Through Streets Broad and Narrow (21 page)

“What did you think, Mike?”

“It was all I expected and more.”

“How d'you mean?”

“Clever,” said Groarke, “but you know that already. Why d'you have to keep on proving it—so loudly?”

“It was only a joke.”

“Not that. It was more than a joke, and it wasn't funny enough.”

“But they loved it.”

“It wasn't serious enough, either,” said Groarke. “It was that nasty thing somewhere in between a dwarf and an acromegalic—the sort of freak people don't care to see on the street—”

“You mean you think it's going to cause trouble?”

“—not in their houses, certainly; not in their hospitals.”

“I went too far?”

“You went so far that I doubt if you'll ever come back. Jameson got hold of me just before we left. He's fond of you, he liked our work in the Anatomy department, he asked me why
on earth I'd let you read it. He said, ‘I'm a Scot, an old one; if I was a not-so-old Irishman, with the memory of an Irishman, I might take that very badly! Tell your friend Blaydon not to let that paper out of his hands.' ”

“But I have already,” said John. “Why the hell didn't you tell me sooner?”

“Then get it back,” said Groarke as they parted outside John's door.

The next morning there was a letter from Father. It read in part:

About your prosed paper, thesis, essay to the University Biological Association (unless by the abbreviation “Bi” you mean the Biochemical Society), presumably also a student body (verb sap.), I would be very careful in the choice of terms you employ if, as you suggest, you intend or are “determined to take the mickey out of the staff in a lightly facetious way.”

In this context, as I may once have told you, when I was “up” for a living at my old College (Corpus Christi), in 1922 and was invited to dine at the Fellow's table (prior to my interview with the President), on
Corpus Christi Sunday
, I innocently asked my neighbour if in view of the Feast it was to be a special dinner. The Fellow who in this instance had no cause to like me (since I beat him to an alpha plus in History in '96), whispered my question behind his hand to his neighbour, “He asks if this to be a special dinner”? and so it went on all round the table to the President himself who professed to think I had intended the Foundation an insult. I did
not
secure the preferment! The moral undoubtedly being, never give your enemies a handle which they may use against you! Beware!

But despite this, and despite the night's misgivings, John was sanguine in the bright sunshine which overlay his walk to Mungo Park that morning. What matters, he thought, is the fact that I
made
the paper. I'll get it back at lunchtime, and put it away in a drawer somewhere. I'll write something better than that next time, probably something technical, I can find the words for anything and I'm always original, so nothing really matters. I've proved myself now to the Medical School and the hospitals
as well as to the Arts side. I've only to do reasonably well in the boxing at the end of the term and I'll get Dymphna. Groarke is jealous, of course; he realizes that I have a talent extra which he can never hope to possess himself. As for the staff: what little they hear they'll soon forget.

From this he went on to feel annoyed that neither Gibson, Cloate, Harman nor Macdonald Browne would ever read the paper themselves. With their identities so firmly established as surgeons, obstetricians and physicians they could afford to be magnanimous and it would be pleasant to know that they had seen with their own eyes the portrait made of them by an apparently insignificant student. There would be an element of comedy, a little flash of human warmth, between the observer and the observed when next one of them threw him a question during a clinic or lecture.

Everyone, John was convinced, liked to feel that he was an object of special interest to someone else, a character with defects, perhaps, but nicely, even warmly appreciated just the same. As for Bethelgert and his friends, they could do little harm; it would be good for them to know that their pomposity and time-serving, their sedulous cultivation of the men in power was narrowly watched and that the general distaste for it was now so vocal that a rival, less privileged group, had united against them. When it came to the allotment of house jobs after qualification, the plums need no longer go always into the same laps. There would have to be a little more subtlety too in the distribution of student residencies, the crack surgeons not necessarily seizing the sons of the most socially influential fathers with the richest private practices.

