The Pornographer (14 page)

He groaned but she ignored it. “Why weren’t contraceptives used?”

“She said they weren’t natural, that they turned the whole thing into a farce. Every time she said it was safe according to the calendar. It didn’t turn out that way.”

“She was using the Boles Method, no doubt. There’s a fool of a gynaecologist in the hospital, a staunch Catholic, and a great Boles man. In this last experiment more women got pregnant using the Boles Method than no method at all. The woman obviously wanted to get pregnant. I see it every day in the hospital. Time running out? Get pregnant, and it’ll be
taken care of. Bored with life? Get pregnant, and it’ll stir things up. Not getting enough attention? Get pregnant, and it’ll bring an overdose of attention. Hit me now with the child in my arms,” he laughed jeeringly.

“The girl or woman probably didn’t get pregnant deliberately. She’ll suffer for it now anyhow,” his wife said.

“If you can tell where instinct ends and consciousness begins you’ll make all our fortunes. Here. Hold on to your seat belts,” he said as he set the carving knife whirring. “I’ll carve you a second helping of instinct any day of the week,” and he poured what was left of the Moselle.

“All this riding of hobby horses isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said calmly.

“Right,” he said. “She can have an abortion.”

“Not here,” she reminded.

“London’s only an hour away. There’s a good clinic in Woodford. She can be back at work in three days. It’s expensive. That’s all.”

“She’d never agree to it,” I said.

“You can’t force her to have an abortion,” his wife said. “It’s probably her last chance to have a child at her age. If she were to have an abortion it’s very unlikely she’d be able to conceive again afterwards.”

“Then, if she won’t agree to the abortion, she can have the child and put it up for adoption.”

“What if she didn’t want to have it adopted once she had it?”

“You’d have to cross that bridge when you reach it. She’d be pleasing herself then, wouldn’t she? She’d be on on her own after that point. But up to there, to my mind, you’ll have to give her all the help you can.”

“Dublin is too small a place for her to have the child, with her kind of family,” I probed.

“It probably is. London would probably be the easiest place all round, but again that’s for her to decide.”

“Is marriage completely out?” she asked.

“If abortion is out for her, marriage is out for him,” he said.

“It sounds horribly logical.” I didn’t care to see it so brutally.

“Life isn’t simply a logical business,” she said.

“No,” he said. “It’s not logical, but it’d be a damned sight worse without some attempt to make sense of it.”

When we rose, she said that Kitty would clear the table in the morning. He and I had large brandies. She had nothing.

By the time I left I no longer felt the vulnerable single person that has to take on suffering and death. We upholster ourselves.

She looked at me when we met under Clery’s clock on the Sunday. “It’s bad news,” I said. “The test was positive. It’s almost certain that you’re pregnant.”

“Now we’re really in it,” she said without seeming to realize anything of the words, and stood silent, as if gathering the knowledge within her, the way I’d seen her stand as if to collect herself before getting into bed for the first time, the way I must have stood when I first heard the test was positive.

“The doctor and his wife were very good. They’ll give us all the help they can. They said the first thing to consider is an abortion. They can arrange it, perfectly legally.”

“Would you agree to that?” she asked indignantly.

“Of course I would but it’s not my decision. You have to decide that.”

“To take a small life, and have it killed. Of course we’d get off scot-free. But how could we live with ourselves again?”

“That wouldn’t bother me. It’s not my decision though.”

“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.”

“Well then, if an abortion is out marriage is even more out.”

“Why?”

“I’d be only marrying you because you’re pregnant.”

“Those sort of marriages are often the happiest. I know at least three.”

“This couldn’t. I’d only marry to cover for you.”

“You’d change when you saw the child.”

“No. I wouldn’t change. I’d leave as soon as you had the child. We talked about it. They said that if I was certain the marriage had no chance—and I am certain it hasn’t—it’d only be a far bigger mess when it happened than if we never married.”

“Of course, they’re your friends,” she said bitterly.

