Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  She said nothing for a time and they both went on with the grapefruit until she said, “Oonagh asked me how long I’d known him—in the cloakroom.”

  “What a muddle it all is,” he said as lightly as he could. “Good! This is a foxtrot, let’s have it, shall we?”

  “I don’t want to dance, thank you.”

  “Not dance?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  No reply.

  “Theresa, aren’t you feeling well?”

  She looked at him; he could not read it at all. It was a little like James looking at him, though it had never struck him before. He was astonished by the resemblance. He thought, She’s Irish. Good God! She’s Irish, too, why didn’t I think of it?

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  But she did not reply and he saw that she was looking at someone behind him carelessly, without any speculation at all. He turned round; it was Dymphna with Bill Collins.

  She said, “Hello John! Where are the rest of your party?”

  “This is Theresa,” he said, “Theresa Clynche. The other two are dancing: Oonagh and Michael Groarke.”

  Dymphna smiled at him and he said at once, “Come on, have the rest of this one with me—in memory of the Admiral.”

  And in that way he left Theresa at the table with Bill Collins, a large handsome fellow with black hair and blue eyes.

  Dymphna asked, “What’s the matter with your partner? She looks furious.”

  “She’s shy, that’s all.” And to help her, he added, “They live in Cork Street.”

  “Poor girl, you ought to have asked her to dance.”

  “I did and she wouldn’t.”

  “Why on earth?”

  “Because she is furious with me.”

  She laughed and danced up a little closer. They went swirling round in a slow waltz, John remembering that he had noticed Dymphna’s height before, the perfect equality of it. She kept very silent, leaning on him just a little with the effect of making him feel most well-formed and able. People kept waving to her, “Hello, Dymphna!” “Hello.” And she waved back at them with brilliant smiles.

  “Isn’t it tremendous?”

  “Wonderful!” He increased his pressure on her back, letting her feel his body hard against her own. At the end of the dance she drifted apart from him, looking at him level, as gay as New Year’s Eve but still with those small shadows he remembered, too large for dimples, in the corners of her cheeks.

  They went back to the table and found that Theresa had been dancing sullenly with Bill Collins, who was roaring about everything. He’d been helping himself to the wine that was to go with the cold chicken. When Oonagh and Groarke returned he filled their glasses too.

  “Dymphna’s the girl,” he said. “You mortgage your shirt to bring her to a dance and she’s off with everyone but you. Here’s to you, Dymphna! Come on, Oonagh, we’ll have the next and the one after that.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “No,” said John, “she’s having the one after with me.”

  “Am I?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  Groarke said, “Where’s the bar?” And Collins said, “To the bar! Come on, Theresa, we’re away to the bar with this fellow.”

  Groarke said, “I’m drinking alone.”

  “Oh no, you’re not. You’re drinking with your Theresa here. With me being dropped by Dymphna and taking on Oonagh that leaves you with the one we’re all secretly making for. But wait while I down a bit of this chicken.”

  Groarke said, “The chicken’s for me.”

  Collins picked up the wing, “Them’s fighting words,” he said in a mock Irish accent.

  Groarke said, “You big bellyache,” and hit him so hard that he knocked him into the waiter who happened to be passing behind him. Groarke didn’t wait to see what happened, he just walked across the floor and disappeared into the bar.

  Collins hadn’t fallen but he looked a bit dazed for a moment. He smoothed his hair down and said, “What a queer fellow; look, he’s fractured my chicken wing I was eating.”

  Oonagh said, “Hadn’t someone better—?”

  The band had started again and people dancing round them were looking at the table and the waiter dusting himself down as though they thought they might have imagined it all.

  Collins said, “Oonagh, that’s us.”

  They moved away together and left Dymphna sitting between John and Theresa.

  Dymphna looked very gay; she said, “You two have this one. I’m going to go and see what’s happened to the other man.”

  Theresa got up without a word and John took her onto the floor.

