John McGahern - The Pornographer

“No. But I’m grateful. Will you come to London soon?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to do much good, does it, it’s outside the main problem now. You remember how in the beginning when both of us thought to come to London together, and live here till the child was born, it was decided that it wasn’t a good idea. And visiting seems to me even worse. It stirs things up, leaves everything exactly the same, so it’s worse than nothing. But I’ll come if you need me.”

“It’s going to be a hard time, but somehow deep down I know it’ll be all right.”

We kissed at the barrier and when I turned round before getting into the carriage she was still at the barrier. I waved and she started to wave back wildly.

It won’t be all right. Nothing will be all right. And it’ll end badly, I said to myself but had to admit that it was a very poor way of thinking. The train was set for Ireland. I started thinking of my mother to the carriage roll. There are women in whom the maternal instinct is so obdurate that they will break wrists and ankles in order to stay needed.

My mother, too, may have been such, if the old calendars were anything to go by: but then you could assert almost anything from those ranks of crossed out days, including, certainly, an impatience to get life over with.

The calendars were in a large bundle of papers, tied with yellowed twine. I got them when I was given formal possession of my parents’ estate in the room above Delehunty’s office, my aunt in another of the green leather armchairs with the row of brass studs, Delehunty’s easy beefsteak face across the roll-top desk, behind him an ancient Bible on the wooden mantel above the fireplace.

They were very ordinary calendars, with scenic views such as shops give out at Christmas. Encrusted around many of the dates were faded notes in some private shorthand that I found impossible to decipher and every date was covered with the same large bold X . Seven years were crossed out this way. The X’s stopped on the nineteenth of May, ten days before her death, around the time I’d been taken from the farmhouse to my aunt’s place in the town. I sensed that God, having veiled the earth in darkness and seen all nature to restoring sleep, could hardly have closed down each day with much greater sense of personal control than the march of my mother’s X’s across the years seemed to proclaim. Maybe I had been lucky in my mother’s death. Before she could get those X’s properly to work on me she’d been taken away. And was I now acting out the same circle in reverse — leaving her in London with her growing burden?

I had been lucky in my aunt and uncle. They’d let me grow easy, and I’d escaped the misfortune of being the centre of anybody’s “interest” till I crossed the dance floor, the cursed circle coming round again, that madness of passion that I had focused on “my love” now focused on me, her cry strengthened with the child’s cry, the happy gods secure as ever in their laughter.

If they let me grow easy, I was letting her die as easily.

I did not go into the hospital till I was four days back in Dublin, since I’d said I’d be a week away.

I wrote more Mavis and the Colonel stories for Maloney. I did not go out at all, ignored day and night and conventional meal times, using alcohol and hot baths in place of exercise when I felt I needed to sleep. “A good bottle of port every day equals a four-mile walk,” a British general had said. I used a well-tried formula I always used when I had catching-up to do, not unlike a cooking recipe: a description of Venice out of a guidebook, like a sprinkling of dried parsley; at Eastbourne the four leaves of the hotel door revolved on their own hinges while outside the brass band thumped and groaned “Bank Holiday”, as the Colonel once again went up his Queen. It all went to cast a thin veil of a logical process over the main purchase, the shaft and clutch, the oiled walls opening to take the fat white spunk, closing with a painful catch of ecstasy as once again it surged straight home. I did not read any of the stories till I had all I wanted done. I had to read them with my own blood, sometimes changing the order of the words until they seemed to sing or cough or groan, supplying the personal salt without which suspicion could not be lulled. Ο rock the cradle with your own dark hands till sleep would come or lust would rise.

And out of this counterfeited rocking of lust sometimes the silken piece of white cloth became a texture again to my fingers before I had let the breeze take it out among the cloud of gulls, and I wanted to take her again in my arms in the cold of a room beneath the black crucifix. When it came to ringing her or not, I did not want to be born again. I had no doubt that I had enough of “life” for some time more.

This became a real problem only when I’d finished and worked through the reading of all the stories and wanted to go to the hospital again. What if I should meet her in the ward? I was back now and I had not rung her as I’d promised.

I bought two bottles of brandy and took the bus to the hospital. It was an incredible evening, a clear sky, and in the hospital grounds all was greenness. The new-cut grass we’d walked over a week before was now in bales, standing on their ends and leaning together in abstract groups of five in the clean field between the hospital and the home on the edge of the farther trees.

I walked mechanically in, went up in the lift, trying to keep the ghostly, wonderful, horrible birth and death of night out of mind, the sea breeze that took it like a whisper from my fingers, and let it die there among the gulls. I wouldn’t meet her. If I met her I could always lie.

Getting out of the lift and walking towards my aunt became in spite of every effort the guilt of stealing towards her by the facing way of the meadow in moonlight and the garbage stairs, up the corridor from where I was walking towards, the blue night-light on, and the solid green swing doors at the farthest end were the palest green. What had I learned from that clandestine night? The nothing that we always learn when we sink to learn something of ourselves or life from a poor other — our own shameful shallowness. We can no more learn from another than we can do their death for them or have them do ours. We have to go inland, in the solitude that is both pain and joy, and there make our own truth, and even if that proves nothing too, we have still that hard joy of having gone the hard and only way there is to go, we have not backed away or staggered to one side, but gone on and on and on even when there was nothing, knowing there was nothing on any other way. We had gone too deep inland to think that a different physique or climate would change anything. We were outside change because we were change. All the doctrines that we had learned by heart and could not understand and fretted over became laughingly clear. To find we had to lose: the road away became the road back. And what company we met with on the road, we who no longer sought company, at what fires and walls did we sit. Our wits were sharpened. All the time we had to change our ways. We listened to everything with attention, to others singing of their failures and their luck, for we now had our road. All, all were travelling. Nobody would arrive. The adventure would never be over even when we were over. It would go on and on, even as it had gone on before it had been passed on to us.

And the dark-haired girl, and the woman with child in London, the dying woman I was standing beside, propped upright on the pillow, lapsed into light and worried sleep, what of them? The answer was in the vulgarity of the question. What of yourself?

The sound of putting the bottles down on the locker top woke her.

“God bless you,” she rubbed her eyes. “I must have dozed off. It’s great to see you. I thought you might be in yesterday, but then I wasn’t sure when you’d get back from London.”