Elegy for April (32 page)

 

Phoebe’s palms were damp. She tried not to look at the little man with the gun, tried not to see him, feeling like an infant hiding its eyes and thinking itself invisible.

 

“I’ve no doubt,” Latimer said, “that you’re both feverishly scheming in your minds to think of some way of getting out of here, maybe at traffic lights like this, or maybe if you see a Guard on the road and pull over and shout, office
r, officer, he’s got a gun!
I hope, I really do hope, that you won’t attempt anything like that.— Ah, there’s the green light. On, James, and don’t spare the horses!”

 

Quirke caught Phoebe’s eye in the driving mirror. They both looked away quickly, as if in embarrassment.

 

They passed through Clontarf, and then they were on the coast road. The tide was out, and wading birds were picking their way about the mudflats under a low, mauve sky that threatened snow; a cormorant was perched on a rock, its wings spread wide to dry. On Bull Island the sand grass was a vivid green. Everything is perfectly normal, Phoebe thought, the world out there just going about its ordinary business, while I am here.

 

“You couldn’t leave it alone, Quirke, could you?” Latimer said. “You had to interfere; you had to bring in that detective and all the rest of it. And now here you are, you and your inconvenient daughter, trapped in this very expensive car by a madman with a gun. The things that happen, eh?”

 

“What did happen, Latimer?” Quirke said. “Tell us. It was you that she got Ojukwu to call, wasn’t it, that night, when she was bleeding and knew she was dying. What did you do? Did you go round there? Did you try to help her?”

 

Latimer, the gun still resting negligently in his lap, had turned sideways in the seat now in order to look out past Quirke at the seascape going by. He seemed not to have been listening. “How did you know?” he asked. “How did you know it was me?”

 

“You were seen at the flat,” Quirke said. “The old lady there, the one who lives upstairs.”

 

“Ah .”

 

“She remembered your mustache.”

 

“Not so unusual for a brother to call on his sister now and then, surely?”

 

“Perhaps she didn’t know you were her brother.”

 

Latimer nodded. He seemed calm, reflective. “Yes,” he said, taking up Quirke’s earlier question, “Mr. Ojukwu telephoned to tell me that my sister had performed an abortion on herself and was hemorrhaging badly. What she was thinking of I don’t know.
She has a doctor, after all, she should have had more sense. And why didn’t she call me in the first place? It’s not as if we had any secrets from each other. Although I suppose she would have felt a certain reluctance, sitting there in that house of shame in a swamp of her own blood with her black lover boy in attendance.”

 

“What did you do?” Quirke asked again.

 

Latimer, with one hand on the pistol, slipped the other inside the breast-flap of his coat and put on a Napoleonic frown, pretending to work hard at remembering. “First of all, I told Sambo to make himself scarce, if he knew what was good for him. He didn’t need telling twice, believe me. Gone like a shadow into the night, he was. I should have brought Big Bertha here”— he hefted the gun—”and shot the fellow, as my father would have done, but I missed that opportunity. Anyway, I was distracted, trying to patch up my unfortunate sister. She was very poorly, as you can imagine. She’d made a surprisingly awful hash of things, given her training and experience. But there you are, people will dabble in specialisms they know nothing about.”

 

“When did she die?” Quirke asked, keeping his eyes on the road ahead.

 

There was a pause. Latimer, still looking out at the sea, frowned, and twisted up his mouth at one side, still making a pretense of racking his memory. “We made a great effort, both of us. A wonderful girl, April. Wonderfully strong. In the end, though, not strong enough. I think perhaps she wanted not to be saved. I can understand that.” He shifted on the seat, grimacing, as if something had suddenly begun to pain him mildly. “I told you, didn’t I, Quirke, that you knew nothing about families— I said it to you, I said, you’ve no experience of such things. The closeness of people in a family. April and I were close, you know. Oh, very close. When we were little we used to say that we’d marry each other when we grew up. Yes, we’d marry, we agreed, and get away from Pa.” He sighed, almost dreamily, and
laid his head back on the seat. “Fathers and sons, Quirke,” he said again, “fathers and daughters. He loved us very much, our Pa, first me, and then April. What games he used to play with us, under the sheets. He was so handsome, so— dashing, as the English say. He was pleased as Punch when April came along; he had so wanted a girl, and now he had one. He was growing tired of me, you see, I knew that. I tried to warn April, when I thought she was old enough to understand. I said to her,
He’s fed up with me, and besides, you’re a girl, he’ll go for you, now
. But she was too young, too innocent. She was six or seven, I think, when Pa turned his affections on her.” He paused. When he spoke again his voice had changed, had become distant. “I used to hear her in the night, crying, waiting for him to come creeping along and slide into bed with her. She was so small, so young.” Latimer started up. “Really, Quirke, for Heaven’s sake!” he cried. “That light was red! You’ll kill the lot of us if you keep on like this— where did you learn to drive?”

