Through Streets Broad and Narrow (36 page)

As in Anglesey, when John had last seen him, he was conventionally dressed: wearing a dull tie, cream-coloured shirt with a dark suit and narrow shoes with off-green socks. His only ostentation lay in the jade and gold cuff-links gleaming just inside his sleeves. On the table in front of him stood a single glass, a heavy gold cigarette-case and a pair of spectacles; beside it, stretched to its full length, was his artificial leg in its smoothly creased black trouser. He was reading a book entitled
In Search of Ireland
.

As John approached he looked up but did not smile. He said only, “Good!” and did not trouble to shake hands, seeming not to see that John had intended to do so.

A waiter approached at once and John, who was feeling hostile, noticed this with annoyance. But Greenbloom was waiting, and so he said, “A brandy and ginger ale, please.”

The waiter left and Greenbloom marked his book with a gold pencil, closed it and put it beside his spectacles.

“No doubt you would like to drink before you talk? They are playing some tunes.”

John thought he would take him at his word, so he nodded and sat silent. Greenbloom did not close his eyes to listen to the music; he attended to it with them wide open as though he could hear more acutely like that.

When his drink had come John could not resist asking, “Aren't you drinking yourself?”

“If by not doing so I disturb you?”

“I'd rather you did.”

“Very well.”

As he said this the waiter reappeared as promptly as though he had been listening or Greenbloom had rung some private bell. Several people looked slyly across at him but he appeared not to notice them and then John observed that he quite genuinely had not done so because he was most intently studying his face. He knew that this had made him flush and was annoyed afresh, thinking, I'm not going to let him quell me even before he opens his mouth. So he looked pointedly round the room for a clock and then checked his wristwatch. But Greenbloom followed his motion as though he too were much interested in the time.

The trio was now playing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and the 'cellist was wobbling her knees as she reached round to bow the strings of her instrument. As the last chord faded, Greenbloom clapped courteously and then sipped once from his glass.

“You had my letter?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You did not reply!”

“Was I meant to?”

But he ignored this and said, “You have lost weight.”

And this led to John's attempting to tell him of his immediate situation, the complex circumstances of his failure and indecision. Beginning with Dymphna, the growth of his love for her and its consequences, he made several attempts to recount them; then, finding it difficult to differentiate between internal and external events, he switched to an account of his relationship with
Chamberlyn-Ffynch and the social adventures in which it had involved him. Collaterally, he explained how in reality the friendship with Palgrave had been a direct consequence of his love for Dymphna and tried to show how by means of it, as later by taking up boxing, he had hoped to impress her. And Greenbloom listened. He appeared to listen as he listened to the music, full-eyed, perfectly still, anticipating nothing; yet not, on the other hand, seeming to relish any aspect of it.

John outlined the medical course and his progress through it up to the time of the paper, the subsequent débâcle culminating in his failure in Midwifery and Dymphna's marriage to Cloate. Greenbloom made no comment and betrayed no surprise at the sudden introduction of Cloate's name into the long and confused account John had given him. He sat there waiting, brooding, it seemed, his eyes occasionally studying John's face, but most of the time focussed on the entrance to the smaller lounge through which the waiters came and went with trolleys and trays. He did not yawn, and asked no questions. When John had finished he waited for a few minutes then got up, signalled for John to follow him and limped out into the foyer of the hotel.

He said, “We will have dinner in your Club; but first I must change. Would you prefer to wait for me here or in my rooms?”

“In your rooms.”

They went up in the lift together and John sat in the sitting-room while Greenbloom had a bath. He passed the time in looking at Greenbloom's possessions. He had the usual press full of clothes; there must have been two dozen pairs of shoes and half this number of suits, all of them, judging by the quality of the cloth and the buttons, pre-war. At one side of the wardrobe there were two spare artificial legs, each with a sock and shoe already in place on the foot. The one in use was with Greenbloom in the bathroom. But apart from the clothes and a few books the only other things he appeared to have brought with him were three photographs and a large triptych open on the dressing-table.

