Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  But John could not think what Groarke might have said. The imagined alternatives contained within the unopened letter in his hand were all quite sensible. They began with the known facts of experience and simply took them a little further. Cloate was in the Army in the field; he might have been killed. Very probably Dymphna was lonely. She would almost certainly want to see him if she were gravely ill; and why shouldn’t she be? Groarke might easily have used her as an intermediary in conveying some message to John.

  He decided then that quite clearly he held a possible future in his hand. The moment he opened and read the letter it was probable that he would become involved in the fiction and make it fact; therefore he threw it unopened over the parapet and watched it shilly down onto the river. It stayed white for a few moments and then the water ran over it like dirty tears and it was borne away beneath the bridge and out of sight.

  Freud would have said that this was a clear example of sadistic retention followed by a compulsive death wish. Perhaps Freud was right; but John could not see how this explanation helped anybody. He crossed the road at a run to watch the letter, like one of the paper boats of his childhood, come out on the other side of O’Connell Bridge. It was drifting steadily over to the right-hand bank, where, fifty yards downstream, there were steps leading to the water level. Preferring Greenbloom’s theory of unities to Freud’s monstrous infantilism, though he was not at this moment consciously comparing the two, he ran fast along the embankment and down the steps to where the water lapped the green weed, cigarette cartons and stranded orange peel. Now far more determined to salvage the letter than ever he had been to destroy it, he was really desperate to get hold of it and read it. If Cloate were dead, he himself would marry Dymphna after an indecently short interval; if anything else, he would comply.

  But the letter was not coming any closer to the bank and worse still it was sinking just perceptibly; already there was a thin layer of water between it and the surface. It looked old, immensely unrecent, and the flap had come unstuck; in a few minutes it would no longer be a letter at all, no one would ever know what it had contained; there would not even be any legible writing on it.

  He dropped his coat on the steps, slipped off his trousers and dived in after it, swimming out nearly to the middle of the Liffey and back with the envelope in his mouth. He had a sublime yet ridiculous feeling that he had saved Dymphna’s life as once he had saved Victoria’s.

  Three people had stopped on O’Connell Bridge and two or three more on the opposite enbankment. He resented them; their silly little heads and faces, their damned curiosity. Someone was shouting, but the words were as meaningless as a foreign language and he had already decided that if asked them he would answer no questions.

  A great oaf of a guarda approached as he was putting on his trousers over his wet pants and soaked shoes. There was a black crowd. On the bridge a tram had stopped and there was a queue of traffic; more fools getting out of their cars and coming to the parapet to see what had happened. A Guinness barge came chugging down from the brewery to the North Wall and blew its hooter. At the top of the steps, the guarda said, “What would be the trouble now?”

  “No trouble.”

  “You were having a dip then?”

  “Yes.”

  “With your clothes on? In November?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was it suicide?” someone asked.

  “Wrong,” John said, “I only do that at night.”

  The guarda laughed. “Now what was there in it?”

  “Fifty pounds, if you must know. A cheque from my father and the letter blew out of my hand from the bridge.”

  Everyone told everyone else and the guarda went back to the bridge to move on the traffic. John combed his hair and crossed the bridge to Billy Henneker’s Coffee Bar where it was the custom to eat bacon and eggs after dances. He sat at the table he had so often shared with Dymphna in the dark, cosy, grubby basement and ordered the breakfast plate and a jug of hot coffee. Though his teeth knocked at sudden intervals he felt wonderfully warm; if the Catholics were to be believed his underclothes were drying on him as rapidly as if he had been dipped at Lourdes; he had a splendid sense of timelessness as though he had taken a psychological Turkish bath. The letter, blurred but still legible, was headed:

  The Phelps Nursing Home,

  Drumcondra Square,

  Dublin.

