Through Streets Broad and Narrow (2 page)

He could never be rich and he knew it himself from the very first; never a Collins or a Halaghan who were smart boys from the second year onwards, nursing their brogues and Hibernian charm, dressing right and all set to get across to London or out to one of the colonial medical services and marry and do well as the sons of supposed landed gentry back in Ireland. No, Groarke's barrenness was as bleak as an axe and there in his eye from the beginning. When he talked about eventually making money in England or America he was angry beneath it all, remembering all the time that it would never come true in the future any more than it had in his past. Yet he must have fed this wrathful dream long before he left school, by looking in shop windows and reading the apposite kind of book and marking people as he picked out John that day in the Common Room as being smart, with a touch of money or privilege in the background.

With his diffident smile, he came up, sat down, and introduced himself. He knew everything about the course, exactly what lectures there would be and where and when. He said it was a good idea to start the Anatomy a year ahead of the Pre-Registration examination.

“Jacob Gee,” he said, “he's a Jew who's demonstrating in the Anatomy rooms and I know him well. He's going to go over the bones with me on Saturdays so that by the time we come to them we'll be finished with the skeleton and be able to start dissecting while the others are still counting vertebrae.”

He knew where to get books and instruments cheaply, too,
and just which questions were likely to crop up in this year's Pre-Registration exam. He worked a lot in the public libraries because, as he said, they weren't full of “codological fools from Trinity outwitting themselves with their own cleverness.”

And in between putting on all this pressure, making the whole course concertina itself into a series of lightning examinations whose difficulties had been correctly calculated in advance, he drew nearly everything out of John himself about himself. He finished very slyly with a mingling of amusement and interest, not to say flattery, that simply made John talk: about his family, his late matriculation, his private-school background, his father's capital, and, by inference, about his dreams of distinction and self-justification.

In fact the only thing John didn't tell him about was Victoria. He had half-felt like saying, If I don't tell you about Victoria Blount I've really told you nothing about myself at all. I was in love with her when I was eleven and she was twelve. We were in love for a long time, nearly two years; and just before I went to my public school we both went to stay with her mother, Enid and her mother's lover, George Harkess, in his farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors. That morning Victoria got herself picked up by a commercial traveller and when we were picnicking in a cave he followed us in. We couldn't get rid of him. He even found an excuse for getting Victoria to himself. He took her off to post a letter of Enid's and they never came back. He murdered her.

On this first occasion and on others subsequently when he was in such a mood of wanting Groarke to know about it, John would try to imagine Groarke's facial expression as he listened. He believed that he would have continued to recount the story through all Groarke's interest, his stealthy attention, with total coldness and without a pause: If you had been old enough, Groarke, you would probably have read about it in the newspapers at the time, everything. There was the inquest, the police search for the murderer which, for all I know, still continues. But you wouldn't have read about my later history because I never told anyone that, not even Greenbloom. Groarke would have asked, Who was Greenbloom? A Jewish friend of my
brother Michael, very eccentric and rich. For some reason he liked me. He was fascinated by the fact that I had lost Victoria and was always trying to discover where the guilt came into it all because he didn't believe we could have loved each other innocently although we were so young.

If Groarke had asked any further questions about Greenbloom he would have refused to answer them because he might have found it humiliating to admit that in some ways he was still tempted to depend upon him and that they still wrote to each other occasionally. It was against his policy now that he had got away from the family and its connections to confess that he had any need of anyone save to celebrate his successes.

So now, having reached this point in his argument with himself, he reverted to his first decision to remain silent. And as it was, neither then nor at any other time during all his five years in Dublin did he ever tell Groarke or anyone else about it.

In return for his other confidences he himself drew very little out of the Irishman in those first weeks. It was a very slow mosaic he ever put together about his home, beyond the fact that his mother and his father were both alive and that he lived by the sea at Kingstown, or near to it. Later, when the friendship with “Chete” Lascalls, Fitzgerald and the others was well under way they used to pull Groarke's leg about his home life. John, in particular, did this with some regularity until the incident with the Guinness bottles, and afterwards never again. But that all lay in the future and in these early days the restless friendship with the others hadn't even started.

That evening, or a Friday or two later, John got off the tram at Glasnevin Cemetery, walked down Ulsterville Avenue to let himself in at the Flynns' where he was served his tea as usual by Greta, the elder of the two, in the Sacred Heart room.

This was their sitting-room and was full of Catholic pictures and junk. There was Our Lady of Lourdes standing against a quarry with flowers at her feet, an enormous Sacred Heart with a vase-like neck dripping perpetual red drops of wax into its surrounding crown of thorns, a small bust of one of the popes and a photograph of a nun with roses kneeling in a grey garden
with the whites of her eyes a little exposed between the lower lids and the pupils.

There was no fire in the fireplace because fires were never lighted before November or December, depending on the weather, when Mary, the younger sister, would fetch out the saved orange peel and put a match to it under the remains of last February's cinders.

The orange peel was dried and shrunken as the breasts of a mummy and blazed furiously, because as Mary explained, “it was the oils in it.” They must have gone to great trouble to preserve it, never doing more than slicing the oranges in half in order to get the fruit out of them, and then putting them away in the chip box in the cupboard under the stairs.

Friday at the Flynns' was not too bad in the way of supper. The leftovers from the Tertiary tea were still nearly fresh, the bread not yet parting from the cucumber or fish paste, and the spice buns quite soft if soaked first in the excellent brown tea. Nevertheless, John had never succeeded in eating it all, partly because the bread filled him up too quickly and partly because there was a dilemma in his increasing anger at the fare. If anything were left he would get it the following evening and that would save them money; whereas, if for once he consumed it all, they would be pleased that nothing had been spoiled while he would have been used like a waste bin. They seemed to be in an unassailable position and if he had not been so nervous of Dublin, of changing his quarters at all in those first months, he would have been so very resentful from an early date that he would have given in his notice and gone elsewhere.

