Through Streets Broad and Narrow (20 page)

“I work better for it,” John said.

“When? When you've finished writing for the Bi and the Phil? When you've finished going to every dance advertised in Front Gate and floating out your money on White Ladies and flowers?” Groarke had stopped too late and they both walked into the pause, the silence which followed, like people stepping off into the gutter for one another. They looked at each other and looked away again.

“I'm grateful to you, Mike,” John said, “We've done well together and you've helped, but I've got to do things, find them out.”

“One thing's enough. If you'd less money you'd know what you've got in having your fees sitting in the bank. There's only two years to go now before we qualify. You should wait until after that.”

“Wait for what?”

“Exhibitionism, trying to live six different lives in the space of one; Ffynch and the Ranelagh Club, the Phil and the Bi and now this muscle stuff.”

John said, “I saw Cloate a day or two ago, he was bloody rude to me.”

“You're getting yourself a name,” Groarke said, “they smell cod.”

“Then to hell with them. I'm English, we've no time for all this cratching and snarling. If I got into the Ranelagh Club it's not my fault; if I happen to be able to write and get noticed for what I've done by the Phil there's no ground for resentment. When they see that I can do the same thing in the Bi, constructively, they may change their ideas. They'll realize then that all my interests are centred on medicine, that although I may look like a playboy I'm in earnest—and in any case I don't see much of Ffynch now and scarcely ever go into the Club.”

“Gill, Moffatt, Macdonald Browne all know you're a member. They've been cracks about it in the
Miscellany
. There's only one doctor ever been elected and he was a regius professor. Your best hope is to stick to the course and keep quiet, you're too much talked about.”

“You'll have me paranoid.”

“It's not a bad thing,” Groarke said, “for a noisy Englishman when Finals are round the corner.”

That night was a Thursday and John took his paper into Davy Byrnes'. There were a lot of the Boat Club in there, and with them, Kerruish.

“Blaydon's going to fight welter in the Novices. Isn't he the man for us now? What are you drinking, John, and what's that you have with you?”

“A letter from Dymphna Uprichard,” one of them said. “No, it's his paper for the Bi. Let's hear some of it.”

But he did not start to read it until he'd had a drink or two. He had been round to the flat and seen Collins' M.G. outside and Broyle's bicycle fastened to the railings with a little chain.

All that Groarke had said and many things which he had not said had contributed to the dark storms which overlay the climate of his love for Dymphna. The club had proved distasteful, a totally unreal world of enormous static armchairs, idling like the members themselves in an environment that had nothing to do with rewards or work.

“Come on,” they said, “we heard your last to the Phil, it was a killer. What're you going to give the Bi tomorrow night?”

They got into a corner and he read them the section on Gibson doing the jejunal resection. When he had finished everyone stood him drinks.

“What did I tell you?” said Kerruish. “He's got words, has this one. They'll all be jumping round on one foot when they hear that. Give us that bit on the placenta again where old Bethelgert gets up and interrupts Macdonald Browne about infarction.”

“No,” said somebody else, “let him read on a bit.” Lynch demanded the beginning, Rafferty wanted the end, but Kerruish said, “Have you not given Cloate a pasting? You'd not go wrong there with that little cod always after other men's wives. Did I tell you I met him in the Theatre Royal one evening last week?”

“You told us, Jack,” everyone shouted.

They talked on a little longer and then most of them left to go down to the Dolphin for steak and chips; but Lynch, a pale man with a very involved and solemn way of talking, hung back and suggested that he and John go to eat somewhere quietly together. They cut across Dawson Street to a small restaurant where there was a bright fire and few patrons. Lynch said, “I'll stand you dinner. That stuff of yours is good.”

“D'you think it is?”

“You know it is, don't you? You must do. If someone does a thing well it stands to reason they must know about it. It's
very involved really, but what I want to say is that performance whether it's practical or aesthetic is it's own arbiter. Take Joyce for instance; that bit in the
Dubliners
where they're arguing about the sermon by the Jesuit and one of them keeps on passing wind and the other—”

“I haven't read Joyce yet,” John said. “Somehow I always seem to be more interested in what I'm thinking myself, though sometimes when I do read someone good I get a feeling of tremendous excitement.”

