The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I suppose,’ he said slowly, ‘they highlight what we’re all at.’

  ‘Do you miss the city, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose. In a way my life ended when I left it. When I was there it still seemed to have possibilities, but now I know it’s all fixed.’

  ‘And that girl – was it Mary Jo?’ I named a dark, swarthy girl, extraordinarily attractive rather than goodlooking.

  ‘The Crystal, National, Metropole, Clerys.’ He repeated the names of the ballrooms they had gone to together. ‘She went to England.’

  ‘Why didn’t you keep her?’

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t on. There seemed to be so much time then that there was no hurry. I went to London to try to see her but she was working at Littlewoods and had shacked up with a married Englishman.’

  I could tell that he had suffered and changed. ‘Do you have anyone here?’

  ‘Yes. There was so much choice in Dublin. But here, if you get anything you have to hold on to it. There are so few women here.’ He sounded as if he was already apologizing. She was a dark pretty girl but she never spoke a word when we met. I noticed that only when alone with Jimmy did she grow animated.

  ‘And you, have you anybody?’ he asked.

  ‘No. There’s an American girl, but there’s nothing sexual. We’re just friends,’ and when I saw that he didn’t believe me I added, ‘There’s a slight chance she may still come down.’

  The Blue Anchor was filling. All of the men nodded to Jimmy and many of them joined us with their pints. When an old fisherman came, Jack Kelly, place was made for him in the centre of the party beside Jimmy. It turned out that they were all members of the newly formed Pint Drinkers’ Association. Jack Kelly was the President and Jimmy was both Secretary and Treasurer. The publicans of the town had got together and fixed a minimum price for the pint, a few pence higher than what had been charged previously. The Pint Drinkers’ Association had been formed to fight this rise. They canvassed bars and pledged that the Pint Drinkers would drink only at those bars that kept to the old price. There cannot have been great solidarity among the publicans, for already six, including the Blue Anchor, which had become the Association’s headquarters, had agreed to return to the old price. When I paid the fee Jimmy wrote my name down in a child’s blue exercise book and Jack Kelly silently witnessed it. Soon afterwards we left the Blue Anchor and began a round of the bars that had gone back to the old price.

  Time went by without being noticed in the days that followed: watching the boats in the harbour, leaning on the bridge of Sligo, the white foam churning under the weir, a weed or fish swaying lazily to the current; reading the morning paper on a windowsill or bar stool; the sea at Rosses and Strandhill. Often in the evenings we played handball at the harbour alley, and though our hands were swollen and all our muscles ached, again it was as if the years had fallen away and we were striking the small rubber inside the netting-wire of our old school, the cabbage stumps in the black clay of the garden between the alley and orchard. Afterwards we would meet in the Blue Anchor, from where we could set out on our nightly round of the bars that had agreed to keep the pint at its old price. As their number was growing steadily, it made for thirsty work.

  ‘It’s catching on like wildfire,’ I said to Jimmy as we lurched away from the last bar one evening, voluble with six or seven pints.

  ‘I’ll wait and see,’ Jimmy said. ‘It’ll probably be like everything else here. It’ll catch on for a while, then fall away.’

  At this time Jimmy began to miss three evenings every week now that the Association, as he put it, was on a firm footing. He took his girl to the cinema or went dancing, and this disturbed Jack Kelly.

  ‘Jimmy’s beginning to show the white flag,’ he complained. ‘He’s missing again this evening. Watch my word. The leg-irons will be coming up soon.’

  VII

  These days might have stretched into weeks but for a card I sent to Kate O’Mara. I wrote that I was happy at the sea and that if she changed her mind and wished to join me to just write. Instead, she telegrammed that she was coming on the early train the next day. I booked two single rooms in a small hotel at Strandhill and Jimmy and I met her off the train. She was wearing sandals, and had on a sleeveless dress of blue denim, and dark glasses.

