John McGahern - The Pornographer

As I listened to her feeding the cats downstairs, I poured another whiskey, mentally taking leave of the room, all the preparations for my coming pointing the frail accusing fingers at me of all rejected poor endeavour. If I could possibly avoid it, I promised, I’d never set foot in that room again.

A brief sun was out and we walked to the pub, an enormous coaching inn close to the station. Its solid lovely structure had been battered by several puzzling decorational assaults and there was a bandstand at the back. I brought the pint of bitter, an orange and two evening papers to the table beside the bandstand.

“Spurs won. Two to one. They got the winning goal in the last quarter. That last great roar that went up must have been for the winner.”

She smiled a nervous smile that seemed to say that she was happy because I seemed happy. We swapped the thin sheets. I got another pint of bitter from the bar but she had enough orange. She took a packet of crisps. We had exhausted the papers by that. A pretty woman somewhere in her thirties came round wiping the tables, and hearing our accents spoke to us.

“What part do you come from? Are you on holiday or living here?” She was from Dublin and worked weekends in the bar when a group played.

I offered her a drink. She had a lager and lime and sat with us. Though she was paid from six o’clock it was often eight before she had any work, and she was blinded with work from then till closing time. The best part of the night was when they sat behind the counter with a nightcap after the washing and cleaning was done, she told us.

She had a story. For all her prettiness her mouth was thin and bitter and she kept tugging nervously at the finger that would have worn a wedding ring.

She’d a clerk-typist’s position in Guinness’s Brewery in Dublin. She emphasized it as a position rather than a job. In those days if you got into Guinness’s you were secure for life. It was harder to get into than into the civil service or a bank, and she’d already got her first promotion when she met this man, an Englishman, an engineer, who was over installing some new plant in the brewery. She married him, left her job, came with him to London, where they had two children, two boys, and then, after seven years, discovered that the man she thought of as her husband all those years had been married to another woman, who he was seeing all that time, when she thought he was away on jobs. She still got angry when the lies she’d swallowed hook, line and sinker came back to her. She’d left him, of course, at once. It all poured out one night he’d had too much to drink. No, she didn’t think she’d ever marry again, once burned ten times shy. She’d a good job now in the Westminster Bank, and the weekends she worked in the pub made that little difference of presents and extra luxuries for her two boys.

I was delighted with the story and bought her two more lagers and lime, encouraging her to elaborate, as Maloney’s words came back to me, “It makes us all feel good. It makes us all feel very good.” Compared to the despicable wretch this woman had the misfortune to meet up with, my own questionable conduct appeared positively exemplary. She only left us when the musicians came in and began to take the wraps off their instruments.

“I suppose we should go before the crowd starts to come in,” the pub was already filling.

“That’s if you can bear to miss another slice of that woman’s life,” the angry answer came.

“She seemed to want to talk.”

“You encouraged her, went on buying her drinks, when we had only this amount of precious time for ourselves.” It was precisely that same precious time that I had been anxious to avoid.

“Her story was sort of interesting, it was kind of a version of ours, but far worse. She seemed decent enough and I was thinking that if you were feeling low or anything you could drop in. She’s Irish. Having gone through that herself, she’d know what you are going through here in London.” A sudden flushed stare from behind two rows of bottles along the counter mirrors told me I was already well on the way to being fuddled as we left the bar.

“That’s all I’d need if I was low,” she said with angry contempt. “Go into that bar and listen to her story. That’s what’d cheer me up. Boy, isn’t that just the holy grail I’ve been looking for all this time. Come in and listen to a tale of woe that’ll cancel your own woe out.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean any harm. I meant it all for the best. What would you like to do now?”

“Why don’t we go back to the flat? I’ll cook us dinner there. There’s plenty of wine and drink.”

“I don’t want you cooking. I want to take you out for dinner tonight. It’d be fun. It’s Saturday night too.”

“All right. We’ll go out to dinner then,” she smiled and we kissed. “I need to clear my ears after that woman’s story. I guess that was just about all I needed.”

“Will we go back into town and eat in Soho?”

“Everywhere’ll be crowded tonight. I’d rather stay round here. There’s a little French place round the corner, run by a fat Breton, who’s cook and waiter and everything. I was there once. It’s a bit on the expensive side though.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

It could have been a hairdresser’s window, except for the lobster pot and a piece of torn netting with rectangular cork floats and lead sinks. Inside, four of the eight or ten tables were full. The man was very fat, in a chef’s hat and apron, arms bared, and he was sweating profusely. I was still not hungry and ordered a steak tartare as an excuse to drink. I then pressed her to eat as much as she was able. There was much laughter as the chef helped her to order. When she did, he brought us a carafe of wine, and we drank as we watched him cook. I ordered a second carafe when he brought our dishes.

As soon as I got out of the restaurant I staggered but covered up by thanking her profusely, “It was a wonderful meal and wonderful place. You have a real nose for restaurants.”

I was drunk, but with the drunk’s cunning of very limited, mostly negative ambitions: one, not to go back to the flat; two, not to have any serious discussion, which was easily achieved at this stage; three, to make trebly certain of avoiding serious discussions if there was any further need to be certain by going on drinking.

“I’m dying for a pint of bitter. Why don’t we go back into that pub? It’s the nearest and we don’t have to see that woman. The pub is enormous and she works the tables at the far end. We can just have a drink near the door. It must be almost closing time,”

The place was packed. Heads crowded together above the counter. A horn shrilled above frantic drums. There were glasses everywhere, cigarette smoke, flushed faces, the dark warm wood, grapes on the stained ceiling; but there were far too many faces to think of even catching a glimpse of the blonde Dublin woman among the dancers and tables around the bandstand in the distant crush and smoke. There was a table near the door where we could rest our glasses while we stood. The bitter tasted warm. There was no possibility of speech except in carefully thought-out monosyllabic shouts. The yellow bitter in its thin pint glass with the imperial stamp looked beautiful. I smiled and raised my glass and shouted, “Good health.” Across the counter between rings of smoke I watched a girl weave her bare arms in a dance, cracking her fingers above her head, the black dress so tightly sewn that her breasts looked crushed. As in a light dream on the edge of waking, faces floated close out of the smoke, seemed to smile, and drift far back only to draw near again.

“You seem to be having a wonderful time,” she shouted in my ear.