By the Lake

by John McGahern

  “To England. To the towns. A mother told me they’d buy a house in the town if they sold. Her husband had already a job in the cement factory. Jimmy Joe McKiernan hardly said a word all day. He’d mention a price or the acres of land or the family name.”

  “Your uncle, the dear Shah, was silent as well. Once I said it would look better if one of us travelled with Jimmy Joe. ‘That’d be only mixing things up, Kate. Jimmy Joe is well used to being on his own,’ he laughed. I had no idea he was referring to the years in jail. ‘Jimmy Joe has as much interest in houses and lands as I have in the moon.’ ‘What interests him?’ I asked. ‘Freeing Ireland,’ was the answer. ‘But Ireland is free?’ ‘In Jimmy Joe’s book there’s a part that’s not free.’ ”

  “The Shah always hated politics,” Ruttledge said. “I don’t think he’s ever voted.”

  “I didn’t know what he was referring to. I was good at giving the impression I understood when I hadn’t a clue—it’s not a very admirable quality but I didn’t care. I was falling in love with the place.”

  A green gate hung from the ash tree then. From the gate a path ran between two rows of alders to the small stone house with an asbestos roof. In the grove, old moss-covered apple trees stood under the great oaks. The garden and the whitethorn hedge were completely wild. An ugly concrete porch had been tacked on to the house as a windbreak and was coming dangerously loose from the stone walls. A line of stone outhouses stretched past the house. In the middle of the rusting hayshed stood a heeled-up cart.

  A kettle hung from a blackened bar above the ashes in the fireplace. There was a small table with unwashed mugs and a heavy glass sugar bowl and a big aluminium teapot. A dishevelled bed stood against the wall in the tiny lower room, a stripped iron bed and a plywood wardrobe in the upper room. Beside the fireplace was a wall cupboard filled with large rounded stones. When the cupboard was opened the stones rolled out in all directions around the floor.

  “They told me they’d tidy up the place,” Jimmy Joe McKiernan complained. “Anyhow you’re seeing what you’re getting.” He had his own quiet authority.

  “This isn’t a house,” the Shah said, running the place down. “The most you could call it is an address and you’d want to be hard up. It’s no more than a site!”

  “People lived here,” Jimmy Joe said. “It was a house and home to them but I won’t argue. I can’t pretend it’s in great shape. The place is a site, if you want, a site above a lake, on twenty acres.”

  Within the deep walls of the window on the lake, a butcher’s calendar of the year before was hung. Above the tables of the months and days was a photo of two boys wheeling bicycles while driving sheep down a country lane between high stone walls. Helping them were two beautiful black-and-white collies. High-class beef, mutton and lamb at best prices. Large and small orders equally appreciated.

  An X was drawn through each day of every month until October was reached. On the twenty-second of October the march of Xs across the days came to a stop. The twenty-third of October was the first clear day and all the remaining days of the year were unmarked. “That was the day he died,” Jimmy Joe said.

  A shop bill lay open in the window sill: a dozen of stout, a bottle of Powers, tea, butter, two loaves, a half-pound of ham, a Mass card, two telephone calls.

  “That was the bill for the wake,” Jimmy Joe McKiernan told them. “They wouldn’t have many people. She was a cousin of my own. Once he died she wouldn’t live here on her own and went to live with relatives. They had cattle on the place but had trouble with fences and neighbours. Now they want to sell.”

  Jimmy Joe McKiernan had spoken more in the short time they’d spent in the house than in the whole of the rest of the day they had spent looking at places.

  “The one thing she is determined about is that the place must not go to any of the neighbours. That’s why it was never put in the Observer. You are the first to see the place.”

  “It’s not a great reference for anybody coming in,” the Shah said.

  “That’s for the people coming in to decide. I’m just being straight.”

  “I know that, Jimmy Joe,” the Shah said appreciatively. “Some of the other crooks would have you believe you were entering paradise.”

  “You are speaking about my colleagues?” Jimmy Joe asked ironically, playfully.

  “A good crowd of boys,” the Shah jeered.

  “A few months ago I was the undertaker. Now I’m the auctioneer. I suppose that’s life,” Jimmy Joe McKiernan said quietly, as if he felt he had spoken too much.

