The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  McCredy was still laughing when he came back. ‘I’ve just been thinking that you two should be the young couple and me the uncle, and if you do decide to get up to something you must ask Uncle’s dispensation first,’ and he clapped me on the back.

  ‘Well, I better start by asking now,’ I said quickly in case my dismay would show, and he let out a bellow of helpless laughter. He must have been drinking, for he put his arms round both of us, ‘I just love you two young people,’ and tears of laughter slipped from his eyes. ‘Hi, barman, give us another round before I die.’

  I sat inside the partition in Gaffneys the next evening as on all other evenings, the barman as usual polishing glasses, nobody but the two of us in the bar.

  ‘Your friend seems a bit later than usual this evening,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think she’ll come this evening,’ I said, and he looked at me inquiringly. ‘She went down the country for the weekend. She was doubtful if she’d get back.’

  ‘I hope there’s nothing wrong …’

  ‘No. Her mother is old. You know the way.’ I was making for the safety of the roomy clichés.

  ‘That’s the sadness. You don’t know whether to look after them or your own life.’

  Before any pain of her absence could begin to hang about the opening and closing doors as the early evening drinkers bustled in, I got up and left; and yet her absence was certainly less painful than the responsibility of a life together. But what then of love? Love flies out the window, I had heard them say.

  ‘She’ll not come now,’ I said.

  ‘No. It doesn’t seem,’ he said as he took my glass with a glance in which suspicion equalled exasperation.

  We did not meet till several weeks later. We met in Grafton Street, close to where we had met the first night. A little nervously she agreed to come for a drink with me. She looked quite beautiful, a collar of dark fur pinned to her raincoat.

  ‘Jerry’s in Sierra Leone now,’ she said when I brought the drinks.

  ‘I know. I read it in the papers.’

  ‘He rang me last night,’ she said. ‘He was in the house of a friend – a judge. I could hear music in the background. I think they were a bit tight. The judge insisted he speak to me too. He had an Oxford accent. Very posh but apparently he’s as black as the ace of spades,’ she laughed. I could see that she treasured the wasteful call more than if it had been a gift of brilliant stones.

  She began to tell me about Sierra Leone, its swamps and markets, the avocado and pineapple and cacao and banana trees, its crocodile-infested rivers. Jerry lived in a white-columned house with pillars on a hillside above the sea, and he had been given a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. She laughed when she told me that a native bride had to spend the first nine months of her marriage indoors so that she grew light-skinned.

  ‘Will you be joining Jerry soon?’ I asked.

  ‘Soon. He knows enough people high up now to arrange it. They’re getting the papers in order.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll come home with me tonight, then?’

  ‘No.’ There wasn’t a hint of hesitation in the answer; difficulty and distance were obviously great restorers of the moral order. ‘You must let me take you to dinner, then, before you leave. As old friends. No strings attached,’ I smoothed. ‘That’ll be nice,’ she said.

  Out in Grafton Street we parted as easily as two leaves sent spinning apart by any sudden gust. All things begin in dreams, and it must be wonderful to have your mind full of a whole country like Sierra Leone before you go there and risk discovering that it might be your life.

  Nothing seems ever to end except ourselves. On the eve of her departure for Sierra Leone, another telegram came from the country. There was nothing mysterious about it this time. Rose had died.

  The overnight bag, the ticket, the train …

  The iron gate under the yew was open and the blinds of the stone house at the end of the gravel were drawn. Her flower garden, inside the wooden gate in the low whitethorn hedge just before the house, had been freshly weeded and the coarse grass had been cut with shears. Who would tend the flowers now? I shook hands with everybody in the still house, including my father, who did not rise from the converted car chair.

  I heard them go over and over what happened, as if by going over and over it they would return it to the everyday. ‘Rose got up, put on the fire, left the breakfast ready, and went to let out the chickens. She had her hand on the latch coming in, when he heard this thump, and there she was lying, the door half-open.’ And they were succeeding. They had to. She had too much of the day.

