Through Streets Broad and Narrow (3 page)

And water in the tap, he thought, as he went up to his bedroom to brush and brilliantine his hair before going down to the Clynches', whom he had met on that first weekend with George through an introduction of Molly Fagan's, an Irish friend of Mother's. He had remembered the Clynche family ever since because he had liked the look of both the daughters, Aileen, the elder one, and Theresa, the younger.

At the time of his first visit in 1934, Aileen had been married about three months to a young doctor called Dennahay who was serving abroad somewhere in the British Air Force. She showed him her rings and kept telling him how wonderful marriage was. One afternoon, when Theresa was on duty in the hospital where she worked, Aileen had taken him on the open tram out to Howth Head and on the way back had shown him her honeymoon photographs. They were very tempting: mostly of her in a hotel bedroom in a filmy nightdress looking tired and made up, one or two of her lying in the heather with her hair down or posed on a rock. There were none of her husband and John had asked her why.

“What'd be the difference in a man?” she had replied. “Aren't most of them on a permanent honeymoon from the time they grow up? Now look at this one! Those are the earrings Anthony gave me—the last present I'll have until he gets his leave next year.”

“Does Theresa want to get married?” he had asked.

“She wouldn't know yet; she's so young.”

“She's very pretty.”

“She will be all right but she doesn't have a thought of such things—being a dedicated probationer at the Children's Hospital.”

“Even with all your mother's lodgers rushing in and out?”

“The students have to pass their exams.”

“So did your husband, presumably?”

“Anthony never dated me until he was in his fourth year.”

They had held hands on the way back; but Aileen had made it quite clear that she would go no further. That night, indeed for several weeks afterwards, he was troubled by thoughts of being
qualified, married and on a Lake District honeymoon with Theresa wearing earrings and makeup. He was troubled because it couldn't possibly come true for another six or seven years and probably wouldn't even then.

But when he reached their house that evening almost a year later it was the same as ever, taking the domestic pattern it had assumed that first weekend so long ago and maintaining it throughout the whole of his Theresa phase.

For one thing, twelve months ago the two elder Clynche boys, Brittas and James, had been charged with making a new basement lavatory for their mothers' lodgers and there had been jokes about it even then. This lavatory was never completed; it was in keeping with the plans for Brittas which never wavered simply because the target was never specified. It was only understood that he was working these last three years in the coal office in O'Connell's Quay “strictly pro tem” before going somewhere else that would be “intirely executive.” He appeared to like John in a tired way and John, responding to this, came to dread the weekends when Brittas wasn't there, only James and Kevin, the youngest, and the bridge party upstairs in Theresa's bedroom.

James was long-faced and even more tired than Brittas. John never discovered what he did but it was very obvious that he detested it, that it filled him with the greatest hatred for everything he disliked and most particularly Englishmen, with good clothes, hanging round his sister Theresa. Later, when the conversational undertone of Dublin had become familiar to him, the long slow monotone about the Six Counties, “Dev” and the Post Office Rising and the Black and Tans, John began to understand the set of James' chin and the grey look he had about his ingoing mouth whenever he heard an English accent. It was very easy to imagine him standing armed by a park wall with a Unionist peer somewhere on the other side of it, or organizing a dawn execution in the Phoenix Park.

Fortunately, the rest of the family made him very welcome in their different ways. Kevin smoked his cigarettes, Brittas pulled his leg gently while old Brigid, when she was “dummy,” came down from the bridge party and talked at a great rate
through her unpinned white hair. She was usually in what she called her “dishabille”; a long black dress of some sort ash-patched from her cigarettes and strewn with the hairs which were not so much white as yellow from the fumigation of her Sweet Afton cigarettes.

Really her body was very ugly and unkempt; it didn't do to concentrate on any part of it below the chin. She had quite forgotten her feet and legs, wearing any old bedroom slipper or tramped-down shoe with terrible stockings. Care and some presence of mind began at the hips with corsets and a fairly regular brassière which could be seen askew over her abandoned breasts. But she did remember her face. Though devoid of makeup, it was always washed and full of fire and enthusiasm for one thing or another; for her children, lineage, her bridge hands, or a horse she had backed.

