Through Streets Broad and Narrow (27 page)

What at that moment, on that particular night, had been in Groarke's mind? How could John possibly have known either then or so much later as they stood a moment at Front Gate and Groarke reiterated his advice about telephoning Dr. Hansom?

Groarke squeezed with him into the green kiosk, labelled TELEFON in Gaelic and when he had replaced the receiver said, “Curt?”

“Very.”

“But he'll see you?”

“Yes,
alone
at seven this evening.”

Groarke nearly sniggered; he would have sniggered if he had been a sniggering person, when he said, “I'll come along with you and wait in Merrion Square.”

“You know well I don't want that.”

And Groarke had gone off back to Kingstown taking his unreadable face with him.

It would be very satisfactory to tell him the next morning that Hansom had relented; that he, John, had conducted the interview very skilfully, not climbing down too fast or too far, but forcing Hansom to admit by implication that the paper had been too shrewd to be ignored; that such ability was worth having once it had been schooled; that Mungo Park's, through this spokesman, had demanded only its surgical pound of flesh and not a drop of spilled blood.

If Groarke had been going forward to that interview with Hansom he would have had a drink on the way, an even stiffer one than he had taken that night at Lady Arlington's.

Whereas John had diluted a little crême de menthe with a deep splash of mineral water, Groarke had drunk so large a glassful of neat liqueur that John had warned, “You'll be so drunk you won't be able to do anything by the time we're fixed up.”

“With who?” Groarke asked contemptuously.

“These women with clothes on.”

“I'm not interested.”

Long before he had half emptied his emerald glass, Groarke had retreated into, or perhaps made substantial for himself, his own particular world; the savage reality he preferred to inhabit.

We're certainly not together, John had thought, I've brought Dublin with me to Paris.

Groarke went over to Lady Arlington and put his drink on the mantelpiece beside her fat grey arm. He eyed her insolently for a few moments and then said, “What are we waiting for?”

Lady Arlington gave him a most sagacious glance. It could not be said that she favoured him with it. She said merely, “Un quart d'heure.”

“That's too long,” Groarke said in the same cold way.

The whites of her eyes were as yellow as a sick Negro's. When you came to look at her cheeks carefully they were neither green nor mauve nor brown, they were like the mixture a child achieves on the lid of its paintbox after half an hour on a rainy afternoon. She had another look at Groarke and smiled.

“You have the great impatience, n'est-ce pas? But your friend is
imperturbable
. It is the quiet man who has the greatest appetite.”

Groarke said nothing and Lady Arlington heaved her corseted body and strapped breasts in a heavy laugh.

“C'est un mauvais quart d'heure, but it will be worth the waiting. You will find Louise and Genevieve very expressive indeed, messieurs.”

The last word took in John as well. He said, “I wish to God you'd come and sit down, Mike.”

Groarke had another drink, he emptied his glass completely and said to Lady Arlington, “So the older they are the more expensive they come?”

“Comment?”

“How much, for instance, would it cost to have a very experienced, a hydraulic, diabolical old bag of forty-five to fifty like my Foxrock aunt?”

She made nothing of this but she did not like his tone and did not mistake the expression of his face. She grew visibly, puffing herself out, giving him one most venomous look, a look which by its very brevity bespoke such authority and power, so malign a knowledge of sons and husbands, that he should have been warned.

John got up. “We'd better go, Mike.”

“Sit down.”

“You're drunk, remember where we are.”

Groarke howled at this and through his laughter John shouted, “I mean we're in a foreign country, you fool. If there's a row we might end up in jail and the English newspapers. Our tickets expire tomorrow.”

Groarke moved up closer to Lady Arlington. She took one step backwards.

Groarke said, “I want you, Madame,
you!
You're so ugly that it would be beautiful. You make me sick; I'm dizzy with the sight of you, you're all the women I ever had nightmares about, you're a ravishing sow, you're all Joyce immortalized.”

Before she could retreat further he got his arm round her, a bear grip, and started plastering her face with kisses and snorting down her neck.

