The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  The whole place would be ablaze with talk once it got out about the cattle. The Kirkwoods alone would remain quiet. ‘His poor father worked here. He was a boy here, grew up here, how could he go and do what he has done?’ old William would say. He had nothing against the Kirkwoods, but they were fools. The old lady was the only one with a bit of iron. When Annie May had to tell them the business, they’d no more think of putting her out on the road than they’d be able to put a dog or a cat out. He could even see them start to get fond of the child by the time it started to wander round the big stone house, old William taking it down by the hand to look at the bees.

  ‘Nursing the hard stuff?’ a man next to him at the bar inquired.

  ‘That’s right.’ He didn’t want to be drawn into any talk. ‘Nursing it well.’

  The boat would get into Liverpool in the morning. Though it would take them days yet to figure out what had happened, he would travel on to Manchester before getting a haircut and change of clothes. From Manchester the teeming cities of the North stretched out: Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Glasgow. He would get work. He had no need to work for a long time, but he would still get work. Those not in need always got work before the people who needed it most. It was a fool’s world.

  The Sergeant and Guard Deasy would call to the big stone house. They would write down dates and information in a notebook and they would search through the herdsman’s house. They would find nothing. A notice would be circulated for him, with a photo. All the photos they would find would be old, taken in his footballing days. They would never find him. Who was ever found out of England! That circular they would put out would be about as useful as hope in hell.

  Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Glasgow – they were like cards spread out on a green table. His only regret was that he hadn’t hit out for one of them years before. He would miss nothing. If he missed anything, it would probably be the tongued boards of the ceiling he had never managed to count. In those cities a man could stay lost for ever and victory could still be found.

  Crossing the Line

  A few of the last leaves from the almond saplings that stood at intervals along the pavement were being scattered about under the lamps as he met me off the late bus from the city. He was a big man, prematurely bald, and I could feel his powerful tread by my side as we crossed the street to a Victorian cottage, an old vine above its doorway as whimsical there in the very middle of the town as a patch of thyme or lavender.

  ‘The house is tied to the school,’ he explained. ‘That’s why it’s not been bulldozed. We don’t have any rent to pay.’

  His wife looked younger than he, the faded blonde hair and bird face contrasting with her full body. There was something about her of materials faded in the sun. They had two pubescent daughters in convent skirts and blouse, and a son, a few years older than the girls, with the mother’s bird-like face and blonde hair, a frail presence beside his father.

  ‘Oliver here will be going back to the uni in a few days. He’s doing chemical engineering. He got first-class honours last year, first in his class,’ he explained matter-of-factly, to the mother’s obvious pleasure and the discomfiture of the son. ‘The fees are stiff. They leave things fairly tight just now, but once he’s qualified he’ll make more in a few years than you and I will ever make in a whole bloody lifetime of teaching. These two great lumps are boarders in The Bower in Athlone. They have a weekend off.’ He spoke about his daughters as if he looked upon them already as other men’s future gardens.

  ‘We’d give you tea but the Archdeacon is expecting you. He wants you to have supper with him. I hope you like porridge. Whether you do or not, you better bolt it back like a man and say it was great. As long as you take to the stirabout he’ll see nothing much wrong with you. But were you to refuse it, all sorts of moral doubts might start to grow in his old head. He’s ninety-eight, the second oldest priest in the whole of Ireland, but he’ll tell you all this himself. I’d better leave you there now before he starts to worry. The one thing you have to remember is to address yourself like a boy to the stirabout.’

  The wind had died a little outside. We walked up the wide street thronged with people in from the country for the late Saturday shopping. There were queues outside the butcher’s, the baker’s, within the chemist’s. Music came from some of the bars. Everywhere there was much greeting and stopping. Pale-faced children seemed to glide about between the shops in the shadow of their mothers. Some of them raised diffident hands or called, ‘Master Kennedy,’ to the big man by my side, and he seemed to know them all by name.

