The Pornographer (15 page)

“I know what that means,” she laughed.

“I may have to go to London,” I said.

“What would you want to go to that old place for?”

“The crowd I work for want me to go.”

“You don’t have to go?”

“It’d be hard not to. They want me to go for a year or so.”

“You don’t have to go anywhere, if you don’t want to. Isn’t it almost time you came home? Your own place is lying there. And whose for the old mill—bad luck to it—except yourself?”

“I couldn’t afford to go home, unless you give me some of those houses you have,” I changed to tease. Over the years she’d acquired seven or eight houses in the town, and as she didn’t believe in cash was always on the lookout for more. They were let out as flats and a few shops and were jealously guarded for her beloved Cyril. She coloured like a young girl.

“Bad luck to you, but haven’t you more than enough—without thinking of my poor shacks.”

“They’d come in very handy,” I laughed. “Will you tell me this now, am I right or wrong, is there anybody who has enough?” I mimicked my uncle, “There’s only the one class
of people that has enough, and there’s no prizes for telling where they are—they’re all in the graveyard.”

“Bad luck to both of you,” she laughed into the last of her brandy. “Ye might look different but the pair of yous are the same thick old blocks.”

We took a taxi to the hospital and I left her there.

When I went in to see her the next evening all the tests had been taken and she was ready to go home.

“Did they tell you anything?” I asked.

“No. It’ll take them a while. They’re sending the results to the doctor.”

When I looked at her racked flesh, the few wisps of hair left on the crown of her head, I saw that it was little more than pure spirit she was living on; and from several random words I gathered that the place in eternity she most hungered for was a half-mile down the abandoned railway among the growing things in the garden.

“You’ll come down soon,” she said. “And you’ll try to get out of going to that old London if you can.”

“I’ll be down soon—whether I have to go or not,” I promised.

On the pretext of my aunt’s visit, I hadn’t seen her for two whole days. The readiness with which she agreed to the break took me by surprise, but we were to meet in Wynn’s Hotel late that night. I waited for an hour before she came. She was very carefully groomed, even glamorous, and in seeming high spirits.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a bit dizzy from the last two days. I saw poor Walter at the magazine. And then I spent yesterday evening with Betty and Janey. I rang Jonathan in London from their place and he insisted on ringing me back tonight. We must have talked for an hour. He’s flying in tomorrow. I’m meeting him at the Hibernian.”

“Would you like something to drink? There’s just about time for you to have one.”

“I’d like a long drink. A lager,” and when I called the waiter he pointedly checked the hotel clock with his watch.

“Who’s Jonathan? Is he the one who wanted you to go to London two years ago?”

“He is English, with handlebars. He’s very charming. Married to this crazy wife who’s been in and out of hospitals for years. He’s a director of a company which publishes several magazines and trade papers, including the British version of the
Waterways
magazine. Several times he’s asked me to marry him. He’s been in love with me for years. It was he who wanted me to give up the job in the bank two years back and go to London.”

She too had gone out in search of allies. There was a sense of gangs forming, their pressure upon all guilt.

“Maybe you’ll marry this Jonathan?”

“Are you crazy? If I couldn’t marry him two years ago how could I marry him now? And he’s too old. He’s in his fifties.”

“How was Walter?”

“Poor Walter was so upset. His wife was pregnant when they married. He asked me if you’d ever said you loved me. You’ll have to thank me. I took your side. Walter was so indignant at first but I swung him round. In the end he agreed that you weren’t behaving badly, all things considered.”

“What about Janey and Betty?”

“They think you’re crazy. ‘That guy will regret not marrying you all the days of his life.’”

“Did you tell them the whole story?”

“Sure. They partly guessed it already. They still think you’re crazy. Did you see your aunt?”

“She’s going home tomorrow.”

“How is she?”

“She’s very poor. I think it can be only a matter of weeks. I think she is dying.”

“One person going out of life,” I winced as she said it, “and another person coming into life. I suppose that’s the story.”

“That’s the story. What’ll we do next?”

“Jonathan warned me not to make a move until I saw him tomorrow in the Hibernian but it seems simple enough. I’ll have to give in my month’s notice to the bank though it galls me to think of them getting away with that gratuity money. But nobody thinks giving up the bank is a big deal. They said I should have got out of it years ago but my aunt won’t think that; she’ll be horrified at giving up all that security and a pension at sixty-five,” she laughed.

