Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  In a primrose-yellow dress Dymphna opened the door to him. She was in the light from the street: dark-haired, moon-white neck and face, her mouth most happy.

  He dropped his case in the hall and went for her like a man at a desert fountain. They were the same height. She betrayed no surprise at his action, neither did she laugh but lent him herself, drinking his kiss like the fountain that eternally drinks itself. They rocked there in the dull hall rented by the surgeons outside the consulting-room door. They toppled under the dim light against the big flowered wallpaper and fell back slowly to support themselves against the wall. Dymphna did not tremble, she was cool and hot at the same time as a fire steadily devouring and glowing in a sustained wind.

  They didn’t bother about his case, they went on up the stairs, flight after flight, stopping on the landings to kiss and rock again.

  In the sitting-room they immediately lay down on her divan bed beneath the three wooden swallows fastened to the wall. Her open diary was on the pillow beside her head, the gas fire was popping in front of three dreggy tea cups and saucers, there were notebooks and Sunday newspapers all over the floor and an ashtray full of Broyle’s pipe ash and used matches.

  Dymphna’s closed eyelids were fringed by the black crescents of her lashes beneath the charcoal eyebrows. She breathed against him faster, pressing her breasts against his thin shirt, her body otherwise motionless and abandoned. He studied her cheek, the small white ear against the dark hair and beside her head he saw her open diary. He began to read it.

  “Friday: Went out to Kingstown with Mike Groarke and walked down the Quay in a gale—soaked. Had tea in the hotel and paid my share. Came back to the flat and washed my hair. Mike dried it but said nothing at all. He went off suddenly—to work! ! !”

  John closed his eyes, opened them again and read the next entry.

  “Saturday: Went riding with Bill Collins in Phoenix Park. Drank White Ladies in the Buttery. Did not pay. Came back to flat and fried eggs. E out with W. Bill talked about his father’s estancia in the Argentine—Córdoba Hills, steers, horses, cattle, tennis in Buenos Aires.”

  John kissed her neck just above the collarbone. He bit the tip of her ear and read:

  “Sunday: Walked from half-past-six tram to Sandymount over the cockle beds without shoes. Saw ships. Cracking breakfast at the flat. No sign of John B. Bored. Note from Mario about Wednesday.”

  She withdrew suddenly and they sat up.

  “You hurt me,” she said and saw her diary. Closing it, she asked, “Where did you get to?” and went over to the mantelpiece for the little key which locked the catch.

  “Offaly.”

  “Who with?”

  “Palgrave C-Ffynch.”

  “Tk! tk!” she said, “that little man.”

  “They’ve a castle,” John said. “We went shooting yesterday with the rest of the party. A woman called Claire Maunde, fabulously rich and, I thought, attractive. I got on rather well with her. Then there was a chap called Cavendish-Walker, a major-general or something and one of the best shots in Norfolk.”

  “What did you shoot?”

  “Oh a woodcock or two and a snipe, a jacksnipe.”

  “My, my, and where was all this, at Palgrave’s place?”

  “Some of it, though actually we went over to the de Savigny’s for tea. Grania showed us all over the place, miles of land, three pubs, masses of shrines and chapels. She more or less locked me in the bathroom—somebody did. She’s tremendous crack.”

  “How old?”

  “About nineteen. Not exactly pretty, you know—what did you do?”

  “Oh, the usual sort of thing. Rode with Bill Collins yesterday and went for a walk this morning at low tide at Sandymount. Tremendous crack.”

  “That all?”

  She was doing one of her little dances in front of the mirror over the mantelpiece. Not watching herself save in glimpses, listening to some tune in her mind, she nodded.

  “You didn’t see Mario or Groarke or anyone?”

  Shook her head and then stood still. She picked up her diary from the floor where she had dropped it.

  “You’ve been reading it,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Mike’s great but he’s as poor as a church mouse. I like Mike.”

  “So do I.”