  One rather well-dressed old man alone passed us in open hostility. It was in such marked contrast to the general friendliness that I asked, ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘He’s a teacher from out the country. They don’t like me. I’m not in their bloody union. Are you in the INTO by any chance?’

  ‘They offered us a special rate before leaving college. Everybody joined.’

  ‘That’s your own business, of course. I never found it much use,’ he said irritably.

  He left me outside the heavy iron gates of the presbytery. ‘Call in on your way back to tell us how you got on. Then I’ll bring you down to your digs.’

  A light above the varnished door shone on white gravel and the thick hedge of laurel and rhododendron that appeared to hide a garden or lawn. A housekeeper led me into the front room where a very old white-haired priest sat over a coal fire.

  ‘You’re from the west – a fine dramatic part of the country, but no fit place at all to live, no depth of soil. Have you ever heard of William Bulfin?’ he asked as soon as I was seated by his side.

  ‘Rambles in Eirinn?’ I remembered.

  ‘For my ordination I was given a present of a Pierce bicycle. I rode all around Ireland that summer on the new Pierce with a copy of the Rambles. It was a very weary-dreary business pedalling through the midlands, in spite of the rich land. I could feel my heart lift, though, when at last I got to the west. It’s still no place to live. Have you met Mr Kennedy?’

  ‘Yes, Father. He showed me here.’

  ‘Does he find you all right?’

  ‘I think so, Father.’

  ‘That’s good enough for me, then. Do you think you’ll be happy here?’

  ‘I think so, Father.’

  ‘I expect you’ll see out my time. I thought the last fellow would, but he left. I dislike changes. I’m ninety-eight years old. There’s only one priest older in the whole of Ireland, a Father Michael Kelly from the Diocese of Achonry. He’s a hundred-and-two. You might have noticed the fuss when he reached the hundred?’

  ‘I must have missed it, Father.’

  ‘I would have imagined that to be difficult. I thought it excessive, but I take a special interest in him. Kelly is the first name I look for every morning on the front of the Independent.’ He smiled slyly.

  The housekeeper came into the room with a steaming saucepan, two bowls, a jug of milk and water, which she set on a low table between our chairs. Then she took a pair of glasses and a bottle of Powers from a press, and withdrew.

  ‘I don’t drink, Father,’ I said as he raised the bottle.

  ‘You’re wise. The heart doesn’t need drink at your age. I didn’t touch it till I was forty, but after forty I think every man should drink a little. The heart needs a jab or two every day to remind it of its business once it crosses forty. What do you think the business of the heart is?’

  ‘I suppose it has many businesses, Father.’

  ‘You’ll never be convicted on that answer, son, but it has only one main business. That’s to keep going. If it doesn’t do that all its other businesses can be forgotten about.’

  He poured himself a very large whiskey, which he drank neat, and then added a smaller measure, filling the glass with water. The Principal had been right. The saucepan was full of steaming porridge when he lifted the lid. He ladled it into the bowls with a wooden spoon, leaving place enough in the bowl for m
ilk and a sprinkling of sugar. It was all I could do to finish what was in the bowl. I noticed how remarkably steady his hand was as he brought the spoon to his lips.

  ‘If a man sticks to the stirabout he’s unlikely to go very far wrong,’ he concluded. ‘I hope you’ll be happy here. Mr Kennedy is a good man. He went on our side in that strike. He kept the school open. It was presumably good for the pupils. I think, though, it brought some trouble on himself. It’s seldom wise in the long run to go against your own crowd.’

  He’d risen, laying his rug aside, but before I could leave he took me by the shoulder up to a large oil painting in a heavy gilt frame above the mantel. ‘Look at it carefully. What do you see?’

  ‘A tropical tree. It looks like an island.’

  ‘Look again. It’s a trick painting,’ he said, and when I could make nothing more of it he traced lines from the tree, which also depicted a melancholy military figure in a cocked hat. ‘Napoleon, on Elba,’ he laughed.