It never struck John until much later, when he had moved on and up into the deep country and met the County, that Brigid Clynche was no more than an Irish slattern dragging up her family between Mass and the cards while her husband fried the Limerick bacon in the basement. When it did strike him it still was not true.

He did not often go up to the bridge room but he caught the essence of it from Groarke's Foxrock aunt, who, he discovered, had been an habituée of it for years. They were all tea women up there, smoking smoking smoking their dangling Sweet Aftons and drinking drinking the best tea in the British Isles. Most of them were in their late forties at the really grand stage where their bodies bulged and their eyes were full and they had so much experience and sharpness to get across in between hands that their scoring was always in doubt because of the ardour of their talk. It was his impression that their fat racy gatherings were quite sexless, that they were in some strange sense similar to their Massings, a great gaggle of mothering wives or widows, counting their cards as they counted their beads waiting for sure Heaven when the games and absurdities were over for ever.

Aileen had her own room at the top of the house somewhere and he was rarely in there. It was a perch where she waited and preened like a Madame Butterfly dreaming of her Pinkerton and
storing the wages she earned in Switzers' dress department. When things were going badly for him with Theresa, which was all the time, she would listen to his confidences and advise him sadly and quite uselessly. She would say, “Ah, she's young, John, she's never been out of Ireland yet. You'll just have to wait and not frighten her or make her suspicious and she'll learn to trust you.”

Trust me, he thought, looking at Theresa and listening to the misty sound of her voice. What's the good of taking her to the Theatre Royal weekend after weekend, having coffee at the Shamrock and then tramming back here to James and Kevin yawning in the cigarette smoke? What shall I tell her about, talk of? I've told her everything and listened to everything: the baby who had a pyloric stenosis in her ward, what the surgeon said, and it's Kevin's birthday Tuesday.

It's myself I want to put across to her, that's all. Why can't she be interested in me? Filled with admiration at all the things I've told her about the past and the infinite possibilities of my future? I want to drop all this swanking and everything and be permanently admired like Pinkerton. On the films they get accepted; they don't have to talk all the time, the girls just fall for them. It's understood. And then he would hear her laugh at something or catch the clarity of her eyes and think, Good God! she should have been at my feet months ago. I come from England, I have what must seem an awful lot of money, I've travelled and the steward said I was good-looking. What's more she's only a probationer nurse at the Children's Hospital and I'm going to be—he would shoot a long line about his medical ambitions and she would half-listen with her eyes and say nothing.

She was a bird on a perch and you couldn't get a bird on a perch. He tried to cage her in with words and feed her with the seeds of a consuming admiration so that then they should start. He never specified what it was that they should start; it certainly was not marriage at this stage. It was just love; love as warming, active and uncircumscribed as the loves of others appeared to be, the loves of the films which lasted a couple of hours or a lifetime, several months or a weekend. Something to be sure of, a circle without beginning or end of admiration, necking, talks and silences; unordained but necessary, essential.

She would hardly ever let him kiss her, and when he did she gave nothing. She just stopped thinking her bird-like thoughts for a moment, or singing the song that was quiet as a robin's, and pecked at the ant of his kiss and pushed him away. He lusted after her exceedingly.

The lust kept him going long after all other desires had starved of inanition. It was a curious thing, more or less the residue of a sort of poetry; or if not the lees of this excitation, then the beginning of it. But whatever it was, whether the primer of the charge or its dull remainder, it stayed with him always, keeping him going back constantly to the house in Cork Street, Saturday after Saturday, and hanging heavily about him all the way back to Glasnevin when Sunday was over, to weight the following days of the week until Saturday came round again.

In an insufficient way he told Groarke about it and Groarke gleamed and made wicked jokes about it. He said, “Take your mackintosh with you.”

“What d'you mean?”

“When you take a woman out, make sure it's raining and get down in a field or under a tree with your mackintosh.”

