Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

She was still laughing and resting a very small hand in the crook of John’s arm.

  Palgrave grew quite irritable with them both and at last, when she could get her breath back, she pointed at the car.

  “It’s so funny,” she said. “You just can’t ever tell how things are going to turn out. Even without them in it, it looks exactly like a hearse.”

  “Good God!” said Palgrave.

  But the flower woman sat down on her stool and John sat on her knee; they laughed and clapped each other on the back and hugged one another.

  Then they went off in Palgrave’s car to Caroline’s home in Ballsbridge.

  John did not see Groarke for several days after the wedding party, and thought that he must have gone out to his home in Kingstown until the whole affair was over. But when a whole week had passed and he had still not returned to duty, John began to feel more and more uneasy.

  He remembered the urgency of Cloate’s advice the day they had met in Grafton Street; something he had said about “cracking up.” He remembered, too, Groarke’s extraordinary behaviour during the Dolphin evening and the elaborate structure of his accusations afterwards in the hospital sitting-room. When he first heard the rumour that “Mike Groarke has been retired on the order of Dr. Hansom,” he believed it at once and sought out Hansom at the end of second clinic.

  Hansom as always was evasive; he doubled about behind his stammer, said, “A question of over-di-stress. F-finals. I think I must advise you to consult the depen-parents. You n-know them, of course?”

  “Well, no, sir.”

  “In that car-case, I am not at liberaliberty to say more.”

  “Could you give me their address, sir?”

  Hansom wrote it out for him and the next day John took the bus out to Kingstown and walked up behind the Marine Hotel to a street of terraced houses. Number Twenty-one was in need of paint; the green door had blistered and the tops of the papules had fallen or been scuffed off by some child, so that the clean oak was exposed in pock-marks. But what took his eye most was the notice on the tiny gate giving access to the front path. In faded letters it warned:

  “ENTRÉE INTERDITE AUX PROMENEURS.”

  John pushed it open, carefully latched it behind him and knocked on the black iron knocker. After a long delay during which he speculated about Groarke’s father the door was opened by a woman with a sad pale-green face and old yellow hair.

  She was wearing a dress of some blackish material against the bodice of which hung a small mother-of-pearl crucifix with a silver figure on its face. She looked very quietly ill, frighteningly so, having the refined look of the chronic invalid whose life is lived in some very remote part of consciousness, most aware and intuitive.

  “Yes?”

  “Does Michael Groarke live here?”

  “I’m his mother.”

  “Oh, could I see him do you think?”

  “Would you be John Blaydon?”

  “That’s right.” He smiled and was about to say something more when she stood aside.

  “Please come in.”

  “Oh, thank you. Is Mike here?”

  “He’s not. He’s away. He’s been taken very sick.”

  “Oh dear! Has he? D’you think—?”

  But at this point they were interrupted; a rather high-pitched voice called out, “Who’s that?” The intonation was defective, each of the two words being given the same stress, so that a most cold impatience was immediately apparent.

  Mrs. Groarke touched herself; a quick movement that could have been the Sign of the Cross, just nerves, or both.

  “Mr. Groarke,” she confided; and then, as an afterthought, “My husband.”

  “I’m awfully sorry,” John began, “I thought of writing to you or ringing up, but—”

  “Mr. Groarke rarely answers letters,” she said. “He never speaks on the telephone.”

  “Well—”

  “It’s his nerves,” she added, as though to reassure him. “Voices upset him.”

  “Who’s that?” came the voice again.

  This time John observed that it came from hehind a closed door at the far end of the hallway, beyond the staircase. There was another notice pinned on this door. It said, simply:

  PREOCCUPIED.

  At that moment it was opened by a man in a dressing-gown; shorter than Groarke, puffy in the face, pursier in the figure, with two scornful eyes once big for the face, but now reduced to less than normal size by the indulged cheeks. The gaze of the eye flicked swiftly over Mrs. Groarke as though their owner was licking some contaminant off her before inspecting its source; then they turned fully on John and the man walked forward.

  “What-does-he-want?” he said distinctly but without adding the question mark and still looking at John.

  “He came for Michael.”

  “You-told-him-he-is-not-here.”

  “I was telling him when you called out.”

  “He knows?” This time the loveless blue eyes beneath the reddish, thinning hair supplied the interrogative—for John.

  “Mrs. Groarke has just told me that Michael’s ill. I wondered if I could see him.”

  “Your name?”

  “It’s Blaydon,” supplied Mrs. Groarke, “Michael’s friend.”

  “Friend?”

  “I’m John Blaydon. Mike and I have worked together ever since we started. If he’s ill I’d very much like to go and see him.”

  The father looked at him. The eyes were as unblinking as pride, the face as expressionless as an upper servant’s.

  “My wife is mistaken. My son has no friends of that name.” He paused and John said, “I assure you, Mr. Groarke—”

  “Yes?”

  “Michael has confided in me, we have both confided in each other for years, nearly five. He’s even told me about your interest in James Joyce, your book.”

  Mr. Groarke glanced at his wife and then towards the front door at the opposite end of the hall. She moved forward at once and opened it, standing aside as courteously as she had done when she invited John to enter.

