The Pornographer by John McGahern

Author:John McGahern [John McGahern]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780571250196
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 1979-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

“It seems I’m not going to London after all,” I said to Maloney. We met in the bar of the Clarence. He had insisted that we start to meet regularly since I was soon going to be away for at least the most of nine months, and he had picked the Clarence as out of the way and suitably grey.

For the hot day he wore baggy flannels, an expensively ragged corduroy jacket, and his buttoned-down shirt was open enough to display a wealth of grey hair on the chest.

“A false alarm,” he chortled. “Following in my own august footsteps.”

“No such luck,” I said.

“You’re going to do a skunk, then?” he looked at me in admiration, and started to laugh, a secretive high-pitched laugh, “I always thought you were one of those priested types, a lot in the head but not much on the ground. That you’d do the decent, follow your conscience, even if it meant tearing your balls off, but apparently I was wrong,” he shouted.

“No,” I ignored what he’d said. “She knows this rich Englishman with a house in Kensington, a crazy wife, several companies. He’s been an admirer of her for years. It’s just poured out in the wash. He’s already flown in from London and out again. They had dinner in the Hibernian, and he’s taking charge of the whole business. She’s going to live in the basement of his Kensington house and he’s getting her a job writing for one of his magazines. Naturally he doesn’t want me to go with her to London.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? This broad must be good looking. I thought she was just an ordinary turkey, a bit dim as to the facts of life.”

“She’s very good looking and this Englishman is old. I can hardly believe my luck. It’s almost too good. I hope she marries him. If she’d marry him it’d take care of the whole mess in one beautiful stroke.”

“I detect a disgusting note of self-congratulation,” he changed. “And it won’t do. It won’t do at all. You’ve behaved stupidly, even by your own admission. You’ve got this woman into a frightful mess. In your conceit you refuse to marry her though she is a beauty, a far cry from your own appearance. And your bad behaviour and general situation is making us feel good. It’s making us all feel very good.”

“How?”

“How can you ask such a question? Your behaviour has dropped the moral averages to zero overnight. It makes some of our own reprehensible past acts practically beatific. We’re disgusted with you.”

“Anyhow you won’t want the Shannon River thing written now.”

“That’s what you think. I want every word of it. And I want both history and myth respected. There are too many people up to their elbows in myth without the slightest respect for history.”

“Why don’t you let up?”

“Would you if you’d just lost a Paris trip and was barely consoled by looking forward to a few nice saunters round Soho and found that even

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