“Exactly! That's the artist in you.”

Lynch talked at great length, very pale; and sweating himself, with a slow sort of excitement. As he talked, a great bitterness seemed to be welling out of him and with the bitterness a most remote but persistent appeal for applause. He reached various very involved epigrammatic passages in what he was saying and paused each time expectantly. John, bewildered, tried to look impressed and Lynch became more and more incoherent and excited. But eventually he said, “Get that thing of yours out and lay it on the table; we'll go through it together and I'll tell you where you're falling off and where you ought to rewrite. Those other Philistines don't realize that it's more than a jape, that it's a very powerful satire. Now take those descriptions of yours, in some of them you're just playing with yourself, aren't you, Blaydon, holding yourself back?”

“Perhaps, yes, I think you're right.”

“Well, don't. It's irresponsible. Cut right down into it. Forget the belly-laughers and hit out at the shams and the cods, tear the hospital wide open so that you'll be taken seriously.”

“It's too risky.”

“Only if you stop halfway,” Lynch said. “Have another drink. You've got to realize that lack of conviction is the real danger, you'll please no one if you hang back. I happen to know that if they can, they're going to pull you apart tomorrow night. The Bethelgert clique think you've had it too easy in the Phil and they're going to slow-clap and moan at your jokes. Mike Groarke's been putting it about that you imagine you're going to have them by the short hairs without committing yourself.”

After a drink or two more John consented. With Lynch's
prompting he saw the paper in a different light; it was going to be a genuine test of his ability and of his convictions. Together they worked through it paragraph by paragraph. After the good meal and the copious drinks, words seemed to flow ever more easily; new ideas, manners of presenting the deepest misgivings about the functions of hospitals in general and of Mungo Park's in particular, came to him with an electric facility.

At eleven o'clock, with the paper substantially reconstructed, with all that had been left out now most vividly replaced, Lynch professed himself satisfied.

They went back to John's rooms with the momentary sense that in discovering the full measure of his talent they had also discovered something most rare and valuable in themselves. Lynch admitted that although he was in his final year he had long been a regular follower of John's activities in the Phil and that he had always felt he had a brilliant future ahead of him. He suggested that so far John's only mistake had lain in his selection of the wrong friends.

“Groarke,” he said, “has never been out of Ireland. He's a dangerous man for you to be mixing with, a favour-seeker who uses any and everybody as he used Cloate and yourself; but the moment it suits him he'd knock you like a poacher knocking off a rabbit.”

John agreed with all this effusively; but he wished Lynch would go. He did not like his pale face and refrangent blue eyes. When he talked he talked too quietly and through too much saliva; he sweated continuously and his incoherence begot a strange unease, a desperation quite different from that of Groarke because it seemed to stem from a loneliness which was protesting whereas Groarke's was selected and even cultivated.

John thought, He's the sort of man you keep on meeting without ever wanting to get to know him. He's clever, of course, and it's good to have interested him so much, but I don't really care a damn what he thinks about anything else, and by this he meant, anything else but my writing.

When they said goodnight Lynch told him that he and the final year would be at the meeting in force. He said, “We're going to slaughter the Bethelgert gang in the discussion.”

At the Bi the applause started almost immediately when John reached the description of the porter clanging the gong for the arrival of Gill. From that moment onwards the unusually large audience, swelled by members of the Phil and a number of medical guests from Merrion Square and Fitzwilliam Square, kept quiet as the picture of the hospital was slowly filled in for them.

After the delight of his initial nervousness, sharp as that of a gambler who has staked too much, John experienced the even sweeter sensation of certainty in the validity of what he was relating. A steel tightrope seemed to stretch between himself and the composite of his hearers. He knew precisely at which moment he would hear the sounds of protest from the Bethelgert section, at which the relief of laughter from everyone.