  And she said:

  Dear John,

  Please, please come and see me today. I’m dreadfully sombong. I know I don’t don’t deserve it but I feel so lonely and friendless and whatever else, you always promised me that all our lives you’d remember and come if I really wanted you. I can’t explain here but when you come you’ll understand. Don’t bring any flowers or anything please; I’ll be so excited and I know you’ll not not-understand me. But just bring yourself. Visiting hour is at three.

  Dymphna.

  There were no girls’ heads and no dates, no horses jumping gates or laundry lists on the back. There were only the old unclarities like, “I know I don’t deserve it but I feel so lonely,” which could mean either that she didn’t deserve his visit or else that she didn’t deserve to feel lonely. But this too was what he had loved, this sharp childish selfishness as clean as little teeth.

  So he rang up Greenbloom at the Shelbourne and told him that, as Dymphna was ill, he would be unable to meet him that afternoon. Greenbloom was very matter of fact; he took the name of the Superintendent of Grangegorman, and demanded a few more details of Groarke’s case; then he suggested that John should meet him in the hotel lounge at seven o’clock that evening.

  “Will Groarke be with you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where’s he going to sleep? At his home?”

  “Initially he will be my guest.”

  “Have you told his parents?”

  “I shall do that later,” Greenbloom said. Then, just as John had hoped he would, he asked, “What made you decide to see this Irish girl again?”

  “It was a question of unities. I thought I detected one on its way to meet me. I rejected it, changed my mind, and went after it.”

  “When did this happen?” demanded the voice at the other end of the line.

  “This morning, immediately after breakfast.”

  “Where?”

  “In the river.”

  The rasp of Greenbloom’s laughter, short and sharp as a cry of pain, assaulted his ear. He started to explain about the letter but was cut short by Greenbloom’s, “Enough! Do not be late tonight. Time is short.”

  He heard a click as the receiver was replaced at the other end.

  He went back to his rooms, put on dry clothes and caught the tram in time to reach the Rotunda for a demonstration of high-forceps delivery in the labour ward.

  That afternoon, on his way to the Phelps Nursing Home, of course he brought her flowers: limp florist’s roses, a shilling each. He had never seen such unroselike roses; no buds, only a stylized scentless flower on the end of each stem, and all the stems exactly the same length as though they had been grown in a factory. He also bought an Irish Bystander and a copy of Woman to cater for the two sides of her nature; having married Cloate he did not think she rated a Tatler. In a sweetshop he bought a small box of white marshmallows.

  All these things in his hands or stuck under his arms depressed him because they suggested that he was conforming. He thought he’d find himself taking flowers to a cemetery if anyone had died and was glad at least that he had resisted buying grapes for her. But what depressed him most was the knowledge that he had no heart in bringing them. If she were mine, how good it would be to be visiting her at the right time with the conventional sort of things. The roses would look different; we’d joke over Woman and laugh enviously at the photographs in the Bystander; we’d each take a bite out of the other’s marshmallow. None of this would be original either, except for us.

  The nursing home chilled him; the maid with a starched face
and refined accent showing him through a hall that belonged to nobody into a waiting-room that belonged to everybody for ten minutes to half an hour. The room was like an hotel room except that it was clean with anxiety; not a speck of dust anywhere, not a dent in a cushion. Whoever owned the place, a syndicate of doctors probably, had hired a Matron just as they had hired the house; between them they’d put up a few pictures they didn’t want in their own homes: consulting-room furnishings. There was an ashtray with two long cigarette ends in it cherried with lipstick; more anxiety: they were only half smoked. There were so many mirrors: surplus to the requirements of the doctors and their wives, he supposed, or to those of the Matron who probably had a small personal room somewhere with a tray of drinks in it, and her S.R.N. Certificate, framed. Of course he paused in front of several of the mirrors. All the relatives would have done this too, the woman with the cherry lipstick, husbands, friends and heirs. He could not see his own face properly for these ghosts tweaking at their collars and ties, putting on more lipstick, primping before they went upstairs with their books and flowers, bunches of grapes.

