The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  The priest hadn’t thought of the day for years or of Michael Bruen till he had stumbled into it without warning by way of the sudden light on the beech chips. It did not augur well. There were days, especially of late, when he seemed to be lost in dead days, to see time present as a flimsy accumulating tissue over all the time that was lost. Sometimes he saw himself as an old man children were helping down to the shore, restraining the tension of their need to laugh as they pointed out a rock in the path he seemed about to stumble over, and then they had to lift their eyes and smile apologetically to the passersby while he stood staring out to sea, having forgotten all about the rock in his path. ‘It’s this way we’re going.’ He felt the imaginary tug on his sleeve, and he was drawn again into the tortuous existence of the everyday, away from the eternal of the sea or the lost light on frozen snow across Killeelan Hill.

  Never before though had he noticed anything like the beech chips. There was the joy of holding what had eluded him for so long, in its amazing simplicity: but mastered knowledge was no longer knowledge unless it opened, became part of a greater knowledge, and what did the beech chips do but turn back to his own death?

  Like the sudden snowfall and Michael Bruen’s burial his life had been like any other, except to himself, and then only in odd visions of it, as a lost life. When it had been agreeable and equitable he had no vision of it at all.

  The country childhood. His mother and father. The arrival at the shocking knowledge of birth and death. His attraction to the priesthood as a way of vanquishing death and avoiding birth. O hurry it, he thought. There is not much to a life. Many have it. There is not enough room. His father and mother were old when they married; he was ‘the fruit of old things’, he heard derisively. His mother had been a seamstress. He could still see the needle flashing in her strong hands, that single needle-flash composed of thousands of hours.

  ‘His mother had the vocation for him.’ Perhaps she had, perhaps all the mothers of the country had, it had so passed into the speech of the country, in all the forms of both beatification and derision; but it was out of fear of death he became a priest, which became in time the fear of life. Wasn’t it natural to turn back to the mother in this fear? She was older than fear, having given him his life, and who would give a life if they knew its end? There was, then, his father’s death, his acceptance of it, as he had accepted all poor fortune all his life long as his due, refusing to credit the good.

  And afterwards his mother sold the land to ‘Horse’ McLaughlin and came to live with him and was happy. She attended all the Masses and Devotions, took messages, and she sewed, though she had no longer any need, linen for the altar, soutanes and surplices, his shirts and all her own clothes. Sometimes her concern for him irritated him to exasperation but he hardly ever let it show. He was busy with the many duties of a priest. The fences on the past and future were secure. He must have been what is called happy, and there was a whole part of his life that, without his knowing, had come to turn to her for its own expression.

  He discovered it when she began her death. He came home one summer evening to find all the lights on in the house. She was in the living-room, in the usual chair. The table was piled high with dresses. Round the chair was a pile of rags. She did not look up when he entered, her still strong hands tearing apart a herring-bone skirt she had made only the year before.

  ‘What on earth are you doing, Mother?’ He caught her by the hands when she didn’t answer.

  ‘It’s time you were up for Mass,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing with your dresses?’

  ‘What dresses?’

  ‘All the dresses you’ve just been tearing up.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about dresses,’ and then he saw there was something wrong. She made no resistance when he led her up the stairs.

  For some days she seemed absent and confused but, though he watched her carefully, she was otherwise very little different from her old self, and she did not appear ill. Then he came home one evening to find her standing like a child in the middle of the room, surrounded by an enormous pile of rags. She had taken up from where she’d been interrupted at the herring-bone skirt and torn up every dress or article of clothing she had ever made. After his initial shock he sent for the doctor.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s just the onset of senility,’ the doctor said.

  ‘It’s irreversible?’

  The doctor nodded, ‘It very seldom takes such a violent form, but that’s what it is. She’ll have to be looked after.’ With a sadness that part of his life was over, he took her to the Home and saw her settled there.

  She recognized him when he visited her there the first year, but without excitement, as if he was already far away; and then the day came when he had to admit that she no longer knew who he was, had become like a dog kennelled out too long. He was with her when she died. She’d turned her face towards him. There came a light of recognition in the eyes like a last glow of a match before it goes out, and then she died.

  There was nothing left but his own life. There had been nothing but that all along, but it had been obscured, comfortably obscured.

  He turned on the radio.

  A man had lost both legs in an explosion. There was violence on the night-shift at Ford’s. The pound had steadied towards the close but was still down on the day.

  Letting his fingers linger on the knob he turned it off. The disembodied voice on the air was not unlike the lost day he’d stumbled into through the light on the beech chips, except it had nothing of its radiance – the funeral during the years he carried it around with him lost the sheltered burden of the everyday, had become light as the air in all the clarity of light. It was all timeless, and seemed at least a promise of the eternal.