During part of the reading great vanities lifted him up like successive waves. He saw not only his childhood justified and the pain he had suffered in the loss of Victoria; he also remembered his solitariness at the Abbey, the distaste of Beowulf's and the recurrent doubts of the family in his ability ever to overcome his eccentricity and backwardness. Against these he set the memory of Greenbloom's confidence in him and his continued interest. He thought, I am, after all, more than a match for the world. I am succeeding in everything I undertake. I have flowered late into something more than a student, more than a writer: a leader.

As he reached the end, the enumeration of the remedies he proposed, he was anticipating in his mind the new standing the paper would give him with the medical faculty, the certainty that his increased reputation would tilt the scales of Dymphna's estimation of him so that she would, after all, find that she loved him.

When he sat down to hear out the subsequent discussion, he was quite beyond appreciating the tone of it. He remembered only that Bethelgert had protested that his paper had been an attack, gross and distorted, on the very foundation of the hospital system, that it had been unbalanced since it took no account of the excellence and goodness of the motives underlying the services so continually dispensed.

When old Jameson, the President, asked him to reply to the
debate, this was the one point which John made. He said it was as foolish to question the good intentions of medical ethic in hospitals as it was to doubt the good intentions of Christianity; but the real question was whether or not the good intentions were adequately fulfilled in practice.

At this there was a roar from Lynch's group in which nearly everyone joined in at the expense of the Bethelgert brothers, who were Orthodox Jews. Realizing his mistake in choosing such a metaphor John was about to apologize when he saw that to do so would only make matters worse, so he sat down quickly, deciding that he would apologize to Bethelgert privately at the first opportunity. But in the middle of the uproar both Bethelgert and his brother, together with Schribman, Shrago and half a dozen other Finals students got up and left the meeting without waiting for the refreshments which were to be served at the end.

It did not, at the time, seem to matter very much. As Lynch said loudly and repeatedly, “They came here to bring you down and you were too much for them. My God, when you hipped old Bethelgert on being a Jew without ever mentioning it, I could have—and that sweet bit about the gold medallist who ends up practising euthanasia for his failures on the side. They'll all be licking their wounds tonight.”

“It wasn't meant to be entirely personal,” John said.

“Now come on,” they said, “it stuck out a mile. You hit them off to the very life. Those descriptions of Cloate, Gibson, of old Stafford Harman himself with his, ‘I diagnosed it on the telephone' in a ‘luetic falsetto'! Did you know he'd had the tabes in nineteen eighteen or was it an inspired guess?”

“Standing joke,” John said, “but that's not the point. What I was really getting at—”

Groarke cut in suddenly and said, “Higher thoughts'll often land you in the—”

“Pure entertainment,” said someone else, “All that cock about hospitals in a green belt was only padding now, wasn't it? And of course utterly impractical. It'd be fine to have yourself wheeled out ten miles to the Curragh with a splenic haemorrhage following a motor smash in Grafton Street.”

“I explained,” said John with a little heat, “that there would be urban emergency centres in the towns, each one connected with, or under the patronage of, a particular hospital.”

“Oh go on! What bullshit! Who'd staff them? Bethelgert and Schribman, I suppose, or other refujews from Germany? No, no, it was damned good fun. It ought to have the medal, but of course it won't.”

“Why not?” asked someone.

“With Bethelgert's old man belonging to the same lodge as Stafford Harman and Freddie Gibson? Don't be damn silly.”

A friend of Lynch's elbowed his way into the group. “Who's got it?” he asked, “I want to borrow it. I'm going to see it gets well written up in the
Miscellany.”

“No,” John said, “I'd rather—”

But it was snatched from beneath his arm and was passed round from hand to hand as extracts were re-read aloud. A sudden fatigue overcoming him, a misgiving as uncertain as the premonitory twinge of a decaying tooth, John made no further protest. Ducking out of the loud circle he called Groarke and they went back to his rooms.