  “Well, that’s fine, isn’t it? We both do.”

  “He’s my friend,” said John. “Why do you want him?”

  “I don’t; not specially. He’s grand for walking with and he’s tremendous plans for his future.”

  “Well, why do you want Collins, then?”

  “Oh, Bill,” she said, “I’ve known Bill two years now.”

  “You met Groarke through me.”

  “And Oonagh,” she put in.

  “Did Groarke and Collins kiss you? Here?” he asked. “On the divan?”

  “Now don’t start a mood. You’d no right to be reading my diary and anyway you’ve had your weekend and I’ve had mine—”

  The door into the bedroom opened and Emma came through, followed by Wilfred Broyle. They slumped on the divan together and Broyle said, “Well, Blaydon. Where’ve you been to this weekend?”

  “The de Savigny’s,” Dymphna answered, “having a whale of a time, haven’t you?”

  “In Offaly?” said Broyle. “Put on the kettle, will you, Emma?”

  “I’ve to go,” John said.

  “But you’ve only just come,” said Emma, pushing at her blue Malayan hair, “hasn’t he?”

  “He’s in a rage,” said Dymphna. “Don’t mind him. Come on, stay for a cup of tea.”

  “I’ve to get back. I’ve done no work this weekend. I haven’t eaten yet. I’ll have to cook something in my rooms.”

  She came down the stairs with him, teasing and laughing. She danced down ahead and waited. She rubbed his hair all over his forehead and at the bottom of the stairs they fell against the wallpaper again, clumsy with desire, John switching out the light so that the only illumination was the half-moon of the fanlight thrown slanting onto the wall beside the stairs.

  When they disentangled, too breathless to speak much, he said, “I’ll see you for coffee tomorrow at Mitchell’s, twelve o’clock.”

  “And bath buns,” she said, “with crystals on the top.”

  They kissed again and she shut the door fast behind him. He limped back to Trinity with a pain in his groins and went to bed without doing a stroke of work.

  The next day he started to work consistently and hard. He attended both clinics at Mungo Park’s. Purposely missing his appointment with Dymphna at Mitchell’s, he had lunch in the Buffet with Groarke instead. When the afternoon’s lectures were over they went on to the Anatomy department until it closed at six, made tea in John’s rooms and then settled down to the other subjects on the syllabus for the scientific preliminary examination.

  Groarke coached John in Physics and Chemistry and John took Groarke through some of the Biology since their talents were contrary in their studies, Groarke grasping the abstractions of figures with great facility, and John readily retaining the minutiae of Biology.

  They heated up a tin of Heinz baked beans on the gas ring at nine o’clock and boiled a kettle for tea. They both felt good. John felt especially pleased with himself. He said, “I wish to God I could do this every night—I’ve just wasted a whole weekend pigging about in Offaly with Palgrave C-Ffynch.”

  Groarke laughed his usual laugh and bit into a piece of toast.

  “What did you do, Mike? Work all the time?”

  “Some of it.”

  “Did you go out at all?”

  “I went for a walk on Friday.”

  “On the Vico Road by moonlight?” John asked. This was a joke of theirs because Groarke had once told him he only went for walks at night and then always along that road above the sea, when there was a moon up.

  But Groarke didn’t laugh. “Along the Quay,” he said.

  “By yourself?”

&n
bsp; “With Cloate.” Groarke was smiling.

  “Cloate?”

  “I took a woman if you want to know; your girl, Dymphna.”

  “Why, Mike?”

  “She’s mad about you, isn’t she?”

  “About me?”

  “She must be. Can’t leave you alone, can she?”

  “D’you mean you think she loves me?”

  “Well what do you think?” Groarke said. “Every time she sees me alone she comes up to ask where you are. “Have you see John today? Do you know if John’s in his rooms? Was John at the clinic with you this morning?’ ”

  “Don’t rib me on this, Mike.”

