Through Streets Broad and Narrow (39 page)

She was looking at him sharply, really sharply; her eyes smaller, her nose keener, her always soft mouth thinned and edged. It was an astonishing vision; he could scarcely believe that it was the same woman or girl he had loved for so long.

An old mood of accusation overcame him. “That's what you've done. You've killed yourself a little, because your son or daughter would have been a possibility of you, an extension going on and on; and we could have been friends. That's what you wanted, you were thinking of going on with it in some way, innocent or guilty. And I believe we could have done it.”

“
You
believe!”

“Yes, I do; and not wrongly. We'd have found something.”

“Never.”

“No, not now, it's not enough to be beautiful, a woman's got to be alive right until her old age. She's got to be good or she dies; and if she's bad it's better that she should.”

She relaxed. “I really think you're mad,” she said. “What an escape!”

“For whom?”

“For me. For both of us, if you like.”

He said nothing. He thought he might be cured of her, of Victoria too. He saw the morbidity of his passion clinging for ever to what was dead or lost instead of to what was as generous and living as itself. He heard her say, “You're so intense. You were always so intense.”

And he thought to himself, I'm afraid I always will be.

“If you want to know,” she was saying, “that's why we never could have got on. I expect you imagine it's because you never made love to me as any other man would have done. And I'd have let you.” There was pleasure in her smile. “I even wanted you to at times if that's going to be any comfort to you! But it wasn't that at all really. I didn't mind you being prudish. It was your moods, you always upset me with them. When we first met in Anglesey with that Greenbloom man I was intrigued by your sadness, I'll admit. I wanted to find out why and make things right for you.”

He did not honestly think that she had. He thought of nothing but the relief she had given him by making herself so ugly; a bleeding woman.

“You see things that aren't there, John. You make mysteries of everything and no one can live for a lifetime with that. It wouldn't matter if you kept them to yourself. But you don't, you affect people, all your friends, even the hospital. Look at the paper you wrote and all the damage it did to everyone and to you yourself.
You're
the worst sufferer. I sometimes think, other people do, that you've got a secret that you can't leave alone and that spoils you for yourself and everyone else. I was in two minds even to write to you in the first place; if I'd been in my normal state of mind I'm sure I wouldn't have done, and now I wish that I hadn't. It's been horrible! horrible! You've made me feel as though I'd done something wicked when I only had a surgical miscarriage like thousands of people, not only doctors' wives, have every day. And just because Mrs. Darling was unlucky you make out that she was murdered in here and that we're all guilty even when we'd only chatted together once. She came in to see how I was and we compared notes, that's all; they couldn't afford another, they'd got two boys and the little girl already—”

He heard the door open and Dymphna's voice cut off like lightning. It was the Matron. He didn't look at her and tried not to slink past her as he said, “I was just going.”

He heard the door shut click behind him and went down the stairs and through the hall so fast that he didn't even notice whether or not the doll was still there slumped on the wooden chest.

In the evening of the same day when John kept his appointment with Greenbloom and Groarke at the Shelbourne Hotel he found it extremely difficult to concentrate on anything. This may have been a consequence of his visit to Dymphna in the afternoon, the painful and unresolved impressions which it had made upon him, or it might equally have resulted from the presence of a small stocky Roman Catholic priest, named Father Beste, whom Greenbloom had collected from somewhere. John was at so great a disadvantage that he felt no astonishment, indeed little interest at all, in the fact of Groarke's presence; though, under the circumstances, it was sufficiently surprising.

For his part Groarke was very stiff and surly, seeming to defend his reappearance by a closed kind of hostility. Greenbloom's other companion was a cheerful round-faced man with short salt-and-pepper hair. His joviality was of the gentle sort and when addressing anyone he seemed almost to be speaking to himself in a charitable monologue which gave one the impression that one was eavesdropping in listening to him at all.

