The Pornographer (26 page)

“To realize that doesn’t seem to make it any better.”

“You seem to me to have behaved well. What are you to do? Marry the woman, for God’s sake?”

“O, I behaved well enough, all right. I know that. But I behaved well as much out of cowardice as anything else. It’s safer to behave well. It’s more protection than behaving badly.”

“Well, it’s done now,” she said, and at the bus stop where we usually parted, she said, “You might as well leave me back tonight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Are you sure?” she smiled, and without thinking I closed my grip on her arm.

As we went between the two lighted globes above the hospital gates I felt invaded by a fragility, a spiritual lightness that had nothing to do with the hospital or dark in the hospital. I had no sense at all of the misery and suffering and even exaltation that may have been going on in that darkened ward. The same fragility I had felt entering rooms of strange people at their ease or walking up to the door of a building the morning of taking up a new job. I was entering a new life. I was being questioned, and I had no longer the power to turn away, nor the confidence to say yes, only that I could try and try with all that I knew, the rash heart given its rashness, but given it by watchfulness and care, knowing they could
not know where it might lead but determined to be its shadow everywhere.

It seems we must be beaten twice, by the love that we inflict and then by the infliction of being loved, before we have the humility to look and take whatever agreeable plant that we have never seen before, because of it being all around our feet, and take it and watch it grow, choosing the lesser truth because it’s all that we’ll ever know.

We went straight to her room, more cell than room, the black cross on its white bare wall, careful even of our breathing between its paper walls.

In the morning when I rang for the taxi I was about to turn to her to say that the hospital seemed to have fewer night visitors in winter, when down the corridor doors started to open softly and footsteps come towards us. We kissed quickly and I could feel her laugh by my side as we heard, “Can we share the taxi into the city?” I had seen none of the sharers before, the sauce chef was not there, and we drove into the sleeping city in a drowsed silence.

I was too tired to read or work the next day, but did not want to sleep, as if by sleeping I’d consign the night casually to some section of animal desire, like any night, as if it was necessary to keep a wilful vigil. In spite of this, I must have fallen asleep in the cane chair, for I was startled by the bell. I had no idea what time it was. The fire had gone out.

A telegram, I thought as I went downstairs. From London or the country. A birth or death or, I stirred guiltily, a death in giving birth, but when I opened the door it was my uncle who was standing there.

“It was the last ring I was going to give,” he said petulantly. “I thought there was no one in. I was just about to powder off with myself.”

“Is she gone or what?” I asked too quickly out of surprise.

“No, but it’d be a blessing for the poor thing if she was. She’s back in the hospital. She collapsed. I’d to come up in the ambulance,” he was undismayed.

“Is she conscious?”

“She is,” he said but I could tell by his answer that he did not know the meaning of the word.

“Has she her senses about her?”

“Not at all. She’s just collapsed. She never moved or spoke a word all the way up. She’s like a dead person but she’s not dead.”

I grew aware that we were standing all that time in the doorway, “Come in.” As we climbed the stairs I saw that he was practically immobile between self-importance and self-pity.

“You haven’t been down,” he accused. “That woman was expecting you a lot of the time.”

“I’m sorry. I meant to, several times, but I didn’t.”

“There’s been big changes.”

“What changes?”

“Well, I bought a place,” he announced.

“What place?”

“McKennas.” I shuffled through the local names until I came on a big farmhouse with orchards and sheds between the saw mill and the town.

“But that’s a farm. What do you want with land?”

“Won’t it make money even if it was only left lying there?” he began to laugh, which continued after I asked how much he’d paid for it. “Guess,” he chuckled and I knew I’d have to draw out the game to the last trick, and settled on a figure I knew to be too high but not outrageously so.

“You must be joking,” he laughed with pure pleasure.

“You mean to say you had to pay more than that?”

“You must be daft. Not half it.”

After we’d tortuously reached the right figure, which I’d to tell him was so low he should have been up for swindling, he wiped tears of pleasure away with the backs of fists.

