The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  ‘One good thing about the night is that we’re not likely to trip over Master William and his telescope,’ Eddie Mac said derisively.

  ‘He’s a very educated man,’ Annie ventured.

  ‘He’s a fool. They’re both fools.’

  ‘Maybe it is that they are too educated for land,’ she continued uneasily, but he ignored what she had said. Even though they were in the fields, he walked apart from her still, not admitting the bitter blow to his vanity that he had been forced to come down to a woman as plain as Annie May after all those years.

  ‘It was different once,’ he said suddenly. ‘That was long before your time. I was only a boy when Mrs Kirkwood first came to the house. She had been a Miss Darby, old Colonel Darby’s daughter. It was an arranged match. The Kirkwoods were almost bankrupt at that time, too – they were never any good – and she had money. The house was done up before she came. It was one of the conditions of the match. The railings were painted, new curtains, everything made shining.

  ‘As soon as they were married, the parties began – bridge parties, tea parties on the lawn. There was a big party every year when the strawberries were ripe. Every Sunday night there was either a dinner party in the house or they went out to some other house to dinner. I heard my father say that old William hated nothing more than those dinners and parties. “It’d make one want to go and live in a cave or under some stone,” he said to my father.’ Eddie Mac started to laugh. ‘All he ever wanted to be with was the bees. The Protestants have always been mad about bees, and there were bee societies at the time. He used to give lectures to the societies. They say the lectures were Mrs Kirkwood’s idea. She used always to go with him to the meetings. It was a way of getting him out of the house. Old William never liked to be with people, but Mrs Kirkwood believed in people. “The only reason she goes to church is to meet people,” he told my father.’

  ‘Anyhow, he still has his bees,’ Annie May said gently.

  ‘Always had, always will have, and now the son has gone the same way, except it’s the stars in his case. The only thing you could be certain of is that no matter what he turned to it was bound to be something perfectly useless.’

  ‘The parties had stopped by the time I came,’ Annie May said. ‘Mrs Kirkwood used to go to the Royal Hotel every Thursday to meet her friends.’

  ‘There weren’t enough Protestants left by that time for parties. Once the church in Ardcarne had to be closed it was the beginning of the end. The money Mrs Kirkwood brought was running out too. If I owned their fields, I’d be rolling in money in a few years, and they can’t even make ends meet. The whole thing would make a cat laugh.’

  ‘They’ve been very kind to me,’ Annie May said.

  ‘What good did it do them? What good?’ he said angrily. ‘They’re there with one arm as long as the other. Useless to themselves or anybody else. They’ll be on the road before long, mark my words, and we’ll be with them if we are not careful.’

  They had come to the big iron gates of the yard. The gates were chained, and they crossed by the stone stile. The back of the huge house stood away to the left at the head of the yard, and in the darkness, all around them in the yard, were the old stone outhouses. The herdsman’s house was some distance beyond the hayshed at the far end of the yard, towards the fields. They stood for a split moment apart on the yard’s uneven surface. His natural cunning and vanity still held him back: it was too dangerous, she lived too close to his own doorstep, it could change his life – but his need was too strong.

  After that night, around nine every evening, when she had finished the chores, and old William was in bed and Master William reading in the library in the front of the house or out in the fields with his telescope, she would go to the herdsman’s house. Too timid to knock, she would make a small scraping sound on the loose door, and sometimes she would have to call. They stayed within the house those first weeks, but after a while he seemed not to want her there. On fine nights, he would take her into the fields. ‘We have our own telescope!’ And when it rained he still preferred to have her out of the house, though she would have loved to sit with him in the darkness listening to the rain beat on the iron. He would take her across to the dry-stone barn where the fruit was stored, the air sticky sweet with the odour of fermenting apples.

  ‘We can listen to the rain far better here. There’s less of roof.’

  He kept an old, heavy blanket there above the apple shelves, and he could end the evening whenever he wished. He could not get her out of his own house as easily. The old laws of hospitality were too strong even for him. When he wanted to be rid of her from this neutral storehouse, he could walk her to the corner of the yard across from the big house. Sometimes it seemed to her that the evenings were ending now almost before they began, but she was too ill with desire and fear to complain. A hot Sunday in the middle of June she made her one faint plea for openness or decency.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be a good day to take the boat and go on the river?’ She was amazed by her own effrontery as soon as the words were spoken. The Kirkwoods had a boathouse on the river and a solid rowboat that was kept in repair but seldom used. To go together on the river would bring what had been furtive and hidden into some small light. It would show that he was not ashamed of her. All courting couples went on Sundays to the river in this kind of weather. Even those who couldn’t get boats strolled the riverbank towards the Oakport Woods. Some of her early admirers had been proud to take her. There were soft bluebells under the trees, a hidden spring with water so pure it made the teeth chatter even in the heat, and she had drunk it laughing through a stem.

  ‘No. Not today,’ he answered slowly, looking down. A yellow dandelion was growing between the yard stones. He kept moving it forwards and back with his boot.

  ‘Wouldn’t it make a change?’