  Under a settee he saw a leg sticking out with a little brown shoe on it. So the Matron was married and had a little girl who had a large doll dressed in off-white organdie? The doll had golden curls and a hair slide, frilly knickers and no genitals. She had a silver bracelet and eyelashes like thin brown brushes. When she was laid down suddenly, something went thump under the organdie bodice but she didn’t manage to say “Mama.” He took a great fancy to this doll, she was so substantial and peaceful. He sat her on his knee and fluffed out her frock.

  When the maid came in suddenly and announced that Matron would see him a minute, he was not a bit embarrassed to have been caught playing with the doll. He let her sit there on his knee as though she were his first daughter, waiting too. He said thank you so coldly that the maid did not even dare to smile; she certainly did not care to ask him for the doll, though she must have recognized it.

  The Matron, who looked as though she had doctors on the quiet, was as cool as a ward sister. She said, “I’m afraid I must ask you not to stay too long.”

  “How is Mrs. Cloate?”

  “She’s quite comfortable; but apart from her relatives, you’re her first visitor. Would you like the flowers put in water?”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “I’ll get Nurse to bring them up in a vase.” She was looking at the doll. “That’s a strange present.”

  He guessed she had said this more or less in spite of herself; since, though she was not in the least in awe of him or of any sort of man that he could think of, it was a little rude. She had a literally “tough” face, the features and the expression fibrous-looking under the careful makeup. In any case he was so dull-witted just looking at her that he didn’t know what she meant. Her eyes lifted from the doll against his chest to his own face as she awaited his reply. He thought, We don’t like one another, and, playing for time, asked, “Present?”

  “The doll. Is it one of Mrs. Cloate’s?”

  He let the doll fall, hanging by a hand from his own, its brown shoes just touching the ground and the head remaining stiffly upright staring at the matron’s legs.

  “Oh this,” he said. “It’s not a present; I found it in here, under the settee. I thought it was yours, or the home’s.”

  “It doesn’t belong to us,” she said so shortly that he had to invent something else.

  “I thought it might be one of the props, something for the children to play with.”

  “Props?” With more brusqueness, she reached out for the doll. “I can’t think how it got here. This room is done out every morning. One of the patients, I suppose. Now whose case was it, called with a child the other day? Mrs. Darling—” She cut herself short. He guessed then, he knew for certain, that Mrs. Darling, whoever she was, had been very ill and that the little girl who had brought the doll had sensed the anxiety and forgotten all about her doll when she came downstairs again with her father or someone. The Matron’s eyes closed because she knew that he had taken all this out of the way she had said the last remark. Her expression closed up altogether as she asked him his name and dumped the doll on a chest in the hall. She led the way upstairs.

  He could not observe anything any more and busted in behind her as she announced him to Dymphna.

  “Mr. Blaydon to see you, Mrs. Cloate. I’ve told him he’s not to stay too long.”

  “But I’m so well now.”

  “Orders are orders. Mr. Moffatt is very strict and this is only your fourth day.”

  The matron left then, giving him an unpleasant look so that he said to the girl on the bed, “Did you tell her I was a medical student?”

  “Goodness! You haven’t changed a bit. Whatever does it matter?”

  “She was terribly cool.” He was beginning to see things. Whoever had sent her all the flowers and all white? Carnations, forced narcissi and things that looked like Madonna lilies gone wrong.

  “I don’t tell her anything: but I have great crack with the nurse.”

  “Then it comes to the same thing.” He paused, taking in the smell of the room: Dettol, face powder, flowers and blood.

  “I bought you a few things.”

  “Oh John, you shouldn’t.”

  “These are marshmallows, you used to love them.”

  “I still do. I haven’t changed either.”

  “And the Tatler,” he said. “No, I mean the Bystander.”

  “Oh good! You are sweet. Don’t sit on that chair, sit on the bed so that I can look at you.”