“That’ll do you,” he laughed as he scolded. “That’s enough.”

“You must admit you got it cheap.”

“Well, it wasn’t too dear. I’ll admit that much. I could have made a profit on it since anyhow.”

“You know you were welcome to use my house. In fact I was hoping that you would. It needs living in.”

“I know that but sure you’ll live in it yourself. It’s coming to the time when I believe if a man hasn’t his own house he has nothing.”

His own state had always been the ideal state, the proper centre of aspiration for everyman.

“I thought you weren’t going to leave while she was ill,” I reminded him.

“Well, I haven’t left yet.”

“Does she know that you bought the place?”

He grimaced with hurt as he told, “She said I was a fierce eejit, that at my age a one-roomed hut close to a church would be more in my line. But then she’s sick. That woman hasn’t been herself for a long time. She’s not been minding her business for ages. And things has been going from bad to worse between me and Cyril.”

“What happened?”

“Well, it got so bad, one evening he had the drink to do the talking for him and he was going on about me being in the place and not paying, when I always paid far more than I took. Anyhow I took the key out of my pocket and threw it on the floor.’ Pick it up,’ I said, ‘and only one of us will walk out that door.’ After that,” he chuckled blackly, “It was about time I thought of looking for my own place.”

“Why didn’t Cyril come with her?”

“Why didn’t Cyril do a lot of things? Cyril’ll not stir himself now, as long as there’s anybody in the world left able to move.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I’m going to go home on the train. I want you to ring for Jim to meet me off the train. He can take the big car or the truck. If he’s not around someone will get word to him. Then
you better go in to see if that woman has come round,” he was all orders.

“What happened to her?”

“She just fell. At the top of the stairs. She was lucky she didn’t roll down. She was supposed to go into hospital a few days before that and didn’t. Lucky the ambulance was there and able to take her, I came with her in the ambulance.”

“Have you eaten?”

“No. I haven’t had a bite. I’m starved.”

We had a mixed grill in the North Star across from the station, and I saw him to the train, using the fact that I’d to phone ahead for Jim to meet him in order to avoid the awkwardness of those minutes that wait for the train to go.

“I don’t suppose it’ll be long until I have to be down now,” I referred to the impending funeral.

“No,” he said confidently, as if some certainty was a matter of rejoicing. “It won’t be long, but you will go in to see her?”

“I’ll go in as soon as I make the call,” and he was satisfied, making a careless gesture of dismissal. How confident and full of well-being he was compared to the small shaken figure that had got off the train that sunny day in early spring to visit her in the hospital. Death had been well reduced from beauty as well as terror. It happened to people who were foolish enough to cease minding their business.

He had exaggerated her state. I thought I’d find her in a coma but she was completely conscious though very weak.

“Is your uncle gone home?” was her only question and when I nodded she smiled before she let her face fall. She recovered her strength so rapidly in the next few days that I thought I’d resume the normal visits. I took her in a bottle of brandy.

“God bless you but I don’t need that any more. It’s cost you enough already, all those old bottles.”

“There’s lots more bottles,” I protested.

“No. I’m taking the pills. You don’t need anything while you’re taking the pills.”

“I thought you didn’t trust the pills,” with every fumbling sentence I was losing ground in the face of her calm.

“I trust the pills good enough—for what I have to do. When you take them you don’t feel anything. In a few days I’ll be out of this old place. I won’t be coming back. I’ve fought long enough and hard enough and it’s beaten me, bad luck to it,” she even laughed.

“You can’t say that.”

“I can say that because it’s the bitter truth and I’ve earned it. I’m not worried. I was just thinking that there’s already far more people that I’ve been close to in my lifetime on the other side than on this side now. There’s some good stories now I’ll have to tell them. I’m afraid there’s many a laugh we’ll have to have over most of the stories,” her eyes were shining. “I’ll have to start looking to see if that uncle of yours can be given extra space up there as soon as I arrive, for no doubt he’ll want to bring that bloody old saw mill with him, not to talk of this doting farm he’s just bought.”

