Through Streets Broad and Narrow (33 page)

But since he had lost Dymphna, as earlier he had lost Victoria, he saw no prospect of resolving his dilemma and so continued to wait inside himself for something external to happen.

He rarely saw Dymphna. He knew that she was living with her parents just outside Dublin and that Cloate, following two weeks' embarkation leave, had been posted to the Middle East. He also heard that occasionally she was seen at dances in the Gresham with other young-marrieds and their husbands. At intervals he was tempted to look for her in Grafton Street on Saturday mornings, suspecting that she might well have kept up the coffee habit in Mitchell's.

One morning, bored and restless, having worked hard all the week, he could resist the desire no longer and spent over an hour walking up and down the pavement opposite the restaurant. He saw her coming out of Switzer's long before she had seen him, and immediately hurried into Mitchell's a minute or two ahead of her. She chose the staircase and he took the lift as soon as he had given her time to settle at a table in the upstairs room.

She was by the window looking down into the street. At first he did not know what it was that had surprised him as, from his position beyond the glass doors, he studied her. She was not so restless, she was subdued, a little fuller in the cheeks and her hair where it grew from the temples was compressed before springing away into her crowning curls. Then he saw that she was smoking. She had Cloate's case beside her on the table and
beneath it, an opened letter with a censorship label running across the top of the envelope.

She smoked quite without pleasure, barely tasting the cigarette, which was a nuisance to her; when it was only half finished she stubbed it out in the ashtray and pulled Cloate's letter out of the envelope, re-read it and put it back. Then she looked round the room for the waitress, stretched her left leg to its full length over the carpet of the aisle, studied it for a moment and curled it back under the table again. She began to make up her face, looked up suddenly over the top of her mirror and saw John as he came in. He returned her glance in a blank way as though he were distracted about some small point and hurried up to the waitress. He said, “Excuse me, but I think I left my cigarette case in here yesterday; a rather battered silver one. Did you happen to find it?”

“If you did, sir, it will be with the cashier.”

“Oh, thank you.”

Dymphna was watching him with her mirror still in her hand, her lipstick poised like a small red fruit between her fingers, but having seen this he hurried out along the opposite side of the room, no longer, after the one confirmatory glance, looking at her any more.

At the bottom of the stairs he was quite dizzy with the old dizziness, only more violent, as though she had really hit him with something, with sorrow, perhaps, with a very great pathos of hers which she had never used against him before.

And it was on that morning when he reached the club, round about lunch time, that he found Greenbloom's letter awaiting him. It was a scrawl on the thick paper of a London club and said only:

John Blaydon,

I hope shortly to be taking up an appointment in Dublin and shall expect to see something of you. Hold yourself in readiness to assist me, principally with regard to contacts.

Circumstances preclude my giving you a date. Discretion, please.

Pray do not bother to reply.

Horab Greenbloom.

John thought, What is this “pray”? He has become pompous. And what the devil does he think I can do for him now, or he for me? He's a damn sight too late. I must say he has the best of everything. Why isn't he in the Forces? His crippled leg, I suppose. And what appointment could it be and why in Ireland when he always loathed the place?

He did not discover what the appointment was until the following week when he picked up a copy of the
Irish Times
and saw that Mr. Horab Greenbloom had been appointed British Press Attaché by Mr. Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, to His Majesty's Legation in Phoenix Park.

Earlier, before the loss of Dymphna and his failure in midwifery, he might have wanted to discuss all this with somebody. As it was, he did mention it to a couple of the Club's old men who said, “Greenbloom, d'ye say? Sounds like a Jew. I ask you, Harrison, what the devil can they be thinking of, appointing a Jew over here?”

Then they began discussing the conduct of the war and Churchill's latest speech about fighting on the beaches which Harrison said was worth two corps of cavalry. From this they drifted into an argument about cavalry versus tanks and John left them to go and do some work in his rooms.

He wondered why he had bothered to tell them, in the first place, that he knew Greenbloom at all, for at this time, with the term a month old, he had been removed even further from any concern with his immediate present by something that had happened a day or two after he had received Greenbloom's letter.

Far more than the voices which suggested he was wasting his time in remaining at Trinity, more even than the cold frustration of Dymphna's marriage to Cloate, this incident occupied his mind by its unwavering meaninglessness.

However often he thought about it he could extract nothing from it in the way of pleasure, pain, sense or nonsense, nor even in the way of a crude or cursing blasphemy such as he sometimes felt in these last months of his apprenticeship. Yet it remained a marker for him over something that was to be recalled unwillingly during the remainder of his life.

He had gone that afternoon to attend one of the clinics in Psychological Medicine which were held out at Grangegorman Asylum. In order to sit the final examination in General Medicine it was necessary not only to have a smattering of the textbooks covering the psychological syllabus, but also to have secured six attendances at one of the recognized mental hospitals. These credits, like those given for practical knowledge of Public Health and entailing visits to slaughterhouses and sewage farms, could be secured at any time in the last year of the course; they were chores which, though no one took them very seriously, had to be accomplished. By the winter term most of the final year had already made the prescribed visits, but John after his failure in midwifery had been so concerned to concentrate exclusively on this that he had left them until rather later than was customary. He therefore went out to the hospital alone and arrived there at about half past three. The hospital porter conducted him to a large empty room on the first floor and told him that since the clinic did not start until four he would have to wait the half hour. John asked him if there would be other students and he replied, “There's always a few, sir, but being the day for the gentlemen from the National University, they're likely to be late; and then Dr. Lesselbaum is often late himself.”

“Dr. Lesselbaum? I thought it was Dr. MacBrien's clinic today?”

“It's Trinity you're from then? It's not your day at all. You'll have to get the doctor's permission before he starts on the cases.”

