Through Streets Broad and Narrow (8 page)

A fine night's work, he thought, a fine night's work; I'll never go back to Cork Street and the Clynches, but I must remain friends with Groarke and work with him. I liked the way he fought, I liked the near-dirtiness of it, I liked his contempt for it. Now I wonder what he knows about Ireland that I don't? These two both seemed to know something civil, it was a civil fight with a lot of agreement behind it; it wasn't an ordinary battle.

Then he walked on up the steep road that runs near to the Mater Hospital, a Catholic place, dark and silent as a nunnery. This made him think of Oonagh and her cold kisses, the letters they exchanged. Well, why not? These could go on if she wanted it. You never knew when the writing might stop and the fun start.

But for the rest, he thought at Doyle's Corner, the frosty glassed pub dead and wet, the rest is over; I'm christened to it now; no more out and out Dublin for me. I'll leave the Flynns' and move into Trinity, the Rubricks or Botany Bay, rooms not too far from the Chete's.

Then as he came up level with the entrance to the cemetery, he thought back to Dymphna, the dance with her, the bright distress in her face over the fight, her lips open and the resilience of her breasts against his back, her not-so-small hand squeezing his own, the sudden stillness of her through all those minutes while she waited as Victoria might have waited: wondering, afraid, delighted.

The cemetery was invisible beyond the wall. He could see a chapel of some sort, yew trees, glimmering drives and footways behind box hedges; but not a tomb-top nor a headstone. He walked down past the entrance to Ulsterville Avenue on the opposite side of the road, and as he walked he craned over the coping of the wet wall. Then, at last, he came to a place where he could see the stretch of it: black crosses, grey angels, a great
ship's prow of marble with some figure on the bowsprit, and lozenges, rectangles, tables, tabernacles all of stone; chains and saints, circlets of flowers and glass; the many pinnacles of monuments, the great variety of the dead; and the silence under the rain.

He crossed the road and let himself in at the Flynns' door.

Oh, my heart is singing, he believed, as he first awakened, or is it not singing? Is it lying like a fisherman's lead in the centre of my chest? Now let me see what happened yesterday? How did it go?

For this was the way the days were about that time in the summer of 1937. Getting out of bed (he got out of bed), going and doing the first year clinics at the hospital (he would be on his way there in twenty minutes), striding about and tramming to meet Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch and all the others (tomorrow he
would
meet Palgrave), and loving Dymphna without ceasing. It was the last that mattered and the only activity which was invariable because, of course, it could not be altered.

He was out of bed now, heading for the bath house across Botany Bay in his pyjamas and dressing-gown through the eight o'clock sunshine. He was allotted a bath straightaway in the next cubicle to one of those Arts men who had obviously been to the Continent. Stropping his Rolls razor and singing
“Auprès de ma Blonde
” and “
Neue Liebe, Neues Leben”
He sang those two every morning, interspersing them with German phrases of conversation with his friend who was in some other part of the bath house. But they picked each other up like some kind of animal with stench glands, through the chattering of athletes, through the watery whistles of the showers and the rumblings of the other bathers. A bit of Joyce's Anna Livia Plurabelle would be answered by another bit of
Finnegan's Wake
, some Goethe by some Rilke; Racine by Voltaire, any old intellectual
thing so long as those two boys could lash their tongues round it and make Continental noises that nobody could understand.

John knew one of them very well by sight, a smooth man with rimless spectacles and big nostrils who wrote for
T.C.D: A College Miscellany
, and was always bursting about Front Square with manuscripts sticking out of his pocket and yellow socks. He had a girlfriend, one of those cool china ones; they had tea together in his rooms, scones and rhubarb jam, they went to most of the College dances without excitement, with an exasperating sureness about them. There was no ring, no engagement, no love-making, no ponderable sex at all; they would get married. They were always together twice a week and when they passed you they always smiled identically little.