  She was a little too short for him and she was as cold as a cucumber. He felt that her hand was shaking just a little and said, “I’m awfully sorry about that.”

  She answered something he could not hear; it was said in a very low voice, the one she used when she asked, “What are you doing?”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  They danced for a minute or two and he noticed that she didn’t dance as well, as sympathetically, as Dymphna. He tried the same trick he had tried with Dymphna, that of increasing the pressure, thinking, They like a bit of blood, anger; that will have livened her up. But it hadn’t; she resisted the pressure, and if anything, danced a little further away than before.

  He said, “Theresa!”

  No reply.

  “Theresa!”

  Again the small, low, rather deep voice which he could not distinctly hear.

  “Theresa, I love you,” he whispered into the ear that was a little too far beneath his mouth. “Please,” he went on, “I love you, that’s why I did it. I think of you all the time; when I’m going to meet you I really do feel fantastically weak, I even get breathless. It can only be because I love you. It must be so. And, I’ll tell you, I’m going to be rich one day. My darling, I keep thinking of you all the time, I can’t think about anyone else. Oonagh’s just a blind, Theresa. Dear little Theresa, other girls are only faces and names. I’ve loved you ever since—I only asked Oonagh to make you jealous. I didn’t mean to tell you tonight, I was going to wait. But I couldn’t.”

  The music stopped and, although it was not the end of the dance, Theresa walked off the floor. He had to run a couple of steps to catch her up so that their quarrel should not be too apparent.

  When they returned to the table, it was empty. The turning mirrors in the central chandelier were on and the band was playing to a ballroom in semi-darkness, a tune of the most tremendous sexual sentimentality. Their colours changed, people were swaying past the table, blue, pink and mauve, sea green and shadowy, in a silence that was undoubtedly conspiratorial although it had only been in existence for about two minutes.

  This made it a little easier for him to continue, but not much.

  He said, “What do you say, Theresa? Aren’t you listening?” and he helped himself to some of the wine, thinking, I’ll get another bottle; to hell with that last ten shillings.

  Theresa said whatever it was she had said before in the same inaudible voice and this time he took her arm hard, demanding with force that she repeat it.

  “Don’t be absurd,” she said, pronouncing it “Ab-zurd.”

  He could not believe his ears, he felt a great white sheet of rage shaking in his face: all the rebuffs of a term and a half flapping like laundry in front of him in the dimness. He thought, My God, I’m made, she won’t have me; she’s done it, she’s gone where Victoria has gone, where Victoria and Dymphna went; I’m free, liberated. But the moment he thought it, he knew it wasn’t true because he was in love with Dymphna.

  Where was she? He looked round the empty table and then started watching to see if she and Groarke were on the dance floor. It was quite several moments before he remembered Theresa.

  He poured the very last of the wine into her glass and said, “Have some wine, Theresa. Eat up your chicken. I’m going to go
and find Groarke.”

  They were in the bar. Groarke was leaning against the wall, his tie out of true and the curls of his fox-dark hair ruffled. He was looking at Dymphna, smiling from green eyes while she talked away at him, moving round him restlessly all the time. The movement was like her hand business only more rhythmical; not the rhythm of a western dance so much as that of some young animal: that of a foal or filly in a field prancing by only moving its legs or turning its head continuously so that the meadow lay more still and the shadows clearer.

  By moving before Groarke like that she made it apparent that she drew something from him which was most exciting to her.

  When John came up, Groarke said, “Another Englishman; this time a real one.”

  “But Groarke,” she said, “Bill Collins is from Waterford.”

  “An ape!” Groarke said. “With an ape’s brain; a big Mick in the fourth year. Cod Irish.”

  “You’ve got it in for the English, have you? But John’s a friend of yours.”

  “Me bhoys,” said Groarke, imitating Collins’ mock Irish, “that was for me. I knew what he meant; and he got it.”

