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

I knew myself too well. There was more caution than any love or charity in my habitual going home. It was unattractive and it had been learned in the bitter school of my father. I would fall into no guilt, and I was already fast outwearing him. For a time, it seemed, I could outstare the one eye of nature.

I had even waited for love, if love this was; for it was happiness such as I had never known.

‘You see, I waited long enough for you,’ I said as we drove away from her Kilkenny town. ‘I hope I can keep you now.’

‘If it wasn’t me it would be some other. My mother will never understand that. I might as well say I waited long enough for you.’

The visit we made to my father some weeks later quickly turned to a far worse disaster than I could have envisaged. I saw him watch us as I got out of the car to open the iron gate under the yew, but instead of coming out to greet us he withdrew into the shadows of the hallway. It was my stepmother, Rose, who came out to the car when we both got out and were opening the small garden gate. We had to follow her smiles and trills of speech all the way into the kitchen to find my father, who was seated in the car chair, and he did not rise to take our hands.

After a lunch that was silent, in spite of several shuttlecocks of speech Rose tried to keep in the air, he said as he took his hat from the sill, ‘I want to ask you about these walnuts,’ and I followed him out into the fields. The mock orange was in blossom, and it was where the mock orange stood out from the clump of egg bushes that he turned suddenly and said, ‘What age is your intended? She looks well on her way to forty.’

‘She’s the same age as I am,’ I said blankly. I could hardly think, caught between the shock and pure amazement.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said.

‘You don’t have to, but we were in the same class at university.’ I turned away.

Walking with her in the same field close to the mock orange tree late that evening, I said, ‘Do you know what my father said to me?’

‘No,’ she said happily. ‘But from what I’ve seen I don’t think anything will surprise me.’

‘We were walking just here,’ I began, and repeated what he’d said. When I saw her go still and pale I knew I should not have spoken.

‘He said I look close to forty,’ she repeated. ‘I have to get out of this place.’

‘Stay this one night,’ I begged. ‘It’s late now. We’d have to stay in a hotel. It’d be making it into too big a production. You don’t ever have to come back again if you don’t want to, but stay the night. It’ll be easier.’

‘I’ll not want to come back,’ she said as she agreed to see out this one night.

‘But why do you think he said it?’ I asked her later when we were both quiet, sitting on a wall at the end of the Big Meadow, watching the shadows of the evening deepen between the beeches, putting off the time when we’d have to go into the house, not unlike two grown children.

‘Is there any doubt? Out of simple hatred. There’s no living with that kind of hatred.’

‘We’ll leave first thing in the morning,’ I promised.

‘And why did you,’ she asked, tickling my throat with a blade of ryegrass, ‘say I was, if anything, too beautiful?’

‘Because it’s true. It makes you public and it’s harder to live naturally. You live in too many eyes — in envy or confusion or even simple admiration, it’s all the same. I think it makes it harder to live luckily.’

‘But it gives you many advantages.’

‘If you make use of those advantages, you’re drawn even deeper in. And of course I’m afraid it’ll attract people who’ll try to steal you from me.’

‘That won’t happen.’ She laughed. She’d recovered all her natural good spirits. ‘And now I suppose we better go in and face the ogre. We have to do it sooner or later and it’s getting chilly.’

My father tried to be charming when we went in, but there was a false heartiness in the voice that made clear that it grew out of no well-meaning. He felt he’d lost ground, and was now trying to recover it far too quickly. Using silence and politeness like a single weapon, we refused to be drawn in; and when pressed to stay the next morning, we said unequivocally that we had to get back. Except for one summer when I went to work in England, the summer my father married Rose, I had always gone home to help at the hay; and after I entered the civil service I was able to arrange holidays so that they fell around haytime. They had come to depend on me and I liked the work. My father had never forgiven me for taking my chance to go to university. He had wanted me to stay at home to work the land. I had always fought his need to turn my refusal into betrayal, and by going home each summer I felt I was affirming that the great betrayal was not mine but nature’s own.

I had arranged the holidays to fall at haytime that year as I had all the years before I met her, but since he’d turned to me at the mock orange tree I was no longer sure I had to go. I was no longer free, since in everything but name our life together seemed to be growing into marriage. It might even make him happy for a time if he could call it my betrayal.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I confessed to her a week before I was due to take holidays. ‘They’ve come to depend on me for the hay. Everything else they can manage themselves. I know they’ll expect me.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I suppose I’d prefer to go home — that’s if you don’t mind.’

‘Why do you prefer?’

‘I like working at the hay. You come back to the city feeling fit and well.’

‘Is that the real reason?’

‘No. It’s something that might even be called sinister. I’ve gone home for so long that I’d like to see it through. I don’t want to be blamed for finishing it, though it’ll finish soon, with or without me. But this way I don’t have to think about it.’

‘Maybe it would be kinder, then, to do just that, and take the blame.’

‘It probably would be kinder, but kindness died between us so long ago that it doesn’t enter into it.’

‘So there was some kindness?’

‘When I was younger.’ I had to smile. ‘He looked on it as weakness. I suspect he couldn’t deal with it. Anyhow it always redoubled his fury. He was kind, too, in fits, when he was feeling good about things. That was even more unacceptable. And that phrase from the Bible is true that after enough suffering a kind of iron enters the soul. It’s very far from commendable, but now I do want to see it through.’

‘Well, then go,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand it but I can see you want to go. Being new, the earliest I can get holidays will be September.’

We had pasta and two bottles of red wine in the flat the evening before I was to leave for the hay, and with all the talking we were almost late for our walk in the Green. We liked to walk there every good evening before turning home for the night.

The bells were fairly clamouring from all corners, rooting vagrants and lovers from the shrubbery, as we passed through the half-closed gates. Two women at the pond’s edge were hurriedly feeding the ducks bread from a plastic bag. We crossed the bridge where the Japanese cherry leaned, down among the empty benches round the paths and flowerbeds within their low railings. The deck-chairs had been gathered in, the sprinklers turned off. There was about the Green always at this hour some of the melancholy of the beach at the close of holiday. The gate we had entered was already locked. The attendant was rattling an enormous bunch of keys at the one through which we had to leave.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’d like to be married before long. I hadn’t thought it would make much difference to me, but, oddly, now I want to be married.’