Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  “Groarke,” he said, “has never been out of Ireland. He’s a dangerous man for you to be mixing with, a favour-seeker who uses any and everybody as he used Cloate and yourself; but the moment it suits him he’d knock you like a poacher knocking off a rabbit.”

  John agreed with all this effusively; but he wished Lynch would go. He did not like his pale face and refrangent blue eyes. When he talked he talked too quietly and through too much saliva; he sweated continuously and his incoherence begot a strange unease, a desperation quite different from that of Groarke because it seemed to stem from a loneliness which was protesting whereas Groarke’s was selected and even cultivated.

  John thought, He’s the sort of man you keep on meeting without ever wanting to get to know him. He’s clever, of course, and it’s good to have interested him so much, but I don’t really care a damn what he thinks about anything else, and by this he meant, anything else but my writing.

  When they said goodnight Lynch told him that he and the final year would be at the meeting in force. He said, “We’re going to slaughter the Bethelgert gang in the discussion.”

  At the Bi the applause started almost immediately when John reached the description of the porter clanging the gong for the arrival of Gill. From that moment onwards the unusually large audience, swelled by members of the Phil and a number of medical guests from Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square, kept quiet as the picture of the hospital was slowly filled in for them.

  After the delight of his initial nervousness, sharp as that of a gambler who has staked too much, John experienced the even sweeter sensation of certainty in the validity of what he was relating. A steel tightrope seemed to stretch between himself and the composite of his hearers. He knew precisely at which moment he would hear the sounds of protest from the Bethelgert section, at which the relief of laughter from everyone.

  During part of the reading great vanities lifted him up like successive waves. He saw not only his childhood justified and the pain he had suffered in the loss of Victoria; he also remembered his solitariness at the Abbey, the distaste of Beowulf’s and the recurrent doubts of the family in his ability ever to overcome his eccentricity and backwardness. Against these he set the memory of Greenbloom’s confidence in him and his continued interest. He thought, I am, after all, more than a match for the world. I am succeeding in everything I undertake. I have flowered late into something more than a student, more than a writer: a leader.

  As he reached the end, the enumeration of the remedies he proposed, he was anticipating in his mind the new standing the paper would give him with the medical faculty, the certainty that his increased reputation would tilt the scales of Dymphna’s estimation of him so that she would, after all, find that she loved him.

  When he sat down to hear out the subsequent discussion, he was quite beyond appreciating the tone of it. He remembered only that Bethelgert had protested that his paper had been an attack, gross and distorted, on the very foundation of the hospital system, that it had been unbalanced since it took no account of the excellence and goodness of the motives underlying the services so continually dispensed.

  When old Jameson, the President, asked him to reply to the debate, this was the one point which John made. He said it was as foolish to question the good intentions of medical ethic in hospitals as it was to doubt the good intentions of Christianity; but the real question was whether or not the good intentions were adequately fulfilled in practice.

  At this there was a roar from Lynch’s group in which nearly everyone joined in at the expense of the Bethelgert brothers, who were Orthodox Jews. Realizing his mistake in choosing such a metaphor John was about to apologize when he saw that to do so would only make matters worse, so he sat down quickly, deciding that he would apologize to Bethelgert privately at the first opportunity. But in the middle of the uproar both Bethelgert and his brother, together with Schribman, Shrago and half a dozen other Finals students got up and left the meeting without waiting for the refreshments which were to be served at the end.

  It did not, at the time, seem to matter very much. As Lynch said loudly and repeatedly, “They came here to bring you down and you were too much for them. My God, when you hipped old Bethelgert on being a Jew without ever mentioning it, I could have—and that sweet bit about the gold medallist who ends up practising euthanasia for his failures on the side. They’ll all be licking their wounds tonight.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be entirely personal,” John said.