  “Ah,” she said to John, “he’s a mad fellow this. Come on now, Groarke, put away that drink and come back to the table and make it up with him.”

  “You finish it,” he said, giving it to her.

  “Easy.” She took and swallowed the half whiskey. “Which of you’s to dance with me after beating up the man I brought?”

  Groarke ignored them by leaning on the bar and ordering another drink, so she looked at John and did a couple of dance steps.

  “Come on,” she said, “it’s a heavenly rumba. Oh, the rumba!” She took John’s hand and led him back into the ballroom.

  They got well into the drums, everybody waving to them, “Hello, Dymphna!” “What happened?” “Who is it with you?” “Who hit old Bill?” But she didn’t answer them; she only danced up extremely closely so that he could feel how perfectly they were matched. He could see that she had wonderful breasts, smooth as white cups, and sensed that she loved them without ever thinking about them: equipment.

  “This is wonderful,” she said. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  When it was over she went in a beeline for the table where someone had opened the new bottle of wine.

  “Some for us all. Now who’s it all you brought with you, I wonder?” She was looking at Theresa who was sitting there all alone with the ribbon round her neck. “Isn’t it great crack?” she went on. “Go on, have this dance with John if Bill and Oonagh have gone off to get themselves a drink.”

  Theresa said, “I have a headache.”

  Dymphna laughed and gave her a glass. “Best thing for a headache: wine and dancing. Go on, John! Take her out the minute the band starts. I’ll have to go and separate those two in the bar. It would be terrible if they got to drinking in there and then saw each other. Bill boxes heavyweight for Trinity. He can afford to be good-tempered, but— Away now! There’s a foxtrot for you.”

  She sang, “Isn’t it a pity that you’re such a scatterbrain,” pecked at another glass of wine and left them.

  John said to Theresa, “Are you sure you won’t dance? I know I’ve made a fool of myself—”

  She didn’t make him any answer at all and he was furious waiting for it.

  He burst out, “You make me feel dead. What do you think about all the time? Why don’t you say something? For God’s sake, talk to me. You can’t just sit there all the time as though we’re in a cinema. Some time you’ve got to talk and think things; you’ve got to feel them. You ought to be in love or something. Why didn’t you love me? Why didn’t you? What’s the matter with me?” And he answered his own question with great vehemence, “Nothing!”

  She got up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get my things.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “A taxi, I’ll get you a taxi; you can’t go home alone.”

  He ran after her, past her, down the stairs and sent the commissionaire out for a taxi with his last five shillings. Collins could pay for the wine and some of the dinner.

  He thought, Silence is best; if I start talking to her again, telling her, I’ll never finish. If I don’t see her into the taxi I shan’t be left guessing any further than I have to guess already what she felt for me—if anything. I did love her; just an atom of encouragement and I’d love her still and the new thing that’s starting with Dymphna would get nowhere. Victoria loved me back; my God, Victoria saw me and look how I loved her, love her wherever she is.

  He fell to thinking about Victoria so desperately with such trembling images of her in his mind’s eye that the stair carpet disappeared and the music he was approaching became inaudible until some transposition took place, giving Victoria back to the very moment he was living. He saw her awaiting him in the ballroom, as pale, as excited, as swift as ever. Not mysterious with death but with vitality; dancing round him in her impatience for him to move with her onto the floor.

  Under this splendid delusion he now ran up the stairs as fast as he had previously run down them; to find Dymphna, to see her only and what she was doing, to catch in one look she might give him the sense that she might be Victoria by virtue of loving him.

  Oonagh was at the table with Collins. He asked them where the others were.

  “If you mean your Irish friend, he’s dancing with Dymphna,” Oonagh said.

  “Good God! Groarke dancing!”

  “She’s giving him a lesson,” Collins said. “Dymphna’d teach anyone to dance in half an hour, even a navvy in hobnailed boots. Tell me now, Blaydon, where’d you pick that fellow up? He makes a very nice fist.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, he lives somewhere about; Kingstown, I think.”

