The Pornographer (18 page)
“What’ll she say if we don’t go in?” I asked.
“We’ll ring her. We’ll have our tea in the town. And we can ring her from there, from the restaurant. I’ll say we have to go out to your place.”
“You don’t need to change or anything?”
“Not at all. Nobody cares round here. I’ll just throw off these overalls.”
He rung her from the restaurant. “She gave out,” he reported afterwards. “But they’re both there. Leave them that way. That way they’re only an annoyance to themselves.”
We had the usual restaurant meal, lamb chops, liver, bacon, fried tomatoes, and an egg, with a big pot of tea and plenty of brown or white bread. Afterwards we drove out to my place.
In all sorts of circuitous ways he detailed the several advantages I’d get from leaving the city and starting up the farm. “After all, the city is more a young man’s place,” he must have repeated several times. That, and teasing out the evening until he was certain that my aunt and Cyril were in bed, took care of the whole charming and childish evening.
I was happy there for five such days, islanded and cut off from the brass letter-box. Three letters waiting on the half-circular glass table with a London postmark were the first things I saw on entering the hallway. My island holiday was over.
Jonathan had met her at the airport. They had taken a taxi to his Kensington house. The flat was a little beauty, two rooms, a kitchen, bathroom, with all mod cons, including an automatic washing machine and drier, which would come in so useful later on. They had drinks upstairs in the lovely long reception room she had known from before. The windows were open. It was much warmer in London than in Dublin. In another few weeks, Jonathan said, they’d be able to sit out and have drinks on the lawn.
Then they took a taxi to Jonathan’s favourite restaurant. The table was piled with flowers. And yet she felt depressed. She missed me dreadfully. Didn’t I know how greatly I was loved, though I seemed to do my very best to avoid seeing it? But she was grateful to Jonathan. She did not know that such a genuinely selfless and good person existed in the world. If
only Jonathan was me, and I was Jonathan.… but she still believed that everything that happened was basically good, because both of us were good people. She still believed that, no matter how it seemed to other people.
She was already working on a magazine. The magazine’s office was close to Covent Garden. She took a bus into the Strand and walked from there. The people all helped her and were very nice, but it was child’s play compared to all the scrivening she’d done for practically nothing for poor Walter and
Waterways
, She ate such rich meals at the different restaurants with Jonathan in the evening that at lunch time she just walked around and had fruit she bought in Museum Street and a cup of coffee in a little Italian place next door to the fruit shop. The morning sickness had stopped but she was hungry all the time. I could guess what that meant. She was sure it was going to be a boy and exactly like me.
Next, she was cooking dinner for Jonathan and herself. That must remind me of something. They had avocado pear, sirloin, an endive salad, and a special dusty bottle of Burgundy Jonathan had brought up from the cellar for the occasion, several cheeses and an Armagnac to finish. Compared with what she’d been used to, her own basement kitchen was luxurious but Jonathan’s kitchen made her feel more like an airline pilot than a plain cook. There were so many knobs and panels! Jonathan said she was a fine cook and Jonathan’s wife had a fantastic library of cook books. Now she cooked for Jonathan and herself every evening he hadn’t a meeting and they’d only go out to restaurants weekends. Jonathan had also got fantastic reports about her as a writer. Everybody on the magazine was pleased with her. Disaster was turning into a dream.
They were wise, the people on the magazine, I thought; she might become the owner’s wife. There must be many who have cursed themselves for not seeing that some young secretary would one day be the wife. Ο most common apotheosis, the sexual: and the most common ruin: poison of the sweet mouth.
I replied gravely to these letters. There was an early heat
wave in Dublin, a stream of people passed out towards the sea in the evenings, many of them on old bicycles. My life was boring. I wasn’t writing but soon I’d have to earn money. I’d been down the country. My aunt was growing worse, but fighting hard to live. If pure desire could make a person live, she would live, I wrote.
