The Pornographer

  “You must be joking,” he laughed with pure pleasure.

  “You mean to say you had to pay more than that?”

  “You must be daft. Not half it.”

  After we’d tortuously reached the right figure, which I’d to tell him was so low he should have been up for swindling, he wiped tears of pleasure away with the backs of fists.

  “That’ll do you,” he laughed as he scolded. “That’s enough.”

  “You must admit you got it cheap.”

  “Well, it wasn’t too dear. I’ll admit that much. I could have made a profit on it since anyhow.”

  “You know you were welcome to use my house. In fact I was hoping that you would. It needs living in.”

  “I know that but sure you’ll live in it yourself. It’s coming to the time when I believe if a man hasn’t his own house he has nothing.”

  His own state had always been the ideal state, the proper centre of aspiration for everyman.

  “I thought you weren’t going to leave while she was ill,” I reminded him.

  “Well, I haven’t left yet.”

  “Does she know that you bought the place?”

  He grimaced with hurt as he told, “She said I was a fierce eejit, that at my age a one-roomed hut close to a church would be more in my line. But then she’s sick. That woman hasn’t been herself for a long time. She’s not been minding her business for ages. And things has been going from bad to worse between me and Cyril.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, it got so bad, one evening he had the drink to do the talking for him and he was going on about me being in the place and not paying, when I always paid far more than I took. Anyhow I took the key out of my pocket and threw it on the floor.’ Pick it up,’ I said, ‘and only one of us will walk out that door.’ After that,” he chuckled blackly, “It was about time I thought of looking for my own place.”

  “Why didn’t Cyril come with her?”

  “Why didn’t Cyril do a lot of things? Cyril’ll not stir himself now, as long as there’s anybody in the world left able to move.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to go home on the train. I want you to ring for Jim to meet me off the train. He can take the big car or the truck. If he’s not around someone will get word to him. Then you better go in to see if that woman has come round,” he was all orders.

  “What happened to her?”

  “She just fell. At the top of the stairs. She was lucky she didn’t roll down. She was supposed to go into hospital a few days before that and didn’t. Lucky the ambulance was there and able to take her, I came with her in the ambulance.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “No. I haven’t had a bite. I’m starved.”

  We had a mixed grill in the North Star across from the station, and I saw him to the train, using the fact that I’d to phone ahead for Jim to meet him in order to avoid the awkwardness of those minutes that wait for the train to go.

  “I don’t suppose it’ll be long until I have to be down now,” I referred to the impending funeral.

  “No,” he said confidently, as if some certainty was a matter of rejoicing. “It won’t be long, but you will go in to see her?”

  “I’ll go in as soon as I make the call,” and he was satisfied, making a careless gesture of dismissal. How confident and full of well-being he was compared to the small shaken figure that had got off the train that sunny day in early spring to visit her in the hospital. Death had been well reduced from beauty as well as terror. It happened to people who were foolish enough to cease minding their business.

  He had exaggerated her state. I thought I’d find her in a coma but she was completely conscious though very weak.

  “Is your uncle gone home?” was her only question and when I nodded she smiled before she let her face fall. She recovered her strength so rapidly in the next few days that I thought I’d resume the normal visits. I took her in a bottle of brandy.

  “God bless you but I don’t need that any more. It’s cost you enough already, all those old bottles.”

  “There’s lots more bottles,” I protested.

  “No. I’m taking the pills. You don’t need anything while you’re taking the pills.”

  “I thought you didn’t trust the pills,” with every fumbling sentence I was losing ground in the face of her calm.

  “I trust the pills good enough—for what I have to do. When you take them you don’t feel anything. In a few days I’ll be out of this old place. I won’t be coming back. I’ve fought long enough and hard enough and it’s beaten me, bad luck to it,” she even laughed.

  “You can’t say that.”

  “I can say that because it’s the bitter truth and I’ve earned it. I’m not worried. I was just thinking that there’s already far more people that I’ve been close to in my lifetime on the other side than on this side now. There’s some good stories now I’ll have to tell them. I’m afraid there’s many a laugh we’ll have to have over most of the stories,” her eyes were shining. “I’ll have to start looking to see if that uncle of yours can be given extra space up there as soon as I arrive, for no doubt he’ll want to bring that bloody old saw mill with him, not to talk of this doting farm he’s just bought.”

  I’d to turn away, “I’ll be in early tomorrow.”

  “You might as well ring your uncle. To tell him to come up for me the day after tomorrow. That I’m going home,” I heard her add. “Anyhow we can settle it tomorrow.”

  I hate tears, hate that impotent rage against the whole fated end of life they turn to, and when I fought them back I was embarrassed by the bottle of brandy still in my hands, like a coat I’d been given to hold by someone who had forgotten to come back.

