Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  He was aware at this time that the laughter of people had become less tolerant because of his failure thus far to hit back at Cosby at all. He sensed that he had crossed the boundary of the comical into that of the farco-tragical. His nose was bleeding freely, Biceps was shouting through the mocking laughter while Cosby was closing in with ever greater confidence. He was quite unable to hurt John any more; punches to the head and face, hooks to his ribs and midriff had formed a kind of numbed carapace against which subsequent coups seemed to fall harmlessly at some little distance.

  Cosby was really a very ridiculous person with his contained life, his absurd novel and his transcendent philosophy which, the moment he gained an unaccustomed advantage of the most vulgar kind, he discarded as a beggar blows away snot. But how humiliating for Cosby that although at last, and perhaps uniquely, he had been experiencing a demonstrable superiority, he was quite unable to conclude it.

  John covered up in green corner and Cosby came in even closer. Over his gloves, John said to him, “Om mane padme hum.” Cosby jabbed a left to his eye and John repeated the thanka, “Om mane padme hum.” Cosby hesitated a moment and then hit him with his right glove very low on the bleeding lip. John lisped out, “Oh the jewel in the lotus flower—om mane padme hum.”

  Biceps shouted, “No talking in the ring, gentlemen. No talking now, box on.”

  “I am your chela,” John said, “you are my guru.”

  “Be quiet!”

  “Your chela is about to knock out his guru,” John said.

  When he had said this he saw someone reaching for the towel to throw it in. He was for the first time fully aware of the laughter and the cat-calls. He felt immensely strong; unassailable as a fool, indestructible as a sage. All the blows he had received, the taste of his split lip, his blood-fogged eye, were immediate physiological insults which he would irresistibly avenge. Somewhere behind the sense of outrage which became him like a drug he discovered an almost murderous contempt of his love for Dymphna. He was no longer in the least interested in Cosby or anything about him. Cosby was a midge or fly that had settled for too long on a sensitive part at an inopportune moment; the representative of the entire species which buzzed, bit, swarmed, pinged and crawled over and contaminated the human situation.

  He went for Cosby’s body with both his gloves. Cosby retreated and counter-attacked with determination; but John stormed through his punches, closed with him and renewed short sharp jabs to the front of his chest and the space between the costal margins. Suddenly Cosby doubled up to sidestep and gain a moment of time to take his breath. John saw the fall of his head and brought up the right uppercut he had practised so often on the punch bag. His gloved fist registered no impact at all, but suddenly Cosby was there no longer; instead there was a reduced replica of him slumped in a crouching position, quite unconscious on the canvas floor.…

  And that was all that happened. It was, after all, so small a victory that at the time no one took much notice of it. When the competition was over he went out for drinks with Jack Kerruish and the others and got a little drunk but not so bad that they had to put him to bed.

  But the remaining fortnight of that term several things, not unconnected with the boxing, did happen. For instance, one evening at about six o’clock, Kerruish arrived at his rooms with several other members of the Boxing Club. They were facetious a little, or they were not; they were affectionate, seemed about to laugh, to be verging on amusement and from the outset a little ill at ease. They were probably contrite, Kerruish certainly was embarrassed in a huge way and it became him. Kerruish, unsure of his position, clapping John on the back, nursing his joke adjacent to his discomfort, unsure whether he was adding insult to grievance, was a most attractive being.

  “What’s to be told him,” he said to the others, “is to be told him in the Wicklow and no other place, am I right?”

  Everyone agreed that he was, so they went off to the Wicklow and filled him a pint of porter.

  “You’ve to drink it with us,” Kerruish said, “without drawing breath, mind.”

  Then these large fellows, Condor, Halaghan, Malcolm and the rest shouldered round him, joking and laughing, drawing patterns with their shoes in the sawdust on the floor of the bar and talking Gaelic to the farmers who had come in from the cattle sales.

  Kerruish said, “There’s this for you and this,” and handed him a cardboard box and a paper bag. “You’ve to open the box first.”