  The small fields around the house were enclosed with thick whitethorn hedges, with ash and rowan and green oak and sycamore, the fields overgrown with rushes. Then the screens of whitethorn suddenly gave way and they stood high over another lake. The wooded island where the herons bred was far out, and on the other shore the pale sedge and stunted birch trees of Gloria Bog ran towards the shrouded mountains. On most of the lake the storm ran and raged but directly underneath the hill a strip of water was as calm and unruffled as a pond. Swans and dark clusters of wildfowl were fishing calmly in the shelter.

  “ ‘If you want it, Kate, keep quiet. Jimmy Joe isn’t a rogue but like the rest of them he has to get the best price he can,’ the Shah warned when I told him how much I liked the place.”

  “I was having a bad time on the side of that hill,” Ruttledge said. “It was the only possible place that we saw that whole day. I knew you liked it. I had grown up among such fields. I had escaped through an education that would hardly have been possible a generation earlier. Now I was face to face with all those dreams we have when we are young. I knew these rushy fields, the poverty, the hardship. On that hill I realized that this could be the rest of my life. It was far from what I had dreamed or hoped for. ‘What do you think?’ Jimmy Joe asked me suddenly. ‘It’s a possibility,’ I answered. ‘What are places like this worth now?’ ‘The value of anything is what people are willing to pay,’ he said with that quiet smile. ‘Your uncle tells me you live in London. How do you find England?’ ‘We have jobs. The life is easy and comfortable. We’d hardly be looking at places here if we were entirely happy.’ ‘What do you find wrong with England?’ ‘Nothing but it’s not my country and I never feel it’s quite real or that my life there is real. That has its pleasant side as well. You never feel responsible or fully involved in anything that happens. It’s like being present and at the same time a real part of you is happily absent.’ ‘Would you find this place real?’ ‘Far too real.’ ‘Would it be the quiet and the birds that’d interest you?’ I hadn’t noticed until then that small birds, wrens and robins and finches, were indeed singing in the desolate branches. And at that moment, as if on cue, a pheasant started to call in a nearby field. No, it wouldn’t be to listen to the birds. They say we think the birds are singing when they are only crying this is mine out of their separate territories. ‘Have you ever lived in England?’ I must have asked aggressively enough because I remember resenting the reference to the birds. He didn’t seem to mind and spoke openly. ‘I spent one winter in the East End around Forest Gate and West Ham. We were trying to spring some men of ours who were in Pentonville. A gang of criminals from the East End was in the same wing of the prison. We were trying to use them in a breakout. Nothing came of the plan. We wanted to use them. They wanted to use us. We also discovered that they were planning to double-cross us during the breakout.’ ‘What were they like?’ I asked. ‘The East End gangsters? They were like rats. They cared about nothing but their own skins.’ He had the idealist’s contempt and distaste for the purely criminal. ‘What would you have done with the gang if there had been a breakout and they tried to double-cross you?’ ‘We’d have shot them. We planned to shoot them anyhow. They knew too much.’ ‘Whether there was a double-cross or not?’ ‘They knew too much. We knew we were being watched.’ He spoke without feeling or rancour. ‘Anyhow nothing came of the plan. We just got out in the nick of time.’ The calm with which he said ‘W
e planned to shoot them anyhow’ added to the chill on that wet hillside.”

  “Bill Evans was standing in the lane in those huge wellingtons when we got back to the cars.”

  “I don’t remember the two buckets but they must have been somewhere,” Ruttledge said. “A rope was tied around the heavy overcoat. On his head was a shiny black sou’wester hat. ‘Do they smoke?’ he asked.

  “It was then that the Shah reached down into one of his pockets and threw a fistful of coins into the air. Some of the coins clattered on the bonnet of the small Ford and rolled among the stones and leaves of the lane. Bill Evans scrambled after the coins like some kind of animal.”

  “I was taken aback by the way he threw the coins,” Kate said.

  “He meant no harm. When we were small whenever he came to our house he did the very same, sometimes with sweets instead of coins. It was a way of expressing power. The whole country was very poor. The Shah then bought the place for us.”

  “I was afraid he’d lose it with all his haggling,” Kate said.

