Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  The night porter came along and was hit in the stomach by two bottles in quick succession. He ran off to the hall and Groarke called out, “He says, ‘Come up to bed,’ as though I were his little friend Chamberlyn-Ffynch. Come back in here and let’s get this thing out of the way. You think I subsist on what you and Dymphna are both able to spare. Toleration.”

  John went back into the room.

  “I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about. If you really mean Dymphna, we’re both in the same position: she went off with Cloate.”

  “Of course she did.” He smiled to himself. “Cash settlement.”

  “What d’you mean, cash settlement?”

  “It will be Luthmann next.”

  “I think you’re ill, Mike. Don’t let’s talk any more about this tonight.”

  “You talk too much, always,” Groarke said, “all this time you’ve been talking and I’ve listened. I’ve heard every word you’ve said and the ones you’ve implied; I know your exact opinion of me and what you rate me.”

  “All this time? D’you mean this evening?”

  “No questions. I mean the Dutch uncle stuff. Passing on your clothes, dishing out money and invitations; sharing your girl and your gibes.”

  “There were no gibes.”

  “No? Not privately? Not between yourselves, about your Kingstown friend who was to dance with Theresa or Oonagh three or four years ago?”

  “Mike, you must be very drunk—”

  Groarke said, “Hit me just once.”

  “—to be going back so far,” John continued. “That dance was years and years ago.”

  “Yes?” Groarke said ruminatively, as though to suggest he could be propitiated.

  “You’ve been building on a false premise. We never discussed you; the exact opposite, in fact. I’ve scarcely ever mentioned you to Dymphna.”

  Groarke was smiling. “Don’t waste any more time, because if you want to know, I hate your way of saying things. I’ve been watching your face for a long time and when it starts saying things—” He broke off. “You’ve only to hit me once; I’ll do the rest.”

  “I don’t want to hit you.”

  “It’s not your way of doing things. You’d rather talk, to your friends; your little friend Chamberlyn-Ffynch and your splendid friends in the country. They don’t realize that you’re twisted as tight as a pig’s tail, an exhibitionist so concerned with his tricks that he doesn’t even know that he’s effeminate.”

  John said nothing.

  “Or possibly,” went on Groarke, “some of them do. Cloate, now, will put a few things right; explanations. He’ll do us all a lot of good.”

  “Cloate?”

  “It’s the big joke.” Groarke came forward to him. “Nothing scrupulous about Cloate. He knows what to do with ’em. Give him a few weeks, give him this leave and you’ll be where you started. No more bloody histrionics, diversity of talent, no more patronage.”

  John hit him so hard so fast and so often that until he saw Groarke lying on the floor and the tags of skin of his own knuckles where they had been jagged on Groarke’s teeth he was quite unconscious of having moved. But the terrible thing was that after a few moments Groarke began to get up again slowly, smiling and bleeding. It was a very strange and horrible thing to see him moving so deliberately and with such happiness in his face; possibly it was like seeing a dead man rising.

  The porter had brought several people down with him in their dressing-gowns, including Maeve Bigger and another woman, Betty Simpson. They stood inside the door: de Burgh White, sly little Smyllie and a few others.

  Groarke half-murdered him; the women probably left pretty soon but the others pulled Groarke off him when he was unconscious and took him down to out-patients’ to recover and be dressed. De Burgh White gave him and Groarke a shot of omnopon each and John was excused duty the following day and lay in bed trying to read.

  Dymphna married Cloate the following week, on a Wednesday; a few days before his leave expired.

  John was sent an invitation to the wedding in one of Dublin’s larger Protestant churches and to the reception afterwards in the Hibernian Hotel. She also sent him a long letter; it must, by the feel of the envelope, have been the longest she had ever written to him in the five years he had known her; but he did not finally read it.

