Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  If Groarke had been going forward to that interview with Hansom he would have had a drink on the way, an even stiffer one than he had taken that night at Lady Arlington’s.

  Whereas John had diluted a little crême de menthe with a deep splash of mineral water, Groarke had drunk so large a glassful of neat liqueur that John had warned, “You’ll be so drunk you won’t be able to do anything by the time we’re fixed up.”

  “With who?” Groarke asked contemptuously.

  “These women with clothes on.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  Long before he had half emptied his emerald glass, Groarke had retreated into, or perhaps made substantial for himself, his own particular world; the savage reality he preferred to inhabit.

  We’re certainly not together, John had thought, I’ve brought Dublin with me to Paris.

  Groarke went over to Lady Arlington and put his drink on the mantelpiece beside her fat grey arm. He eyed her insolently for a few moments and then said, “What are we waiting for?”

  Lady Arlington gave him a most sagacious glance. It could not be said that she favoured him with it. She said merely, “Un quart d’heure.”

  “That’s too long,” Groarke said in the same cold way.

  The whites of her eyes were as yellow as a sick Negro’s. When you came to look at her cheeks carefully they were neither green nor mauve nor brown, they were like the mixture a child achieves on the lid of its paintbox after half an hour on a rainy afternoon. She had another look at Groarke and smiled.

  “You have the great impatience, n’est-ce pas? But your friend is imperturbable. It is the quiet man who has the greatest appetite.”

  Groarke said nothing and Lady Arlington heaved her corseted body and strapped breasts in a heavy laugh.

  “C’est un mauvais quart d’heure, but it will be worth the waiting. You will find Louise and Genevieve very expressive indeed, messieurs.”

  The last word took in John as well. He said, “I wish to God you’d come and sit down, Mike.”

  Groarke had another drink, he emptied his glass completely and said to Lady Arlington, “So the older they are the more expensive they come?”

  “Comment?”

  “How much, for instance, would it cost to have a very experienced, a hydraulic, diabolical old bag of forty-five to fifty like my Foxrock aunt?”

  She made nothing of this but she did not like his tone and did not mistake the expression of his face. She grew visibly, puffing herself out, giving him one most venomous look, a look which by its very brevity bespoke such authority and power, so malign a knowledge of sons and husbands, that he should have been warned.

  John got up. “We’d better go, Mike.”

  “Sit down.”

  “You’re drunk, remember where we are.”

  Groarke howled at this and through his laughter John shouted, “I mean we’re in a foreign country, you fool. If there’s a row we might end up in jail and the English newspapers. Our tickets expire tomorrow.”

  Groarke moved up closer to Lady Arlington. She took one step backwards.

  Groarke said, “I want you, Madame, you! You’re so ugly that it would be beautiful. You make me sick; I’m dizzy with the sight of you, you’re all the women I ever had nightmares about, you’re a ravishing sow, you’re all Joyce immortalized.”

  Before she could retreat further he got his arm round her, a bear grip, and started plastering her face with kisses and snorting down her neck.

  She bit his nose and grabbed the bell sash. Groarke got his fists beneath her buttocks and trundled her across to the sofa; they fell on it so ponderously that two of its legs collapsed. The purple bell sash, broken off at the ceiling, trailed across the carpet from Lady Arlington’s convulsive hand and Groarke whispered, “Trail! Trail! your fingers in the light.”

  With all his weight on her and one arm round her neck Groarke with the other was pulling up the hem of her skirts to disclose her pale-green thighs.

  John jumped on his back and heaved his head backwards; he was trying to choke him off in the crook of his arm when the door opened and two small but compact Frenchmen came into the room.

