Through Streets Broad and Narrow (29 page)

“She'd soon have you hating it again.”

“Not if she were to marry me.”

Groarke laughed, how he laughed, but he would not explain why, though once he said, “There's something in us. You'd better read Joyce, he took it with him to Paris and died of it. Don't think you'd ever get Ireland, you'd sooner get the Uprichard”—he often called Dymphna this. “She's one of the ones that's not meant to be had, she's a eunuch soul like Ireland.”

“Well then, tell me why I hate Ireland.”

“You're fly, like ourselves. You know what goes on. And hungry, you've got a hunger, the Devil in you that's never been censed.”

“You're not a Catholic, are you, Mike?”

But to this Groarke said only, “There's a few; more than in England. Where you'll find the Church, just outside it you'll get experts in the sharper sides of invective.”

He would change the subject and it would be closed for a long time. After such an airing they would work hard together for a week or two, then ignore one another.

Groarke was getting letters from Cloate. John saw them in the letter-rack in the sitting-room with a Field P.O. frank on them and a white label “
Censored by Censor Number 83642
.” One day when Groarke was opening one, John asked him how Cloate was; and Groarke said, “He's getting a thousand a year for appendicectomies and herniotomies!”

“Does he send you money?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why?”

“It's good for the bastard.”

They were taking their course in Anaesthetics from a drunkard with blue eyes. There was something perilous about these
selective eyes of old McIndoo's over a theatre mask. They fixed more constantly on John than on most people and through the mask beneath them was exhaled the sweet wheaty smell of Irish whiskey, morning, afternoon, and probably at night, too, if McIndoo had not had a junior to do the emergency work for him.

McIndoo was not a very advanced anaesthetist; he did not like all the modern machines and gases, nerve-block techniques, intravenous inductions, and left all these to a deputy who was not qualified to give the residents their certificates of competence. McIndoo believed in the Clover's Inhaler, a very simple apparatus consisting of a large red rubber balloon, known as the re-breathing bag, attached to a chromium-plated sphere with valves and sliding panels through which fresh ether could be poured into the central chamber. By opening different valves the patient could be persuaded to breathe varying mixtures of ether, oxygen, and his own exhaled carbon dioxide from the rebreathing bag. In general, ether and oxygen were quite sufficient for the induction and maintenance of anaesthesia; if this became too shallow, the ether could be increased and the oxygen diminished; on the other hand if the respiration became too depressed, the use of the re-breathing bag flooded the patient's system with carbon dioxide and ensured the stimulation of the respiratory centre in the medulla oblongata of the brain stem. This had the effect of making him breathe more deeply in his need to secure more oxygen, and the anaesthetist could then take advantage of the response to administer the appropriate percentages of ether and oxygen.

Though antiquated, the method was fundamentally sound since it depended on a natural and primitive reflex; its defect lay in the fact that only long clinical experience could advise exactly which percentages of the three gases was appropriate at any given moment. The patient was, so to speak, balanced like a ping-pong ball at a rifle range on a triple fountain, now sinking, now rising, a little, but liable if the jets fluctuated too violently to rise or sink too far.

From long practice McIndoo himself could tell with a single flick of the patient's eyelid and a feel at his pulse exactly in
which direction his anaesthesia was bearing. The big man's ears must have been unconsciously tuned to the inhalations and exhalations, measuring their rhythm and depth so that he could anticipate both the patients' and the surgeons' needs. If the former was too “shallow” the surgeon would complain of insufficient muscular relaxation and would be dragging on his retractors and muttering into his mask; if too deep the field would be flooded with black blood and everyone from the operator down to the theatre probationers would be tense and alarmed.

