The Dark

by John McGahern

  But where were you to go? What were you to do with yourself and this book?

  Round by the side was the apple garden. The white paint was new on the iron gate. Just inside was a green seat, fuchsia bushes overhanging it, their bells so brute red, and the purple tongues. You sat there, and looked at the row of cabbages beyond the apple trees, and then turned to the book, but not for long.

  Why are you here? the questioning started.

  To sit and read a book.

  But no, beyond that, why did you come, why are you alone here?

  To think about being a priest.

  You’ll not be able. Even last night you had to sin again. You weren’t able to go to Communion this morning. The only reason you stopped abuse for the last weeks was to be able to put a face on it before the priest.

  You want to go out into the world? You want girls and women, to touch their dresses, to kiss, to hold soft flesh, to be held in their caressing arms? To bury everything in one swoon into their savage darkness?

  Dream of peace and loveliness, charm of security: picture of one woman, the sound of wife, a house with a garden and trees near the bend of a river. She your love waiting at a wooden gate in the evening, her black hair brushed high, a mustard-coloured dress of corduroy or whipcord low from the throat, a boy and a girl, the girl with a blue ribbon in her hair, playing on the grass. You’d lift and kiss them, girl and boy. Then softly kiss her, your wife and love, secrets in eyes. Picnics down the river Sunday afternoons, playing and laughing on the river-bank, a white cloth spread on the grass. Winter evenings with slippers and a book, in the firelight she is playing the piano. In the mirror you’d watch her comb her black hair, so long, the even brush strokes. The long nights together, making love so gently it lingered for hours, your lips kissing, “I love you. I love you, my darling. I am so happy.” A Christmas of rejoicing and feasting. You’d hear the thawing snow outside slip from the branches, the radio playing:

  I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,

  Just like the ones I used to know.

  World of happiness without end.

  You’d have to give that up to be a priest, but it would come to nothing on its own anyhow, the moments couldn’t be for long escaped. Death would come. Everything riveted into that. Possession of neither a world nor a woman mattered then, whether you could go to the Judgment or not without flinching was all that would matter. I strove as fierce as I was able, would be a lot to be able to say. A priest could say that. He’d chosen God before life.

  Though who wanted happiness of heaven, to sing hymns for ever in an eternal garden, no change and no hunger or longing.

  Hell was there too, the fires and crawling worms, sweat and curses, the despair of for ever. How would the innocent afternoons on the river look from hell, the brush strokes through the black hair in the mirror. Was it better never to know happiness so that there’d be no anguish of loss. A priest could have no anguish, he’d given up happiness, his fixed life moving in the calm of certainty into its end, cursed by no earthly love or longing, all had been chosen years before.

  Yet your father was no priest, he’d gone out into the world, played football in the Rock Field, danced in the summer marquees and at winter parties under the mistletoe: he’d married, children had come, and he didn’t seem to have got much sweetness. But what has your father’s life got to do with your life?

  If you married you would plant a tree to deny and break finally your father’s power, completely supplant it by the graciousness and marvel of your life, but as a priest you’d remain just fruit of the cursed house gone to God.

  If you became a priest, would you not be crazed on your deathbed because of the way you’d cheated your life out of human fulfilment, never to have loved and received love, never to have married in the June of passion. Three months of it would have been a great gift.

  I married when I was passionately in love, would be something to look back on no matter what the present horror. It would be something too to haunt you, you’d always hanker after it, it was the red rose of life, you’d never been even given it for a day.

  Though what was the use, there was no escape. You were only a drifter and you’d drift. You couldn’t carry the responsibility of a decision. You were only a hankerer. You’d drift and drift. You’d just dream of the ecstasy of destruction on a woman’s mouth.

  You were sitting on a green bench in the morning, was that not enough. The sun was blazing clear as glass. Your hands were damp with sweat. A ceaseless hum was droning into the heat. You could take off your coat and tie.