“What will you tell her?”

“I’ll tell her I’m going to London to seek my fame and fortune. That it didn’t look as if I’ll be married now. And that I want to try a writing career. That the bank was a dead-end job. She knows that the magazine has been my real interest for years. She’s always giving out about it.”

“Is that what you intend to try in London?”

“Jonathan more or less said he could get me a job in one or other of the papers, that there was always something or other coming up. You know I almost gave up the bank to go two years ago but I got cold feet at the last minute.”

“Will we go?” I asked as the porter cleared away the glasses.

“At least we’ve nothing to fear going back to your place now. We’re not trying to get anything on the cheap and easy. We’re facing up to everything,” she took my arm.

It was strange how rapidly things were taking shape, almost independently of us. We’d give up our lives here, go to London, live there until the child was born. Our lives could hardly be the same again. For years they had stayed the same. Now they were being rushed into some new and frightening shape.

After perfunctory desire, the body that many must have yearned for lay nonexistent by my side. I was going to have months and months and months to get to know it.

“We could have played it safe and had our fun and been just plain selfish like many others,” she said.

“We were stupid.”

“I can’t believe that. We weren’t just calculating people. Mean and calculating is worse than being foolish.”

“Nothing is worse than being stupid.”

“Maybe we were foolish but we are good people and I know everything is going to work out.”

“We were selfish and greedy
and
stupid,” I could hear the quarrel starting.

“I can’t believe that. There are several ways out for us even yet and we’re not taking any easy way out,” I could hear her resentment, but the last thing I wanted was a quarrel, and fought down my growing anger.

Unable to read or work, and unused to having evenings free, I rang Maloney the day she was to have dinner with Jonathan. “Would you like to come into the Elbow or would you prefer a teat-a-teat? Very rarely we get the opportunity these days, old boy.”

“A tête-à-tête, then,” I said.

“I have somebody to see but I’ll cancel. Meet me in the bar of the Wicklow and we’ll treat ourselves to a good dinner somewhere. We deserve a good dinner. A teat-a-teat is as good as a cheek to cheek,” he refused to stay checked.

He had on a beautifully cut dark pinstripe, hand-tailored black shoes, plain tie, a wine kerchief falling nonchalantly from the breast pocket; but his true talent was that no matter what he wore he always managed to look equally ridiculous. He was in one of his very generous moods.

“Everything’s on the company tonight,” he said when I asked him what he wanted to drink. “We’ll put everything on the card and forget about it. The fruits of lust. The individual is dead. And God is dead and everything is a fiddle,” he crowed. “Did you bring any of old Grimshaw’s spunk along to pave the way?”

“I haven’t been able to write anything. I’m fed up with the stuff.”

“We’re all fed up, old boy, except we can’t afford to be fed up. We must never show the flag. We must give ourselves and everybody around us a true enthusiasm for living. We must flog enthusiasm. It’s the coming thing.”

“I may have to go to London,” I said.

“It’s a very good city.”

“I’m not joking. I may have to go there for a year or so.”

“Are you trying to ransom me for more money or what? You can’t write and now you must go to London. You’re an artist, old boy. We’ll miss your physical presence among us. But we’ll be philosophical. One of the few advantages of the artist is that he can set up his business wherever he happens to be or, putting it more simply, he can live anywhere he writes. London should be fine. A stimulus. But why, why have you to go into exile since your whole life and work is an embodiment of the idea of exile?”

“I’ve got this woman pregnant. She won’t have an abortion. She insists on going through with the whole thing. And I’ll have to go to London with her,” I spoke as quickly as I was able so that he couldn’t break in.

“Most unprofessional, I am pained to have to say,” he spoke with exaggerated slowness. “Art is not life because it is not nature. If you spring a leak anywhere the whole boat may go down. You better not go and take up the idea of getting Miss Mavis Carmichael pregnant or you may well find that you’ve got yourself out of a job. Where did this unfortunate accident occur?”

“On the Shannon, I think.”