  “Now come on,” they said, “it stuck out a mile. You hit them off to the very life. Those descriptions of Cloate, Gibson, of old Stafford Harman himself with his, ‘I diagnosed it on the telephone’ in a ‘luetic falsetto’! Did you know he’d had the tabes in nineteen eighteen or was it an inspired guess?”

  “Standing joke,” John said, “but that’s not the point. What I was really getting at—”

  Groarke cut in suddenly and said, “Higher thoughts’ll often land you in the—”

  “Pure entertainment,” said someone else, “All that cock about hospitals in a green belt was only padding now, wasn’t it? And of course utterly impractical. It’d be fine to have yourself wheeled out ten miles to the Curragh with a splenic haemorrhage following a motor smash in Grafton Street.”

  “I explained,” said John with a little heat, “that there would be urban emergency centres in the towns, each one connected with, or under the patronage of, a particular hospital.”

  “Oh go on! What bullshit! Who’d staff them? Bethelgert and Schribman, I suppose, or other refujews from Germany? No, no, it was damned good fun. It ought to have the medal, but of course it won’t.”

  “Why not?” asked someone.

  “With Bethelgert’s old man belonging to the same lodge as Stafford Harman and Freddie Gibson? Don’t be damn silly.”

  A friend of Lynch’s elbowed his way into the group. “Who’s got it?” he asked, “I want to borrow it. I’m going to see it gets well written up in the Miscellany.”

  “No,” John said, “I’d rather—”

  But it was snatched from beneath his arm and was passed round from hand to hand as extracts were re-read aloud. A sudden fatigue overcoming him, a misgiving as uncertain as the premonitory twinge of a decaying tooth, John made no further protest. Ducking out of the loud circle he called Groarke and they went back to his rooms.

  “What did you think, Mike?”

  “It was all I expected and more.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Clever,” said Groarke, “but you know that already. Why d’you have to keep on proving it—so loudly?”

  “It was only a joke.”

  “Not that. It was more than a joke, and it wasn’t funny enough.”

  “But they loved it.”

  “It wasn’t serious enough, either,” said Groarke. “It was that nasty thing somewhere in between a dwarf and an acromegalic—the sort of freak people don’t care to see on the street—”

  “You mean you think it’s going to cause trouble?”

  “—not in their houses, certainly; not in their hospitals.”

  “I went too far?”

  “You went so far that I doubt if you’ll ever come back. Jameson got hold of me just before we left. He’s fond of you, he liked our work in the Anatomy department, he asked me why on earth I’d let you read it. He said, ‘I’m a Scot, an old one; if I was a not-so-old Irishman, with the memory of an Irishman, I might take that very badly! Tell your friend Blaydon not to let that paper out of his hands.’ ”

  “But I have already,” said John. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “Then get it back,” said Groarke as they parted outside John’s door.

  The next morning there was a letter from Father. It read in part:

  About your prosed paper, thesis, essay to the University Biological Association (unless by the abbreviation “Bi” you mean the Biochemical Society), presumably also a student body (verb sap.), I would be very careful
in the choice of terms you employ if, as you suggest, you intend or are “determined to take the mickey out of the staff in a lightly facetious way.”

  In this context, as I may once have told you, when I was “up” for a living at my old College (Corpus Christi), in 1922 and was invited to dine at the Fellow’s table (prior to my interview with the President), on Corpus Christi Sunday, I innocently asked my neighbour if in view of the Feast it was to be a special dinner. The Fellow who in this instance had no cause to like me (since I beat him to an alpha plus in History in ’96), whispered my question behind his hand to his neighbour, “He asks if this to be a special dinner”? and so it went on all round the table to the President himself who professed to think I had intended the Foundation an insult. I did not secure the preferment! The moral undoubtedly being, never give your enemies a handle which they may use against you! Beware!

