The Pornographer

  “But Jonathan himself was all right, wasn’t he?”

  “I’m still fond of him. And basically he’s a good person. He got a raw deal I suppose. But when the chips were down he turned out to be very much the businessman too, ruthless and self-centred.”

  “Isn’t everybody?”

  “I can’t believe that. I couldn’t go on if I believed that.”

  “But he had a point, didn’t he? He wanted to marry you. You wouldn’t marry him.”

  “Well, he never showed that side of himself. He was always the gallant knight,” she said heatedly. “Roses and meals and wine and tears. And suddenly it was either-or. And it wasn’t a fair position.”

  “But you seemed happy when you wrote to me about the wife’s suicide, the time you were afraid she’d come home and cause trouble if she found you in the basement.”

  “He became a different person after that. He even made a pass at me. I had to use all my strength to resist him. And he said he was staying the whole night in the basement, so it would be as easy to sleep with him as not since I couldn’t make up my own sweet mind. And he said horrible things about you.”

  “This all happened after the suicide?”

  “A few days. Ο boy, will I ever forget that funeral service out in Golders Green. Apparently she used to gamble a lot. And she owned a racehorse once. And eight was her lucky number. This enormous floral wreath in the figure of eight—it must have cost the earth—went through the flap with the coffin. She’d put it in the will. They’d to hold it so that the flap didn’t sweep it off.”

  “But why didn’t you marry him? The child would be secure. You were fond of him.”

  “You weren’t very concerned about the child.”

  “That’s true, but I didn’t claim to be, though that’s no virtue. You said we should have been married because of the child, that the child was more important than either of us. What then was so different in this case? According to that logic shouldn’t you have married Jonathan for the child’s sake?”

  “You sound more like a lawyer than a person,” there were bitter tears in her eyes. “Everything was different. You were the child’s father. The child was conceived in love, on my part anyhow. Jonathan was old, older even than his years. It was a last clutching at life. For the advantages I might get, I’d have to give him my life. You may be fond of an old person but when they try to be young, you find you can’t help despising them. And I’d have to make love to Jonathan, like you and I used to make love, and no matter what you say there was nothing sinful or mean or ugly about our lovemaking. It was pure and healthy and natural. How could I make love to an old man, with the memory of that, and at the same time the child of those memories growing within me. Even if I married Jonathan I’d have to give up all hope of ever seeing you again, and there was no way I was ever going to do that.”

  “You sounded quite determined about it when you wrote to me.”

  “No, love. I was hoping it’d have the opposite effect on you. I suppose none of this has the slightest effect on you?”

  “Of course it has. It’s an awful mess to have got into in the first place. If you’d married Jonathan it would have cleared it up, only from my point of view, granted. Now it’s just a mess again.”

  “I can’t take that. I know it’ll work out all right. I know that nothing but good will come of it. Because both of us are good people. We didn’t try to dodge anything. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t a good person.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Do you still write that stuff?”

  “It’s all I get paid for.”

  “But you have some money from your family.”

  “Not enough to live on,” I said abruptly, closing the conversation. “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’ll keep this job till the child comes. It’s very boring but it makes no demands and it pays quite well. One good thing that this upheaval taught me is how valueless our prized security is. I can get a far more exciting job here with my skills than that boring job back at the bank. I’d never have had the courage to find that out except for what happened.”

  “What are you going to do with the child?”

  “That’s the six marker.”

  “Marriage is now out,” the way she reacted I saw she hadn’t by any means given it up. “It’s out.”

  “That may change with the child. It’ll be your child. People long for children.”

  “It won’t change with the child,” I said brutally. “It won’t change.”

  “You can never tell those things.”

  “You’ll have to take my word for it. It’s out. Completely out. And there are only two other ways left now.”

  “What?”

  “Adoption. Give the child to two parents looking for a child. That way it’ll be as if the child were born into a normal home.”

  “It’s all right for you to say that. That way your little mistake will have been farmed out, got rid of. You hadn’t to leave Dublin. You don’t have to carry the child around in your body all these months, cry over it, worry over it. And then after all that just hand it over to somebody else as if it were a postal parcel. And then spend the rest of your life wondering: where is it now, what’s happening to it, is it happy.…”

  “Well, the alternative is simple. You keep the child. And once you do that you’re on your own. You’ll never see me again.”

  “I don’t know how you can say that.”

  “I’m fed up listening to you prate about the child’s good. The child must come first, but apparently only when it happens to coincide with your own wishes. Two parents can bring up a child better than one. There’s nothing special about our seed.”

  “Stop it, stop it,” she said.

  “All right. I’ll pay. And we can have a brandy in the pub.”

  “I need a brandy. And to think I wasn’t able to sleep last night with looking forward to this lunch.”