  They were very ugly and talked briefly but fast. The stockier one, who proved to be Lady Arlington’s husband, though in point of years he could well have been her son, was very angry indeed. He dragged John off Groarke and stood by while his friend tackled the Irishman, who elbowed himself up on Lady Arlington’s belly to see what was going on and then evidently decided to fight. He punched the Frenchman in the solar plexus and the man sat down by one of the occasional tables almost as though he were profoundly considering the situation and what he would do next. Then he fell from a sitting position onto his back, knocking over the table behind him, and lay there with a blue face. Groarke at once embraced Lady Arlington afresh, chewing at her right ear despite the spiky star-shaped earring she was wearing. Her husband, temporarily transfixed by rage and astonishment, said something in French and Groarke shouted back, “Voyeur!”

  Forgetting John, the Frenchman leapt across to the sofa and, from behind, gripped Groarke briefly round the neck in a curiously delicate manner, and then stood back to await results. Whatever he had done to Groarke’s cervical ganglia in that moment must have been painful for the Irishman rocketed off the sofa and launched a right at the smaller man’s jaw. More quickly than a cat clawing down a fly, his opponent grasped the speeding fist with both his hands, jerked it onwards over his shoulder and simultaneously doubled himself up into a crouching position; he appeared to spill Groarke neatly across his back with the result that his head hit the carpeted floor four feet away.

  The man waited for him to revive sufficiently to want to sit up, assisted him tenderly, then gave him a rabbit punch on the back of the neck and laid him down again. When John saw this he ran over to Lady Arlington’s bureau and seized her marble blotting-roller. He brought it down on top of the Frenchman’s head.

  For a moment, apart from the heavy breathing of four of its occupants, there was complete silence in the room. Then the maid came in and shrieked. Lady Arlington sat up and started shouting, the maid disappeared and came back with the concierge, a bottle of smelling salts, a taper and some feathers, the concierge hissed and came back with a bottle of scarlet liquid and five of the girls in ballet skirts. They crowded, chattering and exclaiming, into the room, behaving tragically, saying “Merde!” “Mon Dieu!” and “Ma foi!” They clustered round Lady Arlington on the lopsided sofa like white ants round the vast larval body of their queen, patting her cheeks, proffering her cordials and waving burning feathers beneath her nose.

  Lady Arlington’s husband sat up for a moment, greatly to John’s relief, and then lay down again. Groarke started muttering about his Foxrock aunt and with John’s help got to his feet.

  He said, “Where is she?”

  John said, “She’s gone downstairs. Come on quick.”

  They fought their way out through the ranks of the women, stumbled together down the stairs, traversed the hall and let themselves out into the street where John said, “We’ve got to run like hell; I may have fractured a man’s skull. We’ll have to get our things out of the hotel tonight and catch a train back to Calais.”

  “What man?”

  “The one they were calling Monsieur Arlington.”

  “Christ, how did you do it?”

  “With an old-fashioned blotting-roller but he sat up just before we left, so he’ll be all right, won’t he? I couldn’t possibly have murdered him, Groarke, not if he sat up?”

  They were still running.

  Groarke said, “Where did you hit him?”

  “On the head, along the sagittal suture.”

  On the train Groarke, dissociating himself from the whole affair, discussed cranial injuries; and on the ship between Calais and Dover they dropped their unopened supply of contraceptives into the Channel.

  Dr. Hansom’s house and consulting rooms were not very far from Dymphna’s flat and
this proximity induced in John an extreme unease. In knocking at Hansom’s door to ask him for residence in Mungo Park’s, the preliminary to Finals, he was also seeking to gain admission to Dymphna’s affection; nor did it escape him on the walk round Merrion Square, made such countless times on his way to meet her, that he associated her not only with the hospital’s rejection of him but also with his last sight of the women in the brothel who had gone so swiftly from disinterest to hard-eyed hostility that he still shuddered when he thought of it.

  Groarke said, “Listen, you’d have loved Paris if you’d had a successful love affair there. As it is you didn’t even get a whore,” and, “Listen, d’you know what the Eternal City is? It’s where you had a woman; Babylon or Manchester.”

