By the Lake

by John McGahern

  In the evening the priest’s car drove past the porch and turned under the unfinished shed to roll back down to a stop outside the porch door. Ruttledge went at once to greet him. Inside, he accepted a chair but would not take tea or coffee.

  “Is Herself away?” he asked.

  “No. She’s outside somewhere.”

  They talked of grass and the weather and cattle.

  “Of course I saw you on Monaghan Day,” Ruttledge said. “I heard you got great prices.”

  “Prices were never as high since,” he said. “I made the mistake of buying in some that day,” and he went on to explain how he had seen Ruttledge but had a rule never to greet anybody in the mart or he would spend his whole day greeting and speaking. “There are people in the parish who complain that I shouldn’t be in the mart at all. They’d turn you into some sort of doleful statue if they could.”

  “What do you think of that?”

  “It’s obvious what I think,” he said bluntly. “I suppose you know or guess the errand I’m on?”

  “He was down here a few hours ago, all dressed up, and told me you’d bought him the clothes.”

  “I didn’t buy them for him. I got help in that,” the priest said with surprising distaste. “I did pay for them but not with my own money.”

  “I hope he’ll be happy in the town,” Ruttledge said.

  “We all hope he’ll be happy,” he said with a hint of aggression as he rose. “Whether he will or not is another matter. Sometimes I think it may be better to let these mistakes run their course. Attempting to rectify them at a late stage may bring in more trouble than leaving them alone. We shall see.”

  “I’m glad he’s having his chance no matter what happens,” Ruttledge said. “What else did any of us have?”

  The priest looked at Ruttledge in plain disagreement but was unwilling to argue or to linger. “I’m not going to be very welcome up there. They are losing quite a bit of money, the State pays them every week as well as their man.”

  “I doubt if I’d be any support,” Ruttledge smiled grimly.

  “None.”

  “What are they going to do for water?”

  “Can’t they make it?” the priest said without humour as he turned away.

  Preparations were made for the Saturday. The house was scrubbed and aired, shopping done in the town, the best steaks bought, heads of lettuce picked from the glass house. The iron grill was cleaned and set in place between the bars of the grate. The vases around the house were filled with fresh flowers. In the centre of the table was a bowl of white roses. A bottle of red wine was opened.

  They came in a new white station wagon. Soon after two o’clock it moved through the spaces between the big trees along the shore. The sun was blinding on the glass when it turned in at the alder tree. They were all dressed for a big occasion. Mary had a natural elegance no matter what she wore and was in her Mass clothes. Lucy wore a shawl of white lace over a blue silk dress and white shoes. Jim’s blue shirt was open-necked and he was wearing a soft brown wool jacket with slacks. The four children were dressed in the fashionable shirts and denim and trainers of their age, but they appeared strangely downcast and grave.

  “You’re welcome. It’s great you were all able to come.”

  “You are great to have us. Are you sure you won’t change your mind now that you see the crowd? They were all mad to come.” The Ruttledges knew at once that there was something wrong, and waited.

  Jamesie was missing and before they had time to enquire they saw him slumped in the front seat of the station wagon, his head on his chest, dead to the world.

  “We didn’t know whether to leave him in the house or bring him with us. Mother said you wouldn’t mind,” Jim explained.

  “Bad luck to him,” Mary added. “He went to the village on the excuse of getting messages. In the end Jim had to go looking for him. That’s the way he came home.”

  “Granda always has to be that bit different,” Lucy said tentatively.

  “I think I’ve only seen him like that once. The Christmas he bought turkeys in the town,” Ruttledge said.

  “Then you’ve never seen him when Johnny comes home. He’s this way every year they come from the station,” Mary said.

  “What will we do?”

  “Leave him there to hell,” she said. “He’ll only fall in the fire or something if we bring him in.”

  They trooped dolefully into the house. The house was praised, Lucy praising it excessively. She and Jim had a glass of chilled white wine. The children had lemonade.