It was hot in London too, the place beginning to crowd with tourists. Jonathan hated the tourists. Even a simple stroll in Kensington Gardens on a Sunday morning turned into a tirade against the tourists. Jonathan was so funny when he got angry, with his shiny head and handlebar moustaches, so small when he shook. At times she couldn’t resist pulling the moustaches. That morning they had a lovely quiet drink in a local but she didn’t have alcohol any more. It didn’t agree with her and anyhow it was bad for the baby. They didn’t want to have a fully fledged one-week-old alcoholic on their hands.
What she couldn’t get over was the number of men who’d asked her out, and one or two had even made passes. It was so sad. She wondered what they’d feel if they knew the truth. Jonathan said she looked amazing, and she did feel good, but in Dublin that sort of attention hadn’t been paid to her for years. Was I not jealous at all?
She couldn’t describe how grateful she was to Jonathan. She wouldn’t have believed before this all happened that such a purely good person existed in the world. He’d suffered for years with his crazy wife and he’d never had what’s called a normal happy life. The only snake in their Eden now was that Jonathan’s wife might discharge herself from the institution and find her in the house. Since she’d come to the house she’d started to read the wife’s leters. He’d asked her to. One of the forms the madness took was crazy, irrational jealousy. They could only hope and pray she’d not discharge herself.
My aunt was taken back to the hospital, this time by ambulance.
“Bad luck to it,” she said when I went in to see her. “I’m here to cause you trouble once again. They talked me into giving this X-ray treatment a last try. Somehow I feel I’d be as well off in Lourdes.”
“You can’t talk that way. What’ll happen to the garden?”
“Cyril said he’d look after it and he meant it but I also know he’ll forget,” she laughed. “What I did was give Peter McCabe, a brother of poor Sticks’, some money. He’ll look after it on the quiet.”
“How is the saw mill?”
“Bad luck to the saw mill. You’d swear it was the centre of the universe. Nothing will happen to the same saw mill, and more’s the pity. He couldn’t even hide how pleased he was when he didn’t have to drive me up.”
“He’s all right. I’m fond of him.”
“Oh yes, he’ll never be stuck for someone to stand up for him, the big haveril, as long as he has you, and if you don’t watch out you’ll wind up just like him, a selfish old bachelor.”
I half expected her to go through motions of protest when I put down the bottle of brandy but instead she seized it like a lifeline, “God bless you. I knew you’d not forget it.”
In London, all prayers were being more than answered. More and more belief in heaven grew. Even though she’d been foolish and had been left vulnerable there was someone who was looking after them up there, for she was no longer alone. Just when they were afraid Jonathan’s wife would discharge herself, find her installed in the basement, and let all hell loose, what happened, but in a crazy fit, didn’t she jump from the hospital window and kill herself. After all these years Jonathan was now free.
Jonathan was now pressing his proposal of marriage more fiercely and wanted to adopt the child as his own so that she and the child would inherit all that he owned. For this he demanded, and rightly demanded, that I should give up all rights, which would make us more strangers than if we’d never
met. If I changed my mind afterwards and attempted to approach either her or the child, I’d be arrested at once.
I could hardly believe my luck. Not only did my deep hope seem likely to be answered but to be given the force of the law to boot. At one stroke all the connection would be wiped out. It would be as if nothing had ever happened. We had held the body brute in our instinct, let the seed beat in the warm darkness, and were still free. I’d be glad to sign whatever was demanded. My own resolution stood and I felt that she’d be very foolish not to marry Jonathan. I was sorry for the poor part I had played in the sad business and wished her happiness.
I didn’t hear anything for days and began to write “The Colonel and Mavis Take a Trip on the Shannon”. I went in and out of the hospital with the bottle of brandy each evening like a man attending daily Mass. I started to see Maloney again.
“This woman, apparently, is to be married in London,” I told him.
“This isn’t right,” he said. “You shouldn’t get off like this. The averages should have come down instead of going up. And who is the ass who’s about to bear your burden into Jerusalem?”
“He’s the rich man I told you about who came from London to see her here. She’s been living in the basement of his house in Kensington. He also owns newspapers.”
