Through Streets Broad and Narrow (25 page)

“But what's this he told Cosby in the second round?”

“He hasn't told us yet.”

“What I want to know is why a man should start training himself to think of nothing when there's so much else to be thinking about.”

“It's a Buddhist. He's part of a Buddhist.”

John left them there with the farmers joining in; some of them, being Catholics, suggesting that it was a form of meditation analogous to the exercises of the Jesuits. As he had intended, nobody saw him leave.

When he got back to his rooms he put the cup on the mantelpiece and tried on the tie in front of the bedroom mirror. It looked unconvincing but the fact that Dymphna had bought it for him gave it a most potent significance. He knew that he would never wear it, never throw it away, never see it if he could avoid it. He slid it back into the bag in which it had been wrapped, collected the cup from the sitting room mantelpiece and put them both in his suitcase under the truckle bed.

A few days later there was a Dymphna letter in his box.

Surely you're not going to go on being sombong for the rest of the term? Not even coming to say goodbye or thank you for the Campanile? Nobody who mattered laughed at you at all at the fight. Fergus Cloate said

This was ineffectively crossed out and a fresh sentence began.

I hate to lose people, my friends, I can't bear them just to stop. You'll say that's me again, but I can't help being me, can I? You ought to be sorry for me if you are. Not just ignoring and going past and never to the usual places. I scarcely even see you since the fight. I'm sad.

Then her name scrawled and a picture of a girl's head.

He hesitated about this letter. It was not a new factor at all; he had received many such and always quite soon after reading them he had telephoned her, or replied at great length, then torn up the reply and answered most briefly without using a single endearment. Sometimes in this way he had written eleven or twelve replies and destroyed them all, telephoning instead, or, better still, going off to her rooms to see her, take her out, reproach or forgive her, make love to her, act out some new attitude, pursue some different characterization of himself: silence, mystery, merriment, nonchalance, insouciance, passion, angriness; any visualized self-projection of a role that might intrigue or mystify her, make her grow fond and bring her to his hand forever.

But this time he did nothing. The term was very nearly at an end, in four or five days he would be on his way to Anglesey and from there to David's Vicarage at Maidenford for a time that would be sufficiently beguiling to make continued, total
and, for her, bewildering restraint possible until the following term.

He looked no further ahead than that, because he knew that then a new phase in their relationship must begin. He hoped only that some change would have occurred within himself which would make it possible for him to make no further mistakes; for secretly, most profoundly, he was convinced that it was only a change in himself which was required and not in Dymphna. This was perhaps a very extraordinary conviction to hold since he despised nearly everything that she did or said, read, believed, laughed about and presumably, therefore, thought. He never attempted to explain to himself why or how, simultaneously with his scorn, he was unable to hear her laugh, see her reading a book or venturing an opinion without a turn of his heart so excruciatingly sweet that he instantly approved the cause of her merriment, the substance of the book she was reading or the opinion she held, temporarily even accepting it himself.

In Grafton Street that day he met Theresa for the first time in nearly two years. She was very smartly dressed, thinner and wearing more make-up. She had put her hair up and on its soft summit was wearing a tiny hat with a pheasant's feather on the crown. He certainly did not recognize her and, taking her in swiftly as he always did take in any pretty girl he ever saw, would have passed her had she not spoken to him.

He asked her to have lunch with him there and then in the Country Shop at the table he usually shared with Dymphna. She told him that she was on leave from an English Hospital following an appendectomy. She said, “I wondered if I might see you, this time.”

“How long have you been nursing in England?”

“Oh, nearly two years.”

“Do you like it?”

“I've grown up,” she said, “wasn't I naïve in the old days—do you remember?”

She asked him how far on he was with the course and he told her.

