John McGahern - The Pornographer

“What’ll happen to the child?”

“I don’t know. I hope she’ll have it adopted but I doubt if she will.”

“What’ll you do if she keeps it?”

“I’ll be even more out of it then. I wanted her to have an abortion.”

“I don’t blame her for not having that.”

“Anyhow you know the whole story now. And it’s no pretty story.”

She was silent for a long time, hardly picking at the chicken on her plate. I had seen women pause in much the same way on the edge of the first lovemaking, as if weighing the land before trusting to or turning back from the water; and if they trust to it, that water too must soon become the land.

“You’ve seen this woman in London?”

“That’s why I went.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. What she wants I can’t give her. What I want she can’t give me.”

“What do you want?”

“That it might never have happened.”

“But it has happened.”

“Well then as close to that as I can get.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I suppose it’s called to extricate oneself as best one can.”

“What does she want?”

“She wants the child. She wants me. She wants everything.”

“What’ll she get?”

“I suppose she’ll get the child.”

“And you? What’ll you get?”

“As little as possible I hope. Now, would you have jumped in the Liffey if it had happened to you?”

“I wouldn’t have let it happen,” she said with such determination that I had to smile.

“Well, now that you’ve been warned will you come out with me again?”

“I’ll have to think about it,” she said.

The next time we met she came sheathed in a green wool dress and I took her to meet Maloney. I suppose I took her to see Maloney to show her that it was not just that one thing I was after. I was showing her into that part of my life that was made up of other people. Maloney was very charming.

“What are you, a beautiful healthy apple, doing in this den, with this degenerate,” he moved his arm floridly around the Elbow after kissing her hand. “You’ll get eaten by people with bad teeth.”

“Better to be eaten than to go bad,” she smiled as she risked speech. It would also have been a risk to remain silent, but she couldn’t have known that.

“Very good,” he pretended to stand back to inspect her. “V-e-r-y good. Better to be eaten than to go bad. Maybe just a little bit too good. Now tell me, what’s your opinion of the emancipated woman? I am most anxious to have a straight-from-the-shoulder-no-holds-barred opinion of the emancipated woman.”

“I don’t know what an emancipated woman is. Maybe I am an emancipated woman.”

“Quite right, my dear. I was beginning to fear for you for a minute, only a minute, remember. Not to know is to be happy. Who’d want to leave that child’s country to struggle with space and time and the seven-league boots of human rights. I’ll tell you. Only a fool would want to leave that country.”

“A person generally doesn’t have a choice,” I put in. “It just happens to them.”

“Shut up,” he said. “You’ve eaten the apple. And now you’re addressing yourself to this beautiful fresh girl. Don’t believe a word he tells you. He works for me. I never believe a word he tells me. He’s a wastrel and a corrupter with a priest’s face.”

When we left she said, “He’s a nice man. But he’s tired.”

“Why do you think he’s tired?”

“He tries very hard, doesn’t he? It’s as if he’s always racing to keep up with some idea of himself that he never quite catches.”

“That’s almost too clever,” I said. “He started with the idea that he was a poet. That nearly finishes everybody off. He’d have been intolerable if he’d ever become whatever idea it was. He’s just barely tolerable as he is.”

She came with me to the room.

“What do you think of it?” I had so fallen under the influence of her charm that I was looking to see everything through her eyes.

“It needs cleaning and the letting in of some light, but it’s not my room. It must suit you,” and then she continued in a musing voice. “It’s here that it happened?”

“No.”

“But you must have slept with her — and maybe others — here?”

“Every room has its story. Many stories.”

I felt a rush of desire, as much to cancel all those acts and that one suffocating consequence as desire for her fresh body.

“It’s strange,” she said as we kissed, “I suppose I should feel the opposite but I feel excited.”

“I suppose we should leave it.”

“We should. What are you laughing at?”

“A foolish phrase. A phrase that talks about the continuing virginity of the soul in spite of sexual intercourse. Our virginity seems well restored in spite of that first night when we walked across the meadow to see my aunt.”

“Have you heard anything about her?” she asked.

“No. I was supposed to go down but I didn’t. I suppose she can hardly last out much longer?”

“I was looking at her chart. I shouldn’t be telling you this. In fact I could get into trouble for just reading it. But one night I took it out. The amazing thing is that she’s still alive. With her history she should have been dead about six months ago.”

“She has this fierce will to live. I don’t understand it.”

“Life is very sweet.”

“I suppose it depends on how you’re situated in it. It can be sweet,” these were the sort of conversations that made me wince but I still fell into.

“Just to see the day and the sky and the night seems to me amazing. I can’t imagine anybody wanting to let that go.”

“But aren’t some of the people you nurse tired of it?”

“Some but not very many.”

It was very cold when we went outside but a bus came almost at once, and we separated. The summer had already gone. I shivered involuntarily, I who loved winters, because of what this winter might bring.

A steady stream of letters now flowed from London, and any doubts or hesitations about my ungenerous reluctance to partake in this festival of goodness and renewal that the letters proclaimed was completely quenched by the undoubting tone of the same letters. The child would come at Christmas, and all would be well, she wanted to reassure me as to that, because both of us were good people, and it would come out that way, she knew it, no matter what the world might think. Not that things were easy. She had grown larger. She had got away with it when she’d met her cousin at the Strand Palace but only just. She’d bandaged herself tightly and several times during dinner had almost passed out. “Are you sure you’re all right?” her cousin had kept asking and she had pleaded migraine. What was worse was his jollity in the early evening, hand on her knee, “Now tell me what is it really like to be a citizen of the big smoke?” She had got through it, and she didn’t think she’d aroused suspicion, but she’d not take that risk again. Anyhow her condition was obvious now.

And she often found herself crying. She’d put out hands for me and found them empty, but even in the darkest valleys she knew we were travelling towards the sun. The angels were watching above us with outspread wings. Example followed example to prove it.

The two homosexuals did not take kindly to her pregnancy. She saw their suspicions and told them. They were decent enough about it but they asked her to find another room as soon as she could. They’d explained that for them a great part of the charm of their present setup was its short-circuiting of the mother and the womb. It brought memories of suffocation. Ο boy, it was a queer world, and there sure were some queer people in it, she sang, but the angels were there too, she couldn’t go on except for the angels.