Through Streets Broad and Narrow (19 page)

All this and more was the content of his thought when they were together. Over the two years in which they had been seeing one another this stormy climate had built itself up inside his head, not, “A certain concourse of light and cloud that would never come back,” but one which was always there, dimming when he was not with her for a long period, but sharpened and more brilliantly illumined when they were together again.

It was the weather under which he acted continuously, begetting a complex of its own: that of excitement, extreme hope, hopeless despair, recklessness, confusion, erratic bouts of hard work at his lectures and books and many phases of sloth. The emotional day in which he lived seemed never to have begun, it seemed never to end. He could not foretell what he was going to do at any particular instant of it. He was not happy, he was not unhappy, he was simply possessed.

All this strangeness and novelty which yet never became extraordinary or seemed new was with him that day as they sat in the Shamrock eating tea cakes and drinking tea in the headachy aftermath of the cinema. Dymphna was very restless and flippant; he sensed that she had a very good eye for the time and all at once he knew that she had not the inkling of a notion that he knew it.

A woman should have known when her secret intentions had been filched or stolen; it was not the quality of a man to be thus gifted. Had Victoria grown up she would have retained her sense of possession, would have seen the light in his eye, the certainty of his intuition as though he had suddenly put on her cap. But Dymphna could sit there bowing her pearls with a finger and never know that he had heard the note of her impatience as clearly as an orchestral dischord.

She said, “I've to be away now to the flat.”

So in the street with a Judas motion he took her hand and arm even closer then usual and bought her a bunch of small flowers from the woman under Nelson's Pillar while they were waiting for the tram.

He knew she was trying to think of some way of stopping his coming back to the flat and that it was beyond her to do so because it was the direct lie which she had always to avoid in order to feel honest in her dishonesty. He kept her in suspense till the very last minute, jumping from the tram in College Green saying only, “I'll see you on Monday or ring you tomorrow; I've got to get on with the paper tonight.”

Then as he walked away through Front Gate he remembered the flowers he had pinned to her coat. He knew she would have the sense to remove them before she met Groarke, but not the humility. They would stay there like a small bright face beneath her own, telling Groarke that she had been with him.

They were a present to Groarke from himself, he thought.

Back in his rooms he had to read over what he had written in his paper about the hospital. At first it was a great waste of time, the words and ideas which had so excited and amused him seeming now to be most callow and inept. But at a second reading he felt a pulse of conviction in the picture he had drawn of Mungo Park's, its organization and its Honorary Staff.

Tentatively he began to write a description of Cloate as he had once found him in the main theatre quite by himself; for the patient lying on the table with an exposed thigh painted melon yellow could not be said to have been there in Cloate's consciousness. The man was at this moment only an
objet d'art
, Cloate's
objet d'art
, from whose thigh he was peeling off silvery tissue grafts with a cut-throat razor.

At John's entry the surgeon, who was sitting there like a moustached Mayo girl at some piece of folk-sewing, began to whistle quietly to himself because he now had an audience. The theatre sister was in the sterilizing room, the patient was only locally anaesthetized, there were no housemen about and Cloate was obviously happy. He took no notice of John at all, which was annoying because at this moment he had for him a kind of
holiness. His idle dexterity in flaking off the gleaming foils of skin with time enough, and assurance, to whistle and ignore became the grossest insult. A good surgeon and young, translated now from out-patients' theatre to three rolls on the hall porter's gong and to the Sweepstake wing with its rubbered corridors, autoclaves, shadowless lights and terrazzo walls, a coming name but a nasty little man and frightening too.

John watched him for a moment, with the swiftly assumed humility of the student in the presence of the consultant, and tasted hatred like vinegar in his mouth as he visualized Cloate's complicit smile for Groarke if Groarke had entered in his stead. He realized for the first time how much he resented their relationship and how little he understood it. And Cloate whispered, “Tell sister I want her and then get out,” without so much as looking up.

There was something wrong here on a scale which rose out of the personal and tinged the general. Writing of it, a sharp rancour, a real malice crept into John's picture of the hospital. What had begun as a light satire gradually became a vicious destruction not only of the values of Mungo Park Hospital but of all the Dublin hospitals. He contrasted the ideal hospital of his imaginings with those of his experience, bringing out through his descriptions the dwarfed morality of the consultants who staffed them. He became so excited by the words and ideas pouring out onto the paper before him, by the suddenly discovered power of analysis and suggestion, that he tore up all he had written, took a fresh sheaf of foolscap and started again at the beginning.

He imagined his narrator showing a sagacious but untutored visitor round a typical Dublin Hospital, starting with a description of the proclamatory gong beats clattering through the Victorian wards.

He sketched in portraits of the consultant staff arriving in their large cars, the flutter of sisters, nurses and students round each man, the foibles of the physicians, the manifest vanity of the surgeons, the dreadful shaming of the patients between broad medical humour on the one hand and technical pomposity on the other.

His visitor asked more and more penetrating questions, incredulous and dismayed; his narrator, bland, self-assured and the self-victimized product of the system, made more and more of an odious fool of himself in his attempts to defend.

An authentic picture of Freddie Gibson losing his temper during a bowel resection before an audience of foreign students, kicking buckets across the tiled floor and blaspheming over the shrouded anaesthetized figure of the patient, was followed by an account of Macdonald Browne giving a talk on the placenta with all the coarseness of a drunken vet.

Senior students and housemen were lightly lampooned; outpatients from the slums were herded into gleaming “sweep”—subsidized departments waiting in silence for consultants to press their desk buzzer and buttons; corpses were wheeled to mortuaries through a barrage of intolerable jokes, pathologists fumbled in old-fashioned laboratories with specimens from countless biopsies; venereal clinics in gas-lighted outhouses with outdated equipment queued long for injections and lavage.

