John McGahern - The Pornographer

“I could see that end of it,” he said.

When we got out of the car onto the hard gravel of the road the whole air felt rainwashed. The slopes were bare. And the urgent, rapid sound of racing water ran between the scrape of shoes on gravel, the haphazard banging of car doors, the subdued murmur of voices. We carried her round to the back of the small church, bare as the slopes on which it stood. On the rain-eaten slab of limestone above the open grave I was able to make out my mother and father’s names and my grandmother’s name, Rose; but you would need a nail or a knife to follow the illegible lines of the other impressions they were that eaten away. Through the silence of the prayers a robin sang against the race of water somewhere in the bare bushes. After the decade of the Rosary I was waiting for the shovels to start filling in the clay when the undertaker unrolled a green mat of butcher’s grass and placed it over the grave. They’d fill in the grave as soon as the churchyard was empty, some barbarous notion of kindness.

Standing around and shaking hands afterwards in the graveyard I introduced Maloney to Cyril, who had been weeping during the prayers; and Cyril seemed as impressed as my uncle had been resolutely unimpressed, and invited Maloney back to the house. Five or six cars drove together back to the house.

“When are you going back to Dublin?” I asked Maloney in the house.

“Whenever you want. I can offer you a lift.”

“Would tomorrow morning be too late for you? My uncle sort of expects me to stay that long.”

“Not at all, dear boy. I’d like to look over the town. It reminds me of our old Echo days. I’d like to view the quality of the local blooms, the small-town Helens. I have a room in the Commercial. We can leave round lunchtime.”

“Earlier than that.”

“Whenever you want. I’m at your service.”

Cyril heard us and came over. He’d bought a headstone and wanted us to see it before we left in the morning. Apprehensively he included my uncle in the invitation, but it was brutally refused. “Some people still have to work. The mill will be going tomorrow.”

“It’s marble,” Cyril said. “It’s the best that money could get.”

My uncle turned his back. It was crossing and recrossing my mind that the headstone must have been ordered while my aunt was still alive.

“We’re being invited to an unveiling,” Maloney reminded me coolly.

“All right. I’ll be glad to see it,” I agreed, and Cyril arranged to collect us in the hotel at ten. I was almost as impatient as my uncle to get out of the house. As we left, I saw Maloney’s head bent low to Cyril’s, in an exaggeration of listening.

“Where are we going?” I asked my uncle as I handed him back the car keys.

“I suppose we better go out to my place and make tea or something. If we went to a restaurant it’d be all over town that we didn’t want to eat anything in the house.”

“Or weren’t given anything?”

“Or weren’t given anything,” his laugh was a harsher echo.

He wanted to show me his fields and stock. Perhaps because of my affection, I took pleasure in his pure pleasure, and I didn’t have to talk at all. Then he insisted we go over to my place, pointing out things in need of repair or change, past the point when I no longer listened.

“You should stock that land yourself,” he said later in the evening. “You shouldn’t let it any more when this letting runs out.” He’d forgotten that till he’d stocked his own land he was against all stocking. “Nothing but trouble,” he used to declare. “It’s a full-time job. Don’t say anything more.”

“Who’d look after it for me?” I asked tiredly.

“I would — until you’d come yourself. Who’s for my place after me but yourself? With everything running well there’d be no stronger men than us round here.”

I rose when I heard his alarm go the next morning. He was making breakfast when I got down, rigged out in boots and overalls for the mill.

“You’ll think over what I said last night?” he pressed as we ate.

“Sure.”

“And you’ll be down soon?”

“Or you’ll be up,” I said without thinking.

“No, I won’t be up. Not if I can possibly help it,” he half laughed. There were certain places and people to stay clear of, such as hospitals and undertakers.

“All right. I’ll be down,” I said.

Maloney was at breakfast when I went into the Commercial. He probably had a hangover. He was in a sour mood.

“How did you find the local blooms?” I asked.

“This isn’t Grenoble and I’m not Stendhal’s uncle. Have some coffee? Tell me how you got your decorations.”

“She had the child. I went to see her in London. She had a protector who beat me up.”

“And your aunt inconveniently died next day?”

“Right.”

“Did this gentleman give any reason for beating you up?”

“He said that I had had my fun and I should pay for it.”

“I agree with him. And don’t think you’re washed clean by the beating. Don’t imagine you’ve been washed in the blood of the lamb or any of those cathartic theories. Don’t try to slip out in any of those ways. I know you.”

“Haven’t I done enough?”

“By no means. We can’t have people running round the country with their flies open and all male members at the ready. I’m glad you got beaten up. You’ll get beaten up many times. You deserve to get beaten up.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he used his spoon to point, “you behaved stupidly. People should always get punished for behaving stupidly and they generally do. I always did,” and suddenly he shouted, “Here comes the happy widower. All dressed for the unveiling. He ’s not behaving stupidly,” and he let go a long deep groan that could have passed for a poor imitation of a donkey’s bray. From the groan and the over-elaborate greeting — florid to the point of insult — I guessed he’d passed the rest of the funeral drinking with Cyril. Cyril noticed nothing. He was clearly impressed with Maloney and greeted us both with extreme affability, exuding the self-satisfaction and sense of anticipation of a man about to show off a racehorse or a girl that he felt reflected flatteringly on himself.

Cyril led us towards the red shop front with its wire grille and as he pushed open the door a warning bell rang. It was a shop I’d loved, and though it had been enlarged, the essential feel of it had hardly changed at all. The long solid counter with its brass measuring yard ran past the wood and smoked glass that partitioned off the bar near its end. Neat rows of boxes stood in line: seeds, nails, bolts, door handles, fishing hooks, a special offer of cartridge. Tools leaned all around the walls. Buckets, Wellingtons, bridles hung from the ceiling. A rotavator and a shining copper spraying machine stood side by side in the centre of the floor. The old foreman recognized us and came over. Cyril introduced Maloney, “Mr Maloney … down from Dublin … for the funeral,” in an impressed-with-himself-being-impressed hush of voice.

“I thought those days were gone,” Maloney picked up the copper spraying machine by its leather straps.

“You’d be surprised at how many of our customers haven’t managed to fit in with the new way of going about things,” Brady, the old foreman, said. “But there’s no doubt those days are gone. I suppose ten years at most. But we’ll stock them as long as there’s a demand and they can be got.”

We moved through the partition into the bar. It was very small, two wooden stools at the counter, bare benches around the walls, one table at the back. It was no place for drinking sessions but rather for having a sobering drink while waiting for a large order to be put together in the shop or settling bills or ordering a tombstone or coffin. The door of the bar opened on to another shop and a farther yard where the plastic wreaths were kept and graveclothes and coffins and tombstones and the two hearses.