Elegy for April by Benjamin Black

observed, had attempted to climb into his lap straight off. They were all, even Jimmy, secretly gratified to have among them a person so handsome, so exotic and so black. They liked the sense his presence in their midst gave to them of being sophisticated and cosmopolitan, though none of the four had ever traveled farther abroad than London. They welcomed too with grim satisfaction the looks they got when they were in his company, by turns outraged, hate-filled, fearful, envious.
     
“I do not know what to think,” Patrick said. He leaned forward and set his glass of orange juice on the table— he did not drink alcohol, in compliance with some unspecified religious or tribal prohibition— then sat back again and folded his arms. He was large, slow-moving, deep-voiced, with a great barrel chest and a round, handsome head. A student doctor at the College of Surgeons, he was the youngest of them yet was possessed of a grave and mysterious air of authority. Phoebe was always fascinated by the sharp dividing line along the sides of his hands where the chocolatey backs gave way to the tender, dry pink of the palms. When she pictured those hands moving over April Latimer’s pale, freckled skin something stirred deep inside her, whether in protest or prurience she could not tell. Perhaps it was her own skin she was imagining under that dusky caress. Her mind skittered away from the thought in sudden alarm. “I can’t understand,” Ojukwu said now, “why no one has spoken to her family.”
     
“Because,” Isabel Galloway said witheringly, “ her family doesn’t speak to her.”
     
Ojukwu looked to Phoebe. “Is it true?”
     
She glanced away, towards the fireplace, where a tripod of turf logs was smoldering over a scattering of white ash. Two old codgers were in a huddle there, seated in armchairs, drinking whiskey and talking about horses. She had a sense of the winter night outside hung with mist, the streetlights weakly aglow, andthe nearby river sliding silently along between its banks, shining, secret, and black. “She doesn’t get on with her mother,” she said, “I know that. And she laughs about her uncle the Minister, says he’s a pompous ass.”
     
Ojukwu was watching her closely; it was a way he had, to gaze steadily at people out of those big protuberant eyes of his, which seemed to have so much more white to them than was necessary. “And her brother?” he asked softly.
     
“She doesn’t ever mention him,” Phoebe said.
     
Isabel gave her actor’s laugh, going ha ha ha! in three distinct, descending tones. “That prig!” she said. She was the oldest one of the little band— none of them knew her age and did not dare to guess— yet she was lithe and slim, unnaturally pale, with a sharply angled face; her hair was of a rich, dark, almost bronze color, and Phoebe suspected that she dyed it. She twirled the gin glass in her fingers and recrossed her famously long and lovely legs. “The Holy Father, they call him.”
     
“Why?” Ojukwu asked.
     
Isabel inclined languidly towards him, smiling with imitation sweetness, and patted the back of his hand. “Because he’s a mad Catholic and famously celibate. The only poking Doctor Oscar ever does is—”
     
“Bella!” Phoebe said, giving her a look.
     
“They’re all prigs, the lot of them!” Jimmy Minor broke in, with a violence that startled them all. His forehead had gone white, as it always did when he was wrought. “The Latimers have a stranglehold on medicine in this city, and look at the state of the public health. The mother with her good works, and the brother whose only concern is to keep French letters out of the country and the maternity hospitals full. And as for Uncle Bill, the Minister of so-called Health, sucking up to the priests and that whited sepulchre in his palace out in Drumcondra—! Crowd of hypocrites!”
     
An uneasy silence followed this outburst. The pair of horse fanciers by the fireplace had stopped talking and were looking over with a mixture of