  “And when she sees you,” went on Groarke, “that’s to say, when you’re alone and presuming that she’s just met you with me, doesn’t she come up asking, ‘Have you seen Mike today? How’s your friend Mike? I’ve not seen him lately. Are the two of you coming in to watch the match?’ ”

  “Is that what she said to you?”

  “She said, ‘Do you ever go for walks down that quay of yours at Kingstown? It must be grand on a day like this.’ ”

  “Is that the way she’s always done it?”

  “It was,” Groarke said, “but it won’t be again.”

  “Mike,” John began.

  “Because it won’t be necessary any more. She’s where she wanted to be with me.”

  “You’re in love with her too—now?”

  “In love! In love!” Groarke said, “What is ‘in love’ for Christ’s sake? I was only in love once and that was with my form mistress when I was nine.”

  John said, “I can’t talk about this any more, Mike.”

  “We’re not going to. No questions, no answers.”

  “I couldn’t guarantee that,” John said. “I’m the sort of person who has to talk, I’ve always had to.”

  “You’ll have to work,” Groarke said, “with me, or she’ll slaughter us both. I’m going now but I’ll meet you at the clinic in the morning.”

  John said, “In a way I’d rather it was you than one of the others. I hate those swine, all of them, anyone that spends a minute with her. I’ll hate you more in one way if you keep on, but less in another, because I know you. I don’t feel so vicious, frightened, about people I know; but God, how I hate strangers.” Groarke said nothing to that. He went fumbling at the door in his usual way and let himself out in the blue coat John had given him the term before.

  They met the next day and the day after that. They began a programme of working together which was only ruined by one thing, a growing activity of John’s which exercised as much hold upon his ambition as did Dymphna upon his imagination and sensibility.

  It had begun with someone, soon after his arrival, suggesting that he should join the University Philosophical Society. This person had seen him in Front Square by the library and after asking his name had said that “the Phil” was the only society worth joining, at all costs to avoid the College Historical Society which was full of solicitors-to-be, future local government officials and embryo aldermen, so John had joined the Phil and made an applauded maiden speech. The term before he had read his first paper, entitled “Reaction to Environment”; the subject “Suicide,” about which he often thought with reluctant pleasure. The paper was a very great success. Nearly everyone, it appeared, had tried suicide at one time or another or got near to it or was thinking of it. Mac Burney said he had tried to bring it off when working in Belfast Docks during the Long Vac by drinking a pint of milk through which he had first passed coal gas for over an hour. When he came round he was in a police station charged with breaking and entering a pet shop. A poet called Kelt admitted that in a fit of despair he had seized his landlady’s washbasin, filled it with water and brought it down on the top of his head three times in succession without breaking anything or even spilling much of the water. He had rid himself of the subsequent headache by knocking up Geoghagan the Chemist in Coombe Road.

  Some of the speakers, of course, were less personal and direct than this, taking their tone more from John’s paper, which was full of quotations from Keats and exquisite details from authentic suicides which he had extracted from the Handbook of Medical Jurisprudence.

  But in any event the paper had been well enough received to give John a distinct “Arts” personality and to single him out from the ruck of the Medical Faculty who were considered by the other schools to be scarcely a part of the University at all. As a consequence he was occasionally referred to in the College Miscellany and often had his speeches fully reported after the weekly meeting of the Society. And this was a source of some pleasure to him. It enlarged his world, giving him a sensation of extraordinary popularity and power. He took to wearing brighter waistcoats, in particular a green one in which chopped ostrich feathers were supposed to have been incorporated with the yarn, though Groarke, after examining one under the microscope, had said that it was from the barn yard.

  He did not grow his hair any longer because it was already one of his good points, having developed a fine wave and drake feather curls at the back when he was about sixteen, and because Dymphna did not like him to wear his hair long since it conflicted with the good opinions of the Rugger and Boat Clubs. He did not go in for broad-brimmed hats or cravats in place of ties, only the variation in the waistcoats: the old yellow one from his home, the new green one, a lavender double-breasted one in which his father had married his mother, and a check one used by the family for Christmas charades.