 

Phoebe closed her eyes. She thought of April sitting on the bench in Stephen’s Green that day, smoking, remembering, and then the way she laughed when the gulls came swooping down, flailing and screeching.

 

“I tried to tell our dear Ma what was going on. Of course, she couldn’t take it in. I don’t blame her; it was simply beyond her comprehension.” He nodded to himself. “Yes, beyond her. So then, since there was no help there, I had to take action myself. What age was I? I must have been— what?—fifteen? Why did I leave it so long? Fright, I suppose, and that awful … that awful
embarrassment
, that
shame
. Children blame themselves in these cases, you know, and feel they must keep silent. But April, my poor April— I couldn’t let it go on. So I plucked up my courage and went to Uncle Bill”— he turned to Phoebe—”that’s William Latimer, the Minister. I went to him and told him what was going on. At first he wouldn’t believe it, of course—w ho would,
after all?— but in the end he had to. Then I went to Pa and told him what I had done, and said that Uncle Bill was going to go to the Guards, though I have to say I’m not sure he would have, thinking what a scandal there would be; Little Willie, as Pa used to call him, was already well on his way up the greasy pole and had no intention of sliding down again. It didn’t matter. The fact that I had told someone— anyone—set me free in an odd way. Can you understand that? So I confronted him, confronted Pa. We were in the garden, by the summer house. I was crying, I couldn’t stop, it was so strange, the tears just kept flowing down my face, though I didn’t feel in any way sad, but angry, more like, and— and
outraged
. Pa said nothing, not a word. He just stood there, looking away. I remember a vein in his temple, beating— no, fluttering, as if there were something under the skin there, a butterfly or a wriggly worm. It was in the summer house that Ma found him, late that evening. The weather was so beautiful, I remember, high summer, and a golden haze, and the midges in it like champagne bubbles going up and down.” He picked up the revolver and looked at it. “I wonder why we didn’t hear the shot,” he said. “You’d think we’d have heard it, a gun this size, going off.”

 

They were on the long curve towards Sutton. Now and then a single snowflake would come flickering haphazardly through the air and melt at once to water on the windscreen. Phoebe had drawn herself into the corner of the seat with her arms crossed tightly, clinging onto herself.

 

“This is terrible, Latimer,” Quirke said, “a terrible thing to hear.”

 

“Yes, it is,” Latimer agreed, in a throwaway tone. “
Terrible
is the word. We were bereft, of course, April and I. Despite everything, we loved our father— does that seem strange? Ma didn’t count, of course, we took no notice of her, she might as well not have been there.” He heaved a whistling sigh. “But it was
wonderful, then, what April and I developed between us. Pa had trained us for it, you see, and we were grateful to him for that. True, the world would have frowned on our— our union, if it had known about it, but somehow that made it all the more precious for us, all the more— sweet.” He broke off. “Have you ever loved, Quirke? I mean, really loved? I know what you feel about your”— he cupped a hand beside his mouth and lowered his voice to a stage whisper, as if to keep Phoebe from hearing— “about your darling daughter here.” He coughed, resuming a normal tone. “What I’m talking about is
love
, a love that is everything, a love that pushes everything else aside, a love that consumes— a love, in short, that
obsesses
. This is nothing like the stuff you read about in novels or nice poems. And poor April, I really think she was not up to it. It was too much for her. She tried to escape, but of course she couldn’t. It wasn’t just that I wouldn’t let her go— I paid for the rent in her flat, did you know that? oh, yes, I paid for all sorts of things— but that she couldn’t free herself. Some bonds are just too strong”— he glanced back at Phoebe—”don’t you think so, my dear?”

