The Pornographer (30 page)

“That’s a speech for this time of morning!” I said sarcastically.

“But is it any wonder that the lowest common denominator rules,” he ignored. “There’s hardly any fixed people around at any given time. They’re all either dead or growing up or growing down or standing like your Early York out in the back garden.”

“What are we to do now?”

“Oh you’re all right. You’re our Renaissance man, a true sophist. Inflaming people and fathering children which you later disown. Let me tell you this, sir. We’re not letting you off
the hook. You’ve lowered the moral average all around. And you’re making us all feel good.”

“Will we go to the car?”

“The car’s here,” he pointed to a shining new car across the road that I hadn’t seen him with before.

“We’ll go,” I said. “We’ll go by the saw mill. It’s the shortest way.”

I could hear the singing of the saws above the purring motor before we reached the mill. Maloney let the car go slow so that we had a clear sight of the mill for several seconds.

My uncle was at the big saw, an enormous trunk of beech on the rollers. You could only see him when the saw was still. Once he set it screaming he was hidden by its streaming dust. Jim was farther back but he was not sawing. He seemed to be setting up or oiling one of the minor saws.

After the strain of greedy watching, knowing it would all be soon lost from sight, I was partly grateful when the thick whitethorns shut it out; and I had no wish to stop or to go back. It would only idly prolong what had to be ended and my uncle had even more need of his own space than when he’d come up the long platform, the raincoat over his arm, to see her that first day in hospital. Today was after all the formal beginning of his new life without her, a marrying of it to the old. He’d fill it now for the forever that it was.

“There’s one man who knows he’s going everywhere by staying put,” Maloney said. It was impossible to tell from the tone whether it was intended as a cosmic joke or a simple breath of admiration.

“I’m thinking of proposing marriage to a woman and coming back here,” I said suddenly.

“You’re what?” Maloney swung the wheel so violently that I had to shout to watch the road. “You’re returning? So that the cattle can have the privilege of saying loo to you. You can start to see God in the bushes, not to speak of a bank manager. All that caper?”

“I don’t know. There comes a time when you either run
amok completely or try to make a go of it. I’m going to try to make a go of it.”

“Embedded first in the warm womb, of course, and then hold hands and listen to the dawn choir. Ο sweet suffering Switzerland. We must talk about it. There’s a good hotel in Kells, if I can be seen with you so close to Dublin. Your outer aspects reflect accurately what must be an appalling inner moral condition. I don’t like people starting to do things I was doing ten years ago. Anyhow she may well turn you down.”

“It won’t matter.”

“How do you mean it won’t matter? Has this beating softened your brain as well?”

“The life has to be lived afterwards anyhow, no matter what the answer. Won’t it be even more difficult if the answer is yes?”

“What if she does say
No
?” he shouted.

“The world won’t stop. There’d be a chance of a real adventure lost. I’d be sorry,” and I was beginning to be sorry I had spoken.

“O you’re some lover, I tell you. But fortunately I know you. Blacken day with night. Tell the nodding plants they’ll grow just as well in shade as sun. It’s all in the sweet quality of the mind, so forget the fucking circumstances, brother.”

The rain had started, the powerful wipers sweeping it imperiously aside as soon as it spotted the shining arcs, sweeping and sweeping.

“You’d have seen me if you had been paying attention,” she’d once said to me, the night she came towards me across the floor of the Metropole. By not attending, by thinking any one thing was as worth doing as any other, by sleeping with anybody who’d agree, I had been the cause of as much pain and confusion and evil as if I had actively set out to do it. I had not attended properly. I had found the energy to choose too painful. Broken in love, I had turned back, let the light of imagination almost out. Now my hands were ice.

We had to leave the road of reason because we needed to
go farther. Not to have a reason is a greater reason still to follow the instinct for the true, to follow it with all the force we have, in all the seeing and the final blindness.

“Have you gone dumb or is there nothing you have left to say for yourself or what?” Maloney had taken his eyes off the road to look me full in the face. His scant white hair spilled out from under the wide rim of the black hat. He looked definitely more danceband now than funeral. I gritted my teeth to try to stop the fit of laughter because it hurt so much, but the very pain was making it all the more impossible to stop.

What I wanted to say was that I had a fierce need to pray, for myself, Maloney, my uncle, the girl, the whole shoot. The prayers could not be answered, but prayers that cannot be answered need to be the more completely said, being their own beginning as well as end.

What I did say was, “Why don’t you watch the road?”

“I’ve been watching the bloody road all my life, and it tells me nothing. Yoo-hoo, Road!” he suddenly shouted. “You see! It doesn’t answer. It just speeds past. Yoo-hoo, Road!”

“It might get us there if you did.”

“It’ll get us there anyhow. Yoo-hoo, Road! Yoo-hoo, Road!” he was shouting, driving very fast.

I tried to say something back but couldn’t. And in the silence a fragment of another day seemed to linger amid the sweeping wipers, and grow: the small round figure of my uncle getting out of the train away down the platform, childishly looking around, the raincoat over his arm, at the beginning of the journey—if beginning it ever had—that had brought each to where we were, in the now and the forever.

“Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo, Road. Yoo-hoo.…”

John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934 and brought up in the Republic of Ireland. He trained to be a primary-school teacher before becoming a full-time writer, and later taught and travelled extensively. He lived in County Leitrim. The author of six highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories, he was the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship, the American-Irish Award, the Prix Etrangère Ecureuil and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Amongst Women
, which won both the GPA and the
Irish Times
Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a four-part BBC television series. His work appeared in numerous anthologies and has been translated into many languages. In 2005, his autobiography,
Memoir
, won the South Bank Literature Award. John McGahern died in 2006.

THE BARRACKS

THE DARK

NIGHTLINE

THE LEAVETAKING

GETTING THROUGH

HIGH GROUND

AMONGST WOMEN

THE COLLECTED STORIES

THAT THEY MAY FACE THE RISING SUN
 

play
THE POWER OF DARKNESS