Finally a remedy was sketched in. Not only the bulldozing of the hospitals squatting in their slums followed by the proper expenditure of the money on airy buildings in green belts, not only slum clearance and judicious birth control, but a course in philosophy, aesthetics and Confucian behaviour for all consultants before they were allowed to take up public appointments.

When he eventually got to bed he felt so light that he fancied without the bedclothes he might have floated up to the ceiling with a few lazy strokes and out through the window into Botany Bay.

He went through the transitions of his paper with a kind of delight which he had never known before. It was like thinking about Dymphna when things were going well; yet it was better because there was no chance of the paper later causing him pain. But more than this, there was a quality in most of it which he knew transcended the drudgery and ordinariness of all his earlier writing. Re-reading certain passages he became like Aladdin in the cave; the gleam of light from the antique lamp suddenly revealing sparkling treasure in the accustomed darkness, a sense of all things owed to him having been suddenly repaid. He
thought, Beyond all I superficially know and experience, not a grain can fall to the ground uncounted. These jewels of pleasure and pain which burn in the darkness are building slowly all the time and I have access to them at will. Greenbloom was right. I am a writer.

The next day when he had finished his lectures and clinics he went down to the gymnasium, changed and put on boxing gloves. He spent an hour hitting the punch bag, skipping and shadow-boxing, then had a cold shower and returned, glowing, to a revision of all he had written the night before. In places it struck him that he had gone too far and he discovered that with the greatest facility he was able to replace overstatement by accurate satire without in the least lessening either mordancy or wit. He knew again the sense of mastery he had experienced the night before, finding that he had only to seek a certain concept for a flood of words, of synonyms, of alternative phrases to present themselves and be transferred to the paper beneath his hand. He carefully made the consultants just unprovably recognizable, he touched his description of Mungo Park's in such a way that it loured like an archetype over all the city's hospitals: equivocal, dark, dreadful, an institution created not so much out of malice as out of stupidity.

Here and there he detected touches of Erewhonian description, similarities to the earlier novels of Cronin, but in the main the hospital he had created was his own and the men who brilliantly gambolled, cursed and joked their way through its wards and departments, grotesque masks of their human prototypes: skilled, absurd, a little sinister, not quite identifiable either to their enemies or to their friends, least of all to themselves, though certainly discernible to the students to whom, after all, the paper was addressed.

Any other misgivings he may have had were covered by his remembrance that the Association had itself awarded its silver medal to Margaret May in the preceding year for a paper which had made great fun of the Baggott Street staff. In assessing this he did not consciously remember that the prizewinner was both a Dubliner herself and extremely pretty; but in any case his
delight in his newly found talent blinded him to any further dangers which he might incur from it.

Each evening during the remainder of that week he trained sedulously in the gymnasium. He met a whole different set of students, or of students radically changed by enthusiasm. There was Condor, a great dullard in his own year who was fitness-mad. He bounded round the playing fields with towels round his neck, his long ostrich legs flashing over the grass; he knocked the punch bag about so fast that it could only be heard, he skipped like a great rosy girl and had bottles of liniment for every sort of sprained tendon and pulled muscle. There was Kerruish from the South, the wickedest southpaw in the Universities, whose favourite trick it was to start off a fight right-handed and then floor his opponent with a straight left as sudden as an Act of God. There was also a quiet man named Cosby who was reading modern languages and practising Buddhism.

These and four or five others, when they saw that John's visits to their building were earnestly regular, adopted him much as the Salvation Army adopts a person who wanders once too often into one of their temples. Kerruish knocked him about in the ring once a week and put him down to fight in the Novice's Welterweight at the end of term; Condor taught him footwork and wall drill, Cosby instructed him in breathing exercises and the attainment of what he called “one-pointedness” of mind.

Nobody, except Kerruish, discussed medicine, women or books; everyone except Kerruish measured their chests and what they drank. Kerruish, being the Inter-Universities champion, could discuss what he liked. He had the broad forehead and the curled hair of a bull, out of a square dimpled jaw his teeth gleamed whiter than a negro's and his shoulders were so hunched with muscle that it was said he'd been born carrying a sack of wheat. He came from a small farm in Oughterard and was a catholic of terrible propensity, having a score of girls, a great devotion to the children of Fátima and plentiful supplies of money. He was in the year ahead of John and gave him generous advice about Dymphna.

“When we've made a man of you, that one'll never know what hit her. What's the good of a girl marrying English brains if
there's no Irish hammer to the nail? It's good to be clever but it's better to be fit; that way you don't need to think all the time. Come out in the ring now and knock me down.”

“You know damn well I can't.”

“When Dymphna sees you flooring some other fellow in the Novices' she'll take you home and d'you know what she'll do for you?”

“No.”

“Sure, she'll buy you a Knight's tie,” said Kerruish, putting his head back. “What did you think I was going to say?”

“I'm not a Knight,” John said.

“Then I'll make you one. Only one word from me and t'would be enough. You'd be an all-rounder, brains and brawn. You've only to knock down someone in the Novices and you'll be one of us. A few more weeks, a bit more in your right glove and you'll make a pretty welter for me to second—personally.”

“Who would I have to fight?”

“We'd put you in against someone boned like yourself. You could scrap well with Cosby, he's a book boy, too, trying to walk round his own shadow.”

“All right.”

“Well from now on then, no more sparring with him. Fighting's like making love, you've to save for it.”

Groarke was grim about all this. “Face it,” he said, “you'll never be a muscle man, you've got a pathological squint. It's Wimpole Street for us, where the thoughtful sort hang up their plates; we'll never make the rugger and sex of Harley Street.”

“Kerruish thinks—”

“Who's Kerruish? He'll end up in the Indian Medical Service and be pensioned off with cirrhosis by the time he's fifty.”