  The Kennedys had invited me to their Sunday lunch the next day. Their kitchen was pleasant and extremely warm, the two girls setting the big table and smells of roasting chicken and apple stew coming from the black-leaded range. There was wine with the meal, a sweet white wine. Afterwards, the girls cleared the table and, asking permission, disappeared into the town. Oliver sat on in the room. Kennedy filled his wife’s glass to the brim with the last of the Sauterne, rose, and got himself a whiskey from the press in place of the wine.

  ‘You were just like he was twenty-one years ago. Your first school. Straight from the training college. Starting out,’ Mrs Kennedy said, her face pink with the wine and cooking.

  ‘Teachers’ jobs were hard come by in those days. Temporary assistant teacher for one year in the Marist Brothers in Sligo was my first job. There was pay but you could hardly call it pay. Not enough to keep a wren alive.’

  ‘It was the first of July. I remember it well. We had a bar and grocery by the harbour and sold newspapers. He came in for the Independent. He was tall then, with a thick head of brown hair. I know it was the first of July, but I forget the year.’

  ‘Nineteen thirty-three. It was the year I got out of college. I bought that Independent to see if there were any permanent jobs coming up in October.’

  ‘We were both only twenty. They told us to wait till we had saved some money, that we had plenty of time. But we couldn’t wait. My father gave us two rooms above the grocery part of the shop. Do you ever regret not waiting?’

  ‘We wouldn’t have saved anyhow. There was nothing to save. And we had those years.’

  I felt like an intruder. Their son sat there, shamed and fascinated, unable to cry stop, or tear himself away.

  ‘Those two rooms were rotten with damp, and when there were storms you should have heard the damned panes. You could have wallpapered the rooms with the number of letters beginning “The Manager regrets” that came through the letterbox that winter. Oliver here was on the way.’

  ‘Those two rooms were happiness,’ she said, lifting the glass of sweet wine to her lips, while her son writhed with unease on the sofa.

  ‘We could get no job, and then I was suddenly offered three at the same time. It’s always the same. You either get more than you want or you get nothing. We came here because the house went with the school. It meant a great deal in those days. It still does us no harm.’

  I walked with Kennedy to the school on the Monday. He introduced me to the classes I was to teach. We walked together on the concrete during the mid-morning break. Eagerly, he started to talk as we walked up and down among the playing children. The regulation ten minutes ran to twenty before he rang the bell.

  ‘They’re as well playing in this weather. The inspectors never try to catch me out. They know the work gets done.’

  It was the same at the longer lunchtime, the talk veering again to the early days of his marriage.

  ‘I used to go back to those two rooms for lunch. We’d just go straight to bed, grabbing a sandwich on the way out. Sometimes we had it off against the edge of the table. It was a great feeling afterwards, walking about with the Brothers, knowing that they’d never have it in the whole of their lives.’

  I walked with him on that concrete in total silence. I must have been close to the perfect listener for this excited, forceful man. No one had ever spoken to me like this before. I didn’t know what to say. The children milled about us in the weak sun. Sometimes I shivered at the premonition that days like this might be a great part of the rest of my life: I had dreamed once that through teaching I would help make the world a better place.

  ‘What made you take up teaching?’ he asked. ‘I know the hours are good enough, and there’s the long holidays, but what the hell good is it without money?’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ I answered. ‘Some notion of service … of doing good.’

  ‘It’s easy to see that you’re young. Teaching is a lousy, tiring old job, and it gets worse as you get older. A new bunch comes at you year after year. They stay the same but you start to go down. You’ll not get thanked for service in this world. There were no jobs when I was young. It was considered a bloody miracle to have any sort of a job with a salary. If I was in your boots now I’d do something like dentistry or engineering, even if I had to scrape for the money.’

  The time had already gone several minutes past the lunchtime. The children were whirling about us on the concrete in loud abandon, for them the minutes of play stolen from the school day were pure sweetness.

  ‘Still, if I had had those chances, I wouldn’t have gone to Sligo and I’d never have met her,’ he mused.

  I was in my room in the digs after tea one evening when a daughter of the house in the blouse and gymfrock of the convent secondary school knocked and said, ‘There’s a visitor for you in the front room downstairs.’

