He took her hand gently and snuggled it into the brown velvet cushion of the sofa under the eyes of the Senior House Servant, Herbert, as he passed with a tray of coffee.
He said in a whisper, “It’s strange how things come back full circle, isn’t it?”
“That’s just what I was thinking. It’s all so different, though.”
“Yet the same, in a way.”
“I meant,” she said, “that I’m different. You’ve changed too, but not as much as I have, have you?”
He leaned to her so that she should feel his breath against her cheek, saw her hesitation before she leaned away but noted the compensatory squeeze she gave his hand; he whispered, “You haven’t changed at all, darling little Theresa, you’ve only dared to become yourself. It was all my fault, really, in the old days.”
“No, it wasn’t,” she whispered with winy breath. “It was just that I didn’t trust you and I should have done. I was so naïve and suspicious.”
“Never mind, we can begin all over again.”
“Naïve!” she said again, “but now I’ve grown up. I understand Englishmen better.”
The smile she gave him was so very promising that two years earlier he would not have been able to speak in face of it for at least thirty seconds or even a minute. But now he passed it glibly, wondering who on earth could want it.
She was opening her stained little evening bag. She said, “I’ve got a present for you. I bought it in Bradford months ago and had your initials engraved on it. I kept wanting to give it to you but I never plucked up courage and just kept hoping that one day I’d see you. You’ll think it’s silly but I even prayed about it and in the meantime, I hope you don’t mind, I used it myself.”
She handed it to him and he took it. Presents always distressed him.
“It’s not silver,” she said, “it’s silver plate; but I think it’s rather nice, and I noticed in the old days that you hadn’t got one. Oh I do hope you haven’t been given one since—it holds twenty.”
He examined it carefuly, opened it and found it full of Abdullah cigarettes. He balanced it in his hand, tried to look into her eyes as he attempted to thank her, looked away, put the cigarette case in his pocket, got it out again, took out a cigarette and lighted it.
She had become very pale. He thought she might faint as she stood up, so he gave her his hand to steady her and together they went down in the Club lift, standing behind the servant in his Georgian livery.
In Ranelagh Street she said, “Well, I’m sorry, but it was the best I could get, it was for the camera you gave James, all the things you gave me, everything.”
“Look,” he said, “it’s wonderful. There really aren’t any words to thank you for it. I wasn’t expecting it. Nothing.”
Her hand was cold in his own, the street was half-dark and there was a barrel organ churning away.
“Sure, a little bit of heaven fell from out the sky one day,
And nestled on the ocean in a spot so far away.
And when the angels found it, sure, it looked so sweet and fair,
They said, ‘Suppose we leave it, for it looks so peaceful there.’
. . . . . . .
And when they had it finished, sure they called it Ireland.”
He thought, I could do without that; there’s always a blasted barrel organ sentimentalizng everything.
Outside the Shelbourne, by the caryatids that looked as though they were supporting the whole class structure on their backs, he said, “I’m afraid I must leave you now. I’ll never forget tonight and I’ll keep the beautiful cigarette case for ever and think of you every time I use it, which will be every day.”
She was weeping, her eyes flowing with tears so easily, with such facility, that it flashed through his mind, It’s their primary function, not seeing at all. I must tell that to Groarke.
“I don’t understand you,” she sobbed, “I don’t at all. What have I done? Just tell me what have I done?”
“Go home,” he said. “If I don’t come with you, you’ll have stopped crying by the time you get there; you’ll dry in the wind between here and there.”
“What have I done? If you don’t tell me I’ll never know. Was it the housemen? The present? Was it what I said or something I did?”
“You could pray, I suppose,” was all he could find to reply.
“If it was the housemen I was just pretending, that’s all. They never touched me really, nobody has; it was just fun and I added a bit on. Please don’t think I’m any different from the old days, John, when you loved me.”
“Later you’ll be glad, little Theresa, you’ll be glad.”
“That story about the housemen I told you didn’t really happen to me at all—”
“Oh, please!” He started to laugh; then, suddenly, he shivered. He was overcome by a great disgust for himself. He took her arm and shepherded her along the pavement.
He said, “Often when you behave very badly you think you’ve got very good reasons, very delicate and strange. But when something like this happens, this damned cigarette case, you see something not delicate at all. Your behaviour stinks—it’s worse than that, it’s commonplace!”
“You were always so sweet to me,” Theresa said, “and I didn’t appreciate it.”
“It’s not you. Don’t you understand? Nothing you’ve done or not done. For God’s sake don’t blame yourself or the mythical housemen. You’ve behaved perfectly, always.”
“But why?” she asked. “Why?”
“I’ve fallen in love with someone else, that’s all.”
They walked along past the St. Vincent de Paul Hospital and the National University. The night was cold but not chilling; they went along together, separating just a little more all the way.
“How long?” she asked in her old voice, the one he had scarcely been able to hear in those first weeks of Dublin.
“Oh, a long time, for a very long time.”
“And you’re unhappy again?” She looked up at him with shyness, quoting his old complaint. “She’s giving you hell, is she?”
