The Pornographer

by John McGahern

  “Of course, they’re your friends,” she said bitterly.

  “In a sense, they are, but I think they’d have said the same to any couple. It comes down to whether the marriage has a chance or not. The child makes no difference.”

  “The child, of course, has no rights?”

  “It will have, but that has nothing to do with it. The marriage is between you and me. If it’s not going to work without the child it won’t work with the child.”

  “Do these people know our ages?”

  “They do and they think that’s not important either, if everything else is all right.”

  “I know those sort of people. They live in their comfortable houses. They have planned families. They have everything figured out; and yet they die.”

  “We all die.”

  “You have everything figured out too.”

  “It may be bad enough with thinking but it’d be a damned sight worse just following your nose,” I heard my own voice echo Peter White’s.

  “Stop it,” she said. “Stop it or I’ll scream.”

  We’d crossed the bridge, and turned down Burgh Quay. Rows of people waited for buses the other side of the quay but the river path was empty. Below us the Liffey at low tide lay oily and still in the warm evening. I stood beside the granite wall and waited. Her distress was so great that it hid her beauty, as it would ugliness, had she been ugly. For a wild moment I wanted to say, “I was only testing you. Don’t worry. Well get married,” but the moment went.

  “O boy,” she said without looking at me. “I sure picked a winner.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Stop it. I’m not ready for that. Not yet.”

  “Will we go for a drink?”

  We crossed to the Silver Swan. She went straight to the Ladies. I bought treble gins and brought them to the farthest corner of the bar. She seemed to be gone a long time but did not look any more composed when she came back. The lights of the Silver Swan were so blessedly low that it wasn’t possible to tell whether she’d been crying or not. She let me pour the tonic up to the rim of the glass. We sat for a long time in that silence.

  “Why couldn’t we be married?” the calmness of the voice took me by surprise.

  “I’d only marry you to cover up till the child was born. We’d be only getting deeper and deeper in. The marriage would have no chance of lasting. It’s better to face up to that now rather than go through a sort of charade.”

  “You might change, especially when we’d have the child. I couldn’t see you walking out on the child.”

  “No. I’d not change.”

  “How do you know you wouldn’t? You’re not giving anything a chance.”

  “You’ll just have to take my word for it.”

  “If we get married, I’d at least get that gratuity out of the bank. I hate to think of them being able to hang on to all that money just because I walked out without getting married.”

  “The divorce or separation would soon eat up the gratuity and it’d be a far worse mess.”

  “You sound more like a lawyer than a person,” I felt the calm go. “At least if we got married I’d have the child.”

  “You can have the child anyhow. No one can stop you. Since I am supposed to be a lawyer, why can’t there be an abortion?”

  “How would you get an abortion?” she challenged.

  “It’s very simple. You’d fly to London. There’s a first-class clinic in Woodford. The doctor can arrange it. It’s a simple, fairly painless operation. If you had to, or wanted to, you could be back at work in three days.”

  “And live with that for the rest of your life? Thanks. Ο thanks.”

  “You asked,” the tension gnawed and went on gnawing.

  “I asked? I asked for a lot of things.”

  It was as if silence was turned like a lock and the key forgotten about. We sat in that silence for what seemed like hours. Once I got up and went to the Mens and got two more gins at the counter on my way back, but that didn’t disturb the silence. Sometimes the tension wandered off into a sensuous mindlessness but then would startlingly snap back.

  “I suppose we’d be better back in the room,” she said as if it was now her room too.

  “I suppose we couldn’t be any worse off there.”

  We walked in the warm spring evening. Three hours had passed since we had met. That the curtains in the room were drawn as always seemed to mock us, the light lit above the Chianti bottle on the marble.

  “It’s the same as ever,” she said looking round.

  “It’s always the same,” I said.

  “Somehow it shouldn’t be the same,” she said.

  “Would you like a drink?” and when she shook her head I asked, “Do you mind if I have one?” and when she didn’t answer I poured myself a large whiskey and started to drink it quickly.

  It was then that she came into my arms. “Kiss me. Comfort me. I’m going to need a lot of comforting.”

  As I rocked her I said, “We’ll find some decent way out. You can depend on that. It’ll not be as bad as it seems now.”

  “Why don’t we go to bed,” she said. “We’ve certainly earned it. We have nothing to lose now. Nothing.”

  When I turned out the light we both seemed to undress with abstracted slowness. There was no feverish slipping of knots and buttons and buckle and hooks but rather a sad fumbling with them before reluctantly letting them fall loose.

  I felt her sobbing before I touched her shoulders, and when she came into my arms she shook there in an uncontrolled fit of sobbing. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry but I can’t help it.”

  “It’s all right. No one will bother us here. Don’t worry about it,” and when she quietened we began to kiss, laughing nervously when I dried the tears with the corner of the sheet.

  “That is what I need,” she breathed. “That is what I need. It is not talk I need but loving.” I was silent. “I don’t know why this happened to us. We’re both good people,” she took up.

