Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  “Well then, perhaps it would be better to think of it as a housewarming rather than a political party. If you start telling people that, they might relax more quickly.”

  She clapped her hands. “That’s splendid, we’ll tell everyone that it’s really only a housewarming. I do so like there to be a good reason for things, don’t you? It seems rather pointless, otherwise, for us all to be here when so many people are dying in Europe and getting bombed in London. I was just beginning to wish—”

  But she never expressed what it was she had been beginning to wish; for at that moment, beyond the glass doors of the entrance, the stallion flashed into dazzling relief from the headlights of a car which had drawn up in the narrow mews. Simultaneously everyone turned to discover the source of this bilious blaze, reflected as it was from the ceiling, from the mirrors on the walls and from the horse itself where it towered over the surrounding boxes in the mist thickened by the car’s exhaust. They saw the chauffeur, his grey uniform chlorine-coloured in the yellow light, get out and open the rear door, his air of saluting as Luthmann picked his way past him and past the stallion to the entrance.

  The piano played on mournfully, Palgrave and his companions, insensible of the pause or thinking perhaps that it presaged applause, singing the chorus of “Cockles and Mussels”:

  “Alive, alive o-oh! Alive, alive o-oh!

  Singing cockles and mussels, alive alive-o!

  As Groarke went forward with outstretched hand, Luthmann said, “Good evening, Michael! So we are having some singing? I was a little delayed by some bad news from home; but I trust I am not too late?”

  “Not really,” Caroline said, “it’s only that everyone else is early.”

  Luthmann stopped then and Groarke with his dreadful awkwardness said, “Christian, this is Caroline—”

  “My hostess? Miss Smythe-Thomas?” He took her hand and kissed it a little clumsily. “I like very much your horse, gnädige Fraulein.”

  Groarke said, “I’ll get you a drink.”

  “That is a very good idea.” His eyes questioned John for a moment and Caroline said, “This is John Blaydon, I really don’t know how we’re going to introduce everybody, but you must meet Palgrave because he’s sharing the party with me.”

  “I have heard of you, I think,” Luthmann bowed to John, “from Michael. You are a student of Medicine too? The Englishman?”

  “Both,” said John as Luthmann raised the glass Groarke had given him.

  “I am a German. We are in neutral territory. Prosit!”

  “Good health!”

  The piano had stopped and people were talking again. Jan Benjamin came forward with delight.

  “Christian, dear Christian, the party’s complete!”

  “Good evening, Jan. I did not know you would be here.”

  “But we’re all here, the entire backstage Gate Theatre; and Palgrave! You must meet him. Palgrave, here is Christian Luthmann. What a magnificent entry you made, Christian. We three were round the corner; but the hush, my dear, was dramatic to a degree. How is the war going?”

  “It goes very well.” Luthmann paused to greet Palgrave who was limp-handed and smoking fussily. “For Germany!” the German said, taking in the Swastika behind the bar. “I do not know how it is going for England because I have not yet heard the B.B.C. six o’clock news.”

  Caroline said, “Oh, please don’t let’s get political.”

  “It was a joke. Like the English Lord Haw-Haw joke. You see, I know these little things.”

  “It was in bad taste,” John said.

  “What is this ‘in bad taste’?” the German demanded with a good smile. “Here we are, the guests of neutral people who expect us to uphold our nations. For you, being an Englishman, you have an objection perhaps? But for nobody else. Come, we will shake hands on that.”

  “Frankly,” said Benjamin, “I’m an Englishman too and I think the whole affair’s dreadfully boring.”

  “Good,” said Luthmann to John. “That is an Englishman of sense; he finds impending defeat boring. Let us be merry, for tomorrow we may die. At this moment the Luftwaffe may be flying towards Dublin under the impression from the British radio jamming that it is Belfast. We could die as we stand, drinking. It is very comical to think of.”

  Luthmann had thick, dull-gold Aryan hair. He had a splendid neck, a bounding body; great vitality in it. He was a most attractive person. John took his proffered hand, very warm and dry and Luthmann put an arm round his shoulders. They drank together.

