By the Lake

by John McGahern

  “I think I was doing the same, Jamesie.”

  He gave a small cheer of approval.

  “And then that was Him who was married to Her. Margaret will be heading out into all this soon. All those boys, nice and cuddly.” The granddaughter gave him a light blow and he pretended to hide behind the shield of his huge arms.

  “Margaret must think us all a terrible crowd of donkeys,” Mary said and drew her into the crook of her arm. “What would her father and mother say?”

  All through the evening the pendulum clocks struck. There were seven or eight in the house, most of them on the walls of the upper room. The clocks struck the hours and half-hours irregularly, one or other of them chiming every few minutes.

  “Are any of those clocks telling the right time?” Ruttledge asked, looking up, when he felt it was time to leave.

  “What hurry’s on you?” Jamesie countered quickly. “Isn’t the evening long? It’s ages since ye were over.”

  Unnoticed, Mary had made sandwiches with ham and lettuce and tomato, cut into small squares. As they were handed round, Ruttledge joined Jamesie in another whiskey. Kate and Mary had tea with Margaret.

  “I keep those clocks wound,” Mary said. “I don’t know how to set them. We should get the little watchmaker to the house one of these days to clean and oil the parts and to set all the clocks. Jamesie’s father was a sight for clocks. He’d go to hell if there was one at an auction. He was able to set them perfect. I just keep them wound. You get used to the sound.”

  “Who cares about time? We know the time well enough,” Jamesie said. “Do you have any more news now before you go?”

  “None. Unless the Shah going on holidays qualifies for news.”

  “The Shah gone on his holidays. Lord bless us,” Jamesie said in open amazement.

  “Did he ever go on holidays in his life before?” Mary asked, the more sharply amused.

  “Once, to Lough Derg years ago. This time he’s gone in the same direction but to an hotel beside the ocean.”

  “He must be surely ravelling in spite of his money. He won’t know what to do with himself.”

  “He went with Monica, that cousin of mine who lost her husband. The four children are going as well. He’s taking them.”

  “I’d praise him for that,” Jamesie said.

  Ruttledge lifted the little girl high and gave her coins and asked her and Mary to come round the lake on a visit. The child, holding Mary’s hand, Jamesie and the two dogs walked them all the way out to the brow of the hill.

  “I’ll be over with the mower as soon as there’s any stretch of settled weather,” Ruttledge said.

  “Whenever it suits,” Jamesie answered with the most studied casualness, though for him it was the most important news in the whole of the evening.

  Three days before the planned end of the holiday the Mercedes was back in round the shore followed by Monica’s large red Ford. The eldest boy travelled with the Shah, the girl and two younger boys with their mother. The old man and the boy were chatting as the Mercedes rolled past the porch and getting on wonderfully well together.

  “This man is going to be an aeroplane pilot,” he said expansively, and put his hand proudly on the boy’s shoulder outside the porch. The boy was already taller than the stout old man. All the children were casually, expensively dressed; they were bright-looking, confident.

  Their mother was wearing a simple green dress, the first time since the funeral they had seen her out of black. She was tall, with a natural elegance, and her face was humorous and kind.

  “You came home a little early?”

  “We did,” the Shah answered defensively, while Monica raised her eyes to the ceiling in eloquent silence. “We had long enough.”

  They all had tea with fresh apple tart. By the time tea was over the younger children discovered the black cat. The eldest boy stood beside his mother’s chair as if he was now the support and hope of an ancient house.

  “What was the hotel like?” Ruttledge asked his uncle when they were alone together outside the house.

  “Good enough. It was right beside the front. You had only to cross the road to get to the ocean. Every day I had a dip. I tried to get Monica to go in but she wouldn’t hear.”

  “Was the food good?”

  “Good enough.”

  “They didn’t mind your leaving early?”

  “They were decent. They gave money back. Not that it would have mattered. The Northerners are all good business people.”