  “I suppose we might as well join him,” Mary said sourly when Kate offered to make her a light hot whiskey, knowing she disliked the taste of wine.

  Ruttledge lit a fire beneath the grill with seasoned oak. They gathered to watch it blaze, the shadows leaping on the white walls, and soon the room was full of the charcoal smell mixed with the faint tang of the oak. Smelling the meat, the black cat came into the room to cry and rub her fur against the children’s legs. They were excited by the fire, and when it died to a red bed of glowing embers Ruttledge got them to help him put the pieces of meat on the grill and gave them plates to hold and other small tasks.

  “Our friend hasn’t moved,” Jim remarked from the window. “He’s still sleeping the sleep of the just.”

  “That was all so simple, so perfect, so beautiful,” Lucy said as they moved from the front room to the table. All the children asked for second helpings. Everything was praised many times over and yet reflected in the excessive praise was a pall. He who would have been such fun and life were he in the room was a stronger presence by his absence.

  “He made a great impression on everybody he met in Dublin at Christmas. People are always asking after him,” Lucy said as if it was a source of wonderment.

  “I suppose they weren’t used to the like of him. What’s strange is always wonderful. They wouldn’t be too impressed if they saw him now,” Mary tried to make light of the uncertain praise.

  “What Lucy says is true. Tom Murray, the secretary of the department, talked several times of making an excursion down to see him in his own place,” Jim said quietly. “He got on with everybody. He didn’t care who they were. You’d think he knew them all his life.” He spoke with an affection that reached back to his parents and was generally hidden. With it came a quiet courtesy, deepened by reserve. It was too early yet to tell how the grandchildren would turn out but they looked alert and interesting. They would not have to undergo the uprooting and transplantation of their father. In them the old learned strengths could show up in a new way.

  “Granda won’t know what he missed,” Lucy said cheerfully as she helped remove the plates at the end of the main course. “That was wonderful, Kate. We have been looking forward to this all week.”

  “I’ve never tasted steaks as good,” Jim said.

  “It’s the butcher,” Ruttledge said.

  Ruttledge knew that Jamesie would have dreaded the formality of the meal and its slow ceremony. When the cake and cheese and ice cream were brought in, he stole out to the station wagon by the back of the house. Jamesie sat slumped as before in the front seat. Ruttledge opened the door gently and put his hand on his shoulder. “What have you done to yourself, my old friend?”

  Slowly Jamesie opened his eyes and looked at him out of a great distance of tiredness or sleep or stupor, and then shut them. Ruttledge pressed his shoulder and closed the door as softly as it had been opened.

  “How is he?” Mary asked sharply when he returned, not fooled by the use of the back door.

  “He’s still asleep but he’s all right.”

  “You didn’t talk to him?” she asked sharply, as if they might have conspired together.

  “No, but I could see he’s not sick or anything much wrong with him.”

  “Bad luck to him,” she said. “I don’t know why he had to go and get ossified this day above all days. He’ll be the very same the day Johnny comes home. Anything he can’t fac
e …” she said, and left the sentence unfinished to enter more completely into her own thought.

  “Granda has always to be that bit different but I suppose he’s entitled to it after all these years,” Lucy repeated.

  “Entitled my arse,” Mary said vigorously.

  “Now, Mother,” Jim said.

  His absence had become more of a presence and served to hurry the meal to a close.

  “We can’t thank you enough.”

  “It was lovely to have you all.”

  “You’ll have to come to us in Dublin the next time. There’s plenty of room. He’ll be able to look after the place while you’re away. It’s a good job he can do something right.”

  “We’d love to go.”

  While the goodbyes, the embraces, the words of farewell were being said, Margaret suddenly burst into tears. Her father placed an understanding hand on her head, which only worsened the sobbing. She was joined by her sister and younger brother. The eldest boy James alone did not cry but his face was pale. The adults all made faces and hurried silently into the big station wagon where Jamesie sat without movement.