“Nobody owns newspapers any more.”
“Well, he’s on boards, has shares. It may be magazines and newspapers. Already she has a job on a women’s paper off the Strand.”
“What’s his name?”
“Jonathan.”
“What’s his proper name?”
“I don’t know. That’s all I’ve ever known him as.”
“I could find out,” he threatened.
“Why?”
“That sort of person is always useful to know. There may be a take-over. We may need to expand. You should start to cultivate him, old man, now that, if I may be so crude, you have a foot, a heartbeat, in the door.”
“I don’t know his name, you’ll have to take my word for it. She’s known him for years, probably through Amalgamated Waterways, but she’s never volunteered much about him to me other than that his name is Jonathan, and I’ve never wanted to know more.”
“Could it be Jonathan Martin?” he whistled. “He has a few small business things here. He looks like something between a walrus and a very small elephant but he certainly has the do-re-mi. If that’s who’s in question, she’s doing more than well for herself. But why this rush of marrying? Because she’s pregnant?”
“His wife has just jumped out of a window. That leaves him free after years.”
“So that’s it? I couldn’t imagine a guy with that much power being let run round for long. He’d attract loads of broads, all mad about his moral and spiritual welfare of course. Anything that’d help them into an ocelot coat and a Rolls Royce.”
“It’s all due to God. God arranged for the woman to jump out the window at the right moment,” I made the mistake of laughing.
“And God has arranged that you’re going to write ‘Mavis and the Colonel Take a Tip on the Shannon,” he glowered when I started to laugh. “I hate cheap laughs at the Divine.”
“I’ve started it. You’ll have it in a few days.”
“Good. Very good. All this, you realize, has far more interesting possibilities. But I’m a philosopher. I’m content with small morsels. A small morsel is my nugget of gold,” he bared his teeth at me.
When I had no word for a long time I began to think they might be married. The last I’d heard was that she’d gone with Jonathan to his wife’s cremation in Golders Green. She’d hated
it, the dreadful music, the coffin moving on silent gliss till it disappeared behind the flap, a poor man behind the flap, directing the coffin to the ovens. There was a floral wreath in the figure of eight on top of the coffin and they’d to hold it so that the flap didn’t sweep it off.
It was the bone dust you took home after the bones were raked from the oven after it had been put in a drum they called a pulverizer. Our own custom of lowering the coffin with ropes into freshly dug graves was like a bunch of wild primroses compared to this ghoulish wreath of arum lilies. The organ especially turned the whole thing into a farce.
I wondered if they’d married in a church or a registry office, but mostly I marvelled at my luck. Other than never to have met, never to have slept together, for that fatal seed never to have swum, it could hardly have turned out better. But had they married? If they had they probably had gone on a glamorous honeymoon, a cruise perhaps. Circumstances being what they were, I could hardly expect a having-a-wonderful-time card, while each evening I went in with the brandy to the hospital, and wrote the story.
e, and placed him in the shelter of the boat-house, leaving the unfinished bo
The Colonel collected Mavis outside the office and they drove in the stream of traffic out of the city. It didn’t build any speed till it got past Lucan, but even then they found themselves continually shut in behind slow trucks and milk tankers.
“Ireland will soon be as jammed up as everywhere else. That’s what’s wonderful about the rivers and lakes. They’re empty. Isn’t it exciting to be spending a whole weekend away from people?” Mavis said tiredly.
“O people are all right, as long as they’re well shaped,” the Colonel leered. “And if they’re not well shaped, by Jove, I still find them all right as long as they’re willing, as long as they’re not afraid. What’s wonderful is being with you. To hell with the rivers and the lakes. It’s the scene that’s important, love, you and me, not the bloody setting.”
“It’s all right for you to say that. You don’t work all week in a typing pool, with that bastard McKenzie blowing hot and cold.”
“Why don’t you take McKenzie into your rich, irresistible quim and drown him in blessedness.”