  “How did you find Monica?” Ruttledge asked, wanting to know how she was recovering from the death.

  “I noticed she’s that little bit fond of the bar. She was in it every evening. That or she’s on the lookout for men,” he started to shake.

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “There’s nothing worse than widows. Even priests will tell you that.”

  “Do you want me to put the box quietly in the boot of the car?” Ruttledge wanted to change the conversation.

  “No. Leave it. I’ll be out on Sunday,” he said, and Ruttledge saw how strained he was.

  “I suppose it’ll be a while before you go away again,” he said sympathetically.

  “Wild horses wouldn’t drag me. You’d wonder what all those silly fools are doing rushing off to places.”

  “Maybe it renews and restores a sense of their own place?”

  “Then they’re welcome to it,” he said dismissively.

  “Still, it was a very decent thing for you to do,” Ruttledge said with feeling, knowing how much it had cost him.

  Within the house Monica spoke of the days in the hotel. “You know, he did his very best. It must have been hard. He spoiled the children. He couldn’t do enough for us.” At first her shoulders shook with laughter but then the laughter appeared only in the smile. “At eleven each day he went for a swim. He changed in his room into a faded pair of old trunks that must have been in fashion at the time of the Boer War. If he’d pulled on a dressing gown or even a raincoat it wouldn’t have been too bad but he marched through the hotel in nothing but the trunks and an old pair of sandals, carrying a towel—through the hotel lobby and out into the middle of the road, with cars honking and people splitting themselves—and then into the ocean like a whale.

  “You know, you don’t notice how big he is in his clothes but in the trunks he was like a walking barrel. I kept well out of sight after the first day. A crowd gathered. Eamon here came to me and said, ‘You know, Mother, if Uncle was a funny man we could make money out of him.’ ”

  “It’s all true,” the boy said. “There was a bigger crowd every day.”

  “Be careful,” Monica warned. “I think I would have died if I had been in the lobby but all he did was wave to the people like a cardinal. He was so unbothered and so much himself that people began to take to him in the end. Before we left I saw him get all sorts of looks—people laughing and amused—but also attracted. People are funny. They look down from all sorts of heights and then if the looking down has no effect they get unsure.

  “He may have ignored the crowd but he misses very little. After the children were in bed and Patrick here was in charge I used to go for a walk along the front on my own. On the way back I went into the hotel bar. I had to force myself the first evening. It was what Paddy Joe and myself used to do at the end of the day whenever we went on holiday and I wasn’t sure if I could bear to walk in without him. I wasn’t even sitting down when his lordship was there like my shadow. I was glad of his company. You’d never be bored with him. And it stopped those men coming up and offering drinks, which is the worst of being on your own. One night I had a second brandy. I saw him staring at the glass in an odd way and I asked if there was anything wrong. ‘You could get used to it, Monica,’ he said in that way of his that makes it sound like the end of the road. All that family hated drink. Only very late in her life did my mother take a drink. Lord bless him: he did his very best and he couldn’t have been nicer with the
children and they are all fond of him except when he appeared as Funny Man.”

  “Or throwing his money up in the air,” the boy added.

  “They didn’t like that. I had to make them pick up the coins. When we were growing up we were glad to gather coins no matter from what quarter of heaven they fell.”

  “Mother is always talking about how things were when she was growing up,” the boy screwed his face into an expression of distaste.

  “In fairness, he’d have stayed the whole week in the hotel and never said a word, even though it was killing him, but you should have seen the look on his face when I said that maybe we were there long enough: it was deliverance.”

  Outside the porch the Ruttledges witnessed the formal end of the holiday, the thanks, the praise, the promises, the handshakes, the final kiss. All the children were travelling with Monica and she was the first to drive away after inviting the Ruttledges to her house for an evening.

  “We’ll come when you have time to get settled. We’ll come as soon as you are ready.”