  The Ruttledges saw Johnny resting in the shade of the alder tree at the gate, leaning heavily on the girl’s bicycle, looking exhausted after the steep climb from the lake. He did not see them though they were only a few yards away. When he straightened, passing his hand over the hair flattened across his forehead, they went towards him. “You’re welcome home, Johnny.”

  “It’s great to be home. Great to see yous all and to see yous all so well.”

  His suit was worsted blue. He wore a red tie with a white shirt. The bottoms of his trousers were gathered neatly in with bicycle clips. His shoes were polished but dimmed with a light coating of dust from the dry road. He leaned the bicycle against the wall of the porch and paused on his way into the house to look up at the shed.

  “Patrick mustn’t have been back since last summer?”

  “He still talks about finishing but we haven’t seen much of him lately. He’s been working here and there all over the country.”

  “That’s Patrick,” he said.

  “It’s been a big year for you, Johnny,” Ruttledge said as he got out the bottle of rum and found the blackcurrant cordial far back in a cupboard of the press, while Johnny lit a cigarette, striking a match expertly on the sole of his shoe.

  “A big year. Ford gave me the golden handshake. Yet it all worked out in the end more or less alphabetical. Jamesie and Mary across the lake were as good as gold as was Jim in Dublin. They all did their level best to get me to throw up England altogether and come home for good. I was tempted,” he said, tapping the ash of the cigarette on a small saucer Kate put on the arm of the chair. “I was tempted at first but the more I thought about it the more I saw it wouldn’t work out. People get set in their ways. They can’t manage to fit in together any more. Once you get used to London, a place like the lake gets very backward. You are too far from everything. Jamesie and Mary, God bless them, came to see it that way as well. Without a car it would have been hopeless. You’d be stuck there in front of the alders on Moroney’s Hill facing the small river and the bog. It was a great thing to know all the same that in a tight corner you were still wanted by your own. Who else can you turn to in the end but your own flesh and blood?”

  He was moving in his blindness, as if he was speaking for multitudes.

  “Then Mister Singh got to know and from then on I was more or less on the pig’s back. I have as much in my back pocket now at the end of the week than even in the best days when I was on the line at Ford’s.”

  Kate made a plate of sandwiches. Johnny said he would prefer tea to another rum and black and they all had mugs of tea poured from the big red teapot.

  “What is your new place like?”

  “A row of old Victorian mansions facing the Forest that Mister Singh bought and turned into flats. They are nearly all professional people in the flats—men and women, you don’t ask questions. They come and they go. I have my own entrance in the basement, central heating, bathroom, phone, TV, everything laid on.”

  “Do you have much to do?”

  “There’s enough to keep you busy. Clever and all as these people are, some don’t know how to change a light bulb or a fuse. You name it. They do it. Most things that go wrong I can fix. If it’s something serious I call Mister Singh.

  “Days I go for a bit of a walk in the Forest. You’d miss having a dog. There’s a pond at Snaresbrook where you can watch the ducks and the swans. They’re pure tame. At night I go down to the Hitchcock Hotel. A Mike Furlong from Mayo, who made his money in the building game, owns the Hitchcock. We get on the best. Mike often puts up a drink for me in the Hitchcock. Mister Singh has me do all the short lets. I haven’t made a mistake yet. Touch wood. Mister Singh drives a Bentley now. Before I left he gave me a rise and said how hard it is to find anybody steady and reliable these days.”

  “It sounds as if everything has worked out well.”

