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

Lightly as they, we must have drifted to the dancehall a summer ago. The late daylight had shone through the glass dome above the dancefloor, strong as the light of the ballroom, the red and blue lights that started to sweep the floor as soon as the waltz began.

She’d been standing with a large blonde girl on the edge of the dancefloor. I could not take my eyes from her black hair, the pale curve of her throat. A man crossed to the pair of girls: it was the blonde girl he asked to dance.

I followed him across the ballroom and, as soon as I touched her elbow, she turned and came with me on to the floor.

‘Do you like waltzes?’ were the first words she spoke as we began to dance.

She did not speak again. As we kept turning to the music, we moved through the circle where the glass dome was still letting in daylight, and kept on after we’d passed the last of the pillars hung with the wire baskets of flowers, out beyond the draped curtains, until we seemed to be turning in nothing but air beneath the sky, a sky that was neither agate nor blue, just the anonymous sky of any and every day above our lives as we set out.

‘Do you think it will be late when Cronin tumbles in?’ Ryan asked sleepily.

‘It won’t be early. He went to a dance with O’Reilly and the two women.’

Pale light from the street lamp just outside the window shone on the varnished ceiling boards of the room. Cronin would have to cross the room to get to his bed by the window.

‘I don’t mind if he comes in near morning. What I hate is just to have got to sleep and then get woke up,’ Ryan said.

‘You can be sure he’ll wake us up. He’s bound to have some story to get off his chest.’

Ryan was large and gentle and worked as an inseminator at the AI station in the town, as did Cronin. The three of us shared this small room in the roof of the Bridge Restaurant. O’Reilly was the only other lodger Mrs McKinney kept, but he had a room of his own downstairs. He was the site engineer on the construction of the new bridge.

‘What do you think will happen between O’Reilly and Rachael when the bridge is finished?’

I was startled when Ryan spoke. The intervals of silence before we fell asleep seemed always deeper than sleep. ‘I don’t know. They’ve been going out a good while together. Maybe they’ll be married … What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. He’s had a good few other women here and there in the last few months. I doubt if he wants to get hitched.’

‘She’d have no trouble finding someone else.’

She had been the queen of one beauty competition the summer before and runner-up in another. She was fair-haired and tall.

‘She mightn’t want that,’ Ryan said. ‘The Bachelors’ Ball will be interesting on Friday night. Why don’t you change your mind and come? The dress suits are arriving on the bus Friday evening. All we’d have to do is ring in your measurements.’

‘No. I’ll not go. You know I’d go but I want to have the money for Christmas.’

An old bicycle went rattling down the hill and across the bridge, a voice shouting out, ‘ Fàg à bealach .’

‘That’s Paddy Mick on his way home. He has no bell. It means the last of the after-hour houses are shut.’

‘It’s time to try to get to sleep — Cronin or no Cronin.’

It was very late when Cronin woke us, but daylight hadn’t yet started to thin the yellow light from the street lamp. We would have pretended to have gone on sleeping but he repeated, ‘Are yous awake?’

‘We are now.’

‘That O’Reilly should be run out of town,’ he said.

‘What’s wrong now?’ I had suspected for a while that his lean, intense good looks concealed a deep stupidity.

‘What he made that girl do tonight no poor girl should have to do, and in front of people too.’

‘What was it?’ Ryan raised himself on an elbow in the bed while Cronin slipped out of his clothes.

‘It was horrible.’

‘You can’t just wake us up like this and not tell us.’

‘It was too foul to put in words.’

‘What’s so suddenly sacred about words! Why didn’t you stop it if you felt so badly about it?’

‘What could you say once it was done? Once he made her do it. My woman was so upset that she didn’t talk for the rest of the night.’

Cronin had been going out casually with a hairdresser some years older than he was, who owned her own business in the town. He was taking her to the ball on Friday.

‘Are you going to tell us what happened? Or are you going to let us get back to sleep?’

‘I wouldn’t disgrace myself by telling it.’ He turned his back to us in the bed.

‘I hope you have nightmares.’ Ryan swore before pulling the clothes and pillow violently over his head.

The four of us had breakfast together the next morning. There was no one else in the big dining-room except some night-shift workers from the mill across the road in their white caps and overalls, the pale dusting of flour still on their arms and faces. I’d always envied their high spirits in the morning. Breakfast was for them a celebration. Cronin was gloomily taciturn until near the end of the meal when he said, ‘You’re an awful effin’ so and so, O’Reilly, to do what you did last night.’

‘I haven’t even a notion what you’re talking about.’ O’Reilly bloomed. He was a small barrel of a man with a fine handsome head. He had played cornerback for Cavan in two All-Irelands.

‘No girl should have to do what you made that girl do last night.’

‘You know nothing about women, Cronin,’ O’Reilly said loudly, hoping to get the ear of the mill workers, but they were having too good a time of their own. ‘Women like to do that. Only they have to pretend that they don’t. Let me tell you that all women take a poor view of a man who accepts everything at its face value.’

‘It was a disgrace,’ Cronin said doggedly.

‘You’re a one to talk.’ O’Reilly rose from the table in high good humour. ‘Whatever yourself and the hairdresser were up to in the back of the car, I thought it was about to turn over.’

‘It was a pure disgrace,’ Cronin said to his plate.

Ryan and myself stayed cautiously neutral. I had clashed with O’Reilly from the beginning when I’d refused to become involved with the town football team, which he ran with a fierce fanaticism, and we were all the more cautious because Cronin usually hero-worshipped O’Reilly. In the long evenings they could be seen kicking a ball round for hours in the park after training sessions. Lately, they’d taken to throwing shoes and pieces of cutlery at the ceiling if they thought I was upstairs with a book or correcting school exercises. I was looking forward to the opening of the new bridge.

Ryan’s unwashed Beetle was waiting outside the gate when I finished school at three that evening.

‘I’ve calls in the Gaeltacht. Maybe you’ll come in case there’s need of a bit of translating.’

It was a polite excuse. There was never need of translation. The tied cow could be always pointed out. The breed of the bulls — Shorthorn, Charolais, Friesian — were the same in Gaelic as in English. The different colours of the straws of semen in the stainless steel container on the floor of the Beetle needed no translation. Ryan just didn’t like driving on the empty roads between these silent, alien houses on his own.

‘I got the whole business out of Cronin in the office this morning.’ A wide grin showed on his face as the VW rocked over the narrow roads between the bare whitethorns.

‘What was it, then? I won’t be shocked.’

‘It shocked Cronin.’

‘What was it, for Christ’s sake?’