  Hansom stammered a little. At first you would say a stammering man, therefore a very diffident man, nothing to be frightened of. But you were wrong; it was all Hansom’s negatives which made him stammer. He had said no to so much or had it said for him. No to marriage and whiskey, no to rugby football and books, no to intimacy, friendship and obvious sin, no to considerable money, no to everything except his career, which had meant work and ill health. The result was a great clinician but a soured little man.

  He stammered and stammered in his consulting room, staccato as a toy machinegun popping and shooting down its targets. He would not at first admit that Mungo Park’s had blackballed John on account of the paper, but he spoke about esprit de corps and did not once look at him, so John looked at himself in the consulting-room mirror and was temporarily comforted by the contrast. It was not until afterwards that it occurred to him: I should have gone in my oldest clothes looking as thin, unhealthy and ugly as possible; it would have made it easier for him.

  At the very end when it seemed that there was nothing left to lose he had said, “Well, sir, I’ve to write to my parents tonight. If I can’t get in somewhere I shall obviously have to leave and go to some other University. Do you think, sir, I have any chance of getting into Mungo Park’s next week or not?”

  “I shall of course-course have to contrasult the Board at the next meet-meeting. It is a question of vacacancies purely.”

  “Nobody else, sir, to my knowledge, has ever been stopped residence in his own hospital. You mentioned esprit de corps so it must have been my paper that caused you—the board—to strike my name off the list when I first applied. Since then I’ve tried every hospital in Dublin, that’s to say all the recognized teaching hospitals—”

  “Sussceptissussibilities were hurt. Certain loyola-loyalties must obtain. I shall tacake the matter up with the hospital board—”

  “But I must know soon, sir. For my parents, hundreds of pounds may be involved. I’ve said nothing to them so far because they think I’m doing well; I was doing quite well, sir?”

  Hansom said, “I think you will be accexterpated if you care to app-comply again next week.”

  Rubbing his mauve hands comfortlessly, irritably, he showed John out into the Square.

  The first month in Mungo’s had been hell but he did not realize it until it was over and the second month began. Even then the hellishness of it was not obtrusive, or if at times it was, then he did not appreciate it because he did not realize that its underlying tone was intentional.

  He was kept very much on the run by Frank de Burgh White, the house physician, and by White’s chief, the consultant, Dr. Lait. When he was on casualties he was yelled at a good deal and if he made some clinical error in opening a boil or carbuncle the attention of the surgeon seemed always to be drawn to it by someone or other; his mistakes were never even buried skin deep in the tremendous turnover of the department.

  But because he was so greatly enjoying the work and intrinsically had never expected even competence at the ultimate practice of medicine, still believing himself a charlatan every time he picked up a scalpel or tied the tapes of his mask, the muttered imprecations, the eyes searching ceilings for a word to describe his ineptitude, the recurrent angry summonses to wards and departments all seemed less than unjustified; they seemed to be routine.

  At this time he was excessively gay, believing that there was no malice in him nor anything considerable at all. He even at first believed that he was popular in the sense of a prodigal returned. The white coat with the stethoscope in the pocket; responsibility at the bottom of the scale for a number of ward beds, the nervy delight of casualty duty; all so satisfied his mind that he unconsciously rode countless rebuffs and remained happier for longer than he had ever been before. He ate enormously and talked.

  He talked at breakfast over a plate loaded with half a dozen fried eggs and seven or eight rashers of green Limerick bacon. He talked to de Burgh White with deference, to the women residents challengingly, to the men superficially and to Groarke intimately. Most of the time he confined his talk to “shop,” brainpicking, case notes, surgical techniques, laboratory reports. He asked advice judiciously, he excused his mistakes subtly; he threw out no ideas because he had too many and knew that they must be untrustworthy, since he could not even count on syringing an ear successfully.

  He enjoyed most the twenty minutes after breakfast, when the meal was over and the morning’s work had not yet begun, the consultants all at their homes and the junior students just setting out for the clinics. By this time the housemen and most of the residents would have left the comfortless linoleumed dining room, a maid would have brought in a fresh pot of Indian tea, “Strong enough to trot a mouse on,” and Groarke, with a fellow or two like McBurney or Walshe, and possibly one or two of the women, would be left, smoking, browsing the papers and listening to him.