“Only another two years,” she said, “and you'll be doing house
jobs. We do have fun with the housemen at the Royal, you'd never believe the tricks they get up to. When I was on nights last November Jack Sunderland, he's Mr. Harrison's registrar, and another doctor caught me at six in the morning just as I was coming off duty. They gagged me with some tulle gras and tied me up with a many-tailed bandage and carried me off to their bedroom over in the Admin Block. I kicked and screamed but I couldn't make a sound. Then just as they were taking me past the office, Night Sister appeared round the corner and they slipped me into cloaks and went off with her for over half an hour pretending they were on their way to a pulmonary oedema in Medical.”

She went on like this all through lunch; hospital patter streaming out like milk from a little cow. She described the Christmas Dance and the New Year's Dance and the many social amenities of Bradford, the taste of Green Goddess cocktails, Pilsener lager, gypsy champagne. She smoked two cigarettes and made up her face three time in an hour, hinted at the daring customs of housemen when they were called to the Nurses' Home to visit sick nurses.

When their knees touched under the table, instead of instantly withdrawing her own, she pressed it as closely as Dymphna would have done. While he was paying the bill she slipped off to the Ladies' with a smile whereas before she had always been coldly self-effacing about such absences.

He took her to the pictures and she bought him a packet of cigarettes. In the cinema she held his hand enthusiastically, responding to every pressure. Soon he was kissing her ardently, tasting her cyclamen lipstick, French Fern face powder and the delicate chemist's scent which seemed to have impregnated the soft skin of her neck. By the time the programme was over they were both moist and a little embarrassed.

Theresa laughed and propped off on her high heels to “repair the damage” and John went to the Gentlemen's to dip his head in a basin of cold water and remove the lipstick on the paper towels.

They had tea together in the Regal Tea Rooms and he invited her to have dinner with him in the Ranelagh Club that evening.
She only just kept her balance at this invitation; he saw with delight that it had taken all her two years of Green Goddesses and hospital “finishing” for her to sound matter-of-fact in her acceptance, and when later he was seeing her onto her tram he noted with a sense of poignancy that she was not very used to the high heels either.

Before dinner in the ladies' side of the club he studied her with pleasure.

Without the hat her hair style was absurdly wrong. The little bolero she was wearing was cut like that of a cinema usherette, every line and stitch of her dress proclaiming her social origin. Her evening shoes were disquietingly tall in the heel, she could not walk in them without a pronounced wobble. Her evening bag looked as though it had been unsuccessfully cleaned after a night in a fish and chip shop, her glass jewellery was grotesque, her make-up so misguided that instead of looking like a chorus girl, then the fashion, she looked only like a young nurse off duty.

He gave her sherry in the ladies' drawing-room, seating her on the most central sofa facing the sunburst clock above the Adam fireplace, timing their arrival just prior to the busiest hour of the evening.

After two glasses of Amontillado her Dublin accent with its nasally contorted vowels was merging distinctively with the clipped consonants of hospital-Cheshire and she was talking away more loudly than anyone else in the room, laughing immoderately and flashing him ill-bred glances of sexual complicity. The club servants maintained a frigid courtesy every time he summoned them. Their own Dublin accents, long attenuated by mixing with the aristocracy of the United Kingdom metamorphosed completely into the vocables of the B.B.C. and vintage Oxford.

Other members and their guests, prepared, as he well knew, to pass an hour or more with their cigarettes and drinks before going in to dine, left much sooner than usual. Two elderly men, who normally ignored one another, moved as by outraged consent to the “Periodical” table and consulted sotto voce with no glance in his direction. Their mime of pretending to select magazines
and weeklies from those spread out before them amused him. He watched them move closer together like grey-haired schoolboys under surveillance and noted that they forbore to turn their heads as they addressed one another for fear it should be obvious that they were communicating. He tried hard but unsuccessfully to overhear their remarks. When they eventually returned to their wives, one passing behind the sofa, one in front, he was rewarded by catching the fury of the glances they gave him and returned them blankly; not with innocence, nor with contempt or contrition, but simply with the colourlessness they themselves reserved, most of the time, for their servants.