  “It happened too soon, before we knew one another. We were unlucky.”

  “I’ll have to resign,” she said. “It’s going to be a hard road. I hate to think of them getting away with all that money after all these years.”

  “Where do you think you’ll want to go?”

  “To London. I always wanted to go to London. Two years ago a man called Jonathan wanted me to go. He owns magazines. I nearly resigned and went to work for him on a Water¬ ways magazine there. I little thought then that this’d be the way I’d be going,” she began to cry.

  “I can go with you,” I said. “I could get some job there, or even keep writing the old stuff. I could stay with you till the child was born.”

  “What would we do then?”

  “We’d get the child adopted.”

  “As simple as that. To go through all that and then just turn round and give the child away?”

  “That way the child would have a secure home.”

  “Listen,” she said. “There’s going to be enough hard times in the days ahead. What I need now is loving not talking or thinking. I’m going to need a great deal of loving to face into the days ahead. And you have no idea how much you’re loved. And I know how hard these days have been for you as well,” she said as she drew me back into her arms.

  My aunt came for a checkup at this time. She came on the train. I met her on the platform but when I took her bag at the carriage door she was impatient. “They wanted to drive me up, when it’s just for a few old tests. If you heeded them, they’d have you in a wheelchair before long. You’d never be able to start making your own way again.”

  “There’s no use pushing it though,” I was dismayed at how ill she looked, yet as she walked she seemed to walk ahead of me. She had on the lovely old brown tweed with fur at the throat that I remembered in happier days.

  “You’re just as bad as your uncle and Cyril,” she scolded.

  “I’m not that bad,” I said. “How
do you feel? You look great anyhow.”

  “All I feel is that it’s very cold, as if this year may never take up,” and it made me even more careful. It was a warm day for early summer.

  “What would you like to do—go out to the hospital now or wait for a bit?”

  “We’ll be out in the hospital soon enough. It’s long since we had a chat,” and I took her across the road to the solid comfort of the North Star Hotel. She wanted brandy.

  “Are you sure it won’t interfere with the tests?” my voice had no authority in its policeman’s role.

  “Bad luck to the tests,” she said. “They’re only a matter of going through the rigmarole.”

  “And there’s no chance they’ll try to keep you in?”

  “No. They said I’d be able to go home the day after tomorrow. I have to be home because of the garden.” She began to tell about her garden. She’d got James Prior to rotavate it. It had been a wilderness of weeds, not having been broken for the two previous years. She’d sown beans and peas, lettuce, carrots, parsnips, Early York cabbages, parsley, shallots, beet, even marrows. The netting wire had to be fixed because of the rabbits. The garden had been part of the old railway. Every fine afternoon she walked the half-mile down the disused line. Cyril collected her with the car on his way home from work.

  “I feel I get well there, just rooting about among the plants. You never feel the time pass. And every day there’s something new. Around dinner-time you find yourself getting anxious about the rain. And you forget about the pain, unless it’s playing you up horrible bad. I hadn’t my foot in the train this morning when it started.”

  “I was thinking that something good must have happened when I saw you get off the train, you looked so much better.”

  She wanted another brandy and she joked about the black-haired girl, asking if I had anybody now.

  “Not really anybody,” I said.

  “I know what that means,” she laughed.

  “I may have to go to London,” I said.

  “What would you want to go to that old place for?”

  “The crowd I work for want me to go.”

  “You don’t have to go?”

  “It’d be hard not to. They want me to go for a year or so.”

  “You don’t have to go anywhere, if you don’t want to. Isn’t it almost time you came home? Your own place is lying there. And whose for the old mill—bad luck to it—except yourself?”

  “I couldn’t afford to go home, unless you give me some of those houses you have,” I changed to tease. Over the years she’d acquired seven or eight houses in the town, and as she didn’t believe in cash was always on the lookout for more. They were let out as flats and a few shops and were jealously guarded for her beloved Cyril. She coloured like a young girl.

  “Bad luck to you, but haven’t you more than enough—without thinking of my poor shacks.”

  “They’d come in very handy,” I laughed. “Will you tell me this now, am I right or wrong, is there anybody who has enough?” I mimicked my uncle, “There’s only the one class of people that has enough, and there’s no prizes for telling where they are—they’re all in the graveyard.”

  “Bad luck to both of you,” she laughed into the last of her brandy. “Ye might look different but the pair of yous are the same thick old blocks.”

  We took a taxi to the hospital and I left her there.

  When I went in to see her the next evening all the tests had been taken and she was ready to go home.

  “Did they tell you anything?” I asked.

  “No. It’ll take them a while. They’re sending the results to the doctor.”

  When I looked at her racked flesh, the few wisps of hair left on the crown of her head, I saw that it was little more than pure spirit she was living on; and from several random words I gathered that the place in eternity she most hungered for was a half-mile down the abandoned railway among the growing things in the garden.

  “You’ll come down soon,” she said. “And you’ll try to get out of going to that old London if you can.”

  “I’ll be down soon—whether I have to go or not,” I promised.