  At dances with Dymphna more and more people waved to him, and she liked this; his rooms tended to fill up at the weekends with effervescent mixtures of people: poets and modern-language scholars, medical students, divinity men and the more eccentric of the engineers. When he went into Mitchell’s for Saturday-morning coffee with or without a girl, with the Chete or with Groarke, or occasionally even Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch, people stopped talking for a moment or two and then went on faster than ever. He knew that he was noted and it afforded him a very particular delight to see that Dymphna’s table gave him the longest glances and that during the period of his first break with her she had always, on these occasions, to be very animated at his entry, going a little pale under the pressure of her talk.

  It was a dreadful pleasure to him, really. He would collect the most attractive girl he could find and arrange for the coffee party well in advance. He would then stiffen up his crowd by gathering several other people from the second clinic and, casually, a few of the Arts men on his way through Front Square, so that by the time he had reached Mitchell’s where Dymphna would surely be at a corner table, there would be seven or eight people with him, all dogged-up, and several attractive girls.

  At the café he would get near to Dymphna’s table and encourage all his crowd to talk about themselves by asking the right sort of questions and not saying too much himself. More and more people would accumulate round his table and eventually someone with a sporting connection would filch away one or two of Dymphna’s party so that it seemed to him, and he hoped to her, that the whole world of the University was attaching itself to him. At this point he would pay a good share of the bill and leave with a girl if he had one, or, if not, with Groarke. They would detach themselves quietly as though they did not want to spoil the party they had collected, as though they had elsewhere some other exciting concourse in hand.

  Groarke did not care for this other iron in John’s fire: the writing of papers and the making of speeches. He said, “It’s splitting your forces, it’ll rot you quicker than a woman.”

  John did not tell him that, in a sense, it was a woman: that to some extent the Phil was a flanking attack on Dymphna, who coveted success in any form. He would have told him if Groarke had not been in love with Dymphna himself. He would have said. “Why have you started playing rugger, if not for the same reason?” But of course Groarke knew very well what was in his mind, though it was possible that he knew also how much more dangerous ‘the Phil’ was than the Rugger Club.

/>   Groarke read secretly: most morbid books. As a boy he had been forcibly steeped in Joyce by his father, later he had read for pleasure Corvo and Saki as well as the erotic literature of the period: Frank Harris, Lawrence and Hemingway. He quoted frequently and accurately from the poetry of Yeats and the early work of T. S. Eliot.

  He rarely discussed what he was reading unless they were drinking together or going for a walk which, once John had started to work seriously again, he had consented to do by daylight.

  They would take a bus out into the hills beyond Kingstown and walk in the Sunday twilight out through the suburbs into the true country. They would discuss the histology and the pathology of carcinoma and the chronic granulomata, textbooks of which they already possessed and read despite the fact that they would not be able to start the scheduled course until the following year. On such occasions Groarke would salt his theories with quotations from The Dubliners or dark lines from Yeats, The Waste Land or the Cantos of Ezra Pound.

  The world would take on a mysterious quality, an unease, a nasty haunting which seemed to have a power of drawing actual events into its progress; so that, when it was over, John could never be quite sure how much of it had been only ideas discussed and how much a reality encountered.

  On one such Sunday when they had decided to walk out to Greystones, Groarke started talking about The Green Child by Herbert Read. He related the story of a man revisiting his childhood home and finding his memory of it confused, the river running backwards and the houses on the wrong side of the street; he went on to describe the narrator’s descent through the surface of a pool into a world of dancers, sages and human crystals. Suddenly he stopped and said, “Lift me up by that wall.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see what’s over it.”

  When John had lifted him he asked, “Well, what did you see?” and Groarke said, “A green baby,” and started to laugh under the tall trees which overhung the road.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “See for yourself,” Groarke had said, lifting him up.