Dream of Fair to Middling Women (25 page)

2.
Mild Form.

My father must have been a butcher. I was coming home from some dance or ball or other, because I wore a superb evening gown that became me and satin shoes. I crossed the road and went into the house. It was a big bare room, in a lather of blood. Afraid of staining the gown I caught it up, like Nicolette in the dew, and tiptoed over to the foot of the stair. I was surprised how easily and gracefully I was able to avoid the red puddles. Upstairs just a bare skivvy's cell: wash-hand stand, dresser, stretcher, cracked mirror. Suddenly it seemed that everything, I, my body, my clothes, the party, the whole content of the evening, was a result of the blood I had come through on my way up.

At last the plot looks as if it might begin to thicken, the storm-clouds to gather. The season of festivity and goodwill is upon them. Shopping is in full swing, the streets are thronged with revellers, the Corporation has offered a substantial reward for the best window-dressing, Hyam's trousers are down yet again.

Mistinguett, were she an Empress Wu, would abolish
chalets of necessity. She does not think they are necessary. Not so Belacqua. Emerging happy body from the hot bowels of McLouglin's it struck him again how just exactly right was Tom Moore's bull neck, not a whit too short, as most critics maintained. Bright and cheery above the strom of the College Green, as though coached by the Star of Bethlehem, the Bovril sign danced and danced through its seven phases.

The lemon of faith jaundiced, annunciating the series, was in a fungus of hopeless green reduced to shingles and abolished. Next, in reverence for the slain, the light went out. A sly ooze of gules, carmine of solicitation, lifting the skirts of green that the prophesy might be fulfilled, shocking Gabriel into cherry, annexed the sign. But the long skirts rattled down, darkness covered their shame, and the cycle was at an end. Da capo.

Bovril into Salome, thought Belacqua, and Tommy Moore there with his head on his shoulders. Doubt, Despair and Scrounging, shall I hitch my bathchair to the greatest of these? Across the way, under the arcades of the Bank, the blind paralytic was in his place, he was well tucked up in his coverings, he was eating his dinner like any working man. A friend, not even a friend, a hireling, would come for him at the appointed hour and wheel him home through the dark streets. He would be put to bed. He would be called for punctually and wheeled gently, for he was a power in the Coombe. At cockcrow in the morning he would be shaved and wheeled swiftly to his post. And no man had ever seen him come or go. He went and he returned. When you scrounge you go and you return. That was the first great article of scrounging. Out of his own country no man could scrounge, not properly. The Wanderjahre were a sleep and a forgetting, the proud dead
point. You came back wise and staked your beat in some sheltered place. Pennies came dribbling steadily in and you were looked up to in an alley.

Belacqua had been proffered a sign. Of what avail is it to flog a dead cow. Let attention be drawn simply to the fact: Bovril had made a sign.

Wohin now? To what public? To where the bottled was well up, first; and the solitary shawly like a cloud of the latter rain after the sands of poets and politicians, second; and he neither knew nor was known, third. A lowly house dear to shawlies where the stout was up and he could sit himself to himself on a high stool with a high round and feign to be immersed in the Moscow notes of the Twilight Herald. They were very piquant.

Of the two houses that appealed to these exigencies the one, in Merrion Row, was a home from home for jarveys. That was a point very much in its disfavour. As the Alba hens, so Belacqua could not relish a jarvey. Rough, gritty men. And to Merrion Row from McLouglin's underground was a long perilous way, alive at this hour with poets and peasants and politicians. The other house lay in Lincoln Place. He could go gently by Pearse St, there was nothing to stop him. Long straight Pearse St, it permitted of a simple cantilena in his mind, its footpaths peopled with the tranquil and detached in tiredness and its highway dehumanised in a tumult of buses. Trams were monstrous, moaning along under the wild gesture of the trolley. But buses were simple, tyres and glass and noise. To pass by the Queens, the home of tragedy, was a pleasure at this hour, to pass between the old theatre and the long line of the poor and lowly queued up for thruppence worth of pictures. For there Florence would slip into the cantilena, the Piazza della Signoria and the No 1 tram and the festival
of St John there with the torches of resin ensconced in the niches of every tower flickering all night long and children with the rockets at the fall of night over the Cascine still flagrant in their memory opened the little cages to the glutted cicadae that had survived the long confinement and sat on with their irresponsible parents long after their usual bedtime. Then he walked slowly in his mind down the sinister Uffizi to the parapets of the Arno etc. This pleasure was bestowed by the knowledge of the Fire Station across the way that had apparently been copied here and there from the Palazzo Vecchio. In homage to Savonarola? Hee! Hee! Anyway, no matter how you looked at it, it was a toleramble ramble in the gloaming, and all the more so as he had a great thirst towards the lowly house that would snatch him in off the street in the end through the door of the grocery department if by good fortune that were still open.

