Through Streets Broad and Narrow (32 page)

They drank quantities of champagne and fed the poodle asparagus,
vols-au-vent
and even some of the wine.

A number of people known to Caroline gathered round them but she cold-shouldered them all in a perfectly courteous way by asking them to repeat themselves and then going on with her interrupted comments to John and Palgrave.

Palgrave had told her that John had been in love with Dymphna for years and all she said was, “You too? Half the eligible men in Dublin seem to have been in love with her. I can't think why. She's so tall.”

John said, “I thought you knew nothing about her?”

“Oh, we're not in the same set, of course, but surely you know that in Dublin everybody knows the essentials about everybody?”

“Well, tell me about Fergus Cloate.”

“Prodestant,” she said with her Irish pronounciation. “His father was a farmer and drank enough whiskey to fill Killarney lakes before he died. He supported his mother from the time he qualified and everyone thought he would go to England and marry an heiress. He's terribly attractive.”

“Very,” John said.

“Can you see it too?”

“Well, I must think so, in any case, otherwise why should she have turned down me? But I do really think so.”

“No one would wait for a student when a live major was in the offing. Don't be silly,” she said, stroking the poodle.

“Would you?”

“I might.”

He said, “How very serious you are when you're not laughing.”

“Oh, very.”

Then Palgrave interrupted them. He wanted to know what they should all do when the party was over.

Caroline said, “Come home with me and we'll play the radiogram and dance until it's time to go out somewhere.”

John said, “Let's buy some flowers first—if we leave now we'll just be in time to put them into their car.”

“Do you know which it is?”

“Of course.”

When they got out into Dawson Street they found a flower woman just across the road. She had a little stall with roses and carnations in it, all white. Beside her feet on the pavement was a large washing basket full of more white and pink roses and deep-crimson carnations.

John asked her, “How much are they a bunch?” When she had told him he said, “How much are they all?”

“
All
, sir?”

“Yes, all the ones on the stall and in your basket.”

Although it wasn't cold she was wearing her flower-seller's black shawl and she shook this off onto her stool, when she stood up and started to count her bunches.

“It would come to about ten pounds fifteen shillings if you're really wanting the lot.”

Palgrave said, “This is really a bit silly.” And Caroline danced about with the poodle in great excitement.

“It's a wonderful idea,” she said. “Quite noble. Oh, I do think this is fun. Imagine buying up a complete flower stall for someone you loved.”

John said, “I haven't quite enough. One of you lend me three pounds.”

“I will,” she said, “I think you're absolutely marvellous. She'll never forget it. What are you going to write on the card?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, but you should. It will haunt her. It would haunt me. Were you very much in love with her?”

With the flower woman's help they carried the flowers across the road in swaying armfuls, some of the stems dripping clear glistening juice on the hot macadam and down their clothes, others with their stems wrapped in nests of moss. They filled the whole of the back of Cloate's car with them, arranging them very carefully on the floor, propped up with wire given them by the flower woman who was getting very excited about it, on the back seat and in the ledge in front of the back window.
Then the flower woman said, “For the Good Lord's sake roll up them back windows again or they'll all be blown to Kerry when the young couple sets out on their travels.”

When this was done they stood out in the road and admired the little black car. Caroline suddenly had the giggles; she jigged about with the poodle, which was alarmed by the traffic, and John and Palgrave disentangled the lead while the flower woman pulled Caroline herself to safety on the opposite pavement.

She was still laughing and resting a very small hand in the crook of John's arm.

Palgrave grew quite irritable with them both and at last, when she could get her breath back, she pointed at the car.

“It's so funny,” she said. “You just can't ever tell how things are going to turn out. Even without them in it, it looks exactly like a
hearse
.”

“Good God!” said Palgrave.

But the flower woman sat down on her stool and John sat on her knee; they laughed and clapped each other on the back and hugged one another.

Then they went off in Palgrave's car to Caroline's home in Ballsbridge.