“God!” he said. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think she is and sometimes I think I am. But where does it come from? Tell me that.”
She stopped. They were at the beginning of Cork Street; further down he could see the door of Number Seven, her house, with the sun canvas in place to stop the paint blistering.
“I’ll pray for you,” she said. “Goodnight John, goodbye.”
He got out the cigarette case and it flashed in the headlights of a passing car.
“Here,” he called out, “Theresa, this case. You could—”
But she was walking very fast. He could hear the popping of her high heels echoing up between the chasm of the opposing Georgian houses.
“Goodbye,” he called. “Goodbye, Theresa.”
He waited there for quite a time, until long after her front door had shut behind her. He thought, I will never come into this street again. That is a vow.
4. The Second Wedding
It was the early summer of 1939. There was another war scare on, but it meant little to John and even less to Groarke.
On the way up, beside the Liffey one day, crossing some bridge or other to Stephen’s Hospital which lay up by the Brewery, Groarke had said, “You can tell everyone, you could write home and say ‘I’m walking the hospitals.’ ”
But when they got there and saw the secretary it was regretted that, in view of the international situation and an influx of German exchange students, there was no vacancy for another student-resident. There had been no vacancy either at Baggott Street, the Adelaide, the Green or, of course, at John’s own hospital, the Mungo Park; and as they were short of money they had walked to them all.
“There’s only one thing for you,” Groarke said. “With the places filling up with Hitler’s brilliant boys, you’ll have to go to Hansom and apologize. You’ve lost four weeks already. If you don’t get in somewhere soon you’ll never get signed u
p for the Anaesthetics and that’ll disqualify you from sitting Midder in the Spring.”
“I could try one of the Catholic hospitals,” John said.
“No good, they’re not recognized by the Faculty—you’d better ring up Hansom this evening and ask him if he’ll see you.”
“It looks so damned self-important, after a year.” John mimicked the interview.
“ ‘Please, sir, please, Dr. Hansom, I’m ever so sorry I wrote that paper about the hospitals last year, I didn’t mean any harm, I was just fooling, really!’ He’ll say, ‘What on earth are you talking about? My dear Blaydon, do you really imagine that the remarks of a third-year medical student about one of the most ancient teaching hospitals in Ireland would be taken sufficiently seriously, etc?’”
“He won’t,” Groarke said.
“Won’t what?”
“Say that.”
It was the summer term and hot. The Liffey was smelling a little of mud and drains. The trams wrangled past them with clanging bells and all the trees were in heavy leaf. At O’Connell Bridge a green post-office van went past with white Gaelic letters on its side.
“PHUIST AN TELEGRAF”
The heat and the street dust, the insinuating smell of the city’s canals, some circular iron gratings surrounding the boles of the chestnut trees, re-created the being of Paris where they had gone together the previous autumn.
John said, “This is a foreign city, Groarke, I’m a foreigner here.”
“According to Shaw, so am I.”
“Shaw?”
“He said that Dublin was foreign even to the Irishman.”
One evening they had stopped a taxi in the Place St. Germain.
“Take us to a brothel,” John had said. “A high-class one,” Groarke had added.
“Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?”
“Girls, women.”
“Filles, cocottes, femmes.”
In the taxi Groarke had said, “Are you sure you’ve got enough?”
“Yes, about the equivalent of a quid each in the heels of my shoes. We should get something for that, shouldn’t we?”
“The clap probably.”
“D’you think he knew what we meant?”
“Christ knows! The way he’s driving you’d think we were catching a train.”
“Here, tell him. Make sure. Touch his arm.”
Groarke did so and the taxi-driver turned round. Groarke demonstrated a slow lewd gesture and the taxi accelerated. It drew up in a wide avenue in front of a doorway similar to dozens of others. There didn’t seem to be any lights in any of the windows.
“The fool’s made a mistake. This is a respectable area, it will be full of French middle-class families living in flats and listening to Radio Paris. Go on, Groarke, ask him if this is a brothel—my nerves are beginning to slip.”
But Groarke was ringing the bell beside the heavy closed doors.…
As they crossed O’Connell Bridge John said, “All the same if you’d read the paper, any Irishman, you’d have got away with it.”
“That’s what I told you—at the time.”
“I know you did, but I still don’t believe it. They can’t stop me qualifying for a thing like that.”
“They can stop you getting into residence.”
“That’s the same thing.”
John looked at Groarke. Groarke had visited all the hospitals with him, joking most of the time, cheering him up in a Groarkelike way, his reddish face and sharp green eyes all there, registering everything and thinking hard. Groarke never went too far with his humour or his commiseration. He cared. He wanted John level with him as before. In Finals Part I, in the previous summer, they had actually tied for first place and had to split the prize money, which had made Paris possible. They still saw Dymphna and they still never or hardly ever discussed her.
John went on slyly watching Groarke’s face all the way to College Green. Is he enjoying it, or does it concern him so much that he can only be expressionless? He knows this is a matter of life and death to me as far as Medicine goes. Does he know I’m not sleeping? Has he been coming with me each day to the different hospitals out of compassion or cruelty? To get really close and enjoy the minutiae of my pain? But Groarke’s face was the same as it had been that night nine months ago when the door of the brothel opened and they had found themselves in a red-carpeted hall with chandeliers, stairs going up and a brass handrail shining.
