The Pornographer

by John McGahern

  Maloney had his back to the counter when I came in, pulling on a cigar. Around him there were three or four different conversations going but they all formed a single and distinct whole from the rest of the bar, and people were continually circulating between the points of conversation. There was a tradition of wit on those Fridays which resulted in a killing and artificial tedium. Though they put out pornographic papers it would be difficult to tell them from any bank or insurance party except that their dress was perhaps that bit more attractively careless. Some of the girls said “Hello, stranger” to me between the smiles and handshakes but it had as much significance as “yours sincerely”. Maloney bought me a drink and I gave him the story.

  “I don’t suppose you’ll like it,” I said carelessly.

  “If he doesn’t like it he doesn’t have to publish it,” one of the girls who was with him laughed.

  “Even if we didn’t like it there’s a special place for odd-ball stuff our regulars come in with from time to time,” Maloney countered quickly, and started to slip through it. As he did I asked the girl where she intended to go on her summer holiday. Maloney interrupted tepid talk about the Aran Islands to say in his mock pompous voice, “It breaks no new ground but it’s up to your usual high, traditional standard and of course there’s the usual spunk, old boy. Where do you intend to exercise the Colonel and our good Mavis next?”

  “I thought of a trip in a cruiser up the Shannon.”

  “Excellent idea. Spend your holiday discovering Ireland. Support home industry. I’m all for that, old boy.”

  “In fact, I’ve got an invite on one of those trips and I want to borrow a car for next weekend. It’s all the paper will have to contribute to the field work.”

  “Very in-ter-est-ing. Do you have a Mavis to take along to your Colonel?”

  “Sure,” I tried to cut the joking short. “She’s seventy-nine and after every time we do it we have to search between the sheets for her false teeth. What about the car?”

  “Hi, John,” he called across to a young bald-headed man in a blue duffle coat, “What cars are free next Friday?”

  “There’s a few, I’d take the black Beetle if I was him.”

  “The Black Beetle, then,” I said and Maloney nodded gravely.

  “What can I get you to drink before I go?” I offered, but it was refused, and I made the final arrangements for picking up the Volkswagen late afternoon of the next Friday.

  There was a time I’d have hung on in the pub, afraid of missing something if I left, afraid of being mocked as soon as I left. But now I knew it didn’t matter, and anyhow it could not be controlled. There was always a time when you’d have to leave.

  I spent the Saturday she was to come to cook dinner cleaning the kitchen. Then I got the fire to light and went out and bought the red wine.

  She came with a large cane basket. The way she returned my kiss left no doubt as to how she planned for the evening to end. There was fresh rain on her face, and as we kissed I had no chance of curbing my own desire. Suddenly I wanted nothing but to sleep with her.

  “I’ll show you the kitchen. Then I’ll set the table and draw the wine and leave you to the cooking. I’d only get in your way. All that can be said about the kitchen is that it’s elemental.”

  “It has all that I need. And it’s even clean,” she said.

  “I tried to clean it but I’m afraid it’s not all that clean.”

  “It’s just lovely,” she raised herself on her toes to be kissed again.

  She unpacked the parcels from the basket: two steaks, a head of lettuce, mushrooms, three different kinds of cheeses, four apples.

  “You see, I kept it simple.”

  “It looks delicious. There’s fruit here as well. What’ll you have?”

  “I’ll have a sherry.”

  After I poured a glass of sherry, I said, “I’ll leave the bottle out. Is there anything else before I leave?”

  “Yes. A kiss. And a radio. I like to play the radio while I cook.”

  I took the transistor in from the other room, and the kiss was so prolonged that I put my hands beneath her clothes, moving them freely. It was she who broke loose. “I suppose I better make a start,” her face flushed. I wanted to say, “Why don’t we before you start?” but left the room.

  I set the table, poured out a large whiskey, threw some more wood on the fire and stood leaning against the mantel sipping the whiskey while noises of utensils and smells of cooking came through the radio music from the kitchen. The evening was on its way like a life. There was no use kicking against it now. It had to be plundered like a meal.

  “Everything’s ready,” she called from the kitchen. The smell of the grilled steaks was delicious. “We’ll just have the steaks with the mushrooms and we can have the salad at the same time,” she handed me the salad bowl. “There’s just one thing missing,” she cried out. “No candles!”

  “There are candles somewhere,” I said and found an old packet among the liquor bottles. When she lit the candles and fixed them in their own wax in ashtrays round the room, she switched off the light. There was hardly need of candles because of the leaping fire which flashed on glass and metal and made the plates glow white.

  When I praised the meat she said, “I got it from Janey and Betty’s butcher. They told me he’s expensive but that you can always be certain of him. When I mentioned their names he put down the piece he was going to give me and went back and searched among the hanging pieces in the cold room.”

  “So they too knew about the meal,” I said and she felt it as a rebuke for she didn’t answer. This was how quarrels usually began, and I stopped. When it had mattered to me I was never able to stop.

  “Did you ever eat by candlelight before?” she asked. “It’s such a lovely light.”

  “No,” I lied instantly. “The candles are here since the last blackout.”