John did not see Groarke for several days after the wedding party, and thought that he must have gone out to his home in Kingstown until the whole affair was over. But when a whole week had passed and he had still not returned to duty, John began to feel more and more uneasy.

He remembered the urgency of Cloate's advice the day they had met in Grafton Street; something he had said about “cracking up.” He remembered, too, Groarke's extraordinary behaviour during the Dolphin evening and the elaborate structure of his accusations afterwards in the hospital sitting-room. When he first heard the rumour that “Mike Groarke has been retired on the order of Dr. Hansom,” he believed it at once and sought out Hansom at the end of second clinic.

Hansom as always was evasive; he doubled about behind his stammer, said, “A question of over-di-stress. F-finals. I think I
must advise you to consult the depen-parents. You n-know them, of course?”

“Well, no, sir.”

“In that car-case, I am not at liberaliberty to say more.”

“Could you give me their address, sir?”

Hansom wrote it out for him and the next day John took the bus out to Kingstown and walked up behind the Marine Hotel to a street of terraced houses. Number Twenty-one was in need of paint; the green door had blistered and the tops of the papules had fallen or been scuffed off by some child, so that the clean oak was exposed in pock-marks. But what took his eye most was the notice on the tiny gate giving access to the front path. In faded letters it warned:

“ENTRÉE INTERDITE AUX PROMENEURS.”

John pushed it open, carefully latched it behind him and knocked on the black iron knocker. After a long delay during which he speculated about Groarke's father the door was opened by a woman with a sad pale-green face and old yellow hair.

She was wearing a dress of some blackish material against the bodice of which hung a small mother-of-pearl crucifix with a silver figure on its face. She looked very quietly ill, frighteningly so, having the refined look of the chronic invalid whose life is lived in some very remote part of consciousness, most aware and intuitive.

“Yes?”

“Does Michael Groarke live here?”

“I'm his mother.”

“Oh, could I see him do you think?”

“Would you be John Blaydon?”

“That's right.” He smiled and was about to say something more when she stood aside.

“Please come in.”

“Oh, thank you. Is Mike here?”

“He's not. He's away. He's been taken very sick.”

“Oh dear! Has he? D'you think—?”

But at this point they were interrupted; a rather high-pitched voice called out, “Who's that?” The intonation was defective,
each of the two words being given the same stress, so that a most cold impatience was immediately apparent.

Mrs. Groarke touched herself; a quick movement that could have been the Sign of the Cross, just nerves, or both.

“Mr. Groarke,” she confided; and then, as an afterthought, “My husband.”

“I'm awfully sorry,” John began, “I thought of writing to you or ringing up, but—”

“Mr. Groarke rarely answers letters,” she said. “He never speaks on the telephone.”

“Well—”

“It's his nerves,” she added, as though to reassure him. “Voices upset him.”

“Who's that?” came the voice again.

This time John observed that it came from hehind a closed door at the far end of the hallway, beyond the staircase. There was another notice pinned on this door. It said, simply:

PREOCCUPIED.

At that moment it was opened by a man in a dressing-gown; shorter than Groarke, puffy in the face, pursier in the figure, with two scornful eyes once big for the face, but now reduced to less than normal size by the indulged cheeks. The gaze of the eye flicked swiftly over Mrs. Groarke as though their owner was licking some contaminant off her before inspecting its source; then they turned fully on John and the man walked forward.

“What-does-he-want?” he said distinctly but without adding the question mark and still looking at John.

“He came for Michael.”

“You-told-him-he-is-not-here.”

“I was telling him when you called out.”

“He knows?” This time the loveless blue eyes beneath the reddish, thinning hair supplied the interrogative—for John.

“Mrs. Groarke has just told me that Michael's ill. I wondered if I could see him.”

“Your name?”

“It's Blaydon,” supplied Mrs. Groarke, “Michael's friend.”

“Friend?”

“I'm John Blaydon. Mike and I have worked together ever since we started. If he's ill I'd very much like to go and see him.”