She bit his nose and grabbed the bell sash. Groarke got his fists beneath her buttocks and trundled her across to the sofa; they fell on it so ponderously that two of its legs collapsed. The purple bell sash, broken off at the ceiling, trailed across the carpet from Lady Arlington's convulsive hand and Groarke whispered, “Trail! Trail! your fingers in the light.”

With all his weight on her and one arm round her neck Groarke with the other was pulling up the hem of her skirts to disclose her pale-green thighs.

John jumped on his back and heaved his head backwards; he was trying to choke him off in the crook of his arm when the door opened and two small but compact Frenchmen came into the room.

They were very ugly and talked briefly but fast. The stockier one, who proved to be Lady Arlington's husband, though in point of years he could well have been her son, was very angry indeed. He dragged John off Groarke and stood by while his friend tackled the Irishman, who elbowed himself up on Lady Arlington's belly to see what was going on and then evidently decided to fight. He punched the Frenchman in the solar plexus and the man sat down by one of the occasional tables almost as though he were profoundly considering the situation and what he would do next. Then he fell from a sitting position onto his back, knocking over the table behind him, and lay there with a blue face. Groarke at once embraced Lady Arlington afresh, chewing at her right ear despite the spiky star-shaped earring she was wearing. Her husband, temporarily transfixed by rage and astonishment, said something in French and Groarke shouted back, “Voyeur!”

Forgetting John, the Frenchman leapt across to the sofa and, from behind, gripped Groarke briefly round the neck in a curiously delicate manner, and then stood back to await results. Whatever he had done to Groarke's cervical ganglia in that moment must have been painful for the Irishman rocketed off the sofa and launched a right at the smaller man's jaw. More quickly than a cat clawing down a fly, his opponent grasped the speeding fist with both his hands, jerked it onwards over his shoulder and simultaneously doubled himself up into a crouching position; he appeared to spill Groarke neatly across his back with the result that his head hit the carpeted floor four feet away.

The man waited for him to revive sufficiently to want to sit up, assisted him tenderly, then gave him a rabbit punch on the back of the neck and laid him down again. When John saw this he ran over to Lady Arlington's bureau and seized her marble blotting-roller. He brought it down on top of the Frenchman's head.

For a moment, apart from the heavy breathing of four of its occupants, there was complete silence in the room. Then the maid came in and shrieked. Lady Arlington sat up and started shouting, the maid disappeared and came back with the concierge, a bottle of smelling salts, a taper and some feathers, the concierge hissed and came back with a bottle of scarlet liquid and five of the girls in ballet skirts. They crowded, chattering and exclaiming, into the room, behaving tragically, saying “Merde!” “Mon Dieu!” and “Ma foi!” They clustered round Lady Arlington on the lopsided sofa like white ants round the vast larval body of their queen, patting her cheeks, proffering her cordials and waving burning feathers beneath her nose.

Lady Arlington's husband sat up for a moment, greatly to John's relief, and then lay down again. Groarke started muttering about his Foxrock aunt and with John's help got to his feet.

He said, “Where is she?”

John said, “She's gone downstairs. Come on quick.”

They fought their way out through the ranks of the women, stumbled together down the stairs, traversed the hall and let themselves out into the street where John said, “We've got to run like hell; I may have fractured a man's skull. We'll have to get our things out of the hotel tonight and catch a train back to Calais.”

“What man?”

“The one they were calling Monsieur Arlington.”

“Christ, how did you do it?”

“With an old-fashioned blotting-roller but he sat up just before we left, so he'll be all right, won't he? I couldn't possibly have murdered him, Groarke, not if he sat up?”

They were still running.

Groarke said, “Where did you hit him?”

“On the head, along the sagittal suture.”

On the train Groarke, dissociating himself from the whole affair, discussed cranial injuries; and on the ship between Calais and Dover they dropped their unopened supply of contraceptives into the Channel.

