Through Streets Broad and Narrow (35 page)

Kerruish once asked, “Do you never hear from Mike Groarke? Is he still nursing his headache in an asylum or has he gone and joined with the British Army?”

“I think he's still ill.”

“Ah, God help the poor devil. Wasn't he always a mad one though, and didn't I often tell him it would bring him no luck to lapse from the Faith?”

“His father's not a Catholic at all. Only his mother.”

“Ah, that explains it: a mixed marriage, they're always unfair to the children.”

“You have it both ways,” John said. “Mike was brought up as a Catholic; he had no choice.”

“Of course he didn't! That's what's the matter with him: thinking he was free and safe to leave the fold like that.”

“Look, if the mixed marriage is responsible for making him lapse, and the lapse is responsible for his illness, why is it his own fault that he's ill, Jack?”

“Once a Catholic, always a Catholic. Hadn't he his free will and didn't he use it?”

“Yes, and look what's happened.”

“Because he used it wrong, so. God's law is God's love.”

“But you said it was the mixed marriage?”

“It was, too, but he could have had grace for the wanting despite a black old heretic for a daddy.”

“Jack, all this is absolute rot. If you ask me it's the Catholicism that's driven him round the bend.”

“Only if it's not practised, boy.”

But after that no one mentioned Groarke at all. He had simply disappeared like several others in the year: Mrs. Baggallay whose pregnancies became too numerous for her; a white-haired man of sixty who had decided on his retirement from the Irish Civil Service to become a medical missionary and then abandoned the idea when the war started; a girl called Joan Wilson who had married a lame student with social pretensions three years ahead of her; and others, as well, whose names John had forgotten.

In the junior years there were two or three hundred students who had not even heard of Michael Groarke. They were busy as he and John had once been in passing the preliminary examinations, doing the two-year university course, joining the clubs and societies and pursuing various women.

With the impact of the war livening Dublin, with the coming and going of the faces in Grafton Street, the news of raids and
battles, of bombs, defeats and propaganda-filled speeches from Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill all equally featured in the Irish Press, it became very easy to forget that Groarke had ever existed. It became very difficult to remember that at the time of his illness he had been within six months of qualification.

For the remainder of the term John continued to send him packets of cigarettes, wartime editions of new books, slabs of chocolate and short letters. But he did not attempt to visit him again; he could not even persuade himself to complete his attendances at the hospital. A mood that was less than despair had overcome him for he believed that nothing was now more probable than Nothingness. Whereas at the time of Victoria's murder there had been something against which he could set her loss, because it had happened suddenly and could not possibly have been foreseen, the present situation for him was the consequence of a series of purposive actions, whereas for Groarke its seeds had apparently been in him from the beginning.

In a way at this time it became an obsession with him to identify this long pause in his life with Groarke's own moratorium since whatever his own mistakes had been he could see nothing in Michael's case that did not justify them.

Groarke, he argued, was more single-minded than I was yet he has come to deeper grief, therefore fate owes
me
something.

Riding these comparisons and contrasts between his present case and the past of Victoria's death, between Groarke's miserable defection and his own bored imbroglio, he became for a time a little religious. He started to say his prayers in bed at night and was embarrassed by the childishness of them, finding that apart from the Our Father, the only ones he could remember were those taught him in the nursery twenty or more years previously. They seemed inadequate to his present situation and he was glad that no one else could hear them, wondering what was the explanation of his glibness in ordinary conversation if in attempting prayer he was reduced to so few words and such repetitive ideas.

To offset his failure in these private devotions he took advantage of a letter of introduction written by Father some years earlier. It requested one of Dublin's few Anglican vicars to
allow John to serve at Holy Communion and to avail himself of Confession if need be.