  He had the sense that they did not enjoy listening to him either at that hour in the morning when several of them, including himself, might have had a late call or a hangover, nor after lunch, nor in the evening; but still he talked out of an abundance of excitement and unaccustomed good-fellowship with himself. Maeve Blagger, he knew, took an especial exception to his flood of loquacity; she was the only one of whose hostility he was certain; but he did not care, being almost as fascinated by her inability to leave as she was herself. With the exception of Groarke, the others gave him few leads; they did not pull his leg either; though occasionally, when he started talking about the war which had just started, they would rib him about Ireland’s neutrality or ask him whether he was going to join the R.A.M.C. or the Navy or the Air Force.

  It may have been that by his constant talking he was hoping to propitiate the injuries he had inflicted on the hospital in his paper and which Groarke assured him had been forgotten by no one; but certainly at the time it seemed to him that he talked only because he was happy in the sense of identity the work had given him.

  He would undertake far more casualty duties than was necessary, taking afternoons, and night “on” for others whenever he could get them. He liked the smell of the slum people; their confidence in him, resignation, humility, the rich variety of their accidents and distempers.

  They would erupt with boils, blanes, sebaceous cysts, maculopapular rashes, cheiropompholyx and varieties of eczema; collect lice, tapeworms, bed bugs, scabies and fleas, continued diarrhoea, enormous pustular tonsils, flaming conjunctivitis, galloping tuberculosis and heroic syphilis. They would stagger in with double pneumonia or warts; fall off lamp posts, get jammed under lifts and brewers’ drays, scalped by machinery, gassed by geysers and half-drowned in canals or malting vats. They would achieve extraordinary dislocations under mysterious circumstances and suffer fabulous burns and scalds. While waiting they would be silent, only coughing, vomiting or groaning. When they came in they would be as reserved as customers in a bank, never swearing or exclaiming, never appearing to pray and usually doing exactly what they were asked to do.

  It appeared to him sometimes that both he and they were taking part in a game of which each side knew only half the rules since those which obtained in the slums were denied to the hospital, whilst those of the hospital were Dutch to the slums. He believed in a
dull unrealized way that in the slums they had an enormous, malign and poisonous machine which was an exact opposite to that centred in the hospital.

  Somewhere in the heart of a tenement area, with hideous mechanical tentacles, dredger-like buckets, trip wires, steam sprays, gas exhalers, molten metal belchers and bacterial disseminators, there was concealed in the darkness a consciousness calculating the likely movements of its victims. Against this, tended by himself, the nurses, housemen, and consultants, was set the hospital’s machine, flooded with the brilliant bluish light of theatre lamps, sparkling laboratory equipment, anaesthetic meters and X-ray units.

  He could no more explain to them the workings of this mechanical nexus and his own relationship to it than they could define, for him, their connection with and dependence upon their own arbiter.

  In those early weeks when he was on night duty he would often find his bed undone. Returning from some casualty call at two or three in the morning he would find his mattress stripped of everything, sometimes even the mattress itself missing, and the windows giving onto the hospital courtyard wide open.

  He would climb out onto the stage of the fire escape, descend the three storeys to the concrete and retrieve the blankets, pillows and mattress, re-make his bed and climb into it. He would fall asleep at once and sleep on until the night sister again summoned him. On his return he would find not only that his bed had again been stripped that this time all his clothes, books and other possessions had been thrown out so that to restore order he would have to make two or three trips down the fire escape.

  He visited the rooms of the other residents; McBurney, fast asleep, would turn over at the going on of the light, say, “Christ” and then turn over again. Smyllie, a long-headed Sinn Feiner: “What do you want, Blaydon?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, get out then.”

  In Groarke’s room: “Mike, did you hear anyone pass your door?”