The woman from the box inside the doors had shown them up the stairs.
“What a peach of a stair-rail. I wonder if the beds are brass, too.”
“Victorian, you mean? I can just see my grandfather climbing these stairs.”
“Mine never left Armagh, poor old devil. What do we do now? Wait?”
The woman left them in a perfectly ordinary little sitting-room. There were two sofas, some spindly tables and on the mantelpiece a large pasteboard placard which said:
WELCOME TO LADY ARLINGTON’S
and underneath, the Union Jack crossed with the Tricouleur and surrounded by a painted laurel wreath around which was written:
“Bienvenu a sa Majesté le Roi d’Angleterre et sa Reine.” It being 1938, the year of the Royal visit.
John said, “That’s terribly funny, Groarke; but somehow I can’t laugh.”
Groarke said, “Later you’ll be able to laugh.”
“I still feel there’s been some mistake. Where are the women?”
Lady Arlington came in, a tall woman of gross presence in a grey alpaca dress with a face like a most seemly toad with wide-apart eyes set high in the forehead and cosmetic skin.
“You wish to see the show first?”
“No.”
“It is very good. Trés trés recherché.”
“No, madame, we just want—”
“Je comprends. I will send in my girls and you may choose.” Lady Arlington pressed a bell. Somewhere outside on the landing a door opened and then another. What a noise! Like a class coming out of school.
“Groarke! She’s so matter of fact. How ever many d’you think there are?”
“My girls are all young,” said Lady Arlington, “but experienced.”
“But I’m not,” said John to Groarke.
“Do you think she can’t hear your teeth knocking?’
“Vous n’avez rien à craindre,” said Lady Arlington.
There were eight of them in ballet skirts. They tripped in on naked feet and stood in a semi-circle talking together eagerly. They all had chocolate-coloured nipples and the elastic of their ballet skirts had lost its resilience so that they had to keep pulling them up every time they slipped. The ballet skirts were grey and Groarke said, “Somebody’s mother isn’t using Persil yet.”
“They aren’t interested in us, Groarke; not one of them has even looked at us.”
“They will be afterwards,” said Groarke, “when it comes to paying.”
“Well, messieurs, gentlemen?” Lady Arlington was no more impatient with her customers than the manageress of a department store, and just as clearly so.
John said, “Madame, would you mind awfully if they went away and put some clothes on?”
“Mais certainement! Clothilde, Yvette, allez-vous rober immédiatement!”
Two of the girls with brown eyes and brown centre-parted hair and weary breasts stepped forward and stood in front of John and Groarke.
“No, madame,” John said. “Don’t you agree, Groarke, that it’s rather difficult as they are? They all look so much alike.”
“Send them all away,” Groarke instructed Lady Arlington. “There’s no choice; we want some variety.”
“They’re about as different as a flock of sheep,” John added. “I suppose if you knew them well you could tell them apart, but—”
Lady Arlington dismissed the girls; she moved over to her mantelpiece and stood in front of her show card. “I have some older girls,” she said, “they are engaged at the moment, but in half an hour—In the meantime you would
like something to drink?”
“Yes,” said Groarke, “Liqueurs.”
“Crême de menthe,” John suggested.
She gave the order down a speaking tube and Groarke asked her, “Are these other women the same price or cheaper?”
“They will cost you the same plus, for each of them, a little cadeau. They are very experienced indeed and their clothes are expensive.”
“But if they are older,” Groarke said, “they should be cheaper.”
“Not in France,” said Lady Arlington without laughing.
Groarke said, “Give her a cigarette.”
John produced the case Theresa had given him and Lady Arlington waited for him to stand up and walk over to her before she took one. Groarke, who had matches, lighted it.
A parlour maid in Victorian uniform with a frilly apron and a little cap with streamers brought in the drinks. Groarke toasted Lady Arlington and she acknowledged him with dignity.…
What at that moment, on that particular night, had been in Groarke’s mind? How could John possibly have known either then or so much later as they stood a moment at Front Gate and Groarke reiterated his advice about telephoning Dr. Hansom?
Groarke squeezed with him into the green kiosk, labelled TELEFON in Gaelic and when he had replaced the receiver said, “Curt?”
“Very.”
“But he’ll see you?”
“Yes, alone at seven this evening.”
Groarke nearly sniggered; he would have sniggered if he had been a sniggering person, when he said, “I’ll come along with you and wait in Merrion Square.”
“You know well I don’t want that.”
And Groarke had gone off back to Kingstown taking his unreadable face with him.
It would be very satisfactory to tell him the next morning that Hansom had relented; that he, John, had conducted the interview very skilfully, not climbing down too fast or too far, but forcing Hansom to admit by implication that the paper had been too shrewd to be ignored; that such ability was worth having once it had been schooled; that Mungo Park’s, through this spokesman, had demanded only its surgical pound of flesh and not a drop of spilled blood.
Through Streets Broad and Narrow Page 20