Through Streets Broad and Narrow (15 page)

He did not grow his hair any longer because it was already one of his good points, having developed a fine wave and drake feather curls at the back when he was about sixteen, and because Dymphna did not like him to wear his hair long since it conflicted with the good opinions of the Rugger and Boat Clubs. He did not go in for broad-brimmed hats or cravats in place of ties, only the variation in the waistcoats: the old yellow one from his home, the new green one, a lavender double-breasted one in which his father had married his mother, and a check one used by the family for Christmas charades.

At dances with Dymphna more and more people waved to him, and she liked this; his rooms tended to fill up at the weekends with effervescent mixtures of people: poets and modern-language scholars, medical students, divinity men and the more eccentric of the engineers. When he went into Mitchell's for Saturday-morning coffee with or without a girl, with the Chete or with Groarke, or occasionally even Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch, people stopped talking for a moment or two and then went on faster than ever. He knew that he was noted and it afforded him a very particular delight to see that Dymphna's table gave him the longest glances and that during the period of his first break with her she had always, on these occasions, to be very animated at his entry, going a little pale under the pressure of her talk.

It was a dreadful pleasure to him, really. He would collect the most attractive girl he could find and arrange for the coffee party well in advance. He would then stiffen up his crowd by gathering several other people from the second clinic and, casually, a few of the Arts men on his way through Front Square, so that by the time he had reached Mitchell's where Dymphna would surely be at a corner table, there would be seven or eight people with him, all dogged-up, and several attractive girls.

At the café he would get near to Dymphna's table and encourage all his crowd to talk about themselves by asking the right sort of questions and not saying too much himself. More and more people would accumulate round his table and eventually someone with a sporting connection would filch away one or two of Dymphna's party so that it seemed to him, and he
hoped to her, that the whole world of the University was attaching itself to him. At this point he would pay a good share of the bill and leave with a girl if he had one, or, if not, with Groarke. They would detach themselves quietly as though they did not want to spoil the party they had collected, as though they had elsewhere some other exciting concourse in hand.

Groarke did not care for this other iron in John's fire: the writing of papers and the making of speeches. He said, “It's splitting your forces, it'll rot you quicker than a woman.”

John did not tell him that, in a sense, it was a woman: that to some extent the Phil was a flanking attack on Dymphna, who coveted success in any form. He would have told him if Groarke had not been in love with Dymphna himself. He would have said. “Why have you started playing rugger, if not for the same reason?” But of course Groarke knew very well what was in his mind, though it was possible that he knew also how much more dangerous ‘the Phil' was than the Rugger Club.

Groarke read secretly: most morbid books. As a boy he had been forcibly steeped in Joyce by his father, later he had read for pleasure Corvo and Saki as well as the erotic literature of the period: Frank Harris, Lawrence and Hemingway. He quoted frequently and accurately from the poetry of Yeats and the early work of T. S. Eliot.

He rarely discussed what he was reading unless they were drinking together or going for a walk which, once John had started to work seriously again, he had consented to do by daylight.

They would take a bus out into the hills beyond Kingstown and walk in the Sunday twilight out through the suburbs into the true country. They would discuss the histology and the pathology of carcinoma and the chronic granulomata, textbooks of which they already possessed and read despite the fact that they would not be able to start the scheduled course until the following year. On such occasions Groarke would salt his theories with quotations from
The Dubliners
or dark lines from Yeats,
The Waste Land
or the
Cantos
of Ezra Pound.

The world would take on a mysterious quality, an unease, a nasty haunting which seemed to have a power of drawing actual events into its progress; so that, when it was over, John could
never be quite sure how much of it had been only ideas discussed and how much a reality encountered.

On one such Sunday when they had decided to walk out to Greystones, Groarke started talking about
The Green Child
by Herbert Read. He related the story of a man revisiting his childhood home and finding his memory of it confused, the river running backwards and the houses on the wrong side of the street; he went on to describe the narrator's descent through the surface of a pool into a world of dancers, sages and human crystals. Suddenly he stopped and said, “Lift me up by that wall.”

“Why?”

“I want to see what's over it.”

When John had lifted him he asked, “Well, what did you see?” and Groarke said, “A green baby,” and started to laugh under the tall trees which overhung the road.

“I don't believe you.”

“See for yourself,” Groarke had said, lifting him up.

It was true. There was a small boy on the grass in a clearing. He was wearing a little green knitted suit and standing perfectly still in front of the entrance to a dark shippon; before he made any movement at all Groarke let John down again and they went on their walk.

When they reached Greystones it was dark but they found an hotel open and went into a stone-floored conservatory converted into a bar. There were ferns standing in pots on tall circular stands and water troughs with gold fish swimming through their green weeds. There was only one other person in there, a grey-faced man of about fifty who was well on after several glasses of whiskey. He thought he recognized Groarke and started straight in on talking to them both.

“If you're Trinity,” he said, “you're sure to know my Christopher, my boy. The two'll you have known him in Trinity and how brilliant he was. Wasn't Christopher brilliant now? I'll bet you'll remember a thing or two he said or did. Wasn't he a great one for a joke and didn't he make them sharpen their tongues in the Historical Society when they was debating a good point?”

John said he did remember him because he had a distinct
memory of a young man with red hair who had always worn a green coat and been a leading light in the rival society.