Painfully then under the College ramparts, past the smart taxis, he set off, winding up the cerebro-musical-box. The Fire Station worked like the trusty fetish it was, and all was going as well as could be expected considering what lay before him later in the evening when a terrible thing happened. He ran plump into Chas. It was Chas who could not or would not leave well alone, Belacqua being absorbed in his poor feet and the line of the tune in his mind. It was all Chas's fault.

“Halte-là” exclaimed the pirate “whither so gay?”

Under the overhead railway Belacqua was obliged to halt and face this machine. It carried butter and loaf bought at the dairy. There is only one dairy of any real consequence in Pearse St proper—though a multitude of fine little general groceries in the lanes that lie between
it and the river—and it is close to the tomb-stone manufactory. It is of great consequence. Chas bought his fuel there. Every evening he called round for re-fills. Belac-qua, however, was giving nothing away.

“Ramble” he said vaguely “in the twilight.”

“Just a song” said his dear friend “at twilight. Hein?”

Belacqua fidgeted in the gloom cast by the viaduct. Had he been blocked on his way and violated in the quiet of his mind to listen to this clockwork fiend? Apparently.

“How's the world” he said, however, in spite of everything, “and what's the news of the great world?”

“Fair” said Chas, cautiously, “fair to meedling. The poem moves, eppure.”

“Ah.”

“Yes.”

“Well” said Belacqua, drawing away, “au plaisir.

” “But this very evening” cried Chas “chez the Frica? Hein?”

“Alas” said Bel, well adrift.

And she. In her scarletest robe. And her broad bored pale face. The belle of the ball. Aïe!

But never one without two, and sure enough behold now from out the Grosvenor sprang the homespun poet wiping his mouth and a little macaco of an anonymous politico-ploughboy setting him off. The Poet sucked his teeth over this unexpected pleasure. The golden Eastern lay of his bullet head was mitigated by no covering. Beneath the Wally Whitmaneen of his Donegal tweeds his body was to be presumed. He gave the impression of having lost a harrow and found a figure of speech. He struck terror into the heart of our hero.

He issued a word of command.

“Drink.”

Belacqua slunk at his heels into the Grosvenor, the bright gimlet eyes of the macaco probed his loins.

“Now” proclaimed the Poet, as though he had just brought an army across the Beresina, “give it a name.”

“Excuse me” stammered Belacqua “just an instant, will you have the kindness?”

He waddled out of the bar and out into the street and up the street at all speed and into the lowly public through the door of its grocery department. That was a rude thing to do. When intimidated he was rude beyond measure, not timidly insolent like Stendhal's Comte de Thaler, but finally rude on the sly. Timidly insolent when, as by Chas, exasperated; definitely rude on the sly when intimidated, outrageously rude behind the back of his oppressor. That was Belacqua. Do we begin to know him?

He bought a paper from a charming little sloven, no, but a positively exquisite little Stoebli, he would not menace him, a freelance clearly, he slipped in on his dirty bare feet with only three or four under his arm for sale. Belacqua gave him a threepenny bit and a cigarette picture. He sat on a stool to himself in the central leaf of the main triptych, his feet on a round so high that his knees topped the curb of the counter—a most comfortable seat—and drank stout scarcely at half-mast (but he durst not stir) and made a show of reading the paper.

'A woman' he read with appreciation ‘is either: a short-below-the-waist, a big-hip, a sway-back, a big-abdomen or an average. If the bust be too cogently controlled, then shall fat roll from scapula to scapula. If it be made passable and slight, then shall the diaphragm bulge and be unsightly. Why not invest therefore chez a reputable corset-builder in the brassière-cum-corset déecolleté, made from
the finest Brochés, Coutils and Elastics, quintuple stitched in wearing parts, fitted with unbreakable spiral steels. It bestows glorious diaphragm and hip support, it enhances the sleeveless backless evening gown…'

Very good! Would the scarletest robe be backless? Was she a short-below-the-waist or a sway-back. She had no waist. If she swayed at all it was forward. She was not to be classified. Not to be corseted. Not a woman.
Grock ad libitum inquit.

He began now to be harrassed by dread less the robe should turn out, by God, to be backless. Not but that he thought the back thus bared would not be good. The omoplates would be well marked, they would have a fine free ball-and-socket motion. In repose they would be the blades of an anchor, the fine furrow of the spine its stem. His mind pored over this back that he hoped devoutly not to see. He saw it in his mind as an anchor, a flower-de-luce, a spatulate leaf with segments, like the wings of a butterfly at work on a flower, angled back slightly from the common hinge; then, fetching from further afield, as an obelisk, a cross-potent, pain and death, still death, a bird crucified on a wall. This flesh and bones swathed in scarlet, this heart of washed flesh draped in scarlet.

Unable any longer to bear his uncertainty as to the rig of the robe he passed through the counter and got her house on the telephone.

“Dressing” said the Venerilla “and raging.”

No, she couldn't be got down. She'd been up in her room cursing and swearing for the last hour.

