The Pornographer

  I went early to the Green Goose and waited for her beneath the red and green peacocks’ eyes.

  She looked harassed when she came, as if she hadn’t been sleeping much.

  “How did your weekend go?” I asked when I’d got drinks.

  “It was awful. I suppose the worst was nothing had changed. My sister has her two children. She is happy. Now that she is, her husband’s handicap will fall by two strokes. In the evening Father Paul came in from the Augustinians. He was so glad to see me. He joked about me getting married soon, that I must hurry, since he wanted to be the priest at the wedding. We drank too much sherry. And suddenly we both found ourselves crying in front of the fire. He asked me if I had someone I was interested in and I told him about you. I told him that you didn’t love me,” there were tears in her eyes.

  “It sounds pretty grim.”

  “What right have you to say that?”

  “No right. And I’m sorry. It’s what I want to talk about.”

  “This is all I need tonight!”

  “We only know each other a few weeks, and things are happening far too fast for me. I’m fond of you,” I could hear the lie slithering on the surface of thin ice. “But I’m not in love with you. I want us to call a halt, for a time anyhow, to these regular meetings.”

  “I see you have it all worked out, just like one of your plots.”

  “I haven’t it all worked out, but I want to give it a rest. We’ll drop it for a month or so and see how we feel then. And for that time both of us are free.”

  “But I love you.…”

  “If you love me, then surely you can do that much for a month.”

  “You’re letting nothing through and you can really swing them.”

  “Swing what?”

  “Reasons. Figures. You have it all figured out, haven’t you? There’s hardly need to even talk.”

  “I want to rest it for a month,” I said doggedly.

  “It’ll be no different in a month.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I feel I have enough love for the both of us to begin with. It’s that horrible stuff you’re writing that has you all twisted and unnatural. I’d care so much for you. There’s so many other decent natural things you could do.”

  “I suppose I could run a health food shop or a launch on the Shannon River,” I said angrily.

  “You don’t understand. I love you. I only want the best for you.”

  “Well then, the best for me is that we agree not to see one another for a month.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any use suggesting that we go back to your place and talk about it.”

  “No. There’s no use. You know what that’ll lead to, and we’ll be only deeper and deeper in.”

  “There was a time when you were anxious enough for that,” it was her turn to be angry.

  “We both were. I’ll get a taxi for you or I’ll walk you home. Whichever you prefer.”

  “Walk me home,” she said.

  “I’m grateful, even flattered by your love. But you can’t do the loving for the both of us,” I said to her at the gate.

  “O boy,” she said bitterly. “I waited long enough to sure pick a winner,” and I shook her hand and left before she began to cry.

  I too had stood mutilated by another gate, believing that I could not live without my love; but we endure, as the first creature leaving water endured, having first tried to turn back from the empty land. Having drunk from the infernal glass we call love and knowing we have lived our death, we turn to love another way, in the ordered calm of each thing counted and loved for its impending loss. We learn to smile.

  There was no smiling, nothing but apprehension when a telegram came several days later. Please ring me, and it gave her office number. The worst rose easily enough to mind, that maybe this time nothing as simple as a death was in question. A life might have started. I rang her from the kiosk at the bottom of the road. As the girl on the switchboard tried to get her I could hear the clatter of typewriters.

  “I got your telegram,” I said.

  “Thank God you rang. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  After a long pause she breathed, “There sure is.”

  “Are there many people that can overhear you?”

  “The whole office—thirty or forty.”

  “Is it that you’re … late?”

  “Right.”

  “How long?”

  “Five days.”

  “I’ll meet you after work, then. You get out at five?”

  “I can leave just before.”

  “Meet me at five, then. At the Liffey Bookshop. Round the corner from O’Connell Street, facing the river.”

  “I know it,” she said. “I’ll be there at five.”

  I was fingering through the boxes of second-hand books displayed outside when she came, taking in nothing but the discoloured spines, once red and grey and blue and brown.

  For once she said nothing, swallowing slightly. There were tear-stains on her face, and I feared she was about to start to cry again. “We’ll cross to the river. That way we’ll get out of the rush,” I said, the pavement round us starting to swarm. We began to walk slowly away from the city, out towards Kingsbridge.

  “It’s so good to see you,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do. Yesterday evening I must have walked seventeen times by your place, but I was afraid to go in. I’m sorry,” she wiped away tears with her handkerchief.

  “There’s no need to cry. I’m not running out on you. If you’re pregnant, then we’re in this together.”

  She leaned across and kissed me, “I knew you were a good person. Deep down I knew I could trust you. I didn’t know what I’d do after that last evening. I couldn’t get through to you at all. It was like speaking to a stranger. You seemed determined to let nothing past you. And then I was late. You can imagine what I felt then, and I’ve always been regular as clockwork. It was like one nightmare followed by another. I thought I was going crazy. I think I would have too, except deep down, somehow, I knew I could trust you.”

  “Anyhow I’m here. Is it all right if we walk out towards Kingsbridge, just to get away from this crazy rush hour? We’ll have to talk things out.”

  “Anywhere you want,” she took my arm.

