Elegy For April Part 6

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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 brandis.h.i.+ng 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 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 have happened to her." She looked at him almost beseechingly. "Do you think she'll come back?"

He said nothing for a while. Outside, a bell chimed the hour, and a moment later another bell rang, farther off, from St. Patrick's. Only this city, she thought, would have two cathedrals within a few hundred yards of each other, and both of them Protestant. At last Patrick said, "Did anyone talk to her family?"

"My father and I went to see her brother. He knew nothing, he said, and cared nothing, either. They always hated each other, he and April."

"And Mrs. Latimer?"

"Yes, my father went to see her, too. He went with a detective."

Patrick stared at her, his eyes, the orbs themselves, seeming to grow larger, the whites swelling. "A detective?" he said. "Why?"

"My father knows him* I do, too, sort of. His name is Hackett. It's all right, he's very* discreet."

Patrick looked aside, nodding slowly, thinking. "And what did she say, Mrs. Latimer?"

"Nothing either, I think. Her brother-in-law was there, April's uncle, the Minister. The family is uniting to protect itself, my father says. I suppose they think April has done something that will harm their precious reputation, which is probably all they care about." Why was she speaking like this, so bitterly, with such resentment, suddenly? What business was it of hers what the Latimers said or did not say, what they did or did not do? None of that would bring April back. And then, the next moment, she was shocked to find herself looking into Patrick's great, broad, flat-nosed face and asking, "Do you love her?"

At first she thought he was not going to answer, that he would pretend she had not spoken or that he had not heard or understood her. He blinked slowly; there were times when he seemed to exist at a different pace from everything around him.

"I don't know what you mean," he said simply, his voice very deep and deliberate. "Do you mean, am I in in love?" She nodded, with lips compressed. He smiled and opened his hands wide before her, showing her those broad, pink palms. "April is wonderful," he said, "but I think it would not be easy to be in love with her." love?" She nodded, with lips compressed. He smiled and opened his hands wide before her, showing her those broad, pink palms. "April is wonderful," he said, "but I think it would not be easy to be in love with her."

"People don't expect being in love to be easy, do they?" she said. "I wouldn't expect it to be easy* I wouldn't want want it to be." it to be."

Patrick lowered his head and flexed his shoulders slowly, as if he felt something being drawn in around him.

"It's all right," Phoebe said, and had to stop herself from reaching out and touching his hand. "It's none of my business. Tell me about the Benin bronzes."

He put down his coffee mug and rose and walked to the window. How lightly he moved, in a swaying prance, big and yet strangely delicate, like, she realized, yes, like her father. He took up the bronze figure from the sill and weighed it in his hands. Outside, she saw, it had begun to rain, in an absentminded sort of way.

"Benin was a great city," he said, "at the heart of a great empire. The Bini people were ruled from earliest times by the Ogisos, the sky-kings. Ekaladerhan, son of the last Ogiso, was banished and lived among the Yoruba people, where he changed his name and became the great Oduduwa, ruler of the city of Ife. When the elders of the Bini people sent to plead with Oduduwa to return and be their oba, oba, he sent his son instead, and the dynasty continued. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to come, then the Dutch, and then, of course, the British. At the end of the last century a handful of British representatives were killed in the city, and the famous Punitive Expedition was launched, the palace of the last he sent his son instead, and the dynasty continued. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to come, then the Dutch, and then, of course, the British. At the end of the last century a handful of British representatives were killed in the city, and the famous Punitive Expedition was launched, the palace of the last oba oba was sacked, and its treasures were destroyed or stolen. Most of the bronzes from the palace are now in"* he gave a brief, d ismissive laugh* "the British Museum." He stopped , still hefting the warrior thoughtfully, his eyes hooded. She could tell it was a tale he had often told, and had become a kind of performance, a kind of chant. She imagined April sitting here where she was sitting, watching him at the window with the bronze figure in his hand. What did she know about April or about this man from Africa? What did she know about her friend Isabel Galloway, for that matter, or Jimmy Minor* what did she know? Everyone, she thought, is a stranger. was sacked, and its treasures were destroyed or stolen. Most of the bronzes from the palace are now in"* he gave a brief, d ismissive laugh* "the British Museum." He stopped , still hefting the warrior thoughtfully, his eyes hooded. She could tell it was a tale he had often told, and had become a kind of performance, a kind of chant. She imagined April sitting here where she was sitting, watching him at the window with the bronze figure in his hand. What did she know about April or about this man from Africa? What did she know about her friend Isabel Galloway, for that matter, or Jimmy Minor* what did she know? Everyone, she thought, is a stranger.