  The Shah let down the window as the big car rolled slowly past the porch. “I’ll be out on Sunday. Things should be more or less back to normal by then.”

  On Sunday he took the metal box away.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to count?” Ruttledge asked playfully when he handed over the box. “I could have helped myself to thousands.”

  “That’ll do you now,” he said. “That’s enough out of you for one day. I don’t know how on earth you put up with him, Kate.”

  Then the settled weather came, the morning breeze from the lake lifting and tossing the curtains on the open windows to scatter early light around the bedroom walls.

  A sharp clawing sound came from behind the curtain where a window was open. The din of birds was already loud about the house but the low motor hum of the small insects had not yet begun. The traffic was barely moving on the distant road.

  The clawing was followed by a loud falling into the room, and then stillness. There was a sound of something heavy being dragged along the floor towards the bed. Most mornings the black cat came through the window into the room. Usually she came soundlessly, except when she brought mice or small birds and woke the room with the racket of her play. The sound was heavier and more alarming than a cat coming in with her prey.

  Kate slept through the noise. She even moved her face lower into the pillow as if in search of deeper sleep.

  With a single leap, the cat was on the foot of the bed, claws digging into the white cover as she fought not to be dragged down by the weight she carried. Not until she had secured her grip on the edge of the bed did she advance to leave the animal beneath Kate’s raised shoulder. Then the cat sat straight up and began to purr. It was a young hare she brought, its brown fur stretched out on the white cover, the white of the belly glowing softly in the darkness. All her attention was fixed on the sleeping woman.

  When she was wild and starving, Kate had brought her food. She would watch from behind a tree, not leaving the safety of the tree for the food until the woman left. Eventually, she came, dragging her body low along the ground, provided Kate stood some distance away. Until one day she ate from the plate and sat and cleaned her face instead of running back for cover.

  Though she was now tame and belonged more to the house than the fields, she never lost her wildness completely. She must have come on the leveret when it was sleeping in its form in the long grass or hunted it down when it tried to escape through the thick waves of the meadow.

  Tired of sitting on the bed without any reaction from the sleeping woman, the cat seized the young hare again and advanced until she was able to drop the leveret across Kate’s throat.

  Ruttledge was trapped in the fascination of watching. He could have reached across and lifted the young hare, but he felt powerless, as if he were part of a dream.

  Before he could move, her own hands came from beneath the bedclothes and groped about her throat as if the hands had the separate life of small animals. Feeling the warm fur, they suddenly went still, and with a cry she sat up, flinging the small hare loose.

  “What a thing to do!”

  The cat retreated to the corner of the bed in the face of the outburst and stood her ground. Ruttledge switched on the bedside lamp.

  “How did it get here?”

  “Your cat brought it in. She brought it in through the window.”

  “Why didn’t you stop her?”

  “I didn’t know what she was going to do.”

  Released from the tension of her fright, Kate suddenly reached for the cat. “Oh, you villain! What is the poor animal?”

  “A young hare—half-grown.”

  The flesh was still warm. A trickle of bright scarlet ran from the nostrils. There was a thin red stain along the white cover of the bed, like a trail. He lifted and put the leveret out of sight on the floor.

  “Why did you do that to me?” The cat reacted to the tone of the voice and purred louder than ever and came forward to be lifted and prized.

  Outside there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The ripe heavy grass in the meadow was stirring like water beneath the light breeze. Over breakfast they heard on the radio that ridges of high pressure were moving slowly in off the Atlantic. As they went about the tasks of the morning, from every quarter came the sounds of machinery starting up and the whine of rotary mowers, like low-flying aeroplanes in the meadows. There was a sense that the whole of this quiet place was becoming deranged.