“I’ve thought about it,” Mavis yawned. “And it wouldn’t work. There are some people so in love with their artificial limbs that they wouldn’t throw them away if cured.”
“Never mind psychology. Give us a hand. If someone is strangling you it’s no use knowing that he wasn’t loved by his mother.”
The tiredness dropped away from Mavis, the whole week of the pool like old crumpled clothes left in the bathroom. She snuggled close to the Colonel, “They should have no gear-sticks in cars,” unbuttoned his fly, drew out the already swelling tool, teasing it till it stretched rigidly towards the flickering needle on the dashboard.
He pulled his driving glove off, holding it in teeth before dropping it on top of the dashboard and let his hand trail up the long lovely stretching limbs, the warm firm smoothness of young flesh, drew the cloth down, let the finger stroke, slid the hand beneath the cheeks, closing it gently on the hair and soft skin, “I’m holding the whole world in my hand,” he said. Shyly they caught one another’s eyes in the driving mirror and smiled with the faintest vague plea of apology and drew tighter. “Being so feathered with those wonderful plucking fingers, holding the centre of the world in my hand, I start to find the grey arse of that milk tanker I’ve been trying to pass for the last ten minutes growing beautiful. It’s never a change we need. What we need is to hold the familiar eternally in love’s light.”
“Never mind your psychology,” she laughed. “And don’t get carried away and drive up that milk tank. Metal is not to be confused with soft flesh. It’s a harsh grave.”
“Everything is riding high,” he said, and seeing a clear stretch of road, he drew out, pressing remorselessly down
on the accelerator, the powerful engine taking up with a roar.
She leaned her head closer, so that the blonde tresses brushed the foreskin, and then she took the helmet in soft lips and started to caress and draw.
The tanker seemed to stand still, the long line of traffic, and swelling in her hands—cunning young hands—the sperm beat out towards the climbing needle behind the lighted glass, the whole glass milked over by the time the car pulled in ahead of the line of traffic, and the needle fell back to a steady seventy. After the sudden race of speed, the car seemed to stand still, rocked by a light wind and tide, while gently his ungloved hand stroked till rising above the gearstick, fingers gripping the top of the dashboard, her lips going low to touch the sperm on the glass, she came with a cry that seemed to catch at something passing through the air. She tidied up what had been undone, stretching back in delicious tiredness and warmth as the car rolled on at seventy. “I’ve been waiting all day for that,” the Colonel said. “Getting it off on the road like that is like having a trout in the bag after the first cast. It’s like being in the army while there’s no war. You’re doing your duty while just lazing about.”
“I’ve a feeling it’s going to be a wonderful, wonderful weekend. And it’s already started.”
After Longford, a great walled estate with old woods stretched away to the left and children from a tinker encamment threw a stone that grazed the windscreen. In the distance, between rows of poplars, the steel strip of the Shannon began to flash.
“There it is. And there’s the bar on the left. The Shannon Pot.”
“Charles said he’d have us met there if he couldn’t be there himself.”
The bar was empty. A large pike in a lighted glass case, its jaws open to display the rows of teeth, was the only hint
of a connection with water. A man in a well-cut worsted suit broke off his conversation with the barman and came towards them to enquire, “Would you be the people from Dublin?” and shook hands in the old courtly way. “Mr Smith asked me to give you his apologies. He was called away to England on a sudden bit of business. He hopes to get back before you leave, but if he doesn’t he’ll write. And he asked me to see that you lack for nothing.”
“That’s very kind of old Charles,” the Colonel said.
“What’ll you have?”
“Mr Smith left orders that everything had to be on the house. You’ll not be let buy a drink to save your life,” he said truculently, and introduced them to the barman, a young man in shirtsleeves. They all decided on hot whiskeys with cloves and lemon. They’d hardly touched their glasses when another round appeared, and then another.
“We’d better see the boat,” the Colonel had to protest.
“No hurry at all,” Michael waved his arm. “The man that made time made plenty of it.”
“We better see the boat,” the Colonel insisted. “That is, while we’re able to see anything at all.”
