The Pornographer by John McGahern Page A

of a happy eternity or just another irony, the realization of the unawareness. We feel that we have been freed of the burden of time passing, and the happiness is in the feeling and not in the blind forgetful play among the words.
    I counted what I had written.
    The Colonel and Mavis have had carnal knowledge of one another six times, fucked one another six times, not counting the time in the Colonel’s flat before leaving for the airport. They show no signs of tiredness though Mavis sleeps late while the Colonel goes out to buy wine and fruit for the room, has a Campari and soda at a sidewalk café, and buys a spray of mimosa—my only extravagance—on the way back to the hotel room. As he sniffs it he promises to improve its scent with the even more delicious scent between Mavis’s lovely waking thighs, “my honey”.
    I was tired and flushed, my flesh excited again by the play of Mavis and the Colonel in the mind’s eye. How could it be otherwise? The words had to be mixed with my own blood. How could the dried blood of the words be turned back into blood unless they had once been bound by living blood? “Nonsense, rubbish, blackpudding, pig’s blood,” Maloney had countered not so long ago in the Palace. “That’s poetry talk. Andyou know what I think of that nowadays. Our average reader —and the average is king and queen of circulation—is already so inflamed that he or she would get a rise out of a green tree in Gethsemane.”
    One more long day’s work and he’ll have his Majorcan story and I’ll be free for a whole week. I was tired enough to be grateful that I hadn’t to think what to do for the evening, that it was already decided: I had to meet her at eight in the upstairs lounge of the Green Goose. The memory of the accidental night was already vague enough for me to be curious again, and having driven Mavis and the Colonel from feat to feat I had grown inflamed enough myself to want to lie down with any warm body.
    The Green Goose was grey and concrete and had a painted green bird on an iron sign in the forecourt of the car park that seemed to rattle its sense of not belonging in every sudden gust. It had been built twenty years before to serve the lower-middle-class roads and drives and avenues of brown-tiled semis all around it, and had aged like them into an ugly mildness. The upstairs lounge was heavily carpeted with blue peacock’s eyes, and green and red peacocks stared from the wallpaper. A whole generation of young marrieds must have grown tired of the flap of nappies on lines and summer lawnmowers under those same unalterable eyes.
    It was too early for the couples. There were just a few men with evening papers who had not quite made it from their offices to their front doors. I bought a drink at the counter and took it to one of the corner tables.
    She came at exactly five minutes after eight on the bar clock, wearing an elegant tweed costume, its collar and cuffs edged with dark fur. She walked quickly towards me, chin raised, smiling so hard that her dimples seemed to rise and fall. Her strong body was perfectly formed, the features clear and handsome. She would have been beautiful, I thought, except for this flurry of blue forget-me-nots she seemed to send quivering out with every step.
    “Ο boy,” she said as she sat down. “I was afraid you mightn’t be here.”
    “Of course I’d be here.”
    “I thought coming up the stairs that you mightn’t be here. I thought so much about you the last days you cannot know,” her eyes shone with an overdose of sincerity.
    “What will you have to drink?” I asked.
    She was so filled with the momentous moment that I felt like going on my knees in gratitude for those small blessed ordinary handrails of speech.
    “Would a gin and tonic be all right?”
    “I’m sure I can get you that.”
    She started to arrange her handbag, to take off her gloves.
    Though she wore a hard-working smile, when I got back with the drinks she was quiet