The Pornographer (16 page)
“I thought your
Echo
days were done with.”
“I have no talent for writing. You know that. My talent is for management. It’d drive them mad to be confronted with the logical end of the activity, all these fat smug Parisian pigeons standing around and sitting at cafés. They’ll be incensed. They’ll turn on us in a fury. We’ll be in all the newspapers.”
“Maybe they’d only smile? Or it could become the new fashion in prams.”
“It’d be striking too near the roots for that. It’d be too close to reality for that. Reality is a great stick for beating the people. They can’t stand it, we’re told, but everybody appears very vague about what it is.”
“It’d be closer to a farce, if you ask me, which is exactly what the woman would call it. She’d never agree to it.”
“But I’d pay for it. We’d have a week in Paris as well. We’d eat in the Coupole. We’d go to the Closerie des Lilas. We’d blow it at Lipp’s and the Vendôme.”
“She’d never agree to it, you can be sure. That’s how I got into this fucking position in the first place. She’d say it was turning the whole thing into a farce, that it wasn’t natural, that it wasn’t the way life should be. If she wouldn’t agree to putting a nosebag on the old penis she’d hardly agree to putting the baby in the coffin.” And he was quiet. He took a pickled onion from the counter, showed all his front teeth, cut it in two, ostentatiously chewed it, and then washed it down with a big swallow of brandy.
“Well, old boy, you’re crusading off to London, then. You’ll be in illegitimate attendance while another white hope of the human race comes squawking into the world. And in the meantime you’ll forward me your artistic endeavours.”
“If that’s all right with you.”
“Perfectly all right. Even Queen Victoria saw that the artist
could move at ease in all levels of society, and thereby endanger the whole social structure.”
“It’s very good of you.”
“Forget it, old boy. If she could do nothing about it, neither I’m sure can I, though I’m a queen of sorts too. And since I can’t have my Paris idea I want the Shannon written up, and written up well. I’ll pay well over the odds for it. You’ll need the money in London. I wouldn’t mind spending a few months in London myself, watching over a future clown flashing out into the world,” he said dreamily.
“You mean Mavis and the Colonel on the Shannon?”
“What else?” he almost roared. “Do you think my readers would want an account of two incompetent nincompoops like yourself and this fool of a woman? My readers want icing and sugar, not loaves of bread. And be careful not to let life in. Life for art is about as healthy as fresh air is for a deep-sea diver.”
She was in a high state of excitement when we met the next evening, full of her dinner at the Hibernian with Jonathan. I couldn’t resist feeling that she was having the time of her life.
“Jonathan was waiting for me in the foyer. In his pinstripe and flowing bow, silver hair, he looked extraordinarily distinguished, like an ambassador or something. The table had red roses. We had oysters, Dover sole, cheese, and we drank too much. Jonathan had an enormous cigar the waiter cut for him, with his brandy. And then, suddenly, both of us started to cry, in the middle of the full restaurant.’ It’s such a pity, love, that it’s not our child. We’d be married. We’d have a whole wonderful life together,’ he said. ‘Who’d think two years ago when I pressed you to come to London that we’d be sitting here like this. Life deals us strange cards.’
“He was wonderful. He’s making everything so easy. His wife is in hospital again and he lives alone in this enormous
house in Kensington. And do you know what he’s going to do? He’s going to do up the whole basement part of the house as a separate flat, and I can live there till the child is born. He says, too, that there’ll be no trouble getting me a job on one of the several magazines, that I needn’t confine myself to
Water
¬
ways
, that if I can write about waterways I can write about theatres, London restaurants or parks. Once I get the hang of it it’ll all be the same thing. It’s like a dream come true.”
“Where is he now?”
“He came to see me but he’s using the visit to do some business as well. We’re having a nightcap later in the hotel after he’s seen his guests off. And I’m having lunch with him at the airport tomorrow just before he flies off. We’re going to write the letter of resignation together.”
“I can see little place for me in London in such a new setup,” I ventured cautiously.
“That’s what Jonathan says. He says that if we’re not to be married that it doesn’t make any sense being together, that we’d only get deeper and deeper involved with each other, that it’d make a separation worse.”
I waited in silence, hardly daring to believe. What I’d longed for seemed to be falling like ripe fruit into my hands.
“Jonathan says that you’d be far more help to me by staying here. You could help me with money, with everything, all the help you can give now, if we’re not to be married.’”
I felt like a badger must feel among blackthorns when someone inadvertently opens the teeth of the trap. I was afraid to go free in case by moving at all it might prove not true.