Dr. Hansom's house and consulting rooms were not very far
from Dymphna's flat and this proximity induced in John an extreme unease. In knocking at Hansom's door to ask him for residence in Mungo Park's, the preliminary to Finals, he was also seeking to gain admission to Dymphna's affection; nor did it escape him on the walk round Merrion Square, made such countless times on his way to meet her, that he associated her not only with the hospital's rejection of him but also with his last sight of the women in the brothel who had gone so swiftly from disinterest to hard-eyed hostility that he still shuddered when he thought of it.

Groarke said, “Listen, you'd have loved Paris if you'd had a successful love affair there. As it is you didn't even get a whore,” and, “Listen, d'you know what the Eternal City is? It's where you had a woman; Babylon or Manchester.”

Hansom stammered a little. At first you would say a stammering man, therefore a very diffident man, nothing to be frightened of. But you were wrong; it was all Hansom's negatives which made him stammer. He had said no to so much or had it said for him. No to marriage and whiskey, no to rugby football and books, no to intimacy, friendship and obvious sin, no to considerable money, no to everything except his career, which had meant work and ill health. The result was a great clinician but a soured little man.

He stammered and stammered in his consulting room, staccato as a toy machinegun popping and shooting down its targets. He would not at first admit that Mungo Park's had blackballed John on account of the paper, but he spoke about
esprit de corps
and did not once look at him, so John looked at himself in the consulting-room mirror and was temporarily comforted by the contrast. It was not until afterwards that it occurred to him: I should have gone in my oldest clothes looking as thin, unhealthy and ugly as possible; it would have made it easier for him.

At the very end when it seemed that there was nothing left to lose he had said, “Well, sir, I've to write to my parents tonight. If I can't get in somewhere I shall obviously have to leave and go to some other University. Do you think, sir, I have any chance of getting into Mungo Park's next week or not?”

“I shall of course-course have to contrasult the Board at the next meet-meeting. It is a question of vacacancies purely.”

“Nobody else, sir, to my knowledge, has ever been stopped residence in his own hospital. You mentioned
esprit de corps
so it must have been my paper that caused you—the board—to strike my name off the list when I first applied. Since then I've tried every hospital in Dublin, that's to say all the recognized teaching hospitals—”

“Sussceptissussibilities were hurt. Certain loyola-loyalties must obtain. I shall tacake the matter up with the hospital board—”

“But I must know soon, sir. For my parents, hundreds of pounds may be involved. I've said nothing to them so far because they think I'm doing well; I
was
doing quite well, sir?”

Hansom said, “I think you will be accexterpated if you care to app-comply again next week.”

Rubbing his mauve hands comfortlessly, irritably, he showed John out into the Square.

The first month in Mungo's had been hell but he did not realize it until it was over and the second month began. Even then the hellishness of it was not obtrusive, or if at times it was, then he did not appreciate it because he did not realize that its underlying tone was intentional.

He was kept very much on the run by Frank de Burgh White, the house physician, and by White's chief, the consultant, Dr. Lait. When he was on casualties he was yelled at a good deal and if he made some clinical error in opening a boil or carbuncle the attention of the surgeon seemed always to be drawn to it by someone or other; his mistakes were never even buried skin deep in the tremendous turnover of the department.

But because he was so greatly enjoying the work and intrinsically had never expected even competence at the ultimate practice of medicine, still believing himself a charlatan every time he picked up a scalpel or tied the tapes of his mask, the muttered imprecations, the eyes searching ceilings for a word to describe his ineptitude, the recurrent angry summonses to wards and departments all seemed less than unjustified; they seemed to be routine.

At this time he was excessively gay, believing that there was no malice in him nor anything considerable at all. He even at first believed that he was popular in the sense of a prodigal returned. The white coat with the stethoscope in the pocket; responsibility at the bottom of the scale for a number of ward beds, the nervy delight of casualty duty; all so satisfied his mind that he unconsciously rode countless rebuffs and remained happier for longer than he had ever been before. He ate enormously and talked.