“In a sense, they are, but I think they’d have said the same to any couple. It comes down to whether the marriage has a chance or not. The child makes no difference.”

“The child, of course, has no rights?”

“It will have, but that has nothing to do with it. The marriage is between you and me. If it’s not going to work without the child it won’t work with the child.”

“Do these people know our ages?”

“They do and they think that’s not important either, if everything else is all right.”

“I know those sort of people. They live in their comfortable houses. They have planned families. They have everything figured out; and yet they die.”

“We all die.”

“You have everything figured out too.”

“It may be bad enough with thinking but it’d be a damned sight worse just following your nose,” I heard my own voice echo Peter White’s.

“Stop it,” she said. “Stop it or I’ll scream.”

We’d crossed the bridge, and turned down Burgh Quay. Rows of people waited for buses the other side of the quay but the river path was empty. Below us the Liffey at low tide lay oily and still in the warm evening. I stood beside the granite wall and waited. Her distress was so great that it hid her beauty, as it would ugliness, had she been ugly. For a wild
moment I wanted to say, “I was only testing you. Don’t worry. Well get married,” but the moment went.

“O boy,” she said without looking at me. “I sure picked a winner.”

“What do you want?”

“Stop it. I’m not ready for that. Not yet.”

“Will we go for a drink?”

We crossed to the Silver Swan. She went straight to the
Ladies
. I bought treble gins and brought them to the farthest corner of the bar. She seemed to be gone a long time but did not look any more composed when she came back. The lights of the Silver Swan were so blessedly low that it wasn’t possible to tell whether she’d been crying or not. She let me pour the tonic up to the rim of the glass. We sat for a long time in that silence.

“Why couldn’t we be married?” the calmness of the voice took me by surprise.

“I’d only marry you to cover up till the child was born. We’d be only getting deeper and deeper in. The marriage would have no chance of lasting. It’s better to face up to that now rather than go through a sort of charade.”

“You might change, especially when we’d have the child. I couldn’t see you walking out on the child.”

“No. I’d not change.”

“How do you know you wouldn’t? You’re not giving anything a chance.”

“You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

“If we get married, I’d at least get that gratuity out of the bank. I hate to think of them being able to hang on to all that money just because I walked out without getting married.”

“The divorce or separation would soon eat up the gratuity and it’d be a far worse mess.”

“You sound more like a lawyer than a person,” I felt the calm go. “At least if we got married I’d have the child.”

“You can have the child anyhow. No one can stop you. Since I am supposed to be a lawyer, why can’t there be an abortion?”

“How would you get an abortion?” she challenged.

“It’s very simple. You’d fly to London. There’s a first-class clinic in Woodford. The doctor can arrange it. It’s a simple, fairly painless operation. If you had to, or wanted to, you could be back at work in three days.”

“And live with that for the rest of your life? Thanks. Ο thanks.”

“You asked,” the tension gnawed and went on gnawing.

“I asked? I asked for a lot of things.”

It was as if silence was turned like a lock and the key forgotten about. We sat in that silence for what seemed like hours. Once I got up and went to the
Mens
and got two more gins at the counter on my way back, but that didn’t disturb the silence. Sometimes the tension wandered off into a sensuous mindlessness but then would startlingly snap back.

“I suppose we’d be better back in the room,” she said as if it was now her room too.

“I suppose we couldn’t be any worse off there.”

We walked in the warm spring evening. Three hours had passed since we had met. That the curtains in the room were drawn as always seemed to mock us, the light lit above the Chianti bottle on the marble.

“It’s the same as ever,” she said looking round.

“It’s always the same,” I said.

“Somehow it shouldn’t be the same,” she said.

“Would you like a drink?” and when she shook her head I asked, “Do you mind if I have one?” and when she didn’t answer I poured myself a large whiskey and started to drink it quickly.

It was then that she came into my arms. “Kiss me. Comfort me. I’m going to need a lot of comforting.”

As I rocked her I said, “We’ll find some decent way out. You can depend on that. It’ll not be as bad as it seems now.”