  The asbestos roof was replaced with black slates, new rooms added, a bathroom, a well for water bored. Once the price and contract had been agreed, the Ruttledges returned to London, leaving the Shah to oversee the work. This he undertook with proprietary zeal, rolling round the lake several times a week in the Mercedes. Jimmy Joe McKiernan had said that relations between the old woman and his immediate neighbours were poor. This and everything else he had stated so casually on that first wet stormy day around the lake turned out to be true. They got on as badly with one another as they did with the old woman. “They were like that as far back as I remember,” Jamesie had said. “Give no help or hand to anybody. Grab everything in sight. On our side of the lake people couldn’t do enough for one another and got on far better. Here they were always watching out for themselves. When people are that way there’s never any ease.”

  They coveted the childless old woman’s fields, and she in her turn was determined that they would never own those fields.

  The addition of rooms to the house, the new roof, the drilling of a well for water—with the lake a stone’s throw away—the coming and going of the large Mercedes, were all carefully observed, and resentment fuelled an innate intolerance of anything strange or foreign.

  When the Ruttledges came from London in the spring they were shunned by near neighbours, but they were too involved with the place to notice. Would the move succeed or fail? If it failed they would return to London.

  Jamesie came to the house in the very first days, pretending to be casually passing. They began to talk, and he welcomed them to the place and was invited in. A few evenings later, he arrived unexpectedly with Mary, bringing fresh eggs, small bags of potatoes and carrots and parsnips. “For the house. For the house,” he insisted, in the face of their protestations that what he had brought was too generous. “Just for the house. To wish the house luck.”

  Then John Quinn came. In clouds of smoke, he turned his old white Beetle under the alder tree at the gate so that it faced down towards the lake. When he got out of the car he propped a heavy stone against one of the back wheels before strolling confidently up the little avenue.

  John Quinn was a tall, powerfully built, handsome man, wearing a well-cut suit, his thick grey hair brushed back. As soon as he spoke there was an immediate discrepancy between the handsome physique and the cajoling voice.

  “I came to wish new neighbours good luck and success and happiness. It does the heart good to see a young pair happy and in love starting up their lives in a new place. It lifts the heart. It does the heart good.”

  He was invited in and offered tea or whiskey. With a lordly wave of the hand he refused both.

  “I’m not here to waste your good time or waste my time. I’m here for a purpose. I’m here on a little business. I know your poor uncle well, better known as the Shah, as fine a man as ever entered the town and got on like no other. The little business that brought me is that I have been noticing Mrs. Ruttledge walking the roads and seeing that you got a tall fine-looking woman for yourself when you were abroad I thought you might be able to do as good or nearly as good for a neighbour. I’ll keep my account short. The first poor woman died under me after bringing eight children into the world. After they were all reared I married again. The Lord God has said in the Holy Book ‘Tis not good for man to live alone,’ and I have always taken that Commandment to heart. I don’t mind admitting that the second round of the course was not a success.”

  “What went wrong?” was asked politely in the face of all that was proffered as fluently as a door-to-door salesman pretending straight-faced openness.

  “What God intended men and women to do she had no taste for. What was meant to be happy and natural was for her a penance. John tried everything he knew to turn her round and make her happy. On a beautiful day like this day, the sun shining in heaven, I took her out for a row on the lake to make her feel better in herself. The lake lovely and calm, hardly a breeze, just the odd fish jumping, the birds singing for all they were worth, the mountains lovely and blue in the distance, the swans sailing around and every sound a happy sound, and do you know what she said to me? ‘You wouldn’t be thinking of throwing me in now, John, would you?’ Wasn’t that a strange sort of love talk? John here rowing like a boy and the lake all peaceful and the mountains so blue and so distant. Soon afterwards she beat back to her own place. As we were married in church and she still lives, I have to forage for myself if I do not want to live alone. That’s the little business that has brought me. Since you have done so well for yourself abroad you might do as well or nearly as well for a close neighbour. Your lovely woman is bound to have women friends of her own. And if she could place one of them in my house she’d have a friend of her own close by. We’d be great neighbours and the two houses would get on wonderfully well together and all visiting and helping one another and happy together.”

  Kate excused herself and left the room and John Quinn rose to leave.