  Inside it there was a small silver cup just big enough to take a hen’s egg.

  “That’s not so much for the fight as for the training, though we all say that the uppercut you gave the poor devil was a sizzler. God, didn’t that come up from the floor like a Holy Soul from Purgatory? Look at it now, there’s your name on it, the year and Novices Competition, Welterweight.”

  In the paper bag was a Knight of the Campanile tie.

  “And that’s not the best of it,” said Kerruish. “It was paid for by Dymphna when we told Broyle, who told her, that you were elected to the Knights, so maybe after all you’ll be wanting to thank her.”

  “He should put it on,” Condor suggested, “and we should wet it with another porter.”

  “Well I’ll stand them,” said John, “and thanks very much.”

  “We only want to know what it was you said to Cosby before you fetched up that jaw-jerker of yours?”

  “I’ll tell you,” said John, talking very fast and persuasively. “Cosby writes books. He sits down at seven forty-five every night after he’s eaten a tomato and drunk some orange juice and he clears the table and then he does his exercises—Buddhist exercises. You have to think of absolutely nothing to do these exercises and that means you have to practise and be damned careful what you eat. You might find you’re unable to think of nothing, that however hard you try you’re always thinking of something, so Cosby thinks of a turnip.”

  “A turnip?” asked Condor.

  “A complete turnip. First of all he thinks of the leaves, then he thinks of the turnip itself and lastly he thinks of the roots. Then he stops thinking of the leaves and the roots until he’s left with the turnip as clean as a tennis ball. When he’s got this completely in his mind as a perfect unity, and he’s concentrating on it so hard that there’s absolutely nothing in his head but the globe of the turnip, he suddenly takes that away and there’s nothing left; he’s successfully thinking of nothing.”

  There was a moment’s silence and then Kerruish said, “Why doesn’t he start wid the tennis ball?”

  “You’d have to ask him. It’s probably a question of discipline.”

  “Supposing,” Condor reflected, “you were to start with a woman instead, gradually taking a little piece of her away at a time in your mind until you was left just with—”

  “No good,” said John. “You see Cosby doesn’t happen to like turnip. He has no feelings about them at all.”

  “You big dolt,” said Kerruish to Condor, “thinking you could start with a woman and end up thinking of nothing.”

  “Whatever you started with, Jack, whether it was a tennis ball or lamp standard you’d end up thinking about—”

  “But what’s this he told Cosby in the second round?”

  “He hasn’t told us yet.”

  “What I want to know is why a man should start training himself to think of nothing when there’s so much else to be thinking about.”

  “It’s a Buddhist. He’s part of a Buddhist.”

  John left them there with the farmers joining in; some of them, being Catholics, suggesting that it was a form of meditation analogous to the exercises of the Jesuits. As he had intended, nobody saw him leave.

  When he got back to his rooms he put the cup on the mantelpiece and tried on the tie in front of the bedroom mirror. It looked unconvincing but the fact that Dymphna had bought it for him gave it a most potent significance. He knew that he would never wear it, never throw it away, never see it if he could avoid it. He slid it back into the bag in
which it had been wrapped, collected the cup from the sitting room mantelpiece and put them both in his suitcase under the truckle bed.

  A few days later there was a Dymphna letter in his box.

  Surely you’re not going to go on being sombong for the rest of the term? Not even coming to say goodbye or thank you for the Campanile? Nobody who mattered laughed at you at all at the fight. Fergus Cloate said

  This was ineffectively crossed out and a fresh sentence began.

  I hate to lose people, my friends, I can’t bear them just to stop. You’ll say that’s me again, but I can’t help being me, can I? You ought to be sorry for me if you are. Not just ignoring and going past and never to the usual places. I scarcely even see you since the fight. I’m sad.

  Then her name scrawled and a picture of a girl’s head.