“I'm afraid of me gizzard” said the voice “to go near her.”

“Is it closed at the back” demanded Belacqua “or is it open?”

“Is what closed?”

“The dress” cried Belacqua “what do you think? The dress she is wearing. Is it closed?”

The Venerilla said to hold on while she called it to the eye of the mind.

“Is it the red one?” she said, after a pause.

“The scarlet bloody dress of course” he cried out of his torment “do you not know?”

“Hold on now… It buttons…”

“Buttons? How—buttons?”

“It buttons up behind, sir, with the help of God.”

“Again” said Belacqua.

“Amn't I after telling” moaned the Venerilla down the instrument “that it buttons up on her!”

“Praise be to God” said Belacqua “and his Blissful Mother.”

Now they get themselves ready, the men, women and children that the Frica's mother through the Frica had bidden. From divers points of the cities and suburbs, the nursery, the public-house, the solicitude of the family circle, the bachelor from his cosy and the student from his dirty quarters, they converged now upon her. Who—her? The Frica. Some were on their way, others on the threshold, the threshold of departure, yet others putting the finishing touches to their toilet, or, having done so, chafing to be on the road. But all, one and sundry, whatever their status and wherever their dwelling, however great their impatience or reluctance to be off, would be at more pains to respect the ten or fifteen minutes that etiquette required should intercalate the hush of their proud dead calm between the opening of the door and the first application for admission than would at first thought seem compatible,
except the enormous importance in the cerebellum of fashionable Dublin of so grotesque a function as that now to be held be fully appreciated, with their complete indifference, on the occasion of an orchestral concert, as to whether they reached their seats before the conductor his pulpit, or inversely. To set out to make those pains consistent with this nonchalance would be to do the fashional psyche at all times and in all places, and a fortiori the Dublin specimen, the injury of supposing it to partake of the nature of a fixed gear. Our constant concern for the necks, and more particularly when they threaten to turn out to be wry, of our figures, will not tolerate anything more persuasive on this head than a bald blunt pronunciamento, to wit: that the fashionable psyche disposes of a more restless clutch and a more copious gamut of ratios than any engine ever contrived by the bottom speed ingenuity of man. That is why it is more charming than any engine.

There is yet time, before the masks get together and join issue, for a quick razzia of eavesdropping, a few pothooks and hangers of peeping and creeping and instantaneity.

Calm now and sullen the Alba, dressed insidiously up to the nines, bides her time in the sunken kitchen, paying no heed to her fool and foil the Venerilla. She is in pain, her brandy is at hand, mulling in the big glass on the range. We have seen her absented and distracted in mind, we have been privileged to see her, in a manner of speaking, sheathed. But now we are expected to suppose, behind this façade abandoned in elegance, sagging in its elegance and clouded in its native sorrow that her thought for the moment is at no pains to dissemble, a more anxious
rite than luxury of meditation. The truth of the matter is that her mind is at prayer-stool before a perhaps futile purpose, she is loading the spring of her mind for a perhaps unimportant undertaking. Letting her outside rip for the moment she is screwing herself up and up, she is winding up the weights of her mind, to being the belle of the ball. Any less bountiful girl would have scorned such a performance and considered this class of absorption at the service of so simple an occasion unwarranted and, what was worse, a sad give away. Here am I, a less bountiful would have said, the belle, and yonder is the ball. It is only a question of bringing these two items together and the thing is done. Are we then expected to insinuate, with such a simplist, that the Alba questioned the virtue of her appearance? Not for a moment. She had merely to unleash her eyes, she had merely to unseel them, and well she knew it, and she could have mercy on whom she would. That was all right. Everything was in order as far as that went. But what she did question, and this ought to do to explain her demeanour to the puzzled, was the fitness of a distinction that was hers for the wanting. She only had to open her eyes and take it. That the very simplicity of the gest turned her in the first place against it, relegating it among the many things that were not her genre, cannot be denied. But there we have only a minute aspect of her position. It is with the disparagement attaching to the quality of the exploit in the thought of Belacqua, and in hers tending to, that she now wrestles. It is with its no doubt unworthiness that she has now to do. Sullen and still, aware of the brandy at hand but not thirsting for it, she cranks herself up to a reality of preference, slowly and surely she gilds her option, she exalts it into realms of choice. She will do this thing, she will, she will be the belle, gladly, gravely and carefully,
humiliter, simpliciter, fideliter, and not merely because she might just as well. Is she, who
knows,
to be equilibrated in Buridan's marasmus? Shall she founder in a strait of two wills? By hanging in suspense be the more killed? She who
knows?
Soon she will chafe to be off. And now she dare, until it be time, the clock strike, delegate a portion of her attention for the purpose of re-organising her features, hands, shoulders, back, hang of robe, general bearing, outside in a word. The inside is fixed up. At once she is thirsty for the Hennessy. She sings to herself, for her own pleasure, stressing all the words that should be stressed, like Dan the first to warble like a turdus: