The Pornographer by John McGahern
“I know I am,” he beamed suddenly. “I work very hard at it.” In four weeks she would go to London. Jonathan would meet her at the airport and take her to the basement flat in Kensington. In seven to eight months she would give birth to the child. It was still all that time off, time enough for something to change it back, time enough for it to never happen. Vague and fragile as that sense was, it was enough to blur the sharpness, keep it farther off.
“I’m going to need a lot of loving to get me through all that length of time in London,” she said again. “And since you’re always muddled as to where we’ll meet,” she laughed, “We’ll decide the meeting places for the next four weeks tonight.”
There was no point meeting in the middle of town, she’d have to be there to say her own farewells, the goodbyes being prepared for her at Amalgamated Waterways and the bank, and she wanted as much as possible to keep our lives separate from them. So on wet evenings or on evenings when there was a threat of rain we’d meet in Gaffney’s bar. And if it was fine we’d meet half-way in Calderwood Avenue. She was in high energetic spirits that evening, insisting on counting the small almond and cherry trees in Calderwood. There were two hundred and forty-nine trees in the avenue. She wore a blue ribbon that was too young for her and took it off and tied it round the one hundredth and twenty-fifth tree.
“People will think we’re crazy,” she said as she took my arm to walk back to the room. One evening out of the four weeks we had to meet in Gaffney’s but we saw the blue silk ribbon round the bole of the one hundredth and twenty-fifth almond tree so regularly that we did not notice it fade and grow ragged in the dust and sun.
There is not much difference between seeing someone every evening who is to go to London in four weeks and going to hospital every evening to see someone who is dying, except that we can measure more accurately, and hence control it, a departure for London and imagine more easily what will happen when it’s reached. And each evening as I went to meet her I did not think there was much difference (except in the quality of affection) from going in to see my aunt in the hospital and meeting at the ribboned almond tree, except my male body in its cloth covering replaced the brandy bottle in its brown parcel.
She was always on time. Walking towards her down the long avenue of cherries and almonds proved far worse than walking into my aunt’s awareness down the hospital corridor during those first visits. As soon as she’d see me come her walk would change, as if a band had suddenly struck up, and she’d start to smile and wave. If I waved in answer, there’d follow an excruciating few minutes of waving, smiling, walking up to the beribboned tree.
“Right on the dot,” she’d say as she kissed. I tried coming a few minutes late but as soon as she’d see me along the line of almonds she’d take off towards me waving, smiling, walking. “You’re late,” she’d say. “The ribbon is half-way, a symbol of equality.” I started to come early, examining the parched grass around the roots of the almond tree as she came waving, smiling down the line.
“I guess that grass must be awfully interesting,” she said as her high heels clicked close.
“I’m not much good at waving,” I said.
“That is, I suppose, a tick-off for me. I can do nothing right.”
“Why should it be? I’m just not good at it, that’s all. It may well be what they call a character defect.”
Once or twice we went to suburban cinemas but in good weather we cooled our thirst in pubs, walking sometimes afterwards some miles out to the sea in the lovely evenings; and always we went back to the room.
“I need all the loving I can get to see me through the months in London,” it sounded as if she was working hard at getting a suntan against the winter. Her body was as sleek and beautiful as when we’d met. Morbidly I’d let my fingers trail along her stomach but there was no sign of swelling. The only pleasure was in staying outside oneself, watching the instinct that had constructed this prison suffer its own exhaustion within its walls and instead of bounding with refreshed curiosity to some new boundary of sense, having to take off its coat, and wield a painful pick. In this bright early summer weather it was always daylight when she left.
Sometimes we touched danger. “Jonathan rang today,” she said, and when I didn’t reply asked sharply, “Are you not curious what he had to say?”
“What did he say?”
“He said if his wife will agree to a divorce we might be married. Have you nothing to say to that?”
“I can’t very well object to Jonathan marrying you.”
“He says that if we got married he’s willing to accept the child as his own, but that you’ll have to sign over all your rights to the child. Will you do that? It means you can never lay eyes on the child again in your life,” she continued angrily.
“I’ll be glad to do that.”
“Have you no curiosity about the child?”
“None.”
“I don’t know, there must be something wrong with you, something missing. I don’t know whether you picked it up writing that pornography stuff or not but there’s a lack of feeling that makes me feel sorry for you. Often I sincerely pity you.”
“I can’t do much about that,” I avoided.
“O boy I sure picked a winner.”
Another evening she asked, “Do you play tennis?”
“No, I’ve never played. Why?”
“I used to be a fairly good player. This is the first spring I haven’t played though it must be five or six years since I was on the club team. Anyhow they heard I was going to London and they’re giving a dance and presentation. Would you like to come to the dance?”
“I think I better stay out of everything. It’d only mix things up, especially with Jonathan in it now.”
“What has he got to do with you?”
“You said yourself you’d want the child to appear completely Jonathan’s. And since that’s the case I would like to keep out of it as much as possible. That makes sense, doesn’t it? “and she was silent for a long time.
“Of course, since your rights mean nothing to you, it’s no sacrifice for you to give them up,” she said bitterly.
“I never pretended it was any other way,” I answered.
These parties were the only nights I didn’t see her, but even so they were no holiday. Hardly able to believe I was escaping so lightly, I felt I had the whole frail month in my hands, to be guided as delicately as possible towards the airport. From these functions she brought back trophies. A large clock with a scroll of names, an ornate silver tray, an ice bucket. Amalgamated Waterways gave her a cheque.
“There were speeches about my courage, how I was throwing mundane security over in order to seek fame and fortune. That I made them all seem small. If only they knew the truth,” she said, and I did not answer. Even within the boundaries of the four weeks, I was aware of possibilities within myself for doing something wild and stupid. Troubled by my own confusions in meeting her at the idiotically beribboned almond tree, I started to take down books in the room, unconsciously searching for some general light, as I’d gone out for allies at the first news. It was an ungenerous attitude, but my position was hardly aristocratic. I eventually found a sentence which brought me to a sudden stop: “Everybody must feel that a man who hates any person hates that person the more for troubling him with expressions of love; or, at least, it adds to hatred the sting of disgust.” I wrote it down, and kept it about my person like a scapular, as if the general expressions of the confused and covered feelings could licence and control them.
The last week we met at the almond tree at nine-thirty instead of eight. She was clearing out the room she’d lived in for more than twenty years and packing. She’d booked her ticket to London on an afternoon flight so that Jonathan could meet her. They’d arranged to go from the airport to the flat and then to his favourite restaurant for dinner.
“It’s only fair that I pay for that ticket.”
“I accept that,” she said gravely. “In fact,
“Why have I to collect it? Why can’t someone else do it, as long as I pay for it?”
“I don’t know. I just want you to.”
I didn’t know either, unless the ticket was a sort of personal receipt she had to have for the whole bitter business.
“Did you get it yourself?” were the first words when I handed her the ticket, the words weighed with a significance out of all proportion.
“I got it my very self. The girl who wrote it out had blonde hair, blue eyes and a Mayo accent. She was very pretty.”
“It’s all right for you. You haven’t to uproot yourself and go to London.”
“I was prepared to, but I thought it was just a simple air ticket that’s in question.”
“Thanks,” she said sharply, and thrust it in her handbag.
Between making love that night she cried, and I kept touching the verbal scapular that was part of my mind by now. As I walked her a last time down to the taxi rank at the end of Malahide Road she said, “I know that you’ve suffered as well as I have. We could have taken the easy way out of it and we didn’t and I think we’re both the better people for it.”
“I don’t know,” I touched my scapular a last time.
“And you’ll keep that promise. You’ll come and see me in London.”
“I’ll come. That’s if you want me.”
“I’ll want you,” she kissed me passionately. “Whether I’ll be able to afford you is the only thing in question.”
When I had loved, it had been the uncertainty, the immanence of No that raised the love to fever, when teeth chattered and its own heat made the body cold: “I cannot live without her.”
“I cannot live. …” If she’d said Yes, would not the fever have retired back into the flesh, to be absorbed in the dull blessed normal beat?
And was the note of No not higher and more clear because it was the ultimate note to all the days of love—for the good, the beautiful, the brave, the wise—no matter what brief pang of joy their Yes might bring?
If she had loved me that way—she who was now with child —had not that love been made desperate by my being its hopeless and still centre? Now she had the child. Was that not another Yes, a turning back within the normal beat?
I too had heard the hooves of the tribe galloping down on us. We had not kept within its laws.
I watched the clock. Her plane took off at three-forty. When hen the minute hand touched eight the plane taking her to London would sail heavily into the blue sky. It had flown. A cloud of dust on the road, the motor climbing the last half-mile, and then suddenly below, in a blue flash: the white houses, the masts of the tied-up fleet, the creamy haze of the sea.
As slowly as the hand had come to the eight, it as quickly raced to nine, ten.… It was four o’clock, and moving fast. I felt foolish in my excitement.
The whole city was restored to me, islanded in the idleness and ease of timeless Sunday mornings, church bells stroking the air and the drowning of it in wild medleys, the whole day given back to me because I had lost it.
When the red-bricked Georgian house had been converted into flats the entrance wasn’t changed at all except to put in an aluminium panel of electric buttons. They’d left one laurel, the ragged lawn, three granite steps, the old roses pinned with rusted staples to the wall, a heavy black knocker; and the letters for all the flats spilled through the brass flap onto the hall floor each morning and early afternoon. There was a dull click after they’d all been pushed through. Whoever was first down put them on the half-circular glass table with iron legs under the St Brigid’s cross. The nervous girl who worked on the radio was always the first one down in the morning. She must have watched for the postman from her window and left her room as soon as he’d come through the gate for she generally reached the door at the exact moment the letters were pushed through the brass flap. If he’d any delay in sorting the letters she used to have to wait in the hall, and I hated catching her apologetic, embarrassed smile whenever I’d found her waiting, the noises of the postman uncomfortably present on the other side of the door.
The letter-box became the focus of my precarious happiness, precarious because it was so fragile. When the afternoon post fell to the floor and there was no letter from London I felt released into another whole free day. When three days went by and there was still no letter I began to feel sometimes as if it had been a very vivid, bad dream. It might turn out, like the dream, not to be real, but I was still getting no work done. So I decided to secure my freedom for at least several more days by making the visit I had promised to my aunt and uncle and had been putting off for long.
I slept in my uncle’s room. “I’ll not get up for a while yet but why don’t you put on the light,” I said the first morning as I heard him fumble for the clothes he’d let drop on the floor going to bed.
“There’s no need. It’s just a matter of trousers and shirt,” he refused.
Home on school holidays I used to sleep in this room. Early in the morning I’d start to chatter with him, chattering like old starlings in the rafters my aunt had called it, and it must have been boring for him, but he’d never checked me, no more than he’d turn on the light now to find his clothes or draw the blind.
“I’ll go out to the mill around quitting time,” I said as I heard him pause before leaving the room.
“Whenever suits you. If I was you I wouldn’t start getting up or anything for long yet. You might as well lie back and take it easy when you have the chance.”
I heard steps in the hallway, the click of the lock, a car starting outside, the lock shut, my aunt’s slippers shushing back up the hallway. Cyril was on his way to work. Each morning my uncle must have timed his getting up to avoid Cyril. (Say it again, say it over, people do not find it easy to face one another.) When I heard my uncle leave, I too rose. As I sleepily drew the blinds the empty tarred square met me with a shock, the row of old railwaymen’s cottages beyond. There used to be a footpath to that station along the high cut-stone wall, two carriages and a van waiting to be towed to Dromod; beyond the darkness of the engine sheds, the long elephant’s trunk of piping from the water tank, the maze of rails, and the three stunted fir trees. It was said they never grew because of the poison of the coal smoke though they had blackened cones that dropped between the sleepers and onto the carriage roofs. Now it was level and empty: a tarred square, the cottages, a filling station. I felt like Pirandello and his wife rolled into one, the beginning of all that’s new, the continuance of everything old. What she saw, which wasn’t there, seemed more real to him than what he saw, which had the disadvantage of being there. The dancehall where I had met my first love was gone. We were waltzing in the sky.
This room had not changed, and neither had the bathroom, full of the smell of oranges and pink Jaffa papers speared on a nail above the toilet roll. The stairs with the strips of bicycle tyre nailed to the edge of the steps hadn’t changed, and the black-leaded Stanley—an antique now with its claw feet and running board—was used to fry rashers and egg and sausages. I ate them under the curtained spy window. My aunt used to be able to observe people in her first shop from behind that yellowed lace curtain, before she began to buy shops. Nothing had changed in the early morning except the smell of the brandy. The creamy blossoms of the elder half hid the coal shed still through the outer window out the back yard.
“I hope you don’t think too hard of the brandy,” to my dismay she brought the bottle out and sat with me at the breakfast table. By bringing it out so openly she was drawing me into the guilty maze.
“No, why should I?”
“It’s a great relief to drink with someone in the open. Cyril and your uncle won’t understand anything about it at all.”
“Cyril drinks enough himself to understand,” I said.
“He only drinks because he’s upset. He feels I’m far too long sick now.”
“He must have been upset the greater part of his life, so.”
“Ah, you’re all too hard on Cyril,” she complained. “The world’s hard enough.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said, “and I have nothing but praise for drink. It’s like a change of country; only it’d be awful to become an old soak.” What I said I believed, but there was no need to say so much. My instinct was to create room, to get out of the responsibility she had so suddenly thrust upon me. The blind instinct had run ahead of any seeing, of sympathy or fairness. I was learning to protect myself so fast now that I’d soon have a whole landscape of the moon to move around in.
“If you were like me,” she laughed with a mixture of wry bitterness and pure amusement, “you’d not care what they called you, an old soak or a young soak, as long as you got relief. The country that I find myself in most of the time now, God forgive me, isn’t fit for living in.”
“Why don’t you try the pills?”
“Ah, you’ve never taken those pills. They’re not like natural pills. You can feel them spreading themselves around in you. They’re killing you. That’s what they’re doing. After you take them you feel you’re walking round in a big dead empty glove.”
She poured me a glass. It was hateful in the morning, when the day was fresh, but I drank it. Later I found myself walking with her down the railway to the garden. Except for the beaten path, where the line had run, it was choked with enormous weeds, especially great pulpy thistles.
“The rails went to Scotland and the North,” she said. “I heard they cut them up and sold them as posts for haysheds.”
We went through a wooden gate made strong by the thin wire used to bind fruit crates, and down steps cut into the embankment. The garden was bordered by high banks on either side, covered with the same rank thistles of the railway, and below was an old hedge of whitethorn studded with several green oak and ash trees and one big sycamore. The clay was dark and loose, in neat drills: onions, carrots, parsnips, beet, peas and beans, the black and white miracle of the flower out, long green splashes of lettuce.