  On the pretext of my aunt’s visit, I hadn’t seen her for two whole days. The readiness with which she agreed to the break took me by surprise, but we were to meet in Wynn’s Hotel late that night. I waited for an hour before she came. She was very carefully groomed, even glamorous, and in seeming high spirits.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a bit dizzy from the last two days. I saw poor Walter at the magazine. And then I spent yesterday evening with Betty and Janey. I rang Jonathan in London from their place and he insisted on ringing me back tonight. We must have talked for an hour. He’s flying in tomorrow. I’m meeting him at the Hibernian.”

  “Would you like something to drink? There’s just about time for you to have one.”

  “I’d like a long drink. A lager,” and when I called the waiter he pointedly checked the hotel clock with his watch.

  “Who’s Jonathan? Is he the one who wanted you to go to London two years ago?”

  “He is English, with handlebars. He’s very charming. Married to this crazy wife who’s been in and out of hospitals for years. He’s a director of a company which publishes several magazines and trade papers, including the British version of the Waterways magazine. Several times he’s asked me to marry him. He’s been in love with me for years. It was he who wanted me to give up the job in the bank two years back and go to London.”

  She too had gone out in search of allies. There was a sense of gangs forming, their pressure upon all guilt.

  “Maybe you’ll marry this Jonathan?”

  “Are you crazy? If I couldn’t marry him two years ago how could I marry him now? And he’s too old. He’s in his fifties.”

  “How was Walter?”

  “Poor Walter was so upset. His wife was pregnant when they married. He asked me if you’d ever said you loved me. You’ll have to thank me. I took your side. Walter was so indignant at first but I swung him round. In the end he agreed that you weren’t behaving badly, all things considered.”

  “What about Janey and Betty?”

  “They think you’re crazy. ‘That guy will regret not marrying you all the days of his life.’”

  “Did you tell them the whole story?”

  “Sure. They partly guessed it already. They still think you’re crazy. Did you see your aunt?”

  “She’s going home tomorrow.”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s very poor. I think it can be only a matter of weeks. I think she is dying.”

  “One person going out of life,” I winced as she said it, “and another person coming into life. I suppose that’s the story.”

  “That’s the story. What’ll we do next?”

  “Jonathan warned me not to make a move until I saw him tomorrow in the Hibernian but it seems simple enough. I’ll have to give in my month’s notice to the bank though it galls me to think of them getting away with that gratuity money. But nobody thinks giving up the bank is a big deal. They said I should have got out of it years ago but my aunt won’t think that; she’ll be horrified at giving up all that security and a pension at sixty-five,” she laughed.

  “What will you tell her?”

  “I’ll tell her I’m going to London to seek my fame and fortune. That it didn’t look as if I’ll be married now. And that I want to try a writing career. That the bank was a dead-end job. She knows that the magazine has been my real interest for years. She’s always giving out about it.”

  “Is that what you intend to try in London?”

  “Jonathan more or less said he could get me a job in one or other of the papers, that there was always something or other coming up. You know I almost gave up the bank to go two years ago but I got cold feet at the last minute.”

  “Will we go?” I asked as the porter cleared away the glasses.

  “At least we’ve nothing to fear going back to your
place now. We’re not trying to get anything on the cheap and easy. We’re facing up to everything,” she took my arm.

  It was strange how rapidly things were taking shape, almost independently of us. We’d give up our lives here, go to London, live there until the child was born. Our lives could hardly be the same again. For years they had stayed the same. Now they were being rushed into some new and frightening shape.

  After perfunctory desire, the body that many must have yearned for lay nonexistent by my side. I was going to have months and months and months to get to know it.

  “We could have played it safe and had our fun and been just plain selfish like many others,” she said.

  “We were stupid.”

  “I can’t believe that. We weren’t just calculating people. Mean and calculating is worse than being foolish.”

  “Nothing is worse than being stupid.”

  “Maybe we were foolish but we are good people and I know everything is going to work out.”

  “We were selfish and greedy and stupid,” I could hear the quarrel starting.

  “I can’t believe that. There are several ways out for us even yet and we’re not taking any easy way out,” I could hear her resentment, but the last thing I wanted was a quarrel, and fought down my growing anger.

  Unable to read or work, and unused to having evenings free, I rang Maloney the day she was to have dinner with Jonathan. “Would you like to come into the Elbow or would you prefer a teat-a-teat? Very rarely we get the opportunity these days, old boy.”

  “A tête-à-tête, then,” I said.

  “I have somebody to see but I’ll cancel. Meet me in the bar of the Wicklow and we’ll treat ourselves to a good dinner somewhere. We deserve a good dinner. A teat-a-teat is as good as a cheek to cheek,” he refused to stay checked.

  He had on a beautifully cut dark pinstripe, hand-tailored black shoes, plain tie, a wine kerchief falling nonchalantly from the breast pocket; but his true talent was that no matter what he wore he always managed to look equally ridiculous. He was in one of his very generous moods.