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

Tonight in Galway, in a long dress of burgundy velvet, satin in her hair, the delicate white hands of Eileen O’Neill would flicker on the white keyboard as the Surveyor played, while Mrs Kilboy would say to him at the CWA, ‘Something will have to be done about Jackson’s thieving ass, Sergeant, it’ll take the law to bring him to his senses, nothing less, and those thistles of his will be blowing again over the townland this year with him dead drunk in the pub, and is Biddy’s hens laying at all this weather, mine have gone on unholy strike, and I hear you were measuring the road today, you and a young whipper-snapper from Dublin, not even the guards can do anything unknownst in this place, and everybody’s agog as to how the case will go, the poor woman’s nerves I hear are in an awful condition, having to pass that wooden cross twice a day, and what was the use putting it up if it disturbs her so, it won’t bring him back to life, poor Michael, God rest him, going to Carrick for his haircut. The living have remindedness enough of their last ends and testaments without putting up wooden crosses on the highways and byways, and did you ever see such a winter, torrents of rain and expectedness of snow, it’ll be a long haul indeed to the summer.’

It would be a long haul to summer and the old tarred boat anchored to the Ford radiator in the mouth of the Gut, the line cutting the water as hooked roach after hooked roach made a last surge towards the freedom of the open lake.

When he had knotted his tie in the mirror his eye fell on the last of the whiskey and he filled the glass to the brim. He shivered as it went down but the melancholy passed from his face. He turned the chair round so that he could sit with his arms on its back, facing Biddy. ‘Do you know what I’ll say to Mrs Kilboy?’ he addressed the unheeding Biddy who was intent on the turning of the heel. ‘It’ll be a long haul indeed until the summer, Mrs Kilboy,’ I’ll say. ‘And now, Mrs Kilboy, let us talk of higher things. Some of the palaces of the royal popes in Avignon are wonderful, wonderful, Mrs Kilboy, in the sun; and wonderful the cafés and wonderful, Mrs Kilboy, the music. Did you ever hear of a gentleman called Paganini, Mrs Kilboy? A man of extraordinary interest is Paganini. Through his genius he climbed out of the filth of his local Genoa to wealth and fame. So that when he came to London, Mrs Kilboy, the crowds there crowded to touch him as they once trampled on one another to get their hands on Christ; but he stuck to his guns to the very end, improvising marvellously, Mrs Kilboy, during his last hours on his Guarnerius. I wonder what Guarnerius myself and yourself, Mrs Kilboy, or Biddy down in the barracks will be improvising on during our last hours before they hearse us across Cootehall bridge to old Ardcarne? Well, at least we’ll be buried in consecrated ground — for I doubt if old Father Glynn will have much doubts as to our orthodoxy — which is more than they did for poor old Paganini, for I was informed today, Mrs Kilboy, that they left him in some field for five years, just like an old dead cow, before they relented and allowed him to be buried in a churchyard on his own land.’

The Sergeant tired of the mockery and rose from the chair, but he finished the dregs of the glass with a flourish, and placed it solidly down on the table. He put on his hat and overcoat. ‘We better be making a start, Biddy, if we’re ever going to put Mrs Kilboy on the straight and narrow.’

Biddy did not look up. She had turned the heel and would not have to adjust the needles again till she had to start narrowing the sock close to the toe. Her body swayed happily on the chair as she turned and turned the handle, for she knew it would be all plain sailing till she got close to the toe.

It was in Grafton Street we met, aimlessly strolling in one of the lazy lovely Saturday mornings in spring, the week of work over, the weekend still as fresh as the bunch of anemones that seemed the only purchase in her cane shopping basket.

‘What a lovely surprise,’ I said.

I was about to take her hand when a man with an armload of parcels parted us as she was shifting the basket to her other hand, and we withdrew out of the pushing crowds into the comparative quiet of Harry Street. We had not met since we had graduated in the same law class from University College five years before. I had heard she’d become engaged to the medical student she used to knock around with and had gone into private practice down the country, perhaps waiting for him to graduate.

‘Are you up for the weekend or on holiday or what?’ I asked.

‘No. I work here now.’ She named a big firm that specialized in tax law. ‘I felt I needed a change.’

She was wearing a beautiful suit, the colour of oatmeal, the narrow skirt slit from the knee. The long gold hair of her student days was drawn tightly into a neat bun at the back.

‘You look different but as beautiful as ever,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d be married by now.’

‘And do you still go home every summer?’ she countered, perhaps out of confusion.

‘It doesn’t seem as if I’ll ever break that bad habit.’

We had coffee in Bewley’s — the scent of the roasting beans blowing through the vents out on to Grafton Street for ever mixed with the memory of that morning — and we went on to spend the whole idle day together until she laughingly and firmly returned my first hesitant kiss; and it was she who silenced my even more fumbled offer of marriage several weeks later. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be married. But we can move in together and see how it goes. If it doesn’t turn out well we can split and there’ll be no bitterness.’

And it was she who found the flat in Hume Street, on the top floor of one of those old Georgian houses in off the Green, within walking distance of both our places of work. There was extraordinary peace and loveliness in those first weeks together that I will always link with those high-ceilinged rooms — the eager rush of excitement I felt as I left the office at the end of the day; the lingering in the streets to buy some offering of flowers or fruit or wine or a bowl and, once, one copper pan; and then rushing up the stairs to call her name, the emptiness of those same rooms when I’d find she hadn’t got home yet.

‘Why are we so happy?’ I would ask.

‘Don’t worry it,’ she always said, and sealed my lips with a touch.

That early summer we drove down one weekend to the small town in Kilkenny where she had grown up, and above her father’s bakery we slept in separate rooms. That Sunday a whole stream of relatives — aunts, cousins, two uncles, with trains of children — kept arriving at the house. Word had gone out and they had plainly come to look me over. This brought the tension between herself and her schoolteacher mother into open quarrel late that evening after dinner. Her father sat with me in the front room, cautiously kind, sipping whiskey as we measured each careful cliché, listening to the quarrel slow and rise and crack in the far-off kitchen. I found the sense of comfort and space charming for a while, but by the time we left I too was beginning to find the small town claustrophobic.

‘Unfortunately the best part of these visits is always the leaving,’ she said as we drove away. ‘After a while away you’re lured into thinking that the next time will somehow be different, but it never is.’

‘Wait — wait until you see my place. Then you may well think differently. At least your crowd made an effort. And your father is a nice man.’

‘And yet you keep going back to the old place?’

‘That’s true. I have to face that now. That way I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel anything.’