Persuading himself in this way, it was not long before John decided it would do no harm for the paper to circulate a little longer. It had not been fully appreciated by the Bi itself; no one, with the exception of Lynch and Groarke, had apparently detected its profound undertones. Anyone mature, reading it, would sense this other level immediately. If, for instance, Hansom were to read it, Hansom, the secretary of the hospital and the regius Professor of Medicine, he might conceivably bear some of its more cogent points in mind at the next board meeting.
He might even incorporate a minute or two about serving cups of tea to the out-patients during their three hours' attendance, or, better still, institute an appointments system so that they were not kept waiting so long. He might go so far as to bring the point about the slums to the notice of the Medical Officer of Health who in turn might raise the issue in the Dail.

John thought warmly of Hansom: his stammer, his sadly large collars and skilled purple hands. Perhaps Hansom had polycythaemia or something worse; perhaps that voluminous clinical memory, that capacity for an exact swoop upon a difficult diagnosis, that greatness of compassion, were all housed in a body as delicate as the personality was shy. If Hansom were to see the paper he would realize at once that, despite the callowness of its portraiture, it had been conceived by an ally with a mind as flexible as his own. He might even appoint John as his own resident when the time came next term. That would be a blow to the Bethelgert group; though of course, John, in the event, would probably back out of it on some pretext so as to uphold his own incorruptible principles.

But really, he decided for the last time, none of this mattered at all, it was simply a beguiling fantasy. What did matter was that he would inevitably gain ground with Dymphna and that in the future, for all time, he would know that he was gifted with an accurate power of expression.

As it happened the paper was not returned to him until a week later when Montgomery, one of the more unpleasant of the hospital toadies, came into his rooms with it.

“How did
you
get hold of it?” John asked him.

“It was given to me by Hansom yesterday. He asked me to return it to the writer.”

“That's me.”

“Exactly.”

“Why not say so?”

Montgomery smiled. “I used the words Hansom used. He did not say ‘Blaydon,' he said, ‘the writer.' ”

“What did he think of it?”

“I've no idea.”

“Did anyone else read it?”

“The staff.”

“Did they make any comment?” John was leafing through the crumpled pages. “Good God! Someone's been underlining with a pencil.”

“That would probably be Macdonald Browne or Cloate or Gibson.”

“Didn't any of them say anything?”

“How should I know?”

“You brought it back. Presumably, as usual, you were in the staff room, so presumably you should know.”

“Perhaps I do.”

“Well then, for God's sake! Were they amused, annoyed or what?”

“I think you'll probably find out yourself, at a later date.”

“B—” said John. “Look! Would you mind getting out? I don't know how you came into this, I never lent the paper to you, nor did I say that it was to go the rounds at Mungo Park's. It's old history now; but it still belongs to me; I wrote it and I own it. If I could remember who took it from me, or find out who gave it to you, I'd probably sock him, but since I can't, I might decided to sock you instead, so you'd better go.”

“At our age,” Montgomery said, “problems are not solved by athletic pretensions. Yours certainly won't be; if I'm not mistaken about the feeling at Mungo Park's.”

“Oh, get out.”

“With pleasure!”

“You're only half alive, Montgomery. I'll tell you your fortune: you'll graduate from Burton's to Tyson's for your shirts, you'll exchange a little short-arsed car for a long-arsed car. Provided Hitler doesn't march into Czechoslovakia and start a European war, you'll move in from Dundrum to Merrion Square when you're appointed junior physician at Baggott Street in nineteen forty-one. You'll cure three hundred people and kill half a dozen, and make no difference one way or the other to the remaining ten thousand who've consulted you. You'll marry that ghastly nurse with the blackheads and the Switzers' accent, have two children and thirteen hundred contraceptives and take
out three insurance policies totalling seven thousand pounds. You'll stick to Ontodent for your teeth and ung; hamamelidis for your patients' piles. When you die of a coronary in nineteen seventy-three you'll leave a gross estate of twenty-five thousand pounds, a son with spectacles and a Masonic apron. The hymns sung at your funeral will be—”

But Montgomery had gone and John was late for Kerruish's practice round in the gymnasium.