  Her face had completely cleared, and she was smiling now through brimming eyes. It was as if she’d put all her money on red and the wheel had just stopped and red had won. Below the rounded granite of the wall, the Liffey lay at low tide, two ungainly swans paddling about among the noisy gulls on a mudbank beneath the trickle from an effluent. The small plane trees in their irons along the path were putting out the first leaves.

  “We won’t have a white wedding,” she said. “White is to signify virginity, and I’m hardly a virgin. One person who’ll be thrilled is Father Paul, the Augustinian I told you about who came in when I was down with my sister. He’s known me since I was a little girl. When he left there were tears in his eyes, and he put his two hands on my shoulders, it seems now he must have sensed or known something, for he said I was made for loving and children. One day soon he’d have to see me married. He’ll marry us. You’ll like him, and I know he’ll like you. I won’t need to get any clothes. The plain blue costume will do. And that grey suit of yours will be fine, with the wine tie. We won’t have more than half a dozen people each, and we’ll go to a good restaurant, Bernardoes or Quo Vadis, not to an hotel. I suppose I’ll have to have my sister and her husband, and poor Walter from the magazine, he’ll be so surprised, and the two American girls, Betty and Janey. We won’t have a Protestant family. I’m not so old that I can’t have two or three more children yet.”

  A cold sweat broke out over me as I traced my own place in her words: the grey suit, the church, her friend the boozy priest, her doting face above me, “This is what I need,” as I place the gold ring on mother’s finger, and afterwards the prawns, the long-stemmed wine glasses, the toast
s, each cliché echoing its own applause, the laughter, “We are no common crowd.…”

  At each bus stop she released my arm as we walked on the concrete high above the filthy river and seized it again as soon we got past each queue. If I had got my love pregnant she would have walked beside me in this same misery, and I, released from suffering, would have no hint of it in my gross triumph. I, too, busy with my sudden reprieve, would be making similarly hurried arrangements for the funeral of her singleness.

  At Kingsbridge we crossed from the river pavement and went into Phoenix Park. “No Protestant family”, four long summers swelling by my side, and the lawnmower and conversations across the new back gardens.

  “You’d get a job. There are several jobs you’d get. And you’d not have to write pornography any more. I can see it’s affecting you for the worse in every way. And I’d get a whopping great gratuity from the bank after all these years that’ll keep us till you get a job, even until the child is born. The only demand I’d make is that you give up Mavis—what’sher-name—Carmichael? Otherwise I’d be a compliant wife, an old-fashioned wife.”

  We sat on a green bench deep in the Park. It was beautiful. The daffodils and narcissi were out and the first small hearts of the leaves. In the far distance beyond the white railing men on horses were lining up before the start of a polo match.

  “We have to talk,” I said.

  “I love you so much. All this I feel can have only happened for the best. I know we’ll be very happy. I’ll make you happy.”

  “The first thing we have to find out is—are you pregnant or not?” I had to say it brutally for it to get through.

  “I’ve never missed before.”

  “That’s no way to be certain. You’ll have to take a test.”

  “What sort of test?”

  “A urine test. We’ll have to get a sample of your urine first thing in the morning, and have it analysed. They inject it into an animal and if it comes out positive then you’re pregnant.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about this. As if you’ve been through it all before.”

  “I haven’t. You don’t have to be through everything to know about it. It’s just one of the side benefits of writing pornography, you have to know all the facts, even the ones you don’t use.”

  “Won’t we get married, even if I’m not pregnant?” she suddenly said.

  “Are you crazy?” it was the first time I looked her full in the face. “I’m not running out. And I will marry you—if I have to, if there’s no other way out. But the first thing you have to do is to take the test.”

  “O boy, Ο boy, I sure picked a winner.”

  I turned away and dug nails into my hands. If she said Ο boy once more I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hold myself in check.

  “We might as well go for a drink or something to eat,” I said, and we both rose from the bench. The polo game was now on, the horses with their white-breeched riders racing backwards and forwards beyond the paling. A car with a school of motoring sign went slowly past, a young woman tensely upright at the wheel, the instructor slumped by her side.

  “Stout and a sandwich would suit me better than a proper meal. What about you?” I didn’t feel like eating at all.

  “Anything. Anything you like. I know everything is all right now,” she took my arm.

  We walked further out, as far as the Angler’s Rest, facing the Park Wall. They served beef and cheese sandwiches.

  “Last Sunday was the worst day. I hadn’t heard from you, and I hadn’t yet got up enough courage to send you the telegram. I went out to Betty and Janey’s place for lunch. Afterwards we sat around and read all the Sunday papers. There was this article in the Observer, about unmarried girls in England who’d got pregnant … did you see it?”

  “No.”

  “Many of them were Irish, and there was this peach of an Irishman too, who got his English girl friend pregnant. When she told him she was, do you know what he said—it’s hardly believable—‘You can keep your baggage here, then, in this heathen country. I’m heading back for the auld sod.’ I must have turned beetroot. I felt Betty and Janey could see through me as I read. I left the flat as soon as I could. They wanted to drive me but I said I needed to walk. As soon as I got out of sight of the flat I turned and went down to the sea. I stood on the rocks and thought I’m one of those girls now. I couldn’t believe it. I watched the waves come into the rocks. There was one big ship far out. And I wanted to walk out into the water, and farther and farther out until the waves would cover me.”