 

At Sutton Cross he directed Quirke to turn right, and they began the long ascent of the hill. There were cows in frosty fields and people trudging along at the side of the road in hats and heavy coats, like refugees fleeing a winter war. The flakes of snow were multiplying now, flying horizontally, some of them, while others seemed to be falling upwards.

 

“So the child was yours,” Quirke said.

 

Behind them Phoebe made a small, sharp sound and put a hand to her mouth. Latimer turned to her again.

 

“Are you shocked, Miss Griffin?” he asked. “Well, I suppose it is shocking. But there you are. God allows certain things to happen, seems even to want them to happen, and who are we, mere mortals, to deny a divine wish?”

 

“Did you know she was pregnant?” Quirke asked. He was
leaning forward, peering hard past the clicking windscreen wipers into the snow.

 

“No,” Latimer said, “I didn’t know, but I can hardly say I was surprised, given my training. I could have done something to prevent it, I suppose, but somehow one doesn’t think clearly in the throes of such passion. Do I feel guilty? you’ll ask me. Guilt is not the word. There is no word for it. That was the thing, with April and me, there were no words adequate enough— ah, here were are!” They had gained the summit and pulled into the parking place. The dusty ground was whitened here and there with frost, and before them and on two sides the sea stretched away, pockmarked and pistol-gray. “You can stop here,” Latimer said. “This will do— no, leave the car facing that way, the view is so nice.”

 

Quirke brought the car to a stop and did not switch off the engine. Phoebe suddenly needed very badly to pee. She said nothing, only cowered back farther into the corner of the seat, her hands clasped in her lap and her elbows pressed to her sides. She shut her eyes; she thought she might scream but knew that she must not.

 

Quirke turned to Latimer. “What now?”

 

Latimer seemed not to have heard; he was gazing down the hillside, nodding to himself. “This is where I brought her, that night,” he said. “I stopped the car just here and lifted her out of the backseat, wrapped in a blanket. She felt so light, so light, as if all the blood she lost was half her weight. You’ll laugh at me, I know, Quirke, but the moment had a strong sense of the religious, of the sacramental, though in a pagan sort of way; I suppose I was thinking of Queen Maeve and the thunder on the stones and all that. Silly, I suppose, but then I can hardly have been in my right mind, can I, given all that had happened in the previous few hours— all that had happened, indeed, in all those years when April and I had only each other, and when it was enough.”

 

When he stopped speaking they could hear the wind outside, a faint, vague moaning.

 

Quirke said, “You went back and mopped up the blood, made the bed.”

 

“Yes. That too was a religious ceremony. I felt April’s presence very close—s he was with me— she’s with me still.”

 

“It was you who was watching my window, wasn’t it?” Phoebe said.

 

Latimer glanced at her, frowning. “Your window, my dear? Now, why would I do that? Anyway, enough questions, enough talk.” He lifted the pistol and pointed it at Quirke and then at Phoebe, waggling the barrel playfully. “Get out now, please,” he said, “both of you.”

 

“Latimer,” Quirke began, “you can’t—”

 

“Oh, shut up, Quirke,” Latimer said wearily. “You have nothing to say to me— nothing.”

 

They got out of the car, all three. Latimer held the gun down at his side to conceal it, though the place was deserted, except for, way off down the hill, a man in a duffle coat and cap, plodding along with a white dog at his heels. Quirke took Phoebe by an elbow and drew her in behind him, so that she was shielded by his bulk.

 

“Are you going to tell us what you did with the body?” he said. “Tell us that, at least.”

 

Latimer waggled the gun again limp-wristedly. “Stand over there, by those bushes,” he said. “Go on, go on.”

 

Quirke did not move. He said: “You didn’t bring her out here at all, did you? This is not where you left her. I know you’re lying.”

 

Latimer, still pointing the gun in their general direction, had opened the door on the driver’s side and was climbing in behind the wheel. He paused, and smiled, making a rabbit face and twitching that ridiculous mustache. “Obviously I can’t fool you, Quirke,” he said, shaking his head in rueful, mock
admiration. “No, you’re right, I didn’t bring her here. In fact, I’m not going to tell you where she is. Let her be gone into the air, like dust, like— incense.”

 

“
No!
” Phoebe cried, stepping out from behind Quirke’s sheltering back and freeing her elbow from his grip. “You can’t do that,” she said. “It’s the last insult to her. Let her have a grave, or a place, at least, someplace where we can come and— and remember her.”