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

I drove Kate in and out of town for most of a week. Maggie always came with me when I went to the house at night. I never saw Harkin once on any of these nights. They were worried about taking up too much of my time and tried to give me money. I would gladly have driven Kate in and out for a whole year, but when she found rooms above the hairdressing salon on Main Street I wasn’t needed any more. The one thing I wasn’t sorry to miss was seeing the way Kate looked as we drove away from the house each night.

A slow, hard battle began, all of it silent and underground. Nothing ever came out into the open. After work she went to the house and stayed with the children till their bedtime. Harkin never spoke. As he would not allow her to cook or eat in the house, she delayed coming until after they’d eaten. Weekends were the worst. Often she would turn up at the house and find it locked. He would have taken the children with him on his rounds of the houses.

Once when she suggested that she take the children out to Maggie’s for the weekend, he stared at her in silence before turning away. Gradually the children got used to their changed lives. There were times when they complained that she was not like other mothers. Knowing this, she was careful in everything she did outside the house. After more than a year had gone by, on certain evenings she found an attractive German woman in the house. On those evenings she left early.

When Jerome Callaghan was in the mart on business, he would nearly always come into the office. His ease and charm only increased her wariness. The silence between herself and Harkin over the children was like inching across a glass roof. She could risk nothing. She could only live within the small worlds of her work at the mart, her mother’s house and company, the haven of her own rooms and the cramped confines she was allowed with her children. If Kate had continued living with her husband, any sexual attraction she held for Jerome Callaghan would have been suppressed, but once she left the house and moved into rooms, that changed. He was not put off that she gave no sign of reciprocating his interest. It was in his nature to be patient and he was used to getting his way.

At school Jerome Callaghan had belonged with Kate to a small group distinctly better than the rest, and he belonged there easily, without effort. He could have gone to university, but instead went to work in his uncle’s insurance and auctioneering business in the town. Again, without much effort, he succeeded in expanding the business while getting on well with his uncle, his mother’s brother, who had never married, and when the uncle retired it was Callaghan who took over.

Once the business was his own, he left it as it was. Hardly anything changed. The uncle came in to work as before, and often they had lunch together at the Royal Hotel. His nature was so well known that he was never suspected of courting the uncle in the hope of inheriting his money; and when his uncle died leaving him everything, the plain grief he showed did not look put on like a dark suit for the day.

His uncle had been an original shareholder in the mart, and when Callaghan asked Kate to see McNulty, he was using the manager as a cover. The position was already Kate’s for the taking. While his modest way of life and manner and the underplaying of his increasing wealth were greatly approved of, his sexual inclination was nowhere liked. From a very young age he was drawn to older women: ‘Callaghan doesn’t want the trouble of schooling them; he likes his breaching done,’ was joked to cover suspicion and resentment of any deviation.

An affair with the headmistress of the school Kate’s children attended continued over several years, an intelligent, dark gypsy of a woman who had many suitors once but had let the years run on without naming a wedding day. No matter how much care or discretion was used, word of this and other affairs always got out. On a Friday evening the headmistress would leave her car at the railway station. Callaghan would meet her at a distant station, and they would drive away towards two whole nights and days together; but there was nearly always someone connected with the town who saw them in a hotel or restaurant or bar, and once, during the long school holiday, together on a London street. Harkin and Callaghan viewed one another with innate dislike. Callaghan was working for his uncle when Harkin first came to town. Football didn’t interest him, and he resented the popular athlete’s easy assumption of an animal superiority. Spoiled with adulation, Harkin saw the polite but firm distance Callaghan kept as criticism, all the more chafing since it was too hidden to be challenged.

Once Harkin became involved with the tourists, an involvement that led naturally to property dealing, he was probably relieved to be able to turn their mutual antipathy into rivalry because of the enormous change in the strength of their relative positions over the years. All property dealings that came his way he directed towards Callaghan’s competitors, and now he was moving to set up as an auctioneer in his own right.

‘What does Callaghan ever do but fiddle with old ladies’ buttons while lying in wait for any easy game that comes along?’

A change had come to Callaghan’s life that made him more vulnerable than he knew. His beloved mother died. His brother married. The newly married couple’s protestations when he suggested that he should move and leave them to their own young lives — ‘You’re no trouble to us at all, only help, and we hardly ever see you anyhow’ — strengthened his conviction that he should move out into his own life; but what life? Lazily he had believed that one day he’d marry a young woman, a doctor or a teacher, somebody with work and interests of her own. Years before, he’d bought part of an estate by a lake, with mature woods, oak and beech and larch. Above the lake he’d built a house he neither finished nor furnished, never making up his mind whether it was to be his life or an investment he would sell on a rising market. Several times he thought of finishing the house and going to live there while continuing to live with his brother and sister-in-law. During all this time he was careful not to pester Kate, and, if anything, visited her office in the mart less often than before, but the small courtesies he showed her could not be mistaken. When he did ask her openly out for an evening, she was able both to meet and turn aside the open sexual nature of the invitation.

‘We’re old school friends. We know one another too well,’ she said.

‘That’s not knowing,’ he smiled but did not press her further.

He appeared no longer to be seeing any of the women he had been linked with. Most weekends he spent alone about the town, unheard of before, weekends when she, as often as not, found the bungalow empty and locked, and they could not avoid running into one another.

‘I’m not free,’ she said to him bluntly when they had coffee together in the hotel one Saturday. She had come back into the town after finding the house deserted, the car gone.

‘How not free? You live alone.’

‘I don’t even feel safe to be seen with you here over coffee in daylight.’

‘Why?’

‘Talk. Rumour. You know how little it needs to be fed.’

‘Such scruples do not seem to bother your husband.’

‘That’s his business,’ she told him sharply. ‘He has charge of the children.’

‘You are worried about losing the children?’

‘I think of nothing else.’

She asked him as a favour to stay behind when she left. She wanted to be seen leaving alone. He agreed readily, ordered fresh coffee and was soon joined by two men from the bar who wanted to discuss a property deal.

One of the few liberties she was allowed with the children was to take them to Mass. One Sunday came when she found the children gone and the house locked. Always the same excuse was used — when any excuse was offered — that the children were taken with him on his rounds of the tourist houses for their own safety. She became very upset and decided to walk all the way to the lake to talk to Maggie before going back to the solicitor to see if there was any way she could obtain more regular fixed access. Every week there was some new twist or difficulty. She was afraid that soon she would not get to see her children at all, Jim and Kate and young Maggie, all brought up in the same air and world, and all so different. As she walked outside the town with these images and anxieties moving through her mind, sometimes with the charm of their individual faces and endearing gestures before her, and then again turning away from her with the woodiness of placards or a picket line, a car drew in ahead of her. Before she recognized the car or driver she knew it was Jerome Callaghan.