"Is that where you're from," she asked, "from Benin?"

"No," he said, "no, I am an Igbo. I was born in a small village, on the Niger, but I grew up in Port Harcourt. Not a very pretty place."

She did not care where he was born, what city or cities he had lived in. She felt all at once bereft by his talk of these so far-off places, where she would never be, which she would never know. The rain whispered against the window, as if it, too, had a story to tell her.

"Do you miss it, your home?" she asked, trying not to let him hear the woe in her voice.

"I suppose I do. We all miss our home, don't we, when we leave it."

"Oh, but you haven't left, have you?" she said quickly. "I mean, you'll go back. Surely they need doctors in Nigeria?"

He gave her a sharp, sly glance, and his smile turned chilly. "Of course* we need everything. Except missionaries, maybe. Of them, we have enough."

She did not know what to say to this; she supposed she had offended him, it seemed so easy to do. He put the figure back on the sill carefully, in the spot where it had been* was it a holy thing for him, reaching down to the deep roots of his past?*and came back and sat down opposite her again on the wooden stool.

"You know that's a milking stool," she said. "I can't think where you got it from."

"It was here when I came. Perhaps Mrs. Gilligan was a milkmaid when she was young." He laughed. "Mrs. Gilligan is my landlady. If you knew her, you would see the joke. Hair curlers, headscarf, cigarette. The cows would not like her, I think." He picked up a crumb of cheese in that way that he did, bunching his thick fingers, and put it thoughtfully into his pink mouth. "Sometimes," he said, and his tone was suddenly changed, "sometimes it's hard, here, for me. I get tired* tired of the way I am looked at, tired of the scowls, the muttered remarks."

"You mean, because you're * because of your color?"

He plucked up another morsel from his plate. "It does not relent, that is what is the worst of it. I forget sometimes, about my"* he smiled, making a little bow of acknowledgment* "my color, but not for long. There is always someone to remind me of it."

"Oh!" she said, appalled. "I didn't mean * I mean I*"

"Not you," he said. "Not my friends. I'm lucky to have such friends* you cannot know how lucky."

There was a long silence. They listened to the sibilant sound of the rain on the windowpanes.

"I'm sorry I asked you that about April," Phoebe said. "About your being* about her*"

"About my being in love' with her?" He did that little bob of his head again, smiling. "I could not afford to love someone like April. There is April herself, what she is like, and then there is, too, my color.' "

"I'm sorry," she said again, in a small voice, looking down.

"Yes," he said, almost as softly, "so am I."

When, five minutes later, she came out into the street* Patrick stood in the doorway looking after her as she walked away* she felt more confused than ever. While she was sitting with him and he was talking to her, she had thought she understood, in some way beyond the actual words he had spoken, what he was saying, but now she realized that she had understood nothing. It was strange* what was there to understand? What had she expected him to say, what had she wanted him to say? She had wanted him to tell her, to rea.s.sure her, that he and April had not gone to bed together that night after the drinks at the Shakespeare, not that night or any other, but he had not told her that. Perhaps it was her fault, perhaps she had asked the wrong question, or asked the right one but framed it in a mistaken way; yes, perhaps that was it. Yet what other words could she have used?

The fine rain fell and gleamed on the cobbles with what seemed a malignant intent, and she had to pick her way along carefully for fear that she would lose her footing and fall. But she was falling. She felt something opening inside her, dropping open like a trapdoor, creaking on its hinges, and all underneath was darkness and uncertainty and fear. She did not know how she knew, but she did know, now, without any remaining shadow of doubt, that April Latimer was dead.