  “Anyhow, you sent the telegram and you’re here.”

  “We might as well go back to your place. We have nothing to lose now,” she said later, at the end of the evening in which nothing had been resolved, everything having grown, if anything, more blurred, fear and shame and dismay and revulsion following one another like the revolving lights that coloured the darkness for the slower dances in the ballroom where we’d first met.

  “We’ll not go back tonight. We might as well make certain whether you’re pregnant or not. I’ll find out about the test. And I’ll meet you after work tomorrow evening, same as we met this evening.”

  She was probably right—there was nothing to lose now. I had been careless and stupid, and stupidity is the one thing you’re certain to be punished for, we’d been told it often enough; and here I was being scrupulous in the eye of the disaster, when it was certainly far too late to make a difference.

  “I could sure do with some loving tonight,” the pleasure was now free that had been so dearly paid for.

  “We’ll leave it for tonight,” I felt sick. “We’ll make certain first.”

  “It’s not very long since you were eager enough.”

  “There’s nothing I’d like more,” and except to be free altogether it was true, to take this strong woman’s body and enter into it in rage. Nature has many weathers for drawing us within her gates.

  “Then what have we to lose?”

  “We’ll find out first,” and she began to cry.

  “Look,” I rocked her. “We’re in this together. I’m not running out on you or anything. We’ll find out first. And then we’ll see where we’ll go.”

  “I’m sorry,” she was smiling through her tears. “I’m happy now. I somehow know everything’ll be all right now.”

  “We’ll get a taxi.”

  Sleepless, as when I’d been in love, images came to plague me, and they would not leave me. What were once the images of loss became the images that enmesh and fester round a life.

  There was a semi-detached house at the head of one of the roads around the Green Goose, shrubbery just beginning to appear above the front garden walls, two iron gates, concrete to the garage door. The roof was red-tiled and the walls were pebble-dashed. A lighted bell above the letter box went ding-dong. Behind the house, on either side of a thin concrete footpath, the long, competing back gardens ran to the glass-topped wall: a piece of lawn, some roses, a cabbage patch, rhubarb, cold frames for early lettuce, raspberry canes that needed cutting back, two apple trees that every year brought vandals. The narrow kitchen was up a step from the back garden, the formica-topped breakfast table, the radio, the clock, the whirring fridge. A carpeted room wasn’t far away. There was a solid table and chairs for compulsory entertaining, some books on shelves, a drinks cabinet, a tiled fireplace, a TV set. Upstairs two cupids kept blissful watch above the double bed and waiting carry-cot. The curtains that hid the road were hung and frilled. Swelling by my side she’d yawn Ο boy before she’d kiss and drill. And proudly, stretching towards the line and beaming benediction on the whole setup, she’d hang out her brand-washed flags as good as any.

  When I had cried I cannot live without you, I had cried against the loss of a dream, and believed it was worse than death, since it could not find oblivion. I had thought no suffering could be worse. I was wrong.

  I had gone in and suffered, when it was clear my love could not be returned, like the los
s of my own life in the other. This now was worse. The Other would now happily lose her life in me and I would live the nightmare. It would be worse than loss. It would be a lived loss, and many must have been caught this way and made to live it.

  I called up Peter White, a doctor, a friend from university. We had met fairly frequently for a few years after graduating, to go to pubs and the theatre and once to a rugby international against Scotland at Murrayfield. I had been at his wedding, and afterwards the meetings naturally dwindled, and then stopped. Calling him up out of the past was like calling up a ghost. There are more awkwardnesses than with a total stranger because of the dead barrier of memory.

  He seemed pleased enough to hear from me. I suppose there is always excitement—even when it is unpleasant—when the pall of everyday is torn away.

  “I’m afraid it does me no credit,” I explained. “I’m looking for something. And I didn’t know who else to turn to.…”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, it’s not money!” I prevaricated.

  “We could even manage a little of that,” his easy ironical laugh brought easy idle evenings vividly back, mockingly now.

  “I may well be in trouble, may well have got a woman pregnant.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “Are there two ways?” I countered defensively. “I hate asking you this, but how do you go about getting this test done —to know for certain.”

  “I can take care of that for you.”

  “But I don’t want that.”

  “It’s no trouble. I can get it done at the hospital,” and he gave instructions for getting the urine sample and we arranged to meet late the next evening in O’Neill’s of Suffolk Street when I’d bring him the sample. Often we conceal our motives from ourselves. I had rung him instead of ringing any anonymous doctor because I was now looking for allies.

  Spring was late, and when it came it was more like early summer. Fairview Park was full of flowers and young men, their trousers tucked into socks, kicking footballs under the greening trees, using their cast-off clothes to mark the goals. I had played with them once. They were mostly apprentice barmen on their day off. Corporation workmen started to assemble scaffolding and ladders and then to paint the bandstand. As I went to meet her, the faintest tang of the spring tides was getting through the city dump and the car fumes. Because of the angle at which I saw the world, the good weather was getting on my nerves.