Through Streets Broad and Narrow (45 page)

“What about Mrs. Mahoney?”

“She's known me since I was a baby. If one of us doesn't wake up in time for you to leave before she comes, she won't think anything. She's a very good woman, as a matter of fact.”

“All right then, I'll stay.”

She put both arms round him. He felt her kissing him as earlier the girl Fiona had kissed Luthmann; and he responded. They stood there swaying in the empty room, their eyes closed, no passion in their embrace at first; only an overwhelming fear. Before their feeling could change she left him and went up the stairs to her bedroom. She threw down two blankets and a pillow from the top of the staircase.

“You're very sweet to stay. It's really sweet of you, John.”

He smiled up at her and made up his bed on the sofa.

He never saw her again, because in the morning he awoke early and by seven o'clock was on his way back to his rooms to make coffee before going to the hospital for a Gynae clinic.

On the following Tuesday he passed the three-hour examination
paper without much trouble and went up for the long and tricky clinical on the following day.

The principal case was a jolly multiparous woman of thirty-five who watched his examination of her enormous stomach with some amusement. He tried hard to maintain a formal attitude but her brown eyes, small in the big face, were too intent and observant for him. She was watching his hands, a little desperate, trying for the Pawlik grip and getting no definite information as to how the baby was lying.

“Isn't it a pity for you I'm so fat, now?”

“That's quite all right. Tell me Mrs.—”

“Tyrrell, it is; Annie Tyrrell.”

“Thank you. Tell me, has everything gone smoothly so far? You haven't had the baby turned or anything, have you?”

“That would be telling, wouldn't it?”

“Well—we are allowed to ask questions. I mean you haven't by any chance had a version?”

“An adversion? What would that be?”

“It's the question of the head, you see.” He was beginning to sweat; the chilly perspiration of the examination hall.

“Whose head?” she asked; and she winked.

He was sure he must have looked a fool. He wanted to tell her hurriedly, confide in her. Believe me, I've done this hundreds of times. There's absolutely nothing to it, normally I could see your baby inside you and tell the examiner exactly how it's lying. But today I'm off my stroke and you're so damnably fat. Your old uterus is so muscular and floppy, too, with all the cargoes it's carried that it's got me completely foxed. I'd not worry in the ordinary way, but it just happens that everything depends on my getting this first case right: the whole pattern of my whole life. It will set the tone of the entire exam for me. Now there's something a bit unusual here. Oh, for God's sake, Mrs. Tyrrell, if you or your baby or my hands would give me just one clue.

The examiner was two candidates away. In ten minutes or so he would be at the next bed where Figgins was standing looking shinily confident, ready to answer any question at all.

John tried to auscultate the foetal heart, but all he could hear were the loud souffles of Mrs. Tyrrell's uterine blood-flow. Transiently he heard the bird-like ticking from the baby's breast; but just as he was sure he had located it to the left of her navel the child heaved, or a rush of flatus in Mrs. Tyrrell's transverse colon blotted out the rhythm. He started to search again with the questing end of his stethoscope and the palms of his hands. In a few moments he heard the pulse again, under her liver this time. He heard her speaking to him again with complicity and very quickly.

“Maybe, sir, I should have said
which
head?”

He understood her at once. It explained everything. The multiplicity of the foetal parts, the duplication of the heart sounds, the anomaly of her great size in relation to her thirty-week pregnancy. He settled down happily and mapped out the position of each child. He re-checked her blood pressure and pelvic measurements, then with a sudden sense of leisure he stood back and asked her with a straight face, “Tell me, Mrs. Tyrrell, is there by any chance a history of twins in either your own or your husband's family?”

“Twins, oh, no.” She smiled. “Not yet, sir.” She did not wink again; but she lay back all the more comfortably and closed her eyes.

He said, “Thank you very much. Until the examiner comes I've finished now,” and he covered her with the red hospital blanket.

“Good luck, sir,” she said.

The minor cases were easy, and when he got out into the street again with the others he didn't even trouble to compare notes with them. Having lost a year already he was not on very familiar terms with any of them, and he was exam bored. The spate of accounts, of ready listening you had to give before you could tell your own story were not for him any longer. Nor were the frothing pints in Davy Byrnes' or the Wicklow Bar. He lunched by himself in the college Buffet and went back to his rooms to do two or three hours' revision of the gynaecology in preparation for the final viva the next morning.

At teatime he went up to the Shelbourne to see Groarke and found him sitting alone in Greenbloom's bedroom.

“How did you get on?” Groarke asked.

“So far, I'm through. I nearly came down in the clinical, but by the mercy of God, as Father Beste would say, I struck a darling of a woman who dropped me the hint just in time.”

Groarke was chewing his teeth, stretched out on Greenbloom's sofa. “Viva, tomorrow?”

“Yes, ten A.M.”

“And after that you're going back to Anglesey?”

“On Saturday; by the morning boat.”

The photograph of Eli had been removed, the triptych was folded up and locked with a minute archaic-looking key.

“Mike, what are your plans?”

“I'm starting again next term. Medicine and surgery in the summer, a house job in London during the winter. After that, the Navy.”

Groarke threw him a cigarette. “We missed you.”

“I know. I'm sorry, Mike. It was a question of first things first. After the party I only had two days in which to finish my revision. I just had to pretend that none of it had happened. I wanted to come and see you and Greenbloom, of course. I wanted to see if there wasn't something we could do, but—oh God, Greenbloom would understand, even if you don't.”

“He did.”

“Where is he?”

“He flew to London yesterday, he's coming back tomorrow.”

“To London? Why?”

“To see his mother. Beste brought him the news of his brother's death yesterday morning. The German priest was not allowed to visit the hospital. He was told by the superintendent that the prisoner had died in diabetic coma six weeks ago—and was ‘cremated in the camp crematorium.'”