  Six apple trees stood in the garden: three cookers, a honeycomb, Beauty of Bath, apples with the rust of pears and not ripe till the frosts. Jam-jars half full of syrup hung on twine from the branches. Wasps circled and circled the rims before they were tempted into the struggling froth of the dead and dying trapped in the sweetness. Some apples had fallen on the ground, shells of flaming colour, rotting brown of the flesh eaten far as the skins. The Beauty of Baths on the tree were cold and sharp, the teeth shivered once they sank in, there was nothing to do but throw it out of sight into the tall cocksfoot along the hedge.

  You left coat and tie with the Penguin on the seat and idled back into the graveyard, alive with bees moving between the small flowers of the graves. There was such heat and nothingness now. A white clover at your feet swayed under the clambering of a sucking bee. You watched it, the trembling flower, the black bee unsteady and awkward on the ruffled whiteness, and suddenly you jumped and trampled bee and flower into the earth of the grave. More were moving between the red and white and yellow heads in the sunshine. You could turn it into a sport, tramp bee after bee down, it’d amuse the morning, you could keep a count, as they grew scarce in the graveyard the stalking’d grow more difficult. Nero used tear wings off flies above Rome once, though what was the use. After all you were in the graveyard in the day.

  This place was such a green prison. The wall of sycamores shut it away from the road. The tall graveyard hedges and the steep furze-covered hill at the back of the house, only one green patch in its centre where a lone donkey grazed, closed it to the fields around, it ran to no horizon. There was little movement. A general noise of machinery came. A car or van went by behind the sycamore screen. Two living voices in conversation drifted from some field. Somewhere a hen cackled with fright. Here was only interest of the graves and names, the verses, the dates, the weeds and withered wreaths, the ghastly artificial roses and lilies under globes of glass. You could make a catalogue of all these, they’d pass the time just as well as the slaughter of bees, whatever either would really do. The day would probably go its own way anyhow.

  The toll of a funeral bell sounded close, after a minute a slow second followed. What was obviously a funeral went past through the sycamores, shod hooves coming clean through the noise of motors. John came towards you out of the house.

  “I was wondering where the bell is ringing from, John.”

  “From the Protestant church, sir. Mr. Munro’s funeral is there today, sir.”

  It brought you to a halt, the sirring was so strange, you’d never been sirred by anyone before, and there seemed no reason for it now either. It was as uncomfortable as any pretending.

  “Why do you call me sir, John? We’re not much different in years or anything.”

  He stopped. A quick flash showed in the eyes, and the pale face flushed.

  “I don’t know, sir. You’re stopping here, sir,” he said doggedly, after a long embarrassed pause, a dogged defiance in the voice, you’d blundered, though you’d never discover how from him. The slow tolling of the Protestant bell continued.

  “Have you to go far?” you tried to make conversation on the gravel.

  “Just to the church to ring the Angelus, sir. It’s probably better to wait till the funeral’s over now, sir.”

  “Are there many Protestants here?”

  “About half as many as Catholics but they have the good land, sir.”

&nbs
p; At the church door he caught the wire bell-rope in his hand but he didn’t pull it till he was sure the last funeral toll had sounded. You blessed yourself and tried to pray but couldn’t, his white arms went up and down with the bell-rope, that was all.

  “What time would you like your lunch at, sir?” he asked when he’d finished.

  “I’m not particular, whatever time is easy for you.”

  “In about an hour so, sir. At one.”

  “That’ll be all right, if it’s easy for you then.”

  “Thanks, sir.”

  You watched him on the gravel to the front door. The sirring was strange, the boy housekeeper, you here alone in the day, it was all baffling and strange.

  What was there to do for the hour but wander, from gravel to grave to garden, examine the cactus leaves, wonder what your father was doing at this time, shudder at the memory of the night before, the mind not able to stay on anything for long. When the hands touched anything they wanted to grip it tight enough for the knuckles to whiten and the hour went hours long, real relief when the absurd gong was struck at exactly one for lunch.