  He would very much have liked to see Groarke about it and ask him if he too had been given an invitation and a letter. In fact Groarke had sent him a note in Harman’s Surgery lecture which he gathered was an apology of some kind; though strangely worded. He glanced at it and put it in his pocket. For several minutes afterwards he felt Groarke not looking at him from the opposite side of the lecture theatre, and for several more minutes he felt Groarke looking at him steadily. He fingered the plasters on his face and made full notes of the lecture and soon forgot exactly what Groarke had written in his note.

  That day he was going up Grafton Street with his eyes skinned in case he should see Dymphna. His face was still a terrible mess and practically everybody looked at it; but not more than he did himself in the shop windows, some of which gave good reflections, particularly the chemist’s at the bottom of the street, because it had black windows to show up the gold lettering.

  He was opposite Mitchell’s when he saw her coming out in her “dusty pink,” a coat and skirt of which she had been very fond for six months or more. She was incredibly pale; not incredibly really, but only more noticeably so because her colour no longer even remotely belonged to him. Nothing about her: not her hair, so light in weight that it was always being blown about by wind or by anyone even breathing into it when they were dancing, not her height nor her laughter, which had always seemed to be directly for the person with her, nor her handwriting, nor the pleasures she promised for tomorrow or the next day or the day after that.

  She saw him very quickly, just before Cloate came out behind her, presumably after paying the bill; for it was her habit always to go out to the entrance of Mitchell’s while the bill was paid and look at the display of wedding cakes in the window. Cloate was fairly snapping up the morning. He looked across to the car he was going to take her out to lunch in, and she turned away from him, obviously to say, “John’s over there!” while she continued to pretend that she was looking at the cakes.

  John got moving at that, but Cloate caught him up, spun him round on the pavement and looked at his blackened eyes and plasters.

  “Sorry about this—” he began.

  “I’ll give you a present,” John said, “because I dislike bearing ill-will. Look, Major, just go and get married and then get posted across to Libya or Malaya or somewhere and get yourself atrociously wounded or better still dead, so that your wife can enjoy herself with the rest of the Mess. For your information she is still V.I. as far as I’m concerned though I can’t speak for Groarke, Collins, Fitzgerald, Mario Greene and others unknown, all of whom have had the pleasure of wasting their substance and adolescent yearnings, et cetera.”

  “You fool!” Cloate said. “It’s Groarke I meant. He’s been out drinking with us. He’s coming to the wedding; he’s happy.”

  “I’m so glad,” John said.

  “That’s what I mean,” said Cloate. “Get after Groarke.”

  “Never again.”

  “Together you’ll be all right. Apart you’re going to crack up.”

  “Going to?” John asked. “I’m only waiting now; you know that, don’t you? Ever since the paper.”

  “Forget the paper, Blaydon. You’ve brains; if you keep after Groarke you’ll make Finals.”

  John said, “What do you know about me, my past or my future? Damn all, nothing at all. On the outside you’re a vicious little man with whiskers on your arms and a schizoid moustache; inside you’re as sentimental as a Universal Aunt. You’ll make a good soldier-surgeon and a better leave-jerker. I can just see you striding about in our Army, getting yourself mentioned in despatches like the rest of the Sinn Feiners who think they’re
going to run the war for us. But don’t get yourself mixed up with the Chaplain’s Corps or the Mission for Fallen Women; they’re not in your line.”

  Cloate began to smile halfway through this. When John finished he said, “How long can you keep it up? It’s magnificent.”

  “If you were a better target I could keep it up for a week; but I’ve about exhausted you for the moment.”

  “Why don’t you come and have a drink with us?”

  John leaned forward to Cloate and simpered, “D’you think she’d mind?”

  He began to laugh himself at that. He tittered into Cloate’s face and saw him for the first time dismayed; seeing it, he left him there and went wherever it was he had been going to go.