  But despite this, and despite the night’s misgivings, John was sanguine in the bright sunshine which overlay his walk to Mungo Park that morning. What matters, he thought, is the fact that I made the paper. I’ll get it back at lunchtime, and put it away in a drawer somewhere. I’ll write something better than that next time, probably something technical, I can find the words for anything and I’m always original, so nothing really matters. I’ve proved myself now to the Medical School and the hospitals as well as to the Arts side. I’ve only to do reasonably well in the boxing at the end of the term and I’ll get Dymphna. Groarke is jealous, of course; he realizes that I have a talent extra which he can never hope to possess himself. As for the staff: what little they hear they’ll soon forget.

  From this he went on to feel annoyed that neither Gibson, Cloate, Harman nor Macdonald Browne would ever read the paper themselves. With their identities so firmly established as surgeons, obstetricians and physicians they could afford to be magnanimous and it would be pleasant to know that they had seen with their own eyes the portrait made of them by an apparently insignificant student. There would be an element of comedy, a little flash of human warmth, between the observer and the observed when next one of them threw him a question during a clinic or lecture.

  Everyone, John was convinced, liked to feel that he was an object of special interest to someone else, a character with defects, perhaps, but nicely, even warmly appreciated just the same. As for Bethelgert and his friends, they could do little harm; it would be good for them to know that their pomposity and time-serving, their sedulous cultivation of the men in power was narrowly watched and that the general distaste for it was now so vocal that a rival, less privileged group, had united against them. When it came to the allotment of house jobs after qualification, the plums need no longer go always into the same laps. There would have to be a little more subtlety too in the distribution of student residencies, the crack surgeons not necessarily seizing the sons of the most socially influential fathers with the richest private practices.

  Persuading himself in this way, it was not long before John decided it would do no harm for the paper to circulate a little longer. It had not been fully appreciated by the Bi itself; no one, with the exception of Lynch and Groarke, had apparently detected its profound undertones. Anyone mature, reading it, would sense this other level immediately. If, for instance, Hansom were to read it, Hansom, the secretary of the hospital and the regius Professor of Medicine, he might conceivably bear some of its more cogent points in mind at the next board meeting. He might even incorporate a minute or two about serving cups of tea to the out-patients during their three hours’ attendance, or, better still, institute an appointments system so that they were not kept waiting so long. He might go so far as to bring the point about the slums to the notice of the Medical Officer of Health who in turn might raise the issue in the Dail.

  John thought warmly of Hansom: his stammer, his sadly large collars and skilled purple hands. Perhaps Hansom had polycythaemia or something worse; perhaps that voluminous clinical memory, that capacity for an exact swoop upon a difficult diagnosis, that greatness of compassion, were all housed in a body as delicate as the personality was shy. If Hansom were to see the paper he would realize at once that, despite the callowness of its portraiture, it had been conceived by an ally with a mind as flexible as his own. He might even appoint John as his own resident when the time came next term. That would be a blow to the Bethelgert group; though of course, John, in the event, would probably back out of it on some pretext so as to uphold his own incorruptible principles.

  But really, he decided for the last time, none of this mattered at all, it was simply a beguiling fantasy. What did matter was that he would inevitably gain ground with Dymphna and that in the future, for all time, he would know that he was gifted with an accurate power of expression.

  As it happened the paper was not returned to him until a week later when Montgomery, one of the more unpleasant of the hospital toadies, came into his rooms with it.

  “How did you get hold of it?” John asked him.

  “It was given to me by Hansom yesterday. He asked me to return it to the writer.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why not say so?”

  Montgomery smiled. “I used the words Hansom used. He did not say ‘Blaydon,’ he said, ‘the writer.’ ”

  “What did he think of it?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Did anyone else read it?”

  “The staff.”

  “Did they make any comment?” John was leafing through the crumpled pages. “Good God! Someone’s been underlining with a pencil.”

  “That would probably be Macdonald Browne or Cloate or Gibson.”

  “Didn’t any of them say anything?”

  “How should I know?”

  “You brought it back. Presumably, as usual, you were in the staff room, so presumably you should know.”