  “You see, Michael,” Luthmann said to Groarke, Caroline and the others, “under our skins we are brothers. We meet in a neutral place with charming women, with ravishing girls, we have a drink of good Scottish whiskey, we both wish our country to win even though one of us already knows that his nation is already defeated. And then, when we laugh, when our blood prevails, we are immediately united. But united.”

  He drank again and swept forward at Palgrave. “Come, we will sing. I have heard of your playing, Palgrave. You run a band, very hot stuff, in Offaly where I know a charming girl friend.” He stopped suddenly and turned on Caroline, pretending that he could not see her, “But where is our other host, the girl with the delightful stationary horse?”

  “Hostess,” she corrected him. “I can’t come yet, really. In a few minutes—”

  “But you will!” he ordered. “Surely you cannot refuse the pressure of a guest even though, with so ravishing an example before him of neutrality, he mixes his sexes.”

  And she went with them, with Palgrave and Jan Benjamin, allowing herself to be drawn forward by the hand he had lodged in her waist. But she called out, “Michael, dear, do get yourself behind the bar there now that we really seem to have started; and John, would you tell Mrs. Mahoney to start sending in the pâtés.”

  From the annexe John and Groarke heard Luthmann’s confident voice. “We will sing an Irish song and an English song and a German song. That will be correct so that all may be patriotic. The German song we sing will be a song of the Wehrmacht: “Wir Fähren gegen Englandt.” His laughter, very strong and gay, quite unobjectionable, merged into the opening bars of “Does Your Mother Come From Ireland?”

  Groarke followed John into the kitchen. He said, “Come outside.”

  “I will in a moment.” John instructed Caroline’s housekeeper, “Oh, Mrs. Mahoney, forgive us butting in, but Miss Smythe-Thomas wants the food served now. Shall I ask someone to come and give you a hand?”

  “If they’ll just take in the trays from by the door. There’s not room in here for all them young people.”

  “We’ll be back ourselves in a moment.”

  “Don’t count on that,” Groarke said to him as they went out into the yard.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Because something’s gone wrong. What time is Greenbloom getting here?”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “He went off to meet Beste just before I left the Shelbourne,” Groarke said. “They were on the telephone before that. I gathered there might be some news from Rome.”

  John leaned against the stallion. Palgrave was now singing “The Mountains of Mourne.” Through the glass doors his thin tenor reached them, interrupted by the laughter, the sudden high voices of the guests. The patterns of people in there shifted quite near at hand, yet remotely as a rehearsal seen from an emtpy auditorium.

  John said, “You’ve been so tight-lipped about it all. Every time I’ve asked you how things were going with Luthmann you’ve told me to wait. You never even told me whether he took the money or not.”

  “He took it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He would see what could be done.”

  “When he said he’d been delayed by bad news from home, surely he wasn’t referring to Eli? It’s too soon. There wasn’t going to be any definite news for at least a day or two—according to the original arrangements.”

  From his pocket Groarke took an envelope folded small
. “He gave me this when I shook hands with him.”

  John opened and read the enclosed note. It was typed on an unheaded sheet of writing paper and was unsigned.

  A good joke, Michael, but one which might have comprised us both. I shall be delighted to meet your friend Greenbloom’s brother when he arrives to take up his appointment next week. We will talk later. Consider other matters as settled for the moment.

  “It seems so damned amateur,” John said. “Indiscreet.”

  “That happens to be Luthmann’s skill. Don’t you realize he’s an official, ‘good sort,’ a try-anything-once man? That’s why he got the job here. Did you imagine they’d have sent some heel-clicking Prussian to Dublin? His job is to be jolly, open-handed frank and honest.”

  “I thought you said he’d kept the money? Accepted it?”

  “He did.”

  “How much?”

  “All of it.”

  “He can’t do that.”

