John McGahern - By the Lake

“The Shah always hated politics,” Ruttledge said. “I don’t think he’s ever voted.”

“I didn’t know what he was referring to. I was good at giving the impression I understood when I hadn’t a clue — it’s not a very admirable quality but I didn’t care. I was falling in love with the place.”

A green gate hung from the ash tree then. From the gate a path ran between two rows of alders to the small stone house with an asbestos roof. In the grove, old moss-covered apple trees stood under the great oaks. The garden and the whitethorn hedge were completely wild. An ugly concrete porch had been tacked on to the house as a windbreak and was coming dangerously loose from the stone walls. A line of stone outhouses stretched past the house. In the middle of the rusting hayshed stood a heeled-up cart.

A kettle hung from a blackened bar above the ashes in the fireplace. There was a small table with unwashed mugs and a heavy glass sugar bowl and a big aluminium teapot. A dishevelled bed stood against the wall in the tiny lower room, a stripped iron bed and a plywood wardrobe in the upper room. Beside the fireplace was a wall cupboard filled with large rounded stones. When the cupboard was opened the stones rolled out in all directions around the floor.

“They told me they’d tidy up the place,” Jimmy Joe McKiernan complained. “Anyhow you’re seeing what you’re getting.” He had his own quiet authority.

“This isn’t a house,” the Shah said, running the place down. “The most you could call it is an address and you’d want to be hard up. It’s no more than a site!”

“People lived here,” Jimmy Joe said. “It was a house and home to them but I won’t argue. I can’t pretend it’s in great shape. The place is a site, if you want, a site above a lake, on twenty acres.”

Within the deep walls of the window on the lake, a butcher’s calendar of the year before was hung. Above the tables of the months and days was a photo of two boys wheeling bicycles while driving sheep down a country lane between high stone walls. Helping them were two beautiful black-and-white collies. High-class beef, mutton and lamb at best prices. Large and small orders equally appreciated .

An X was drawn through each day of every month until October was reached. On the twenty-second of October the march of Xs across the days came to a stop. The twenty-third of October was the first clear day and all the remaining days of the year were unmarked. “That was the day he died,” Jimmy Joe said.

A shop bill lay open in the window sill: a dozen of stout, a bottle of Powers, tea, butter, two loaves, a half-pound of ham, a Mass card, two telephone calls .

“That was the bill for the wake,” Jimmy Joe McKiernan told them. “They wouldn’t have many people. She was a cousin of my own. Once he died she wouldn’t live here on her own and went to live with relatives. They had cattle on the place but had trouble with fences and neighbours. Now they want to sell.”

Jimmy Joe McKiernan had spoken more in the short time they’d spent in the house than in the whole of the rest of the day they had spent looking at places.

“The one thing she is determined about is that the place must not go to any of the neighbours. That’s why it was never put in the Observer . You are the first to see the place.”

“It’s not a great reference for anybody coming in,” the Shah said.

“That’s for the people coming in to decide. I’m just being straight.”

“I know that, Jimmy Joe,” the Shah said appreciatively. “Some of the other crooks would have you believe you were entering paradise.”

“You are speaking about my colleagues?” Jimmy Joe asked ironically, playfully.

“A good crowd of boys,” the Shah jeered.

“A few months ago I was the undertaker. Now I’m the auctioneer. I suppose that’s life,” Jimmy Joe McKiernan said quietly, as if he felt he had spoken too much.

The small fields around the house were enclosed with thick whitethorn hedges, with ash and rowan and green oak and sycamore, the fields overgrown with rushes. Then the screens of whitethorn suddenly gave way and they stood high over another lake. The wooded island where the herons bred was far out, and on the other shore the pale sedge and stunted birch trees of Gloria Bog ran towards the shrouded mountains. On most of the lake the storm ran and raged but directly underneath the hill a strip of water was as calm and unruffled as a pond. Swans and dark clusters of wildfowl were fishing calmly in the shelter.

“ ‘If you want it, Kate, keep quiet. Jimmy Joe isn’t a rogue but like the rest of them he has to get the best price he can,’ the Shah warned when I told him how much I liked the place.”

“I was having a bad time on the side of that hill,” Ruttledge said. “It was the only possible place that we saw that whole day. I knew you liked it. I had grown up among such fields. I had escaped through an education that would hardly have been possible a generation earlier. Now I was face to face with all those dreams we have when we are young. I knew these rushy fields, the poverty, the hardship. On that hill I realized that this could be the rest of my life. It was far from what I had dreamed or hoped for. ‘What do you think?’ Jimmy Joe asked me suddenly. ‘It’s a possibility,’ I answered. ‘What are places like this worth now?’ ‘The value of anything is what people are willing to pay,’ he said with that quiet smile. ‘Your uncle tells me you live in London. How do you find England?’ ‘We have jobs. The life is easy and comfortable. We’d hardly be looking at places here if we were entirely happy.’ ‘What do you find wrong with England?’ ‘Nothing but it’s not my country and I never feel it’s quite real or that my life there is real. That has its pleasant side as well. You never feel responsible or fully involved in anything that happens. It’s like being present and at the same time a real part of you is happily absent.’ ‘Would you find this place real?’ ‘Far too real.’ ‘Would it be the quiet and the birds that’d interest you?’ I hadn’t noticed until then that small birds, wrens and robins and finches, were indeed singing in the desolate branches. And at that moment, as if on cue, a pheasant started to call in a nearby field. No, it wouldn’t be to listen to the birds. They say we think the birds are singing when they are only crying this is mine out of their separate territories. ‘Have you ever lived in England?’ I must have asked aggressively enough because I remember resenting the reference to the birds. He didn’t seem to mind and spoke openly. ‘I spent one winter in the East End around Forest Gate and West Ham. We were trying to spring some men of ours who were in Pentonville. A gang of criminals from the East End was in the same wing of the prison. We were trying to use them in a breakout. Nothing came of the plan. We wanted to use them. They wanted to use us. We also discovered that they were planning to double-cross us during the breakout.’ ‘What were they like?’ I asked. ‘The East End gangsters? They were like rats. They cared about nothing but their own skins.’ He had the idealist’s contempt and distaste for the purely criminal. ‘What would you have done with the gang if there had been a breakout and they tried to double-cross you?’ ‘We’d have shot them. We planned to shoot them anyhow. They knew too much.’ ‘Whether there was a double-cross or not?’ ‘They knew too much. We knew we were being watched.’ He spoke without feeling or rancour. ‘Anyhow nothing came of the plan. We just got out in the nick of time.’ The calm with which he said ‘We planned to shoot them anyhow’ added to the chill on that wet hillside.”