  He hesitated about this letter. It was not a new factor at all; he had received many such and always quite soon after reading them he had telephoned her, or replied at great length, then torn up the reply and answered most briefly without using a single endearment. Sometimes in this way he had written eleven or twelve replies and destroyed them all, telephoning instead, or, better still, going off to her rooms to see her, take her out, reproach or forgive her, make love to her, act out some new attitude, pursue some different characterization of himself: silence, mystery, merriment, nonchalance, insouciance, passion, angriness; any visualized self-projection of a role that might intrigue or mystify her, make her grow fond and bring her to his hand forever.

  But this time he did nothing. The term was very nearly at an end, in four or five days he would be on his way to Anglesey and from there to David’s Vicarage at Maidenford for a time that would be sufficiently beguiling to make continued, total and, for her, bewildering restraint possible until the following term.

  He looked no further ahead than that, because he knew that then a new phase in their relationship must begin. He hoped only that some change would have occurred within himself which would make it possible for him to make no further mistakes; for secretly, most profoundly, he was convinced that it was only a change in himself which was required and not in Dymphna. This was perhaps a very extraordinary conviction to hold since he despised nearly everything that she did or said, read, believed, laughed about and presumably, therefore, thought. He never attempted to explain to himself why or how, simultaneously with his scorn, he was unable to hear her laugh, see her reading a book or venturing an opinion without a turn of his heart so excruciatingly sweet that he instantly approved the cause of her merriment, the substance of the book she was reading or the opinion she held, temporarily even accepting it himself.

  In Grafton Street that day he met Theresa for the first time in nearly two years. She was very smartly dressed, thinner and wearing more make-up. She had put her hair up and on its soft summit was wearing a tiny hat with a pheasant’s feather on the crown. He certainly did not recognize her and, taking her in swiftly as he always did take in any pretty girl he ever saw, would have passed her had she not spoken to him.

  He asked her to have lunch with him there and then in the Country Shop at the table he usually shared with Dymphna. She told him that she was on leave from an English Hospital following an appendectomy. She said, “I wondered if I might see you, this time.”

  “How long have you been nursing in England?”

  “Oh, nearly two years.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “I’ve grown up,” she said, “wasn’t I naïve in the old days—do you remember?”

  She asked him how far on he was with the course and he told her.

  “Only another two years,” she said, “and you’ll be doing house jobs. We do have fun with the housemen at the Royal, you’d never believe the tricks they get up to. When I was on nights last November Jack Sunderland, he’s Mr. Harrison’s registrar, and another doctor caught me at six in the morning just as I was coming off duty. They gagged me with some tulle gras and tied me up with a many-tailed bandage and carried me off to their bedroom over in the Admin Block. I kicked and screamed but I couldn’t make a sound. Then just as they were taking me past the office, Night Sister appeared round the corner and they slipped me into cloaks and went off with her for over half an hour pretending they were on their way to a pulmonary oedema in Medical.”

  She went on like this all through lunch; hospital patter streaming out like milk from a little cow. She described the Christmas Dance and the New Year’s Dance and the many social amenities of Bradford, the taste of Green Goddess cocktails, Pilsener lager, gypsy champagne. She smoked two cigarettes and made up her face three time in an hour, hinted at the daring customs of housemen when they were called to the Nurses’ Home to visit sick nurses.

  When their knees touched under the table, instead of instantly withdrawing her own, she pressed it as closely as Dymphna would have done. While he was paying the bill she slipped off to the Ladies’ with a smile whereas before she had always been coldly self-effacing about such absences.

  He took her to the pictures and she bought him a packet of cigarettes. In the cinema she held his hand enthusiastically, responding to every pressure. Soon he was kissing her ardently, tasting her cyclamen lipstick, French Fern face powder and the delicate chemist’s scent which seemed to have impregnated the soft skin of her neck. By the time the programme was over they were both moist and a little embarrassed.

  Theresa laughed and propped off on her high heels to “repair the damage” and John went to the Gentlemen’s to dip his head in a basin of cold water and remove the lipstick on the paper towels.