  “That’s the little business that brought me now. I’m hoping you’ll be able to give a neighbour a helping hand. I put all my cards out on the table. There’s nothing underhand about my way of doing business.”

  Ruttledge walked him to the battered white Beetle parked outside the gate. He removed the stone from a rear wheel before getting into the car.

  “If things manage to work out now, please God, we could have wonderful times together and everybody will be happy.”

  When he let in the clutch, the car rolled downhill, gathering speed. The engine coughed and spluttered into life close to the lake in clouds of smoke and continued to batter slowly out along the shore like a disabled boat attempting to make it back to harbour.

  “I was sorry to leave,” Kate said. “I couldn’t bear to be in the same room with him. Very few people have that effect.”

  “I was wondering if he was real while he was talking,” Ruttledge said.

  “Oh, he was real all right. He was looking me up and down as if I were an animal. What are we to do about the extraordinary request?”

  “We’ll do nothing,” Ruttledge said. “We’ll find out about him.”

  It was obvious the Shah knew a great deal more about John Quinn than he was willing to tell when he was asked about their visitor the following Sunday.

  “Oh, John Quinn,” he wiped his knuckles on his eyes and shook at the mention of the name. “Oh John’s a boy. Women and more women,” he said but would not add to the detail. “When he was young he was the law around and loved to settle fights in bars, taking both men outside and beating them good-looking. ‘Putting a little manners on people,’ he would say.”

  “He said he had dealings with you.”

  “Everybody has dealings with John Quinn. That’s all there is to John.”

  “How do you deal with him?”

  “You don’t. But he can always unearth these silly women,” and shaking with amusement he indicated with a wave of the hand that to be
a provider of such low detail was valley upon valley beneath him.

  When they next met, Jamesie and Mary’s attention was fixed on every word as the visit was described. “I thought I heard everything till now. John Quinn is a living sight. He’ll try anything. He never misses a chance but I never thought I’d see the day when he’d be trying to get people to forage for women for him in England,” Jamesie said.

  “His first lookout would be to see if there was any chance to get in with you, Kate,” Mary said.

  “That’s the way these fellas are,” Jamesie said. “They’ll try anything. ‘Fuck them. What can they do but refuse?’ is how they think about other people. They’ll just go on to someone else. They have no value on people, only what they can get out of them. When he came about our place first he borrowed our little mule of the time and when he brought the mule back his breast was all skinned. ‘The borrowed horse has hard hooves!’ When he came again he was refused. I think he was the first person we ever turned away but it was like water off a drake. ‘What can they do but refuse!’ My father was fond of that mule and we weren’t able to work him for months afterwards.

  “John Quinn was tall and good-looking and strong, as fine-looking a man as you’d meet in a day or two days. His older brother Packy still lives in the homeplace and is as different from John as difference can be, quiet and decent. John used to plough for hire. On a headland he was able to swing the plough around without backing from the horses. He’d drink a bottle of stout or two but never more, he was always too careful, especially if he had to pay. He never went with girls or women when he was young though he could have had his pick. He’d sweet-talk them plenty and flirt and dance but all the time John Quinn was looking out for John Quinn.

  “The Sweeneys were ripe for plucking. Their place was the sweetest place around, the same limestone fields as you get at the old Abbey—you know them yourselves, where you can see the shapes of the old monks’ cells in the grass—and they had money when no one had money. The place was known as the beehive. Margaret was an only child like her mother before her. Her father Tom Sweeney had married into the place from the mountain. He was no beauty but a great worker and it was him who planted the big chestnut tree in the middle of the yard and ringed it round with the wall of whitewashed stones and the iron hoops. Her mother was a big easy-going woman and she adored Tom Sweeney, ugly as he was—there’s no telling with people—and they both adored the ground Margaret walked on. They were simple, decent people and nothing mean or small about them. They were just that bit innocent. Tom Sweeney would be the first to go to the help if any neighbour was in trouble. Anybody who called to the house would be welcomed and given food and drink—they had always great poitín Tom got from the mountain, far far better than any whiskey—but they never went out much to people or bothered with other houses. They were content with their own company, and those sort of people are the most lost when anything happens. They have no one to turn to.