The Pornographer (19 page)

I drove them up through the white mist over the river in the morning, half-remembered cattle and tree trunks and half branches on the ghostly banks. There were two flaxen-haired boys and a willow of a girl in from the country at the Bush Hotel. They took the girl up the river with them to the village, and left her with the fat man. “I could sleep for a month,” the fat man said, he’d go back to Carrick that evening on a paper run. It had been easy, the old technique, morsel leading to juicy morsel, to lying down to several solid meals.

They went alone through the lake, the beauty of the glass wall of water touching Mavis. “It’d be nice to have a summer place on the hill up there overlooking the Weir.”

“Yes, but you’d get tired. There’s nothing more tiring than so-called beauty. It saps energy because it’s an idea. You’d never know what you’d pick up off the boats. And we’d have
the insurance of ourselves if the fishing turned out to be poor,” he put his arm round her shoulders as they went through the locks and kissed.

As I brought them naked into one another’s arms a last time —“straight and affectionate”—the boat at anchor in the arms of the wooded bay, I felt sick enough to want to turn away from what I saw, to shout at them to stop. The old plays were not wrong: there are single moments of weakness when our whole life can be changed to nightmare, set in a sweet flutter so faint that we are uncertain if it touched us at all in passing; but already we had fallen. I remembered how grateful the two of us had been the next day for the boat after that cursed night. The business of having to take it back down the river had kept us from getting on each other’s nerves. And now Maloney had his story.

I had a second drink while waiting for him to finish reading in the Elbow. He read it standing at the counter. He didn’t touch his drink but stayed completely silent till he’d finished.

“It doesn’t quite phosphoresce with your usual glow, but it’s all right. We’ll publish it. Anyhow the Shannon makes a change from Madagascar. You’re a younger version of the Colonel of course?”

“Whatever you think.”

“And your lady in London is a vintage Mavis? Did she pull you off against the dashboard of the company Beetle on your way down? I liked that. It was one of the better touches.”

“No. She didn’t. I wish she had. It would have been safer on the dashboard.”

“Your yokel who introduced you to the boats sounds authentic. He couldn’t have been invented. He’s the very heart and soul in person of my dear friends, the plain people of Ireland. You’ll please answer me that. Was he invented or drawn from life?”

“He can be found any day round Roosky.”

“Thanks. I could tell. He was treated a bit harshly, but I’m glad to see our pair were kind. In Merriman’s effort it was
done with less kindness but very much more gusto. Anyhow we’re not in that untranslatable league. The boat was real?”

“Yes. It was a boat like that, and the morning was misty.”

“The willow of a girl at the Bush is much more down our readers’ usual line. Except they’ll be disappointed you didn’t follow up the fat man on his paper run. Licked lips must have gone dry. But the accident or miracle of life did take place while the boat was stationary. As you put it, in the arms of the bay?”

“Yes. That’s your pound of flesh. That’s where I think it happened. Now why don’t you let go?”

“Because I find it very in-ter-est-ing. I can see how you’ve fallen between two schools. You should have written it as plain biography, with copious, boring footnotes. That way no one would doubt you. No one has the faintest idea as to why we exist but everybody is mad for every sort of info about other existences. That way they can enjoy their own—safely. You can’t beat life for that sort of thing. They get someone else to do their living and their dying for them, there’s no way they have to do it for themselves. And the first thing you have to convince them of is that it
happened
. Then you can tell them anything. Contrary to the sceptical view, your human being is mad to believe, to be convinced, especially that everything is going to turn out well in the end.”

“O for God’s sake, I didn’t write the bloody thing to furnish a text for a lecture.”

“You need a lecture. You’ve got off scot-free. This big sugar-daddy is taking on your growing burden. You’ve sullied the Shannon and you’re still out there laughing, back at square one, ready to start all over again. You need a lecture all right. You need several lectures,” he concluded.

The sense of getting off free was short-lived, dispelled by a short, plain note the next morning. No honeymoon had taken place.