“D'you think he'll give it?”

“He's easy enough,” the porter said, “These Americans stand on no ceremony and he's only here with us three months so I don't doubt he'll not mind, sir.”

Before he left he explained that he would have to lock John in as it was the rule that, apart from those in the administrative block, all doors had to be kept fastened.

“As I told you, sir, you're at liberty to wait for the other gentlemen in the hall, if you wish it.”

John assured him that he'd prefer to remain where he was and when the man had gone he looked round the room. There were twenty or thirty wooden chairs in rows on the bare floor, a small
rostrum about six inches high on which was an old-fashioned clerical desk with a high stool behind it and a blackboard on an easel. The rest of the room was furnished like the waiting-room of a dingy hotel with school desks drawn up against the walls between the tall windows. There were three windows on each side of the room and three or four separate doors; all, apart from one at the end of the room, locked. This gave access to a lavatory and washbasin. The lavatory had no cistern or chain and the washbasin had no handles on the taps.

At the opposite end of the room there was a bricked-in fireplace with a black marble mantelpiece on which there rested a large blued Victorian mirror reflecting an accurate but dark light from the windows. On the top of the mirror, leaning against the green distempered wall was a notice with the single word SILENCE printed on it.

The room was heated by radiators beneath two of the six windows and each radiator was enclosed behind a perforated cast-iron screen. The electric lights were nearly flush with the ceiling and enclosed with wire grilles. There were no switches anywhere on the walls.

The view from the windows on either side was almost identical, sparse laurel bushes and wet grass lawns spanned by asphalt paths which were quite without curves. John tried to find a different view by going to each of the windows in turn. He thought that he might see the hospital wall and entrance gate; beyond them, some recognizable landmark; the spire of a church or one of the city's gasometers. But he could see nothing but the lawns and laurel bushes, the diminishing paths and, in the distance, the grey of falling rain, some hedges of yew and more laurels. He then attempted to open one of the sash windows so that by sticking out his head he might at least identify some other part of the building, but none of the windows would open more than six inches, since the grooves in which they ran were blocked by cast-iron slugs affixed by heavy screws.

There was no clock in the room and by his wristwatch the time was passing very slowly; but at last, at about five minutes to four, the porter unlocked the door and showed nine or ten National University students into the room. They were of
a quite different stamp from the Trinity men, not having cultivated any Englishness in their dress or accent. They came in quietly and they all had heavy notebooks, while two of them carried pocket textbooks with them. They ignored John and sat down on the chairs, some of them in small groups and one or two of them deliberately sitting apart as Groarke might have done, reading hard at their books or making notes. They looked far more concerned about their Finals than would an equivalent group of Trinity men, and when they had been in the room about five minutes they talked even more quietly together, not far above whispering. When this stage had been reached, John decided that he would stay no longer. Although all these men were in the same town and he must surely have passed some of them dozens of times in Grafton Street or in the Green he could not recognize a single one of their faces. They seemed to be quite without curiosity about him and after the absorbed anonymity of his time alone in the room their carelessness seemed to be less than an insult; it seemed to suggest that his total experience in Dublin had been of no importance at all, even that he might have imagined it.

He said to the nearest of them, “It looks as though I've come on the wrong day.”

“You're Trinity?”

“Yes; I think I'll get back there.”

“You can't, not until the porter comes. We're doing the epileptics today and they're firm on the locking of the doors.”

“Surely there's a bell or something?”

“There's no bell.”

But at this moment Dr. Lesselbaum, the American, came in with the case book under his arm and accompanied by two male nurses in blue trousers, black ties and white coats.

The doctor had very thick glasses which distorted his eyes, making them look large if he looked directly at the class and suddenly extremely small if he glanced away to the side. His skin was yellow and his hair black and springy; he had heavy whiskers in his nostrils and ears. When John went forward to ask him if he had any objection to his staying he waved him back to his place and in a soft monotone began to outline the history of
the first case. While he was reciting this with the dates of the major incidents of the man's life, a description of his delusions and of the varying types of aura he experienced, one of the male nurses went out to fetch in the patient himself.

The man was quite cheerful when he was shown in. He smiled round at the class, stood easily between the two white-coated nurses and answered Dr. Lesselbaum's few set questions politely and quickly. As he was going out he waved to everybody and at nearly the same instant took a flying leap at Dr. Lesselbaum's waist. The doctor dodged him, the attendant beside him grabbed him in a special grip of some sort and walked him away through the door with the man shouting extraordinary sentences into the air.

Lesselbaum took no notice of this incident at all. He simply turned over a page in the large case book and began to read the history of the next man.

“Aged fifty, no siblings, mother an alcoholic. This man developed typical epileptiform seizures during puberty. There is a significant family history of migraine on the paternal side, a maternal aunt suffers from recurrent urticaria. The patient's father is an habitual criminal with intense religious convictions, confessing to delusions of personal mystical experience including levitation, colloquial prayer and hallucinations within the Christian ambience. When not in prison he frequents religious houses and communities and takes an active part in various forms of imagined apostolate.

“The patient himself will admit of no sexual experience though it is probable that from an early age he centred erotic fantasies about his mother since he insisted on taking an extra pillow to bed with him. He is resistant to the suggestion that he disliked his father, stating that the latter was always, I quote, ‘good to me, giving me money when he was drunk and sweets when he was not!' He will not acknowledge any juvenile sexual experience though on questioning he alleges close friendship with a schoolfellow and to early difficulty in micturating from the standing position. It is considered that in addition to his epilepsy with its congenital basis, this case also presents mixed features of latent schizophrenia with additional paranoid elements. He has
made little progress on heavy sedation with phenobarbitone and the newer epanutin, though as yet there are no signs of psychocerebral degenerative change.”