Elegy for April by Benjamin Black Page B

and clung there, twitching and throbbing. “Well,” Isabel asked now, “what’s the latest? Has April escaped from the white slave trade and come back to tell the tale?”
     
Phoebe shook her head. “My father and I went round to her flat yesterday,” she said. “With a detective.”
     
Isabel opened her eyes very wide. “A detective! How exciting!”
     
“There’s not a sign of her there, Bella. Everything in the flat is just as she left it— she might have walked out to go to the shop and not come back. She can’t have gone away; she took nothing with her. It’s as if she vanished into thin air.”
     
Isabel shook her head with her eyelids lightly closed. “Darling, no one vanishes into the air, thick or thin.”
     
“Then where is she?”
     
Her friend looked away, and busied herself searching in her purse. “Have you got a cigarette? I seem to be out.”
     
“I’ve given up smoking,” Phoebe said.
     
“Oh, my God, you haven’t, have you? You’re becoming more virtuous every day, a nun, practically, I can’t keep up with you— not, mind you, that I want to.” Phoebe said nothing. There was a sourness sometimes to Isabel’s tone that was not appealing. “I suppose,” she said, “you wouldn’t like to buy some fags for me? I really am broke.” Phoebe reached for her purse. “You’re such a darling, Pheeb. I feel a complete slut compared to you. Gold Flake— a packet of ten will do.”
     
At the bar, while she waited for the barman to give her the cigarettes and fetch her change, Phoebe recalled an evening that
     
the little band had spent here three or four weeks previously. Isabel had been in a play that closed after five per formances, and her friends had gathered in the Shakespeare to console her. There were the usual stares from the other customers— Patrick seeming not to notice, as always— nevertheless it had turned into a jolly occasion. April was there, gay and sardonic. They had drunk a little more than they should have, and when they came outside at closing time the streets were glittering with frost, and they walked under the sparkling stars round to the Gresham in hope of persuading the barman there, an avowed and ever hopeful admirer of Isabel’s, to give them a nightcap. In the lobby they laughed too loudly and spent some time shushing each other, putting fingers to each other’s lips and spluttering. To their disappointment Isabel’s fan was not working that night and no one would give them a drink, and instead Patrick invited them back to his flat up by Christ Church. The others had gone with him, but something, a vague yet insurmountable unwillingness— was it shyness? was it some obscure sort of fear?— made Phoebe lie and say she had a headache, and she took a taxi home. When she got home she was sorry, of course, but by then it was too late; she would have felt a fool turning up at Patrick’s door at dead of night, pretending that her headache had suddenly vanished. But she knew that something happened at Patrick’s that night; no one would talk about it next day, or in the days after that, but it was their very silence that told her something definitely had occurred.
     
She brought the packet of cigarettes back to the table.
     
“Tell me what the detective said,” Isabel urged, tearing at the cellophane with her scarlet nails. “No, wait— first tell me what he was like. Tall, dark, and handsome? Was he the Cary Grant type, all smooth and sophisticated, or big and dangerous like Robert Mitchum?”
     
Phoebe had to laugh. “He’s short, pasty, and plug-ugly, I’mafraid. Hackett is his name, which suits him, somehow. I met him before, when—” She stopped, and a shadow fell across her features.
     
“Oh,” Isabel said. “You mean in Harcourt Street, when all that—”
     
“Yes. Yes, then.” Phoebe found herself nodding, very rapidly, she could not stop, she was like one of those figures on a poor box that nod when a penny is put in, and her breathing had quickened too. She closed her eyes. She must get