“Everything’s on the company tonight,” he said when I asked him what he wanted to drink. “We’ll put everything on the card and forget about it. The fruits of lust. The individual is dead. And God is dead and everything is a fiddle,” he crowed. “Did you bring any of old Grimshaw’s spunk along to pave the way?”
“I haven’t been able to write anything. I’m fed up with the stuff.”
“We’re all fed up, old boy, except we can’t afford to be fed up. We must never show the flag. We must give ourselves and everybody around us a true enthusiasm for living. We must flog enthusiasm. It’s the coming thing.”
“I may have to go to London,” I said.
“It’s a very good city.”
“I’m not joking. I may have to go there for a year or so.”
“Are you trying to ransom me for more money or what? You can’t write and now you must go to London. You’re an artist, old boy. We’ll miss your physical presence among us. But we’ll be philosophical. One of the few advantages of the artist is that he can set up his business wherever he happens to be or, putting it more simply, he can live anywhere he writes. London should be fine. A stimulus. But why, why have you to go into exile since your whole life and work is an embodiment of the idea of exile?”
“I’ve got this woman pregnant. She won’t have an abortion. She insists on going through with the whole thing. And I’ll have to go to London with her,” I spoke as quickly as I was able so that he couldn’t break in.
“Most unprofessional, I am pained to have to say,” he spoke with exaggerated slowness. “Art is not life because it is not nature. If you spring a leak anywhere the whole boat may go down. You better not go and take up the idea of getting Miss Mavis Carmichael pregnant or you may well find that you’ve got yourself out of a job. Where did this unfortunate accident occur?”
“On the Shannon, I think.”
“Going in for mythological stuff as well? Compound everything. This won’t do. This won’t do at all. And now you’re off to London, modern style, the illegitimate father present at the birth. Very good.”
“There was a time I thought I’d have to marry the woman and stay here.”
“And why didn’t you, old boy? That’s how I got married—but I was in love. My wife was going to ditch me but then found she was pregnant and married me; then on our wedding night she discovered it was a false alarm, that she wasn’t pregnant at all. Afterwards we laboured and laboured in vain until she decided to go to the doctor. Whatever he did, whatever rearranging he did, I couldn’t hang up my trousers on the foot of the bed after that but she was away. There are lessons no doubt in all these things for those who care to observe them. Well, why didn’t you follow father’s good example, even in the eye of rejection, to the altar?”
“It was luckily decided that it wasn’t a very good idea. Since I was only willing to marry her in order to leave her.”
We moved from the bar to the restaurant. The wine waiter had a crest of embroidered grapes on his jacket. Maloney gave him a severe inspection as he took the wine list, but it had much the same effect as that of a tailor appraising a potential customer for a new suit, and it ended with the waiter choosing the wines.
“There’s no disaster in life that can’t be turned to someone’s advantage,” he was irrepressible. “Martin Luther King, you may remember, had a dream. I just have a plan but we’ll fill the inner man while I outline it.”
We had avocado with prawns, lamb cutlets with spinach, and cheese. The waiter picked a Château Margaux and Maloney ordered a second bottle to go with the cheese before we finished the first. Afterwards he insisted on moving back to the bar for brandies.
“You may remember in the Echo days when Maureen Doherty ditched me and I wrote that poem,” he began.
“How could I forget it?”
“I was undismayed. I’ve always been undismayed. Many women have ditched me but I knew sooner or later one of them would leave it too late and get caught jumping out of the house shouting Fire! It’s exactly of course what happened. And then after one of those rows with that fool Kelly down at the Echo I was even a bigger bloody fool and handed in my notice. Kelly accepted it with alacrity and I went off to Paris to be a poet. That cured me. A black man said to me that Paris was the one place where there was no racial discrimination, that everybody got treated equally badly there. I lived in a garret, of course, off the rue Buci. There were three hundred and sixty-nine steps up to it, the wood worn away in the centre of the steps. That’s what you mean by centuries of feet. The bloody house was built by Henry the Fourth in 1603. The windows were in the roof, glass in blacksmith’s frames. I stuffed the frames with newspaper to keep the draughts out. Very cold days were spent in cafés with a book and a beer and coffee, the waiters clearing the table and trying to rout you out of it every hour or so; but you could look out through the glass at the rain and people passing and the red flop of the canvas and the deer and partridges hung across in the game butchers—and—have visions. My most frequent vision was that of an enormous tray of roast beef and browned potatoes back in Ireland. In hot weather the garret was like a glasshouse. Couldn’t live in it then either. I used to go and sit in the Luxembourg. How well I remember the trained pears in their plastic bags. I have so many heart-shaking memories. Life is a great teacher if you can extricate yourself for a few moments every few years or so from the middle of its great bog.
“It was in the Luxembourg I got my plan. I used to hate the Parisian brats, going for rides on the ponies round the fountain, the overalled little man coming behind with the litter cart on bicycle wheels, cleaning up the pony shit off the sacred gravel. Then they put up a notice. Only old people or people with children were to be allowed into the park. That finally pissed me off with Paris and poetry and I swore never to return except with my plan.