McIndoo could choose, as he wished, to give his students either a smooth or a rough passage. He spoke in monosyllables which could be gentle or disturbing. He could say “Bag” as softly as a man in the seduction of an opium dream, or he could growl it like a bulldog with its jaws clenched on a postman's buttock. He could put out a spatulate thumb three seconds before the nick of time and twitch a valve, or shove out a fist, snatch the whole apparatus and wind the student with his elbow at the same moment. His blue, very blue periwinkle eyes could protrude kindly above the mask, full of tired affability, or they could glaze and bore like an oxyacetylene flame. He could shout, “Bag! Fool! Ether! Bag! Blast!” and then add a noise of his own and take over the whole management, leaving the student standing uselessly behind him with nothing to do except avoid the eyes of everyone else. In very rare instances he could refuse to sign the certificate which was an essential preliminary to sitting Finals Part II and make the student repeat the course.

John told Groarke, “I've had it. I'm blue with funk. How can you tell whether the patient's too shallow with a surplus of oxygen or for lack of carbon dioxide? If I give oxygen he yells out ‘Ether!' when I give ether he shouts, ‘Bag!' when I pump on the bag he says, ‘Oxygen, you fool!' ”

“You ought to do some on your own in Out-Patients' Theatre.”

“Don't be stupid, no one will let me.”

“Have you tried?”

“De Burgh White calls me the “Surgeon's Dilemma.” I went in there yesterday when Gibson was doing an emergency herniotomy. I told him I was on duty and he ignored me completely,
he said to Clery, “For God's sake, Sister, get me some half-wit for the anaesthetic, but not
that
one!”

“You're breaking up,” Groarke said.

“That whiskey-swigging old bastard isn't going to finish me.”

“ ‘Come the four corners of the world in arms,'” Groarke quoted. “He's going to hold you back to repeat the course.”

“I'm as competent as anyone else.”

“You were, you mean.”

“Was, then.”

“He's out to break your nerve.”

“That's what I've been telling you.”

“And you know why?”

“The paper, I suppose. I never thought McIndoo would have been interested enough to read it. He looks as though he runs to very simple rules, those blue eyes and the monosyllables, the hair on his arms.”

“He's a mystic,” said Groarke, “a whiskey mystic. They're often the most dangerous. He dislikes you more than Gibson, Lait, Macdonald Browne and Heaton put together.”

“Why not Cloate too?”

“Cloate's gone.”

There was a pause after this. Then John said, “But why should that man hate me more than the rest of the staff? He's anaesthetist to about three hospitals but they're Mungo Park's men from start to finish.”

“War record; Anglo-Irish; medals up. You've attacked Ireland and let England down at the same time. You've broken through his compromise.”

“I haven't let England down, or if I have, apart from the paper, you've done it too.”

“I'm Anglo-Irish, too,” said Groarke, “so it doesn't worry him.”

At the end of the course a week or two later John's name was posted on the board as having failed to satisfy the anaesthetist.

He caught Dr. McIndoo in the consultants' room where he was taking off his British warm before the start of the morning's cases.

“Why did I fail in Anaesthetics, sir?”

“Because you are a fool.”

“I meant what was my principal mistake?”

“Being a bloody fool.”

“Where the anaesthetics were concerned, sir?”

“You start again when I've had your additional fee.”

“What guarantee have I that you'll pass me next time?”

“None. Now get out.”

The weather was very hot. On his afternoons off he took Dymphna out bathing at the Kingstown baths.

At this time he was being what she termed “sensible” about her. But since half measures never satisfied him he was being more than sensible. Whereas she had suggested he should not worry about Groarke, Collins, and the others whom she saw regularly, but should enjoy such times as he himself shared with her, he for his part had effected a censorship of his thoughts so that she began to complain of his silences and the paucity of his curiosity. She did this only until she had assured herself of his continued love, and then she smiled about that.

“So that's forbidden ground,” she would say when he refused to tell her. something, “so we won't ask you that one.”

She was very delightful over it all, not making him feel that his reserve was a sulk, but that it was something more endearing and mature. His criticisms of his conduct came from himself; he was quite unable, convincingly, to discredit her with the shifts to which he had put himself even though the distaste he felt for them came from seeing them through what he imagined to be her eyes.