  Two days later I helped her into the big car outside the hospital and drove her and my uncle out of the city. She was practically gay, harassing my uncle’s stolidity with sharp wit. He was well insulated against all suffering, wearing a coat of embarrassed righteousness far thicker than his black crombie which seemed to proclaim, “You see the compromising sort of situations people who insist on being stupid, who do not mind their business force you into.” As before, at Maynooth I left them to get the bus back into the city. As I kissed her frailty our silence seemed to acknowledge that we’d never see one another again. Her coldness shook me, her perfect mastery. It was if he she’d completely taken leave of life, and any movement back was just another useless chore, and everything—me, my uncle, I doubted if Cyril could even light her eyes now—had become boringly equal.

  “My aunt was in the hospital and is gone home,” I told her when we met, unable to keep from touching her black hair.

  “I know. Some of the doctors were annoyed that she was brought to us when she collapsed. She should have been taken to a local hospital. There’s nothing we can do for her any more.”

  “She has money. You know what influence is in a small place. They’d think the Dublin hospital would be better, and she’d have to go to the best. Anyhow she’ll not be back. It’s all neat enough. There’s only two telegrams to wait for now. A birth and a death.”

  “Maybe she’ll not send word about the child.”

  “You think she might land on the doorstep?”

  “No. That she’d think her own interests would be best served by staying separate. That she could do anything she wants with the child.”

  “She’ll be able to do that anyhow.”

  I gave her the letters to read. She read them, but very reluctantly.

  “What do you think of her and the whole business?” I asked.

  “What does it matter what I think? No matter what I think it’s useless,” she refused to be drawn.

  The telegram came five days after Christmas, announcing the birth. I just waited.

  A rapturous letter followed. She had had a dangerous and difficult confinement, but the child was worth it all. The child was beautiful. All his little features were replicas of my own, except th
e ears. We can’t all be perfect, she quoted from her favourite movie. I should hear him crow.

  I wrote restating my old position in what I thought were the clearest possible terms, which she described as brutal and hurtful.

  All right, we could give up the child for adoption, but on these conditions. I’d have to come to London and live at Kavanagh’s and take care of the child for a whole week. Feed it, change it, wash it. She’d move out for that time. If, at the end of the week, I could be heartless enough to give it away for ever, then she’d consent to the adoption, but there was no other way she’d consent.

  I just repeated my position, saying whether I took care of the child for a day or a month could make no difference.

  The next letter did not come by return and was more cautious. Would I come to London?

  I hesitated for some days before writing that I would go to London. I’d see her to talk about what she intended to do, but under no circumstance would I agree to see the child. It had the echo of negotiating a deal of sale. I might be prepared to go ten thousand but under no circumstances would I consider fifteen or anything close to it.

  I took the plane with the feeling of being flushed from one city to the other, that there should be a chain to pull. I rang her from London Airport.

  “It’s great to hear your voice,” she said. “If you’d rung a half-hour earlier you’d have heard the little man crowing. But he’s sound asleep again. You’ll have to wait till you get here. Where are you ringing from?”

  “The airport.”

  “Why don’t you get the tube? It’s quicker at this time. I’ll meet you outside Archway Station. And we can walk here.”

  “I’m not going to the house.”

  “But you’re expected. Everybody’s looking forward to meeting you. There’s food and drink. Michael and Nora have been talking about little else but meeting you for days.”

  “I’m sorry but I’m not going to the house,” I found myself trembling with nervousness. “I don’t intend to see the child.”

  When she was silent I said, “I’m keeping to my end of the bargain. Meet me at ten in The Bell at the bottom of Fleet Street. That’s if you want to meet me.”

  “But everybody’s expecting you. And don’t you want to see your child at least once?”

  “No. And I’m sorry. Meet me at ten in The Bell if you want to meet me.”

  As I’d plenty of time, I walked from Cromwell Road across London to the pub. Walking in a city where a great deal of time has been spent is like walking with several half-tangible, fugitive images that make up your disappearing life. There had been snow and there was packed ice along the edges of the pavement. I loved the glow of the night-lights. If one could be free of this clinging burden of tension it would be a lovely place to walk in, asking nothing but to be free to walk and look and see, hunch shoulders against the cold. Except I was too old not to know that it was by virtue of this very tension that it took on the apparel of happiness.

  She came through the door on Fleet Street just before ten, with a man in his forties, red hair thinning, his powerful body managing to look awkward and ill at ease in his blue suit and shirt and tie. He was plainly Irish, from a line of men who had been performing feats of strength to the amazement of an infantile countryside for the past hundred years, adrift in London now, pressing buttons on a tower crane, and I knew at once he was Michael Kavanagh.

  “I wanted to come on my own,” she said in a low pleading voice, “but Michael insisted on driving me. He’s been wanting to meet you for a long time.”

  “That’s fine with me. I’m glad to meet you,” and he reluctantly gave me his hand. That he was raging with uneasiness showed in his every movement.

  “What’ll you have to drink?”

  “A light and bitter,” he said and she had a glass of lager.

  With the warm brown wood of the bar, the white mantles hanging from the gas lamps, the governor in his long shirtsleeves behind the solid counter, it could have been a very pleasant place to talk and drink.

  “Well, what are you going to do?” Kavanagh was going to sort me out quickly.

