Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  It was true. There was a small boy on the grass in a clearing. He was wearing a little green knitted suit and standing perfectly still in front of the entrance to a dark shippon; before he made any movement at all Groarke let John down again and they went on their walk.

  When they reached Greystones it was dark but they found an hotel open and went into a stone-floored conservatory converted into a bar. There were ferns standing in pots on tall circular stands and water troughs with gold fish swimming through their green weeds. There was only one other person in there, a grey-faced man of about fifty who was well on after several glasses of whiskey. He thought he recognized Groarke and started straight in on talking to them both.

  “If you’re Trinity,” he said, “you’re sure to know my Christopher, my boy. The two’ll you have known him in Trinity and how brilliant he was. Wasn’t Christopher brilliant now? I’ll bet you’ll remember a thing or two he said or did. Wasn’t he a great one for a joke and didn’t he make them sharpen their tongues in the Historical Society when they was debating a good point?”

  John said he did remember him because he had a distinct memory of a young man with red hair who had always worn a green coat and been a leading light in the rival society.

  “And he died in Baggott Street,” the father said. “Three weeks ago. Christopher died in Baggott Street of incipient defective endocarditis. You’d know what that is, being medical; but all I know is it killed Christopher and you know what he said when they called his mother and me in to see him die? Didn’t I say to him, ‘You must pray on the name of Jesus, Christopher, to bring you to health. Jesus’ll not fail you’; and what did Christopher say to that before he died? Didn’t he whisper to his mother and myself, ‘Jesus!’ What are you boys drinking? I’m old tonight, only fit to make a little spittle and wax, with Christopher dead; but I’ll give you a drink. Students don’t have much money, so you two’ll have some of the drinks I was giving to Christopher when he got his honours as he would have got them surely as he whispered to his mother and me, ‘Why, Jesus is with me.’ ”

  They could not shake this man off. He seemed almost to have amused Groarke in some way, certainly he horrified John. They took two drinks off him and then ran out to get a bus back.

  Groarke started talking about Streptococcus viridans and said that he’d never liked Martin in any case and that his father had been a full barrel before ever the strep had bitten the boy. He said, “What’s to be done if for someone to synthesize a chemotherapeutic that will knock that strep as easily as Eckstair’s prontosil knocks the others.” And then he said, “Defective endocarditis. Jesus!” imitating the old man in the bar and they both laughed.

  Walks like this, meetings together when they were not working, gradually aroused in John a fresh fear of Ireland, or if not of Ireland, of Dublin. It reminded him of his early days at the Flynns’, of the Clynche household, of James; it accrued to itself some essence of the atmosphere in Ffynchfort; it stretched a long arm back to the even more remote past: to Yorkshire, the lake, the moors and the murder of Victoria.

  He would gladly, after such an incident, have dropped Groarke had he been able, but he would have been quite incapable of doing so even if Groarke had not been in love with Dymphna and still seeing her from time to time, because Groarke’s ambition, his great greed to success, the brilliance of his talent bent upon the course, drew John as the bright light draws the eye to the mirror of a microscope. To travel with Groarke was to overtake other people; his mind illumined Medicine in a manner which was sympathetic to John’s own thinking but which yet avoided the distractions to which he himself was so prone.

  With Groarke seeing Dymphna the lode was even more magnetic, the bond between them stronger. At times it seemed to John that since he himself had ceased permanently to see her it was unnatural of Groarke to continue to do so. He wondered how, since he and Groarke were so involved with one another, it could be possible for Groarke to continue in the affair at all, at least until it had somewhere been decided that she was permitted to John again. This, of course, was an entirely unreasonable conviction, but it had deep roots in their identification of themselves as more than uneasy friends, the sense they had of standing apart from the rest of the year in their talent, their ambition and their unexpressed but implicit scorn of nearly everyone else they met or knew.

