He put down his coffee mug and rose and walked to the window. How lightly he moved, in a swaying prance, big and yet strangely delicate, like, she realized, yes, like her father. He took up the bronze figure from the sill and weighed it in his hands. Outside, she saw, it had begun to rain, in an absentminded sort of way.
“Benin was a great city,” he said, “at the heart of a great empire. The Bini people were ruled from earliest times by the Ogisos, the sky-kings. Ekaladerhan, son of the last Ogiso, was banished and lived among the Yoruba people, where he changed his name and became the great Oduduwa, ruler of the city of Ife. When the elders of the Bini people sent to plead with Oduduwa to return and be their oba, he sent his son instead, and the dynasty continued. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to come, then the Dutch, and then, of course, the British. At the end of the last century a handful of British representatives were killed in the city, and the famous Punitive Expedition was launched, the palace of the last oba was sacked, and its treasures were destroyed or stolen. Most of the bronzes from the palace are now in”- he gave a brief, d ismissive laugh- “the British Museum.” He stopped, still hefting the warrior thoughtfully, his eyes hooded. She could tell it was a tale he had often told, and had become a kind of performance, a kind of chant. She imagined April sitting here where she was sitting, watching him at the window with the bronze figure in his hand. What did she know about April or about this man from Africa? What did she know about her friend Isabel Galloway, for that matter, or Jimmy Minor- what did she know? Everyone, she thought, is a stranger.
“Is that where you’re from,” she asked, “from Benin?”
“No,” he said, “no, I am an Igbo. I was born in a small village, on the Niger, but I grew up in Port Harcourt. Not a very pretty place.”
She did not care where he was born, what city or cities he had lived in. She felt all at once bereft by his talk of these so far-off places, where she would never be, which she would never know. The rain whispered against the window, as if it, too, had a story to tell her.
“Do you miss it, your home?” she asked, trying not to let him hear the woe in her voice.
“I suppose I do. We all miss our home, don’t we, when we leave it.”
“Oh, but you haven’t left, have you?” she said quickly. “I mean, you’ll go back. Surely they need doctors in Nigeria?”
He gave her a sharp, sly glance, and his smile turned chilly. “Of course- we need everything. Except missionaries, maybe. Of them, we have enough.”
She did not know what to say to this; she supposed she had offended him, it seemed so easy to do. He put the figure back on the sill carefully, in the spot where it had been- was it a holy thing for him, reaching down to the deep roots of his past?-and came back and sat down opposite her again on the wooden stool.
“You know that’s a milking stool,” she said. “I can’t think where you got it from.”
“It was here when I came. Perhaps Mrs. Gilligan was a milkmaid when she was young.” He laughed. “Mrs. Gilligan is my landlady. If you knew her, you would see the joke. Hair curlers, headscarf, cigarette. The cows would not like her, I think.” He picked up a crumb of cheese in that way that he did, bunching his thick fingers, and put it thoughtfully into his pink mouth. “Sometimes,” he said, and his tone was suddenly changed, “sometimes it’s hard, here, for me. I get tired- tired of the way I am looked at, tired of the scowls, the muttered remarks.”
“You mean, because you’re… because of your color?”
He plucked up another morsel from his plate. “It does not relent, that is what is the worst of it. I forget sometimes, about my”- he smiled, making a little bow of acknowledgment- “my color, but not for long. There is always someone to remind me of it.”
“Oh!” she said, appalled. “I didn’t mean… I mean I-”
“Not you,” he said. “Not my friends. I’m lucky to have such friends- you cannot know how lucky.”
There was a long silence. They listened to the sibilant sound of the rain on the windowpanes.
“I’m sorry I asked you that about April,” Phoebe said. “About your being- about her-”
“About my being ‘in love’ with her?” He did that little bob of his head again, smiling. “I could not afford to love someone like April. There is April herself, what she is like, and then there is, too, my ‘color.’ “
“I’m sorry,” she said again, in a small voice, looking down.
“Yes,” he said, almost as softly, “so am I.”
When, five minutes later, she came out into the street- Patrick stood in the doorway looking after her as she walked away- she felt more confused than ever. While she was sitting with him and he was talking to her, she had thought she understood, in some way beyond the actual words he had spoken, what he was saying, but now she realized that she had understood nothing. It was strange- what was there to understand? What had she expected him to say, what had she wanted him to say? She had wanted him to tell her, to reassure her, that he and April had not gone to bed together that night after the drinks at the Shakespeare, not that night or any other, but he had not told her that. Perhaps it was her fault, perhaps she had asked the wrong question, or asked the right one but framed it in a mistaken way; yes, perhaps that was it. Yet what other words could she have used?
The fine rain fell and gleamed on the cobbles with what seemed a malignant intent, and she had to pick her way along carefully for fear that she would lose her footing and fall. But she was falling. She felt something opening inside her, dropping open like a trapdoor, creaking on its hinges, and all underneath was darkness and uncertainty and fear. She did not know how she knew, but she did know, now, without any remaining shadow of doubt, that April Latimer was dead.
IT WAS IN THE AFTERNOON WHEN INSPECTOR HACKETT TELEphoned. “Wouldn’t February make you want to emigrate?” he said, and did his gurgling laugh. Quirke, in his flat, had been asleep on the sofa with a book open on his chest. How unfair it was, he thought, with a warm rush of self-pity, that even though he had not taken a drink in weeks he still found himself falling into what might be drunken dozings, from which he would wake with all the symptoms of a hangover. “Did I disturb you?” the policeman asked, with amusement. “Were you in the middle of something, as they say?” He paused, breathing. “ The lads from the forensics gave me their report. That was blood, all right. A couple of weeks old, too. There must have been a big splash that someone mopped up.”
Quirke rubbed his eyes until they smarted. “How big?”
“Hard to say.”
“What about the bed- how is it there were no bloodstains on it?”
“There were, if you looked close enough, which apparently I didn’t. Only on the side, a few little specks. Must have been a rubber sheet or something under her.”
“Oh, Lord.” He was picturing the girl, a faceless figure in a shift, with one shoulder strap fallen down, sitting on the edge of the bed with her head hanging and legs splayed and the blood falling on the floor, drop by frightening drop.
For a time neither spoke. Quirke gazed at the window, at the rain, at the already darkening day.
“What’s significant,” Hackett said, “is the kind of blood it was.”
“Oh, yes? What kind was it?”
“They have some technical name for it, I can’t remember- it’s written down here somewhere.” There was the sound of papers being riffled through. “Can’t find the blasted thing,” the policeman muttered. “Anyway, it’s the kind that would be there after a miscarriage, or…” He paused.
“Or?”
“What would you medical men call it- a termination, is that the word?”