He was really feeling very fit at this time, having kept up his training more or less constantly throughout the term. There was a confidence in his degree of health which, temporarily at least, allowed him to pass unscathed through the aftermath of the paper. He began to think there really was something in what Groarke called the muscle staft, the once-odious “corpore sano” of Beowulf's; it enabled a man to ride the shadows, the unremitting barrage of self-questioning to which the mind was subject. To be oneself, organized, a doer and sayer, rising sharply in the mornings with a growing confidence in one's ability to hit fast and hard if necessary, was a good escape from pusillanimity into all manner of certainty.

He really didn't worry very much about the hospital or the paper at all. Instead he saw a good deal more of Cosby and discussed Buddhism with him.

Cosby was writing a Buddhist novel. Each evening he would eat a vegetarian supper in his rooms, then clear the table meticulously and get out his manuscript. He would say, “You'll have to go now—I have sixty-five minutes' writing to do.”

“Can't you put it off? I wanted to discuss a rather peculiar experience I had in bed last night. I was doing the breathing exercises and the meditation when—”

“One does not put things off,” Cosby said. “There must be a due order in the observances. I have to start in exactly seven minutes.”

“How do you know you'll be able to do it?”

“Do what?”

“Write whatever you're going to write?”

“I have my schedule.” He produced a large board covered with foolscap and drawing pins. The foolscap was divided into ruled columns headed:

DATE. SCENE. CHARACTERIZATION. DIALOGUE. PLOT DEVELOPMENT.

Under the date of that particular day it read:

SCENE: Malaya—Kuala Lumpur—jungle—organ music (ice cream incident).

CHARACTERIZATION: Development of Rupert's sexual difficulties vis-a-vis Mrs. Spencer (Helena). Husband's impotence tic (the always wet palms).

DIALOGUE: E's quest for meaning, delicate necessity of telling R of F's inhibitions. (Mem: P to I.)

PLOT DEVELOPMENT: R's increasing realization of the poverty of the senses. Her half-consent before final assault on “him.”

“How fascinating,” John said. “By the way, what does P to I mean?”

“Oh, a reference, that's all.”

“What to?”

“Forster's
A Passage to India
, if you must know. I'm not borrowing from it, it's simply there to remind me not to.”

“I don't see why you shouldn't—if you like it. I think it's a damned good book.”

“Fool's Purgatory
is to be something new, a
novel,”
Cosby said. “In any case, plagiarism is entirely against zen principles. The Buddha—”

“One other thing,” John interrupted, “if you don't think I'm being too inquisitive—Where it says, ‘the always wet palms' does that mean trees in the jungle or—”

“No,” said Cosby with a trace of irritation, “it is a psychological implication of Rupert's state of mind when he's with Helena. It refers to his hands. But really I must ask you to go. I like always to do at least three minutes' meditation before I start my composition.”

“I'll see you in the gym, then, tomorrow. I'm rather worried about our fighting one another next week. I mean, naturally, I don't want you to win, on the other hand, I'll feel an awful swine if I knock you about too much after reading all this nonviolence stuff in the books you've lent me.”

“One has to pass through violence into non-violence. Personally, at this stage, I have no qualms at all about inflicting whatever punishment I can. I expect you to feel the same.”

“I wish I did.”

Cosby laid both his hands palm upwards on the table, a sign that he was going to ask a significant question, “Why precisely do you not want me to win?”

“Because Dymphna will be there.”

“I imagined that would be your answer.”

“D'you think it's immature of me?”

“I don't think immaturity even comes into it,” Cosby said. “With a motive like that you haven't even
begun.”

“You're dead right. But I don't mind telling you that whoever wins I'm going to begin—the same night. I've waited about long enough for her.”

“And by that I presume you mean you are going to possess the wretched child?”