  They had tea together in the Regal Tea Rooms and he invited her to have dinner with him in the Ranelagh Club that evening. She only just kept her balance at this invitation; he saw with delight that it had taken all her two years of Green Goddesses and hospital “finishing” for her to sound matter-of-fact in her acceptance, and when later he was seeing her onto her tram he noted with a sense of poignancy that she was not very used to the high heels either.

  Before dinner in the ladies’ side of the club he studied her with pleasure.

  Without the hat her hair style was absurdly wrong. The little bolero she was wearing was cut like that of a cinema usherette, every line and stitch of her dress proclaiming her social origin. Her evening shoes were disquietingly tall in the heel, she could not walk in them without a pronounced wobble. Her evening bag looked as though it had been unsuccessfully cleaned after a night in a fish and chip shop, her glass jewellery was grotesque, her make-up so misguided that instead of looking like a chorus girl, then the fashion, she looked only like a young nurse off duty.

  He gave her sherry in the ladies’ drawing-room, seating her on the most central sofa facing the sunburst clock above the Adam fireplace, timing their arrival just prior to the busiest hour of the evening.

  After two glasses of Amontillado her Dublin accent with its nasally contorted vowels was merging distinctively with the clipped consonants of hospital-Cheshire and she was talking away more loudly than anyone else in the room, laughing immoderately and flashing him ill-bred glances of sexual complicity. The club servants maintained a frigid courtesy every time he summoned them. Their own Dublin accents, long attenuated by mixing with the aristocracy of the United Kingdom metamorphosed completely into the vocables of the B.B.C. and vintage Oxford.

  Other members and their guests, prepared, as he well knew, to pass an hour or more with their cigarettes and drinks before going in to dine, left much sooner than usual. Two elderly men, who normally ignored one another, moved as by outraged consent to the “Periodical” table and consulted sotto voce with no glance in his direction. Their mime of pretending to select magazines and weeklies from those spread out before them amused him. He watched them move closer together like grey-haired schoolboys under surveillance and noted that they forbore to turn their heads as they addressed one another for fear it should be obvious that they were communicating. He tried hard but unsuccessfully to overhear their remarks. When they
eventually returned to their wives, one passing behind the sofa, one in front, he was rewarded by catching the fury of the glances they gave him and returned them blankly; not with innocence, nor with contempt or contrition, but simply with the colourlessness they themselves reserved, most of the time, for their servants.

  At dinner he himself drank most of the half-bottle of wine he had ordered to accompany the pheasant, to ensure that Theresa remained in her state of refined intoxication without either surfacing into cold sobriety or on the other hand subsiding into young girl’s drunkenness.

  He had no idea what to do with her afterwards. He thought he might take her into Stephen’s Green just before the gates closed and sit with her on the same bench he had chosen two years earlier, within sound of the ducks, and make love to her. He wondered if he might take her out to the Greyhound and then back by inebriate taxi, or even go with her to the house in Cork Street and brazen it out with James, Kevin and the rest of them. Then, he knew that her home was out of the question because one does not commit murder in public. For he saw very clearly the nature of his intention. He certainly did not think that it was wrong to obtain for himself the redress of her pain, and would, had he been sufficiently patient and interested, have prolonged the deception he had prepared so that, when at last he rejected her, she should suffer all the more sharply.

  As it was, drinking his coffee with her in the drawing-room, spinning out the time, caring not a damn for the glances and whispered comments of the smart women and thudding grey men, he suddenly lost the last of his interest in the whole project.

  How she talked; how gay she was. Her lips, once so desirable, curled at him but he saw only the mouth of her mother; her eyes beneath the still-placid brow were shy and bold, the boldness being an even greater mark of her innocence than the demureness. He smiled back, allowing his own gaze to dwell on her as on Dymphna; but he saw only old Clynche’s eyes, her father’s, and the feminine version of her brother James’ hatchet cheeks.