  “What’s to prevent him? Who am I going to protest to? I can’t send a letter to the Irish Times or write to the Dail saying that I tried to bribe the Nazis to release a Jewboy from Dachau.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “I can’t,” Groarke said. “For Christ’s sake! Where d’you think I’ve been raising my fees since Cloate ran out on me?’”

  “Not Luthmann?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good god!”

  “When I’d run enough with him and couldn’t begin to pay it back he said that I could make it good in other ways.”

  “How?”

  “He suggested I might make use of my English friends and take the odd trip across to Liverpool and send him code postcards when I got wind of convoys. It wouldn’t have been difficult. You were mentioned.”

  “You could get yourself shot.”

  “I preferred Grangegorman.”

  Two or three people came out of the party. A girl with a glass in her hand was legged up onto the stallion by one of her companions.

  “Ride him, ride him, Fiona!”

  “Go on Charles, get up behind her!”

  “No, no, she’s Europa. A white stallion instead of a bull.”

  “Europa, good God!” guffawed the man named Charles. “The further off from Kingstown the nearer is to Llanfairpwllgyngyllgogerychwyndrobwllantisiliogogogoch.”

  “She’ll have to mind a Jerry submarine doesn’t get her in the Channel.”

  “Up Germany!”

  “Up neutrality!”

  “Help me down. I’m dizzy,” she told Groarke. “You, with the red hair, what’s your name? Who’s side are you on?”

  Groarke ignored her; followed by John he moved away up the mews towards Fitzwilliam Square.

  “I thought it was to do with Dymphna,” John said. “Your retreat to Grangegorman, I mean.”

  “As my father would say, ‘La whore a ses raisons!’ Because that would have been your motive it doesn’t mean it would have been mine. The Consulate staff have obviously discovered who Eli Greenbloom really is.”

  John absorbed this. It was difficult to run over the points of Groarke’s defection, the entirely new colour given to so many of his actions in the past eighteen months; it was difficult to do this and simultaneously relate the new conception of him to Greenbloom’s brother Eli awaiting release or death in Dachau.

  They were walking together now, faster, in the direction of Stephen’s Green and the Shelbourne.

  John said, “You sold Dymphna, too!”

  “Agreed.”

  “To Cloate?”

  “Yes, yes, if you call it selling.”

  “I do.”

  The mist was quite thick in Lower Baggott Street, a winter’s mist, cold and frost-tinted round the globes of the street lamps and the headlights of the cars. The glowing interiors of trams rounding the corner of the Green were nearly empty, there were few people on the pavements. Under the trees behind the railings two or three couples hurried towards Grafton Street, the cafés and the cinemas.

  “Ambition!” John said. “Greenbloom was right again.”

  “Yes, ambition, me bhoy! To qualify on the string of my father’s carpet slippers, his stinking literary pretensions. Be bitter about it and I’ll give you all the reasons. Local boy makes good with help of friends.” Groarke didn’t laugh when he said this; he walked faster and John kept pace with him, saying, “I couldn’t have helped you—not to that extent.”

  “I didn’t want you to. You amused me when you didn’t sicken me.”

  They had stopped outside the Shelbourne; John because he had forgotten why he had come there, Groarke presumably because he hadn’t finished what he wanted to say.

  He said, “You didn’t hinder me, not directly, that is, until you waved that damned girl under my nose. I fell for that all right.”

  “Why?”

  “Money didn’t come into it; I didn’t think so. One direction in which we started level, or not so level—being Irish too, an advantage to me, if you like. No fees to find, very little social savoir-faire, just straightforward boy and girl stuff.” He stopped. “What did you get out of me?”

  “Out of you?”

  “Oh Christ! What advantages?”

  “I’m beginning to wonder.”

  Groarke said, “Give me a cigarette before we go in.” He took the packet. “Have one yourself. I’ll stand you a drink on your friend Greenbloom’s account.”

  “We’d better find him first.”

  “No, we’ll drink first. The stuff’s flowing in that flat but so far we’ve neither of us had anything.”