“I am not going to be married, which—going by the tone of your last letter—can, I know, be little relief to you. I could not bring myself to marry Jonathan. Since I couldn’t, it was only proper that I move from his house and give up the job on the magazine, which, I found, wasn’t really a job at all, but something he created for me.

“I have found a cheap flat in North London and I’ll have no difficulty finding another job, nothing glamorous, some obscure place that will see out the remaining time. I have money and you are not to worry in any way. I’ll write you a long account as soon as I am completely settled. Jonathan’s conduct in all this was exemplary. He put no pressure of any kind on me other than to marry him but once I knew I couldn’t bring myself to do it I couldn’t go on staying in his house or keep the job.

“You can imagine what a few weeks these have been and you’ll never know how greatly loved you are. I don’t know, but when it came to the crunch I just couldn’t imagine holding Jonathan in my arms after your dear lovely self, and the idea just became increasingly funny. But, boy, I didn’t feel like laughing at all when he turned up with this other woman. I knew it was crazy but I just felt hopping mad.”

I was dismayed and furious and downhearted.

“You’ll be glad to learn I don’t need lectures now. This woman isn’t marrying,” I informed Maloney.

“I’m delighted,” he crowed.

“Why?”

“It lets you off too easily of course. Too soft an umbrella. If she’d married him, you’d have been two-nil up on the night. Now it’s even-steven. You’re right out there in the firing line once more. I thought the game was closed. Now it’s an on-going thing again. It’s interesting. It’s getting very interesting.”

I bought a round of drinks. He wasn’t able to contain his curiosity for long. “Why did this lady throw up the chance of
fortune and respectability? Or did she just dally with it in her lap too long?”

“I don’t see what’s so funny about it,” I said, and he went into convulsions.

“Give us some water to dilute this,” he said to the barman when he’d recovered.

“Why?” he pressed. “Why didn’t she marry her tycoon? She might have done us all a good turn.”

“It’s a sore point. Apparently she was so taken with my physique that the idea of doing it with this Englishman wasn’t entertainable. It was just funny.”

“A good definition of the funny, if I may say so. Tension set off by the realization of the difference between what should be possible and what is in fact impossible. The idea of seeing one take place in the other.”

I stayed silent. There was no stopping him now.

“Our national poet was shrewder in sexual and other matters than most people give him credit for. ‘Isn’t it amazing,’ he once intoned, ‘the survival of the virginity of the soul in spite of sexual intercourse.’ This bird may have opened up her oyster to you, but she’s no Moll Flanders. Like our friend Yeats she’s more of a spiritualist. She believes in the continuing virginity of the individual, in spite of all the evidence around to the contrary. Yes,” he said, “I’ll have another look at our Shannon story. Knowing that real people are involved gives the spice of pornography a very satisfying solidity. It might even phosphoresce a little more this time.”

In a long letter she described how the idyll with Jonathan ended.

They’d been very happy for some days after the cremation. She’d cooked dinner most evenings upstairs and they’d stayed at home, sometimes going for a short stroll in the area before separating for the night.

“‘We’re going out tonight,’ he’d warned me mysteriously
that morning, and it was to his favourite restaurant we went, the red roses as usual on the table. He was in wonderful spirits, joking with the waiters, and he ordered champagne.

“‘No, my dear. It’s not my birthday and I was never one for beating round the bush. As you know I’ve been in love with you for years but it took your sad business to bring us together. You always said you couldn’t marry me while my wife was alive because of your Catholic faith. The other business—Gwen’s death—has left me free after all these years. If you haven’t already guessed it, I’m asking you to marry me.’

“‘When?’

“‘Now if possible. Perhaps not right now or even tomorrow but very soon, soon as we can get a licence.’

“‘We’ll have to wait.’

“‘No, dear. We don’t have to go through the church ceremony now if that doesn’t suit you but we’ll wait for the child as man and wife, living together. The child will be brought up as if it were our child.’