  I went into the room to look on her face. The face was over too. If she had been happy or unhappy it did not show now. Would she have been happier with another? Who knows the person another will find their happiness or unhappiness with? Enough to say that weighed in this scale it makes little difference or every difference.

  ‘Why don’t you let it go with him?’ I heard her voice. ‘You know what he’s like.’ She had lived rooted in this one place and life, with this one man, like the black sally in the one hedge, as pliant as it is knobbed and gnarled, keeping close to the ground as it invades the darker corners of the meadows.

  The coffin was taken in. The house was closed. I saw some of the mourners trample on the flowers as they waited in the front garden for her to be taken out. She was light on our shoulders.

  Her people did not return to the house after the funeral. They had relinquished any hopes they had to the land.

  ‘We seem to have it all to ourselves,’ I said to my father in the empty house. He gave me a venomous look but did not reply for long.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. We seem to have it all to ourselves. But where do we go from here?’

  Not, anyhow, to Sierra Leone. For a moment I saw the tall colonial building on a hill above the sea, its white pillars, the cool of the veranda in the evening … Maybe they were facing one another across a dinner table at this very moment, a servant removing the dishes.

  Where now is Rose?

  I see her come on a bicycle, a cane basket on the handlebars. The brakes mustn’t be working for she has to jump off and run alongside the bicycle. Her face glows with happiness as she pulls away the newspaper that covers the basket. It is full of dark plums, and eggs wrapped in pieces of newspaper are packed here and there among the plums. Behind her there shivers an enormous breath of pure sky.

  ‘Yes,’ my father shouted. ‘Where do we go from here?’

  ‘I suppose we might as well try and stay put for a time,’ I answered, and when he looked at me sharply I added, for the sake of my own peace, ‘that is, until things settle a bit, and we can find our feet again, and think.’

  The Conversion of William Kirkwood

  There might well have been no other room in the big stone house but the kitchen, as the rain beat on the slates and windows, swirled about the yard outside. Dampened coats were laid against the foot of the back door, and the panelled oak door that led to the rest of the house was locked because of the faulty handle, the heavy key in the lock. A wood fire flickered in the open door of the huge old range which was freshly black-leaded, its brass fittings gleaming; and beside it Annie May Moran, servant to the Kirkwoods since she was fourteen, sat knitting a brown jersey for her daughter, occasionally bending down to feed logs to the range from a cane basket by her side. At the corner of the long deal table closest to the fire, William Kirkwood sat with her daughter Lucy, helping the child with school exercises. They were struggling more with one another than with algebra, the girl resisting every enticement to understand the use of symbols, but the man was endlessly patient. He spread coins out on the table, then an array of fresh walnuts, and finally took green cooking apples from a bucket. Each time he moved the coins, the nuts, the apples into separate piles she watched him with the utmost suspicion, but each time was forced into giving the correct answer to the simple subtraction by being made to count; but once he substituted x and y for the coins and fruit
no number of demonstrations could elicit an answer, and when pressed she avoided understanding with wild guesses.

  ‘You are just being stubborn, Lucy. Sticking your heels in, as usual,’ he was forced at length to concede to her.

  ‘It’s all right for you, but I’m no good at maths,’ she responded angrily.

  ‘It’s not that you’re no good. It’s that you don’t want to understand. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. It seems almost a perversity.’

  ‘I can’t understand.’

  ‘Now Lucy. You can’t talk to Master William like that,’ Annie May said. She still called him Master William though he was now forty-five and last of the Kirkwoods.

  ‘It’s all right, Annie May. It’d be worth it all if we could get her to understand. She refuses to understand.’

  ‘It’s all right for you to say that, Master William.’ Lucy laughed.

  ‘Now, what’s next?’ he hurried her. ‘English and church history?’

  ‘English and catechism notes for tomorrow,’ she corrected.