The Arts man kept his singing up through the whole bath time and John made for the cold shower, not muttering but bristling. This fool with the scones and the rhubarb jam and a girl who was never unwell had found something; how to live an uncomplicated sex life. He sang
every
morning; apparently never had to ask, as the sleep and the dark fell away, “Now how is it going today?” He passed his exams, he wrote his bits of poetry and he was on the way to a D.Ph. or something and a perfectly aseptic marriage. I must never be quite sure of his name, John thought. If anyone happens to say, “There goes—” or “That's—” I shall interrupt them at once.

He got back to his rooms and made his pint of cocoa on the gas ring. That was an economical breakfast; it left more money for Dymphna and Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch, in that order. After the second clinic, coffee with her; this afternoon, the pictures or a ride; this evening, the flat; and tomorrow, the weekend at Ffynchfort with Palgrave. All very complicated: a thousand cogs within a thousand wheels turning turning in opposite directions to one end, only one end.

Breakfast finished, he went through the Back Gate, past Westland Row and into the slums. He could see the Chete five minutes ahead of him, cuffs showing, sleek head shining with just the right amount of brilliantine; but he didn't run to catch him up. With “Eights” Week again approaching the Chete had gone rowing mad, he was in training, his rooms were always
full of Boat Club men talking about “bell notes,” “tubs” and “toothpicks.” Nobody was drinking in view of the training. They went round to each other's room to make sure that they were in bed by nine and up by six because of the training. They were off the beer, necking was out and singing too. Dancing and smoking were cut for them; they had nothing to sing about; no Guinness, no late-night fizzlers with Virgin Sturgeon songs, no sex life of any sort whatsoever, since, when they were not in bed or working, they were in shorts on the river being bawled at by someone with a bicycle and a megaphone.

All of them, and the Chete in particular, had developed a rosier-than-thou attitude beside which or inside which nothing mattered. Some of them, those who were ploughing exams like the Chete, had a bruised look; others had a saving myself for whatsoever-it-might-be smilelessness and still others an almost mystical expression. Quite a few of them were joining the Oxford Group and confessing publicly to impurity when young or the theft of a pen nib from the Remove at Aldenham, Epsom, or St. Columba's.

When the rowing men were not in there, John, Groarke, Fitzgerald and Chamberlyn-Ffynch still sometimes visited the Chete's rooms, but more often and in view of the Chete's annual deadness, they gathered in John's rooms or Palgrave's.

In truth, though, they had all broken up a little by the time they had reached the end of the second year and in several directions relationships were a little stretched. This was partly due to the gradual diffusion of everyone's acquaintance and partly to obsessions. It was all extremely complicated and no one had very much time or the care to investigate it, since they were too much preoccupied with their own living. Yet, still, there were occasions when they were seen briefly together, the five of them in a row crossing College Green or the Front Square, taking a train or bus out to the Forty Foot at Dun Laoghaire or crammed into Fitzgerald's car on their way to the Races. But it was rare for “The Gentlemen” to be seen all together all at once and, as a result of Chamberlyn-Ffynch's arrival, Groarke was never with them when they were all together because he would not have been going anywhere with them; and in any case,
since he was in love with Dymphna, he and John had to be very careful about everything.

The slums were the same as they always were, bright and smiling. Featherweight children hopped in the hopscotch squares, women in aprons and white blouses went in and out of doorways with jugs in their hands. Men sat on the doorsteps smoking, and paper bags blew about in the gutters. There was wire netting instead of glass in the shop windows and the same old turnips, bruised apples and long carrots as were always there. Some doors were shut and some were open; some windows had curtains but most had not. There was certainly no particular smell unless the wind was blowing down and bringing with it a little chimney smoke and some soot grains.

The only possible thing to be noticed about the slums was that they were always exactly as busy every day of the week and every week of the year. They manifested the same activities all the time, the women with jugs or washing, the children with games and the men with yellowed cigarettes. Yes despite this, although they were crowded with people, you never saw very many of them at a single time on a sample morning and those you saw had no particular health. The question did not really arise because everybody was unwell from the babies up or down to the grandfathers, who had lived long enough to be grandfathers and the babies to be babies. The only other remote observation to be made, and it was one which was remembered rather than seen, was that there was a high percentage of yellowness in the slum-dwellers' faces. The women's yellowness was more exactly an ivory white shining through the flesh which when bled is always yellow shading to green, the men's yellowness was perhaps smokers' sallow and the babies' was starvation.