  “I don’t know,” I said and watched him finish the pint, order another round from the bar. She was worn and looked as if she’d been through a severe illness. The grey in her hair showed much more. I found myself completely indifferent to her, as if we’d both journeyed out past touching. Kavanagh drank the second pint more slowly.

  “How do you mean you don’t know?” he pursued.

  “What is there to do now? Either the child is adopted or kept.”

  “And it’s no concern of yours, like?”

  “It is some concern.”

  “Some concern… after all you’ve put this poor girl through. It’d make stones bleed.”

  “I’d prefer if the child could be adopted. That way it’d have two proper parents.…”

  “I couldn’t give the child away. I don’t know how anybody that even saw him could give him away,” she said. But I hardly looked at her. It was with Kavanagh I’d have to contend.

  “Well, you better come back to the house and see your good handiwork anyhow. That’s all the girl says that she wants. Many a man would go on his bended knees at the very thought that such a girl should even think of marrying him. And all she wants from you is to go back to the house for an hour. That’s all she says she wants. And if that’s the way you are, in my humble opinion, she’s well rid of you.”

  “Come back with us to the house,” she put her hand on my arm. “That’s all I ask. If you want you can walk out of the house after that, and be as free as you want to be.”

  “I’m not going back to the house. And I’m not seeing the child.”

  “What did you come to London for, then? Why didn’t you skulk with the rest of the craw thumpers back in good old holy Ireland that never puts a foot wrong?”

  “I’m leaving,” I said. Time had been called several minutes before. And we were attracting the governor’s eye. Twice he had come out from behind the counter and lifted our glasses.

  “Goodnight. Thanks,” I said to him and turned to go out by the back way, towards St Brides. I had just let the door swing when Kavanagh caught me and pulled me against the wall, “Are you coming or not?”

  “No,” I pushed against his arms but it was like pushing against trees.

  “Are you coming or not?” and he started to shake me. I had no fear, feeling apologetic in the face of my own coldness, having the bad taste to remember a Civil War joke, “Who’re you for?” the man with the gun was asking the drunk outside the pub: “I’m for yous.”

  “Are you coming or not?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’ll be took,” he started to drag me. At that, strength came to me, and I managed to free one arm, and strike and kick. Then I was spun completely free, and I could feel the blows come so fast that I could not be certain where they were coming from, and the hardness of the wall. I must have been falling, for the last I remember was striking out at her as she came towards me with outstretched hands. I must have lost consciousness for moments only, for they were quarrelling nearby when I woke. “What did you want to do that for?” she was crying. “You’ve gone and ruined everything.”

  “Leave him there and to hell with him. To hell with both of you and all stupid women.”

  I was at the bottom of steps. Quickly I pulled off shoes, and rose, holding the shoes in my hand, and stole round by the church.

  “He’s gone,” I heard, and I tried to hurry but I wasn’t able.

  There was a deep doorway in a lane somewhere off the church whose gates hadn’t been locked across and I went in and sat on the innermost steps.

  I heard them searching for me but they never came quite my way. Only once did they get close enough for me to hear their voices and then I couldn’t be sure of the words, “I told you he’s done a skunk. He was only faking being hurt. There’s no need to worry over that gentleman. I’m telling you that cunt will take g
ood care of himself.”

  Soon there was no one near, the spasmodic jerky sound of the distant night traffic, some aeroplanes, their landing lights flashing as they came in over the Thames. I felt the cold and it was painful to move my lips and my face seemed numb, one eye was closed; and I was extraordinarily happy, the whole night and its lights and sounds passing in an amazing clarity that was yet completely calm, as if a beautiful incision had been made that separated me from the world and still left me at pure ease in its still centre. I could walk except for a dragging foot, but I hesitated to feel my ribs and face. When I did manage to bring myself to look closely by the light of a streetamp in a barber’s window, I knew I’d have to be very careful not to run into any policeman on the beat.

  A milk bar saw me through till morning. I sat in a corner with a newspaper and let the coffee go cold. Using the newspaper as a screen I was able to examine my face in a far mirror but wouldn’t have recognized it except by moving my hands and the newspaper’s angle. The one cut that would need stitches was across the upper lip where the blow had cut it right across against the teeth. For a while everything had that same ethereal clarity, but that went too, in tiredness and stiffness and some pain. As soon as it was light I took a taxi to the airport. At such times, it is a great blessing to have money. It was now extremely painful for me to make the slightest facial movement. One or two people did make gestures towards my appearance in the airport that made me laugh, but the laughing too was painful so that I had to turn and lean against the wall.

  Now it was a luxury to be flushed from one end to the other and I got a taxi to a doctor who stitched the lip. He thought there were no bones broken but wanted me to go for X-rays. He said he thought it’d be three weeks or so before I was presentable.

  My luck seemed to be holding. There was no telegram waiting for me on the glass-topped table when I got in.

  She has lived so long, I thought, let her live for three weeks more. I thought I’d never make the last steps of the stairs once I saw the door. I had just the one simple, fixed idea—to crawl to the bed and sleep. There is nothing that can stand against an overwhelming desire for sleep. It is as strong as death.