  On the day of her wedding he cut all his lectures and asked someone to take over his ward. He cashed the remainder of his term’s allowance—a cheque for ten pounds, dressed in his best clothes and gave himself lunch in the Ranelagh Club, eating magnificently. He enjoyed everything about it; the glass of dark Marsala in the hall, a conversation with old Harrison and Lord Tyrrelstown who were raging about black boxers being allowed to fight white ones, and the luncheon itself in the coffee room. The cold buffet alone was enough to give one an appetite; vast veal and ham pies with eggs in them, barons of pink-centred beef, crumbed hams, cold game of several sorts and wooden platters of smoked salmon.

  When he thought of the wartime austerities beginning in England he ate with greater appetite than ever and recklessly ordered a half bottle of champagne, which he finished very quickly. For a savoury he ordered chicken’s liver rolled up in bacon on tiny pieces of fried bread. He then selected a hefty piece of Gorgonzola which was nearly liquid with ripeness, and asked Bartlett to bring him a fruit basket. He ate a whole bunch of blue grapes, two Irish peaches and an imported pear. When he had finished these he went back into the hall where he found Palgrave drinking sherry alone on the fender.

  While John drank his black coffee laced with square crystals of tawny sugar he told him all about the wedding and invited him to come along to the reception with him. Palgrave said he had a date with a beautiful Dublin girl, not quite crême de la crême but fantastically rich. John said, “Bring her along too. There’s bound to be masses to eat because it’s a middle-class wedding and the reception will be lavish.”

  So Palgrave went and collected her and together they all three went down to the Hibernian Buttery which did not close until three o’clock, the hour at which the reception was due to begin.

  Palgrave’s girl, Caroline Smythe-Thomas, was extremely good-looking, a blue eye with a made up infant face and far too well dressed. Everything she wore looked as though it had come out of the most expensive section of one of her father’s department stores. She was impudent and spoke with a little drawl, eagerly, taking iridescent interest in everything said to her. She drank much faster than Dymphna would have done, downing one Old Fashioned after another and listening ever more ardently to their conversation. She thought the wedding sounded an absolute scream and said she loved weddings and dances, parties and racing. She told them she had won a poodle at a charity raffle the week before. John said, “Why didn’t you bring it with you?” So she and Palgrave went and fetched it in Palgrave’s car and brought it back to her. Caroline had also brought a reel of shining satin ribbon with her; and after George, the barman, had cut it into lengths they amused themselves by tying lovers’ knots all over the poodle’s unclipped patches of curls. They tied two on its head, one on each of its flanks and three on its behind before they went upstairs to the reception with the poodle on a white lead.

  John gave their names to the usher who bawled out, “Mr. John Blaydon, Miss Caroline Smythe-Thomas and Mr. Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch”—and they made their way through crowds of doctors, Trinity women, Boat Club men, dentists and their wives, vets and Protestant clergy, to shake hands with the bride and groom.

  John told Cloate, “I took the invitation at its face value; it said, ‘and friend’ so, as a matter of fact, I brought two.”

  He then shook hands with Dymphna and said, “Tell me, where is the honeymoon to be or is that a secret?” He also said, “I hope you’ll be very happy together, I’m sure you will.” And he said, “I think it’s terribly brave of you and original to have such a short engagement. I suppose you’ll be going to live in England, but then, of course, one mustn’t look too far ahead.”

  He had not the least idea what Dymphna replied; he could never remember either immediately afterwards or very much later. She was a white shape, perhaps with dew on the edges if he had looked into her face, the direction of it, as he felt her cold hand in his own, and prevented himself from seeing anything. It was a faculty he had cultivated, this of looking boldly and blindly into things, into other people’s faces, like a man staring into a mist; he found it very necessary and it astonished him that it should be possible; but it was.

  Fortunately they had missed the speeches and the telegrams so not one of them knew anything. Not even which of the older people were Dymphna’s parents and which Cloate’s, nor where they were going for the honeymoon or which church they had been married in since John had forgotten what it said in the invitation and could not be bothered to look.

