John McGahern - The Dark

This utter sense of decrepitude and dust over the house — the clocks, the bulldogs, the mahogany case of books, the black leather armchairs, the unlived in room. At least in your own house there was life, no matter what little else.

In these houses priests lived, you’d be alone in one of them one day too, idling through the pages of books, reading the Office as you walked between the laurels. Girls in summer dresses would stroll past free under the sycamores, You could go to the sick rooms to comfort the defeated and the dying. People would come to the door to have Masses said for their wishes and their dead, they’d need certificates of birth and marriage, letters of freedom. It was summer now. It’d be hardly different with newspapers and whiskey watching the pain of the leaves fall and the rain gather to drip the long evenings from the eaves.

Though that was far ahead, it didn’t remove your presence from this actual day, in this black leather armchair, a vision of green laurels through the window. The best thing was to go somewhere.

“No. It’s worse than home,” Joan had said the night before, it was impossible to know what was wrong, you’d not remembered it much either, too squalidly involved in your own affairs. It brought new lease of energy, at least that much. It’d be better to tell John before going. He was in his shirt-sleeves, baking, when you went down, the smell of stewing apples mixed with the dough.

“I’m sorry,” you had to apologize when he started. “I wondered is the town far?”

“Three miles or about, sir.”

“You could walk it in an hour?”

“Yes. Easy, sir.”

“I think I’ll go so — to see my sister. Did you see her since she came?”

“She was out two Sundays, sir,” he said everything guardedly, there was no use.

“Will you tell Father where I’ve gone if he comes before me?”

You looked at John, you wished you could talk, whether he was happy here or not, how long more he’d stay with the priest and where he’d go then, if he had interest in books or sports or anything, but you couldn’t, and the more you heard of the sirring the more unreal it got.

“Good-bye so, John.”

“Good-bye so, sir.”

Across the stone stile out by the front of the church you went into the cool of the sycamores, a few hundred yards down the road the Protestant church where the funeral bell had tolled. The sycamores gave way there, and the narrow dirt-track ran between high grass margins with thorn hedges out of which ash saplings rose. You had to carry your coat on your arm the day was so hot. Close to the town tar replaced the earth and stones, the day full of the smell of melting tar, sticking to your shoes to gather the dust and fine pebbles. The gnawing in the guts started as you came into the town and kept on towards Ryan’s.

RYAN WAS SELLING SANDALS TO A CUSTOMER, AND NO SIGN OF Joan in the shop. He smiled recognition, the teeth more than the servility of the eyes said he was sorry to be engaged, he’d be finished in a minute, he’d consider it a great favour if you could possibly wait.

Eventually the sale was completed. He rattled out assurances as he covered the box with brown paper and tied it with twine. With fawning gratitude and wishes of good luck he saw the woman far as the door.

“A pleasant surprise to see you,” he shook hands with you smiling. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. It’s such bad weather for business, everyone making too much use of the sunshine, and hard to blame them to come to the shops. You get fed up waiting and fixing the shelves. But the rain, the rain will come, and it’ll be different.”

“I hope it’s alright to come,” you said when the flood subsided.

“Perfectly alright. You come to see Joan, isn’t it? It’s perfectly alright.”

“Father Malone is away. So I thought I’d come in to see Joan for an hour.”

“Perfectly alright, she’ll be delighted. She’s in the kitchen.”

He led the way in through the counter, and opened the kitchen door to let you in the first. Joan was scrubbing at the sink, and she looked up startled.

“I have a pleasant surprise for you, Joan. Your brother has come to take you out on the town. So run and change.”

“But I’m almost finished,” she reddened.

“It doesn’t matter, it’ll wait for again. You better make use of the sunshine while it lasts.”

She went sideways to the stairs, drying her hands as she went in the apron, smiling in servile gratitude or apology. You were glad when she went, you took the idiotic formal smile of pleasantness off your own face, and turned to Ryan who stood at the open door to the shop. He offered a cigarette and joked, “No bad habits I see,” when it was refused, and he was lighting his own.

Through the big window your eyes went out to the garden and you started. The two daughters of the night before were lobbing a tennis ball over and back across a loosely strung net, wearing swimsuits and ornate white sandals instead of usual tennis dress. Their mother sat in the shade of plum trees along the back wall, a newspaper spread across her lap in the deck-chair, and she was too far away to know whether she was dozing or following the casual play.

“Two fine lazy pieces,” Ryan said, he’d followed your eyes through the window. “Someone else will wear himself to the bone to keep them before long. They have the right ideas already. They can’t get enough of dances. You’re very quiet, I hear? You don’t go to the dances?”

“No. I don’t go to the dances,” and already resentment had started.

White wool of a new tennis ball hung in the air and a racket swung. Arm and straining thigh flashed in the stroke, the body stiffening sheer nakedly in the apple-green swimsuit, and you had to pull your eyes away in fear.

“Tempting?” Ryan smiled, and rage rushed again. You wanted to smash Ryan’s face in, to defile and slash the stripped girls in the garden, to kick into the trunks of thighs that opened under the newspaper in the deck-chair. But all you could do was clench hands and wait till Joan came. You managed to answer his, “Have a nice time,” politely enough too as you left.

You weren’t very far down the street though when you burst out violently, “You were scrubbing clothes and they were in the garden. And he asked me in the kitchen if I found his cursed daughters tempting. He asked me if I thought they were tempting.”

“That’d be true enough to form,” she said uneasily, it brought some quiet, it made you feel selfishly involved with your own affairs again.

“You said it was worse than home?”

“Yes,” she was uncertain.

“In what way?”

“She makes you feel bad about everything and I’m afraid of him.”

“How?”

“The first day,” and she was breaking, “I was on a stool putting shoe-boxes up on the shelves and he put his hands right up my dress and that was only the beginning. Once he got me in the bathroom and it was horrible. I’m always afraid. And then he takes it out on you in other ways,” and she began to cry violently.

“No, you mustn’t cry, not in the street, wait, Joan, we’ll soon be out of the town.”

That much had to be slowly dragged, and when it came it was too much, it would be better to have waited, but how your hands hungered for their throats. They could sit on deck-chairs under the plum trees and look at tennis, naked but for the swimsuits. Why couldn’t Ryan climb on his wife in the deck-chair, that’s what he had married her for, or couldn’t he tear off the swimsuits and straddle the pampered daughters or be whipped naked down the streets. And if you could get him into that bathroom for one minute you’d choke him.

Across the stone bridge at the foot of the town the feet went, out to bungalows with port-holes one side of the front door, and the effort or rhythm of the walking brought some calm. You didn’t want to hear anything more but to get her away.