  You’d no hunger but you forced yourself to eat. There was too much clamminess even with the doors and windows open. From time to time you had to lay down the knife and fork to crush a sucking leg. John came and went but would not be drawn into conversation.

  Afterwards you stood in front of the mantelpiece of white marble with its bulldogs and St. Martin de Porres before you tried the bookcase again. You took out several books and it was the same performance each time. Your eye roved angrily over the print, you replaced it and took out another, replaced it, on and on, till you hurled a big history on the floor, and jumped on it with rage, crying, “I’ll do for you, I’ll do for you, do for you.”

  The fit brought release once it spent itself. You wondered if John had heard in the kitchen, you must be half going crazy. You wondered if the damage to the book on the floor would ever be noticed. Then you picked it up and with sense of foolishness replaced it in the press and turned the key. You sat again in the chairs. The collection of clocks started up the confused medley of another half-hour.

  This utter sense of decrepitude and dust over the house—the clocks, the bulldogs, the mahogany case of books, the black leather armchairs, the unlived in room. At least in your own house there was life, no matter what little else.

  In these houses priests lived, you’d be alone in one of them one day too, idling through the pages of books, reading the Office as you walked between the laurels. Girls in summer dresses would stroll past free under the sycamores, You could go to the sick rooms to comfort the defeated and the dying. People would come to the door to have Masses said for their wishes and their dead, they’d need certificates of birth and marriage, letters of freedom. It was summer now. It’d be hardly different with newspapers and whiskey watching the pain of the leaves fall and the rain gather to drip the long evenings from the eaves.

  Though that was far ahead, it didn’t remove your presence from this actual day, in this black leather armchair, a vision of green laurels through the window. The best thing was to go somewhere.

  “No. It’s worse than home,” Joan had said the night before, it was impossible to know what was wrong, you’d not remembered it much either, too squalidly involved in your own affairs. It brought new lease of energy, at least that much. It’d be better to tell John before going. He was in his shirt-sleeves, baking, when you went down, the smell of stewing apples mixed with the dough.

  “I’m sorry,” you had to apologize when he started. “I wondered is the town far?”

  “Three miles or about, sir.”

  “You could walk it in an hour?”

  “Yes. Easy, sir.”

  “I think I’ll go so—to see my sister. Did you see her since she came?”

  “She was out two Sundays, sir,” he said everything guardedly, there was no use.

  “Will you tell Father where I’ve gone if he comes before me?”

  You looked at John, you wished you could talk, whether he was happy here or not, how long more he’d stay with the priest and where he’d go then, if he had interest in books or sports or anything, but you couldn’t, and the more you heard of the sirring the more unreal it got.

  “Good-bye so, John.”

  “Good-bye so, sir.”

  Across the stone stile out by the front of the church you went into the cool of the sycamores, a few hundred yards down the road the Protestant church where the funeral bell had tolled. The sycamores gave way there, and the narrow dirt-track ran between high grass margins with thorn hedges out of which ash saplings rose. You had to carry your coat on your arm the day was so hot. Close to the town tar replaced the earth and stones, the day full of the smell of melting tar, sticking to your shoes to gather the dust and fine pebbles. The gnawing in the guts started as you came into the town and kept on towards Ryan’s.

  15

  RYAN WAS SELLING SANDALS TO A CUSTOMER, AND NO SIGN OF Joan in the shop. He smiled recognition, the teeth more than the servility of the eyes said he was sorry to be engaged, he’d be finished in a minute, he’d consider it a great favour if you could possibly wait.

  Eventually the sale was completed. He rattled out assurances as he covered the box with brown paper and tied it with twine. With fawning gratitude and wishes of good luck he saw the woman far as the door.

