“Phoebe!” he said, stopping, with that big smile of his. “How good to see you.”
“I was- I was meeting someone,” she said. “Over at the cathedral. A friend of mine. I just left her.” She was babbling, she could hear herself. “I forgot you lived in this street. I’m on my way back to work.”
Patrick was still smiling. He must know she was lying. What would he think she was doing here? Would he realize she must have been hoping he would be there and she would meet him? “Come in for a minute,” he said. “It’s so cold.”
It was a shabby little house that he lived in, with a narrow front door painted in wavy lines and varnished to look like wood. He had the upstairs flat; she had never been in it before. His landlady occupied the ground floor. “She is out,” he said, “so there is no need to worry.” The hall was laid with cheap lino, and the stairs were steep and had a dank smell. He had done what he could to make the tiny, bleak living room seem homely, with colored posters on the walls and a bright-red blanket draped over the back of an old armchair. She was aware of the bed in the corner but would not allow herself to look at it. His desk was a folding card table set up under the window. On it, beside a green Olivetti portable typewriter and a stack of textbooks, stood a framed photograph of a middle-aged couple in tribal costume, the woman wearing an elaborate headdress. There was a telephone on the floor beside the bed; she noticed it was an old-fashioned one, like April’s, with that winder on the side.
“Have you had your lunch?” Patrick asked. “I was going to make something.” Phoebe was gazing at a small bronze figure on the windowsill; it was of a big-eyed, fearsome-seeming warrior in a spiked helmet brandishing an elaborate spear or some sort of long, ornamental sword, broad at the tip. “From Benin,” Patrick said, following her gaze. “It is an oba- a king, or ruler. Do you know about the Benin bronzes?”
Phoebe shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh, no need. Very few people up here know about Benin- African art can never be sophisticated in Europe an eyes. This piece is a copy, of course.”
He went into an alcove where there was a sink and a wall cupboard and, perched precariously on a shelf, a Baby Belling electric stove, hardly bigger than a hatbox, with a single cooking ring. He filled a kettle and put it on the ring to boil, and began to unpack the string bag on the draining board. “Would you like coffee or tea?” he asked. “I have cheese and bread and dates. Are you hungry?”
“I love dates,” she said, though she had never tasted them before.
He had no pot and made the coffee in a saucepan instead. The coffee was black and bitter and she could feel the grounds like sand between her teeth, yet she thought she had never tasted anything so wonderful and exotic, so redolent of elsewhere. They sat facing each other across a little low table, she in the armchair with the red blanket and he perched on a comical little three-legged stool. The dates were sticky and tasted like chocolate. Over the rim of the mug she watched Patrick’s hands. They were large and almost square, with very thick fingers that seemed to caress with elaborate tenderness the things they touched. Here, like this, in his own place, among his own things, he seemed younger than he did elsewhere, boyish, almost, and a little shy, a little vulnerable. “Would you like some cheese?” he asked. When he spoke the last word his lower lip was drawn down, and she glimpsed the pink inside of his mouth, more crimson than pink, a dark, secret, soft place. From the corner of her eye she saw that he had put her coat on the bed; it lay at an angle with one sleeve outflung. It might have been her, prostrate there.
“I lied,” she said. “I wasn’t meeting a friend. I wasn’t meeting anyone.”
“Oh?” He showed no surprise, only smiled again. When he smiled he had a way of dipping his large head quickly down to one side and up again, which made him seem awkward and happy at the same time.
“The truth is I came up here in the hope that I’d see you. And what a strange coincidence, meeting you in the street. I could hardly believe it when I saw you.”
“Yes, a coincidence. I decided to stay at home today”- he nodded towards the table with its pile of books-”to study.” He ate with small, deft, quick movements, strange to see in one so broad and solid, those big fingers bunched and lifting morsel after morsel to his lips, those lips that seemed dry, and were cracked, and yet looked soft, too, soft as some kind of dark, ripe fruit. “Why did you want to see me?” he asked.
She drank her coffee, holding the mug in both hands, huddled into herself. She continued trying not to see the coat on the bed, but there it was, sprawled there, at once blameless and suggestive. “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose I wanted to talk about April. I keep thinking… oh, I don’t know. I keep thinking of the things that could have happened to her.” She looked at him almost beseechingly. “Do you think she’ll come back?”
He said nothing for a while. Outside, a bell chimed the hour, and a moment later another bell rang, farther off, from St. Patrick’s. Only this city, she thought, would have two cathedrals within a few hundred yards of each other, and both of them Protestant. At last Patrick said, “Did anyone talk to her family?”
“My father and I went to see her brother. He knew nothing, he said, and cared nothing, either. They always hated each other, he and April.”
“And Mrs. Latimer?”
“Yes, my father went to see her, too. He went with a detective.”
Patrick stared at her, his eyes, the orbs themselves, seeming to grow larger, the whites swelling. “A detective?” he said. “Why?”
“My father knows him- I do, too, sort of. His name is Hackett. It’s all right, he’s very- discreet.”
Patrick looked aside, nodding slowly, thinking. “And what did she say, Mrs. Latimer?”
“Nothing either, I think. Her brother-in-law was there, April’s uncle, the Minister. The family is uniting to protect itself, my father says. I suppose they think April has done something that will harm their precious reputation, which is probably all they care about.” Why was she speaking like this, so bitterly, with such resentment, suddenly? What business was it of hers what the Latimers said or did not say, what they did or did not do? None of that would bring April back. And then, the next moment, she was shocked to find herself looking into Patrick’s great, broad, flat-nosed face and asking, “Do you love her?”
At first she thought he was not going to answer, that he would pretend she had not spoken or that he had not heard or understood her. He blinked slowly; there were times when he seemed to exist at a different pace from everything around him.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said simply, his voice very deep and deliberate. “Do you mean, am I in love?” She nodded, with lips compressed. He smiled and opened his hands wide before her, showing her those broad, pink palms. “April is wonderful,” he said, “but I think it would not be easy to be in love with her.”
“People don’t expect being in love to be easy, do they?” she said. “I wouldn’t expect it to be easy- I wouldn’t want it to be.”
Patrick lowered his head and flexed his shoulders slowly, as if he felt something being drawn in around him.
“It’s all right,” Phoebe said, and had to stop herself from reaching out and touching his hand. “It’s none of my business. Tell me about the Benin bronzes.”