The Pornographer Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t have any money, just enough for a small salary for poor Walter, who’d work for nothing if he had to, he’s that crazy about all rivers and lakes and even half filled-in canals. What I get, though, is plenty of trips and cruises.”
    Enough similar tags had been cast into the air to mark us off for one another, like a dab of dye on the markings of mallards.
    “Why don’t you come and have a drink with me?” I asked,and when she hesitated, “It’d be easier and more pleasant for us to talk than in this bump-around.…”
    For the first time she looked at me sharply, stepping instinctively back, taking stock of the whole. One of the few laws of the cattle light was that if you came off the floor with someone for a drink the sexual had been allowed in.
    “All right,” she said suddenly, without qualification.
    The bar was jammed downstairs and when I found the waiter I’d had earlier he told me that there were some tables free at the far side of the upstairs balcony and that he’d bring the drinks there. “Bring large ones. Gins and tonics,” I told him.
    I pushed ahead of her through the crowd downstairs and then followed her through the women crushed together on the stairs outside the ladies’ cloakroom. She had a magnificent strong figure beneath the light blue woollen dress, and when she turned her fine features, seeing the empty tables across the balcony, and smiled, “It’s a wonder they’ve not been taken,” she looked astonishingly beautiful, a wonderful healthy animal.
    “Some prefer the milling downstairs. As well, they probably don’t know that it’s empty up here.”
    We got a table where we could lean against the balcony rail and watch. A fine dust was rising from the floor as well as the thick curls of tobacco smoke. The drummer had taken his jacket off and was sweating profusely as he launched into a solo. The waiter came with the drinks. He spooned in the ice from a jug he carried on the metal tray.
    “Will you be wanting anything else, sir?” he asked.
    “Bring the same again in a while. You might as well take for both now,” there’d be no need to think again of the drinks.
    “Do you live in a flat…?” I asked when we lifted the drinks.
    “No. I live in my aunt’s house. I’ve lived there since I was six. Three of her daughters live there as well, my cousins. It is a house of women,” she spoke excitedly.
    “How do you happen to be there?”
    “It’s a long story. I have one sister but she’s married to a solicitor down the country, where we come from. My father was a small builder. He struggled all his life, and when he was just beginning to do well—we had a bungalow in Clontarf—and mother and he could afford to go out together in the evening, they were coming from a dinner-dance in the Shelbourne, driving, and somehow missed the turn below Burgh Quay, and went into the Liffey. My sister and I were too young to know much about what happened except the bustle. We were shared out between two different aunts. The aunt and uncle I was given to already had eight children of their own. It was much stricter there than with my poor parents. My uncle taught chemistry. He was the Professor, a light of Maria Duce. He certainly wouldn’t approve of this place,” she was looking down on the dancers below. It was a slow waltz. Some of the couples were so wrapped round one another on the floor that except for the drapery of clothes they might be dancing in coitus.
    “No, if he was like that I can’t imagine he’d approve of it,” I said idly.
    The waiter came with the other tray of drinks.
    “I don’t think I’ll be able for all this. Already I’m feeling a little tipsy,” she said.
    “Pour me what you don’t want,” and having established the intimacy we clinked our glasses.
    “It killed my uncle having to retire,” she went on.
    “Is he long dead?”
    “Two years. He suffered a terrible death. One Sunday I came into the room and found him crying.