“I had almost given it up entirely but your lechery may have saved the day. This is it. I’ll get a pram made in the shape of a coffin, miniature handles, crucifix, brown varnish, the lid at an angle of forty-five degrees to keep out the rain, a white handgrip for pushing, big wheels and small wheels.
“You’ll go to London, and see the baby off the assembly line like any modern father. The three of us—why, the four of us—will go to Paris, put the baby into the morality play of a pram, and go for our evening stroll in the gardens. Isn’t that a stroke of genius? Of course I’ll pay for the party. Or the firm will. At one go I’ll be going back to Paris, putting my plan into action, and keeping my word. Isn’t the whole idea a poem in itself, a mobile poem, a life poem, an action poem?” In his excitement he slapped me on the back.
“I thought your Echo days were done with.”
“I have no talent for writing. You know that. My talent is for management. It’d drive them mad to be confronted with the logical end of the activity, all these fat smug Parisian pigeons standing around and sitting at cafés. They’ll be incensed. They’ll turn on us in a fury. We’ll be in all the newspapers.”
“Maybe they’d only smile? Or it could become the new fashion in prams.”
“It’d be striking too near the roots for that. It’d be too close to reality for that. Reality is a great stick for beating the people. They can’t stand it, we’re told, but everybody appears very vague about what it is.”
“It’d be closer to a farce, if you ask me, which is exactly what the woman would call it. She’d never agree to it.”
“But I’d pay for it. We’d have a week in Paris as well. We’d eat in the Coupole. We’d go to the Closerie des Lilas. We’d blow it at Lipp’s and the Vendôme.”
“She’d never agree to it, you can be sure. That’s how I got into this fucking position in the first place. She’d say it was turning the whole thing into a farce, that it wasn’t natural, that it wasn’t the way life should be. If she wouldn’t agree to putting a nosebag on the old penis she’d hardly agree to putting the baby in the coffin.” And he was quiet. He took a pickled onion from the counter, showed all his
front teeth, cut it in two, ostentatiously chewed it, and then washed it down with a big swallow of brandy.
“Well, old boy, you’re crusading off to London, then. You’ll be in illegitimate attendance while another white hope of the human race comes squawking into the world. And in the meantime you’ll forward me your artistic endeavours.”
“If that’s all right with you.”
“Perfectly all right. Even Queen Victoria saw that the artist could move at ease in all levels of society, and thereby endanger the whole social structure.”
“It’s very good of you.”
“Forget it, old boy. If she could do nothing about it, neither I’m sure can I, though I’m a queen of sorts too. And since I can’t have my Paris idea I want the Shannon written up, and written up well. I’ll pay well over the odds for it. You’ll need the money in London. I wouldn’t mind spending a few months in London myself, watching over a future clown flashing out into the world,” he said dreamily.
“You mean Mavis and the Colonel on the Shannon?”
“What else?” he almost roared. “Do you think my readers would want an account of two incompetent nincompoops like yourself and this fool of a woman? My readers want icing and sugar, not loaves of bread. And be careful not to let life in. Life for art is about as healthy as fresh air is for a deep-sea diver.”
She was in a high state of excitement when we met the next evening, full of her dinner at the Hibernian with Jonathan. I couldn’t resist feeling that she was having the time of her life.
“Jonathan was waiting for me in the foyer. In his pinstripe and flowing bow, silver hair, he looked extraordinarily distinguished, like an ambassador or something. The table had red roses. We had oysters, Dover sole, cheese, and we drank too much. Jonathan had an enormous cigar the waiter cut for him, with his brandy. And then, suddenly, both of us started to cry, in the middle of the full restaurant.’ It’s such a pity, love, that it’s not our child. We’d be married. We’d have a whole wonderful life together,’ he said. ‘Who’d think two years ago when I pressed you to come to London that we’d be sitting here like this. Life deals us strange cards.’
“He was wonderful. He’s making everything so easy. His wife is in hospital again and he lives alone in this enormous house in Kensington. And do you know what he’s going to do? He’s going to do up the whole basement part of the house as a separate flat, and I can live there till the child is born. He says, too, that there’ll be no trouble getting me a job on one of the several magazines, that I needn’t confine myself to Water¬ ways, that if I can write about waterways I can write about theatres, London restaurants or parks. Once I get the hang of it it’ll all be the same thing. It’s like a dream come true.”
“Where is he now?”
“He came to see me but he’s using the visit to do some business as well. We’re having a nightcap later in the hotel after he’s seen his guests off. And I’m having lunch with him at the airport tomorrow just before he flies off. We’re going to write the letter of resignation together.”
“I can see little place for me in London in such a new setup,” I ventured cautiously.
“That’s what Jonathan says. He says that if we’re not to be married that it doesn’t make any sense being together, that we’d only get deeper and deeper involved with each other, that it’d make a separation worse.”
I waited in silence, hardly daring to believe. What I’d longed for seemed to be falling like ripe fruit into my hands.
“Jonathan says that you’d be far more help to me by staying here. You could help me with money, with everything, all the help you can give now, if we’re not to be married.’”
I felt like a badger must feel among blackthorns when someone inadvertently opens the teeth of the trap. I was afraid to go free in case by moving at all it might prove not true.
