Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  GABRIEL FIELDING

  Through Streets Broad and Narrow

  To my mother

  Katherine Mary Fielding

  Contents

  Chapter 1. The Fair City

  Chapter 2. The Gentlemen

  Chapter 3. The Paper

  Chapter 4. The Second Wedding

  Chapter 5. Term

  Chapter 6. La Débâcle

  A Note on the Author

  In Dublin’s fair city,

  Where the girls are so pretty,

  I first set my eyes on Sweet Molly Malone,

  As she wheel’d her wheelbarrow

  Thro’ streets broad and narrow,

  Crying, “Cockles and mussels alive, alive-o!”

  Alive, alive-o! Alive, alive-o!”

  Crying, “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!”

  She was a fishmonger,

  But sure ’twas no wonder,

  For so were her father and mother before;

  And they each wheel’d their barrow

  Thro’ streets broad and narrow

  Crying “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!”

  She died of a fever,

  And no one could save her,

  And that was the end of sweet Molly Malone;

  But her ghost wheels her barrow

  Thro’ streets broad and narrow,

  Crying “Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!”

  All characters in this story are imaginary. No reference is intended to any person ever encountered, either living or dead.

  Some of the Dublin hospitals are given their real names; but the principal one, together with its consultant staff, is a product of fantasy. It should not be confused with any existing institution in that city.

  I have borrowed and adapted the name Semarque from my friend Thomas Semark. I am grateful to him both for this and for the many ideas he has given me.

  G. F.

  1. The Fair City

  “Man, you’re so good-looking!” said the Welsh steward. “You take my breath away.”

  John Blaydon, at eighteen, had occasionally believed that this might be so, more than suspected it, by the double mirrors before a dance: the side view, close up.

  “Better-looking than the last time, even.” The French vermouth the steward was adding to the third gin rocked up the glass in time with the horizon seesawing through the portholes. “I mean it; can’t take my eyes off you, man!”

  It was almost certainly true; on those private occasions his own profile had quelled John like a shout at close quarters.

  He tipped the steward nothing and crabbed along to the nearest mirror to have a look at himself. He used his sea-leg walk, the knees slightly bent, the toes turned in—as his brother-in-law George had advised—went onwards through the saloon where the swell was impoverishing the wealthy, and up the stairway to the boat deck; full of smoke and spray.

  So he was better-looking even than the last time? Which, though no one would guess, had really been the first time. I must get hold of this, he thought. I’m extremely good-looking: tall, dark-eyed, loping and intelligent. But by the time he reached the boat deck he was different, all smoothness gone. Instead he saw himself as a rugged man, a traveller standing overcoated beside the lifeboat and the ship’s rail, “on the crest of youth,” as Mother would have said. He wished there were somebody to impress and immediately visualized himself getting into conversation with a beautiful girl up there beside the ventilator, but there were no girls on the boat deck, only a pale Jewish rabbi with an intensely black beard. So John toured the funnels with the three gins weltering inside him higher than the seas, “mad as the wind and snow.” But there were only seagulls with lemon eyes, pepperings of hard soot in the smoke swathes and the mast scribbling invisible patterns against the grey cloud base. Watching it, he fell into an intricate day or sea dream remembering that first trip to visit George, his sister Mary’s fiancé, when he was doing his Midwifery at the Coombe Hospital.

  It had been Mother’s idea, of course. He could remember the substance of a dozen conversations, even hear her voice saying, “George will know whether you’re going to be able to stand it. John’s so fastidious. He’ll just have to be able to face blood and mess if he’s going to take up Medicine.” He could remember, too, the city of Dublin as he had first seen it on that first-morning-ever in Ireland with George “on call” at the Coombe Hospital and the case which had “come on” down at the Portobello Barracks. George and the other student unpacking their bags beside the woman’s bed in the dim room of the married quarters, then fixing up an enema and laughing all the time like jolly gods.

  “Well,” he had replied in the taxi on the way back to the hospital, “I didn’t know women looked like that. I mean, I imagined they looked like nudes in pictures, seemly; or like flowers.”

  “ ‘Seemly’!” said George to his partner.

  “For God’s sake!”

  “But although she was so young she was yellow,” John had insisted. “Yellow and purple or pale purple. Her skin was yellowish and her stomach was shiny like an animal’s.”

  “Go on, go on!”

  It had shaken him up. Perhaps if the baby had been born it would have drawn everything together. The unhealthy colour, the fleshiness, the indignity. The girl on the bed had seemed moist as though she were just a little way under water, remote as a sea creature; whereas he had been accustomed to think of women as being dry as flowers, of the air and sunlight.

  The woman had been ill, of course, joyless too; with her hair margins wet and her eyes so inaccessibly humble that George and his partner had seemed like clowns, quite without malice or clumsiness; but so stupid .…

  The picture in his mind faded and was replaced by another one. He remembered how in the evening they had taken him to see a demonstration delivery and been most gentle with him, putting on his white coat and becoming nearly reverent when they got onto the rubberized floor of the hospital theatre. The woman there had not been recognizably a woman at all and had borne a baby head-on into the hands of the obstetrician. That was all he had seen, the legs in yellowing woollen stockings and the dilating circle enclosing the baby’s head as it slowly appeared from her body, while she, behind her hummock of sheet was told repeatedly to “bear down,” or “breathe out.”