“Six weeks ago? He was dead all the time?”

“That was the message.”

“But he didn't have diabetes.”

“No.”

“They put him out with insulin, then?”

“He's dead.” Groarke said.

John went round the room looking at things. Greenbloom had removed most of his possessions, even the ashtrays were empty of his particular cigarette ends.

Groarke said, “What are you looking for?”

“I was looking
at
things.”

“Been a death in the room,” Groarke said. “D'you know what that fellow's done?”

“What fellow?”

“Himself, Greenbloom.”

“No, what?” John picked up a letter from the top of the bureau. It was addressed to him in Greenbloom's heavy hand and had already been opened.

“Why didn't you tell me about this?”

“He's squared all my debts,” Groarke said. “The whole seven hundred pounds. He'll see me through until I qualify; and this after I'd told him Luthmann had lent me some of the money.”

But John was reading Greenbloom's letter.

My Dear John,

I understand the reasons for your absence and Groarke will have explained to you the reasons for mine.

We were too late for Eli and I shall not mourn him. Those German romantics are already in flight. When this war is over we shall find them marching into peace and democracy as enthusiastically as they have recently plunged into war. Since they believe only in what they might become they will have no memory of what they were. There is no point of rest in the philosophies they have espoused—and no centre for their guilt unless it be in the breast of the Europe which we ourselves are. We each contain within us the old barbarities of the new Germany. With my brother, I begin to see that the Crucifixion also is today.

Pray breakfast with me here tomorrow at 10.

Thank you for your help which I hope to have repaid to your friend Groarke.

Yours affectionately,
Horab.

John said, “Did you read it?”

“Yes.”

“What did you think of it?”

“I prefer: ‘The unpurged images of day recede …'”

“Say it.”

Groarke rolled himself off the sofa and onto the carpet. He crawled across it on all fours like a dog or a man playing bears and reached up for the bell push. He pressed it.

“Do you ever feel that the only possible answer is an action of some sort?”

“I do, as a matter of fact. It's what children do.”

“Well get down on your knees alongside me,” Groarke said, “and when this flunkey arrives we'll give him something to think about.”

They took up their positions on either side of the door and waited. When it opened the Shelbourne room-servant did not see them at first. He was an elderly Englishman with a compressed face, the expression glazed into place by years of politeness and tip-taking. He stood there in the doorway with John and Groarke at the level of his knees, looking for the occupant of the room.

Groarke spoke, “Two large brandies and soda, please.”

The man jumped perceptibly; they saw his knees jerk back within the trousers legs.

“What, sir?”

Groarke stared up at him complacently, “Two large brandies and sodas.” He turned to John, “Or would you prefer whiskey?”

“No,” John said, looking up at the waiter, “but would you please be sure that it's Schweppes' ginger ale? I don't like Mumford's; it's too gingery.”

The waiter went on standing there as though he were afraid to move until Groarke said to John, “That'll be all, won't it?”

“Some biscuits,” John said.

Groarke instructed the waiter, “Some biscuits.” He asked John, “With butter?”

“No, thank you, just biscuits.”

The man withdrew slowly. Groarke all-foured across the carpet, reached up to the handle of the bedroom door and disappeared
inside it. John heard him grunting and padding round the room looking for something. In a few minutes he came back carrying one of Greenbloom's books in his mouth, a volume of Yeats' poetry, and at this moment the door opened and the waiter reappeared with a jug on which stood the drinks and a plate of biscuits.

“Put it on the floor, please,” Groarke instructed through the book.

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

From his position in front of the electric fire John said, “He, Mr. Groarke, wants you to put the tray on the floor.”

The waiter kneeled down between them and carefully deposited the tray in front of them, so that momentarly they were all three on all fours.

Groarke took the book out of his mouth and said, “That proves something. The question is, what?”

“Unities,” John said.

The waiter asked Groarke whether there would be anything else.

“Yes, have a drink with us.”

“I'm on duty, sir,” he said, making for the door. When it had closed behind him, Groarke said, “That was helpful.”

“Splendid,” John said, getting on to the sofa. “I feel better already, now let's have the poem.”

“Drink first,” Groarke said and drained his double brandy. Then he stood up and in the Gaelic monotone, the slow precise chant of the poet himself, read the first verse of “Byzantium.”

“
The unpurged images of day recede;

The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;

Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song

After great cathedral gong;

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

All that man is
,

All mere complexities
,

The fury and the mire of human veins
.”

“More,” John requested, emptying his glass.

“
Before me floats an image, man or shade
,

Shade more than man, more image than a shade;

For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth

May unwind the winding path;

A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

Breathless mouths may summon!

I hail the superhuman!

I call it death-in-life and life-in-death
.

The words and brandy teased them in the silence. Groarke was springing to life with the old, long-absent brilliance in his face. The poem rang across the room, the death and fret; the mystery slowly resolving into the fulfilment of a just imaginable promise.

Groarke said, “We'll celebrate this man. We'll bury him and raise him.”

“We'll do it with food and wine.”

“A wake,” Groarke said.

“Only the best.”

“A royal tomb.”

“A palace, a mausoleum.”

“In the Ranelagh Club,” John said.

“No Jews admitted,” Groarke said.

“But he was rich.”

“And he's dead.”

“He's alive.”

“And we are too.”

They went through into Greenbloom's bedroom and borrowed a magnificent suit each; John's was a little too full a fit, but Groarke's might have been tailored for him.

Groarke left a note for Greenbloom on top of the bureau explaining that in view of his viva John would be unable to meet him for breakfast and that he himself might be late as they intended to celebrate fittingly his brother Eli's martyrdom.