  ‘Not today.’ He was still searching for the cover of an acceptable lie. ‘There’s an animal sick. I wouldn’t like to be caught that far from the house if it took a turn for the worse. Anyhow, aren’t we as well off round the house here? Maybe later we can ramble down by the orchard. It’ll be as cool there as on any river.’

  At midday she made a meal that was much liked in this weather – smoked haddock in a cream sauce with cauliflower and young peas and small early potatoes. It must have been all of fourteen years since Mrs Kirkwood had taught her how to bring the sauce to a light consistency, to flavour it with chives and parsley. If Mrs Kirkwood was here on this hot Sunday, William and her son would not be dining with Eddie Mac in the kitchen. The linen and silver would be set in the front room, the front door open, the faded canvas deck-chairs stretched under the walnut tree on the front lawn for coffee and newspapers.

  The big kitchen, though, was pleasant enough – a fresh coolness from the brown flagstones she had washed in the morning, the door open on the steps down to the yard, a shimmer of heat above the iron roofs, and the dark green of the trees beyond. The house was too big for all of them. The men did not speak as they ate, and she winced as she listened to the thin clink of knife and fork on the bone china.

  ‘I have to say that was a superb meal, Annie,’ William volunteered as they rose.

  ‘I can heartily second that,’ his son added.

  ‘I’ll be around the yard today,’ Eddie Mac said to Master William as he lifted his cap. ‘I don’t like the look of the blue heifer.’

  ‘If you need help, you’ll find me in the library.’

  She had not eaten, but even after she had cleared the table and washed and put away the dishes she still had little appetite. She drank a mug of coffee with a slice of fruit cake as she stared out on the empty yard. It was already late in the afternoon when she rose, washed the mug, closed the door, and went heavily down the steps into the dull heat of the yard.

  She found him at the corner of the stables waiting with an eagerness he hadn’t shown for weeks, a blue cloth coat he sometimes wore to the fair on his arm. They went silently into the orchard, picking
a place in the high grass away from the beaten path that ran from the gate to the pale row of beehives facing south under the far ivy-covered wall. A clump of wild raspberries that had spread right up to the outer branches of the russet trees gave added cover, though no one in the world would find them there this blessed day.

  ‘You see, it’s washed.’ He offered her the blue coat to feel with about as much tenderness as it was ever possible for him to show before he spread it on the ground.

  ‘It’s as cool here as on any river,’ he said as he reached for her. ‘As cool as on any river. They can have the fields and anything they want. This is happiness,’ he said in a heavy, hoarsely rhythmic tone as he moved above her. ‘This is the centre, centre of everything, they can have all else they want.’

  ‘Then I must be part of that centre too,’ she said quietly out of the same dull defeat she had felt alone in the big kitchen, not caring about the words she had said.

  He stopped in pure amazement. He could not have looked more taken aback if the deep earth itself had stirred and spoken. For a moment, she thought he was about to strike her, but all he did was quickly straighten his clothes and turn his back to her in the long grass. The oppressive silence was at length broken by the sound of the small orchard gate being opened and closed. Old William came slowly down the worn path between the trees. He was going to the hives, dressed all in white, his white beard tucked beneath the suit, the frame of the veil resting on an old straw hat, the long gloves tied with twine below the elbow. He carried a hive tool and smoker, pausing now and then to fan the smoker as he walked slowly along.

  From the shelter of the grass and wild canes they watched him go through the hives. His slow care somehow took away some of the oppression. Each time he lifted a roof, a thin stream of bees would move towards the veil. He paid them no attention, working methodically through the hives, sometimes having to use the tool to prise the frames apart, now and again turning his back to the sun to hold up the frames to the light. When he had gone through all the hives, and the bees were quietly working again, he lifted an old wooden chair out of the grass and sat to one side, staring directly into the flight path, the way people lean on bridges to watch water flow below.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. Just watching. He could sit that way for hours. Once I asked him what they were doing. “They’re killing off the drones today, Edward,” he said. You’d think he was talking about the weather.’

  ‘Still, he sells part of the honey to Sloans,’ she said. ‘They buy some of his sections every year.’

  ‘For what? For pennies. Mostly he has to feed it back to the bloody bees. Or give it away. The only certain thing about anything the Kirkwoods ever turn their hand to is that it is guaranteed to be perfectly useless.’

  They watched old William rise from the chair, remove the hat and veil, freeing a few bees caught in the mesh with his fine, long fingers. He turned the chair upside down again in the grass and came slowly up the orchard. The sun had already gone down behind the walls. They too soon rose, smoothed the stains and bits of grasses from their clothes, and left in opposite directions. Annie May had changed much from the night she had come with Eddie Mac from the dance, but she still held on to a dull hope, and she was beginning to fear that she was with child.

  Soon she was certain, and yet she put off telling Eddie. They hired four casual yardmen for the harvest. All her time seemed to go in preparing meals. There was a time when Eddie used to flirt with her in front of the workmen, but now he just ate morosely and silently.