  He went to draw the curtain. She had made the red curtain too with its pale lining but hadn’t torn it. How often must she have watched the moonlight on the still headstones beyond the laurel as it lay evenly on them this night. She had been afraid of ghosts: old priests who had lived in this house, who through whiskey or some other ill had neglected to say some Mass for the dead and because of the neglect the soul for whom the Mass should have been offered was forced to linger beyond its time in Purgatory, and the priest guilty of the omission could himself not be released until the living priest had said the Mass, and was forced to come at midnight to the house in all his bondage until the Mass was said.

  ‘They must have been all good priests, Mother. Good steady old fellows like myself. They never come back,’ he used to assure her. He remembered his own idle words as he drew the curtain, lingering as much over the drawing of the curtain as he had lingered over the turning off of the radio. He would be glad of a ghost tonight, be glad of any visitation from beyond the walls of sense.

  He took up the battered and friendly missal, which had been with him all his adult life, to read the office of the day. On bad days he kept it till late, the familiar words that changed with the changing year, that he had grown to love, and were as well his daily duty. It must be surely the greatest grace of life, the greatest freedom, to have to do what we love because it is also our duty. He wasn’t able to read on this evening among the old familiar words for long. An annoyance came between him and the page, the Mass he had to repeat every day, the Mass in English. He wasn’t sure whether he hated it or the guitar-playing priests more. It was humiliating to think that these had never been such a scourge when his mother had been alive. Was his life the calm vessel it had seemed, dully setting out and returning from the fishing grounds? Or had he been always what he seemed now? ‘Oh yes. There you go again,’ he heard the familiar voice in the empty room. ‘Complaining about the Mass in the vernacular. When you prefer the common names of flowers to their proper names,’ and the sharp, energetic, almost brutal laugh. It was Peter Joyce, he was not dead. Peter Joyce had risen to become a bishop at the other end of the country, an old friend he no longer saw.

  ‘But they are more beautiful. Dog rose, wild woodbin
e, buttercup, daisy …’

  He heard his own protest. It was in a hotel that they used to go to every summer on the Atlantic, a small hotel where you could read after dinner without fear of a rising roar from the bar beginning to outrival the Atlantic by ten o’clock.

  ‘And, no doubt, the little rose of Scotland, sharp and sweet and breaks the heart,’ he heard his friend quote maliciously. ‘And it’s not the point. The reason that names of flowers must be in Latin is that when flower lovers meet they know what they are talking about, no matter whether they’re French or Greeks or Arabs. They have a universal language.’

  ‘I prefer the humble names, no matter what you say.’

  ‘Of course you do. And it’s parochial sentimentalists like yourself who prefer the smooth sowthistle to Sonchus oleraceus that’s the whole cause of your late lamented Mass in Latin disappearing. I have no sympathy with you. You people tire me.’

  The memory of that truculent argument dispelled his annoyance, as its simple logic had once taken his breath away, but he was curiously tired after the vividness of the recall. It was only by a sheer act of will, sometimes having to count the words, that he was able to finish his office. ‘I know one thing, Peter Joyce. I know that I know nothing,’ he murmured when he finished. But when he looked at the room about him he could hardly believe it was so empty and dead and dry, the empty chair where she should be sewing, the oaken table with the scattered books, the clock on the mantel. Wildly and aridly he wanted to curse, but his desire to curse was as unfair as life. He had not wanted it.

  Then, quietly, he saw that he had a ghost all right, one that he had been walking around with for a long time, a ghost he had not wanted to recognize – his own death. He might as well get to know him well. It would never leave now and had no mortal shape. Absence does not cast a shadow.

  All that was there was the white light of the lamp on the open book, on the white marble; the brief sun of God on beechwood, and the sudden light of that glistening snow, and the timeless mourners moving towards the yews on Killeelan Hill almost thirty years ago. It was as good a day as any, if there ever was a good day to go.

  Somewhere, outside this room that was an end, he knew that a young man, not unlike he had once been, stood on a granite step and listened to the doorbell ring, smiled as he heard a woman’s footsteps come down the hallway, ran his fingers through his hair, and turned the bottle of white wine he held in his hands completely around as he prepared to enter a pleasant and uncomplicated evening, feeling himself immersed in time without end.

  Along the Edges

  EVENING

  ‘I must go now.’ She tried to rise from the bed.

  ‘Stay.’ His arms about her pale shoulders held her back as she pressed upwards with her hands. ‘Let me kiss you there once more.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ she laughed and fell back into his arms. ‘I have to go.’ Her body trembled with low laughter as he went beneath the sheet to kiss her; and then they stretched full length against one another, kissing over and back on the mouth, in a last grasping embrace.

  ‘I wish I could eat and drink you.’

  ‘Then I’d be gone.’ She pushed him loose with her palms. They both rose and dressed quickly.

  ‘I’ll leave you home. It’s too late for you to go alone.’ Lately she had seemed to want to assert their separateness after each lovemaking.

  ‘All right. I don’t mind,’ she said, a seeming challenge in her eyes.

  ‘Besides I want to.’ He leaned to kiss her on the side of the throat as she drew on her jacket. They stole down the stairs, and outside he held the door firmly until the catch clicked quietly behind them. The fading moonlight was weak on the leaves of the single laurel in the front garden, and he grew uneasy at the apparent reluctance with which she seemed to give him her gloved hand on the pavement, with the way she hurried, their separate footsteps loud in the silence of the sleeping suburbs.