“Why don’t we go to bed,” she said. “We’ve certainly earned it. We have nothing to lose now. Nothing.”

When I turned out the light we both seemed to undress with
abstracted slowness. There was no feverish slipping of knots and buttons and buckle and hooks but rather a sad fumbling with them before reluctantly letting them fall loose.

I felt her sobbing before I touched her shoulders, and when she came into my arms she shook there in an uncontrolled fit of sobbing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry but I can’t help it.”

“It’s all right. No one will bother us here. Don’t worry about it,” and when she quietened we began to kiss, laughing nervously when I dried the tears with the corner of the sheet.

“That is what I need,” she breathed. “That is what I need. It is not talk I need but loving.” I was silent. “I don’t know why this happened to us. We’re both good people,” she took up.

“It happened too soon, before we knew one another. We were unlucky.”

“I’ll have to resign,” she said. “It’s going to be a hard road. I hate to think of them getting away with all that money after all these years.”

“Where do you think you’ll want to go?”

“To London. I always wanted to go to London. Two years ago a man called Jonathan wanted me to go. He owns magazines. I nearly resigned and went to work for him on a Water¬
ways
magazine there. I little thought then that this’d be the way I’d be going,” she began to cry.

“I can go with you,” I said. “I could get some job there, or even keep writing the old stuff. I could stay with you till the child was born.”

“What would we do then?”

“We’d get the child adopted.”

“As simple as that. To go through all that and then just turn round and give the child away?”

“That way the child would have a secure home.”

“Listen,” she said. “There’s going to be enough hard times in the days ahead. What I need now is loving not talking or thinking. I’m going to need a great deal of loving to face into
the days ahead. And you have no idea how much you’re loved. And I know how hard these days have been for you as well,” she said as she drew me back into her arms.

My aunt came for a checkup at this time. She came on the train. I met her on the platform but when I took her bag at the carriage door she was impatient. “They wanted to drive me up, when it’s just for a few old tests. If you heeded them, they’d have you in a wheelchair before long. You’d never be able to start making your own way again.”

“There’s no use pushing it though,” I was dismayed at how ill she looked, yet as she walked she seemed to walk ahead of me. She had on the lovely old brown tweed with fur at the throat that I remembered in happier days.

“You’re just as bad as your uncle and Cyril,” she scolded.

“I’m not that bad,” I said. “How do you feel? You look great anyhow.”

“All I feel is that it’s very cold, as if this year may never take up,” and it made me even more careful. It was a warm day for early summer.

“What would you like to do—go out to the hospital now or wait for a bit?”

“We’ll be out in the hospital soon enough. It’s long since we had a chat,” and I took her across the road to the solid comfort of the North Star Hotel. She wanted brandy.

“Are you sure it won’t interfere with the tests?” my voice had no authority in its policeman’s role.

“Bad luck to the tests,” she said. “They’re only a matter of going through the rigmarole.”

“And there’s no chance they’ll try to keep you in?”

“No. They said I’d be able to go home the day after tomorrow. I have to be home because of the garden.” She began to tell about her garden. She’d got James Prior to rotavate it. It had been a wilderness of weeds, not having been broken for the two previous years. She’d sown beans and peas, lettuce,
carrots, parsnips, Early York cabbages, parsley, shallots, beet, even marrows. The netting wire had to be fixed because of the rabbits. The garden had been part of the old railway. Every fine afternoon she walked the half-mile down the disused line. Cyril collected her with the car on his way home from work.

“I feel I get well there, just rooting about among the plants. You never feel the time pass. And every day there’s something new. Around dinner-time you find yourself getting anxious about the rain. And you forget about the pain, unless it’s playing you up horrible bad. I hadn’t my foot in the train this morning when it started.”

“I was thinking that something good must have happened when I saw you get off the train, you looked so much better.”

She wanted another brandy and she joked about the black-haired girl, asking if I had anybody now.

“Not really anybody,” I said.