  They both watched him leave.

  5. Term

  It was the winter of nineteen hundred and forty. The lights of Dublin shone upwards more brightly for the custom of darkness which for fifteen months had encompassed the other island, and, a little further north, the Six Counties themselves.

  Sometimes at night the pulse of German bombers could be heard as they assembled over the pinpoints of the city’s illuminations before beating away up the coat to the factories and dockyards of Belfast. But thus far the only hostile explosion John or anyone else had heard within Free State Territory had been that which had blown up William of Orange and his horse in Stephen’s Green.

  In a dull way John was working for re-examination in midwifery, having failed it in the viva at the beginning of the preceding term. He worked with only intermittent enthusiasm both because he had never expected to fail in the first place and because he suspected that there had been something tendentious in his defeat. Having passed the three-hour paper and scrambled through the clinical, it was dismaying to have tripped up in the fifteen-minute viva conducted by Macdonald Browne and a visiting examiner from Queen’s University, Belfast.

  At the posting of the results on the notice board in an always dark and draughty passage in the Medical School he had heard people saying that he had been ploughed because Macdonald Browne had objected to an earlier paper of his, the one he had written for the Biological Association nearly two years previously. This suggestion, repetitive, made with malice or occasionally with a certain affection, continued to reach him whenever the subject of Finals was discussed. He met Jack Kerruish one day in the Wicklow and drank with him. Jack said, “Now he’s had his sport with you, John boy, you’ve only to sit again and Macdonald Browne’ll relent.”

  “D’you really think that’s why he did fail me?”

  “Not at all! But he could have been sore about it. You took an awful kick at his department.”

>   “It was two years ago.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying. Didn’t he give you the clinical and the paper last time and only scupper you in the oral?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then won’t he be letting you through the three of them in December?”

  Johnny Walshe joined in and said, “John’s not looking half the boy he used to be. But just you hang on now to your head and you’ll be through and away over to England and the war.”

  “You’re pulling my leg?”

  “But we’re not,” they said; and they meant it. They gave him more to drink and hammered his back; they assured him he was a good fellow with a great future before him, and Johnny Walshe said he himself had once had a go of temperament and had got to brooding about something at night and feeling his friends were strange to him. If John had been a Catholic, they said, instead of a poor damned Protestant he’d be thanking God he’d longer in Ireland amongst his truest friends, he’d see the thing in scale.

  “With what?” he asked, and they said, “With Eternity, what else?”

  But his friends had thinned out. Groarke was still away in some hospital or nursing home and though John continued to send him letters care of his home address he never received any reply and so was quite unable to trace him. The Chete, himself eighteen months behind the rest of his year, had drifted into Stephen’s Hospital, the recognized home for athletic “chronics,” where he was doing a little work, a lot of rowing and recurrently worrying about his fiancée’s putative pregnancies.

  John’s days were a succession of ante-natal clinics at the Rotunda, lectures in Medicine and Surgery and long hours at his textbooks in the evenings. He wrote home infrequently, resorted increasingly to the Ranelagh Club for thrifty meals, eavesdrop news of the war from staff officers on leave, and glasses of Marsala and vintage port at two shillings a time. He had no idea whether or not he would pass the exam the next time he sat it, he had never really believed that he would qualify or that if, by some inevitable process, he did, it would make any real difference to his life; by which he meant the life inside himself. Sometimes he thought, I must be a doctor before I start to be anything else; at others he thought, I must be something else before I start to be a doctor.

  But since he had lost Dymphna, as earlier he had lost Victoria, he saw no prospect of resolving his dilemma and so continued to wait inside himself for something external to happen.

  He rarely saw Dymphna. He knew that she was living with her parents just outside Dublin and that Cloate, following two weeks’ embarkation leave, had been posted to the Middle East. He also heard that occasionally she was seen at dances in the Gresham with other young-marrieds and their husbands. At intervals he was tempted to look for her in Grafton Street on Saturday mornings, suspecting that she might well have kept up the coffee habit in Mitchell’s.

  One morning, bored and restless, having worked hard all the week, he could resist the desire no longer and spent over an hour walking up and down the pavement opposite the restaurant. He saw her coming out of Switzer’s long before she had seen him, and immediately hurried into Mitchell’s a minute or two ahead of her. She chose the staircase and he took the lift as soon as he had given her time to settle at a table in the upstairs room.

  She was by the window looking down into the street. At first he did not know what it was that had surprised him as, from his position beyond the glass doors, he studied her. She was not so restless, she was subdued, a little fuller in the cheeks and her hair where it grew from the temples was compressed before springing away into her crowning curls. Then he saw that she was smoking. She had Cloate’s case beside her on the table and beneath it, an opened letter with a censorship label running across the top of the envelope.

  She smoked quite without pleasure, barely tasting the cigarette, which was a nuisance to her; when it was only half finished she stubbed it out in the ashtray and pulled Cloate’s letter out of the envelope, re-read it and put it back. Then she looked round the room for the waitress, stretched her left leg to its full length over the carpet of the aisle, studied it for a moment and curled it back under the table again. She began to make up her face, looked up suddenly over the top of her mirror and saw John as he came in. He returned her glance in a blank way as though he were distracted about some small point and hurried up to the waitress. He said, “Excuse me, but I think I left my cigarette case in here yesterday; a rather battered silver one. Did you happen to find it?”