  He had been expected to feel faint after this. George and his friends were certain it must have upset him and were immensely jolly again, walking him across the grey Dublin street to the pub where he was to be revived with brandy and cross-questioned about his reactions by the rest of their “firm.”

  He hadn’t, however, felt in the least faint; merely confused by the sadness of the first woman and by the anonymity of the second. Confused too by the loudness of the students in the woman’s home and their restraint in the hospital. Confused and fascinated by the thought that he might always have over-respected women who, when it came to it, were always a little way under water at the hands of men.

  And now, a year later, with George sitting Finals in Medicine and Surgery for the second or third time in Leeds and Mary still awaiting her wedding, here it was: his own return to Dublin, this time to start. With himself in the same ship with the same steward, the same—he got up—not the same dreams, nor ambitions; but the same desperation to be something definite; to have somewhere to start from. “I’m a medical student; no, not a brilliant one, I’ve met too many, I never met one that wasn’t. But a student of Medicine. Dr. John, Mr. John Blaydon, you are—just are!” And he re-entered the saloon with a thumping heart which was due either to the gins or to his vanity.

  He found his rooms in Ulsterville Avenue without difficulty and was shown his bedroom by the Flynn
sisters who, except for the elder’s wartless hands, looked so much like the Jones sisters at the little shop at home. But what a mistake this was he discovered only very much later. The Flynn’s depression was a deeper thing altogether, a richer thing like a velvet scabbard with a very sharp dagger in it. Roman Catholic; whereas the two old Jones sisters’ was just Chapel-despair.

  After breakfast next morning they gave him a key and stood bonily about in the hall with gaunt arms while he thanked them and went on reassuring them about everything in the way he always felt bound to do with everybody; as though he were in truth a villain who must conciliate to the last or be discovered.

  But he soared on the long tram ride through the city about which he knew and had read nothing; and when College Green was reached over the winds of O’Connell Bridge, the once-seen set of Trinity College struck him with the old dumb excitement so that he forgot even the flamboyance of what he was wearing. He had set off a magnificent sight in a white straw hat and a grey tweed suit which though hairy and heavy had not yet bagged at the knees; and with this he wore a yellow tie which Michael had long ago borrowed from Greenbloom at Oxford and never returned. Also he carried a walnut walking stick, finely tapered and crowned with a smooth gold handle; a relic of Aunt Flo’s to Father and filched by John from the study cupboard when he was packing.

  But he forgot all this that morning as he crossed and re-crossed the Front Square from the Bursary to the Registrar’s Office and then made the long walk through the College Park to the Medical School itself for his interview with the Dean.

  Though it was only early autumn the Dean had a great fire in his study and stood before it in a suit somewhat similar to John’s own. He seemed not to feel the heat and sweated not at all in his thick suit and silver hair. John found that he dated the entire time of his Dublin venture by that interview with the Dean in 1935.

  He felt he had been falsely practised upon by the Dean’s reserve, that the Dean should have told him, “I am sixty-seven, Blaydon. I qualified in ’ninety-seven and took my Fellowship in Surgery three years later in nineteen hundred. I gave up my surgical practice ten years ago and should be dead by next year because I have refused all treatment, which is to say—surgery.”

  As it was, he had been left with nothing but the memory of the Dean’s silence, the blazing fire and the almost identical suit. He had not even realized that the elderly man he had seen must have been a doctor himself and the friend of nearly all of Ireland’s most eminent surgeons.

  He found that in remembering those minutes with the Dean the smile he had himself conferred on him was not of kindness but of great secrecy. He imagined this smile being nursed by the Dean through years of interviews such as his own: a succession of young men in all stages of the seven-year course being smiled upon in their progress towards what the Dean himself had become and at some time abandoned.

  But back through the park on that first day from the darker end of the college where the Faculty lay, to the fairer end of the Arts side, it was the promise of the buildings themselves which occupied him: SCHOOL OF ANATOMY, ZOOLOGY, BOTANY, PATHOLOGY. The letters cut in the stone of great doorways through which, until the term proper began, no one went in or out; but with which, inevitably, he must soon become familiar.

  For only two shillings he had his lunch in the Common Room Buffet, and it was here on this or a day soon afterwards that he first met Groarke.

  Most of the others were together, groups of two or three coming in, picking up and packing their trays on the long run beneath the oil paintings in a splather of fast talk. But Groarke, like himself, was alone, though otherwise most dissimilar. His clothes not shabby, but at that stage where you could not imagine them as ever having been new or bloomy. And this proved to be a correct impression because down the years John always passed his own on to him. It became such a habit that he found himself buying his own things with Groarke in mind; because, though the Irishman was sturdier, they were roughly the same build throughout their time together. He would think, Yes, this will do, Groarke will look well in this, the blue streak will go well with his eyes.

