“What about her brother, then?” she said.

 

Jimmy laughed at that. “The Grand Gynie of Fitzwilliam Square, plumber to the quality, no pipe too small to probe?”

 

“Don’t be disgusting, Jimmy.” She took a drink of her tea, but it was cold. “Although I know April doesn’t like him.”

 

“Doesn’t like? Try loathes.”

 

“Then what should I do?” she asked.

 

He sipped his ginger beer and grimaced and said plaintively: “Why you can’t meet in a pub like any normal person, I don’t know.” He seemed already to have lost interest in the topic of April’s whereabouts. They spoke desultorily of other things for a while, then he took up his cigarettes and matches and fished his raincoat from under his chair and said he had to go. Phoebe signaled to the waitress to bring the bill— she knew she would have to pay, Jimmy was always broke— and presently they were climbing to the street up the damp, slimed steps. At the top, Jimmy put a hand on her arm. “Don’t worry,” he said. “About April, I mean. She’ll turn up.”

 

A faint, warmish smell of dung came to them from across the street, where by the railings of the Green there was a line of horse-drawn jaunting cars that offered tours of the city. In the fog they had a spectral air, the horses standing unnaturally still with heads lowered dejectedly and the caped and top-hatted drivers perched in attitudes of motionless expectancy on their high seats, as if awaiting imminent word to set off for the Borgo Pass or Dr. Jekyll’s rooms.

 

“You going back to work?” Jimmy asked. He was glancing about with eyes narrowed; clearly in his mind he was already somewhere else.

 

“No,” Phoebe said. “It’s my half-day off.” She took a breath and felt the wet air swarm down coldly into her chest. “I’m going to see someone. My— my father, actually. I suppose you wouldn’t care to come along?”

 

He did not meet her eye and busied himself lighting another cigarette, turning aside and crouching over his cupped hands. “Sorry,” he said, straightening. “Crimes to expose, stories to
concoct, reputations to besmirch— no rest for the busy newshound.” He was a good half head shorter than she was; his plastic coat gave off a chemical odor. “See you around, kid.” He set off in the direction of Grafton Street but stopped and turned and came back again. “By the way,” he said, “what’s the difference between a wen and a wart?”

 

When he had gone she stood for a while irresolute, slowly pulling on her calfskin gloves. She had that heart-sinking feeling she had at this time every Thursday when the weekly visit to her father was in prospect. Today, however, there was an added sense of unease. She could not think why she had asked Jimmy to meet her— what had she imagined he would say or do that would assuage her fears? There had been something odd in his manner, she had felt it the moment she mentioned April’s long silence: an evasiveness, a shiftiness, almost. She was well aware of the simmering antipathy between her two so dissimilar friends. In some way Jimmy seemed jealous of April, as he was of Patrick Ojukwu. Or was it more resentment than jealousy? But if so, what was it in April that he found to resent? The Latimers of Dun Laoghaire were gentry, of course, but Jimmy would think she was, too, and he did not seem to hold it against her. She gazed across the street at the coaches and their intently biding jarveys. She was surer than ever that something bad, something very bad, perhaps the very worst of all, had befallen her friend.

 

Then a new thought struck her, one that made her more uneasy still. What if Jimmy were to see in April’s disappearance the possibility of a story, a “great yarn,” as he would say? What if he had only pretended to be indifferent, and had rushed off now to tell his Editor that April Latimer, a juinior doctor at the Hospital of the Holy Family, the “slightly notorious” daughter of the late and much lamented Conor Latimer and niece of the present Minister of Health, had not been heard from in over a week? Oh, Lord, she thought in dismay, what have I done?

 

 

 

 

 

2

 

QUIRKE HAD NEVER KNOWN LIFE SO LACKING IN SAVOR. IN HIS first days at St. John’s he had been in too much confusion and distress to notice how everything here seemed leached of color and texture; gradually, however, the deadness pervading the place began to fascinate him. Nothing at St. John’s could be grasped or held. It was as if the fog that had been so frequent since the autumn had settled permanently here, outdoors and in, a thing present everywhere and yet without substance, and always at a fixed distance from the eye however quickly one moved. Not that anyone moved quickly in this place, not among the inmates, anyway.
Inmates
was a frowned-upon word, but what else could they be called, these uncertain, hushed figures, of which he was one, padding dully along the corridors and about the grounds like shell-shock victims? He wondered if the atmosphere were somehow deliberately contrived, an emotional counterpart to the bromides that prison authorities were said to smuggle into convicts’ food to calm their passions. When he put the question to Brother Anselm that good man only laughed. “No, no,” he said, “it’s all your own work.” He meant the collective work of all the inmates; he sounded almost proud of their achievement.

 

Brother Anselm was Director of the House of St. John of the Cross, refuge for addicts of all kinds, for shattered souls and petrifying livers. Quirke liked him, liked his unjudgmental diffidence, his wry, melancholy humor. The two men occasionally took walks together in the grounds, pacing the gravel pathways among the box hedges talking of books, of history, of ancient politics— safe subjects on which they exchanged opinions as chilly and contentless as the wintry air through which they moved. Quirke had checked into St. John’s on Christmas Eve, persuaded by his brother-in-law to seek the cure after a six-month drinking binge few details of which Quirke could recall with any clearness. “Do it for Phoebe if no one else,” Malachy Griffin had said.