The Vicar, the Reverend Stanley Semarque, gave John a glass of sherry, introduced him to his wife and daughter and showed him round the church. Impulsively John asked him if he would hear his confession and Father Semarque, after initial embarrassment, consented to do so. When John was finished the Vicar gave him plentiful advice in a very quiet voice and suggested that it was time he thought of marriage. John, who had thought of nothing else for the past five years, with Dymphna, and imagined that he had made this clear in his confession, quite agreed and decided that the Vicar was a fool.

On the way back to the Vicarage Father Semarque said, “I take it that you would like to assist me at the nine o'clock tomorrow? You must stay and have some lunch with us. My wife knows many of the Fellows of Trinity and I know she will be most interested to talk to you again.”

John said he would be delighted to come out on the Sunday and caught the tram back to Stephen's Green. He walked down Grafton Street and wandered into the Carmelite church to see what the people he had so often observed coming out of it did while they were in it.

He found it rich with lingering incense and ablaze with candles, attractively busy with people praying absorbedly in front of their penny lights. The statues offended him a little and the people a great deal so soon as he had time to think about them. The whole place was a peep show, he decided, alien and strange. For all he knew Groarke's Foxrock aunt might be in here praying; or Brigid Clynche, Theresa or James. This was where they worshipped, all the native persons of the Ireland he did not know and did not wish to know. Groarke had suggested that the malice in Ireland, the coldness, came of this culture: the tumbles, the pitfalls in the social fabric, neutrality, the subjacent mockery and sharpness of intuition. And Groarke was deadly sick.

He left the church feeling disturbed; he really did wonder if he might have been wrong to walk out of it without trying it out beyond his first distaste. The people's faces had looked good,
quite unselfconscious, each one an island of praying, each one apparently practised in what he or she was doing. Extraordinary, the way they came in and went out again afterwards as purposefully as though they were patronizing a shop or a bank. But then, he thought, no one spoke to me or even glanced at me; I might have been sicker than Groarke; indeed I'm not at all sure that I'm not; yet they had no thought for me.

Outside the church a notice had been put up in readiness for Sunday; it said:

NAVE 3D

Three pence to kneel or sit in the nave; this disgusted him; he believed his feeling had been trifled with and felt a little warmer towards Father Semarque and the church by the sea.

The next morning he managed to serve without making too many mistakes and was made comfortable by his glimpses of the congregation, so English-looking, and by the singing of the hymns whose tunes or words echoed far back into his earliest childhood. But during lunch at the Vicarage he became aware of Mrs. Semarque's intention to make him notice her daughter and said to himself, If the Vicar has suggested to her that he knows I am lonely, he might also have seen fit to tell her that I am lonely only for Dymphna.

He imagined the Vicar getting into bed the night before like one of Anthony Trollope's clergy and saying such things as, “Nice young man that; been a long time on the way, though. That letter from his father was nearly two years old. I looked him up in Crockford, by the way, apparently he retired early.”

And Mrs. Semarque said, “How many children have they, dear?”

Later she said, “He seemed a
very
nice young man. I thought Barbara seemed taken with him. I wonder if he's engaged.”

“I think not.”

Then the Vicar's wife said, “If he's the youngest of six they must have considerable private means for the father to have retired so early.”

And Father Semarque searched his conscience and said, “Been
in some trouble over some girl, I don't doubt. Looked a little under the weather.”

And she said, “They all go through it. Now Barbara would—she's such a sympathetic girl.”

Hearing all this imaginary conversation going on in his mind, John looked across the potatoes on his plate and mentally addressed Barabara, saying, “No, no, my dear, I am not for you. I am not at all a nice boy, I dream dreams, but not about you. Something terrible happened to me when I was young and I don't believe in God or hockey. If I were drunk and succeeding in anything I have undertaken and happened to meet you at a dance, I might, if you could be persuaded, give you a pleasurable fright; but it would have to be very dark because your eyes are too small and I've no conversation; I wasted it all on Dymphna.”

Barabara unintentionally replied to him by asking him if he played tennis and he replied, “No, I used to like it, but I discovered after five years that it didn't like me.”