The priest drank generously, but not greedily, and became less cheerful and more practical with every glass he put away. Groarke, on the other hand, drank nothing because Greenbloom had forbidden him to have anything but tonic water, which he detested. Two full glasses of it stood in front of him, on Greenbloom's orders.

Horab had them at a corner table of the long lounge; and although John had arrived three quarters of an hour late, none
of them seemed to be in a hurry to go through into the dining-room. Twice in the course of the ensuing conversation the waiter reminded Greenbloom that the meal was ready but was only thanked and waved away for his pains. The three of them had obviously been talking hard or listening harder to Greenbloom who, a little histrionically, was calling them “My friends,” as though the meeting were a conspiracy.

When John hurried across to them and began to apologize, all Greenbloom said was, “You're late! Sit down and attend to Father Beste, if you please. You were saying, sir?”

“Ah, well. I was mentioning that we have this little fellow in there; a Carmelite from the Dutch Province, and it wouldn't be too difficult at this stage, before the Nazis tumble him, to get another priest—”

Greenbloom leant forward, “Tumble him?”

“Bump him off's what I mean,” said Father Beste to himself. “You know, the rope or the gas chamber or a shot in the back of the neck. You pick up these slang phrases in America and it's hard to drop them when you get back here to Dublin. Well now, we do have the entrée in a way to all these camps, particularly those in Bavaria, and I was thinking we might get one of our priests from Munich to visit Father Marcus in Dachau while he's in the camp hospital. That way we could keep a check on things.”

“Astonishing,” Greenbloom said. “You talk about this colleague of yours as though he were shortly going to celebrate a birthday instead of a merciless and undeserved death.”

“Don't we know he'd deserved every minute of his life?”

“One would have imagined that if you can so easily convey messages to these places, it would be likely that you could save your own priests.”

“That's not the way of it at all. The Church's kingdom was never of this world. But, fortunately, there's few corners of it where we can't get out word.”

The priest became very practical. “But I think it would be helpful, Mr. Greenbloom, if we cut the talk and you gave us the facts again. I've lost track of some of the steps you outlined in your plans for your brother.”

Greenbloom spoke slowly. “It is a reasonable plan, I think. Tomorrow, through my intermediary, Michael Groarke, I shall pass over both the money and the Swedish bonds to Luthmann, together with my brother's full name and camp number. Since greed is always in a hurry I don't think Groarke's explanation as to the origin of the bribe need be elaborate. He will tell Luthmann that the cash is a personal fee for his good offices and that the donor does not require it to be set against the life in question. I think we can be sure that under these circumstances, Luthmann will pocket it without reporting it to his consul. The bonds, secured against iron-ore mining funds in which kinsmen of mine have a major interest, have already been signed by the previous owner. Enclosed with them is the legal transfer making them available to a prominent member of the Nazi party.”

“We will allow two to three days for the Consulate here in Dublin to radio the German Foreign Office in Berlin, giving them the serial numbers of the bonds and the legal details from Stockholm. In addition to this we'll give them a further two days for the internal transmission from Himmler's office to the Commandant of Dachau ordering my brother's immediate release. On the seventh day your Bavarian priest will use his entry permit to visit Father Marcus in the camp hospital and find out whether or not my brother has in fact been released.”

“That's fine,” Father Beste said. “You've only missed out the extra it's going to cost if our priest is to be talking to the Commandant himself. Any other time we've tried to get one of them in to give the Last Sacraments or whatever else may be, it's always been a devil of an expense. Even with plenty of money they strip our fellows down—whether they're for in or out—and subject them to a thorough verbal examination; but without money you don't stand a dog's chance anyway. The German Father will be needing some for the doctor in the hospital, some more for the underlings and a whale of a lot more than that for the old pig himself.”

“Precisely,” Greenbloom replied. “Before you leave this evening I shall hand over to you a sum equivalent to fifty pounds in Reichsmarks at the current rate of exchange. I imagine you'll
find means of reimbursing your Bavarian province within the course of a month or two?”