“You have a whole month to think about it. But what Jonathan says seems to make sense,” I made the first cautious move, staring down in amazement at the bared teeth of the loose trap. I could go free.
“Jonathan and I wrote out the letter of resignation at the airport, in the upstairs lounge. We laughed a great deal over the words beg or wish or desire or state. And then he just dictated it straight and I took it down. Then we went and posted it. As it dropped I said, ‘There goes my future. All those years with so much being contributed each year towards my marriage gratuity.’ We were both too nervous for lunch, but Jonathan insisted on buying a bottle of champagne. It’s strange how coincidences happen. It was his birthday. I had never known when his birthday was before. He’s fifty-seven. ‘To London Airport. I’ll be waiting for you there. You may seem old to your young man but you look awfully young and pretty to me,’ he said.”
“You are beautiful and young.”
“I sure picked a winner, didn’t I?”
“We both had bad luck.”
“How?”
“Everything happened too soon,” I said. “We never had a chance. What did you do after you left the airport?”
“Well then, I caught myself rushing back to the bank. I’d got the morning off and then after sending in my resignation I was worried and rushing back. Are you crazy, I said to myself. You’ve worked for them for over twenty years, and you’ve got not a thing out of it, and now you’re rushing back, when even if you were caught trying to burn the building it’d take at least a month to fire you. It was hard to get used to, so I turned back for home. I knew I’d find my aunt alone at home and I wanted to get the whole thing over with. It was only when I was near the house that I had second thoughts and I wished I had gone straight back to the bank from the airport.
“The kitchen door was open and she was in the garden, her rubber gloves on, at her roses. She asked me if I had a headache or something and I decided to bungle it through.’ No, Aunt Josephine, I took the day off. I’ve been offered a job on a magazine in London and I’ve resigned from the bank. Don’t worry: I’m not going at once. It takes a month for the resignation to take effect and I’m sure I can withdraw it at any time before then.’ You should have seen her face. ‘Have you thought about the pension you’ll lose?’ were the first words when she found her voice. ‘How will you manage all on your own in a place like London?’ So the story is out—I’m going to London to seek fame and fortune.”
Angrily she intercepted my glance towards her body. “No,” she said. “The two per cent chance of error is gone. I practically didn’t make it to the bathroom this morning. Early morning sickness.”
“What do you want to do now?” I asked.
“I want to go back to your place,” she said. “I know it may sound exciting, going to London—but I know, I know I’ll hardly be in London before I start missing you. The fame and fortune is all a lie. It’s going to be a hard summer and a longer autumn and winter. And I’ll not have you. I’m going to need a lot of loving in the next month to get me through all that length of time without you.”
“It seems I’m not going to London after all,” I said to Maloney. We met in the bar of the Clarence. He had insisted that we start to meet regularly since I was soon going to be away for at least the most of nine months, and he had picked the Clarence as out of the way and suitably grey.
For the hot day he wore baggy flannels, an expensively ragged corduroy jacket, and his buttoned-down shirt was open enough to display a wealth of grey hair on the chest.
“A false alarm,” he chortled. “Following in my own august footsteps.”
“No such luck,” I said.
“You’re going to do a skunk, then?” he looked at me in admiration, and started to laugh, a secretive high-pitched laugh, “I always thought you were one of those priested types, a lot in the head but not much on the ground. That you’d do the decent, follow your conscience, even if it meant tearing your balls off, but apparently I was wrong,” he shouted.
“No,” I ignored what he’d said. “She knows this rich Englishman with a house in Kensington, a crazy wife, several companies. He’
s been an admirer of her for years. It’s just poured out in the wash. He’s already flown in from London and out again. They had dinner in the Hibernian, and he’s taking charge of the whole business. She’s going to live in the basement of his Kensington house and he’s getting her a job writing for one of his magazines. Naturally he doesn’t want me to go with her to London.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? This broad must be good looking. I thought she was just an ordinary turkey, a bit dim as to the facts of life.”
“She’s very good looking and this Englishman is old. I can hardly believe my luck. It’s almost too good. I hope she marries him. If she’d marry him it’d take care of the whole mess in one beautiful stroke.”
“I detect a disgusting note of self-congratulation,” he changed. “And it won’t do. It won’t do at all. You’ve behaved stupidly, even by your own admission. You’ve got this woman into a frightful mess. In your conceit you refuse to marry her though she is a beauty, a far cry from your own appearance. And your bad behaviour and general situation is making us feel good. It’s making us all feel very good.”
“How?”
“How can you ask such a question? Your behaviour has dropped the moral averages to zero overnight. It makes some of our own reprehensible past acts practically beatific. We’re disgusted with you.”
“Anyhow you won’t want the Shannon River thing written now.”
“That’s what you think. I want every word of it. And I want both history and myth respected. There are too many people up to their elbows in myth without the slightest respect for history.”
“Why don’t you let up?”
“Would you if you’d just lost a Paris trip and was barely consoled by looking forward to a few nice saunters round Soho and found that even that was pulled out from under your feet because a friend wasn’t being asked to pay his bills?” “You’re too much,” I said.