  The fact that from that suppertime onwards they could never directly refer to this matter again gave it a more constant presence in their minds, the power of a betrayal which is always being meditated upon simply because it is always being practised. Yet at the same time it made them seek one another out with more necessity and determination even than before. Each watched the other for the smallest signs of policy: Groarke’s rugger-playing being as swiftly noted by John as were his own social activities by Groarke.

  When Groarke cut a Friday-night session over Anatomy or Histology with John, or when John disappeared for a weekend or a dance with some other set scorned by or financially denied to Groarke, each would wonder on their next meeting where the other had been and what, if any, connection the absence might have had with Dymphna.

  She herself did not leave John alone for long. Increasingly she put herself in his way. He would see her, strangely, coming in through Back Gate when he was returning from a clinic, though she had never previously had occasion to use it. Often she would pass his rooms at lunchtime, the dark head going past the railed grass and her laughter audible, or some small thing she said to the girl she was with. Once she was on the bridge in St. Stephen’s Green leaning against the stone with her sandwiches beside her, lobbing crusts onto the water for the Muscovy ducks. They had a good deep look at one another as he came up over the hump before she turned her back on him, leaning far over the water with her skirt ruckled against the parapet so that he saw her thighs above the hollows behind her knees.

  But she made no more definite move to fetch him back to her glove until the day after the exam results came out at the end of the term. Then, dizzy with his success, honours in all four subjects and a paid demonstratorship in Zoology, he had snatched her letter out of the box in his rooms before Groarke could see it.

  The letter still unread, they had gone to the Wicklow together and drunk Guinness until three o’clock, talking a thousand to the dozen, meeting up with Cloate later, in the Dolphin, who had given them cold tongue, potato salad and whiskey, listened to them, amused, and asked John about his activities in the Philosophical Society.

  He had found no chance of opening the letter, no appropriate circumstance of reading it until he got back to his rooms late in the evening. When it came out of the envelope there were, as usual, drawings all down the margins of the page: girls’ heads, all the same, with dark hair, drooping lashes and parted inky lips, telephone numbers and horses jumping gates. It did not say very much more than usual, either, until the last paragraph, where the lines slanted more steeply and illegibly up the reverse of the sheet. It said, “Congratulations on the exam. Why’ve you been so sombong lately (a Malayan expression of her cousin Emma’s)? Just work or have you taken a skunner against us all?” She’d never say anything so direct as “against me.”

  Then there was more about herself, “as shallow-brained as usual. Just as selfish: skimming the froth off life and not bothering to be deep” and “aren’t you getting a name for yourself, every issue of the Miscellany has something catty in it about you or what you’ve said.” Here there were three horses jumping gates and then the last paragraph.

  “Don’t honestly think I like not seeing you. Feeling very sad tonight because you never come up here and it’s not the same just to hear about you or see you looking pale when you go past me never even smiling. All the different girls you’re with: why must you?

  “Dymphna.”

  He did not see her that night because Palgrave, almost as though he had scented his good humour—a return of tolerance, brightness—had come in and taken him round to the Club. There they had met various influential
members on the election committee before whom John’s behaviour had been impeccable. The Marquis of Hattery had cracked a dozen jokes about the Catholic priesthood and the Pope; Jack Verulam told some anecdotes about the bloodstock sales and John described his flight with Greenbloom so graphically that even General Marriott switched on his deaf aid. When he reached the absurd anticlimax of having landed in The Curragh, under the impression they were thirty kilometres from Paris, he had the company by their ganglia.

  As gale-driven spume sweeps flotsam into high places, the laughter swept him into the high esteem which had hitherto been nearly inaccessible despite his discretion on previous occasions. He saw these sagacious, perennially bored senators glancing at one another with approval, and heard the General approaching Palgrave in the club lavatory about “putting that young fellow up.” “Got any family, d’you know?”