“Going in for mythological stuff as well? Compound everything. This won’t do. This won’t do at all. And now you’re off to London, modern style, the illegitimate father present at the birth. Very good.”

“There was a time I thought I’d have to marry the woman and stay here.”

“And why didn’t you, old boy? That’s how I got married—but I was in love. My wife was going to ditch me but then found she was pregnant and married me; then on our wedding night she discovered it was a false alarm, that she wasn’t pregnant at all. Afterwards we laboured and laboured in vain until she decided to go to the doctor. Whatever he did, what
ever rearranging he did, I couldn’t hang up my trousers on the foot of the bed after that but she was away. There are lessons no doubt in all these things for those who care to observe them. Well, why didn’t you follow father’s good example, even in the eye of rejection, to the altar?”

“It was luckily decided that it wasn’t a very good idea. Since I was only willing to marry her in order to leave her.”

We moved from the bar to the restaurant. The wine waiter had a crest of embroidered grapes on his jacket. Maloney gave him a severe inspection as he took the wine list, but it had much the same effect as that of a tailor appraising a potential customer for a new suit, and it ended with the waiter choosing the wines.

“There’s no disaster in life that can’t be turned to someone’s advantage,” he was irrepressible. “Martin Luther King, you may remember, had a dream. I just have a plan but we’ll fill the inner man while I outline it.”

We had avocado with prawns, lamb cutlets with spinach, and cheese. The waiter picked a Château Margaux and Maloney ordered a second bottle to go with the cheese before we finished the first. Afterwards he insisted on moving back to the bar for brandies.

“You may remember in the
Echo
days when Maureen Doherty ditched me and I wrote that poem,” he began.

“How could I forget it?”

“I was undismayed. I’ve always been undismayed. Many women have ditched me but I knew sooner or later one of them would leave it too late and get caught jumping out of the house shouting Fire! It’s exactly of course what happened. And then after one of those rows with that fool Kelly down at the Echo I was even a bigger bloody fool and handed in my notice. Kelly accepted it with alacrity and I went off to Paris to be a poet. That cured me. A black man said to me that Paris was the one place where there was no racial discrimination, that everybody got treated equally badly there. I lived in a garret, of course, off the rue Buci. There were three hundred and
sixty-nine steps up to it, the wood worn away in the centre of the steps. That’s what you mean by centuries of feet. The bloody house was built by Henry the Fourth in 1603. The windows were in the roof, glass in blacksmith’s frames. I stuffed the frames with newspaper to keep the draughts out. Very cold days were spent in cafés with a book and a beer and coffee, the waiters clearing the table and trying to rout you out of it every hour or so; but you could look out through the glass at the rain and people passing and the red flop of the canvas and the deer and partridges hung across in the game butchers—and—have visions. My most frequent vision was that of an enormous tray of roast beef and browned potatoes back in Ireland. In hot weather the garret was like a glasshouse. Couldn’t live in it then either. I used to go and sit in the Luxembourg. How well I remember the trained pears in their plastic bags. I have so many heart-shaking memories. Life is a great teacher if you can extricate yourself for a few moments every few years or so from the middle of its great bog.

“It was in the Luxembourg I got my plan. I used to hate the Parisian brats, going for rides on the ponies round the fountain, the overalled little man coming behind with the litter cart on bicycle wheels, cleaning up the pony shit off the sacred gravel. Then they put up a notice. Only old people or people with children were to be allowed into the park. That finally pissed me off with Paris and poetry and I swore never to return except with my plan.

“I had almost given it up entirely but your lechery may have saved the day. This is it. I’ll get a pram made in the shape of a coffin, miniature handles, crucifix, brown varnish, the lid at an angle of forty-five degrees to keep out the rain, a white handgrip for pushing, big wheels and small wheels.

“You’ll go to London, and see the baby off the assembly line like any modern father. The three of us—why, the four of us—will go to Paris, put the baby into the morality play of a pram, and go for our evening stroll in the gardens. Isn’t that a stroke of genius? Of course I’ll pay for the party. Or
the firm will. At one go I’ll be going back to Paris, putting my plan into action, and keeping my word. Isn’t the whole idea a poem in itself, a mobile poem, a life poem, an action poem?” In his excitement he slapped me on the back.