John McGahern - The Pornographer

“I don’t know, hypocrisy has its place. You can only do without it at your peril.”

“Well to hell with it, then,” she laughed.

We danced body to body in the dark huddle of bodies, enmeshed in their own blood heat and moving slowly to the dull beat across the crammed floor. My hands went over the shimmer of the dress, sleek as a second skin. Now and again we kissed. In a sudden jolt against her the roused seed started to pulse. I looked at her face to see if she showed any signs of noticing but the eyes were closed against my shoulder, the body moving slowly to the music in its own drugged sleep.

“Will I be able to leave you home?”

“All the buses to the hospital will have gone already.”

“We’ll get a taxi.”

“It’s nice to have money.” she smiled. “I’m just qualified one year now.”

“That must leave you not much more than twenty.”

“No. I had to repeat a couple of the exams. I’m twenty-three.”

“It seems very young to me. I’m thirty.”

“Thirty is a good age for a man.”

She had on a herring-bone coat with a grey fur collar when she came from the cloakroom. She took my hand as we went down the stairs. There were several taxis drawn up for the people coming out of the dancehall, and we got into the fifth or sixth. The night was warm and there was a full moon above O’Connell Street.

“St Mark’s Hospital,” I said and she added, “The nurses’ home, in past the hospital. At the back.”

“Picked up a fare outside the Metropole,” he said into the crackle of his radio. “Going to the nurses’ home of St Mark’s Hospital.”

“Will you be on all night?” I asked the driver when he put the receiver down.

“I don’t come off till five,” he said.

She leaned towards me and I slipped my hand across her shoulder and began to fondle her breasts. The cool night air came in the taxi’s open window.

“Do you think will my aunt live long?” even as I said the words they sounded incongruous, and I felt her go tense.

“She’ll hardly get better now. Hardly anybody in there gets better. They get respites. That’s all. The ward she’s in is terminal though she doesn’t know that.”

“I’m sorry for asking. It slipped out.”

“I don’t mind. That’s the depressing part of a cancer hospital. No one really gets better in our hospital. Even the wards not classed terminal are. You begin to feel it’s your fault. I’ll look for another place as soon as I have my year done.”

“That hospital is one place to avoid at all cost. Two of my pals went in there. They’re both dead,” the driver showed us he’d been listening.

“I suppose all hospitals are places to stay out of,” I said to break the uneasy silence.

“If you’re well,” he said. “But you’re more than glad of them once you’re sick enough.”

The taxi turned in the hospital gates, went past her window, the moonlight pale on the concrete framing the dark squares of glass. The wheel had many sections. She had reached that turn where she’d to lie beneath the window, stupefied by brandy and pain, dulling the sounds of the whole wheel of her life staggering to a stop. I was going past that same window in a taxi, a young woman by my side, my hand on her warm breast. I shivered as I thought how one day my wheel would turn into her section, and I would lie beneath that window while a man and woman as we were now went past into the young excitement of a life that might seem without end in this light of the moon.

An old sweet scent rushed through the taxi window as soon as we passed beyond the hospital, so familiar that I started, and yet I could not place or find its name, it so surrounded the summers of my life, lay everywhere round my feet; not woodbine, not mint, not wild rose.…

“They were cutting it today. I was on night duty last night and was trying to get to sleep but couldn’t with the mower rattling past the window,” she gave the name. Of course, it was hay.

“It’d remind you of the country,” the driver added as he turned in a half circle in front of a big building set in trees, and stopped.

It was new-cut meadow turning to hay, and when we got out on the tarmac, long fallen rows stretched and turned palely everywhere between the white hospital and home.

“Don’t be so quiet,” she tousled my hair as we went in.

I followed her through a hall and down a corridor. The first room she went into sounded empty but as soon as she pressed the light switch a dishevelled couple sat bolt upright on a sofa to face our eyes. I could feel her low chuckle as she said, “Sorry,” and put the room again into darkness. The same thing happened at the second door she tried. The third room was empty, a large room with coffee tables strewn with newspapers and magazines, several armchairs and sofas and a big television set.

“We’ll leave the light on,” she said. “That way we run less risk of being bothered.”

We sat on a tasselled grey sofa facing the blank TV set, our backs partly turned to the door. When we started to kiss and play she put no restraint on my hands, and when I put fingers beneath the elastic she raised her back for me to draw it down, moved her knees sideways, and her feet were already out of her shoes. There was a rug on the arm of the sofa that she reached for and spread over us.

We heard doors of other rooms being tried from time to time, the sound of the light switch go on and off. The same footsteps would pause outside our door but did not come in. Only once was the door opened a foot or so and as quickly closed.

“Have you brothers and sisters?” she asked.

“No.”

“Would you like to be married?” her directness took me by surprise.

“I suppose I would but I don’t know. Would you?” I was surprised and unsure what she meant.

“Of course I would. To have my own husband and child and house and garden and saucepans and pets. All that.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“It’s far more fun, isn’t it?”

“What if you found yourself married to a boring man?”

“I wouldn’t marry a boring man. And I don’t find all that many men are boring. Usually the very attractive ones are married, but that’s a different thing. It’s women I find who are mostly boring and small and spiteful.”

“What would you do if you found yourself pregnant?” I asked tensely.

“You mean if I weren’t married?”

“Yes.”

“I’d want to get married.”

“And if the man was already married or wouldn’t marry you for some reason.”

“I’d throw myself in the Liffey,” she drew herself up in unfeigned alarm. “What are you laughing at?”

“You wouldn’t. You’re too young and healthy. And beautifully normal. Anyhow the man would be sure to marry you. I’d want to marry you.”

Suddenly she pinned my shoulders to the sofa and we started to roll. She was unusually swift and strong, “I give up,” I laughed, and then she loosed herself again to my hands. Afterwards she said suddenly, “Would you like to see your aunt?”

“Why?”

“The nurse on night duty on the ward is a friend. It might be fun to walk across the meadow to see her.”

“But what would my aunt say if she saw me there?”

“She’ll not see you. The lights’ll all be off. You’ve come often enough in to see her in the day but I’m sure you never thought you’d be in to see her in the middle of the night with a wild nurse,” she drew me by the hand.

A heavy summer’s dew lay on the fallen swards and our shoes left bright tracks across the meadow. The grey of day was beginning to be mixed with the moonlight, but the sweet fragrance of the new hay was everywhere. She searched among a bunch of keys after we’d crossed the meadow and opened a door down concrete steps between bare tubular steel railings, “It’s the back way,” she whispered, “where the laundry and that comes out.”