  One day she was coming through the yard with a hurriedly gathered bag of green cooking apples for the men’s dessert when she heard cheering from the cattle pen. Eddie Mac was in the centre of the pen, his arm round the neck of a young black bull, his free hand gripping its nostrils, the delicate membrane between finger and thumb. The cheering of the men around the pen rose as he slowly forced the struggling animal to its knees, but then suddenly, either through loss of his footing or the terrified animal gathering all its strength into a last surge, he was thrown violently against the steel bars, and the bull broke loose. He wasn’t hurt. He rose at once to race after the bull, to rain kicks at its mouth and throat, the cornered animal bellowing for the rest of the herd as it tried to lift its head away from the blows.

  She grew so afraid that she found herself shaking. The fear stayed with her all through the day as she cooked and served and washed. Because she could stand the fear no longer she told him in the evening what she had been putting off for weeks.

  He did not look at her as she spoke. He had known from that first night he took her that it would end with his being driven out. He had been expecting it from the very beginning. His only surprise was that it had taken so long.

  ‘How much time is there?’ he asked.

  ‘Four months. Maybe a little more.’ It was such relief to her that he had listened so quietly. Then she found herself pressing for a wild, common happiness. ‘We could do up the small house. Families were brought up in it before. It’d need very little change. I could go on working in the big house. They’d probably be only glad of it. It’d mean the two of us were settled.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Everything will work itself out,’ he said, and she began to cry. ‘We’ll have to think things out. It’ll take time,’ he said.

  ‘Time?’

  ‘We have to see the priest if we’re to be settled. Banns will have to be read, certificates got, a lot of things. The harvest business will be all over here in a few days. The yardmen will be let go the end of the week. Then we can start to think.’

  ‘Everything will be all right, then.’ She could hardly believe her own happiness.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about a single thing. Once this week is over everything will be taken care of.’

  ‘I was afraid,’ she said. ‘Now I can’t believe that everything is going to turn out so good.’

  He had been through this before. There was only one difference between this time and the other times. All the other times it was the girls that had to stir themselves and make for England. This time he would have to disappear into England.

  That night, after she had gone, he lay for a long time fully clothed on the iron bed in the bare three-roomed house, smoking cigarette after cigarette, though he usually smoked little, staring up at the tongued boards of the ceiling. As a boy he had tried to count right across the ceiling, often by the leaping firelight on a winter’s night, but he had never managed to complete a single count, always losing the count among the maze of boards at the centre. Tonight he had no need to count so far. Today had been Monday, the second of the month. Tomorrow: Tuesday. Then Wednesday. The fair of Boyle was held on the first Thursday of every month. That was three days away.

  The evening before the fair he picked six of the finest black two-year-olds from the fields, the prize cattle of the farm, and penned them by the road, a rough pen he and his father had put together years before with old railway sleepers. After he closed the pen, he threw hay in a corner so that the cattle would stay quiet through the night. He had been given such a free hand running the land for so long that no one questioned him about the cattle. When he came in it was already dark, and rain had started to fall. He found Annie May ahead of him in the house. Though no lamp was lit, she had stirred the fire and a kettle was boiling. The little table that hung on iron trestles from the wall had been lifted down. Cups and plates were set. She had brought food from the big house.

  ‘As there was no answer, I let myself in,’ she apologized.

  ‘You were as well,’ he responded.

  When she said to him that night, ‘You might get finer women, but you’ll never find another who’ll love you as much as I’ll love you,’ he knew it to be true in some far-off sense of goodness; but it was not his truth. He saw the child at her breast, the faltering years ahead with the Kirkwoods. He shut it out of his mind.

  It was still dark and raining heavily when he put th
e cattle on the road in the morning. All he had with him was a stick and small bundle. The first miles were the worst. Several times he had to cross into the fields and run alongside the cattle where the walls were broken, their hooves sliding on the road as they raced and checked. It was much easier once they tired and it started to get light. The tanglers looking to buy the cattle cheap before they reached the fair tried to halt him on the outskirts of the town, but with a curse he brushed past them towards the Green. People had put tables and ladders out all along the street to the Green to protect doors and windows. He found a corner along the wall at the very top of the Green. All he had to do now was wait, his clothes stuck to his back with perspiration and rain. As the cattle quietened after their long, hard run, their hooves sore and bleeding, they started to reach up and pluck at the ivy on the wall.

  He had to hang around till noon to get the true price. Though the attempts at bargaining attracted onlookers and attention, to sell the cattle quickly and cheaply would have been even more dangerous still, and it was not his way.

  ‘Do you have any more where those came from?’ the big Northern dealer in red cattle boots asked finally as he counted out the notes in a bar off the Green.

  ‘No. Those don’t come often,’ Eddie Mac replied as he peeled a single note from the wad and handed the luck penny back. The whiskey that sealed the bargain he knocked quickly back. The train was due at three.

  Afterwards no one remembered seeing him at the station. He had waited outside among the cars until the train pulled in, and then walked straight on. Each time the tickets were being checked he went to the WC, but he would have paid quietly if challenged. He had more money in his inside pocket than he had ever had in his whole life before.

  From Westland Row he walked to the B&I terminal on the river and bought a single ticket to Liverpool a few minutes before the boat was due to sail. When the boat was about an hour out to sea, he began to feel cold with the day’s tiredness and went to the bar and ordered whiskey. Warmed by the whiskey, he could see as simply back as forward.