  “They certainly look it,” everything was running easily again. The candles hadn’t been used since She and I were here before going into the country, the last night we spent here together. The pain of that night still wavered in their flames, but wearily. It was over.

  I helped her clear away the plates and we started to kiss after the cheese was brought out.

  This time I said, “Why don’t we give the meal a rest? Come back to it.…”

  “Why not?”

  Between the sheets she said, “I feel marvellous. I don’t know what I was doing all those years, making the nine Fridays, going to the Sodality, out on the streets with the Legion of Mary, always in for nine when my uncle was saying the Rosary. I must have been crazy. Everybody must have been crazy. I was wasting my life and now I am doing what is natural. I don’t feel dirty or sinful or anything. I just feel that I have a great deal of lost living to make up for.”

  “Sex is only a small part of living,” I said warily.

  “Yes, but what is it without it? I’m crazy about you,” she raised herself so that her body shone above me before she bent to kiss. “I thought of nothing else all week. I wanted the week to run to Saturday night. I’d find my fingers reaching out, and I’d wonder what they were reaching for, and then I’d realize they were reaching for your skin.”

  I drew her towards me, “This time we can take all the time in the world,” and when it was over, all the grossness of the food and wine seemed drained away and a peace that was almost purity seemed to settle on what a few moments before had been muscular and wild.

  I put more wood on the fire when we rose and drew the cork of another bottle of wine. She lit the candles that had been blown out. They wavered on the half-filled wine glasses, on the Brie and Stilton and Cheddar and water biscuits on the wooden platter.

  “This girl,” she said with a pause that I knew to be the pain of jealousy, “this girl, the girl you were in love with, who was she?”

  I looked at her, how vulnerable and open the face was. She was going to hurt herself by searching about in a life that no longer existed,
that she had been unaware of when it was going on. Crazy as it was, she was determined to cause herself that pain.

  “We met much like we met—like most of Ireland meets—at a dance. We went casually out for a year. At first she did most of the running, and when she tired I took up the pursuit. It’s a usual enough pattern. The more I pushed myself on her the more tiresome I became to her, and that speeded up her withdrawal, which made her ten times as attractive. I felt I couldn’t live without her. Which made me ten times as tiresome. I was ill, lovesick, mad. If she’d finished it then it might have been easier, but who knows. She kept the thing going, interested in my madness, which was after all about her, and we can all do with an awful lot of ourselves. I think it nearly turned into a farce in the end.”

  “I don’t know how you can call it a farce. It sounds horrible. What’s worst about it is that I wish I had her chance.”

  “Marriage to a madman is hardly a recipe for domestic bliss. Because of her interest in this madness about herself I think she nearly fell in love with me. If she’d done that then it’d have been the farce.”

  “Isn’t that what you’d want? Isn’t that what everybody wants, two people in love at the same time.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. If she had fallen in love with me I think it would have soon cured me of my madness. No world can afford to have all its inmates mad at the same time.”

  “You seem to have it all figured out. If I didn’t believe there wasn’t some happiness I don’t know how I’d be able to go on.”

  “You would,” I said. “Anyhow it all got too much. She drew the line.”

  “I don’t see what’s funny about something as horrible as that. All the sex writing must twist and blind you to everything about love, make it just pure cynical.”

  “On the contrary. It clears it out of the way. You learn it has nothing to do with love or living. It’s like sport. Except it’s between the sheets instead of in the gym.”

  “Was she younger than you?” she was still biting into herself.

  “She was, a few years. Why don’t we go to bed?”

  The pain made her look tired and older. “Let’s clear up,” she said. “I hate waking up to a dirty kitchen.”

  After we tidied up I fell into a drugged sleep and woke with the splitting headache of a hangover. Later in the morning she asked, “Since it’s Sunday why don’t we spend the day together?”

  “I’d love to but I have to work,” and I walked her part of the way to where she lived. It was one of those spring mornings, the sun thawing the white frost out of the front gardens, and people with prayerbooks were going and coming between the Masses.

  “Look. We’ll have the whole of next weekend together,” I said as we parted. “What’ll you do for the day?”

  “I think I’ll go to Mass like the other people,” she said.

  We drove in the stream of traffic out of the city the next weekend. It didn’t build any speed till it got past Lucan, and even there we found ourselves continually shut in behind slow trucks and milk tankers.

  “Ireland will soon be as jammed up as everywhere else. That’s what’s wonderful about the rivers and lakes. They’re empty. Isn’t it exciting to be spending the whole weekend away from people?”

  “People are all right,” I said morosely.

  “There’re towns and villages that we can put in at. That’s what’s wonderful about the Shannon. You have a choice. You can be with people or get away and there’re pubs up lanes or a few fields from the river. There’s one in particular that we must visit in a village past Carrick, the man is fat and lovely and he’s always in good humour.”

  After Kinnegad the road emptied and we drove steadily and fast. Outside Longford a great walled estate with old woods stretched away to the left and children from a tinker encampment threw a stone that grazed the windscreen. In the distance, between rows of poplars, the steel strip of the Shannon started to flash.

  “There it is—the Shannon River,” she greeted excitedly. “They said they’d meet us in the first bar on the right. That’s it. Over there. The Shannon Pot.”