  “Perhaps I do.”

  “Well then, for God’s sake! Were they amused, annoyed or what?”

  “I think you’ll probably find out yourself, at a later date.”

  “B—” said John. “Look! Would you mind getting out? I don’t know how you came into this, I never lent the paper to you, nor did I say that it was to go the rounds at Mungo Park’s. It’s old history now; but it still belongs to me; I wrote it and I own it. If I could remember who took it from me, or find out who gave it to you, I’d probably sock him, but since I can’t, I might decided to sock you instead, so you’d better go.”

  “At our age,” Montgomery said, “problems are not solved by athletic pretensions. Yours certainly won’t be; if I’m not mistaken about the feeling at Mungo Park’s.”

  “Oh, get out.”

  “With pleasure!”

  “You’re only half alive, Montgomery. I’ll tell you your fortune: you’ll graduate from Burton’s to Tyson’s for your shirts, you’ll exchange a little short-arsed car for a long-arsed car. Provided Hitler doesn’t march into Czechoslovakia and start a European war, you’ll move in from Dundrum to Merrion Square when you’re appointed junior physician at Baggott Street in nineteen forty-one. You’ll cure three hundred people and kill half a dozen, and make no difference one way or the other to the remaining ten thousand who’ve consulted you. You’ll marry that ghastly nurse with the blackheads and the Switzers’ accent, have two children and thirteen hundred contraceptives and take out three insurance policies totalling seven thousand pounds. You’ll stick to Ontodent for your teeth and ung; hamamelidis for your patients’ piles. When you die of a coronary in nineteen seventy-three you’ll leave a gross estate of twenty-five thousand pounds, a son with spectacles and a Masonic apron. The hymns sung at your funeral will be—”

  But Montgomery had gone and John was late for Kerruish’s practice round in the gymnasium.

  He was really feeling very fit at this time, having kept up his training more or less constantly throughout the term. There was a confidence in his degree of health which, temporarily at least, allowed him to pass unscathed through the aftermath o
f the paper. He began to think there really was something in what Groarke called the muscle staft, the once-odious “corpore sano” of Beowulf’s; it enabled a man to ride the shadows, the unremitting barrage of self-questioning to which the mind was subject. To be oneself, organized, a doer and sayer, rising sharply in the mornings with a growing confidence in one’s ability to hit fast and hard if necessary, was a good escape from pusillanimity into all manner of certainty.

  He really didn’t worry very much about the hospital or the paper at all. Instead he saw a good deal more of Cosby and discussed Buddhism with him.

  Cosby was writing a Buddhist novel. Each evening he would eat a vegetarian supper in his rooms, then clear the table meticulously and get out his manuscript. He would say, “You’ll have to go now—I have sixty-five minutes’ writing to do.”

  “Can’t you put it off? I wanted to discuss a rather peculiar experience I had in bed last night. I was doing the breathing exercises and the meditation when—”

  “One does not put things off,” Cosby said. “There must be a due order in the observances. I have to start in exactly seven minutes.”

  “How do you know you’ll be able to do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Write whatever you’re going to write?”

  “I have my schedule.” He produced a large board covered with foolscap and drawing pins. The foolscap was divided into ruled columns headed:

  DATE. SCENE. CHARACTERIZATION. DIALOGUE. PLOT DEVELOPMENT.

  Under the date of that particular day it read:

  SCENE: Malaya—Kuala Lumpur—jungle—organ music (ice cream incident).

  CHARACTERIZATION: Development of Rupert’s sexual difficulties vis-a-vis Mrs. Spencer (Helena). Husband’s impotence tic (the always wet palms).

  DIALOGUE: E’s quest for meaning, delicate necessity of telling R of F’s inhibitions. (Mem: P to I.)

  PLOT DEVELOPMENT: R’s increasing realization of the poverty of the senses. Her half-consent before final assault on “him.”