 

Stopping drinking had been easy; what was difficult was the daily unblurred confrontation with a self he heartily wished to avoid. Dr. Whitty, the house psychiatrist, explained it to him. “With some, such as yourself, it’s not so much the drink that’s addictive but the escape it offers. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Escape from yourself, that is.” Dr. Whitty was a big bluff fellow with baby-blue eyes and fists the size of turnips. He and Quirke had already known each other a little, professionally, in the outside world, but in here the convention was they should behave as cordial strangers. Quirke felt awkward, though; he had assumed that somehow St. John’s would afford anonymity, that it would be the least anyone consigning himself to the care of the place could expect, and he was grateful for Whitty’s studiedly remote cheerfulness and the scrupulous discretion of his pale gaze. He submitted meekly to the daily sessions on the couch— in fact, not a couch but a straight chair half turned towards the window, with the psychiatrist a largely unspeaking and heavily breathing presence behind it— and tried to say the things he thought would be expected of him. He knew what his troubles were, knew more or less the identity of the demons tormenting
him, but at St. John’s everyone was called upon to clear the decks, wipe the slate clean, make a fresh start— cliché was another staple of the institutional life— and he was no exception. “It’s a long road, the road back,” Brother Anselm said. “The less baggage you take with you, the better.” As if, Quirke thought but did not say, I could unpack myself and walk away empty.

 

The inmates were urged to pair off, like shy dancers at a grotesque ball. The theory was that sustained daily contact with a designated fellow sufferer, entailing shared confidences and candid self-exposure, would restore a sense of what was called in here
mutuality
and inevitably speed the pro cess of rehabilitation. Thus Quirke found himself spending a great deal more time than he would have cared to with Harkness—last-name terms was the form at St. John’s— a hard-faced, grizzled man with the indignantly reprehending aspect of an eagle. Harkness had a keen sense of the bleak comedy of what he insisted on calling their captivity, and when he heard what Quirke’s profession was he produced a brief, loud laugh that was like the sound of something thick and resistant being ripped in half. “A pathologist!” he snarled in rancorous delight. “Welcome to the morgue.”

 

Harkness—it seemed not so much a name as a condition— was as reluctant as Quirke in the matter of personal confidences and at first would say little about himself or his past. Quirke, however, had spent his orphaned childhood in institutions run by the religious, and guessed at once that he was—what did they say?— a man of the cloth. “That’s right,” Harkness said, “Christian Brother. You must have heard the swish of the surplice.” Or of the leather strap, more like, Quirke thought. Side by side in dogged silence, heads down and fists clasped at their backs, they tramped the same paths that Quirke and Brother Anselm walked, under the freezing trees, as if performing a penance, which in a way they were. As the weeks went on, Harkness began to release resistant little hard nuggets of information,
as if he were spitting out the seeds of a sour fruit. A thirst for drink, it seemed, had been a defense against other urges. “Let me put it this way,” he said, “if I hadn’t gone into the Order it’s unlikely I’d ever have married.” He chuckled darkly. Quirke was shocked; he had never before heard anyone, least of all a Christian Brother, come right out like this and admit to being queer. Harkness had lost his vocation, too—”if I ever had one”— and was coming to the conclusion that on balance there is no God.

 

After such stark revelations Quirke felt called upon to reciprocate in kind, but found it acutely difficult, not out of embarrassment or shame— though he must be embarrassed, he must be ashamed, considering the many misdeeds he had on his conscience— but because of the sudden weight of tedium that pressed down on him. The trouble with sins and sorrows, he had discovered, is that in time they become boring, even to the sorrowing sinner. Had he the heart to recount it all again, the shambles that was his life— the calamitous losses of nerve, the moral laziness, the failures, the betrayals? He tried. He told how when his wife died in childbirth he gave away his infant daughter to his sister-in-law and kept it secret from the child, Phoebe, now a young woman, for nearly twenty years. He listened to himself as if it were someone else’s tale he was telling.

 

“But she comes to visit you,” Harkness said, in frowning perplexity, interrupting him. “Your daughter— she comes to visit.”

 

“Yes, she does.” Quirke had ceased to find this fact surprising, but now found it so anew.

 

Harkness said nothing more, only nodded once, with an expression of bitter wonderment, and turned his face away. Harkness had no visitors.

 

That Thursday when Phoebe came, Quirke, thinking of the lonely Christian Brother, made an extra effort to be alert to her and appreciative of the solace she thought she was bringing him.
They sat in the visitors’ room, a bleak, glassed-in corner of the vast entrance hall— in Victorian times the building had been the forbiddingly grand headquarters of some branch of the British administration in the city— where there were plastic-topped tables and metal chairs and, at one end, a counter on which stood a mighty tea urn that rumbled and hissed all day long. Quirke thought his daughter was paler than usual, and there were smudged shadows like bruises under her eyes. She seemed distracted, too. She had in general a somber, etiolated quality that grew steadily more marked as she progressed into her twenties; yet she was becoming a beautiful woman, he realized, with some surprise and an inexplicable but sharp twinge of unease. Her pallor was accentuated by the black outfit she wore, black skirt and jumper, slightly shabby black coat. These were her work clothes— she had a job in a hat shop— but he thought they gave her too much the look of a nun.