Through Streets Broad and Narrow (18 page)

When he arrived about Greenbloom's explosion he refused to come into the house at all, crossing himself many times and spitting all over the terrace. He said, “Fifty pounds for the bones and the headstones, Reverend Blaydon. Six months there is of work to collect the Jones' from the Williams' with twenty families of each been put down in the top layer and their stones as broken up as turnip and potato in a bowl of
Stunch Rhuddan
. How would even the
Diawl
himself know which was the skull of Robert Cae Mooch and which the teeth of Pen Slats when both was a Hughes and the headstones to their concubines? And where is space now for Harry Parry Bach in the second layer with the levels all disturbed?”

“Harry Parry!” said Mother. “What are you talking about? He brought us a load of driftwood only last week.”

“Ask him!” Old Scraffe spat. “I gave him his ground this summer for the New Year and he wants his money back and extra for the wear and tear of the bomb on his wife. What am I to do in the summer with all the bloody English wanting to test their luck passing through the old altar when the jaws are in pieces. The Reverend says to say it is hard and unconscionable thing to blaspheme with the wages of sin.”

“And there, for once, he's right,” said Mother. “If we've stopped that piece of vandalism, that disgusting mercenary tip-taking when visitors coming in good faith find you there instead of my husband, and are told a lot of superstitious lies about dying if they get stuck in the altar, then it's more than the wages of sin, it's the Devil himself who's objecting and you can tell
the Vicar from my husband and myself that we are writing to the Bishop about it today.”

Old Scraffe returned every morning from the twenty-seventh until New Year's Day when for some reason connected either with his own or with the Reverend Plank's interpretation of the New Testament, he stopped.

Gradually, over the remainder of the holidays, the damage to the church roof and the private tomb of the Thomases, one-time owners of the copper mines, was made good. The foundations of the tower itself were found to have been unaffected and Greenbloom put an end to Old Scraffe's and the Vicar's complaints by sending them each a substantial cheque.

He wrote from London about his own and Boscawen-Jones' researches into what he called “British Christianity,” explaining that although it had been a bitter disappointment to find so many Thomases in the supposed tomb of St. Eilian, it had only served to stimulate him in his continuing search for historical truth.

“Finally,” Russel said from his place on the rostrum, “the prognosis is, of course, hopeless. Growth is rapid even where the tumour is not bilateral, metastases form rapidly and life is soon destroyed by sarcomatous emboli travelling freely about the body.”

While the specimens were being passed around, other members of the Biological Association asked questions. Bethelgert got up and in the deep voice which was expected to take him straight to Harley Street as soon as he had qualified, said, “Can the speaker tell us whether histologically this neoplasm is a mixed or a spindle-celled sarcoma? Also how many, if any, cases have been reported in older infants, that is to say, over the age of three years? I see in a recent issue of the
Journal of the American Medical Association
that in Texas—”

But at that point John and Groarke triggered off the general vexation by hammering on the floor with their heels. The Bethelgert faction hissed for silence as everyone else drummed and slow-clapped. Bethelgert himself sat down with an undisturbed face and John said to Groarke, “What you need to get to the top is a minute brain, a nose like an ice-breaker and an influential father.”

From his place beside old Jameson, the President, Russel answered the questions.

“Histologically, many pathologists regard Wilm's tumour as a teratoma, but Weinke of Düsseldorf and Kratz of Basle—”

Groarke said, “Why I come here to listen to this crap, lifted
straight out of
Romanis and Mitchener
without a syllable of originality added—”

“It was your idea,” John said.

As the specimens reached them Groarke turned one over with his forefinger and it slid down to the end of the tray leaving a thin slide of blood and urine behind it. He said, “I'll bet you that morphologically the whole lot of them are embryomata.”

“The whole lot?”

“All renal growths, if not all neoplasms. They ought to hand over every case of pregnancy to the path labs within half an hour of death.”

John picked up the largest kidney and gazed at it with real hope. Actual specimens always filled him with this sense of expectation. One day he would observe, he was assured, some feature which no one else had ever noticed, something as impenetrably concealed by its obviousness as the law of gravity in the falling apple. But in this instance, as in so many others, the discovery shrank back into the kidney itself, leaving between his fingers only what everyone else could see, an area of true kidney at the bottom and a cystic encapsulated mass at the top.