He had taken to smoking a pipe and sat puffing it beside her on the long bus ride to Kingstown. He did not enjoy it as much as cigarettes, but it was something to hang on to and he believed that since it suggested tranquillity it might help him to obtain it.

For at this time he was very nervy indeed; his world seemed to have been arrested, to have been stilled in a gigantic pause which it was quite beyond his own power to terminate. Examining, as he had done, his aims in their several directions, he had to
admit that they might prove totally inconclusive in each. Yet he felt that soon as one single endeavour succeeded for him, then all else might easily and astonishingly follow.

He did not try to tell Dymphna about his difficulties. Why should he have done so, when she herself was the principle in which all the others were entailed? He sat smoking his pipe beside her in the roaring bus waiting for the pattern of the afternoon at the baths to repeat itself like the well-known dream it was, and from which there was no awakening since it was not begotten by sleep.

There would be the walk along the promenade, the towel round his neck and her things under his arm, the breeze from the sea, salt-sweet fluttering her short hair but quite failing to make her white cheeks flush. At the baths, sitting or lying on the cement which had been swathed flat round the brown rocks and their sharp indigo shadows, an hour, two or three, would pass swiftly into the evening chill from the sea. They would have swum together in the baths or in the open sea two or three times, drunk lemonade and eaten chocolates and boiled sweets, dried one another's backs, dived from the highest boards, exchanged gossip with other people, looked at one another a little and said even less. It would be time to return home to Dublin where they would eat somewhere, conversation flickering into interest over some topic in which they were both sufficiently disinterested, then pay the bill and make for the flat.

It did not worry them at all that they had said nothing, or if it worried John it did not worry her. He believed that she too must be waiting, though in a different way from himself. He thought, How interesting it would be if she could tell me what is the deciding factor which she awaits in each of us, in herself. But he concluded that this was the one thing which she could not know, and remembered Theresa with satisfaction even though he knew the comparison did not hold, since Theresa had possessed an integrity of some sort.

At the flat they would kiss to exhaustion in the old familiar fashion and he would be lost there in the darkening room in the readiness of his passion; a “good” certain to be recreated over and over again if only he could bring himself to test it by a
single fulfilment. But always his reservation that she must confess she loved him, coupled with her own need for something more forceful than persuasion, arrested them at the brink of committal. She would grow weary as himself, pale in the summer's light; a compound of stars, some moon, and of the slow sunset showing her lips, eyelids, cheeks, neck and arms all a little fuller. Yet never once did she suggest that he must go, always the decision was his own; and he went reluctantly as ever, leaving her there as enigmatic in this as in everything else.

No man could believe that she whom he loved, while so young, would have plunged with him without a decisive affection to rule her. No man, at heart, loving as he loved her, would have wanted to admit that such a woman was the measure of his love, one lusting easily as a man and for no particular reason at all; or so it seemed to him.

He would leave her leaning against the door at the top of the stairs, hesitate, wanting to return, to find some word that would cover all that he had never said so that she in her turn might reply, “Go, don't ever come back,” or, “I understand you. Wait a little longer,” or, “Of course, it's simple. I love you, will marry you. It is proved.”

But she said nothing at any time, or something so trivial that he never wished to remember it. Often she did not even smile. Certainly at this time she betrayed by no hint in tone or gesture that she was irritated by the dull repetitions of their days and evenings. Often, a little gaiety, the insouciance for which amongst other things he most loved and most despaired of her, would be her parting habit. He could find nothing vulgar in her ways, however ordinary they might be. If she started most delicately to put on her lipstick, she did it with such abstraction that the action was in itself mysterious.

When I have gone, he wondered, for what does she prepare? It is late. Emma will be coming in, there will be the washing-up to do. Does Dymphna read a book or write her diary or does she lie back on the divan and begin to think about tomorrow? Am I just one of several interruptions that make up her present life? And if so which is the interruption which is going to constitute her marriage?