John McGahern - The Pornographer

And the angels were still there. She’d met this Irish couple, the Kavanaghs, who had four children, and a large Victorian house they’d bought cheap near the Archway, and they had renovated it themselves. He drove a tower crane on the buildings and she was a nurse in the Highgate Hospital. Because of the children the wife worked nights. The house was so big that they had spare rooms even with the four children. They knew our story and they felt that we had done the right thing. The very sound of the word abortion made Michael angry. And she was able to be of real use to Nora Kavanagh. She made Michael and the children’s supper whenever Nora was working nights. She got the children out for school and let Nora early to bed when she got home, “They were dying off like flies last night,” Nora’d say some mornings and she’d babysit any time Michael and Nora wanted to go out. Often they’d bring back beers and the three of them would sit and talk in front of the TV. She knew I’d like the Kavanaghs and they thought I’d acted well in the whole business and wanted to meet me. She felt completely taken care of. She loved the children and the house. She’d said to Michael that she’d be willing to change places with their sheepdog if it meant being able to stay on in the house and they’d both collapsed laughing. She’d difficulty getting them to take the small rent and they gave it back and more in presents. They wanted her to give up her job at the Tottenham yard but the work was so easy that she’d keep it on up to the last.

She felt as if she was in a train. The doors were locked and it was moving fast. All the faces about her in the carriage were happy and smiling. The train had passed all the early stations and was now racing through the night. In a very short time it’d stop. She’d get out at Christmas to the child and she knew the angels would be watching.

The first plan was to have the child in the house. Then it was decided that it was safer, because of her age, to have the child in the hospital. Michael’s wife was able to arrange a bed in a semi-private ward in her own hospital.

She gave up work in the Tottenham yard two weeks before Christmas and asked for the money I’d earlier offered. Papers arrived for me to sign. The train was still beautifully on course, all the doors locked, though it now seemed probable that it would carry past Christmas and possibly into the New Year. Would I come to London for Christmas? London was the most exciting place in the world at Christmas.

While these letters brought me near a winter that was happening elsewhere, her bells for good cheer were for me a simple cause of gloom. I met the black-haired girl casually, but often saw her coats and dresses, now so familiar to me, in a crowd. They had become the envelopes of a quiet love.

“It’s bloody awful,” I complained at the end of a week in which not a day had gone by without a letter of glad tidings from London.

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” she said.

“I suppose it’s just vanity on my part. You imagine you control your life, and then something comes along like this and blows it wide open.”

“It is vanity.”

“To realize that doesn’t seem to make it any better.”

“You seem to me to have behaved well. What are you to do? Marry the woman, for God’s sake?”

“O, I behaved well enough, all right. I know that. But I behaved well as much out of cowardice as anything else. It’s safer to behave well. It’s more protection than behaving badly.”

“Well, it’s done now,” she said, and at the bus stop where we usually parted, she said, “You might as well leave me back tonight.”

“Are you sure?”

“Are you sure?” she smiled, and without thinking I closed my grip on her arm.

As we went between the two lighted globes above the hospital gates I felt invaded by a fragility, a spiritual lightness that had nothing to do with the hospital or dark in the hospital. I had no sense at all of the misery and suffering and even exaltation that may have been going on in that darkened ward. The same fragility I had felt entering rooms of strange people at their ease or walking up to the door of a building the morning of taking up a new job. I was entering a new life. I was being questioned, and I had no longer the power to turn away, nor the confidence to say yes, only that I could try and try with all that I knew, the rash heart given its rashness, but given it by watchfulness and care, knowing they could not know where it might lead but determined to be its shadow everywhere.

It seems we must be beaten twice, by the love that we inflict and then by the infliction of being loved, before we have the humility to look and take whatever agreeable plant that we have never seen before, because of it being all around our feet, and take it and watch it grow, choosing the lesser truth because it’s all that we’ll ever know.

We went straight to her room, more cell than room, the black cross on its white bare wall, careful even of our breathing between its paper walls.

In the morning when I rang for the taxi I was about to turn to her to say that the hospital seemed to have fewer night visitors in winter, when down the corridor doors started to open softly and footsteps come towards us. We kissed quickly and I could feel her laugh by my side as we heard, “Can we share the taxi into the city?” I had seen none of the sharers before, the sauce chef was not there, and we drove into the sleeping city in a drowsed silence.

I was too tired to read or work the next day, but did not want to sleep, as if by sleeping I’d consign the night casually to some section of animal desire, like any night, as if it was necessary to keep a wilful vigil. In spite of this, I must have fallen asleep in the cane chair, for I was startled by the bell. I had no idea what time it was. The fire had gone out.

A telegram, I thought as I went downstairs. From London or the country. A birth or death or, I stirred guiltily, a death in giving birth, but when I opened the door it was my uncle who was standing there.

“It was the last ring I was going to give,” he said petulantly. “I thought there was no one in. I was just about to powder off with myself.”

“Is she gone or what?” I asked too quickly out of surprise.

“No, but it’d be a blessing for the poor thing if she was. She’s back in the hospital. She collapsed. I’d to come up in the ambulance,” he was undismayed.

“Is she conscious?”

“She is,” he said but I could tell by his answer that he did not know the meaning of the word.

“Has she her senses about her?”

“Not at all. She’s just collapsed. She never moved or spoke a word all the way up. She’s like a dead person but she’s not dead.”

I grew aware that we were standing all that time in the doorway, “Come in.” As we climbed the stairs I saw that he was practically immobile between self-importance and self-pity.

“You haven’t been down,” he accused. “That woman was expecting you a lot of the time.”

“I’m sorry. I meant to, several times, but I didn’t.”

“There’s been big changes.”

“What changes?”

“Well, I bought a place,” he announced.

“What place?”

“McKennas.” I shuffled through the local names until I came on a big farmhouse with orchards and sheds between the saw mill and the town.

“But that’s a farm. What do you want with land?”

“Won’t it make money even if it was only left lying there?” he began to laugh, which continued after I asked how much he’d paid for it. “Guess,” he chuckled and I knew I’d have to draw out the game to the last trick, and settled on a figure I knew to be too high but not outrageously so.

“You must be joking,” he laughed with pure pleasure.