But without the slums there would have been nothing for the hospital to do. It sat there in the hollow by the canal like a farm with its arable all round it; and the arable was the slums and the crops were the people.

No one at the hospital took very much notice of the people until they came out of the slums and went into the hospital. The consultants drove through in their cars every morning; they must have done or otherwise the hospital yard would not have
been filled with very large American or English cars. The students walked.

The first clinic, a medical one, was to be taken by Alfie Parsons who was getting on for eighty and an enthusiast. They all hung about in the hall waiting for him to arrive; and, as always with Alfie's clinics, there were a number of crashers from other hospitals, even some visiting Englishmen from the Rotunda, all eager to hear Alfie on the subject of occult blood, renal disease or anything at all so long as it was Alfie.

Because he was an enthusiast he had no need to act and this was why his histrionics drew no applause, but were accepted as part of his clinical equipment, whereas the surgical dramas of Mr. Grille in gastrectomy or the throw-away antics of Mr. Heston, the plastic surgeon, were always acclaimed immediately.

In his white wing collar and white hair, with his deftly dancing hands juggling with the lees of urine or gastric juice, Alfie had become what he set out to be, a clinician transcending his own senility, an ageless physician.

He arrived in his small car at five to nine, coming unselfconsciously through the clangour of the gang (three beats for Mr. Parsons), and did not linger in the gas-heated consulting room but headed the clinic straight along to the St. Columba's ward. He smiled his way past the patients beneath the turgid murals of St. Columba's life, scribbled a few words on the blackboard in front of the autumn fire and began.

“Gentlemen, in the clinical aspects of genito-urinary pathology: ware the warm, wet, palm.” He waited for the shuffles to subside and repeated it, “Ware! the warm, wet palm.”

With excitement he explained how, beneath the elaborate details of kidney function, behind the complex chemistry of the blood and the niceties of progressive glomerular destruction in clinical nephritis, the patient innocently sported the tokens of his disease long before it became grossly apparent. A picture emerged of a person in whom the skin itself in the first consulting-room handshake provided the first clue to the true diagnosis. As the hour ran on and the test tubes were manipulated, the blackboard was scored over with chains of symptoms and signs,
the differential diagnoses were discussed and the questions answered. All too soon Alfie took out his presentation watch, bade them good morning and hurried off to take his “outpatients.”

As the clinic dispersed to smoke and wait in the hall, Groarke came up to John and said, “It's Grille on the next clinic.”

“What's he going to do?”

“Bluster as usual,” said Groarke. “I asked Cloate if I could assist in O.P. Theatre.”

“Good idea, but I think I'll finish my cigarette first.”

When he got into O.P. Theatre Groarke was sloping round Cloate, whom he admired for his talent and the fact that an aunt had left him a little capital. Having qualified early he was the youngest man on the staff of the hospital, a Fellow of the Irish College of Surgeons with an inevitably brilliant future. He had slightly small grey eyes, boot-black hair, a commercial traveller's moustache and a habit of whispering when he was operating. He whispered the sort of things which Groarke preferred to say out loud and they seemed to understand one another very well. Perhaps Fergus Cloate was one of the people who lent Groarke money. They lived near one another, were both Anglo-Irish and bitterly distrustful of nearly everyone else. They certainly drank together occasionally and never invited anyone else, seeming on these occasions to avoid other people.

This morning Cloate had a very dirty tramp on the table who had been brought in with retention of urine due to a presumed venereal stricture. Cloate gave Groarke the anaesthetic to do with a Clover's inhaler, of the old-fashioned balloon type.

Cloate whispered to the theatre sister, “The silver bougies, sister,” and snapped his hard grey eyes at her.