One of the photographs was of his mother; it was signed “Mother,” and there was a Hebrew inscription beneath the signature.
Another, of a pale young man with the shadowy look of Greenbloom himself, was signed, “Your affectionate brother Eli” and dated August, 1939. It was also signed by the photographer, Felix Mesurier (Paris), who was evidently a personal friend for he had written, “
Après nous le prelude
.”

John studied Eli's face with closer attention. He decided that he looked dead in the way that photographs of second lieutenants of the First World War had looked dead when he had seen them on people's pianos in his Northumberland childhood. Then he remembered that since most of them had been dead they might have looked so because he had known that they were dead; so he changed his mind and suggested to himself that Eli only looked doomed. At first glance he appeared to be wearing some kind of a uniform; but on closer inspection it was no recognizable uniform at all, only a black coat and the upper part of a black waistcoat showing between the lapels, and a dark-coloured shirt of some sort worn with a black tie. But the eyes were not dead, they were not liquid either, nor enigmatic, nor sombre; they were gloom circles on the mat surface of the photograph, well spaced by the grey nose and only just differentiated from the tarnished whites.

The whole photograph was a trick of chemical paint on paper conveying a mood that was as much a deliberate falsity as the one it was intended to beget in the beholder; or so John decided. He also decided that Horab might as well have framed only the name and the message, “Your affectionate brother Eli, August, 1939.”

He turned his attention to the triptych, glancing briefly at the first panel; very sharply painted, obviously good, perhaps modern; and then to the third, equally complex, equally Christian and confusing. But really, all the time he was looking at these two panels he was nursing an intense curiosity about the central panel which was concealed behind a small green velvet curtain. His impatience was so acute that he was quite unable to concentrate on the details of its companion pieces, noting only that they were labelled with tiny ivory plaques:
La Débâcle
and
L'Ascension
. He lifted the bottom of the curtain concealing the central piece and saw that it was entitled
La Crucifixion
.

But before he could examine it further he was suddenly aware of being watched, realized that he knew this to be so because the sounds from the bathroom had ceased and that a moment or two earlier he had heard the door swing open to admit the scent of Greenbloom's bath salts to the bedroom.

He turned round to see him standing there in a pitch-black bathrobe with only one leg showing beneath its hem, one hand on the doorknob, his head wet and bedraggled, some silvery feathers of hair hanging down on either side of his temples. Greenbloom stood there like a black flamingo. At that instant he was smiling. He said, “Well?” and swung himself into the room, hopping like the flamingo, putting out the wings of his sleeves to steady himself from one piece of furniture to another in his progress to the bed.

He sat down on it and, in his old way, ordered, “Leg!”

John went towards the bathroom to get it but was stopped and directed to the press. “A spare. That one with the black sock. I'm dressing for dinner.”

When he had carried it across to him, Greenbloom said, “Turn your back.”

“Can't I help?”

“Since I value your friendship, no! Instead, you might care to finish your inspection of ‘
La Crucifixion
.'”

“I hope you didn't mind.”

“Kindly look at it.”

John drew the curtain across and was confronted by a black panel. There was nothing whatsoever painted on the smooth wooden surface. Instead there was a visiting card pinned to the empty space:

M. ELI GREENBLOOM

and scribbled across this in a flat, even, hand: “
Horab. La Crucifixion c'est aujourd'hui aussi … J'espère
.”

Greenbloom had his leg on and his pants and trousers. The harness of the leg crossed his naked chest to the opposite shoulder
and was very clean. He said, “It was never completed. One must conceal what is incomplete.”

“Who painted them?”

“My brother Eli. You saw his message?”

“Yes.”

“It is interesting, I think?”

“It's cryptic,” John said. “What does he mean, ‘The crucifixion also is today, I hope.'”