  There was a bar a few doors down from the view of the Bay of Naples with its several sailboats and we had the drinks standing at a counter girdled by a thin brass rail. She took a brandy but I changed to a pint of bitter. As I came out of the Mens I was able to look at her for the first time. There were still no apparent signs of her pregnancy. She was a strong handsome woman, younger looking than her thirty-eight years. Years of regular hours and church-going had worked wonders of preservation on natural good looks.

  “Do you know what I want you to do? I want you to come with me to Jonathan’s place. No, we don’t have to go in or anything, in fact we couldn’t,” she was in extreme good spirits again when I joined her. “But I just want you to see it. We can get the bus. We can just walk past the gate. It’s no more than twelve minutes away on the bus.”

  “But why?”

  “I just want you to see it. It won’t take long.”

  “Whatever you say,” I was anxious to avoid the tension of the restaurant at any cost. It had been the same argument as we had had several times in Dublin and we’d never reached anywhere except the same impasse, and never would. “I’m in your hands for the rest of the day,” I said.

  We left the pub like any pair of lovers in the centre of London for the day, and I caught her hand as we raced to get to the stop on Shaftesbury Avenue before a six bus which was stopping at traffic lights.

  We got off a few stops after Harrods and walked. There was a feeling of decorum and quiet about the roads, of ordered, sheltered lives. The houses were rich and white, with balconies and black railings, and they all had basements.

  “It’s only three doors away,” she’d grown very nervous. “If there are signs of anybody in the house we’ll just walk straight past.”

  There was a magnolia tree on the bare front lawn, an elegant grey door, and the basement was down steps. It didn’t look as if there was anybody in the house.

  “They must be in the country for the week-end,” she said. “When I left, the lawn was white with magnolia blossom. They must have va
cuumed them up.”

  “Who’s they?” I asked.

  “Jonathan and his wife. Did I not tell you he’s married? The woman is a widow, has money too. It’s she who has the cottage in the country. Clutching at a late life.”

  “Come on. You never know, there might be somebody in the house.”

  “I’d love to just get one look into the basement.”

  “No. I’m moving on if you are. It’s not right,” I was afraid someone might open the door and enquire what we wanted or—worse—invite us in.

  “I suppose it was just foolish of me to want to see if the basement has been changed.”

  “Why did you want to see the house at all?”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted you to see it. Often I used to wish it was just us two who were in the house. But I was very grateful for that basement when I came to London first. What do you think of it?”

  “I think it’s a fine house,” I said.

  I had a beer in the small local at the corner of the road, where she and Jonathan used to have a drink on Sunday mornings after walking in the gardens. Then we took the underground to Finsbury Park. Her flat was just seven bus stops from the station.

  Cars were parked bumper to bumper on both sides of the road we turned into, the long rows of glass glittering each time the sun shone out of hurrying white clouds.

  “There must be a home game,” she said. “We’re just a few minutes away from the Spurs ground. Both my landlords are fanatic Spurs followers,” and as if to support what she’d said a huge roar went up close by, followed by a deafening rhythmic pounding of feet on hollow boards, broken by a huge groan that led off into sharp definitive clapping. The whole little terrace was grey, the brick dark from smoke or soot, tradesmen’s houses of the nineteenth century, each house with a name plaque between the two upper windows in the shape of a cough lozenge. “Ivanhoe” was the barely legible name I made out as she searched for her key. A black and a grey cat met us in the narrow hallway.

  “We have the house to ourselves. My landlords are on the Costa Brava. I’m looking after the cats for them. You should have heard all the feeding instructions I got before they left. The cats are their children,” she stroked the cats in the hallway but they did not follow us up the stairs. I listened to the baying of the crowd: indignation, polite appreciation, anxiety, relief, abuse, anger, smug satisfaction.

  “I’m hardly ever here on a Saturday. I do my shopping and laundry round this time every Saturday.”

  The flat looked as if it had been furnished from several junk rooms. There was a gas cooker, a gas fire, a circular table, armchairs of different shapes and colours, a corduroy sofa, a narrow bed against the wall. There was lino on the floors but what nearly broke my heart was the bowl of tulips, the fresh cheese biscuits, the unopened bottle of whiskey and the bottles of red and white wine, and even packs of stout.

  “You have gone to far too much trouble,” I said into her shining eyes. “How did you come on this place?”

  “I saw it in the paper. And the two men liked me. They thought I had a bit of class. Though they’re men they’re really married. George is all shoulders, masculine, deep voice. And Terry is the dreamy, flitty one, very so-so. They must have taken a whole case of suntan lotion to the Costa Brava. They’d make you die. I’m going to come back with a really sexy tan,’ Terry said. ‘And I’ll hold George’s hand when we go out to shop’!”

  “Do they know you’re pregnant?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think you will have any trouble when they find out?”

  “No. I don’t think so. They’re very nice. The house couldn’t be more quiet. And it’s cheap. I even save money now. Except they might want to adopt the baby, when they find out I’m pregnant, that’s the only trouble I can foresee. It’s the one thing in their line that poor Terry can’t do.”

