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

‘I’m too old,’ he said.

‘You left it late but it’s certainly far from too late.’

The conversation had brought on so much confusion that it was let drop. William left as usual after the one whiskey.

‘I’m afraid you struck the mark there,’ McLoughlin said as soon as they were alone.

‘How?’

‘You said what was plainly on his mind.’

‘It’s hardly Lucy.’

‘Lucy’s not in it at this stage, though she’s upset enough at school about something or other,’ the teacher said.

‘What are we to do, then? We can’t just go out and find any old bird for the last of the Kirkwoods. She’ll have to be able to flap at least one good wing.’

‘I suppose you’ll be changing to pints now.’ Charlie appeared at the doorway, and, without waiting for an answer, went and cleared the whiskey glasses from the table.

‘A pair of pints, Charlie,’ the Sergeant said exuberantly. ‘Nothing decent ever stands alone. How long is it since we bundled you into the car that Sunday and found your good woman for you?’

‘It must be the best part of five years, Sergeant,’ Charlie laughed defensively, and when he laughed the tip of his small red nose wrinkled upwards in a curl.

‘It was a drastic solution to a drastic problem. You had the place nearly drunk out after your mother died. The first six women we called on that Sunday turned us down flat.’

‘I doubt they did right. I was no great catch.’

‘We were about to give up for that Sunday when we called on Baby. She said before we finished, “I’ll take him. I know the bar and the farm,” and we brought you in out of the car.’

‘Maybe that’s when she made her big mistake,’ Charlie tried to joke.

‘She made no mistake,’ the teacher put in gently, afraid that Charlie was being hurt by the Sergeant’s egotism, oblivious of everything but his own part in that Sunday. ‘She made the best move of her life. Look where you both are today — children, money. Who could want more?’

‘Maybe it’s as good as the other thing anyhow.’ Charlie laughed with unchanged defensiveness.

‘It’s far better. This love business we hear so much about nowadays is a pure washout,’ the teacher said definitively.

‘One thing is sure,’ the Sergeant said after Charlie had brought them the pints. ‘We can’t bundle William Kirkwood into the back of a car and drive him around for a whole Sunday until we find him a wife,’ and at the very absurdity of the picture both men began to laugh until tears ran from their eyes, and they had to pound their glasses on the table. When they were quiet, the Sergeant said, ‘There are more ways of choking a dog than with butter,’ which renewed the laughter.

What they didn’t know was that Charlie had been standing in the hallway all the time, rigid with anger as he listened. ‘The pair of bitches,’ he said quietly, his anger calming as he moved to face the men who were growing rowdy behind the wooden partition.

‘What will we do about the Captain? He didn’t seem averse to the idea,’ the Sergeant was saying in the parlour.

‘We can’t, as you put it, bring in any old bird. We’ll have to look hard and carefully. It’d be a very nice thing to see the Captain married.’ The teacher was serious.

The first to be approached was Eileen Casey, the junior mistress in the school in Keadue. She was twenty-eight, small, with very blonde straight hair, fond of reading, pretty in a withdrawn way. Her headmaster, a friend of McLoughlin’s, brought it up over the tea and sandwiches of the school lunch hour. When it was clear that she was not interested and was going out with a boy from her own place near Killala and was looking for a school closer to home so that they could marry, he pretended it had been nothing but a joke on his part. ‘We like to see how these rich converts look in our girls’ eyes.’

After this, the Sergeant and McLoughlin sat for a whole evening and compiled a list of girls. They were true to their word that they couldn’t bring in just any old bird. All the girls they picked were local flowers, and they knew they faced the probability of many rebuffs, but they studied how to go about it as circuitously and discreetly as possible.

Before this got under way, William Kirkwood came to McLoughlin’s bungalow to dinner for the first time. He felt ill at ease in the low rooms, the general cosiness, the sweet wine in cut glasses, and Mrs McLoughlin’s attempts at polite conversation. Not in all the years of his Protestantism had he ever felt his difference so keenly. What struck him most was the absence of books in a schoolmaster’s house. He disliked spirits after dinner, but this evening he was glad of the glass of whiskey in his hand as he faced McLoughlin in his front room while Mrs McLoughlin did the washing up. Around him, among the religious pictures and small statues, were all the heirlooms and photos of a married life that seemed to advance with resolute cheerfulness towards some sought-after stereotype. He was on edge, and when McLoughlin said, ‘We’ve started looking,’ he practically barked, ‘For what?’

‘For a good woman for you.’ McLoughlin didn’t notice the edge and smiled sweetly.

‘Dear Peter … I had no idea … This is too ridiculous.’ William Kirkwood was on his feet at once. ‘It is positively antediluvian.’ He had started to laugh dangerously. ‘Fortunately, no one will have me. Imagine the embarrassment of some poor woman who was fool enough to have me when she found I couldn’t abide her! I’d have to marry her. You couldn’t do otherwise to any unfortunate two-legged.’

McLoughlin sat the outburst through in open-mouthed dismay. ‘We thought you’d like to be married.’

‘That’s true. I would.’

He was even further taken aback by the positiveness of the ready response. ‘Is there any person you had in mind yourself?’ McLoughlin was glad to find any words on his lips.

‘Yes. There is,’ came even more readily still. ‘But what’s the use? She’d never have me.’

‘May I ask who she is?’

‘Of course you can. I was thinking of Miss Kennedy. Mary Kennedy.’

‘Well then. I don’t see why you had to get in such a state.’ It was McLoughlin’s turn to attack. ‘She was the first girl we were thinking of approaching.’

McLoughlin was not so much surprised by the preference as by the fact that the solitary isolated ‘odd’ Kirkwood should have a preference at all.

The Kennedys were a large local family, had good rock land and part of the woods, owned a sawmill and a small adjoining factory making crates and huge wooden drums on which electric cable was rolled. They had been rich enough to send Mary and her sisters to the Ursulines in Sligo. There she was nicknamed ‘big hips’, more for her laughing vitality than measurements. From the Ursulines she went to train as a nurse in the Mater Hospital in Dublin. She was black-haired and tall, too sharp featured to be beautiful, but there was about her an excitement and vitality that was more than beauty. Even the way she had of scratching her head as she laughed, her wide stance, intrigued men. At the Mater, she fell in love with a pale young doctor, conscientious and dull, who was flattered at first, but gradually he backed away from her high spirits. When he broke with her, she came home and hung listlessly about the house for six months, sometimes going for long solitary walks.

It was on one of those walks that William Kirkwood met her in his own fields. She had been surprised by a play of the late October light all the way across the top of the hill, and there being no purpose to her walk she had crossed the stone wall to follow the streak of evening along the hill. To William’s polite inquiry, ‘May I help you in any way, Miss Kennedy?’ she had responded with a certain mischievousness — ‘No, thank you, Mr Kirkwood. I’m just out for a walk’ — because it was unheard of for a local person to be just out for a walk. Mary Kennedy was surprised to find the ‘young Mr Kirkwood’ that they used to laugh about when she was a child — the same Mr Kirkwood who spent all fine nights out in the fields studying the stars through a telescope and his days reading or in bed — a middle-aged man, tall and beautifully mannered certainly, but middle-aged. They chatted for a while before separating. She didn’t think much about the meeting but, apart from the good manners, what she remembered most was his openness and lack of furtiveness. Furtiveness was what she found in most Irish men when faced with a young woman.