  A frail, grey-haired man rose as soon as I entered. He had an engaging handshake and smile.

  ‘I’m Owen Beirne, branch secretary of the INTO. I just called in to welcome you to the town and to invite you to our meeting on Friday night. I teach in a small school out in the country. Forgive the speech.’ He smiled as he sat down.

  I explained briefly that I had joined the union already and suggested that we move from the stiff front room.

  ‘We’ll cross in a minute to the Bridge Bar. They always have a nice fire, but it’s safer to say what I have to say here. I suppose you don’t know about your Principal and the union.’

  ‘He told me he wasn’t a member.’

  ‘Did he try to stop you joining?’ he asked sharply.

  ‘No. I told him I’d joined already.’

  ‘Well, he was a member before the strike but he refused to come out on strike. For several months he crossed that picket line, while the church and de Valera tried to starve us to our knees.’

  There was nothing for me to say.

  ‘As far as we are concerned, I mean the rest of the teachers around here, Kennedy doesn’t exist. You’re in a different position. He’s your Principal. You have to work with the man. But if we were to meet the two of you together, you might find yourself blackballed as well.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘It means nothing as far as you are concerned. You just go your own way and notice nothing. But should he try to pull the heavy on you in school – he did with one of your predecessors – let us know and we’ll fall on him like the proverbial load of bricks.’ He had risen. ‘That’s what I wanted to get out of the way.’

  The bar was empty, but there was a bright fire of logs at one end. Owen Beirne ordered a hot whiskey with cloves and lemon. The barman seemed to like and respect him. I had a glass of lemonade.

  ‘Don’t you take a drink?’

  ‘Seldom.’

  ‘I drink too much. It’s expensive and a waste of time. During the times I don’t drink I read far more and feel better in every way. Unfortunately, it’s very pleasant.’

  He told me his father had been a teacher. ‘My
poor father had to go to the back door of the presbytery every month for his pay. The priest’s housekeeper gave it to him. It was four pounds in those days. I’ll never forget my mother’s face when he came back from the presbytery one night with three pounds instead of four. The housekeeper had held back a pound because the priest had decided to paint the church that month. One of the great early things the INTO got for the teacher was for the salary to be paid directly into his own hands – to get it through the post instead of from the priest or his housekeeper.

  ‘All that was changed by my time. The inspectors, the dear inspectors, were our hairshirts. A recurring nightmare I have is walking up and down in front of a class with an inspector sitting at the back quietly taking notes. Some were the roaring boys. One rode the bucking mule in Duffy’s Circus in Ballinasloe, got badly thrown, but was still out before nine the next morning to check if the particular teacher he’d been drinking with was on time. They were like lords or judges. Full-grown men trembled in front of them at these annual inspections. Women were often in tears. The best hams and fruit cakes were brought out at lunchtime. For some there had to be the whiskey bottle and stout in the schoolhouse after school.

  ‘Then, during the war, the Emergency, we had an inspector in Limerick called Deasy, a fairly young man. I was teaching in his area at the time. He was a real rat. In Newcastle West there was an old landed family, a racehorse and gambling crowd, down on their luck. An uncle was the Bishop of Cashel. One of the sons was a failed medical student, and God knows what else, and as part of a rehabilitation scheme didn’t the Bishop get him a temporary teaching job. Deasy was his inspector. I’m sure the teaching was choice, and what Deasy didn’t say to his man wasn’t worth saying. This crowd wasn’t used to being talked to like that. He just walked out of the school without saying a word. Deasy sat down to his tea and ham sandwiches and fruit cake with the schoolmistress. They were still having lunch when your man arrived back. He sat down with them, opened his coat nice and quietly, produced the shotgun and gave Deasy both barrels. He wasn’t even offered the Act of Contrition. I was in the cathedral in Limerick the night Deasy’s body was brought in. It was a sad sight, the widow and seven children behind the coffin. Every inspector in the country was at the funeral. Things were noticeably easier afterwards.’