  She’d poured me a large glass of whiskey and sipped at a little white wine herself, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  “Does your family know anything yet?”

  “No. And I don’t intend to tell them. If they did find out, they’d hold their big middle-class conference. A course of action would be decided on. And they’d arrive en masse to take over the show. I’d be whisked home or into a convent or something. Boy, would they be thrown. Nothing like this ever happened in the family before.”

  “You won’t tell them, then?”

  “Not until it’s over, if even then. As far as they’re concerned I’m on an artistic jag, seeking fame and fortune in the environs of Fleet Street.”

  Her eyes shining, brimming with tears but smiling through them, she moved towards me over lino, a child rolling an orange across the floor. She leaned her face against my knees and when I put my arms round her I felt the sobbing.

  “It means so much to me you’re here,” she said. I stroked her hair and rocked her quietly, glad of the burning whiskey numbing a confusion of feeling. Smiling apprehensively up at me through tears as if afraid of my reaction, she started to undo buttons, and then she took my penis in her mouth. Excited, I let my hands run beneath her blouse, teasing and globing the full breasts.

  “We might as well go to bed,” I said as an enormous roar that sounded as if a home goal had just been scored rolled through the shabby room.

  “You see, you can only notice for certain without clothes,” she said, but in the narrow bed she pushed me away, crying out angrily that I was using her to induce a miscarriage, “That is what you want anyhow.”

  “If you think that, come on top,” I pulled her on top of me. “You can control everything. The bed is too narrow.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just nervous.”

  A sudden swelling roar from the crowd reached a pitch when it seemed it must sweep to triumph, but with a groan it fell back, scattered in neat handclapping. My hands went over her shoulders, her back, her buttocks, her sweating: and I willed all sense down to living in her wetness like in a wound.

  When it was over, feet stamping impatiently from the ground on the hollow boards, she said, “Sometimes I lie in this bed and just cry and think how did I ever get myself into this. And other times I’m just so happy that I don’t want to go to sleep. I think of the young life growing within me. I think how amazing it is. I’m giving another person the gift of life, of the sky and the sea and summer and the crowded streets of cities, everything that Man or God has made. And I can’t get over what a miracle of a gift it is to be able to give to anybody, what a gift it is to give, not only a whole garden in the evening but everything, can you imagine it, everything, just everything?” She raised herself above me on one arm so that her breasts and fine shoulders shone. What sounded like a final roar went up from the crowd, and then a general round of applause for what could have been teams leaving the field, broken by the odd coltish boo. “How can you deny that it’s wonderful?”

  “Nobody can. No more than they can quarrel with the sea or the morning.”

  “What’s wrong with you, then?”

  “Nothing. I happen to think the opposite is true as well. It’s horrible as well as wonderful.”

  “But that doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

  “It’s still the truth. I’d find it depressing if a place couldn’t be found for it on the committee.”

  “Who knows the truth?”

  “Nobody. The cowardly fall short of it, bravura tries to go beyond it, but they are recognizable limits and balances. We mightn’t be able to live with it but we can’t block it out either.”

  “O boy, here we go again.”

  “And it certainly doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

  “And I love you. I often cried out for you. Now I’m being selfish. I want to eat and drink you.”

  I thought nobody could tell anybody that, and I listened to the loud street. Footsteps were hurrying past. Feverish discussions or arguments, tired and contented voices went past. Gar doors banged. Motors started. And then the clip-clop of a pol
ice horse came slowly down the street.

  “What are you listening to, love?”

  “A horse. It must be a police horse.”

  “They’re always around on match Saturdays. That’s the crowd going home. They always make that much of a racket. You’d hardly get moving in the streets around here now and the buses are all packed. Especially when they’ve lost, they’d trample you down.”

  The horse went past. Soon afterwards several horses trotted past the windows.

  “There’re going back to the barracks,” she said. “This is the way they go back every Saturday. All this useless information comes from the masculine landlord, George,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was nervous the last time. Come on top of me.”

  “We can lie sideways.”

  “No. Come on top of me. I want to feel you.” I waited while she searched, and when I felt her panting reach for a thread just out of reach, and fall back with a catch of the breath, I let it be over. I poured whiskey and grew more and more restless, disturbed by the preparations for my coming, the flowers, the cheese biscuits, the alcohol, and God knows what else was hidden out of sight. They shone all the more disturbingly out because of the poorness of the room, the hopelessness of the whole venture, like primroses in a jam jar on a grave of someone who had worn the ragged jacket of the earth for all his days before donning the final uniform of king and beggar.

  “What time do the pubs open?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking I’d start to make us something to eat a little later,” it was exactly what I feared.

  “I think they must be open now,” I seemed to remember that they were always open just a little time after the matches ended and then the classified evening papers would come in. “I’d love a pint of English bitter. And it’d be fun to check on the result of the match. My guess is that the home team must have won.”