  English she loved, and they raced through the exercises. She was tall and strong for her thirteen years and had boyish good looks. When they came to the doctrinal notes, it was plain that he was taking more interest in the exercises than the pupil. Through helping Lucy with these exercises in the evenings, he had first become interested in the Catholic Church. In a way, it had been the first step to his impending conversion. He smiled with pure affection on the girl as she tidied all her books into her leather satchel, and after the three had tea and buttered bread together she came into his arms to kiss him goodnight with the same naturalness as on every night since she had been a small child and he had read her stories. When Annie May unlocked the panelled door, a rush of cold met them from the rest of the house, and she hurried to take the hot water jar and the lighted candle in its blue tin holder to show the child to her upstairs room.

  After Eddie Mac, herdsman to the Kirkwoods, as his father had been herdsman before that, had sold the pick of the Kirkwood cattle on the Green in Boyle and disappeared into England with the money, leaving Annie May pregnant, it was old William, William Kirkwood’s father, who persuaded Annie May to stay and have the child in the house.

  ‘Why should you have to go to England where you’ll know nobody? You did no wrong. Stay and have the child here. We don’t have to care what people think. We’ll be glad of the child.’

  Annie May never once thought of calling the girl by her own name, and she was named Lucy after a favourite aunt of the Kirkwoods. The girl grew strong and healthy, with her father’s dark hair. She loved to shout in the big empty rooms of the stone house and to laugh with hands on hips as her voice was echoed back, the laugh then echoing hollowly again, voice and laugh closer to the clipped commanding accents of the Kirkwoods than to her mother’s soft obscured speech, vowel melting into vowel. The old man and child were inseparable. Every good day they could be seen together going down to the orchard to look at the bees, she, clattering away like an alarmed bird, trying to hold his hand and hop on one foot at the same time, he, slow by her side, inscrutable behind the beekeeper’s veil. And it was Lucy he sent to find William that final day when he wasn’t able to lift the tops of the hives, imagining that they had all been stuck down by the bees. It was a sunny spring day. The bees were making cleansing flights from the hives.

  ‘I can’t understand it, William,’ the beekeeper explained to his son when Lucy brought him to the hives.

  ‘If the bees have stuck the roofs down, Father, we may need a hive tool. I’ll try to twist them and ease them up slowly,’ William said, but to his consternation found that the roof was loose in his hands and lifted easily. ‘They’re not stuck at all. They’re quite free.’ He began to laugh, only to fall into amazed silence when he saw that his father had grown too weak to lift the few boards of painted pine. Gently he led the old man and puzzled child back to the house.

  ‘You must have caught something, Father. A few days in bed and you’ll be fine.’

  During that same windless spring night in which a light rain fell around the big house and its trees like a veil, the old beekeeper sank steadily, and near morning slipped as gently out of life as he had passed through.

  Annie May wept bitterly for the old man, but Lucy was too young for grief and turned naturally to William. She started to go with him everywhere, about the sheds and out into the fields. She was as good as any boy at driving sheep and cattle. Annie May tried to put some curb on these travels, but Lucy was headstrong and hated housework. Besides, not only did William seem to like the girl’s company in the fields but he often found her extremely useful. It was as a gesture of some recompense to Annie May for stealing the child’s hours in the fields – as well as that of a naturally pedagogic nature – that led him to help Lucy from her early years with her school exercises in the winter evenings.