  They’d met just after broken love affairs, and had drifted casually into going out together two or three evenings every week. They went to cinemas or dancehalls or restaurants, to the races at Leopardstown or the Park, making no demands on one another, sharing only one another’s pleasures, making love together as on this night in his student’s room.

  Sensing her hard separateness in their separate footsteps as they walked towards her home in the sleeping suburbs, he began to feel that by now there should be more between them than this sensual ease. Till now, for him, the luxury of this ease had been perfect. This uncomplicated pleasure seemed the very fullness of life, seemed all that life could yearn towards. Yet it could not go on for ever. There comes a point in all living things when they must change or die, and maybe they had passed that point already without noticing. He had already lost her while longing to draw closer.

  ‘When will we meet again?’ he asked her as usual at the gate before she went in.

  ‘When do you want?’

  ‘Saturday, at eight, outside the Metropole.’

  ‘Saturday – at eight, then,’ she agreed.

  There was no need to seek for more. His anxiety had been groundless. Wednesdays and Saturdays were always given. No matter how hard the week was he had always Saturdays and Wednesdays to look forward to: he could lean upon their sensual ease and luxury as reliably as upon a drug. Now that Saturday was once more promised his life was perfectly arranged. With all the casualness of the self-satisfied male, he kissed her goodnight and it caused her to look sharply at him before she went in, but he noticed nothing. He waited until he heard the latch click and then went whistling home through the empty silent streets just beginning to grow light.

  That next Saturday he stayed alone in the room, studying by the light of a bulb fixed on a Chianti bottle, the texts and diagrams spread out on newspaper that shielded his arms from the cold of the marble top that had once been a washstand, the faded velvet curtain drawn on the garden and hot day outside, on cries of the ice-cream wagons, on the long queues within the city for buses to the sea, the sea of Dollymount, the swimmers going in off the rocks, pleasures sharpened a hundredfold by the drawn curtain. Finally, late in the afternoon, when he discovered that he had just reached the bottom of a page without taking in a single sentence, he left the room and went down to the front. At the corner shop he bought an orange and sat on a bench. The sea lay dazzling in the heat out past the Bull and Howth Head. An old couple and a terrier with a newspaper in his mouth went past him as he peeled the orange. Music came from a transistor somewhere. Exams should be held in winter, he thought tiredly, for he seemed to be looking at the people walking past him, sitting on benches or on the grass as if through plate glass.

  Still, at eight o’clock she would come to him, out of the milling crowds about the Metropole, her long limbs burning nakedly beneath the swinging folds of the brown dress, the face that came towards him and then drew back as she laughed, and he would begin to live again. He had all that forgetting to go towards, the losing of the day in all the sweetness of her night. He rose, threw the orange peel into a wire basket, and walked back to the room. He imagined he must have been working for about an hour when he heard the heavy knocker of the front door. When he looked at his watch he found that he had been working already for more than two hours.

  He listened as the front door opened, and heard voices – the landlord’s, probably the vegetable man or the coal man – but went quite still as steps came up the stairs towards the door of the room, the landlord’s step because of the heavy breathing. A knock came on the door, and the fat, little old landlord put his head in, stains of egg yolk on his lapels. ‘A visitor for you,’ he whispered and winked.

  She stood below in the hallway beside the dark bentwood coat-rack, her legs crossed as if for a casual photo, arms folded, a tense smile fixed on her face, her hair brushed high. She had never come to the house on her own before.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said to the landlord when he came down.

  ‘Won’t you come up?’ he called from the he
ad of the stairs.

  The landlord made a face and winked again as she climbed.

  ‘I’m sorry coming like this,’ she said.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said as he closed the door. ‘I was just about to get ready to go to meet you. This way we can have even more time together.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she said quickly. ‘I came round to see if you’d mind putting the evening off.’

  ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘No. It’s just that Margaret has come up of a sudden from the country.’

  ‘Your friend from school days?’

  ‘Yes. She hardly ever comes up. And I thought you wouldn’t mind giving the evening up so that we could go out together.’

  ‘Did she not tell you she was coming up?’ The whole long-looked-forward- to balm of the evening was threatened by this whim.

  ‘No. She came on a chance. Someone was coming up and offered her a lift.’

  ‘And she expects you to drop everything?’

  ‘She doesn’t expect anything.’ She met his annoyance with her own.

  ‘All I can say is that you must care very little about the evening if you can change it that quickly.’

  ‘Well, if you’re that huffed about it we can go through with the evening. I didn’t think you’d mind.’

  ‘Where is this Margaret?’

  ‘She’s outside. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘I suppose I should pay my respects and let the pair of you away.’

  ‘Don’t put yourself out.’

  ‘It’ll be a pleasure,’ but then his anger broke before he opened the door. ‘If that’s all our going out means to you we might as well forget the whole thing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.