  ‘Jimmy’s an old friend. I thought we’d all have a glass and some sandwiches,’ I said when she seemed puzzled by Jimmy’s presence.

  ‘I had lunch on the train.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. You can have a drink,’ Jimmy said as we took her bags.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not a big drinker,’ she laughed nervously.

  ‘What’ll you have?’ I asked her in a bar down from the station, quiet with three porters discussing the racing page as they finished their lunch hour.

  ‘I’ll take a chance,’ she grew more easy. ‘Can I have an Irish coffee?’

  All our attempts at speech were awkward and soon Jimmy made a show of examining his watch and rose. ‘Some of the population has to work,’ he grinned ruefully.

  ‘I’ll come in tomorrow or the next day,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll keep any letters for you, then,’ he said.

  ‘How do you feel?’ I asked when we were alone.

  She took up the story of her broken affair. She hadn’t been able to work or read and she began to go to the Green, sitting behind dark glasses in one of the canvas deck-chairs placed in a half-circle round the fountain in hot weather; and she just sat there watching the people pass or remembering her life in New York, and gradually was growing calm when one day Nora Moran found her and took her down the country. The day seemed to have been an exact replica of the day I had spent there.

  ‘The workmen were so servile with her,’ Kate complained.

  ‘They don’t mind that. It’s their way,’ I said.

  ‘But American workmen would never be like that.’

  ‘Listen, won’t we miss the bus?’ An edge had crept into the talk.

  ‘You don’t want to hear about Nora?’

  ‘I do, but you should know that Nora needs a fresh person every day, the way some people need a bottle of whiskey.’

  ‘If she wasn’t around she was on the phone. A few nights ago, as she was going on about herself, I put the phone down. When I picked it up again, there was Nora still talking. She hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t been listening.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry now,’ I gripped her shoulders. ‘You’re here now.’

  ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here,’ she said as we went to the bus. The bus dropped us at the church across from the hotel. A large taciturn man, Costello, had us sign our names in the register and then showed us to our rooms on separate floors.

  VIII

  The eight o’clock bells woke me the next morning. It was a Sunday and we came downstairs almost together. She had on a black lace scarf and leather gloves and a missal with a simple gold cross.

  ‘Are you going to Mass before having breakfast?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’ She laughed a light girlish laugh.

  ‘I’ll come too,’ I said, and since she was looking at me in surprise I added, ‘It makes a good impression round here,’ as we walked across and joined other worshippers on the white gravel between the rows of escallonia that led to the church door. I remembered her saying once, ‘I’m a bad Catholic but I am one because if I wasn’t I couldn’t bear all the thinking I’d have to do’; and for me, as I knelt by her side in the church or stood or sat, it was more like wandering in endless corridors of lost mornings than being present in this actual church and day, the church I’d grown up in, with wings to the left and right of the altar and the cypress and evergreen still in the windows.

  ‘We’ll have you reconverted soon,’ she said playfully as she sprinkled holy water in my direction as we left by the porch door.

  ‘Once you’ve lost it you can’t go back. I think the whole point is not being able to imagine be
ing anything else. Once you can, you’re gone.’

  ‘In that sense I’m not one either.’

  ‘I think we should have breakfast.’ We hurried quickly past the people shaking hands at the gate.

  In spite of what I said, Sunday was suddenly new again for me. The first bell for Second Mass was more than an hour away and we had already done our duty. As children we would have changed out of our stiff Sunday suits and shoes, and the day was still before us, for football or pitch-and-toss or the river, the whole day stretching before us in such a long, amazing prospect of pleasure that we were almost loath to begin it.

  In the same recovery of amazement, I watched Kate’s beauty against the power of the ocean as we walked afterwards on the shore, traced the fading initials on the wood of the cannon pointed out to sea, watched the early morning golfers move over the fairways, and saw the children come out with their buckets and beach balls, watched by their parents from the edge of the rocks.

  ‘We can have all this and more,’ the waves whispered.