  Caroline said, “It’s the best wedding I ever attended. Divine! We’ll have to read all about it in the Irish Times tomorrow if we remember; and isn’t it a bit of luck just getting all the champagne and the cake without having to listen to the sermon or anything?”

  From this John gathered she was Protestant, thank God. But it turned out she was Catholic and didn’t seem to matter because she obviously didn’t take it seriously in any case.

  They drank quantities of champagne and fed the poodle asparagus, vols-au-vent and even some of the wine.

  A number of people known to Caroline gathered round them but she cold-shouldered them all in a perfectly courteous way by asking them to repeat themselves and then going on with her interrupted comments to John and Palgrave.

  Palgrave had told her that John had been in love with Dymphna for years and all she said was, “You too? Half the eligible men in Dublin seem to have been in love with her. I can’t think why. She’s so tall.”

  John said, “I thought you knew nothing about her?”

  “Oh, we’re not in the same set, of course, but surely you know that in Dublin everybody knows the essentials about everybody?”

  “Well, tell me about Fergus Cloate.”

  “Prodestant,” she said with her Irish pronounciation. “His father was a farmer and drank enough whiskey to fill Killarney lakes before he died. He supported his mother from the time he qualified and everyone thought he would go to England and marry an heiress. He’s terribly attractive.”

  “Very,” John said.

  “Can you see it too?”

  “Well, I must think so, in any case, otherwise why should she have turned down me? But I do really think so.”

  “No one would wait for a student when a live major was in the offing. Don’t be silly,” she said, stroking the poodle.

  “Would you?”

  “I might.”

  He said, “How very serious you are when you’re not laughing.”

  “Oh, very.”

  Then Palgrave interrupted them. He wanted to know what they should all do when the party was over.

  Caroline said, “Come home with me and we’ll play the radiogram and dance until it’s time to go out somewhere.”

  John said, “Let’s buy some flowers first—if we leave now we’ll just be in time to put them into their car.”

  “Do you know which it is?”

  “Of course.”

  When they got out into Dawson Street they found a flower woman just across the road. She had a little stall with roses and carnations in it, all white. Beside her feet on the pavement was a large washing basket full of more white and pink roses and deep-crimson carnations.

  John asked her, “How much are they a bunch?” When she had told him he sai
d, “How much are they all?”

  “All, sir?”

  “Yes, all the ones on the stall and in your basket.”

  Although it wasn’t cold she was wearing her flower-seller’s black shawl and she shook this off onto her stool, when she stood up and started to count her bunches.

  “It would come to about ten pounds fifteen shillings if you’re really wanting the lot.”

  Palgrave said, “This is really a bit silly.” And Caroline danced about with the poodle in great excitement.

  “It’s a wonderful idea,” she said. “Quite noble. Oh, I do think this is fun. Imagine buying up a complete flower stall for someone you loved.”

  John said, “I haven’t quite enough. One of you lend me three pounds.”

  “I will,” she said, “I think you’re absolutely marvellous. She’ll never forget it. What are you going to write on the card?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, but you should. It will haunt her. It would haunt me. Were you very much in love with her?”

  With the flower woman’s help they carried the flowers across the road in swaying armfuls, some of the stems dripping clear glistening juice on the hot macadam and down their clothes, others with their stems wrapped in nests of moss. They filled the whole of the back of Cloate’s car with them, arranging them very carefully on the floor, propped up with wire given them by the flower woman who was getting very excited about it, on the back seat and in the ledge in front of the back window. Then the flower woman said, “For the Good Lord’s sake roll up them back windows again or they’ll all be blown to Kerry when the young couple sets out on their travels.”

  When this was done they stood out in the road and admired the little black car. Caroline suddenly had the giggles; she jigged about with the poodle, which was alarmed by the traffic, and John and Palgrave disentangled the lead while the flower woman pulled Caroline herself to safety on the opposite pavement.