  Except for his isolation with Annie May and Lucy in the stone house, the war found William Kirkwood little better off than his Catholic neighbours, poorer than some Catholics already on the rise. He had a drawing-room and library and lawn and orchard and spreading fields within stone walls, but the lawn was like a meadow and many of the books on the high shelves of the library had been damaged by the damp. The orchard was wild, his father’s beehives rotting away unseen in the high grass at its foot. The many acres had been understocked and half farmed for too long, and there were broken gaps in the stone walls. Nearly all the other Protestant landowners, friends of his parents, presences in his youth, seeing the erosion of their old ascendancy, had emigrated to Canada, Australia, or moved to the North. William Kirkwood stayed, blessedly unaware that he had become a mild figure of fun, out watching the stars at night as a young man when he should have been partying with the Protestant blades or parading their confident women among the prize floral arrangements and cattle and horses and sheaves of barley of the shows; now struggling on miles of good land to support himself, an old servant woman and her illegitimate child. But this laughter was based on no knowledge of the man. It came from casual observation, complacent ignorance, simple prejudice, that lazy judgement that comes more easily than any sympathy, and it was to receive a severe jolt because of the war away in Europe. A neutral Ireland declared it The Emergency. Local defence forces were formed. William Kirkwood saw no division of loyalty and was among the first to join. He was given a commission, and the whole local view of him – humorous, derisory, patronizing – changed. He proved to be a crack marksman. He could read field maps at a glance.

  His mother’s father had been old Colonel Darby, half deaf, with a stiff leg and a devotion to gin, who was not much mentioned around the stone house because he had never let slip a single opportunity to pour sarcasm and insult on his gentle sober son-in-law, William’s father. The Darbys had been British officers far back, and once William Kirkwood put on uniform it was as if they gathered to claim him. Men who had joined for the free army boots and uniform, for the three weeks in Finner Camp by the sea on full pay every summer, got an immediate shock. The clipped commands demanded instant compliance. A cold eye searched out every small disorder of dress or stance or movement. There were mutterings, ‘Put one of them back on a horse and it’s as if they never left the saddle. They’d ride you down like a dog,’ but they had to admit that he was fair, and when he led the rifle team to overall victory in the first Western Shield, and was promoted Captain, Commanding Officer for the north of the county, a predictable pride stirred and slow praise, ‘He’s not as bad as he appears at first,’ began to grow about his name.

  Out of uniform he was as withdrawn as before and as useless on land. Lucy was with him everywhere still. Though school and church had softened her accent, it still held more than a hint of the unmistakable Protestant bark, and she took great pride in William’s new uniform and rank. She had caused a disturbance at school by taking a stick and driving some boys from the ball alley who had sneered at William’s Protestantism: ‘He doesn’t even go to his own
church.’

  ‘He has no church to go to. It was closed,’ she responded and took up her stick.

  Annie May had lost all control of her, and often William found himself ruling in favour of the mother, caught uncomfortably between them, but mostly Lucy did William’s bidding. To be confined with her mother in the house was the one unacceptable punishment. To be with William in the fields was joy. She helped him all that poor wet summer at the hay. She could drive the horse-raker and was more agile than he. Beyond what work she did, and it was considerable, her presence by his side in the field was a deep sustenance. He shuddered to think of facing the long empty fields stretching ahead like heartache, the broken sky above, without her cheerful chatter by his side, her fierce energy.

  And it seemed only right that she was by his side on the morning that the long isolation of the Kirkwoods ended.

  The hay had been turned in the big rock meadow but rain was promised by evening. What lay ahead of them, even with the help of the horse-raker, was disheartening. They would have to try to save as much as they were able. What still lay on the ground by evening would have to take its chance of better weather. They could do no more.

  Suddenly, there was a shout in the meadow, and Francie Harte came swaggering towards them. Francie had given William much trouble in the early days of the Force. He had been forever indulging in practical jokes.

  ‘Is there anything wrong with me dress today, Captain?’ he shouted out as he came close. His walk was awkward because of the hayfork hidden behind his back.

  ‘No, Francie. We are not in uniform today,’ William Kirkwood replied mildly, not knowing what to make of the apparition. Then a cheer went up from behind the roadside hedge and the whole company of men swarmed into the field. Another man was opening the gate to let in an extra horse and raker. Haycocks started to spring up the field before the shouting, joking, cursing, jostling tide of men. Lucy was sent racing to the house to tell Annie May to start making sandwiches. William himself went to Charlie’s for a half-barrel of porter. Long before night the whole field was swept clean. After the men had gone William Kirkwood walked the field, saw all the haycocks raked and tied down.