IT WAS IN THE AFTERNOON WHEN INSPECTOR HACKETT TELEphoned. "Wouldn't February make you want to emigrate?" he said, and did his gurgling laugh. Quirke, in his flat, had been asleep on the sofa with a book open on his chest. How unfair it was, he thought, with a warm rush of self-pity, that even though he had not taken a drink in weeks he still found himself falling into what might be drunken dozings, from which he would wake with all the symptoms of a hangover. "Did I disturb you?" the policeman asked, with amus.e.m.e.nt. "Were you in the middle of something, as they say?" He paused, breathing. " The lads from the forensics gave me their report. That was blood, all right. A couple of weeks old, too. There must have been a big splash that someone mopped up."

Quirke rubbed his eyes until they smarted. "How big?"

"Hard to say."

"What about the bed* how is it there were no bloodstains on it?"

"There were, if you looked close enough, which apparently I didn't. Only on the side, a few little specks. Must have been a rubber sheet or something under her."

"Oh, Lord." He was picturing the girl, a faceless figure in a s.h.i.+ft, with one shoulder strap fallen down, sitting on the edge of the bed with her head hanging and legs splayed and the blood falling on the floor, drop by frightening drop.

For a time neither spoke. Quirke gazed at the window, at the rain, at the already darkening day.

"What's significant," Hackett said, "is the kind of blood it was."

"Oh, yes? What kind was it?"

"They have some technical name for it, I can't remember* it's written down here somewhere." There was the sound of papers being riffled through. "Can't find the blasted thing," the policeman muttered. "Anyway, it's the kind that would be there after a miscarriage, or *" He paused.

"Or?"

"What would you medical men call it* a termination, is that the word?"

9.

INSPECTOR HACKETT HAD ALWAYS BEEN INQUISITIVE, TOO MUCH so, as he sometimes thought and as it sometimes proved. He supposed it had to be a good trait in a policeman* he often thought it was the thing that had led him into the Force in the first place* but it had its drawbacks, too. "Snoop" had been his nickname when he was at school, and sometimes he would get a punch in the face or a kick in the backside for poking too eagerly into what was none of his business. It was not that he particularly wanted to get hold of secrets for their own sake, or to find out things that would give him an edge over those whose secrets they were. No, the source of his itch to know was that the world, he was sure, was never what it seemed, was always more than it appeared to be. He had learned that early on. To take reality as it presented itself was to miss an entirely other reality hidden behind.

He clearly remembered the moment he was first given a glimpse into the veiled and deceptive nature of things. He could not have been more than eight or nine at the time. He was walking down an empty corridor one day in school and glanced into a cla.s.sroom and saw a Christian Brother alone there, sitting at a desk, crying. Long ago as it was, he could still call up the entire scene in his memory, and it would be as if he were there again. It was morning, and the sun was s.h.i.+ning in through all the big windows along the corridor; he remembered the way the sunlight fell on the floor in parallelograms with skewed, slender crosses inside them. Why there was no one around except for him and the Christian Brother, or why he was there or what he was doing, he did not recall. There must have been a football match or something on, and someone had sent him back to the school on an errand. He saw himself walking along and coming up to the open doorway of the cla.s.sroom and looking in and glimpsing the Brother sitting there all by himself, not at his own desk at the top of the cla.s.s but at one of the boys' desks in the front row, although it was much too small for him. He was crying, bitterly, in silence, with his mouth slackly open. It was shocking, but fascinating, too. The Brother was one of the easier masters, young, with red hair brushed straight back like a c.o.c.k's comb, and he wore black, horn-rimmed gla.s.ses. He was holding something in his hand* a letter, was it?* and the tears were streaming down his face. Maybe someone had died, though he would hardly have got the news of a death by letter. Or was it a tele gram, maybe? Later, at the lunch break, he saw the same Brother in the school yard, supervising the boys, and he seemed as he always did, smiling and joking and making pretend swipes at fellows with the leather strap. How had he recovered his composure so readily, with not a sign of his earlier sorrow? Was he still grieving inside and covering it up, or had the tears been just the result of a pa.s.sing weakness, and were they forgotten now? Either way, it was strange. It was disturbing, too, of course, but it was the strangeness that stayed with him, the out-of-the-ordinariness of the spectacle of a grown man sitting there at the too-small desk, crying his heart out, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary morning.