  The nurse tapped and came in with his roses in a cut-glass vase. The two women looked at each other and he knew that their eyes said, “Not now,” and that Dymphna’s said, “Have a good look at him so that we can later.” And the nurse did take her time about pulling at the roses and mopping up a little water from the top of the dressing-table where she had placed the vase.

  Dymphna only said to her, “Be a darling and switch on the stove.”

  “You’re all right, snug in bed, isn’t she?” The nurse said to John.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you let Matron catch you sitting on the bed. She’ll have the hide off the pair of you.”

  Dymphna said, “He loves tea. Any chance?”

  “Not today. More than my job’s worth since Mrs. Darling.”

  Dymphna looked really pained, he knew her pain-face well. She laughed so merrily and said, “Well, anyway, give us our full half-hour, won’t you?”

  “Now you be good. Quiet as mice when the cat’s not away.”

  When she had gone they found themselves trying to pat things back into shape like disturbed earth.

  Dymphna said, “And roses too, when I particularly said you weren’t to.”

  “How long have you been in here?”

  “A week.”

  He was trying to tick up the points but they kept drifting like reflections disturbed by falling stones; and the stones were the observations he was quite unwillingly making: that she looked pregnant and that this fitted in with her appearance the last time he had seen her sitting in Mitchell’s, reading the letter from Cloate. The white turn-down of the sheet bowed round her stomach; she had a milky-white bed jacket very openly knitted and a low-topped nightdress. He could see the great milk veins of her breasts cold and soft and nearly as white as the lily flowers. He could even, after so long in the Rotunda, smell her pregnancy. A pregnant woman’s breath smells of milk, not of cow’s milk but of a milk sweeter and stranger. There was a lot of her breath in the room, it climbed over the smell of the fresh blood and the flowers.

  “She said it was your fourth day?”

  “My fourth day since my miscarriage, silly.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I’m sorry. Honestly, it’s the shock of seeing you again. I just couldn’t focus. Your letter. You see I thought you’d been ill. I got the idea you were terribly ill.”

  “No, it went quite smoothly really. They did ge
t the wind up a bit, I suppose they always do over doctors’ wives; but considering we’d left it so late it can’t really have been too bad at all.”

  “Oh good.” His mind had stuck at “Doctors’ wives.”

  “I hope to be going home next week,” she went on, “but I just had to see you before. I was a bit naughty in my letter, I admit. I did want you to think I was ill. I knew you’d come then.” She reached forward for the box of marshmallows. “Have one, and stop looking so worried.”

  “What do you mean you’d left it so late?” he asked.

  “Well, how could we at this stage? And I was too frightened to tell Fergus. I knew it would worry him dreadfully when he can’t even get compassionate leave. I kept putting it off so that when I finally did write I was well past the third month.”

  He took a marshmallow for something to do; it was squishy and tasteless, he couldn’t even taste the icing sugar.

  “You’ve got it all over your mouth,” she said.

  “Go on with what you were saying.”

  “No, I don’t want to. It’s all over now. I didn’t ask you here to talk about that. I wanted to see if we couldn’t be friends again. I seem to have lost all my friends by marrying Fergus and it’s quite unfair. I’d made all sorts of plans—”

  “You were saying about the third month.”

  “Oh, well, I suppose you’re nearly a doctor, so it won’t seem so sordid to you. But promise me you won’t ever refer to it again after this, if I tell you?”

  “I promise.”

  “Well, I hadn’t quickened or anything, I didn’t feel any movements; they don’t start until the something or other week—”

  “The eighteenth,” he said and she hurried on, “But we had to move very fast. I didn’t know what to do, I never expected to be so fertile, it must practically have been a honeymoon baby; I mean conception. Anyway, Fergus managed to get a wire through telling me to see Douglas Moffatt at once, and then a few days later he wrote to us both and Douglas got me in here straightaway and took it away.”