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

That was the way our first evening went. People who came into the pub were dripping with rain and we stayed until they’d draped the towels over the pump handles and called ‘Time’ in the hope the weather would clear, but it did not.

The beat of rain was so fierce when we came out that the street was a dance of glass shapes, and they reminded me of blackened spikes on the brass candleshrine which hold the penny candles before the altar.

‘Does it remind you of the candlespikes?’ I asked.

‘Yes, now that you mention it.’

Perhaps the rain, the rain will wash away the poorness of our attempts at speech, our bodies will draw closer, closer than our speech, I hoped, as she returned on the throat my kiss in the bus; and from the bus, under the beat of rain on the umbrella, we walked beyond Fairview church.

‘Will I be able to come in?’ I asked.

‘It would cause trouble.’

‘You have your own room?’

‘The man who owns the house watches. He would make trouble.’

Behind the church was a dead end overhung with old trees, and the street lights did not reach as far as the wall at its end, a grey orchard wall with some ivy.

‘Can we stay here a short time, then?’

I hung upon the silence, afraid she’d use the rain as excuse, and breathed when she said, ‘Not for long, it is late.’

We moved under the umbrella out of the street light, fumbling for certain footing between the tree roots.

‘Will you hold the umbrella?’

She took the imitation leather with the white stitching in her hands.

Our lips moved on the saliva of our mouths as I slowly undid the coat button. I tried to control the trembling so as not to tear the small white buttons of the blouse. Coat, blouse, brassière, as names of places on a road. I globed the warm soft breasts in hands. I leaned across the cold metal above the imitation leather she held in her hands to take the small nipples gently in teeth, the steady beat on the umbrella broken by irregular splashes from the branches.

Will she let me? I was afraid as I lifted the woollen skirt; and slowly I moved hands up the soft insides of the thighs, and instead of the ‘No’ I feared and waited for, the handle became a hard pressure as she pressed on my lips.

I could no longer control the trembling as I felt the sheen of the knickers, I drew them down to her knees, and parted the lips to touch the juices. She hung on my lips. She twitched as the fingers went deeper. She was a virgin.

‘It hurts.’ The cold metal touched my face, the rain duller on the sodden cloth by now.

‘I won’t hurt you,’ I said, and pumped low between her thighs, lifting high the coat and skirt so that the seed fell free into the mud and rain, and after resting on each other’s mouth I replaced the clothes.

Under the umbrella, one foot asleep, we walked past the small iron railings of the gardens towards her room, and at the gate I left her with, ‘Where will we meet again?’

We would meet at eight against the radiators inside the Metropole.

We met against those silver radiators three evenings every week for long. We went to cinemas or sat in pubs, it was the course of our love, and as it always rained we made love under the umbrella beneath the same trees in the same way. They say the continuance of sexuality is due to the penis having no memory, and mine each evening spilt its seed into the mud and decomposing leaves as if it was always for the first time.

Sometimes we told each other stories. I thought one of the stories she told me very cruel, but I did not tell her.

She’d grown up on a small farm. The neighbouring farm was owned by a Pat Moran who lived on it alone after the death of his mother. As a child she used to look for nests of hens that were laying wild on his farm and he often brought her chocolates or oranges from the fairs. As she grew, feeling the power of her body, she began to provoke him, until one evening on her way to the well through his fields, where he was pruning a whitethorn hedge with a billhook, she lay in the soft grass and showed him so much of her body beneath the clothes that he dropped the billhook and seized her. She struggled loose and shouted as she ran, ‘I’ll tell my Daddy, you pig.’ She was far too afraid to tell her father, but it was as if a wall came down between her and Pat Moran who soon afterwards sold his farm and went to England though he’d never known any other life but that of a small farmer.

She’d grown excited in the telling and asked me what I thought of the story. I said that I thought life was often that way. She then asked me if I had any stories in my life. I said I did, but there was one story that I read in the evening paper that interested me most, since it had indirectly got to do with us.

It was a report of a prosecution. In the rush hour at Bank Station in London two city gents had lost tempers in the queue and assaulted each other with umbrellas. They had inflicted severe injuries with the umbrellas. The question before the judge: was it a case of common assault or, much more serious, assault with dangerous weapon with intent to wound? In view of the extent of the injuries inflicted it had not been an easy decision, but eventually he found for common assault, since he didn’t want the thousands of peaceable citizens who used their umbrellas properly to feel that when they travelled to and from work they were carrying dangerous weapons. He fined and bound both gentlemen to the peace, warned them severely as to their future conduct, but he did not impose a prison sentence, as he would have been forced to do if he’d found the umbrella to be a dangerous weapon.

‘What do you think of the story?’

‘I think it’s pretty silly. Let’s go home,’ she said though it was an hour from the closing hour, raising the umbrella as soon as we reached the street. It was raining as usual.

‘Why did you tell that silly story about the umbrellas?’ she asked on the bus.

‘Why did you tell the story of the farmer?’

‘They were different,’ she said.

‘Yes. They were different,’ I agreed. For some reason she resented the story.

In the rain we made love again, she the more fierce, and after the seed spilled she said, ‘Wait,’ and moving on a dying penis, under the unsteady umbrella in her hands, she trembled towards an inarticulate cry of pleasure, and as we walked into the street lamp I asked, we had so fallen into the habit of each other, ‘Would you think we should ever get married?’ ‘Kiss me.’ She leaned across the steel between us. ‘Do you think we should?’ I repeated. ‘What would it mean to you?’ she asked.

What I had were longings or fears rather than any meanings. To go with her on the train to Thurles on a Friday evening in summer and walk the three miles to her house from the station. To be woken the next morning by the sheepdog barking the postman to the door and have tea and brown bread and butter in a kitchen with the cool of brown flagstones and full of the smell of recent baking.

Or: fear of a housing estate in Clontarf, escape to the Yacht Sunday mornings to read the papers in peace over pints, come home dazed in the midday light of the sea front to the Sunday roast with a peace offering of sweets. Afterwards in the drowse of food and drink to be woken by, ‘You promised to take us out for the day, Daddy,’ until you backed the hire-purchased Volk-swagen out the gateway and drove to Howth and stared out at the sea through the gathering condensation on the semicircles the wipers made on the windshield, and quelled quarrels and cries of the bored children in the back seat.

I decided not to tell her either of these pictures as they might seem foolish to her.

‘We’d have to save if we were to think about it,’ I heard her voice.