  From the first Groarke was a taker or perhaps, since he never actually asked, an accepter. John never had to persuade him to have anything from a drink to a meal or a pound note or a swim at the Forty Foot or a pair of shoes. He would take all these offers just as he took people in from the minute he met them, not in the sense of deceiving them but in the sense of receiving them; which, as John discovered, was an Irish trait, though in Michael Groarke’s case there was the arrogance of poverty about it.

  He could never be rich and he knew it himself from the very first; never a Collins or a Halaghan who were smart boys from the second year onwards, nursing their brogues and Hibernian charm, dressing right and all set to get across to London or out to one of the colonial medical services and marry and do well as the sons of supposed landed gentry back in Ireland. No, Groarke’s barrenness was as bleak as an axe and there in his eye from the beginning. When he talked about eventually making money in England or America he was angry beneath it all, remembering all the time that it would never come true in the future any more than it had in his past. Yet he must have fed this wrathful dream long before he left school, by looking in shop windows and reading the apposite kind of book and marking people as he picked out John that day in the Common Room as being smart, with a touch of money or privilege in the background.

  With his diffident smile, he came up, sat down, and introduced himself. He knew everything about the course, exactly what lectures there would be and where and when. He said it was a good idea to start the Anatomy a year ahead of the Pre-Registration examination.

  “Jacob Gee,” he said, “he’s a Jew who’s demonstrating in the Anatomy rooms and I know him well. He’s going to go over the bones with me on Saturdays so that by the time we come to them we’ll be finished with the skeleton and be able to start dissecting while the others are still counting vertebrae.”

  He knew where to get books and instruments cheaply, too, and just which questions were likely to crop up in this year’s Pre-Registration exam. He worked a lot in the public libraries because, as he said, they weren’t full of “codological fools from Trinity outwitting themselves with their own cleverness.”

  And in between putting on all this pressure, making the whole course concertina itself into a series of lightning examinations whose difficulties had been correctly calculated in advance, he drew nearly everything out of John himself about himself. He finished very slyly with a mingling of amusement and interest, not to say flattery, that simply made John talk: about his family, his late matriculation, his private-school background, his father’s capital, and, by inference, about his dreams of distinction and self-justification.

  In fact the only thing John didn’t tell him about was Victoria. He had half-felt like saying, If I don’t tell you about Victoria Blount I’ve really told you nothing about myself at all. I was in love with her when I was eleven and she was twelve. We were in love for a long time, nearly two years; and just before I went to my public school we both went to stay with her mother, Enid and her mother’s lover, George Harkess, in his farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors. That morning Victoria got herself picked up by a commercial traveller and when we were picnicking in a cave he followed us in. We couldn’t get rid of him. He even found an excuse for getting Victoria to himself. He took her off to post a letter of Enid’s and they never came back. He murdered her.

  On this first occasion and on others subsequently when he was in such a mood of wanting Groarke to know about it, John would try to imagine Groarke’s facial expression as he listened. He believed that he would have continued to recount the story through all Groarke’s interest, his stealthy attention, with total coldness and without a pause: If you had been old enough, Groarke, you would probably have read about it in the newspapers at the time, everything. There was the inquest, the police search for the murderer which, for all I know, still continues. But you wouldn’t
have read about my later history because I never told anyone that, not even Greenbloom. Groarke would have asked, Who was Greenbloom? A Jewish friend of my brother Michael, very eccentric and rich. For some reason he liked me. He was fascinated by the fact that I had lost Victoria and was always trying to discover where the guilt came into it all because he didn’t believe we could have loved each other innocently although we were so young.

  If Groarke had asked any further questions about Greenbloom he would have refused to answer them because he might have found it humiliating to admit that in some ways he was still tempted to depend upon him and that they still wrote to each other occasionally. It was against his policy now that he had got away from the family and its connections to confess that he had any need of anyone save to celebrate his successes.

  So now, having reached this point in his argument with himself, he reverted to his first decision to remain silent. And as it was, neither then nor at any other time during all his five years in Dublin did he ever tell Groarke or anyone else about it.

  In return for his other confidences he himself drew very little out of the Irishman in those first weeks. It was a very slow mosaic he ever put together about his home, beyond the fact that his mother and his father were both alive and that he lived by the sea at Kingstown, or near to it. Later, when the friendship with “Chete” Lascalls, Fitzgerald and the others was well under way they used to pull Groarke’s leg about his home life. John, in particular, did this with some regularity until the incident with the Guinness bottles, and afterwards never again. But that all lay in the future and in these early days the restless friendship with the others hadn’t even started.

  That evening, or a Friday or two later, John got off the tram at Glasnevin Cemetery, walked down Ulsterville Avenue to let himself in at the Flynns’ where he was served his tea as usual by Greta, the elder of the two, in the Sacred Heart room.