“It’s just across the road. There’s nothing to it,” he said with poor grace, but led them out.
It was a large white boat with several berths, a fridge, gas stove, central heating and a hi-fi system. The Shannon, dark and swollen, raced past its sides. Night was starting to fall.
“There’s nothing to these boats,” he said and switched on the engine. It purred like a good car, the Fibreglass not vibrating at all once it was running. “And there’s the gears —neutral, forward, neutral, reverse. There’s the anchor. And that’s the story. They’re as simple as a child’s toy. And still you’d grow horses’ ears with some of the things people manage to do to them. They crash them into bridges, get stuck in mudbanks, hit navigation signs, foul the propeller up with nylons, fall overboard. I’ll tell you something for nothing: anything that can be done your human being will
do it. One thing you have to give to the Germans though is that they leave the boats shining. They spend the whole of the last day scrubbing up. But do you think your Irishman would scrub up? Not to save his life. Your Irishman is a pig.”
Because of his solid, handsome appearance, his saintly silver hair, it’d be difficult to tell that he was as drunk as he was except for the wild speech. When Mavis opened the fridge she gave a little cry. It was full of wine, smoked salmon, tinned caviar, steak, cheese. There were all kinds of spirits and liqueurs in a cabin beside it.
“It’s very like old Charles not to do anything by half,” the Colonel acknowledged.
“Mr Smith wanted everything to be right for yous. Mr Smith is a gentleman,” Michael chorused.
When the Colonel wiped the misted port window clear, the gleam of the water was barely discernible in the last light.
“I don’t suppose we’ll make Carrick tonight,” the Colonel said. “I was looking forward to a few tender loins tonight, including your dear own,” the Colonel pinched. “But I suppose we’d better be sensible and inspect it in daylight instead.”
“We’ll have a drink,” Michael said and proprietorially got whiskey and glasses out.
“No more than a taste,” Mavis laughed as she withdrew a glass. “I just need the faintest aphrodisiac.”
“Like Napoleon,” the Colonel said. “Do you ever feel like an aphrodisiac, Michael?”
“To tell you the truth, I never sooner one drink more than another. Just whatever gives me the injection.”
“You get on well with old Charles?” the Colonel asked as they drank. “He’s a nice man.”
“A gentleman. Mr Smith is a gentleman. No other way to put it. The English are a great people, pure innocent. But your Irishman’s a huar. The huar’d fleece you and boast
about it to your face. Your Irishman is still in an emerging form of life.”
“Did you grow up close to here?”
“A mile or two down the road, a few mangy acres. The galvanized shack is still standing. I still hang out there for the summer, the hay and that, it does for the summer. In the winter I live on one or other of the boats. It’s in the winter we do up the boats.”
“Do you do any farming?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go as far as to call it that. I run a few steers on it.”
“Who looks after them when you’re on the boats?”
“A neighbour. I let him graze a few of his own on it that keeps him happy. That’s been going on since my poor father and mother died, God rest them. Before the boats started I used to work here and there at carpentry. I never wanted to depend on the land. Depending on the land is a terrible hardship. I saw it all,” and he filled his glass again to the brim, trying to press more on the Colonel and Mavis.
“No,” Mavis stretched full length in the cabin. “I’m beginning to feel … If I drink any more I’ll be out of commission,” she laughed.
For a moment Michael seemed alarmed but with a swig of the whiskey his old jauntiness returned.
“Have you ever gone in for the girls, Michael?” the Colonel slapped him on the knee.
“Not in any serious way. I stick to this,” he raised his glass triumphantly. “It’s all right for the rich. But my generation, seeing the hardship our parents had to go through, decided to stay clear. Maybe we were as well off. Anyhow we hadn’t the worry.”
“No wonder the country is in such a poor state, but privately we’re beginning not to be able to contain ourselves. But there’s enough for everybody. You don’t mind, Mavis? We don’t want to sit down to meat—without offering our guest some.”