He said to Groarke, “Extraordinary to think that this child was probably having its nappy changed last week.”

But Groarke was listening to Montgomery, who was talking about hypernephroma.

“The so-called ‘golden' tumour, which, I imagine, is one of the most relevant differential diagnoses in this context. Incidentally, it would be helpful if the speaker would list for us on the board—”

Groarke said, “Christ! Let's get out of here the moment old Jameson starts to wind up.”

So they did not wait for the coffee but went out straight across Front Square to the Wicklow Bar where Groarke said, “I hope to God
you're
going to do something interesting next week.”

“You mean speculative?”

“Speculative!”
Groarke repeated as though he were spitting something bitter through his lips. “Last week Bethelgert produced some old fool with a pulsating left eye due to retrobulbar
angioma, the week before that Bradford was passing wind about Tysarch's disease in Central European Jews, and this week we've had Russel's baloney about Wilm's tumour. By the time we qualify we're going to be magnificently equipped to run a clinic in the suburbs of Cairo waiting five years for a brat with toxoplasmosis and associated iridocyclitis to be carried in by an Abyssinian Negress married to a Jewish torch-singer. Why don't you do measles or mumps or housemaid's knee and watch all those fourth-year cods polishing their spectacles in the hope they'll remember having read about it somewhere?”

John said, “I never wanted to join the Bi anyway, I far preferred the Phil. If you'd let me get on with it—”

“Never mind that now, it's essential you do something worth while next week.”

“We could collaborate,” John said. “I can never get outside all this jargon they use. Mind you, I like it, I get a great kick out of telling someone I've got a follicular tonsilitis with bilateral cervical adenitis, but as for trotting it off at a question-time like Russel and Bethelgert—Mike, d'you suppose I'll
ever
qualify?” But Groarke only stared at his palm and said, “You could do headaches.”

“I was thinking of something light,” John said. “As a matter of fact I've written some of it already, I thought they'd lap up a bit of clowning after all this pundit stuff.”

“I'd be careful.”

“Oh it's quite harmless, a light satire, you know, with the joke on myself as much as anyone else. Of course I'd prefer to do something fantastically obscure like some disease only occurring in male Esquimaux at puberty, or, seriously, a resumé of our own ideas of the aetiology of carcinoma.”

That set Groarke off on the degenerative changes in certain neoplasms; they sat on in the sawdust-floored bar knocking back slow pints of porter until closing time. The private world of their enthusiasm rid them temporarily of the rancour which was so great a part of their waking life. As they talked, as their knowledge was aired, their speculations and theories grew tall as the towers of Glendalough beneath the high smoke-blurred ceiling of the Wicklow. Their bitterness over Dymphna, their
rivalry for the leadership of their own third year and their detestation of nearly everyone else in the senior classes was, for the time, forgotten.

They parted almost reluctantly; Groarke to get the tram back to Dun Laoghaire and John to his rooms where he worked on his paper for the Bi until midnight.

He told Dymphna something about it the next morning when they met in Mitchell's for coffee. She half-listened to what he was saying and he saw with pleasure that her inattention was due to the fact that she was looking at him. Usually Dymphna did not look at people, she just talked and played up to them in a way that suggested she had seen them to begin with and was now no longer interested. He found this hard to explain to himself; but he contrasted the fact that when he was looking at her he was so lost in seeing that he forgot his own existence; whereas she, when with him, seemed only to remember herself. But in this instance he knew that for quite several seconds she was really regarding him.

In order to get some clue as to what she might be thinking, he asked, “What's the matter?”

“You always frown when you're concentrating. You shouldn't; it makes you look old.”

“Somebody else said that to me once,” he said, remembering Victoria so sharply that he was unable to prevent his words.

“Who?”

“She said it when I was twelve. She said it made me look old when I was
twelve
. Isn't that absurd?”

“You ought to play a game of some sort,” Dymphna said, “you're always pale.”