I’d to turn away, “I’ll be in early tomorrow.”

“You might as well ring your uncle. To tell him to come up for me the day after tomorrow. That I’m going home,” I heard her add. “Anyhow we can settle it tomorrow.”

I hate tears, hate that impotent rage against the whole fated end of life they turn to, and when I fought them back I was embarrassed by the bottle of brandy still in my hands, like a coat I’d been given to hold by someone who had forgotten to come back.

Two days later I helped her into the big car outside the hospital and drove her and my uncle out of the city. She was practically gay, harassing my uncle’s stolidity with sharp wit. He was well insulated against all suffering, wearing a coat of embarrassed righteousness far thicker than his black crombie which seemed to proclaim, “You see the compromising sort of situations people who insist on being stupid, who do not mind their business force you into.” As before, at Maynooth I left them to get the bus back into the city. As I kissed her frailty
our silence seemed to acknowledge that we’d never see one another again. Her coldness shook me, her perfect mastery. It was if he she’d completely taken leave of life, and any movement back was just another useless chore, and everything—me, my uncle, I doubted if Cyril could even light her eyes now—had become boringly equal.

“My aunt was in the hospital and is gone home,” I told her when we met, unable to keep from touching her black hair.

“I know. Some of the doctors were annoyed that she was brought to us when she collapsed. She should have been taken to a local hospital. There’s nothing we can do for her any more.”

“She has money. You know what influence is in a small place. They’d think the Dublin hospital would be better, and she’d have to go to the best. Anyhow she’ll not be back. It’s all neat enough. There’s only two telegrams to wait for now. A birth and a death.”

“Maybe she’ll not send word about the child.”

“You think she might land on the doorstep?”

“No. That she’d think her own interests would be best served by staying separate. That she could do anything she wants with the child.”

“She’ll be able to do that anyhow.”

I gave her the letters to read. She read them, but very reluctantly.

“What do you think of her and the whole business?” I asked.

“What does it matter what I think? No matter what I think it’s useless,” she refused to be drawn.

The telegram came five days after Christmas, announcing the birth. I just waited.

A rapturous letter followed. She had had a dangerous and difficult confinement, but the child was worth it all. The child was beautiful. All his little features were replicas of my own, except the ears. We can’t all be perfect, she quoted from her favourite movie. I should hear him crow.

I wrote restating my old position in what I thought were the clearest possible terms, which she described as brutal and hurtful.

All right, we could give up the child for adoption, but on these conditions. I’d have to come to London and live at Kavanagh’s and take care of the child for a whole week. Feed it, change it, wash it. She’d move out for that time. If, at the end of the week, I could be heartless enough to give it away for ever, then she’d consent to the adoption, but there was no other way she’d consent.

I just repeated my position, saying whether I took care of the child for a day or a month could make no difference.

The next letter did not come by return and was more cautious. Would I come to London?

I hesitated for some days before writing that I would go to London. I’d see her to talk about what she intended to do, but under no circumstance would I agree to see the child. It had the echo of negotiating a deal of sale. I might be prepared to go ten thousand but under no circumstances would I consider fifteen or anything close to it.

I took the plane with the feeling of being flushed from one city to the other, that there should be a chain to pull. I rang her from London Airport.

“It’s great to hear your voice,” she said. “If you’d rung a half-hour earlier you’d have heard the little man crowing. But he’s sound asleep again. You’ll have to wait till you get here. Where are you ringing from?”

“The airport.”

“Why don’t you get the tube? It’s quicker at this time. I’ll meet you outside Archway Station. And we can walk here.”

“I’m not going to the house.”

“But you’re expected. Everybody’s looking forward to meeting you. There’s food and drink. Michael and Nora have been talking about little else but meeting you for days.”

“I’m sorry but I’m not going to the house,” I found myself trembling with nervousness. “I don’t intend to see the child.”