  “You could say it went all more or less to plan,” he agreed emphatically, lighting another cigarette. “A thing about all those old buildings is the soundproofing though all the flats are carpeted. Over the basement this darkie has a long-lease flat. He speaks several languages and works as a translator. He’s tall and thin and good-looking enough, with close fuzzy hair, in or around forty, though it’s hard to tell with darkies. His English is very posh and he nearly always wears his Oxford scarf in case you’d make any mistake. He leaves John Quinn in the pure shade as far as whore-mastering is concerned. He can be gone for weeks or days at a time but when he’s there women come and go as if there’s no tomorrow. They’re all white. I have never seen him with a black woman. Because of the poor soundproofing, lying there in the dark you can hear the whole performance as good as if you were in the room. There’s one you could set yer alarm clock to her ‘Oh My God,’ at three in the morning. They come in their own cars or taxis. He never meets them but you should see the show when they leave. I never tire watching. You’d be in stitches. The performance never changes, from woman to woman, or with the same woman from one week to the next. Oh they are all ages, from their twenties to around forty or fifty. At weekends they generally stay the whole night and leave when it’s well into the day, and that’s when you get to see the whole show.”

  Johnny appeared to grow younger as he rose from the chair, shaking away years of tiredness, and with a delicate movement of the hands suggested a flicking of a long scarf back across his shoulder. He walked with extreme slowness, his arm encircling an imagined waist so tightly that it made all movement difficult, pausing every few short steps to gaze soulfully into the other’s eyes. At the point of parting he enfolded the woman in a long embrace, then held her at arms’ length, to suffer the more what he was losing and, as if unable to endure this parting, enfolded her again to draw some solace from the last unbearable embrace. Then he stood, flicking the Oxford scarf back across his shoulder, looking after the departing car or taxi as if he was supporting the weight of the loss of all life, all love, all beauty.

  Johnny suddenly drew himself erect, clicked his heels smartly together and bowed low with a sweep of his arm. The Ruttledges’ applause was not feigned.

  “Patrick Ryan would do it far better,” Johnny said modestly. “But I tell you that darkie is some cowboy. He’s some comedian, I tell you.”

  “It couldn’t be better,” Kate said.

  “You’d think some of them would catch on?”

  “They just lap it up,” he said.

  “Do you get to speak with him at all?” Ruttledge asked.

  “No. I never get to speak with him unless there’s something wrong in the flat and he makes it clear he wants you out as soon as ever possible. He’d walk away to the window or stand and open a book. No. He’d hardly even have the time of day for Mister Singh. I’m dirt but I don’t care. What is he but a man? He can be taken out of the air like a bird if you had the mind. Anyhow he doesn’t seem
to have any men friends.”

  “He probably hasn’t the time.”

  “We were putting the trailer on the car when you came,” Ruttledge explained. “I have to run in for a few things before the town closes. Would you be interested in the jaunt?”

  “I wouldn’t mind. It’d put round a few hours. What about the bicycle?”

  “We can hop it in the trailer. That’s no trouble.”

  “That’s great. I was puffed after the cycle round the shore.”

  They drove in silence, Johnny folded back into the comfort of the car seat. He did not look around, not at the reeds along the shore, the summer breezes rippling the surface of the lake like shoals, the green brilliance of the leaves of the wild cherry amid the common foliage; not the wildfowl or the few swans or the heron flapping out of the reeds to lead them out before swinging loftily aside and then wheeling lazily around. He was folded back into himself as into tiredness or night.

  At the gate he barely protested when Ruttledge jumped from the car, lifted the bicycle from the trailer and placed it behind one of the round stone piers.

  “I should have done that,” he said.

  “You’re on your holidays. I’m used to the trailer. What’s Jamesie doing today?”

  “Down in the bog, I think. He’s never in the house. You should hear the dressing down Mary gave him when we came from the train. She said he disgraced the children when they went over to your place. Jim told me about it as well when he met me at the airport.”

  “He disgraced nobody but I was surprised.”

  “When we come from the train he always gets that way. He’s highly strung. He watches everything like a hawk and you don’t notice generally.”

  “Why did he go off the rails? Usually he’s wonderful when the children are there.”

  “In some ways he was always a sort of a mystery man,” Johnny said, tiring of the subject.

  When they left the narrow tarred lanes, the car picked up speed and Johnny sat up in the seat: he knew the names of all the houses they passed.