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

Two evenings later, when he let himself into the flat and found Mary Kelleher there, it was as if she had never been away.

‘You didn’t expect me back so soon?’

‘I thought you’d still be in Dundalk, but I’m glad, I’m delighted.’ He took her in his arms.

‘I had as much of Dundalk as I wanted, and I missed you.’

‘How did it go?’

‘It was all right. The cousins were nice. They had a small house, crammed with things — religious pictures, furniture, photos. There was hardly place to move. Everything they did was so careful, so measured out. After a while I felt I could hardly breathe. They did everything they possibly could to make me welcome. I read the poems at last.’ She put the book with the brown cover on the table. ‘I read them again on the train coming back. I loved them.’

‘I’ve long suspected that those very pure love sonnets are all addressed to himself,’ McDonough said. ‘That was how the “ignorant bloody apes and mediocrities” could be all short-circuited.’

‘Some are very funny.’

‘I’m so glad you liked them. I’ve lived with some of them for years. Would you like to go out to eat? Say, to Bernardo’s?’ he asked.

‘I’d much prefer to stay home. I’ve already looked in the fridge. We can rustle something up.’

That weekend they went together for the long walk in the mountains that he had intended to take the day they met. They stopped for a drink and sandwiches in a pub near Blessington just before two o’clock, and there they decided to press on to Rathdrum and stay the night in the hotel rather than turn back into the city.

It was over dinner in the near empty hotel dining-room that he asked if she would consider marrying him. ‘There’s much against it. I am fifty. You would have to try to settle here, where you’ll be a stranger,’ and he went on to say that what he had already was more than he ever expected, that he was content to let it be, but if she wanted more then it was there.

‘I thought that you couldn’t be married here.’ Her tone was affectionate.

‘I meant it in everything but name, and even that can be arranged if you want it enough.’

‘How?’

‘With money. An outside divorce. The marriage in some other country. The States, for instance.’

‘Can’t you see that I already love you? That it doesn’t matter? I was half teasing. You looked so serious.’

‘I am serious. I want to be clear.’

‘It is clear and I am glad — and very grateful.’

They agreed that she would spend one week longer here in Dublin than she had planned. At Christmas he would go to New York for a week. She would have obtained her doctorate by then. James White would be surprised. There were no serious complications in sight. They were so tired and happy that it was as if they were already in possession of endless quantities of time and money.

In wild, wet January weather, two months after Mr Waldron’s death, Mrs Waldron and her daughter, Eileen, closed their big house outside Castlebar and moved to their summer cottage on Achill.

The whole family — two other daughters, their husbands, two sons, their wives and three grandchildren — had gathered in the big house that Christmas. They would have preferred it to be kept open until at least the summer, but their mother was determined to move, even on her own. The Waldrons were an unusual family, all of them secure in good professions, and they had little interest in their inheritance other than for it to be settled according to their parents’ wishes. Their chief inheritance, a good education, had already been given. Michael Flynn was to be kept on two days a week to look after the gardens and grounds, and Eileen, a solicitor, who worked in Castlebar, might sometimes use the house in bad weather or whenever there were late court sittings. With some reluctance it was agreed that the horses and the few cattle that had been their father’s main diversion would be sold. In a year’s time they could look at the situation again. With relief and some nervous laughter it was settled that nothing more had to be done or said. They could start opening the wines they would have with the Christmas dinner.

Eileen would have been as happy to stay as to move. There was a man her own age in Castlebar who interested her. It was she who had been the closest to her father. She did not like the idea at first of his horses being sold, but had to admit that keeping them made little sense. Secretly she was glad of the hour-long drive from Achill to Castlebar: it might help shake off the listlessness and sense of emptiness she had begun to feel once her initial anger at the death had passed. And she had come to that unnerving time when youth is rapidly disappearing into early middle age.

The wind rocked the heavy, white Mercedes as they crossed the Sound to the island the January Saturday they moved, the sea and sky rain-sodden and wild. They had taken very little with them from Castlebar. The only precious thing they took was an old, trusting black cat they were all very attached to. The black cat had four white paws and a white star on her forehead and was called Fats.

In the evenings the cat used to wait for the surgeon’s car to come from the hospital. Often Mr Waldron carried her indoors on his shoulder, and when he went over the fields to look at the cattle or horses the cat went with him, racing ahead and crying to be lifted on to his shoulder whenever the grass was wet. All through his final illness the cat slept at the foot of his bed. Whenever Mrs Waldron attempted to remove her from the folded quilt, he woke instantly. ‘No. Leave her be. She has not deserted us’ — a humorous reference to the apparent avoidance of them early in the illness, especially by many of the people who had worked for years with him at the hospital. All through their long life together it had been agreed that it was vanity, a waste, to consider how they appeared in the eyes of others.

In merriment they had often recalled walking behind the professor of philosophy on a clear winter’s morning when they were undergraduates on their way to the Saturday market and hearing him demand after each person passed, ‘Did they snub us or did they not see us?’ Over the years it had become one of the playful catch-phrases of the house: ‘Did they not see us or did they snub us?’

At first Mrs Waldron did not believe that his colleagues were avoiding him, thought indeed it was all in his imagination: ‘You’ll be as paranoiac as old Professor Ryan soon if you’re not careful.’

‘I don’t think so. In fact, I’m glad they’re avoiding us. Most of the time I’m too tired to receive them if they did want to visit.’

Then, when it was clear he would not recover, she noticed the wives melt away to another part of the supermarket, the husbands disappear down side-streets in the middle of the town.

‘We are no longer useful. It is as simple as that.’

‘It can’t be that simple.’

‘Not complicated, then, either. They work with sick people but they are not ill. They are outside and above all that. They have to be. They loom like gods in the eyes of most of these poor creatures. Now that I am sick I simply am no longer part of the necessary lie that works. I have to be shut out. Gods can never appear ill or wounded.’

‘ You never behaved that way.’

‘I like to think I was a little different, but maybe not all that different either. Anyhow …’

The day before he died, he woke briefly, recognized her and said, ‘I think we were a good pair,’ and almost at once the heavy, monotonous breathing resumed. They were the last words he spoke, and broke her heart, but they were a deep source of solace in the days ahead. She lifted the cat from the foot of the bed, burying her face in the fur, and left the darkened room to the nurse who came behind her and closed the door softly.