Through Streets Broad and Narrow (37 page)

“An idea probably derived from a triptych of Hieronymus Bosch who used these symbols in the portrayal of the sensual passions. Bosch was also an ugly man.”

“Is your brother Eli ugly?”

“By now I should imagine he is even uglier than I remember him.”

“He didn't look ugly in the photograph.”

“In portrait photography never trust a three-quarter profile. This particular study would have been most expensive had not the photographer, one of the best in Paris, been an intimate friend of Eli's.” Greenbloom paused. “They were arrested simultaneously in their flat in the Rue Jacob.”

“Are they both in Dachau?”

“Not now.”

There seemed to be nothing more to say. Bartlett came in and left the drinks on the table. When he had gone Greenbloom said suddenly, “They were once homosexuals. The Nazis do not like homosexuality outside the Party, it disgusts them. Since they
were also Jews and later, converts to Rome, I am surprised, that is to say I
was
surprised to learn from an unimpeachable source eight weeks ago that my brother was still alive.”

“In Dachau?” John asked. “I don't know quite where it is.”

“It is a romantic village about ten miles north of Munich. Incidentally, one of the most Catholic areas of Bavaria.”

“How horrible.”

“Romanticism is a terrible thing,” Greenbloom said. “It is intolerable in art, unrealistic in politics and anathema in religion. Belloc once said that to go to Rome by way of Germany was equivalent to pouring beer on top of good wine.”

This meant little to John and to cover his lack of interest he asked, “What's the meaning of the other picture?”

“According to the notes he sent me, ‘
L'Ascension
' marks Eli's acceptance of the Christian creed. The transparency of the ascending Christ extends the motif of the doors in the first panel, limiting nothing but taking into itself the whole body of the natural to give it final reality in the supernatural. Only the face and brow of this figure are at rest within themselves; the remainder of the body and its vestments fluctuate between what is beautiful and what is not. The whole background of the picture leads the eye into the confines of this enormous, perpetually rising body. Had you studied it you would have seen that it too was composed of the physical forms of men and women, those in the shadows taking what shape they have from the reflected light of the remainder. This symbolizes my brother's conviction that the Hell-form exists only by virtue of the Heavenly, that consequently the excruciation of the damned is, in this sense, Heaven-sent.”

“Does he mean the Ascension, too, is going on all the time?”

“I have wondered.” Greenbloom picked up his glass and raised it to his mouth. “To the man who jokes—in the asylum.”

“To Groarke!”

When they had drunk John asked, almost as an afterthought, and half wishing he had thought more carefully before he put the questions, “When you said Eli was completing the Crucifixion in Dachau I suppose you didn't mean he was actually painting it—?”

Greenbloom only said, “We will dine and you will perhaps tell me more about your friend Groarke.”

During dinner John asked him why he was so interested in Michael Groarke.

“Because he, like Eli, is a prisoner. One of my objects in taking this post was to make personal but incognito contact with the Nazis here and secure the release of my brother from Dachau.”

“Is that possible?”

“It is not as probable as the liberation of your friend, but if I find the right German and pay the right amount I have some hope that Eli will be sent through Italy to Yugoslavia, or one of the other escape routes.”

“Then surely you don't want to waste time on Groarke.”

“There are unities,” Greenbloom said angrily. “As a Jew
I
recognize them. I came here to obtain freedom for my brother and the first person I meet is similarly concerned to release a friend from the imprisonment of his ambition. Do you imagine that all will go well with
my
cause if I neglect yours? We will see the superintendent of the asylum tomorrow. I will offer safeguard for your friend and take full responsibility. I shall also listen to him myself and we shall understand one another since I too have succeeded magnificently in all my failures.”

John did not argue with him. He was not at this time very interested in Groarke. The faculty he had developed of forgetting all about people when he believed that they could no longer help him in any way had extended so far that it seemed to operate almost before he had need of it.

When they went to drink coffee in the hall, he asked instead for more information about Greenbloom's plans for Eli.

“Which particular Dublin Nazi are you going to approach?”

