Read Online Elegy for April by Benjamin Black - Free Book Online

hope?” He had stepped back and with an adroit little dive had got in behind his desk and was already settling himself before he had stopped speaking. “So, Miss … Griffin,” he said, and she caught the slight hesitation; she had never considered abandoning the name Griffin and calling herself Quirke instead—why should she have, when Quirke had not given her his name in the first place? “What can I do for you?”
     
She and Quirke had seated themselves on the two small chairs to the right and left in front of the desk. “It’s not about me that we’ve come,” she said.
     
The little man looked sharply from her to her father and back again. “Oh? Yes?”
     
“It’s about April.”
     
Quirke was smoking the last of his cigarette, and Latimer with one finger pushed a glass ashtray forward to the corner of the desk. He was frowning. “About April,” he said slowly. “I see. Or rather I don’t see. I hope you’re not going to tell me she’s in trouble again.”
     
“The thing is,” Phoebe said, ignoring the implications of that word again , “I haven’t heard from her, and none of her other friends have either, since a week from last Wednesday. That’s nearly … what is it? … nearly twelve days.”
     
There was a silence. She wished that Quirke would say something to help her. He was studying a large photograph hangingamong framed degrees on the wall behind the desk, showing Oscar Latimer, in a dark suit and wearing some kind of sash, shaking hands with Archbishop McQuaid. What was it Jimmy Minor had called McQuaid? That whited sepulchre in his palace out in Drumcondra . The Archbishop wore a sickly smile; his nose was almost as sharp and bleached as that of Latimer’s nurse.
     
Oscar Latimer drew back the cuff of his jacket and looked pointedly at his watch. Sighing, he said, “I haven’t seen my sister since— well, I don’t remember when it was. She long ago cut herself off from the rest of us and—”
     
“I know there was— there was tension between her and your mother,” Phoebe said, in an effort to sound conciliatory.
     
Latimer gave her a look of cold distaste. “She as good as disowned her family,” he said.
     
“Yes, but—”
     
“Miss Griffin, I don’t think you understand what I’m telling you. As far as we’re concerned, I mean the family, April is a free agent, beyond our influence, outside of our concern. She’s gone twelve days, you say? For us, she left much longer ago than that.”
     
The room was silent again. Quirke was still gazing distractedly at the photograph.
     
“I didn’t say she was gone,” Phoebe said quietly, “only that I haven’t heard from her.”
     
Latimer let fall another sharp little sigh and again consulted his watch.
     
Quirke at last broke his silence. “We wondered,” he said, “if April might perhaps have been in touch with her mother. Girls tend to cleave to their mothers, in times of difficulty.”
     
Latimer regarded him with amused disdain. “Difficulty?” he said, as if holding the word up by one corner to examine it. “What do you mean by that?”
     
“As Phoebe says, your sister hasn’t been heard from, that’s all. Naturally her friends are worried.”
     
Latimer fairly hopped where he sat. “Her friends?” he cried— it was almost a bleat. “Don’t talk to me about her friends! I know all about her friends.”
     
Quirke let his gaze wander again over the walls and then refixed it on the little man behind the desk. “My daughter is one of those friends,” he said. “And your sister is not beyond their concern.”
     
Latimer set his small, neat hands flat before him on the desk and took a long breath. “My sister, since she became an adult, and indeed for long before that, has caused nothing but distress to our family, and to her mother in particular. Whether she’s in difficult y , as you put it, or just off somewhere on one of her periodic romps I frankly don’t care. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a patient waiting.” He stood up, making two tripods of his fingers and