John McGahern - Creatures of the Earth - New and Selected Stories

‘I suppose there’s some consolation in that.’ Ryan was anxious to escape, knowing the hostility the themes of Ingolsby’s ponderous conversations roused. They were felt as a slur or rebuke. This time he’d not escape easily. Ingolsby needed to live through his own voice too this wet evening.

‘What’s your opinion of Shakespeare’s validity for the modern world?’

‘It’s not so easy to say,’ he deferred again, his eyes anxious about the room, his wife on the sofa with Mrs O’Connor, measuring a sleeve of a pullover on their daughter; soon she’d be knitting silently and patiently again while the night came the same as every other coming into her patient life, while McVittie said to O’Connor, ‘The shops out in the country were hard hit by emigration. But we managed to survive. We branched into new lines. We got Esso to put down a petrol pump for instance. We changed with the times.’

‘It’s a cardinal law of nature that every man should have his head firmly screwed on to know how to change with the times and survive,’ O’Connor agreed.

The people in the room had broken up into their separate groups, and when Miss Evans raised her arms in a yawn out of the chair Haydon leaned forward to say, ‘There must have been right old sport last night.’

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Haydon,’ she laughed, pleased.

‘The way all women are, all on their dignity till the business gets down to brass tacks and then an almighty turn of events. And who’d object to an old roll between the sandhills after the dancing anyhow?’ he raised his voice, as if to irritate Ingolsby, who was pressing a reluctant Ryan on Wordsworth.

She laughed softly, a hint of defiance against the unconcealed hostility of the married women with their children in the laugh, smiling a little as she looked towards the windows streaming with rain.

‘The sandhills won’t be much of a temptation tonight, Mr Haydon.’

‘No,’ he said, laughing gently with her, ‘but where there’s an old will there’s always an old way.’ In a voice gentle with what sounded like regret he inquired, ‘It was at the Silver Slipper you were last night, wasn’t it, a bird told me?’

‘The bird was right,’ she said. ‘The Blue Aces were playing there.’

‘The rain, the rain at the sea, is deadly.’ He turned absently in tiredness or memory and reached and took a white shell from the mantelpiece and held it to his ear to listen to it roar.

‘It makes everything miserable,’ McVittie said, tired of his complete possession of O’Connor, but all Haydon did was nod heavily as he replaced the shell and turned again to the girl.

The wash of rain on the windows, the light through their mist going dull on the blue sea of the wallpaper, the red and yellow hollyhocks like tall flowering masts of sailing ships; and when a child wiped a clearing on the glass, cabbages showed between the apple trees in the garden, and the green cooking apples were bright and shining in the leaves with rain.

‘Education comes from the Latin educo , to lead forth. People seem to have forgotten that in the modern interpretation of education,’ Ingolsby laboured.

It was some consolation to Ryan that he’d abandoned the poets, but his eyes still apologized to the room. He’d make his position even clearer yet, in his own time.

The turning of the pages without reading, pleasure of delaying pleasure to come. Heroes filled those pages week after week. Rockfist Rogan and Alf Tupper and Wilson the Iron Man. The room, the conversations, the cries of the seagulls, the sea faded: it was the world of imagination, among the performing gods, what I ashamedly desired to become.

Alf Tupper put aside welder and goggles, changed into his country’s singlet to leave the whole field standing in that fantastic last lap, and Wilson, Wilson, the Iron Man, simply came alone into Tibet and climbed to the top of Everest .

‘You saw an execution then too, didn’t you?’ I asked my father, and he started to tell as he rowed. He’d been captured in an ambush in late 1919, and they were shooting prisoners in Mountjoy as reprisals at that time. He thought it was he who’d be next, for after a few days they moved him to the cell next to the prison yard. He could see out through the bars. No rap to prepare himself came to the door that night, and at daybreak he saw the two prisoners they’d decided to shoot being marched out: a man in his early thirties, and what was little more than a boy, sixteen or seventeen, and he was weeping. They blindfolded the boy, but the man refused the blindfold. When the officer shouted, the boy clicked to attention, but the man stayed as he was, chewing very slowly. He had his hands in his pockets.

‘Take your hands out of your pockets,’ the officer shouted again.

The man slowly shook his head.

‘It’s a bit too late now in the day for that,’ he said.

The officer then ordered them to fire, and as the volley rang, the boy tore at his tunic over the heart, as if to pluck out the bullets, and the buttons of the tunic began to fly into the air before he pitched forward on his face.

The other heeled quietly over on his back: it must have been because of the hands in the pockets.

The officer dispatched the boy with one shot from the revolver as he lay face downward, but he pumped five bullets in rapid succession into the man, as if to pay him back for not coming to attention.

‘When I was on my honeymoon years after, it was May, and we took the tram up the hill of Howth from Sutton Cross,’ my father said as he rested on the oars. ‘We sat on top in the open on the wooden seats with the rail around that made it like a small ship. The sea was below, and smell of the sea and furze-bloom all about, and then I looked down and saw the furze pods bursting, and the way they burst in all directions seemed shocking like the buttons when he started to tear at his tunic. I couldn’t get it out of my mind all day. It destroyed the day.’

‘It’s a wonder their hands weren’t tied?’ I asked him as he rowed between the black navigation pan and the red where the river flowed into Oakport.

‘I suppose it was because they were considered soldiers.’

‘Do you think the boy stood to attention because he felt that he might still get off if he obeyed the rules?’

‘Sounds a bit highfalutin’ to me. Comes from going to school too long,’ he said aggressively, and I was silent. It was new to me to hear him talk about his own life at all. Before, if I asked him about the war, he’d draw fingers across his eyes as if to tear a spider web away, but it was my last summer with him on the river, and it seemed to make him want to talk, to give of himself before it ended.

Hand over hand I drew in the line that throbbed with fish; there were two miles of line, a hook on a lead line every three yards. The licence allowed us a thousand hooks, but we used more. We were the last to fish this freshwater for a living.

As the eels came in over the side I cut them loose with a knife into a wire cage, where they slid over each other in their own oil, the twisted eel hook in their mouths. The other fish — pike choked on hooked perch they’d tried to swallow, bream, roach — I slid up the floorboards towards the bow of the boat. We’d sell them in the village or give them away. The hooks that hadn’t been taken I cleaned and stuck in rows round the side of the wooden box. I let the line fall in its centre. After a mile he took my place in the stern and I rowed. People hadn’t woken yet, and the early morning cold and mist were on the river. Outside of the slow ripple of the oars and the threshing of the fish on the line beaded with running drops of water as it came in, the river was dead silent, except for the occasional lowing of cattle on the banks.