He ended this by laughing terribly and then said, “For Christ's sake come and do the femur.”

They would go off to the Anatomy room together, Groarke producing the small
Conyngham
in which he had been at work the night before with red ink. John used to borrow this book to see whether Groarke had a good brain or not, whether he had underlined the print intelligently. When he found that the red scoring was scanty and never at the obvious places, he respected Groarke intensely and decided to go on working with him and supplying him with comforts and money.

They drove each other on all through the first term and passed the Pre-Registration very easily at the end of it.

He took this news home with him for the Christmas holiday and was made much of by everyone except Mary, whose George had just ploughed Finals part II for the third time.

The family had no real idea what Pre-Registration meant and neither had John himself, but despite this he made good play with it, suggesting that he was now registered with the Irish
Government or even the British Medical Association as a serious student of Medicine. Very soon he heard Mother telling people that he was doing “brilliantly” in Dublin and was satisfied.

For the first time in his life he found the holiday at home long enough and left the send-off party in such high spirits on the quayside at Holyhead that he inadvertently kissed his sister's artistic boy friend, the Primitive, on the beard in mistake for his sister, Melanie.

During the new term he met Dymphna again for the first time since the original meeting at Porth Newydd. He had arranged to take a girl called Oonagh Kenney out to coffee after lectures on Saturday morning. Theresa was on duty at her hospital and so could not have come in any case, the point being that even if she had been free he would not have asked her to the Mitchell's coffee party. He pretended to himself that she was too common and Irish for such a gathering, but the real reason was that he wanted to find a corrective to the pain of his lust for her. He argued that, in the main, one could only feel poetry for one girl at a time and that since the satisfaction of the lust was necessary in order to subdue the poetry it would be helpful to start lusting after someone else who might possibly give a point or two instead of freezing up at every physical advance. To this end he had been working on Oonagh very consistently. Though she was more expensive than Theresa it was worth it, quite apart from the primary motive. For one thing it delighted him to believe that he despised Theresa in some sense, even if only a social one; it was a form of revenge. For another, Oonagh, though Catholic, lived in England and was easier to talk to.

He was surprised when Dymphna, whom he had first met in Anglesey a year or two earlier, appeared as well. It was not that he had forgotten her at all, it was only that he had put her away somewhere in a mental place not far removed from that in which the moors and the murder lay buried. He had thought, I do not want to meet
her
again until I am more definitely whatever I am going to be. He had even persuaded himself that, far from really living in Ireland and liable to be met or encountered
in a real street or house at some time, she was forever at Port Newydd; a person by moonlight; an inclusion in the whole watery dream of Victoria which had gone as his childhood and schooldays had gone where they were safe. He had cultivated this propensity most carefully. When anyone got so far to the edge of his care that he had to risk “that” in order to reach them, he let them fall over and disappear.

He would do it with Theresa if it became necessary and with anyone else. There was a pit at the brink of feeling into which he could let them fall soundlessly whenever and if ever the time came that they threatened Victoria; or if not Victoria, then himself. His soul, he thought it might be.

So when Dymphna and Oonagh came walking up to the Front Gate that morning he allowed himself only one moment of recognition; remembering, as he pronounced to himself the syllables of her name, the precise circumstances of their previous meeting nearly two years earlier. As she approached him he was imaginatively again in conversation with Horab Greenbloom by the edge of Admiral Bodorgan's lake, telling him of the events which had followed Victoria's death and of their most secret effects on him.

He sensed afresh in that instant of her approach, the disturbance the Irish girl had caused him when he saw her resemblance to Victoria, recalled his longing to tell her of it in their later conversation and their promises both to write to one another and to meet again as soon as he arrived in Dublin. Then, just as swiftly, at the very moment of their introduction, he banished all these memories from his mind and recorded her as a stranger. He looked at her politely, with no hesitation and saw that she was leggy and not, after all, particularly pale or desirable. He said to himself, She is a tall girl, her hair is very short. Why doesn't she keep still? Her hands are too big.