From that day on he thought of life as a voyage of discovery* scant and often trivial discovery, it was true* and himself as a lone lookout among a s.h.i.+pful of purblind mariners, casting the plumb line and hauling it in and casting it again. All around lay the surface of the ocean, seeming all that there was to see and know, in calm or tempest, while, underneath, lay a wholly other world of things, hidden, with other kinds of creatures, flas.h.i.+ng darkly in the deeps.

The early twilight was coming on when he climbed the steps again to the house in Herbert Place and fetched the key from under the broken flagstone and let himself in. The hall was silent, and dark save for a faint glow from the streetlamp coming through the transom, but he did not switch on the light, out of a vague unwillingness to disturb the lie of things. The house was in the owners.h.i.+p of the estate of Lord Somebody* he had forgotten the name* who lived in En gland, an absentee landlord. He had looked up Thom's Directory and found only two tenants listed, April Latimer and a Helen St. J. Leetch. Quirke's daughter had told him which flat this other person, this Leetch person, lived in, but he could not remember what she had said. He knocked on the door of the ground-floor flat, but from the hollow sound his knuckles made he knew it was unoccupied. He climbed past April's door on the first floor without stopping and continued on, leaning on the banister rail and breathing hard. The landing above was so dark that he had to feel along the walls for the light switch, and when he found it and flicked it no light came on. There was no light either under the door here, and when he leaned down and put an eye to the keyhole he could see nothing within but blackness. Yet one of his policeman's extra senses told him this flat was not empty. He raised a hand to knock but hesitated. Something was near him, some presence; all at once he could feel it. He was not fanciful; it was by no means the first dark place he had stood in with a human presence nearby making not a sound, not even breathing, for fear of being found and pounced on. He cleared his throat, the noise sounding very loud in the silence.

When he knocked on the door it was immediately wrenched open with a bang, and a waft of dead, cold air came out at him. "What do you want?" a hoa.r.s.e voice demanded, rapid and urgent. "Who are you, and what do you want?"

He could see her dimly against a vague glow that must be coming in from the street through a window behind her. She was a stark, stooped form, leaning on something, a stick, it must be. She gave off a stale smell, of old wool, tea leaves, cigarette smoke. She must have heard him coming up the stairs and waited for him, pressing herself against the door inside, listening.

"My name is Hackett," he said, in a voice deliberately loud. "Inspector Hackett. Are you Mrs. Leetch?"

"Helen St. John Leetch is my name, yes yes* why?"

He sighed; this was going to be a tricky one. "Do you think I could come in, Mrs.*"

"Miss."

"*just for a minute?"

He heard her fingers scrabbling along the wall, and then a weak bulb above her head came on. Halo of tangled gray hair, face all fissures, a sharp, black, gleaming eye. "Who are you?" Her voice now was surprisingly firm, commanding, he might have said. She had what he thought of as a refined accent. Protestant; relic of old decency. Every other house in these parts would have a Miss not Mrs. St. John Leetch, waiting behind the door for someone, anyone, to knock.

"I'm a detective, ma'am."

"Come in, then, come in, come in, you're letting in the cold." She shuffled a step backwards in a quarter circle, making angry jabs at the floor with her stick. She wore a calf-length skirt that seemed made of sacking, and at least three woolen jumpers that he could count, one over the other. Hen's claw, agued, on the handle of the stick. She spoke headlong, staccato, her dentures rattling. "If it's about the rent, you're wasting your time."

"No, ma'am, it's not about the rent."

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 ident.i.ty 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 k.n.o.b 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?"