“You have a whole month to think about it. But what Jonathan says seems to make sense,” I made the first cautious move, staring down in amazement at the bared teeth of the loose trap. I could go free.
“Jonathan and I wrote out the letter of resignation at the airport, in the upstairs lounge. We laughed a great deal over
the words
beg
or
wish
or
desire
or
state
. And then he just dictated it straight and I took it down. Then we went and posted it. As it dropped I said, ‘There goes my future. All those years with so much being contributed each year towards my marriage gratuity.’ We were both too nervous for lunch, but Jonathan insisted on buying a bottle of champagne. It’s strange how coincidences happen. It was his birthday. I had never known when his birthday was before. He’s fifty-seven. ‘To London Airport. I’ll be waiting for you there. You may seem old to your young man but you look awfully young and pretty to me,’ he said.”
“You
are
beautiful and young.”
“I sure picked a winner, didn’t I?”
“We both had bad luck.”
“How?”
“Everything happened too soon,” I said. “We never had a chance. What did you do after you left the airport?”
“Well then, I caught myself rushing back to the bank. I’d got the morning off and then after sending in my resignation I was worried and rushing back. Are you crazy, I said to myself. You’ve worked for them for over twenty years, and you’ve got not a thing out of it, and now you’re rushing back, when even if you were caught trying to burn the building it’d take at least a month to fire you. It was hard to get used to, so I turned back for home. I knew I’d find my aunt alone at home and I wanted to get the whole thing over with. It was only when I was near the house that I had second thoughts and I wished I had gone straight back to the bank from the airport.
“The kitchen door was open and she was in the garden, her rubber gloves on, at her roses. She asked me if I had a headache or something and I decided to bungle it through.’ No, Aunt Josephine, I took the day off. I’ve been offered a job on a magazine in London and I’ve resigned from the bank. Don’t worry: I’m not going at once. It takes a month for the resignation to take effect and I’m sure I can withdraw it at any time before then.’ You should have seen her face. ‘Have you
thought about the pension you’ll lose?’ were the first words when she found her voice. ‘How will you manage all on your own in a place like London?’ So the story is out—I’m going to London to seek fame and fortune.”
Angrily she intercepted my glance towards her body. “No,” she said. “The two per cent chance of error is gone. I practically didn’t make it to the bathroom this morning. Early morning sickness.”
“What do you want to do now?” I asked.
“I want to go back to your place,” she said. “I know it may sound exciting, going to London—but I know, I know I’ll hardly be in London before I start missing you. The fame and fortune is all a lie. It’s going to be a hard summer and a longer autumn and winter. And I’ll not have you. I’m going to need a lot of loving in the next month to get me through all that length of time without you.”
“It seems I’m not going to London after all,” I said to Maloney. We met in the bar of the Clarence. He had insisted that we start to meet regularly since I was soon going to be away for at least the most of nine months, and he had picked the Clarence as out of the way and suitably grey.
For the hot day he wore baggy flannels, an expensively ragged corduroy jacket, and his buttoned-down shirt was open enough to display a wealth of grey hair on the chest.
“A false alarm,” he chortled. “Following in my own august footsteps.”
“No such luck,” I said.
“You’re going to do a skunk, then?” he looked at me in admiration, and started to laugh, a secretive high-pitched laugh, “I always thought you were one of those priested types, a lot in the head but not much on the ground. That you’d do the decent, follow your conscience, even if it meant tearing your balls off, but apparently I was wrong,” he shouted.
“No,” I ignored what he’d said. “She knows this rich English
man with a house in Kensington, a crazy wife, several companies. He’s been an admirer of her for years. It’s just poured out in the wash. He’s already flown in from London and out again. They had dinner in the Hibernian, and he’s taking charge of the whole business. She’s going to live in the basement of his Kensington house and he’s getting her a job writing for one of his magazines. Naturally he doesn’t want me to go with her to London.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? This broad must be good looking. I thought she was just an ordinary turkey, a bit dim as to the facts of life.”
“She’s very good looking and this Englishman is old. I can hardly believe my luck. It’s almost too good. I hope she marries him. If she’d marry him it’d take care of the whole mess in one beautiful stroke.”
“I detect a disgusting note of self-congratulation,” he changed. “And it won’t do. It won’t do at all. You’ve behaved stupidly, even by your own admission. You’ve got this woman into a frightful mess. In your conceit you refuse to marry her though she is a beauty, a far cry from your own appearance. And your bad behaviour and general situation is making us feel good. It’s making us all feel very good.”