  Ruttledge was ready for cutting. As he swung the mower round to connect to the drive shaft, he felt some apprehension but no excitement. He had not grown up with machines and got none of the pleasure he saw young men take in their power; neither would he ever be as skilful and confident in their use. He knew the basic mechanics and the danger of the blurring speed of those small blades. The morning wind from the lake that lifted the curtains had died. The water was like glass, reflecting the clear sky on either side of a sparkling river of light from a climbing sun. Not a breath of wind moved on the meadows. The only movement was the tossing of the butterflies above the restful grass. The idling tractor stilled the insect hum but not the clamour of the crows or the shrieks of the lake gulls. Once the mower was in gear and turned up to full throttle it drowned every sound. In a cocoon of noise and dust and diesel fumes and the dull, reflected heat from metal, he sat at the wheel while the tractor and mower circled and circled the meadow, the grass falling in front of the blurring whine of the blades. Out of a corner of an eye he saw hares escaping and a hen-pheasant leading her small band of young across the swards towards the dubious safety of a deep drain. When all the meadows were cut they looked wonderfully empty and clean, the big oak and ash trees in the hedges towering over the rows of cut grass, with the crows and the gulls descending in a shrieking rabble to hunt frogs and snails and worms. In corners of the meadows, pairs of plump pigeons were pecking busily at grass seed. No pheasant or hare had been killed or maimed. With the sea of grass gone, the space between the house and the lake suddenly seemed a different land.

  “I’m hurrying,” Ruttledge said as he had tea and a sandwich in the house. “I know Jamesie will be on edge once he hears the mower.”

  “What time do you think you’ll be finished?”

  “His meadows are small: by teatime.”

  “I’ll be over around six.”

  He travelled round the shore. All the gates from the road to the house were open. The pair of dogs met the tractor at the last gate, escorting it down to the house. The brown hens lay sprawled in the dust and shade behind the netting wire. A pair of boots was drying in front of the open door. The green gate to the meadows had been pushed wide from the whitewashed wall of the outhouse. Ruttledge left the tractor running on the street, the mower raised.

  “Are yous ready?”

  A sound of laughter came from within.

  “Good soldiers never die,” Jamesie shouted out but did not appear.

  It was dark and c
ool within the cave of the house after the hot sunlight. Jamesie sat at the table by the window in his stocking feet with a copy of the Observer. Mary and Margaret sat quietly together at the unlit stove. After the greetings and welcomes, Jamesie said, “Why don’t you turn the bloody thing off out on the street and we’ll have tea or a drink or something?”

  “No. We’ll start. How much do you want cut?”

  Jamesie and Mary looked to one another quickly before turning to Ruttledge. “What do you think?”

  Ruttledge refused to be drawn. “It’s up to you. I can mow it all if you want.”

  “Mary?” Jamesie turned.

  “There’s no use asking me. You know yourself what you want.”

  He was in crisis, having always had the meadows cut in three parts: it was against his instinct to risk it all in the one throw. In bad summers he would spend weeks struggling with hay, but cut in three portions all of it would never be lost. While he knew that the machines had taken most of the hardship from haymaking, he couldn’t quite believe that they had taken most of the risk and excitement and drama as well.

  “What did you do?” he asked anxiously.

  “I knocked all mine.”

  “Cut it all to hell,” Mary said suddenly. “Otherwise we’ll be sick looking at it for the whole summer.”

  “What if it pours?” Jamesie demanded.

  “The forecast is good,” Ruttledge said gently.

  “Fuck it,” Jamesie said suddenly. “Cut it to hell. We’ll live or die.”

  “Good!” Mary said vigorously. “I wouldn’t like to count the summers I was sick of the colour of hay.”

  The meadows must have once been tiny, not much more than gardens. Hedges or ditches had been removed and now ran as shallow drains through the small meadows. Wherever they dipped sharply Jamesie had marked them with old nylons tied to the top of poles like flags. In places the meadows ran along the river and the edges of the bog. On these stretches he kept watch. Ruttledge was uneasy to have him so close because he knew the danger of a blade flying loose or catching a small stone to whirl it from the thick grass like a bullet, but Jamesie could not be persuaded away.