He was extremely timid at this time, excusing himself by advancing his late development as a cause. To have been so long at home had made him fearful of leaving Ulsterville Avenue without first consulting everyone about it in Anglesey, which was impossible. Although he did not realize it, this first timorousness up by Glasnevin was the primary symptom of the disease he developed fully only five years later: a caution and suspicion of the Dublin Irish which amounted nearly to paranoia and which dogged him for fifteen years afterwards.

Despite the constancy of his fear and anger he was always
polite: his politeness astonished him, he had never said a word that was not a miracle of courtesy. When they came in as they often did to stand about him and watch him with strange kindness he always pretended to be enjoying the food. He heard them rub their mauve hands as he crunched up the spice buns the Franciscan Tertiaries had been unable to eat a night or two before. He even found himself saying, as he said now, most complimentary things about their kindness in having saved the stuff for him.

Greta asked him what he was doing that night, was he going to study at his books again? And he told her, no, that he was going down to the Clynches' in Cork Street.

“Are you now?”

He felt them glance at one another behind his back because the Clynches' were Catholic and they knew it. But they did not know that this did not yet enter at all into his reckoning, that he had not even become socially sensitized; it being as unimportant to him as a political allegiance, or perhaps even a little less so. Theresa Clynche was the one he had his eye on in Cork Street, and what she did on Sunday mornings did not interest him in the very least.

The Catholicism of the country to him was like its climate; he noticed it occasionally but had it so firmly fixed in his mind that Ireland was Catholic, green and wet that except for the odd time he did not care whether most of the inhabitants carried umbrellas or not. His nonchalance on this was lost quite soon, and in the social sense, quite completely, by the accumulation of trivial incidents like the Flynns' silver paper party.

For some reason, conciliatory, no doubt, he suggested on this particular evening that he would help them with it for half an hour or so. While Greta cleared the tea things he went into the next room with Mary and sat down at the table on which the silver paper and the medals were stacked in large bundles and little boxes.

This was St. Joseph's room. There were a number of statues of him with and without Family, and at least three different pictures showing him young and in the background: a hale bridegroom. There had been a picture in the Northumberland nursery
showing Our Lord and His earthly father at work in the carpenter's shop using very modern tools, a light breaking round the Child's head as He held the hammer and the nails; and this was the point, that St. Joseph was just a background figure whom no one would have brought forward to the extent of filling a room with him. Nor making him so young and good-looking.

The children of the Guild of Mary had collected a vast amount of silver paper from chocolate boxes and packets, cigarette cartons and the insides of tea chests. There was even some tangerine silver paper left over from somebody's Christmas the year before and they must have scoured the slum pavements and shops to collect it because some of it was gutter-dirty and mixed up with old bills and apple peel. It had all to be smoothed out and folded flat and packed neatly to go off to the hospital or some sodality or other; and once this was done and it had been weighed and priced, the children would get their Vatican medals in exchange: pope's heads, miraculous plaques, and Sacred Hearts with thorns through them.

“Do you give them oranges or anything with the medals?” he asked Mary.

“Who? The
chill
dren?” (Mary pronounced it like that always, making them sound very cold and poor.)

“Yes, the children who collected it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They wouldn't be wanting them.”

“Well, cocoa then, in the winter?”

“Notatall,” she said; all in one word, for emphasis.

“But they're slum children, aren't they?”

“They're poor,” she said, pronouncing it “poohr.” “They're very poohr, all right.”

“Well, then, surely you ought to give them something to eat? They can't eat these,” he said, dripping a rain of medals through his fingers.

“They'd rather have them all the same,” she said, lifting her voice as Greta came in. “Wouldn't they, Greta? Here's Mr.
Blaydon wanting to know if we give the
chill
dren oranges or cocoa with the medals?”

The cucumber and fish paste rising and souring him as much as the scorn he thought he detected in her voice, he said, “
We
always fed them. In my father's parish in the north of England, the Wolf Cubs, Guilds, Mothers, Scouts and Guides always got a bellyful summer and winter; not just a bellyful of talk, but of food as well. Why, even after Communion, there was the parish breakfast, buns and marmalade, home-baked bread and tea and sugar. Tea cakes!”

“Ah, Commungyon,” they said together.

“He doesn't understand,” said one of them as they both went on so greedily at the silver paper that it might have been his money they were counting and storing away.

“No, I don't! Not if you take their silver paper and sell it while they are hungry. Our Lord commanded that you should feed my sheep.”

“Ah! St. Peter,” they whispered together.

“Hell!” he said, pushing back his chair.

“Now don't be angry,” said Greta.

“No, don't be flaring at us,” added Mary. “You see it's right even though we can't explain. It's very hard to be finding the words: the
chill
dren want the medals.”

“More!” said Greta. “They want them more; and the poorher they are, don't they want them desperately?”

“Well, in any case, I'll have to be going,” he said, rising impatiently from his chair. “There's never time to explain something that's wrong. You'll find that; I have already.”

“So you're very young,” said Mary. “Isn't he, Greta?”

“He's young and a little lonely just now.”

“That's nothing to do with it,” he said. “It's the children that matter. I've seen some of them already, they're lighter than birds and I have a friend who's going to be a good doctor who says half of them have the rickets over here. We don't have rickets in England.”

“England!” they said with just a suggestion of sighing in the way they looked upwards at the ceiling. And, as he got to the door, “Well, goodnight now, Mr. Blaydon, and if you're wanting
a warm drink when you come back in from the Clynches', there's some milk in the kitchen.”