“My opposite number, before he knows the nature of my own appointment.”

“But how extraordinary.”

“Yes?” Greenbloom asked.

“Because that will be Christian Luthmann, the German press attaché. He's a friend of Groarke's. They know each other well.”

“Precisely,” Greenbloom put down his cup. “Unities are only
to be discovered by recognizing them before they present themselves. There is no point in discussing these matters further tonight. Thank you for a good meal. Meet me at the Shelbourne tomorrow afternoon at three o'clock.”

But the next day there was a letter in his box. Recognizing Dymphna's handwriting, knowing again as so often in the past the sickening pace of his heart, the vertiginous tilt of the floor, he put it in his pocket and with clumsy hands cooked his breakfast on the gas ring. He managed to eat most of it and then, to get some air, he walked to the Rotunda clinic instead of taking the tram.

He thought that it would be a magnificent thing to throw the letter unopened from O'Connell Bridge into the Liffey. There is so much information one cannot avoid, but a letter is always a choice, and this letter, so contagious in its physical effects, might have come direct from a plague house.

When he reached the bridge he looked at the envelope again, studying it most minutely. The postmark showed that it had been posted on the evening of the day before in Dublin and not at her home in the country; the turn of the handwriting, less defined than usual, conveyed haste and some clumsiness. It was a thin envelope and there was no bulk inside it, therefore it was a short letter. What did it say? It said, perhaps, “Cloate is dead—killed in action.” Or it said, “I'm really very lonely and miss my friends. With Fergus away it would be lovely to have someone to talk to. Couldn't you bring yourself to have coffee with me just occasionally? Fergus begged me to see you if only you'd consent—” Perhaps it said, “I'm desperately ill; I must see you, I want to explain,” or, “Dear John, How are you after all these months? I've just heard from Mike Groarke; he says—”

But John could not think what Groarke might have said. The imagined alternatives contained within the unopened letter in his hand were all quite sensible. They began with the known facts of experience and simply took them a little further. Cloate
was
in the Army in the field; he might have been killed. Very probably Dymphna was lonely. She would almost certainly want
to see him if she were gravely ill; and why shouldn't she be? Groarke might easily have used her as an intermediary in conveying some message to John.

He decided then that quite clearly he held a possible future in his hand. The moment he opened and read the letter it was probable that he would become involved in the fiction and make it fact; therefore he threw it unopened over the parapet and watched it shilly down onto the river. It stayed white for a few moments and then the water ran over it like dirty tears and it was borne away beneath the bridge and out of sight.

Freud would have said that this was a clear example of sadistic retention followed by a compulsive death wish. Perhaps Freud was right; but John could not see how this explanation helped anybody. He crossed the road at a run to watch the letter, like one of the paper boats of his childhood, come out on the other side of O'Connell Bridge. It was drifting steadily over to the right-hand bank, where, fifty yards downstream, there were steps leading to the water level. Preferring Greenbloom's theory of unities to Freud's monstrous infantilism, though he was not at this moment consciously comparing the two, he ran fast along the embankment and down the steps to where the water lapped the green weed, cigarette cartons and stranded orange peel. Now far more determined to salvage the letter than ever he had been to destroy it, he was really desperate to get hold of it and read it. If Cloate were dead, he himself would marry Dymphna after an indecently short interval; if anything else, he would comply.

But the letter was not coming any closer to the bank and worse still it was sinking just perceptibly; already there was a thin layer of water between it and the surface. It looked old, immensely unrecent, and the flap had come unstuck; in a few minutes it would no longer be a letter at all, no one would ever know what it had contained; there would not even be any legible writing on it.

He dropped his coat on the steps, slipped off his trousers and dived in after it, swimming out nearly to the middle of the Liffey and back with the envelope in his mouth. He had a sublime yet
ridiculous feeling that he had saved Dymphna's life as once he had saved Victoria's.