As he expected the three of them laughed without amusement. Then Mrs. Semarque asked did he know Macdonald Browne at Trinity? “They have a hard court and a grass court out at Ballsbridge. Penelope, the daughter, is awfully keen, isn't she, Barabara?”

John said yes he did know Macdonald Browne. “As a matter of fact he failed me in my last exam.”

“Oh dear, oh dear, we can't have that,” said Mrs. Semarque.

And John with a throw-away smile addressed her silently, And oh dear oh dear, I can't have your daughter, not even served on ice with your Schnauzkrampf husband presiding over the nuptials. If you only knew it, you're talking about all the wrong things. Tennis and Macdonald Browne are the most rapid acceleration you could have found for me. Your poor daughter must continue to languish up here by the sea waiting for someone with a job in the Bank of Ireland.”

Throughout the rest of the meal he wondered how it was that he knew so much about people and with so much certainty that there were times when he could accurately forecast what they were going to say next. He thought that this faculty, or at any rate his unswerving belief in his possession of it, might be
a sign of madness if it were not that of an unique inordinacy of the mind. Groarke too had enjoyed it to an abnormal degree, so had Melanie, John's own sister, and of course his mother. In fact, very many people, particularly in Ireland, knew what secret motives, opinions and fears underlay the frankest conversations, though not very many people so consistently as he did himself.

From this he passed on to wondering how it could be that he often made such gross social mistakes if his intuition was so acute; the paper, for instance, and the unpleasure he must so frequently have caused to Dymphna. He decided that the knowledge must be intermittent, a gift of interpretation which, when it ceased to function, left its possessor in worse case than his fellows, that therefore it was best used sparingly.

All this time he threw back replies to the conversation over the Vicarage luncheon table and over the coffee which followed, not feeling any great distaste for the family, nor any specific censure of the Vicar's having made private use of his confession; but confirmed in his loneliness and more obsessed by Groarke even than before.

He left before teatime and went down to the Club to find there a message from Greenbloom, saying that he had called before luncheon and asking John to telephone him at the Shelbourne Hotel at the first opportunity.

Greenbloom invited him to come and have a drink with him before dinner and John strolled up Ranelagh Street at about five thirty, past the unlighted windows of various offices and insurance companies, trying to imagine how Greenbloom would have adjusted himself to Dublin and Ireland after so long an interval between his visits. He tried to work out how many years had elapsed since they had landed in
The Scapegoat
on the Curragh Racecourse; about nine or ten, he thought, and, since then: Rachel's marriage, his own five years of Dymphna and Medicine, Greenbloom's conversion to Christianity and, overlying everything, the war in Europe.

He thought, All this is an unlikely circumstance. I'm not sure that, as I imagine him, I believe in Greenbloom at all. His existence is inseparable from my adolescence and my memories of
Victoria; he belongs to the world of my childhood. And, thinking this, he decided as he entered the hotel to scale Greenbloom down and make him an ordinary war-shy intellectual like those he had met one vac in the censorship department at Liverpool: not-so-young men with weak chests, flawless accents and a penchant for word games and French Vermouth.

But when he walked into the Shelbourne lounge to the music of Verdi played by a trio of royal-looking ladies beside the open piano, Greenbloom leapt to his eye like a prickly pear in a bed of hardy annuals. His hair, grey-streaked at the sides, was cut quite short on the scalp and left long on the temples. His face had broadened out with the long eyes enclosed between grosser lids, each underscored by a single heavy crease just above the cheekbones. His nose had gathered flesh, was as smooth as before, but a trace less hooked and predatory; beneath it his mouth, though coarser, was as firm as ever, and not grown into an unattractive redness. But it was his weight, the dark presence of his physical solidity, which made him stand out from all the other odd groups and single people who were in there at that hour. He seemed to have a sombreness round him, a suggestion of shadow making the silver in his hair more opalescent and the olive of his flesh more luminous by contrast; he was like a mourner in sunshine.