“‘I’ll have to think about this.’

“‘You have a few days, a week, no more than a week. I hope though you’ll make up your mind before the week. You see, my love, I’m fifty-eight. I have no illusions and even less time. At most I have twelve years, ten, eight, maybe even less. Foolish or not, I want to spend those years as a happy, normal married man. I don’t expect to be given happiness but I’m prepared to work at it. And I know we can make a success, with luck maybe a great success.’ I was right up against it. I was very fond of Jonathan, but somehow I never thought of sleeping with him, of waking up with those funny handlebars every morning. And what clinched it, if it needed clinching, was that I could no more give up hope of seeing you again than giving up my own life, which I’d have had to do, if I’d married Jonathan.

“He was very nice when I told him that I couldn’t, and then the very next Sunday he brought a tall Englishwoman, closer to his age than mine, and I saw he was behaving exactly
towards her as he used to me; and there was no doubt but that she intended to marry him.

“I moved out at once. The place I found is in a tradesmen’s terrace, a house close to a football ground, and I’ve the upstairs, two rooms, a small kitchen.

“I’ve got a job, much like the job I had in the bank, if anything less glamorous, a firm that hires out scaffolding and ladders to small builders, and it’s only ten minutes on the bus, a half-hour’s walk from the flat.

“And now, after all this, I want to see you, to see you in London, to feast my eyes on you, my love, come soon.”

I wrote that I was sorry she didn’t take Jonathan’s offer but that was her business. My mind hadn’t changed and wouldn’t change, so that in practical terms she had to leave me out of all considerations of her life, except to lend her what help I could throughout the pregnancy. I’d go to London to see her but only to see if I could be of any help and to keep a promise. It sounded a priggish letter when I read it through but I sent it.

My aunt had grown dependent on the brandy, and I gave her warnings that I’d be away in London for some days. I was worried about what would happen if she couldn’t get her daily portion of oblivion.

“Will you be all right?” I asked for the umpteenth time when I went in to see her the evening before I was to leave for London, and when she was as vague as ever I pressed, “You know you don’t have to worry about me. I know you only take the brandy for the pain. If you need some, how will you manage while I’m away?”

For a moment she bridled at the question but then she said, “God bless you for asking. There’s a man comes round the ward in the morning with newspapers and fruit and that. If I want it, he gets it for me,” and with that she drew a big wad of notes from beneath her pillow and handed them to me.

“What’s that for?” I asked in amazement.

“You’re going to London, aren’t you? You’ll need money in London.”

“But I’ve enough money.”

“I know but all that brandy you’ve brought me in for so long doesn’t grow on the bushes. I just want you to know I know that. Take it. If you don’t need it, spend it for me.”

I took it, and little thought I’d see my aunt again before I got back from London.

I got the bus into O’Connell Street from the hospital. There, I went to the Elbow to see if I’d meet up with Maloney. He wasn’t there nor was there anybody from the paper. I had a slow pint of beer at the counter and then went back into O’Connell Street to mix with the jostling crowds in the summer evening.

The next day I’d take the boat to London to see her. A crowd of girls, their little flounces of laughter brushing out to the sharp clatter of high heels, got out of a taxi and went in through the swing doors towards the dancehall where we’d met. I started to follow them, not singling any out, just following their singing excitement. I fell in behind them in the queue, not caring to follow their speech too precisely, some words falling about pilots in Dublin Airport, knowing it would drag them down to some uncommon commonplace. I bought a ticket after they had left the window, one girl paying for the whole bevy. The pale red
House Full
placard was on its easel but faced to the wall. The ex-boxer in evening dress tore the ticket in two at the head of the stairs, searching our faces as he handed us one half of the ticket back, sticking the half he kept on a piece of wire, his handsome battered face expressionless.

I got a beer and sat at one of the tables, watching trousered and nyloned legs swish past the four steps. When it was no longer possible to see the dance floor I finished the beer and pushed my way through, the men crowding together at the top of the steps.