  And of course Palgrave from his own point of view could not advantageously say “no,” or “some,” so before the evening ended it was arranged that John’s name should be put in the ballot book for the New Year election, when, provided no one objected to the admission of a medical student, the first in the history of the club, his membership was assured.

  Palgrave spent the night there but John returned to his rooms and, although it was very late, packed his bags ready for the return home to Anglesey on the day following.

  In the morning he telephoned Dymphna at the flat and when she told him she was willing to stay in Dublin for the day, delayed his departure for a further twenty-four hours.

  They lunched in the Country Shop in Stephen’s Green and ate steak and kidney pudding and the extra-special potato cakes spread with creamery butter. Then they took the tram which runs alongside the road in its own railed-off track to Howth Head and hired a boat to row across to Ireland’s Eye.

  There was a good wind blowing seeding spray from the hummocks of green water. This salt fusillade splashed Dymphna’s hair, which blew out short and framed her face until the hairline was revealed as a black pointed widow’s cap. He found it hard to row for the sight of her sprawling there in the stern, in one of Wilfred Broyle’s sweaters, taking it all in as a bird of the sea rides gales and waves; cold of feather, hot of heart, never involved; but fishing or calling, diving, swallowing or swimming from moment to moment from the instant of its birth to its solitary death.

  She shouted things to him; though he could not hear them he knew that they were facetious and that she was happy. He sensed most clearly that momentarily he was resolving for her the dilemma which unconsciously drove her, the search for the simplicity on which she could depend and the vitality which could praise her. He thought, I should be smoking a pipe, too, and square my jaw a little. It’s a pity my arms aren’t thicker and that if it weren’t for the rowing I should be shivering with cold. He also thought that she must have done this dozens of times with the others and been bored stiff at the end of it. I at least can think and talk. She may know that I see her more beautiful than ever they could and can convey it.

  When they reached the sand of the island’s eastern beach they waded out and drew up the boat in the freezing water. The island rose from sand through small dunes to a high hill beyond which was shallow cliff traversed by a steep path. They went down this into the raging sunlight of early evening. The water beneath them was opaque with cold and blueness, rays caught its ripples like flames and the seaweed hung like grottoes of serpents from the hard grey rock.

  Dymphna said, “We’ll swim in this. Last bathe of summer.”

  “It’s December.”

  “First bathe of next, then.”

  They took off their clothes a few yards apart and she ran in off the tiny bouldered beach. But he dived from a rock without daring to look at her from some memory of Victoria and the lake. Dymphna was a woman, not a girl; it was not the mystery of her in this sense which prevented him, it was not because she would have minded, for he knew that she wanted him to do so. It was because of his desire which, like a starving leopard fastened within reach of satisfaction, may throttle itself in its attempt to get free. If once I look in this, he thought, see the water clothing her legs, creeping up, flaring like wings from her shoulders when she runs forward, the flames of this winter sun falling from her wrists and arms, I’ll remember it as I remember Victoria. But it will be worse now because I know what it is to be dry in the mouth, to ache physically, to find everything but the thought of possessing her drier than a tomb.

  So they swam quickly together and he saw nothing but a body distorted into pale flatnesses as blue as plaice bellies, legs foreshortened and jointless in the trick of the reflection as they found their depth again and ran to their clothes. He dried her back with his vest and chafed her feet with his hands as the sun went down and frigid indigo shadows crept forward from each spicule of grass over the sand dunes. Then they ran round the island and lay down in a hollow, kissing the salt in one another’s lips and cheeks until their shivering sent them back across the tide race to the village.

  They ate brown buttered bread in Mooney’s Bar with a dozen oysters and a pint of porter each, then they trammed back to Fitzwilliam Square to make coffee in the flat.

  He said, “In four years I’ll be qualified. We could be engaged in a year or so. We could even marry before I qualified.”

  “It’s far too soon,” she said as always. “Heavens, you’re only twenty-two and I’m only nineteen.”

