Elegy for April by Benjamin Black Page A

curiosity and disapproval.
     
“I still think,” Patrick Ojukwu said, “that someone should speak to Mrs. Latimer or to April’s brother. If there is disagreement between them and April, and she does not keep in touch, they may not know she has not been heard from.”
     
The other three exchanged uneasy glances. The Prince was right, the family should be alerted. Then Phoebe had an idea. “I’ll ask my father,” she said. “He probably knows the Minister, or Oscar Latimer, or both. He could speak to them.”
     
Isabel and Jimmy still looked doubtful and exchanged a glance. “I think one of the four of us should do that,” Jimmy said, avoiding Phoebe’s eye. “April is our friend.”
     
Phoebe looked at him narrowly. They all knew where Quirke had been for the past six weeks. They knew too of her and Quirke’s history together, or not together, rather. Why should they trust him to approach the Latimers? “Then I’ll phone her brother,” she said stoutly, looking round as if inviting them to challenge her. “I’ll call him tomorrow and go to see him.”
     
She stopped. She did not feel half as brave or decisive as she was pretending to be. The thought of confronting the famously prickly Oscar Latimer made her quail. And from the way Jimmy and Isabel shrugged and looked away it seemed they were no more enthusiastic for her to talk to him than they had been when she offered her father as a spokesman. Of the three, Patrick Ojukwu had the most enigmatic expression, smiling at her in a strange way, broadening his already flat, broad nose and drawing back his lips to show her those enormous white teeth of his all the way to the edges of gums that were as pink and shiny as sugarstick. He might almost have been mocking her. Yet behind that broad smile he, too, she sensed, was uneasy.
     
Despite her misgivings, that night when she got home shecalled Oscar Latimer, from the telephone in the hallway. His office number was the only one she could find in the directory, and she was sure he would not be there, at eleven o’clock at night. She knew very well that she was calling him now in the certainty that she would not get him, and she was startled when the receiver was picked up after the first ring and a voice said softly, “Yes?” Her impulse was to hang up immediately, but instead she went on standing there with the phone pressed to her ear, hearing her own breath rustling in the mouthpiece, a sound like that of the sea at a great distance, the waves rising and falling. She thought it must be the wrong number she had dialed but then the voice again said, “Yes?” as softly as before, and added, “Oscar Latimer here. Who is this, please?” She could not think what to say. The hall around her suddenly seemed unnaturally quiet, and she was afraid that as soon as she began to speak the fat young man would come storming out of his flat to rail at her for making noise and disturbing him. She said her name and had to repeat it, more loudly, though still speaking barely above a whisper. There was another silence on the line— perhaps he did not recognize her name, for why should he?— then he said, “Ah. Yes. Miss Griffin. What can I do for you?” She asked if she could see him in the morning. After the briefest pause he said she might come at half past eight, that he could give her five minutes, before his first patient was due. He hung up without saying goodbye, and without asking what it was she wanted to see him about. She supposed he thought she must be in trouble; probably girls in trouble phoned him all the time, at all hours of day and night, since he was the best-known doctor, in his line, in town.
     
She was halfway up the stairs when she stopped and came back down again, and fished more pennies out of her purse, and put them in the slot and dialed Quirke’s number. She could not think if there had been an occasion before in her life when, as now, she craved so much the sound of her father’s voice.
     
     

     
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