“They are separate sentences; or so
I
hope. It is when they become one that I cease to hope. But we shall discuss this later, briefly; so soon as you have made a second and more successful attempt to outline for me your own problems.”

He dressed rapidly but more tidily than in the old days, not scattering things everywhere, and they drove down to the Ranelagh Club in a hired Daimler.

Before they went in, he instructed, “Should you introduce me to anyone my name is August Graeme. I am an American metallurgist here on business from New York. This is important.”

“But your appointment was in all the newspapers.”

“For that reason the Minister took particular care to see that my
arrival
was not. Mr. Graeme, on the other hand, landed at Shannon two days ago.”

“Is that why you're living in the Shelbourne instead of at the Consulate or somewhere?”

“I need about a week,” Greenbloom said. “After that I shall take up my appointment officially.”

Giving up any further attempt to diminish Greenbloom, John asked, “Why does your arrival have to be so hush hush? You're not engaged in espionage, are you? I mean, an agent on behalf of the British government or something?”

“I hope to carry out a small personal mission in the week at my disposal, that is all. That is why I expect something of you from this evening onwards. You may suggest that I am an old friend of your family's, a benefactor of your brother Michael's, his employer, in fact. We met at Oxford. The more truth one can incorporate in a lie the better.”

“I'm to act as camouflage, you mean?”

“Socially, yes.”

“But I told you; I shall be up to my eyes in exams in a few days' time.”

“We'll discuss that in a moment. You must take me to a room where we're not likely to be overheard. There we shall attempt the almost impossible task of communicating.”

In the club library John ordered drinks and when Bartlett had gone, said, “I keep thinking about your pictures—”

“As I told you, they are the work of my brother Eli. Each of the panels took him six months to complete: they were
not
experimental.”

“Why did he never complete the third one?”

“He is completing it now.”

Greenbloom waited so obviously, which is to say, by not moving at all, by a certain intonation of the last word, that John also waited for him to finish what he had patently not finished. The time passed, yet he added nothing; and John, borrowing Greenbloom's own word, said, “Well? Where? In France?”

“In Dachau,” Greenbloom said, “in person. We will drink to him, a toast without words.”

They emptied their glasses and Greenbloom said, “In all you have told me about your particular Dublin, I suspect that you have omitted one vital factor, the one which pains you most.”

“That would be Groarke,” John said, “my closest friend.”

“One of those friends whom one dislikes immoderately?”

“Not at present; that wasn't the reason for missing him out. It was only because I thought it would complicate things more. Even without Groarke there was so much to explain; and if I've no clear idea exactly what he means myself, how can I expect to make him relevant to you?”

“The facts?”

“He's had a breakdown, he's in a mental hospital. He was in love with Dymphna too.”

“An ambitious man,” Greenbloom said. “Is he certified or is his attempt to escape a voluntary one?”

“He's not certified but I should have said it was an involuntary one. He can do nothing. He wants to qualify, he's nearer to it than I am myself, yet he's shut up in a private ward in Grangegorman
wasting the most vital time of all. He won't even write to me. I've only managed to visit him once and that was by accident; then, when I spoke to him, he seemed to be genuinely amused. He made a joke.”

“We will drink to him.”

Greenbloom pressed the bell and ignoring Bartlett's arrival began to talk quite at random about Eli's pictures. Perhaps to pass the time or else simply because he had been thinking about them for some minutes he limped round the loo table like an absorbed lecturer or a man rehearsing a speech.

“‘
La Débâcle
' is the artist's interpretation of the Eden myth. The man and woman are being driven not out of, but further into the primal garden. The streaming seraph in the upper part of the picture holds open for them the transparent doors of temporal vision. These are covered with anatomical shapes which might also be flowers and fruit; they suggest
eating
.” He emphasized the last word as though it disgusted him, and Bartlett, who was waiting to take John's order, looked at him with surprise. John asked for two glasses of dark Marsala and as soon as Bartlett had gone, Greenbloom went on.