  IX

  As it was a hot Sunday, I knew that relatives or people I had known would come to the sea and if I hung about the hotels or front I was certain to meet them.

  ‘I think I’ll steer clear of the ocean for the next five or six hours,’ I said to her at lunch, and explained why.

  ‘What do you care? Are you too shy?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘It’d be stupid to be shy at my age. It’s just too hard to make talk, for them and me.’

  When she was silent I said, ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Where’ll you go?’

  ‘I’ll take a book or something over to that old roofless church you can barely see in the far distance.’

  ‘I guess I’ll come – that’s if you have no objection,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll only be glad.’

  As we walked I pointed to the stream of cars going slowly down to the sea. The roofless church was two miles from the hotel. At first, close to the hotel, we had come across some half-circles of tents in the hollows, then odd single tents, and soon there was nothing but the rough sea grass and sand and rabbit warrens. Some small birds flew out of the ivy rooted in the old walls of the church, and we sat among the faceless stones, close to a big clump of sea thistle. Far away the beach was crowded with small dark figures within the coastguard flags.

  ‘In America,’ she said, looking at the lighthouse, ‘they have a bell to warn ships. On a wet misty evening it’s eerie to hear it toll, like lost is the wanderer.’

  ‘It must be,’ I repeated. I felt I should say something more about it but there was nothing I could say.

  We began to read but the tension between us increased rather than lessened. I saw the white tinsel of the sea thistle, the old church, the slopes of Knocknarea, the endless pounding of the ocean mingled with bird and distant child cries, the sun hot on the old stones, the very day in its suspension, and thought if there was not this tension between us, if only we could touch or kiss we could have all this and more, the whole day and sea and sky and far beyond.

  ‘This country depresses me so much it makes me mad,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Why?’ I looked up slowly.

  ‘Everybody comes to the beach and just sits around. In America they’d be doing handstands, playing volleyball, riding the surf. Forgive me, but I had to say something.’

  ‘I don’t mind at all.’

  ‘That’s part of the trouble. You should mind.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ I thought that if we were Barnaby and Bartleby we could hardly be further apart.

  ‘Kate,’ I said suddenly, ‘why can’t we be lovers?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head and smiled.

  ‘You’re free now. We could have so much more together and if nothing came of it we’d have very little to lose.’

  ‘No, I don’t think of you that way. I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’ She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t think of us that way.’

  I thought bitterly of what she said – like Nora Moran’s workmen I had been brought up a different way, that was all – but asked, ‘You mean you can’t think of us as ever being together?’

  ‘I’m very fond of you but I could never think of us in that way. I think we’re far too alike.’

  ‘I had to ask.’ I conceded I had lost. She did not want me the way some people cannot eat shellfish or certain meats. There was once a robin who sang against the church bells striking midnight thinking that the yellow street lamps in the road below were tokens of the day.

  Hours later, in the tiredness of the evening, spaces now on the hill between the cars leaving the beach for the day, she said gently, ‘I hope it’ll make no difference between us.’

  ‘It won’t.’

  ‘I think we can have far more as we are. What’s between us is only a beginning.’

  ‘I don’t think so but it seems it’s the way it must be.’

  X

  The next day was wet, a mist that closed in from the sea so that the church was barely visible from the hotel, but though the rain was soft as a caress on the face it wet one through. I played billiards all that morning in a bar down on the front and then rang Jimmy. I arranged to meet him in Sligo.

  ‘I’m going to Sligo. Would you like to come?’ I asked her over lunch.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Jimmy and his girl are going to the cinema and he asked if we’d like to go with them and have a drink afterwards.’

  ‘Like two happy couples?’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to come,’ I said, and we began to talk about Nora Moran. The more we talked the more I felt how much more honest was Nora’s brutal egotism set against our pale lives here by the sea.

  ‘If Nora has ears to hear they must be burning now,’ she laughed when we had ended.

