John McGahern - The Pornographer

“They could be dangerous,” I said.

“They’d go through you like fucking bullets except they’re mostly rotten. They’ve been hammered in years ago and the wood has grown over them. I saw them ruin more saws than you can name,” he was relaxed, holding forth.

“What’s this got to do with the argument between Jim and yourself?”

“He took in a few big oaks for this fella that he knows. And I was going to use the big saws.”

“Are the oaks all right?”

“Of course they are. But you have to make a stand sometime round here or you’d wind up taking orders. There’s no giving of orders as it is.”

“I can’t see you taking orders,” I said.

“You can never be too sure of that,” he shook with the laughter of pure pleasure as he wiped his eyes with the back of the enormous scarred hands. “To make sure of that, you have to keep sitting upon the other fella every chance you get.”

I hung about until they closed the mill, and after that it gradually grew plain that he was loathe to go into the house in case he’d meet Cyril or even possibly my aunt.

“What’ll she say if we don’t go in?” I asked.

“We’ll ring her. We’ll have our tea in the town. And we can ring her from there, from the restaurant. I’ll say we have to go out to your place.”

“You don’t need to change or anything?”

“Not at all. Nobody cares round here. I’ll just throw off these overalls.”

He rung her from the restaurant. “She gave out,” he reported afterwards. “But they’re both there. Leave them that way. That way they’re only an annoyance to themselves.”

We had the usual restaurant meal, lamb chops, liver, bacon, fried tomatoes, and an egg, with a big pot of tea and plenty of brown or white bread. Afterwards we drove out to my place.

In all sorts of circuitous ways he detailed the several advantages I’d get from leaving the city and starting up the farm. “After all, the city is more a young man’s place,” he must have repeated several times. That, and teasing out the evening until he was certain that my aunt and Cyril were in bed, took care of the whole charming and childish evening.

I was happy there for five such days, islanded and cut off from the brass letter-box. Three letters waiting on the half-circular glass table with a London postmark were the first things I saw on entering the hallway. My island holiday was over.

Jonathan had met her at the airport. They had taken a taxi to his Kensington house. The flat was a little beauty, two rooms, a kitchen, bathroom, with all mod cons, including an automatic washing machine and drier, which would come in so useful later on. They had drinks upstairs in the lovely long reception room she had known from before. The windows were open. It was much warmer in London than in Dublin. In another few weeks, Jonathan said, they’d be able to sit out and have drinks on the lawn.

Then they took a taxi to Jonathan’s favourite restaurant. The table was piled with flowers. And yet she felt depressed. She missed me dreadfully. Didn’t I know how greatly I was loved, though I seemed to do my very best to avoid seeing it? But she was grateful to Jonathan. She did not know that such a genuinely selfless and good person existed in the world. If only Jonathan was me, and I was Jonathan.… but she still believed that everything that happened was basically good, because both of us were good people. She still believed that, no matter how it seemed to other people.

She was already working on a magazine. The magazine’s office was close to Covent Garden. She took a bus into the Strand and walked from there. The people all helped her and were very nice, but it was child’s play compared to all the scrivening she’d done for practically nothing for poor Walter and Waterways , She ate such rich meals at the different restaurants with Jonathan in the evening that at lunch time she just walked around and had fruit she bought in Museum Street and a cup of coffee in a little Italian place next door to the fruit shop. The morning sickness had stopped but she was hungry all the time. I could guess what that meant. She was sure it was going to be a boy and exactly like me.

Next, she was cooking dinner for Jonathan and herself. That must remind me of something. They had avocado pear, sirloin, an endive salad, and a special dusty bottle of Burgundy Jonathan had brought up from the cellar for the occasion, several cheeses and an Armagnac to finish. Compared with what she’d been used to, her own basement kitchen was luxurious but Jonathan’s kitchen made her feel more like an airline pilot than a plain cook. There were so many knobs and panels! Jonathan said she was a fine cook and Jonathan’s wife had a fantastic library of cook books. Now she cooked for Jonathan and herself every evening he hadn’t a meeting and they’d only go out to restaurants weekends. Jonathan had also got fantastic reports about her as a writer. Everybody on the magazine was pleased with her. Disaster was turning into a dream.

They were wise, the people on the magazine, I thought; she might become the owner’s wife. There must be many who have cursed themselves for not seeing that some young secretary would one day be the wife. Ο most common apotheosis, the sexual: and the most common ruin: poison of the sweet mouth.

I replied gravely to these letters. There was an early heat wave in Dublin, a stream of people passed out towards the sea in the evenings, many of them on old bicycles. My life was boring. I wasn’t writing but soon I’d have to earn money. I’d been down the country. My aunt was growing worse, but fighting hard to live. If pure desire could make a person live, she would live, I wrote.

It was hot in London too, the place beginning to crowd with tourists. Jonathan hated the tourists. Even a simple stroll in Kensington Gardens on a Sunday morning turned into a tirade against the tourists. Jonathan was so funny when he got angry, with his shiny head and handlebar moustaches, so small when he shook. At times she couldn’t resist pulling the moustaches. That morning they had a lovely quiet drink in a local but she didn’t have alcohol any more. It didn’t agree with her and anyhow it was bad for the baby. They didn’t want to have a fully fledged one-week-old alcoholic on their hands.

What she couldn’t get over was the number of men who’d asked her out, and one or two had even made passes. It was so sad. She wondered what they’d feel if they knew the truth. Jonathan said she looked amazing, and she did feel good, but in Dublin that sort of attention hadn’t been paid to her for years. Was I not jealous at all?

She couldn’t describe how grateful she was to Jonathan. She wouldn’t have believed before this all happened that such a purely good person existed in the world. He’d suffered for years with his crazy wife and he’d never had what’s called a normal happy life. The only snake in their Eden now was that Jonathan’s wife might discharge herself from the institution and find her in the house. Since she’d come to the house she’d started to read the wife’s leters. He’d asked her to. One of the forms the madness took was crazy, irrational jealousy. They could only hope and pray she’d not discharge herself.

My aunt was taken back to the hospital, this time by ambulance.

“Bad luck to it,” she said when I went in to see her. “I’m here to cause you trouble once again. They talked me into giving this X-ray treatment a last try. Somehow I feel I’d be as well off in Lourdes.”

“You can’t talk that way. What’ll happen to the garden?”

“Cyril said he’d look after it and he meant it but I also know he’ll forget,” she laughed. “What I did was give Peter McCabe, a brother of poor Sticks’, some money. He’ll look after it on the quiet.”