“I think surely that can be done.”

“Also, Father Beste, I shall hand you a blank cheque which you may fill in at your discretion either for your own services or to the interest of any charity you think fit.”

“Not at this stage. You see, I think I ought to warn you again, Mr. Greenbloom, that there have been occasions, ever since the invasion of Poland, when we've tried to strike some bargain for ourselves and been shown the gate. With the way the pace has quickened, of course, we couldn't be thinking of doing it for all the priests they've got into them places. It'd bankrupt even the Church.” Father Beste took a quick gulp of his whiskey. “But I'll tell you now that we did try it for the little Carmelite they've incarcerated in the hospital there. Don't we know from experience that when they want a discreet death they always push the case over to the medical side for an injection or a pill? And wasn't Father Marcus a key man in the Catholic press in Holland and he could well have climbed down a little in his editorials after the Nazi conquest? But he wouldn't budge, not even though the Archbishop himself, when he saw which way he was heading, begged him to put on the soft pedal. So we raked up the money by local subscription and sent the lot along to the German Consulate in Amsterdam.”

In the silence which followed, Groarke made his first remark to no one in particular.

He said, “Whom the gods love, they first admit to hospital.”

Greenbloom turned on him. “They do not make them mad. Insanity, as I made clear this afternoon, is nearly always self-inflicted.”

“What I did was in a good cause,” Groarke said. “My own.”

Greenbloom studied him. “I do not think you were ever even remotely mad, my friend. I am not interested in what you have done or not done. But I can assure you that by the time you have assisted me with my brother Eli who is otherwise likely to be gassed to the music of Beethoven, you will be very sane indeed.”

Groarke looked back at him contemptuously.

“Why should one Jew out of a hundred thousand be saved, or one priest out of ten thousand? Who is my brother?”

Father Beste said, “In times like these we can spare a martyr or two,” and Greenbloom said, “There are unities. Has it ever occurred to you that there are only two real religions, the Jewish and the Christian? Both are wealthy. In the single instance of my brother it takes an eternal city and an international bank to reach his sepulchre.”

All Groarke replied was, “For God's sake let me have one drink.”

Greenbloom smiled. “At least this Irishman is sufficiently religious not to proffer me his sympathy.” He fired at Groarke, “You may have wine only, sir; at dinner in a few minutes' time. I hope, incidentally, that after the meal you'll find time to tell John about the small private party you're both giving in a few days' time.”

“A party?” John asked. “Whom are we inviting?”

“As I had already explained before you arrived I am anxious to meet Christian Luthmann, the German, just once in my neutral, American capacity. I feel that such a meeting will give me a psychological advantage at a later date. I make no proviso about the number of guests, but I think it would be wiser to err on the side of too many rather than too few. I suggest, incidentally, that apart from myself, you invite nobody over the age of thirty.” Greenbloom got up. “My friends, we will now go in to dinner.”

It was not until the end of the meal, when Greenbloom and Father Beste had left them sitting together at the table, that John had an opportunity of talking to Groarke. He asked him how Greenbloom had persuaded him to take his discharge from Grangegorman, and Groarke said, “When you bite on that fellow your teeth hit bone.”

“But what did he say to you to convince you? Or rather to convince Melhuish, the superintendent?”

“It didn't rest with him anyway. I was a voluntary patient and could come out when I chose.”

“Mike, I wish you'd get on with it and tell me the whole story.”

“There is no story.”

“There must be. For instance, what made you go in to begin with? Why didn't you tell me you were breaking up? Why didn't you answer a single letter or allow me to visit you?”

Groarke had the old look on his face; the look of a man in cold wind. He said, “No questions.”

“Good God, Mike, we've wasted six months or more. I'm up for Midwifery again for the second time next week;
you
should have been sitting Medicine and Surgery. We've foundered at the worst possible moment.”