“Not in the least. I was going to suggest it myself. He’s strong, he’s healthy, he’s handsome. What more can a woman ask?” and she stretched her long lovely limbs, the thighs gleaming bare all the way into the darkness.
“I was beginning to fancy Michael myself. Rough sacking can give a great thrill after silk.”
The Colonel started to unbutton the blouse slowly, letting the rich soft young breasts swing free; and he turned to Michael, “Forgive the liberty. Of course you’ll be the first, old chap.”
Finishing his whiskey, and rising in slow righteous anger, Michael said, “I’m getting out. You’re nothing but a pair of fucking huars. I don’t know which of ye is the worse, the young huar, or you, you old bald fool that should know better.”
“Don’t let him go,” Mavis shouted at the insult. “We’ll teach him.”
Michael swung at the Colonel, who gripped him easily at the elbow, held him as he went down, where he struggled until the Colonel hit him, and he went still.
“In spite of all that drinking he’s as strong as a horse, but you can’t beat the old commando training.”
“He’s not hurt, is he?”
“He’ll come through in a few minutes. I just gave him the one-two. He’ll probably have a headache for a while.”
“Tie him. Tie him and strip him. We’ll give him an eyeful when he comes to.”
They both undressed him, Mavis gripping the limp penis before letting it fall back. “O I’m glad he didn’t join. It’d be worse than Lough Derg to have to fuck with him. He mustn’t have washed since he last went to Bundoran and that must be twenty years before. To hell with him, but we’ll still give him an eyeful.”
They tied him with the sheets.
“Shall I bugger him? I rather like the dirt.”
“Hold it. I’ll take all of it after that. An old boy like that,
drinking all round the country, laughing at women, boasting he’d escaped—escaped from what?—wait till he comes to, we’ll give him something to see.”
Her fingers fluttered toward her true and trusty friend. The Colonel strained above her, bent to kiss her lips, touch the small thumbs of the breasts, and then went beneath the shaved armpits. They waited till they heard a stir. His eyes were open. “Let me out,” Michael shouted, and they laughed as they watched his futile struggle on the floor. “See this.” And they forgot him.
He lifted up her buttocks and drew down a pillow beneath, feasting on the soft raised mound, the pink of the inside lips under the hair. When she put her arms round his shoulders the stiff pink nipples were pulled up like thumbs, and he stooped and took them, turn and turn about in his teeth, and drew them up till she moaned. Slowly he opened the lips in the soft mound on the pillows, smeared them in their own juice, and slowly moved the helmet up and down in the shallows of the mound. As he pulled up the nipples in his teeth, moving slowly on the pillow between the thighs now thrown wide, she cried, “Harder, hurt me do anything you want with me, I’m crazy for it.” She moaned as she felt him go deeper within her, swollen and sliding on the oil seeping out from the walls. “O Jesus,” she cried as she felt it searching deeper within her, driving faster and faster. “Fuck me, fuck me, Ο Jesus,” he felt her nails dig into his back as the hot seed spurted deliciously free, beating into her. And when they were quiet he said, “You must let me,” and his bald head went between her thighs on the pillow, his rough tongue parting the lips to lap at the juices and then to tease the clitoris till she started to go crazy again.
“Wait,” she said. “We’ve forgotten our friend on the floor. Is he snoring?”
“The blackguard,” the Colonel shouted. “Did you ever see such an unholy erection?”
“It’s huge.”
Mavis took him in her soft hands while Michael turned away and moaned, “You’re lucky we’re kind,” she said. “We could have left you like this forever,” and she bent her hot body, drawing until he started to thrust towards her. “It’s like milking an old bull.” The spunk started to beat, and he cried as it fell, throb after throb, beating out, years of waste.
“We may have started something we can’t stop. He may rampage the countryside now.”
“What will we do with him?”
“I have something to give him,” the Colonel put a pill in the whiskey and forced him to drink. They waited till he was snoring, untied him, dressed him, carried him out of the, and placed him in the shelter of the boat-house, leaving the unfinished bo by his side.
