“She remembered your mustache.”
“Not so unusual for a brother to call on his sister now and then, surely?”
“Perhaps she didn’t know you were her brother.”
Latimer nodded. He seemed calm, reflective. “Yes,” he said, taking up Quirke’s earlier question, “Mr. Ojukwu telephoned to tell me that my sister had performed an abortion on herself and was hemorrhaging badly. What she was thinking of I don’t know. She has a doctor, after all, she should have had more sense. And why didn’t she call me in the first place? It’s not as if we had any secrets from each other. Although I suppose she would have felt a certain reluctance, sitting there in that house of shame in a swamp of her own blood with her black lover boy in attendance.”
“What did you do?” Quirke asked again.
Latimer, with one hand on the pistol, slipped the other inside the breast-flap of his coat and put on a Napoleonic frown, pretending to work hard at remembering. “First of all, I told Sambo to make himself scarce, if he knew what was good for him. He didn’t need telling twice, believe me. Gone like a shadow into the night, he was. I should have brought Big Bertha here”- he hefted the gun-”and shot the fellow, as my father would have done, but I missed that opportunity. Anyway, I was distracted, trying to patch up my unfortunate sister. She was very poorly, as you can imagine. She’d made a surprisingly awful hash of things, given her training and experience. But there you are, people will dabble in specialisms they know nothing about.”
“When did she die?” Quirke asked, keeping his eyes on the road ahead.
There was a pause. Latimer, still looking out at the sea, frowned, and twisted up his mouth at one side, still making a pretense of racking his memory. “We made a great effort, both of us. A wonderful girl, April. Wonderfully strong. In the end, though, not strong enough. I think perhaps she wanted not to be saved. I can understand that.” He shifted on the seat, grimacing, as if something had suddenly begun to pain him mildly. “I told you, didn’t I, Quirke, that you knew nothing about families- I said it to you, I said, you’ve no experience of such things. The closeness of people in a family. April and I were close, you know. Oh, very close. When we were little we used to say that we’d marry each other when we grew up. Yes, we’d marry, we agreed, and get away from Pa.” He sighed, almost dreamily, and laid his head back on the seat. “Fathers and sons, Quirke,” he said again, “fathers and daughters. He loved us very much, our Pa, first me, and then April. What games he used to play with us, under the sheets. He was so handsome, so- dashing, as the English say. He was pleased as Punch when April came along; he had so wanted a girl, and now he had one. He was growing tired of me, you see, I knew that. I tried to warn April, when I thought she was old enough to understand. I said to her, He’s fed up with me, and besides, you’re a girl, he’ll go for you, now. But she was too young, too innocent. She was six or seven, I think, when Pa turned his affections on her.” He paused. When he spoke again his voice had changed, had become distant. “I used to hear her in the night, crying, waiting for him to come creeping along and slide into bed with her. She was so small, so young.” Latimer started up. “Really, Quirke, for Heaven’s sake!” he cried. “That light was red! You’ll kill the lot of us if you keep on like this- where did you learn to drive?”
Phoebe closed her eyes. She thought of April sitting on the bench in Stephen’s Green that day, smoking, remembering, and then the way she laughed when the gulls came swooping down, flailing and screeching.
“I tried to tell our dear Ma what was going on. Of course, she couldn’t take it in. I don’t blame her; it was simply beyond her comprehension.” He nodded to himself. “Yes, beyond her. So then, since there was no help there, I had to take action myself. What age was I? I must have been- what?-fifteen? Why did I leave it so long? Fright, I suppose, and that awful… that awful embarrassment, that shame. Children blame themselves in these cases, you know, and feel they must keep silent. But April, my poor April- I couldn’t let it go on. So I plucked up my courage and went to Uncle Bill”- he turned to Phoebe-”that’s William Latimer, the Minister. I went to him and told him what was going on. At first he wouldn’t believe it, of course-w ho would, after all?- but in the end he had to. Then I went to Pa and told him what I had done, and said that Uncle Bill was going to go to the Guards, though I have to say I’m not sure he would have, thinking what a scandal there would be; Little Willie, as Pa used to call him, was already well on his way up the greasy pole and had no intention of sliding down again. It didn’t matter. The fact that I had told someone- anyone-set me free in an odd way. Can you understand that? So I confronted him, confronted Pa. We were in the garden, by the summer house. I was crying, I couldn’t stop, it was so strange, the tears just kept flowing down my face, though I didn’t feel in any way sad, but angry, more like, and- and outraged. Pa said nothing, not a word. He just stood there, looking away. I remember a vein in his temple, beating- no, fluttering, as if there were something under the skin there, a butterfly or a wriggly worm. It was in the summer house that Ma found him, late that evening. The weather was so beautiful, I remember, high summer, and a golden haze, and the midges in it like champagne bubbles going up and down.” He picked up the revolver and looked at it. “I wonder why we didn’t hear the shot,” he said. “You’d think we’d have heard it, a gun this size, going off.”
They were on the long curve towards Sutton. Now and then a single snowflake would come flickering haphazardly through the air and melt at once to water on the windscreen. Phoebe had drawn herself into the corner of the seat with her arms crossed tightly, clinging onto herself.
“This is terrible, Latimer,” Quirke said, “a terrible thing to hear.”
“Yes, it is,” Latimer agreed, in a throwaway tone. “Terrible is the word. We were bereft, of course, April and I. Despite everything, we loved our father- does that seem strange? Ma didn’t count, of course, we took no notice of her, she might as well not have been there.” He heaved a whistling sigh. “But it was wonderful, then, what April and I developed between us. Pa had trained us for it, you see, and we were grateful to him for that. True, the world would have frowned on our- our union, if it had known about it, but somehow that made it all the more precious for us, all the more- sweet.” He broke off. “Have you ever loved, Quirke? I mean, really loved? I know what you feel about your”- he cupped a hand beside his mouth and lowered his voice to a stage whisper, as if to keep Phoebe from hearing- “about your darling daughter here.” He coughed, resuming a normal tone. “What I’m talking about is love, a love that is everything, a love that pushes everything else aside, a love that consumes- a love, in short, that obsesses. This is nothing like the stuff you read about in novels or nice poems. And poor April, I really think she was not up to it. It was too much for her. She tried to escape, but of course she couldn’t. It wasn’t just that I wouldn’t let her go- I paid for the rent in her flat, did you know that? oh, yes, I paid for all sorts of things- but that she couldn’t free herself. Some bonds are just too strong”- he glanced back at Phoebe-”don’t you think so, my dear?”
At Sutton Cross he directed Quirke to turn right, and they began the long ascent of the hill. There were cows in frosty fields and people trudging along at the side of the road in hats and heavy coats, like refugees fleeing a winter war. The flakes of snow were multiplying now, flying horizontally, some of them, while others seemed to be falling upwards.