Elegy for April Read Online Free PDF

spread downwards and was pressing now on the backs of her eyes. “The milk was off,” Jimmy said, setting a cup and its saucer before heron the desk. “There’s plenty of sugar, though. I put in three spoonfuls.”
     
She sipped the scalding, bittersweet tea and tried to smile. “I feel a fool,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever fainted before.” She looked at Jimmy over the steaming rim of the cup. He was standing before her with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, his head on one side, watching her. He was still wearing that smelly raincoat. “What shall we do?” she said.
     
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
     
“Go to the Guards?”
     
“And say what?”
     
“Well, that— that April hasn’t been heard of, that we went into her flat and it was empty, that there was a bloodstain in the sink.” She stopped. She could hear herself how weak it sounded, weak and fanciful.
     
Jimmy turned away and paced the floor, weaving a path among April’s scattered underthings. “She could be anywhere,” he said, almost impatiently. “She could be on a holiday— you know how impulsive she is.”
     
“But what if she’s not on a holiday?”
     
“Look, she could have got sick and gone home to her mother.” Phoebe snorted. “Well, she could,” he insisted. “When a girl is sick her first instinct is to fly back to the nest.” Where, she wondered, was the nest that Jimmy would fly home to, if he was sick, or in trouble? She imagined it, a cramped, whitewashed cottage down an unpaved road, with a mountain behind, and a dog at the gate growling, and a figure in an apron wavering uncertainly in the dimness of the doorway. “Why don’t you call her?” he said.
     
“Who?”
     
“Her mother. Mrs. Latimer, old ironsides.”
     
It was, of course, the obvious thing to do, the thing she should have done first, but the thought of speaking to that womandaunted her. “I wouldn’t know what to say,” she said. “Anyway, you’re right, April could be anywhere, doing anything. Just because she hasn’t called us doesn’t mean she’s— doesn’t mean she’s missing.” She shook her head and winced as the pain pulsed anew behind her eyes. “I think we should meet, the four of us, you, me, Patrick, Isabel.”
     
“A conference, you mean?” he said. “An emergency council?” He was laughing at her.
     
“Yes, if you like,” she said stoutly, undeterred. “I’ll call them and suggest we meet up to night. The Dolphin? Seven thirty, as usual?”
     
“All right,” he said. “Maybe they’ll know something; maybe one of them will even have heard from her.”
     
She rose and went out to the kitchen, carrying the teacup. “Who knows,” she said over her shoulder, “they might have gone off somewhere together, the three of them.”
     
“Without telling us?”
     
Why not? she thought. Anything is possible— everything is. After all, April had not told her about the key under the stone. What else might she have kept secret from her?
     
     
     
     
     
    4
     
QUIRKE’S FLAT HAD THE SHEEPISH AND RESENTFUL AIR OF AN unruly classroom suddenly silenced by the unexpected return of the teacher. He put down his suitcase and walked through the rooms, peering into corners, examining things, not knowing what he expected to find, and found everything as it had been on the morning of Christmas Eve when the taxi had come to take him, sweating and shaking, to St. John’s. This was obscurely disappointing; had he been hoping for some outrageous violation, the windows smashed, his belongings plundered, his bed overturned and the sheets shat on? It did not seem right that all here should have remained intact and unaffected while he was away suffering such trials. He returned to the living room. His overcoat was still buttoned. There had been no fire lit in the flat for nearly two months, and the air felt colder in here than it had outside. He plugged in the one-bar electric fire, hearing himself grunt as he leaned down to the socket; immediately there was a scorched smell as