The father looked at him. The eyes were as unblinking as pride, the face as expressionless as an upper servant's.

“My wife is mistaken. My son has no friends of that name.” He paused and John said, “I assure you, Mr. Groarke—”

“Yes?”

“Michael has confided in me, we have both confided in each other for years, nearly five. He's even told me about your interest in James Joyce, your book.”

Mr. Groarke glanced at his wife and then towards the front door at the opposite end of the hall. She moved forward at once and opened it, standing aside as courteously as she had done when she invited John to enter.

They both watched him leave.

It was the winter of nineteen hundred and forty. The lights of Dublin shone upwards more brightly for the custom of darkness which for fifteen months had encompassed the other island, and, a little further north, the Six Counties themselves.

Sometimes at night the pulse of German bombers could be heard as they assembled over the pinpoints of the city's illuminations before beating away up the coat to the factories and dockyards of Belfast. But thus far the only hostile explosion John or anyone else had heard within Free State Territory had been that which had blown up William of Orange and his horse in Stephen's Green.

In a dull way John was working for re-examination in midwifery, having failed it in the viva at the beginning of the preceding term. He worked with only intermittent enthusiasm both because he had never expected to fail in the first place and because he suspected that there had been something tendentious in his defeat. Having passed the three-hour paper and scrambled through the clinical, it was dismaying to have tripped up in the fifteen-minute viva conducted by Macdonald Browne and a visiting examiner from Queen's University, Belfast.

At the posting of the results on the notice board in an always dark and draughty passage in the Medical School he had heard people saying that he had been ploughed because Macdonald Browne had objected to an earlier paper of his, the one he had written for the Biological Association nearly two years previously. This suggestion, repetitive, made with malice or occasionally
with a certain affection, continued to reach him whenever the subject of Finals was discussed. He met Jack Kerruish one day in the Wicklow and drank with him. Jack said, “Now he's had his sport with you, John boy, you've only to sit again and Macdonald Browne'll relent.”

“D'you really think that's why he did fail me?”

“Not at all! But he could have been sore about it. You took an awful kick at his department.”

“It was two years ago.”

“That's just what I'm saying. Didn't he give you the clinical and the paper last time and only scupper you in the oral?”

“Yes.”

“Well then won't he be letting you through the three of them in December?”

Johnny Walshe joined in and said, “John's not looking half the boy he used to be. But just you hang on now to your head and you'll be through and away over to England and the war.”

“You're pulling my leg?”

“But we're not,” they said; and they meant it. They gave him more to drink and hammered his back; they assured him he was a good fellow with a great future before him, and Johnny Walshe said he himself had once had a go of temperament and had got to brooding about something at night and feeling his friends were strange to him. If John had been a Catholic, they said, instead of a poor damned Protestant he'd be thanking God he'd longer in Ireland amongst his truest friends, he'd see the thing in scale.

“With what?” he asked, and they said, “With Eternity, what else?”

But his friends had thinned out. Groarke was still away in some hospital or nursing home and though John continued to send him letters care of his home address he never received any reply and so was quite unable to trace him. The Chete, himself eighteen months behind the rest of his year, had drifted into Stephen's Hospital, the recognized home for athletic “chronics,” where he was doing a little work, a lot of rowing and recurrently worrying about his fiancée's putative pregnancies.

John's days were a succession of ante-natal clinics at the
Rotunda, lectures in Medicine and Surgery and long hours at his textbooks in the evenings. He wrote home infrequently, resorted increasingly to the Ranelagh Club for thrifty meals, eavesdrop news of the war from staff officers on leave, and glasses of Marsala and vintage port at two shillings a time. He had no idea whether or not he would pass the exam the next time he sat it, he had never really believed that he would qualify or that if, by some inevitable process, he did, it would make any real difference to his life; by which he meant the life inside himself. Sometimes he thought, I must be a doctor before I start to be anything else; at others he thought, I must be something else before I start to be a doctor.