  “Does he box?”

  “He told me he used to run a club somewhere when he was younger.”

  “Well, well.” Collins was leaning one elbow on the table with his hand at the side of the jaw where Groarke had hit him. All the time he was talking his eyes were ranging the dancers until they came to rest and moved more slowly. It was a temptation to follow the direction of his settled glance to see where it was concentrated. John resisted it but Oonagh didn’t; she said, “They seem to be doing quite well together, don’t they?”

  “Dymphna’s the girl,” said Collins. “Why don’t you two get on the floor together and when the little tenement angel comes back, I’ll see what I can do with her.”

  “Tenement angel?”

  “That’s Oonagh’s name for your partner.”

  “You mean Groarke’s partner,” John said.

  But Collins only said, “That would about fit.”

  So John danced with Oonagh. He told her that Theresa had left and she said, “You must be enjoying yourself.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Do you always tell lies?”

  “What lies?”

  “You told me that Theresa was your Irish friend’s partner; she told me that she’d never met him before.”

  “I was making a foursome.”

  “It’s a fivesome now,” she said, “but don’t worry; it’s useful to know, that’s all.”

  “What is?”

  “That you’re a liar.”

  “Why shouldn’t I lie to you?”

  “No reason at all that I know of,” she said, “thank God.”

  They said nothing else and went back to the table with a great dislike between them.

  When the bills came round, Collins paid half of the whole thing and gave five shillings to the waiter. Everyone except Groarke protested against the injustice of his paying so much, but Groarke sat silent, smiling to himself or even, perhaps, at Collins’ morocco leather wallet stuffed with pound notes.

  Collins saw this smile and said, “I’ll save you all a taxi; I’ve got a car outside.”

  “The estate car,” said Dymphna.

  “The ladies first,” Coll
ins ordered, “and then the boys, after which I’ll take Dymphna out to Mulhuddart.”

  Groarke said, “I live in Kingstown.”

  Collins said, “It’s a long way to Dun Laoghaire,” making it rhyme with Tipperary; and they all got into the car.

  At Trinity Hall John took Oonagh up the steps to the door. Perversely he wanted to kiss her there, kiss someone. Why not? What was changed? Wasn’t it over? He believed he had a right to kiss her because she was attractive to him, a girl. These damned dreary conventions had enmeshed him from the start and made complex the simple facts. One kiss, some warmth from Theresa in the first place would have dumbfounded the necessity for asking them both; Groarke. Who the hell made all these laws that came between them, the couples in the dance? Yet how impossible to kiss her now though he remembered having done so three hours earlier when he had picked her up at Trinity Hall.

  “I suppose this means no more letters?” he said.

  “Does it?”

  “Well, doesn’t it?”

  The horn tooted and she looked over his shoulder at the brake.

  “Thank you so much for taking me,” she said. “Goodnight.”

  “Oh, goodnight.”

  He ran back to the car and got in beside Groarke, Collins saying without coarseness, “Quin tickling on the steps and keeping me waiting.”

  “Bill, you’re terrible.”

  “The tongue of Shakespeare, Henry the Fifth.”

  “Let’s go and swim,” she said, “at the Forty Foot. Think of it in the moonlight.”

  “Not tonight,” said Collins.

  “But we’ve to go to Dun Laoghaire anyway,” she said, “to deliver this man in the back. Afterwards we could have a drink at the Purty Kitchen or go on out to the Greyhound on the way home.”

  Nobody answered her and she sat silent for a very little time and then turned round to them in the back, letting one hand and arm hang down over the high seat, trailing it in the light flashes from the passing street.

  “Sure you’re all very quiet in there,” she said. “Now who’s for a bathe at the Forty Foot?”

  “I’ll join you,” John said.

  “And you,” she said to Groarke, “the man with the temper, wouldn’t you like to cool your red hair in it?”