  “If you did, sir, it will be with the cashier.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  Dymphna was watching him with her mirror still in her hand, her lipstick poised like a small red fruit between her fingers, but having seen this he hurried out along the opposite side of the room, no longer, after the one confirmatory glance, looking at her any more.

  At the bottom of the stairs he was quite dizzy with the old dizziness, only more violent, as though she had really hit him with something, with sorrow, perhaps, with a very great pathos of hers which she had never used against him before.

  And it was on that morning when he reached the club, round about lunch time, that he found Greenbloom’s letter awaiting him. It was a scrawl on the thick paper of a London club and said only:

  John Blaydon,

  I hope shortly to be taking up an appointment in Dublin and shall expect to see something of you. Hold yourself in readiness to assist me, principally with regard to contacts.

  Circumstances preclude my giving you a date. Discretion, please.

  Pray do not bother to reply.

  Horab Greenbloom.

  John thought, What is this “pray”? He has become pompous. And what the devil does he think I can do for him now, or he for me? He’s a damn sight too late. I must say he has the best of everything. Why isn’t he in the Forces? His crippled leg, I suppose. And what appointment could it be and why in Ireland when he always loathed the place?

  He did not discover what the appointment was until the following week when he picked up a copy of the Irish Times and saw that Mr. Horab Greenbloom had been appointed British Press Attaché by Mr. Brendan Bracken, the Minister of Information, to His Majesty’s Legation in Phoenix Park.

  Earlier, before the loss of Dymphna and his failure in midwifery, he might have wanted to discuss all this with somebody. As it was, he did mention it to a couple of the Club’s old men who said, “Greenbloom, d’ye say? Sounds like a Jew. I ask you, Harrison, what the devil can they be thinking of, appointing a Jew over here?”

  Then they began discussing the conduct of the war and Churchill’s latest speech about fighting on the beaches which Harrison said was worth two corps of cavalry. From this they drifted into an argument about cavalry versus tanks and John left them to go and do some work in his rooms.

  He wondered why he had bothered to tell them, in the first place, that he knew Greenbloom at all, for at this time, with the term a month old, he had been removed even further from any concern with his immediate present by something that had happened a day or two after he had received Greenbloom’s letter.

  Far more than the voices which suggested he was wasting his time in remaining at Trinity, more even than the cold frustration of Dymphna’s marriage to Cloate, this incident occupied his mind by its unwavering meaninglessness.

  However often he thought about it he could extract nothing from it in the way of pleasure, pain, sense or nonsense, nor even in the way of a crude or cursing blasphemy such as he sometimes felt in these last months of his apprenticeship. Yet it remained a marker for him over something that was to be recalled unwillingly during the remainder of his life.

  He had gone that afternoon to attend one of the clinics in Psychological Medicine which were held out at Grangegorman Asylum. In order to sit the final examination in General Medicine it was necessary not only to have a smattering of the textbooks covering the psychological syllabus, but also to have secured six attendances at one of the recognized mental hospitals. These credits, like those given f
or practical knowledge of Public Health and entailing visits to slaughterhouses and sewage farms, could be secured at any time in the last year of the course; they were chores which, though no one took them very seriously, had to be accomplished. By the winter term most of the final year had already made the prescribed visits, but John after his failure in midwifery had been so concerned to concentrate exclusively on this that he had left them until rather later than was customary. He therefore went out to the hospital alone and arrived there at about half past three. The hospital porter conducted him to a large empty room on the first floor and told him that since the clinic did not start until four he would have to wait the half hour. John asked him if there would be other students and he replied, “There’s always a few, sir, but being the day for the gentlemen from the National University, they’re likely to be late; and then Dr. Lesselbaum is often late himself.”

  “Dr. Lesselbaum? I thought it was Dr. MacBrien’s clinic today?”

  “It’s Trinity you’re from then? It’s not your day at all. You’ll have to get the doctor’s permission before he starts on the cases.”

  “D’you think he’ll give it?”

  “He’s easy enough,” the porter said, “These Americans stand on no ceremony and he’s only here with us three months so I don’t doubt he’ll not mind, sir.”

  Before he left he explained that he would have to lock John in as it was the rule that, apart from those in the administrative block, all doors had to be kept fastened.

  “As I told you, sir, you’re at liberty to wait for the other gentlemen in the hall, if you wish it.”

  John assured him that he’d prefer to remain where he was and when the man had gone he looked round the room. There were twenty or thirty wooden chairs in rows on the bare floor, a small rostrum about six inches high on which was an old-fashioned clerical desk with a high stool behind it and a blackboard on an easel. The rest of the room was furnished like the waiting-room of a dingy hotel with school desks drawn up against the walls between the tall windows. There were three windows on each side of the room and three or four separate doors; all, apart from one at the end of the room, locked. This gave access to a lavatory and washbasin. The lavatory had no cistern or chain and the washbasin had no handles on the taps.