“And he died in Baggott Street,” the father said. “Three weeks ago. Christopher died in Baggott Street of incipient defective endocarditis. You'd know what that is, being medical; but all I know is it killed Christopher and you know what he said when they called his mother and me in to see him die? Didn't I say to him, ‘You must pray on the name of Jesus, Christopher, to bring you to health. Jesus'll not fail you'; and what did Christopher say to that before he died? Didn't he whisper to his mother and myself, ‘Jesus!' What are you boys drinking? I'm old tonight, only fit to make a little spittle and wax, with Christopher dead; but I'll give you a drink. Students don't have much money, so you two'll have some of the drinks I was giving to Christopher when he got his honours as he would have got them surely as he whispered to his mother and me, ‘Why, Jesus is
with
me.' ”

They could not shake this man off. He seemed almost to have amused Groarke in some way, certainly he horrified John. They took two drinks off him and then ran out to get a bus back.

Groarke started talking about Streptococcus viridans and said that he'd never liked Martin in any case and that his father had been a full barrel before ever the strep had bitten the boy. He said, “What's to be done if for someone to synthesize a chemotherapeutic that will knock that strep as easily as Eckstair's prontosil knocks the others.” And then he said, “Defective endocarditis. Jesus!” imitating the old man in the bar and they both laughed.

Walks like this, meetings together when they were not working, gradually aroused in John a fresh fear of Ireland, or if not of Ireland, of Dublin. It reminded him of his early days at the Flynns', of the Clynche household, of James; it accrued to itself some essence of the atmosphere in Ffynchfort; it stretched a long arm back to the even more remote past: to Yorkshire, the lake, the moors and the murder of Victoria.

He would gladly, after such an incident, have dropped Groarke had he been able, but he would have been quite incapable of doing so even if Groarke had not been in love with
Dymphna and still seeing her from time to time, because Groarke's ambition, his great greed to success, the brilliance of his talent bent upon the course, drew John as the bright light draws the eye to the mirror of a microscope. To travel with Groarke was to overtake other people; his mind illumined Medicine in a manner which was sympathetic to John's own thinking but which yet avoided the distractions to which he himself was so prone.

With Groarke seeing Dymphna the lode was even more magnetic, the bond between them stronger. At times it seemed to John that since he himself had ceased permanently to see her it was unnatural of Groarke to continue to do so. He wondered how, since he and Groarke were so involved with one another, it could be possible for Groarke to continue in the affair at all, at least until it had somewhere been decided that she was permitted to John again. This, of course, was an entirely unreasonable conviction, but it had deep roots in their identification of themselves as more than uneasy friends, the sense they had of standing apart from the rest of the year in their talent, their ambition and their unexpressed but implicit scorn of nearly everyone else they met or knew.

The fact that from that suppertime onwards they could never directly refer to this matter again gave it a more constant presence in their minds, the power of a betrayal which is always being meditated upon simply because it is always being practised. Yet at the same time it made them seek one another out with more necessity and determination even than before. Each watched the other for the smallest signs of policy: Groarke's rugger-playing being as swiftly noted by John as were his own social activities by Groarke.

When Groarke cut a Friday-night session over Anatomy or Histology with John, or when John disappeared for a weekend or a dance with some other set scorned by or financially denied to Groarke, each would wonder on their next meeting where the other had been and what, if any, connection the absence might have had with Dymphna.

She herself did not leave John alone for long. Increasingly she put herself in his way. He would see her, strangely, coming
in through Back Gate when he was returning from a clinic, though she had never previously had occasion to use it. Often she would pass his rooms at lunchtime, the dark head going past the railed grass and her laughter audible, or some small thing she said to the girl she was with. Once she was on the bridge in St. Stephen's Green leaning against the stone with her sandwiches beside her, lobbing crusts onto the water for the Muscovy ducks. They had a good deep look at one another as he came up over the hump before she turned her back on him, leaning far over the water with her skirt ruckled against the parapet so that he saw her thighs above the hollows behind her knees.

But she made no more definite move to fetch him back to her glove until the day after the exam results came out at the end of the term. Then, dizzy with his success, honours in all four subjects and a paid demonstratorship in Zoology, he had snatched her letter out of the box in his rooms before Groarke could see it.

The letter still unread, they had gone to the Wicklow together and drunk Guinness until three o'clock, talking a thousand to the dozen, meeting up with Cloate later, in the Dolphin, who had given them cold tongue, potato salad and whiskey, listened to them, amused, and asked John about his activities in the Philosophical Society.

He had found no chance of opening the letter, no appropriate circumstance of reading it until he got back to his rooms late in the evening. When it came out of the envelope there were, as usual, drawings all down the margins of the page: girls' heads, all the same, with dark hair, drooping lashes and parted inky lips, telephone numbers and horses jumping gates. It did not say very much more than usual, either, until the last paragraph, where the lines slanted more steeply and illegibly up the reverse of the sheet. It said, “Congratulations on the exam. Why've you been so sombong lately (a Malayan expression of her cousin Emma's)? Just work or have you taken a skunner against us all?” She'd never say anything so direct as “against me.”

Then there was more about herself, “as shallow-brained as usual. Just as selfish: skimming the froth off life and not bothering
to be deep” and “aren't you getting a name for yourself, every issue of the
Miscellany
has something catty in it about you or what you've said.” Here there were three horses jumping gates and then the last paragraph.

“Don't honestly think I like not seeing you. Feeling very sad tonight because you never come up here and it's not the same just to hear about you or see you looking pale when you go past me never even smiling. All the different girls you're with: why must you?

“Dymphna.”

He did not see her that night because Palgrave, almost as though he had scented his good humour—a return of tolerance, brightness—had come in and taken him round to the Club. There they had met various influential members on the election committee before whom John's behaviour had been impeccable. The Marquis of Hattery had cracked a dozen jokes about the Catholic priesthood and the Pope; Jack Verulam told some anecdotes about the bloodstock sales and John described his flight with Greenbloom so graphically that even General Marriott switched on his deaf aid. When he reached the absurd anticlimax of having landed in The Curragh, under the impression they were thirty kilometres from Paris, he had the company by their ganglia.