“I would if I could play anything successfully, but quite apart from my appalling eyesight, I can't co-ordinate properly.”

“Why not fencing,” she said, “or boxing?”

“I know I'd be no good at fencing; I'd dramatize the thing so much I'd get myself spiked or whatever it is in the first sixty seconds.”

Dymphna stopped looking at him and fiddled with the Ciro pearls he had given her on her last birthday.

“In Daddy's family all the men were brought up to play some
sort of game. I think it's rather an attractive idea even if they play badly. I like men who play games.”

“Why?”

“It thrills me, that's all.”

Not an original rebuttal came to him; only the third-rate arguments and comments of ten dozen wets whose physique precluded them from any form of athletic game.

As usual she sensed his dissatisfaction, and at once applied the remedy by saying, “What's the sense? You're just John, aren't you, and perhaps too talented to be excelling at everything? Now what's about this old paper you're writing for the Bi?”

They went to the pictures that afternoon and tea afterwards in the Shamrock where three years before he had sat with Theresa and after that, Oonagh. Now, as then, he was short of money, shorter, if anything, than in those days, because the purchase of Dymphna cost him everything his parents sent him. All that he saved during the intermissions in their relationship caused by jealousy over Groarke, Collins, Mario Green and one newcomer in the first year, an American called Hank Leadbetter, was immediately expended when the affair was resumed. Such renewals repaid him fabulously: a glory of dances, rides in Phoenix Park, White Ladies in the Buttery and dinners at Jammet's. The cost of them was, in a sense, nothing, if he had money; it was time with her and a place in which to pursue her like a hound running down a stag. When the money ran out he would borrow and pawn; when no further borrowing or pawning was possible he would break up the furniture in his room to feed the fire, would live on turnip and potato fried on the gas ring in his rooms until the next cheque arrived from home. Then he would replace the furniture, going to auction sales in the Coombe Road and stock up his larder again at the College Co-op. He would repay his most pressing debts, stave off the others, and expend the remainder on more dances, shows, drinking, and rides.

It never occurred to either of them that money was anything but an opportunity. If she said, “Whatever's happened to your table and chairs?” and he told her, they would laugh together
and kiss one another in the bare room behind the drawn curtains. Sometimes she would give him a meal in the flat, but the food was so dreadful that he never pressed for an invitation even in the worst famines. One day she had given him some warmed-up rabbit stew made by Emma three days earlier. While he was eating it she herself got out a little bowl of sour milk from the cupboard and started to smooth it into her face. He loved this, watching her with a growing excitement centred about the fact that she preferred to do this rather than eat. He was so solemn in his delight that it was not until three weeks afterwards that it struck him she might not have cared for the rabbit stew. All he could see was her bright face with little furrows of snowy curd being stroked into the white cheeks and the forehead, soft floccules clinging to her eyebrows and beading the lashes of one eye.

“They say it's terribly good for the complexion.”

“Who do?”

“I read it in
Woman.”

It could not be otherwise; she seemed to make of the sour milk a precious ointment, he could smell it, a scent stranger than Cleopatra bathing in perfumed asses' milk in the current release at the Regal. The beauty of her sitting opposite him doing this so seriously and yet as lightly as a cat who sweeps her cheeks with ever widening circles of her paw, deprived him of what little appetite he had so that he could do nothing but wait for her to finish, after which they had gone straight through to the divan in the sitting-room to make ineffectual love for the rest of the afternoon.

She was magnificent to lie with, kissing, kissing and kissing to exhaustion, lost and silent, wanting to draw him as he himself wished to be drawn; but each of them waiting for some outside certainty which would permit an ending which never came. Afterward he would never know why he had never crossed the barrier that was most certainly there. It was not unthinkable; he thought about it too much; he always believed that it was possible and that he would; yet again he knew that he never would until she had said that she loved him. He argued, or may have argued that she might let him take her one day without
admitting she loved him; that afterwards he would never be sure that she mightn't have done the same for Groarke or one of the others, and that therefore she would never be his. But in the main he was waiting and he was fairly sure that she was waiting too, even though she might have very different reasons, or no self-known reason at all to judge by so much of her behaviour.