  We went to our rooms to read. Outside the window the road shone black with rain. Through the mist it was as if fine threads of rain were being teased slowly down. We did not meet till the flat gong that hung in the hallway rang for tea.

  ‘You haven’t changed your mind?’ I asked cautiously.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I want you to do something for me. I want you not to go to Sligo.’

  ‘But I can’t not go. I promised Jimmy.’

  ‘You can call him up.’

  ‘There’s no phone in the digs and he’s left work by now.’

  She was eating so slowly that I began to fear I would miss the bus if I waited for her.

  ‘I’m sorry. I have to go,’ I said as I rose.

  ‘Do you have to go so soon?’

  ‘The bus’ll be outside in five minutes or so.’

  To my puzzlement she laid her knife and fork side by side on the plate, rose, took her raincoat from the bentwood stand in the hall, and came out with me into the rain. In uncomfortable silence we watched the bus pass down, waited for it to turn at the cannon and come back, the waves crashing incessantly on the shore beyond the soft, endlessly drifting veils of rain.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind and come?’ I asked as I heard the bus.

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. As the veiled yellow sidelights showed in the rain she suddenly tugged my sleeve and said earnestly, ‘I want you to do this for me. I want you not to get on the bus.’

  ‘Is there any good reason?’ I demanded. Only a beloved could ask so much, so capriciously. Did she want all this as well as the voices, without any of the burden of love or work?

  ‘Just that I want you not to.’

  ‘I can’t not go,’ I said, ‘but what I’ll do is get the next bus back. I’ll be back within an hour. Maybe we’ll go out for a drink then,’ and pressing her arm climbed into the bus. As soon as I paid the conductor I looked back. Already the bus had changed gear to climb the hill and I could not see through the rain and misted windows whether she was still standing there or had gone back into the hotel. I stirred uneasily, feeling
that I had left some hurt behind. Yet what she had demanded had been unreasonable; but far more insistently than reason, or the grinding of the bus, came, ‘If you had loved her you would have stayed.’ But all of life turns away from its own eventual hopelessness, leaving insomnia and night to lovers and the dying.

  I had come far in time since first I travelled on this bus. Surprised as a boy by the conductor’s outstretched hand, I had reached up and shaken it. The whole bus had rocked with laughter and one man cheered. ‘It’s the fare now I’d be looking for,’ and though he had smiled the conductor had been as embarrassed and confused as I had been.

  As much through the light of years as through this wet evening the bus seemed to move. It was an August evening. We were going home at the end of another summer holiday. When the bus stopped at the Central, Michael Henry got on. His clothes hung about him and the only sign of his old jauntiness was the green teal’s feather in the felt hat. After years in America he had come home, bought a shop and farm, married, had children. We kept an account in his shop and every Christmas he gave us a bottle of Redbreast and a tin of Jacob’s figrolls.

  ‘How is it, Michael, that you seem to be going home and we’ve never met in all this time at the sea?’ my father asked.

  ‘I guess it’s because I just came down yesterday,’ Michael Henry said as he put his small leather case in the overhead rack.

  ‘How is it you’re going home so soon?’

  ‘I guess I thought the sea might do me some good but I only felt worse last night. I don’t believe in shelling out good money to a hotel when you can be just as badly off at home. America teaches you those things.’

  He sat the whole way home with my father. They talked of America and the war in Europe. Not many weeks later, in scarlet and white, I was to follow the priest round Michael Henry’s coffin as he blessed it with holy water from the brass jar in my hands.

  And suddenly the dead man climbing on the bus, the living girl asking me not to go to Sligo in the rain outside the hotel, I on the bus to Sligo to collect some letters, Barnaby and Bartleby, even now in their Dublin doorways patiently watching the day fade, all seemed to be equally awash in time and indistinguishable, the same mute human presence beneath the unchanging sky, and for one moment I could not see how anyone could wish another pain. We were all waiting in the doorways.