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

‘One good thing about the night is that we’re not likely to trip over Master William and his telescope,’ Eddie Mac said derisively.

‘He’s a very educated man,’ Annie ventured.

‘He’s a fool. They’re both fools.’

‘Maybe it is that they are too educated for land,’ she continued uneasily, but he ignored what she had said. Even though they were in the fields, he walked apart from her still, not admitting the bitter blow to his vanity that he had been forced to come down to a woman as plain as Annie May after all those years.

‘It was different once,’ he said suddenly. ‘That was long before your time. I was only a boy when Mrs Kirkwood first came to the house. She had been a Miss Darby, old Colonel Darby’s daughter. It was an arranged match. The Kirkwoods were almost bankrupt at that time, too — they were never any good — and she had money. The house was done up before she came. It was one of the conditions of the match. The railings were painted, new curtains, everything made shining.

‘As soon as they were married, the parties began — bridge parties, tea parties on the lawn. There was a big party every year when the strawberries were ripe. Every Sunday night there was either a dinner party in the house or they went out to some other house to dinner. I heard my father say that old William hated nothing more than those dinners and parties. “It’d make one want to go and live in a cave or under some stone,” he said to my father.’ Eddie Mac started to laugh. ‘All he ever wanted to be with was the bees. The Protestants have always been mad about bees, and there were bee societies at the time. He used to give lectures to the societies. They say the lectures were Mrs Kirkwood’s idea. She used always to go with him to the meetings. It was a way of getting him out of the house. Old William never liked to be with people, but Mrs Kirkwood believed in people. “The only reason she goes to church is to meet people,” he told my father.’

‘Anyhow, he still has his bees,’ Annie May said gently.

‘Always had, always will have, and now the son has gone the same way, except it’s the stars in his case. The only thing you could be certain of is that no matter what he turned to it was bound to be something perfectly useless.’

‘The parties had stopped by the time I came,’ Annie May said. ‘Mrs Kirkwood used to go to the Royal Hotel every Thursday to meet her friends.’

‘There weren’t enough Protestants left by that time for parties. Once the church in Ardcarne had to be closed it was the beginning of the end. The money Mrs Kirkwood brought was running out too. If I owned their fields, I’d be rolling in money in a few years, and they can’t even make ends meet. The whole thing would make a cat laugh.’

‘They’ve been very kind to me,’ Annie May said.

‘What good did it do them? What good?’ he said angrily. ‘They’re there with one arm as long as the other. Useless to themselves or anybody else. They’ll be on the road before long, mark my words, and we’ll be with them if we are not careful.’

They had come to the big iron gates of the yard. The gates were chained, and they crossed by the stone stile. The back of the huge house stood away to the left at the head of the yard, and in the darkness, all around them in the yard, were the old stone outhouses. The herdsman’s house was some distance beyond the hayshed at the far end of the yard, towards the fields. They stood for a split moment apart on the yard’s uneven surface. His natural cunning and vanity still held him back: it was too dangerous, she lived too close to his own doorstep, it could change his life — but his need was too strong.

After that night, around nine every evening, when she had finished the chores, and old William was in bed and Master William reading in the library in the front of the house or out in the fields with his telescope, she would go to the herdsman’s house. Too timid to knock, she would make a small scraping sound on the loose door, and sometimes she would have to call. They stayed within the house those first weeks, but after a while he seemed not to want her there. On fine nights, he would take her into the fields. ‘We have our own telescope!’ And when it rained he still preferred to have her out of the house, though she would have loved to sit with him in the darkness listening to the rain beat on the iron. He would take her across to the dry-stone barn where the fruit was stored, the air sticky sweet with the odour of fermenting apples.

‘We can listen to the rain far better here. There’s less of roof.’

He kept an old, heavy blanket there above the apple shelves, and he could end the evening whenever he wished. He could not get her out of his own house as easily. The old laws of hospitality were too strong even for him. When he wanted to be rid of her from this neutral storehouse, he could walk her to the corner of the yard across from the big house. Sometimes it seemed to her that the evenings were ending now almost before they began, but she was too ill with desire and fear to complain. A hot Sunday in the middle of June she made her one faint plea for openness or decency.

‘Wouldn’t it be a good day to take the boat and go on the river?’ She was amazed by her own effrontery as soon as the words were spoken. The Kirkwoods had a boathouse on the river and a solid rowboat that was kept in repair but seldom used. To go together on the river would bring what had been furtive and hidden into some small light. It would show that he was not ashamed of her. All courting couples went on Sundays to the river in this kind of weather. Even those who couldn’t get boats strolled the riverbank towards the Oakport Woods. Some of her early admirers had been proud to take her. There were soft bluebells under the trees, a hidden spring with water so pure it made the teeth chatter even in the heat, and she had drunk it laughing through a stem.

‘No. Not today,’ he answered slowly, looking down. A yellow dandelion was growing between the yard stones. He kept moving it forwards and back with his boot.

‘Wouldn’t it make a change?’

‘Not today.’ He was still searching for the cover of an acceptable lie. ‘There’s an animal sick. I wouldn’t like to be caught that far from the house if it took a turn for the worse. Anyhow, aren’t we as well off round the house here? Maybe later we can ramble down by the orchard. It’ll be as cool there as on any river.’

At midday she made a meal that was much liked in this weather — smoked haddock in a cream sauce with cauliflower and young peas and small early potatoes. It must have been all of fourteen years since Mrs Kirkwood had taught her how to bring the sauce to a light consistency, to flavour it with chives and parsley. If Mrs Kirkwood was here on this hot Sunday, William and her son would not be dining with Eddie Mac in the kitchen. The linen and silver would be set in the front room, the front door open, the faded canvas deckchairs stretched under the walnut tree on the front lawn for coffee and newspapers.

The big kitchen, though, was pleasant enough — a fresh coolness from the brown flagstones she had washed in the morning, the door open on the steps down to the yard, a shimmer of heat above the iron roofs, and the dark green of the trees beyond. The house was too big for all of them. The men did not speak as they ate, and she winced as she listened to the thin clink of knife and fork on the bone china.

‘I have to say that was a superb meal, Annie,’ William volunteered as they rose.

‘I can heartily second that,’ his son added.

‘I’ll be around the yard today,’ Eddie Mac said to Master William as he lifted his cap. ‘I don’t like the look of the blue heifer.’

‘If you need help, you’ll find me in the library.’