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

‘I know it is. I’m very grateful.’

‘To hell with gratitude. Gratitude doesn’t matter a damn. It’s one of those moves that benefits everybody involved. You’ll come to learn that there aren’t many moves like that in life.’

‘I know that but I still have to think about it.’

‘Listen. Let’s not close on anything this evening. Naturally you have to consider everything. Why don’t you drop over to my place tomorrow night? You’ll have a chance to meet my lads. And herself has been saying for a long time now that she’d like to meet you. Come about nine. Everything will be out of the way by then.’

I rowed very slowly away, just stroking the boat forward in the deadly silence of the half-darkness. I watched Reegan cross the road, climb the hill, pausing now and then among the white blobs of his Friesians. His figure stood for a while at the top of the hill where he seemed to be looking back towards the boat and water before he disappeared.

When I got back to the house everyone was asleep except a younger sister who had waited up for me. She was reading by the fire, the small black cat on her knee.

‘They’ve all gone to bed,’ she explained. ‘Since you were on the river, they let me wait up for you. Only there’s no tea. I’ve just found out that there’s not a drop of spring water in the house.’

‘I’ll go to the well, then. Otherwise someone will have to go first thing in the morning. You don’t have to wait up for me.’

‘I’ll wait,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait and make the tea when you get back.’

‘I’ll be less than ten minutes.’

I walked quickly, swinging the bucket. The whole village seemed dead under a benign moon, but as I passed along the church wall I heard voices. They came from Ryan’s Bar. It was shut, the blinds down, but then I noticed cracks of yellow light along the edges of the big blue blind. They were drinking after hours. I paused to see if I could recognize any of the voices, but before I had time Charlie Ryan hissed, ‘Will you keep your voices down, will yous? At the rate you’re going you’ll soon have the Sergeant out of his bed,’ and the voices quietened to a whisper. Afraid of being noticed in the silence, I passed on to get the bucket of spring water from the well, but the voices were in full song again by the time I returned. I let the bucket softly down in the dust and stood in the shadow of the church wall to listen. I recognized the Master’s slurred voice at once, and then voices of some of the men who worked the sawmill in the wood.

‘That sixth class in 1933 was a great class, Master.’ It was Johnny Connor’s voice, the saw mechanic. ‘I was never much good at the Irish, but I was a terror at the maths, especially the Euclid.’

I shivered as I listened under the church wall. Nineteen thirty-three was the year before I was born.

‘You were a topper, Johnny. You were a topper at the maths,’ I heard the Master’s voice. It was full of authority. He seemed to have no sense at all that he was in danger.

‘Tommy Morahan that went to England was the best of us all in that class,’ another voice took up, a voice I wasn’t able to recognize.

‘He wasn’t half as good as he imagined he was. He suffered from a swelled head,’ Johnny Connor said.

‘Ye were toppers, now. Ye were all toppers,’ the Master said diplomatically.

‘One thing sure is that you made a great job of us, Master. You were a powerful teacher. I remember to this day everything you told us about the Orinoco River.’

‘It was no trouble. Ye had the brains. There are people in this part of the country digging ditches who could have been engineers or doctors or judges or philosophers had they been given the opportunity. But the opportunity was lacking. That was all that was lacking.’ The Master spoke again with great authority.

‘The same again all round, Charlie,’ a voice ordered. ‘And a large brandy for the Master.’

‘Still, we kept sailing, didn’t we, Master? That’s the main thing. We kept sailing.’

‘Ye had the brains. The people in this part of the country had powerful brains.’

‘If you had to pick one thing, Master, what would you put those brains down to?’

‘Will you hush now! The Sergeant wouldn’t even have to be passing outside to hear yous. Soon he’ll be hearing yous down in the barracks,’ Charlie hissed.

There was a lull again in the voices in which a coin fell and seemed to roll across the floor.

‘Well, the people with the brains mostly stayed here. They had to. They had no choice. They didn’t go to the cities. So the brains was passed on to the next generation. Then there’s the trees. There’s the water. And we’re very high up here. We’re practically at the source of the Shannon. If I had to pick on one thing more than another, I’d put it down to that. I’d attribute it to the high ground.’

He watched her for a long time among the women across the dancefloor in the half-light of the afternoon. She wasn’t tall or beautiful, but he couldn’t take his eyes away. Some of the women winced palpably and fell back as they were passed over. Others stood their ground and stared defiantly back. She seemed quietly indifferent, taking a few steps back into the thinning crowd each time she found herself isolated on the floor. When she was asked to dance, she behaved exactly the same. She flashed no smile, gave no giddy shrug of triumph to betray the tension of the wait, the redeemed vanity.

Nurses, students, actors and actresses, musicians, some prostitutes, people who worked in restaurants and newspapers, nightwatchmen, a medley of the old and very young, came to these afternoon dances. Michael Duggan came every Saturday and Sunday. He was a teacher of Latin and history in a midlands town forty miles from Dublin, and each Friday he came in on the evening bus to spend the whole weekend round the cinemas and restaurants and dancehalls of O’Connell Street. A year before he had been within a couple of months of ordination.

When he did cross to ask her to dance, she followed him with the same unconcern on to the floor as she had showed just standing there. She danced beautifully, with a strong, easy freedom. She was a nurse in the Blanchardstown Chest Hospital. She came from Kerry. Her father was a National Teacher near Killarney. She had been to these afternoon dances before, but not for a couple of years. Her name was Susan Spillane.

‘I suppose everybody asks you these questions,’ he said.

‘The last one did anyhow.’ She smiled. ‘You’d better tell me about yourself as well.’ She had close curly black hair, an intelligent face, and there was something strange about her eyes.

‘Are your eyes two different colours?’

‘One eye is brown, the other grey. I may have got the grey eye by mistake. All the others in the house have brown eyes.’

‘They are lovely.’ The dance had ended. He had let her go. It was not easy to thread a way through these inanities of speech.

A girl could often stand unnoticed a long time, and then it was enough for one man to show an interest to start a rush. When the next two dances were called, though he moved quickly each time, he was beaten to her side. The third dance was a ladies’ choice, and he withdrew back into the crowd of men. She followed him into the crowd, and this time he did not let her slip away when the dance ended. It was a polite convention for women to make a show of surprise when invited for a drink, of having difficulty making up their minds, but she said at once she’d love a drink, and asked for whiskey.

‘I hardly drink at all, but I like the burnt taste,’ and she sipped the small measure neat for the two hours that were left of the dance. ‘My father loves a glass of whiskey late at night. I’ve often sat and had a sip with him.’