Free Elegy for April by Benjamin Black Page B

knight’s move on the gear stick when shifting into third was tricky, but he soon mastered it. Of course, Malachy cautioned, in a faintly aggrieved tone, he would not find it all such smooth going when he had to deal with traffic. Quirke said nothing. His hour of excited anticipation and anxiety was over; now he was a driver, and the car was just a car.
     
They came to the Castleknock Gate, and Malachy instructed him in how to make a three-point turn. As they drove back the way they had come they passed by another learner driver, whose car was executing a series of jumps and lurches, like a bucking horse, and Quirke could not suppress a smug smile and then felt more childish still.
     
“When are you coming back to work?” Malachy asked.
     
“I don’t know. Why— have there been mutterings?”
     
“Someone asked a question at a board meeting the other day.”
     
“Who?”
     
“Your chap Sinclair.”
     
“Of course.” Sinclair was Quirke’s assistant and had beenrunning the department on his own for the past half year while Quirke was first drinking and then drying out. “He wants my job.”
     
“You’d better come back and make sure he doesn’t get it, then,” Mal said, with a faint, dry laugh.
     
They came to the gates again and Malachy said it would be best if he were to take over and drive them back to Mount Street, but Quirke said no, he would go on, that he needed experience of real road conditions. Had he a license, Malachy inquired, was the car insured? Quirke did not answer. A bus had swerved out of the CIE garage on Conyngham Road and was bearing down on them at an angle from the right. Quirke trod on the accelerator, and the car seemed to gather itself on its haunches for a second and then leapt forward, snarling.
     
The mist was dispersing over the river, and there was even a watery gleam of sunlight on the side of the bridge at Usher’s Island. Quirke was considering the dilemma of what he was to do with the car now that he had bought it and mastered the knack of driving. He was hardly going to use it in the city, he who loved to walk, and for whom one of life’s secret pleasures was luxuriating in the back of taxis on dark and rain-smeared winter days. Perhaps he would go for spins, as people always seemed to be doing. Come on, old girl , he would hear a driver say to his missus, let’s take a spin out to Killiney, or up to the Hellfire Club or the Sally Gap. He could do that; he rather thought not, though. What about abroad, then, put the old motor on a ferry and pop over to France? He pictured himself swishing along the Côte d’Azur, with a girl by his side, her scarf rippling in the warm breeze from the open window, he blazered and cravatted and she sparkling and pert, smiling at his profile, as in one of those railway posters.
     
“What are you laughing at?” Malachy asked, suspiciously.
     
At College Green a white-gauntleted Guard on point dutywas waving them on with large, stylized beckonings. The car sped into the turn at Trinity College, the tires shrieking for some reason. Quirke noticed Malachy’s hands clasped in his lap, the knuckles white.
     
Quirke said, “Did you ask at the hospital about April Latimer?”
     
“What?” Malachy sat as if mesmerized, his eyes wide and fixed on the road. “Oh, yes. She’s still out sick.”
     
“Did you see the note?”
     
“Note?”
     
“The sick-note that she sent in.”
     
“Yes, it said she has the flu.”
     
“That’s all?”
     
“Yes.”
     
“Did it indicate how long she’d be out for?”
     
“No, it just said she had the flu and wouldn’t be in. That was a red light, by the way.”
     
Quirke was busy negotiating that tricky change into third gear. “Typed or handwritten?”
     
“I can’t remember. Typed, I think. Yes, typed.”
     
“But signed by hand?”
     
Malachy pondered, frowning. “No,” he said, “now that you mention it, it wasn’t. Just the name, typed out.”
     
At the corner of Clare Street a boy with a schoolbag on his back stepped off the