“How?”
“How can you ask such a question? Your behaviour has dropped the moral averages to zero overnight. It makes some of our own reprehensible past acts practically beatific. We’re disgusted with you.”
“Anyhow you won’t want the Shannon River thing written now.”
“That’s what you think. I want every word of it. And I want both history and myth respected. There are too many people up to their elbows in myth without the slightest respect for history.”
“Why don’t you let up?”
“Would you if you’d just lost a Paris trip and was barely consoled by looking forward to a few nice saunters round Soho
and found that even that was pulled out from under your feet because a friend wasn’t being asked to pay his bills?” “You’re too much,” I said.
“I know I am,” he beamed suddenly. “I work very hard at it.” In four weeks she would go to London. Jonathan would meet her at the airport and take her to the basement flat in Kensington. In seven to eight months she would give birth to the child. It was still all that time off, time enough for something to change it back, time enough for it to never happen. Vague and fragile as that sense was, it was enough to blur the sharpness, keep it farther off.
“I’m going to need a lot of loving to get me through all that length of time in London,” she said again. “And since you’re always muddled as to where we’ll meet,” she laughed, “We’ll decide the meeting places for the next four weeks tonight.”
There was no point meeting in the middle of town, she’d have to be there to say her own farewells, the goodbyes being prepared for her at Amalgamated Waterways and the bank, and she wanted as much as possible to keep our lives separate from them. So on wet evenings or on evenings when there was a threat of rain we’d meet in Gaffney’s bar. And if it was fine we’d meet half-way in Calderwood Avenue. She was in high energetic spirits that evening, insisting on counting the small almond and cherry trees in Calderwood. There were two hundred and forty-nine trees in the avenue. She wore a blue ribbon that was too young for her and took it off and tied it round the one hundredth and twenty-fifth tree.
“People will think we’re crazy,” she said as she took my arm to walk back to the room. One evening out of the four weeks we had to meet in Gaffney’s but we saw the blue silk ribbon round the bole of the one hundredth and twenty-fifth almond tree so regularly that we did not notice it fade and grow ragged in the dust and sun.
There is not much difference between seeing someone every
evening who is to go to London in four weeks and going to hospital every evening to see someone who is dying, except that we can measure more accurately, and hence control it, a departure for London and imagine more easily what will happen when it’s reached. And each evening as I went to meet her I did not think there was much difference (except in the quality of affection) from going in to see my aunt in the hospital and meeting at the ribboned almond tree, except my male body in its cloth covering replaced the brandy bottle in its brown parcel.
She was always on time. Walking towards her down the long avenue of cherries and almonds proved far worse than walking into my aunt’s awareness down the hospital corridor during those first visits. As soon as she’d see me come her walk would change, as if a band had suddenly struck up, and she’d start to smile and wave. If I waved in answer, there’d follow an excruciating few minutes of waving, smiling, walking up to the beribboned tree.
“Right on the dot,” she’d say as she kissed. I tried coming a few minutes late but as soon as she’d see me along the line of almonds she’d take off towards me waving, smiling, walking. “You’re late,” she’d say. “The ribbon is half-way, a symbol of equality.” I started to come early, examining the parched grass around the roots of the almond tree as she came waving, smiling down the line.
“I guess that grass must be awfully interesting,” she said as her high heels clicked close.
“I’m not much good at waving,” I said.
“That is, I suppose, a tick-off for me. I can do nothing right.”
“Why should it be? I’m just not good at it, that’s all. It may well be what they call a character defect.”
Once or twice we went to suburban cinemas but in good weather we cooled our thirst in pubs, walking sometimes afterwards some miles out to the sea in the lovely evenings; and always we went back to the room.
“I need all the loving I can get to see me through the months
in London,” it sounded as if she was working hard at getting a suntan against the winter. Her body was as sleek and beautiful as when we’d met. Morbidly I’d let my fingers trail along her stomach but there was no sign of swelling. The only pleasure was in staying outside oneself, watching the instinct that had constructed this prison suffer its own exhaustion within its walls and instead of bounding with refreshed curiosity to some new boundary of sense, having to take off its coat, and wield a painful pick. In this bright early summer weather it was always daylight when she left.
Sometimes we touched danger. “Jonathan rang today,” she said, and when I didn’t reply asked sharply, “Are you not curious what he had to say?”
“What did he say?”
“He said if his wife will agree to a divorce we might be married. Have you nothing to say to that?”
“I can’t very well object to Jonathan marrying you.”