  “A pleasant surprise to see you,” he shook hands with you smiling. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. It’s such bad weather for business, everyone making too much use of the sunshine, and hard to blame them to come to the shops. You get fed up waiting and fixing the shelves. But the rain, the rain will come, and it’ll be different.”

  “I hope it’s alright to come,” you said when the flood subsided.

  “Perfectly alright. You come to see Joan, isn’t it? It’s perfectly alright.”

  “Father Malone is away. So I thought I’d come in to see Joan for an hour.”

  “Perfectly alright, she’ll be delighted. She’s in the kitchen.”

  He led the way in through the counter, and opened the kitchen door to let you in the first. Joan was scrubbing at the sink, and she looked up startled.

  “I have a pleasant surprise for you, Joan. Your brother has come to take you out on the town. So run and change.”

  “But I’m almost finished,” she reddened.

  “It doesn’t matter, it’ll wait for again. You better make use of the sunshine while it lasts.”

  She went sideways to the stairs, drying her hands as she went in the apron, smiling in servile gratitude or apology. You were glad when she went, you took the idiotic formal smile of pleasantness off your own face, and turned to Ryan who stood at the open door to the shop. He offered a cigarette and joked, “No bad habits I see,” when it was refused, and he was lighting his own.

  Through the big window your eyes went out to the garden and you started. The two daughters of the night before were lobbing a tennis ball over and back across a loosely strung net, wearing swimsuits and ornate white sandals instead of usual tennis dress. Their mother sat in the shade of plum trees along the back wall, a newspaper spread across her lap in the deck-chair, and she was too far away to know whether she was dozing or following the casual play.

  “Two fine lazy pieces,” Ryan said, he’d followed your eyes through the window. “Someone else will wear himself to the bone to keep them before long. They have the right ideas already. They can’t get enough of dances. You’re very quiet, I hear? You don’t go to the dances?”

  “No. I don’t go to the dances,” and already resentment had started.

  White wool of a new tennis ball hung in the air and a racket swung. Arm and straining thigh flashed in the stroke, the body stiffening sheer nakedly in the apple-green swimsuit, and you had to pull your eyes away in fear.

  “Tempting?” Ryan smiled, and rage rushed again. You wanted to smash Ryan’s face in, to defile and slash the stripped girls in the garden, to ki
ck into the trunks of thighs that opened under the newspaper in the deck-chair. But all you could do was clench hands and wait till Joan came. You managed to answer his, “Have a nice time,” politely enough too as you left.

  You weren’t very far down the street though when you burst out violently, “You were scrubbing clothes and they were in the garden. And he asked me in the kitchen if I found his cursed daughters tempting. He asked me if I thought they were tempting.”

  “That’d be true enough to form,” she said uneasily, it brought some quiet, it made you feel selfishly involved with your own affairs again.

  “You said it was worse than home?”

  “Yes,” she was uncertain.

  “In what way?”

  “She makes you feel bad about everything and I’m afraid of him.”

  “How?”

  “The first day,” and she was breaking, “I was on a stool putting shoe-boxes up on the shelves and he put his hands right up my dress and that was only the beginning. Once he got me in the bathroom and it was horrible. I’m always afraid. And then he takes it out on you in other ways,” and she began to cry violently.

  “No, you mustn’t cry, not in the street, wait, Joan, we’ll soon be out of the town.”

  That much had to be slowly dragged, and when it came it was too much, it would be better to have waited, but how your hands hungered for their throats. They could sit on deck-chairs under the plum trees and look at tennis, naked but for the swimsuits. Why couldn’t Ryan climb on his wife in the deck-chair, that’s what he had married her for, or couldn’t he tear off the swimsuits and straddle the pampered daughters or be whipped naked down the streets. And if you could get him into that bathroom for one minute you’d choke him.

  Across the stone bridge at the foot of the town the feet went, out to bungalows with port-holes one side of the front door, and the effort or rhythm of the walking brought some calm. You didn’t want to hear anything more but to get her away.