  We had hardly time to look around the big lounge, a large pike preserved in a lighted glass case above the bar, the only sign of a connection with water, when a man in a well-cut worsted suit came up to us and enquired, “Would you be the people from the magazine?” When we told him we were he shook hands in the old courtly way, standing far back and bowing. “Mr Smith, the man who owns the boats, asked me to apologize for him. He meant to be here himself but was called to England the day before yesterday on sudden business, but he said all the information was here in these brochures, and if there was anything else you needed to know for the article to just leave word and he’d phone it in as soon as ever he got back. I’m supposed to see,” he smiled, “that you lack for nothing on the voyage. I’m known everywhere as Michael. And how was your journey down—good?”

  “It was easy. We drove down,” I said.

  He then introduced us to the barman, a young man in shirtsleeves.

  “What about something warm after the journey? The evening is fine but it’s chill enough,” and we all had hot whiskeys. We had hardly touched them when another round appeared without a word, and then another. We started to protest but Michael waved our protest aside as if it was an appreciated but thoroughly unnecessary form of politeness. “We better see the boat first,” I had to say firmly, “then we can come back here.”

  “The boat’s just across the road. There’s nothing to it,” he said and led us out.

  The boat was across the road, a large white boat with several berths. It had a fridge, a gas stove, central heating and a hi-fi system. The Shannon, dark and swollen, raced past its sides. Night was starting to fall.

  “There’s nothing to these boats,” he said and switched on the engine. It purred like a good car, the Fibreglass not vibrating at all once it was running. “And there’s the gears—neutral, forward, neutral, reverse. There’s the anchor. And that’s the story. They’re as simple as a child’s toy. And still you’d grow horses’ ears with some of the things people manage to do to them. They crash them into bridges, get stuck in mudbanks, hit navigation signs, foul the propeller up with nylons, fall overboard. I’ll tell you something for nothing: anything that can be done your human being will do it. One thing you have to give to the Germans though is that they leave the boats shining. They spend the whole of the last day scrubbing up. But do you think your Irishman would scrub up? Not to save his life. Your Irishman is a pig,” he said. Only for the speech I’d not have noticed that he was by no means sober. “I’ve used this type of boat before, Michael,” she interrupted the flow. “They’re a lovely job. But—this shouldn’t have been done. The fridge is full, there’s wine, a bottle of whiskey.…”

  “Mr Smith wanted everything to be right for yous. Mr Smith is a gentleman.”

  Outside the misted windows the Shannon raced. When I wiped the port window clear the gleam of the water was barely discernible in the last lights.

  “What’ll we do?” I asked. “Will we make a start or stay?”

  “I’d hoped to make Carrick tonight,” she said.

  “I think it’s too late. I think we should stay here tonight and leave at daybreak.”

  “It’s the best thing ye can do,” Michael chorused.

  I unscrewed the cap from the whiskey bottle in the fridge and poured three whiskeys.

  “We’ll just have one drink here with Michael and then we’ll go and get the things out of the car. What kind of man is Mr Smith?’ I asked by way of conversation.

  “A gentleman. The English are a great people to spend money. They’re pure innocent. But your Irishman’s a huar. The huar’d fleece you and boast about it to your face. Your Irishman is still in an emerging form of life.” The whiskey was large enough to have lasted a half-hour but he finished it in two gulps. When I poured him another drink he finished it too. Then, in case he’d settle in the boat for the rest of the even
ing, I suggested we should go back and have a last drink in the pub.

  “I’ll stay,” she said as we went to leave. “I’ll check out the things on the boat, see what we need for the night, and I’ll join you later.”

  “There’s no beating an intelligent woman,” Michael said as we climbed out of the boat.

  “Do you live far from here?” I asked him over the whiskey and chaser I bought him in the bar.

  “I’ve a few acres with some steers a mile or two out the road. There’s an auld galvanized thing on the place, and it does for the summer, the hay and that, but in the winter I live on one or other of the boats. It’s in the winter we do up the boats for the summer.”

  “Who looks after the cattle?”

  “A neighbour. I let him graze a few of his own on it and that keeps him happy. Before the boats started up I used to work here and there at carpentry. The wife was easy-going. She always gave me my head,” he joked since it was plain he had no wife at all.

  It was with great difficulty he was prevented from buying her a large brandy when she joined us though she only wanted a soft drink. Afterwards he told us stories, all of them fluent. We only got away early by saying that in order to do the article we had to be on the move at first light. He caught both our hands at the wrist, murmuring, “Good people, good people. The best,” and making us promise several times to see him as soon as we got back. He got unsteadily to his feet to wave, “God bless,” as we went out. We got our things out of the car and went across to the boat.

  “Well, that was a bit of local colour to start off with.”

  “He was nice enough,” she said, “but he’s spoiled with the tourists.”

  I was uneasy when she came into my arms in the boat. There was the pure pleasure of her body in the warmth, the sense of the race of water outside, the gentle resting movements of the boat, but I did not want to enter her.

  “Why?” she protested.

  “It’s just too dangerous.”

  “According to the calendar I am back into the safe days.”