“He says that if we got married he’s willing to accept the child as his own, but that you’ll have to sign over all your rights to the child. Will you do that? It means you can never lay eyes on the child again in your life,” she continued angrily.
“I’ll be glad to do that.”
“Have you no curiosity about the child?”
“None.”
“I don’t know, there must be something wrong with you, something missing. I don’t know whether you picked it up writing that pornography stuff or not but there’s a lack of feeling that makes me feel sorry for you. Often I sincerely pity you.”
“I can’t do much about that,” I avoided.
“O boy I sure picked a winner.”
Another evening she asked, “Do you play tennis?”
“No, I’ve never played. Why?”
“I used to be a fairly good player. This is the first spring I haven’t played though it must be five or six years since I was on the club team. Anyhow they heard I was going to London
and they’re giving a dance and presentation. Would you like to come to the dance?”
“I think I better stay out of everything. It’d only mix things up, especially with Jonathan in it now.”
“What has he got to do with you?”
“You said yourself you’d want the child to appear completely Jonathan’s. And since that’s the case I would like to keep out of it as much as possible. That makes sense, doesn’t it? “and she was silent for a long time.
“Of course, since your rights mean nothing to you, it’s no sacrifice for you to give them up,” she said bitterly.
“I never pretended it was any other way,” I answered.
These parties were the only nights I didn’t see her, but even so they were no holiday. Hardly able to believe I was escaping so lightly, I felt I had the whole frail month in my hands, to be guided as delicately as possible towards the airport. From these functions she brought back trophies. A large clock with a scroll of names, an ornate silver tray, an ice bucket. Amalgamated Waterways gave her a cheque.
“There were speeches about my courage, how I was throwing mundane security over in order to seek fame and fortune. That I made them all seem small. If only they knew the truth,” she said, and I did not answer. Even within the boundaries of the four weeks, I was aware of possibilities within myself for doing something wild and stupid. Troubled by my own confusions in meeting her at the idiotically beribboned almond tree, I started to take down books in the room, unconsciously searching for some general light, as I’d gone out for allies at the first news. It was an ungenerous attitude, but my position was hardly aristocratic. I eventually found a sentence which brought me to a sudden stop: “Everybody must feel that a man who hates any person hates that person the more for troubling him with expressions of love; or, at least, it adds to hatred the sting of disgust.” I wrote it down, and kept it about my person like a scapular, as if the general expressions of the confused and covered feelings could licence and control them.
The last week we met at the almond tree at nine-thirty instead of eight. She was clearing out the room she’d lived in for more than twenty years and packing. She’d booked her ticket to London on an afternoon flight so that Jonathan could meet her. They’d arranged to go from the airport to the flat and then to his favourite restaurant for dinner.
“It’s only fair that I pay for that ticket.”
“I accept that,” she said gravely. “In fact, I want you to collect it. It’s booked in O’Connell Street but you can pick it up at any Aer Lingus place.”
“Why have I to collect it? Why can’t someone else do it, as long as I pay for it?”
“I don’t know. I just want you to.”
I didn’t know either, unless the ticket was a sort of personal receipt she had to have for the whole bitter business.
“Did you get it yourself?” were the first words when I handed her the ticket, the words weighed with a significance out of all proportion.
“I got it my very self. The girl who wrote it out had blonde hair, blue eyes and a Mayo accent. She was very pretty.”
“It’s all right for you. You haven’t to uproot yourself and go to London.”
“I was prepared to, but I thought it was just a simple air ticket that’s in question.”
“Thanks,” she said sharply, and thrust it in her handbag.
Between making love that night she cried, and I kept touching the verbal scapular that was part of my mind by now. As I walked her a last time down to the taxi rank at the end of Malahide Road she said, “I know that you’ve suffered as well as I have. We could have taken the easy way out of it and we didn’t and I think we’re both the better people for it.”
“I don’t know,” I touched my scapular a last time.
“And you’ll keep that promise. You’ll come and see me in London.”
“I’ll come. That’s if you want me.”
“I’ll want you,” she kissed me passionately. “Whether I’ll be able to afford you is the only thing in question.”
When I had loved, it had been the uncertainty, the immanence of No that raised the love to fever, when teeth chattered and its own heat made the body cold: “I cannot live without her.”
“I cannot live. …” If she’d said Yes, would not the fever have retired back into the flesh, to be absorbed in the dull blessed normal beat?
And was the note of No not higher and more clear because it was the ultimate note to all the days of love—for the good, the beautiful, the brave, the wise—no matter what brief pang of joy
their
Yes might bring?
