John McGahern - The Pornographer

“It’s certainly not much to look at,” I said when she came out of the cabin.

“But the fat man is lovely. That’s his bar next to the church, with the smoke rising from the chimneys.”

We tied up the boat at the small stone pier with four metal bollards that made an arm with the stone bridge, flooded fields and woods, another lake shining in the three eyes of its arches in the next distance. We walked to the bar, the village scattered round a single field, no two shops or houses together, all standing away from one another at angles and distances of irreconcilable disagreements.

“Probably half of them aren’t talking,” she laughed. “The fat man says he’d go mad with the boredom except for the boats.”

Because of the talk of his fatness I did not find the man all that fat: he had limp thinning hair, a pleasant red face, and he wore a striped butcher’s apron, the formality of any apron unusual in these villages. Two hatted men nodded drunkenly at the corner of the counter. The man knew her at once, seemed delighted to see her, saying only that she was early this year. He made up delicious ham sandwiches, offered us a choice of coffee or white wine, and refused money for either the coffee or sandwiches. While we ate he sat with us on a heavy ecclesiastical bench that must have come out of some old church. She had several questions to ask him about the river and the trade from the boats, and she wrote down most of his answers. When they’d finished she read back to him what he’d said. While they worked I tried to follow the whispers of the hatted pair at the counter who continually cast spying glances our way but all that came clear from the words and half-phrases was one hoarse whisper, “That’s the answer. Get up early. And you’ll win them all. You’ll bate the whole effin’ lot of them if you get up early.”

All day I’d been seeing a far more attractive person than the woman I had known up till then. For the first time I was seeing her work, and she shone in the distance its discipline made.

We had shared nothing but pleasure, and no two people’s pleasure can be the same at the same time for long, the screw turned tighter till it had to be forced on the wrong threads. If we’d shared some work instead of pleasure would it have made any difference? It didn’t matter, it was ending now, and ending on an older note, one withdrawing before becoming enmeshed in the other, intolerant of all chains but those forged in its own pain.

“What are you thinking?” she asked as we went back down to the boat.

“I was thinking how well you work. That you make notes, write everything down. It’s not that usual. You’d be surprised how many try to get by on that old amateurish flair .”

“I’m grateful for that,” she said gravely.

We hugged the black navigation signs after going through the bridge, a series of barrels between pans set on stone piers. We went faster when we came out into the lake, two small islands to the left, one wooded, the other of pale rocks ringed with reeds, and on the shore a great beech avenue waited for spring as it ran to ruined coach houses. The river was so narrow where it entered the lake that we’d to slow the boat down again to a crawl. The woods were to the left and we could see far into them where a red sun was slipping down between the trunks. The flooded fields were so close beyond the right bank of reeds that we had to move very slowly.

The man was waiting for us at the lock house. It was so long since a boat had gone through that I’d to help turn the wheels that operated the gates while she took the boat up through the lock. For a while it seemed the handle wouldn’t turn but then it gave with a grinding of cog-wheels. When the boat had gone through the lock she joined the lock-keeper to ask him some things for her article, and I went back to the boat. With the water pouring like glass over the wall, then foaming out into the black water where it went still, a broken-down boat-house away in the shallows, the man and woman intent in conversation on the solid arm of the lock gate, and the trees and water held in frost as the light started to fail, the evening seemed so beautiful that it was hard to believe it was real. There had been so many interpretations of beauty as such an evening and scene that it had grown abstract and unreal.

When she joined me again in the boat she closed the notebook triumphantly. “That’s it. All I have to do now is write it. I’ve at least twice as much as I need.”

In ten minutes we were letting the anchor down in a half-moon of a bay, sheltered by old woods. “We must come together sometime in the summer,” she said. “In the summer the whole bay is choked with water-lilies.”

She took lamb chops out of the fridge and I uncorked two bottles of red wine. “I feel we’ve earned this meal,” she said as we kissed. Before she put the chops under the grill she gave herself a quick sponge bath at the other end of the boat and changed into a lovely, clinging brown wool dress. Except for the grey hair and heavy breasts, the naked back was so trim and taut that it might have been the back of a young girl.

“Do you not want to know who I was here with the last time?” she asked.

“Who?” I asked, thinking as I watched her move in perfect ease in half nakedness close to me how far we’d come in bodily intimacy in the few short weeks since the first dancehall night.

“Certainly no man. Those two American girls, Betty and Janey. But it’s far better with a man, especially with you,” she laughed.

I was ravenous even before the meat started grilling, and as soon as I’d eaten, with the early morning on the river, all the raw air of the day, and the red wine, I began to yawn.

“Sleepy?”

“I’m almost dead out.”

“We’ll leave the washing-up till tomorrow.”

It seemed inevitable, it could not be put off now or avoided, and the feeling grew that it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the tiredness and the desire.

“Are you sure it’s all right?” I made a last fainthearted protest as she came naked into my arms, my body taut with desire.

The next day both of us were grateful for the boat. Getting it back down the river kept us separate and busy.

“What’ll we do about Michael?” she asked in Carrick. “We hardly need another session.”

“We’ll have one drink with him and tell him we must get away.”

When next we met she had given in the written article.

“Walter’s delighted with it. It’s going into the next issue.” I read it in the upstairs lounge of the Green Goose, while she sipped nervously at her drink, and watched my face greedily. It read quickly, was full of useful things for anybody going on the river, and almost off-handedly caught something of the very withdrawnness of inland waters.

“It’s no wonder Walter is pleased,” I handed her back the typescript, and we went back to the flat that evening.

“I can’t see you this weekend,” I said close to morning, before she could press me for a meeting. “My aunt is out of hospital. I have to go down to see her.”

“I might as well go down the country too,” she said. “My sister has adopted a second child. I’ve been promising for a long time to go down to see her. I’d only spend the whole weekend moping if I stayed in Dublin. When will we meet when you get back?”

“Wednesday,” I was determined to finish the whole affair. “We can meet in the Green Goose at eight on the Wednesday.”

“I don’t like the pub,” she said.

“We can just meet there and go some place else if we want to after.”

“How is the pain? You’re looking far better than in the hospital,” I lied uneasily to my aunt when I went down to see them that weekend.