  They went up to the reception desk and Groarke asked if Mr. Graeme had returned.

  The receptionist referred to her message pad. “Mr. Graeme telephoned a few minutes ago to say that he had been delayed. He thought you might call.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He said he would be joining Miss Caroline Smythe’s party a little later and that you were not to leave her address before he arrived.”

  They went through into the smaller of the two lounges and then Groarke said, “He’s left me the key to his rooms. We’ll have a quick drink up there and go back to the flat.”

  They ordered their drinks from one of the waiters and took them up in the lift. When they got into Greenbloom’s sitting-room they sat down on a sofa and Groarke got hold of Eli’s photograph. He laid it down on his knees and stood his drink on it as though it were a tray.

  John said, “I think you’ve been the biggest cod of the lot. You were the first Irishman I met over here. Very charming, full of good intentions, a generous confidant. I admired you, I thought I liked you.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You certainly did your best to make me single-minded. I think that of all the Dubliners, even Theresa’s circle, Dymphna’s and Palgrave’s, you were the only one I really trusted after the first few months.”

  “Interesting,” Groarke said. “I took you right in, then?”

  “Completely. Until that night in the Mungo Park. I suppose that was a touch of the real situation?”

  “That was the breath of it.”

  “You’re an envious devil.”

  “A poor and envious devil,” Groarke said. “It takes a poor man to know envy and even then he’s to have a richer one beside him.”

  “Well, it’s been a very expensive lesson,” John said. “In a way, if I’d met you, known you first, I needn’t have troubled to come to Ireland.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that you are Ireland, the same the English have been running their heads into for the past fifteen hundred years or so.”

  “No,” said Groarke. “You under-simplify. I’m not like Ireland, I’m like life. I know a silly bastard who lapsed from Catholicism because a Jesuit father struck him when he was at school. What a reason! As if sooner or later we’re not all slapped on the cheek by a Jesuit.” He held up the photograph of Eli Greenbloom. “Here’s a Jew in Dachau. Now he’s a Catholic and
he’s still in Dachau. So are hundreds of Protestants, Socialists and Communists; men, in fact. The only difference is that this one thought he was going to get out.”

  They finished their drinks and John said, “Well that’s that. Now that I do know you, I don’t particularly dislike you.”

  “A lot of negatives.”

  “I don’t particularly like you, either.”

  “You’re advancing,” Groarke said. “We’d better get after Greenbloom. This man here in the photograph has my sympathy for some reason. I can’t get the bastard out of my mind.”

  When they got back to Caroline’s party they found that Luthmann had taken it over completely.

  They were singing German songs: The Horst Wessel, Urians Reis um die Welt, and the Wehrmacht song Wir Fähren gegen Englandt.

  Luthmann had one arm round Caroline and another round Jan Benjamin. He was sweating attractively, had taken off his jacket and was swaying them both to Palgrave’s piano rhythm. In his shirt front he had pinned small replicas of the three flags behind the bar, the Irish flag given pride of place in the middle.

  There was a certain amount of sex going on up the staircase and probably a good deal more upstairs. Couples sitting on the floor with their backs to the mirrors had that self-cherishing look of the love-makers, some sitting close and quiescent, talking pearly things to one another, only their hands and arms suddenly clenching and writhing at intervals. John saw that their mouths were startling; he had one of his thoughts that physical love goes always to the lips and remembered suddenly Greenbloom’s triptych and the tone in which he had said, “Eating!” when he was describing “La Débâcle.” I suppose I looked the same when I was with Dymphna, just as arrogant; as though she should marvel at each breath I took.

  When Luthmann waved to them and came forward in his white silk shirt with so much muscle under it and sweat stains in the armpits, by some association John resented the grip of his hand, though previously he remembered that it had felt pleasant. The hand seemed so clean and strong, sewn with short golden hairs—very Aryan. Luthmann continued to hold his hand.

  “But where have you been, you two gentlemen, one of Ireland and one of England? Can it be that you have offended against neutrality?”