  “It’s quite old enough if we love one another. I’d do even better if I was married. I’ll work like a black with Groarke.” And he wished he hadn’t mentioned him.

  “Mike wants me to marry him, too,” she said.

  “Would you?”

  “I’m marrying no one yet,” she said, “I’ve only just started.”

  “Started what?”

  “Everything. My course, life, being young and yet out of eternal control. You’re all so serious, all of you, all wanting to get married all the time. Mummy and Daddy didn’t get married until they were nearly thirty. They’d both lots of affairs, they knew what they were doing.”

  “Are they happy?”

  “Of course not. Who is after twenty years of it? It’s all the more reason for putting it off.”

  “But I want to marry you, desperately. Dymphna, I’ll make a wonderful life for us both. We’d always have enough money and we’ll both get more one day. I’d live anywhere you wanted, Ireland or England; a doctor can always earn a living.”

  “How dreadful it all sounds—like a magazine story. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone earning their living for me. If I married at all I’d want someone with it already earned, a vet, say, with a colossal country practice or someone with an estate, here or abroad.”

  “Like Collins, I suppose.”

  “He’s not serious and anyway he’s not in love with me. He’s got dozens, thank goodness.”

  “If you loved him you’d want to marry him.”

  “I wouldn’t fall in love with Collins,” she said, teasing him by use of the surname.

  “What about me?” he said, hearing the familiar pulse in his ears as he waited. “Your letter,” he went on in order to stop himself trembling. “You said you missed me a lot.”

  “So I did.”

  “Well, d’you love me then?” God, what a silly question when what he meant was, Do you ever see me as I saw you today, as I always see you. Like a precious vase, a spirit between heaven and earth, a body sweeter than opium and movements like music, a face which, however you’re looking, falls into a beauty as astonishing as beauty.

  “How would I know?” she said. “Aren’t you a dreary old thing—asking, asking, asking.”

  “But you must know. If you miss people, that can be love. If you keep wanting to be with them. If you enjoy oysters and kisses with them, if you get dreadfully bored when they don’t come. If you like their dancing, smiling, talking, thinking of you, returning to find you. All that can be love. You must know.”

  “Can I help it if I do
n’t?”

  “Well, d’you feel any of these things for me?”

  “Some of them, sometimes.”

  “And the others, too?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Which one most?”

  “Oh,” she said sitting down on the divan, lolling back on it, “you’re all tremendous. I think I love you all. Wasn’t it grand today, the spray and swim? Those luscious oysters.”

  He was watching her.

  “Don’t be sombong,” she said. “Why d’you think all the time? Mario doesn’t, nor Bill Collins, but you and Mike, you’re terrible thinkers.”

  He pushed her back and lay beside her. The dreadful, repetitive, inconclusive, pattern of their love-making began again. The gas fire popped and hissed, the clock ticked on. They grew pale and wet, breathless and exhausted, as they had done so many times before.

  John thought, Why don’t I spend the night and have done with it? Someone else will sooner or later. Perhaps if I take her she will love me, perhaps women never respect a virgin as I am. But she seemed to know his thoughts; a sudden physical prudence crept into her, quiet laughter at the very moment of his decision overcoming his resolve before it became final. They went arm in arm down the stairs.

  She only said, “Write to me and don’t be gloomy again next term. You can’t blame me for wanting to be young while I am young, can you? Mummy says not to waste a minute of it.”

  If the others can do it, I can too, John told himself. She’s not a person to talk to. There’s nothing there yet. I may want to marry her because I never want anyone else to have someone whom only I can fully appreciate. I will never tire of her. It’s not a question of having her for life, it’s a question of having life for her. But if I’ve got to play this dreadful game with all the others until I can get her, I’ll play it until the end.

  The next day he took the Holyhead mail boat and, arriving in Holyhead, found nobody waiting to meet him despite his earlier telegram. He rang up from the station hotel and Nanny answered. She sounded very flustered.