At dinner he himself drank most of the half-bottle of wine he had ordered to accompany the pheasant, to ensure that Theresa remained in her state of refined intoxication without either surfacing into cold sobriety or on the other hand subsiding into young girl's drunkenness.

He had no idea what to do with her afterwards. He thought he might take her into Stephen's Green just before the gates closed and sit with her on the same bench he had chosen two years earlier, within sound of the ducks, and make love to her. He wondered if he might take her out to the Greyhound and then back by inebriate taxi, or even go with her to the house in Cork Street and brazen it out with James, Kevin and the rest of them. Then, he knew that her home was out of the question because one does not commit murder in public. For he saw very clearly the nature of his intention. He certainly did not think that it was wrong to obtain for himself the redress of her pain, and would, had he been sufficiently patient and interested, have prolonged the deception he had prepared so that, when at last he rejected her, she should suffer all the more sharply.

As it was, drinking his coffee with her in the drawing-room, spinning out the time, caring not a damn for the glances and whispered comments of the smart women and thudding grey men, he suddenly lost the last of his interest in the whole project.

How she talked; how gay she was. Her lips, once so desirable, curled at him but he saw only the mouth of her mother; her eyes beneath the still-placid brow were shy and bold, the boldness being an even greater mark of her innocence than the demureness.
He smiled back, allowing his own gaze to dwell on her as on Dymphna; but he saw only old Clynche's eyes, her father's, and the feminine version of her brother James' hatchet cheeks.

He took her hand gently and snuggled it into the brown velvet cushion of the sofa under the eyes of the Senior House Servant, Herbert, as he passed with a tray of coffee.

He said in a whisper, “It's strange how things come back full circle, isn't it?”

“That's just what I was thinking. It's all so different, though.”

“Yet the same, in a way.”

“I meant,” she said, “that I'm different. You've changed too, but not as much as I have, have you?”

He leaned to her so that she should feel his breath against her cheek, saw her hesitation before she leaned away but noted the compensatory squeeze she gave his hand; he whispered, “You haven't changed at all, darling little Theresa, you've only dared to become yourself. It was all my fault, really, in the old days.”

“No, it wasn't,” she whispered with winy breath. “It was just that I didn't trust you and I should have done. I was so naïve and suspicious.”

“Never mind, we can begin all over again.”

“Naïve!” she said again, “but now I've grown up. I understand Englishmen better.”

The smile she gave him was so very promising that two years earlier he would not have been able to speak in face of it for at least thirty seconds or even a minute. But now he passed it glibly, wondering who on earth could want it.

She was opening her stained little evening bag. She said, “I've got a present for you. I bought it in Bradford months ago and had your initials engraved on it. I kept wanting to give it to you but I never plucked up courage and just kept hoping that one day I'd see you. You'll think it's silly but I even prayed about it and in the meantime, I hope you don't mind, I used it myself.”

She handed it to him and he took it. Presents always distressed him.

“It's not silver,” she said, “it's silver plate; but I think it's rather nice, and I noticed in the old days that you hadn't got
one. Oh I do hope you haven't been given one since—it holds twenty.”

He examined it carefuly, opened it and found it full of Abdullah cigarettes. He balanced it in his hand, tried to look into her eyes as he attempted to thank her, looked away, put the cigarette case in his pocket, got it out again, took out a cigarette and lighted it.

She had become very pale. He thought she might faint as she stood up, so he gave her his hand to steady her and together they went down in the Club lift, standing behind the servant in his Georgian livery.

In Ranelagh Street she said, “Well, I'm sorry, but it was the best I could get, it was for the camera you gave James, all the things you gave me, everything.”

“Look,” he said, “it's wonderful. There really aren't any words to thank you for it. I wasn't expecting it. Nothing.”

Her hand was cold in his own, the street was half-dark and there was a barrel organ churning away.