Three people had stopped on O'Connell Bridge and two or three more on the opposite enbankment. He resented them; their silly little heads and faces, their damned curiosity. Someone was shouting, but the words were as meaningless as a foreign language and he had already decided that if asked them he would answer no questions.

A great oaf of a guarda approached as he was putting on his trousers over his wet pants and soaked shoes. There was a black crowd. On the bridge a tram had stopped and there was a queue of traffic; more fools getting out of their cars and coming to the parapet to see what had happened. A Guinness barge came chugging down from the brewery to the North Wall and blew its hooter. At the top of the steps, the guarda said, “What would be the trouble now?”

“No trouble.”

“You were having a dip then?”

“Yes.”

“With your clothes on? In November?”

“That's right.”

“Was it suicide?” someone asked.

“Wrong,” John said, “I only do that at night.”

The guarda laughed. “Now what was there in it?”

“Fifty pounds, if you must know. A cheque from my father and the letter blew out of my hand from the bridge.”

Everyone told everyone else and the guarda went back to the bridge to move on the traffic. John combed his hair and crossed the bridge to Billy Henneker's Coffee Bar where it was the custom to eat bacon and eggs after dances. He sat at the table he had so often shared with Dymphna in the dark, cosy, grubby basement and ordered the breakfast plate and a jug of hot coffee. Though his teeth knocked at sudden intervals he felt wonderfully warm; if the Catholics were to be believed his underclothes were drying on him as rapidly as if he had been dipped at Lourdes; he had a splendid sense of timelessness as though he had taken a psychological Turkish bath. The letter, blurred but still legible, was headed:

The Phelps Nursing Home,
Drumcondra Square,
Dublin.

And she said:

Dear John,

Please, please come and see me today. I'm dreadfully sombong. I know I don't don't deserve it but I feel so lonely and friendless and whatever else, you always promised me that all our lives you'd remember and come if I really wanted you. I can't explain here but when you come you'll understand. Don't bring any flowers or anything please; I'll be so excited and I know you'll not not-understand me. But just bring yourself. Visiting hour is at three.

Dymphna.

There were no girls' heads and no dates, no horses jumping gates or laundry lists on the back. There were only the old unclarities like, “I know I don't deserve it but I feel so lonely,” which could mean either that she didn't deserve his visit or else that she didn't deserve to feel lonely. But this too was what he had loved, this sharp childish selfishness as clean as little teeth.

So he rang up Greenbloom at the Shelbourne and told him that, as Dymphna was ill, he would be unable to meet him that afternoon. Greenbloom was very matter of fact; he took the name of the Superintendent of Grangegorman, and demanded a few more details of Groarke's case; then he suggested that John should meet him in the hotel lounge at seven o'clock that evening.

“Will Groarke be with you?”

“Of course.”

“Where's he going to sleep? At his home?”

“Initially he will be my guest.”

“Have you told his parents?”

“I shall do that later,” Greenbloom said. Then, just as John had hoped he would, he asked, “What made you decide to see this Irish girl again?”

“It was a question of unities. I thought I detected one on its way to meet me. I rejected it, changed my mind, and went after it.”

“When did this happen?” demanded the voice at the other end of the line.

“This morning, immediately after breakfast.”

“Where?”

“In the river.”

The rasp of Greenbloom's laughter, short and sharp as a cry of pain, assaulted his ear. He started to explain about the letter but was cut short by Greenbloom's, “Enough! Do not be late tonight. Time is short.”

He heard a click as the receiver was replaced at the other end.

He went back to his rooms, put on dry clothes and caught the tram in time to reach the Rotunda for a demonstration of high-forceps delivery in the labour ward.

That afternoon, on his way to the Phelps Nursing Home, of course he brought her flowers: limp florist's roses, a shilling each. He had never seen such unroselike roses; no buds, only a stylized scentless flower on the end of each stem, and all the stems exactly the same length as though they had been grown in a factory. He also bought an Irish
Bystander
and a copy of
Woman
to cater for the two sides of her nature; having married Cloate he did not think she rated a
Tatler
. In a sweetshop he bought a small box of white marshmallows.