John McGahern - By the Lake

“It’s great to be home. Great to see yous all and to see yous all so well.”

His suit was worsted blue. He wore a red tie with a white shirt. The bottoms of his trousers were gathered neatly in with bicycle clips. His shoes were polished but dimmed with a light coating of dust from the dry road. He leaned the bicycle against the wall of the porch and paused on his way into the house to look up at the shed.

“Patrick mustn’t have been back since last summer?”

“He still talks about finishing but we haven’t seen much of him lately. He’s been working here and there all over the country.”

“That’s Patrick,” he said.

“It’s been a big year for you, Johnny,” Ruttledge said as he got out the bottle of rum and found the blackcurrant cordial far back in a cupboard of the press, while Johnny lit a cigarette, striking a match expertly on the sole of his shoe.

“A big year. Ford gave me the golden handshake. Yet it all worked out in the end more or less alphabetical. Jamesie and Mary across the lake were as good as gold as was Jim in Dublin. They all did their level best to get me to throw up England altogether and come home for good. I was tempted,” he said, tapping the ash of the cigarette on a small saucer Kate put on the arm of the chair. “I was tempted at first but the more I thought about it the more I saw it wouldn’t work out. People get set in their ways. They can’t manage to fit in together any more. Once you get used to London, a place like the lake gets very backward. You are too far from everything. Jamesie and Mary, God bless them, came to see it that way as well. Without a car it would have been hopeless. You’d be stuck there in front of the alders on Moroney’s Hill facing the small river and the bog. It was a great thing to know all the same that in a tight corner you were still wanted by your own. Who else can you turn to in the end but your own flesh and blood?”

He was moving in his blindness, as if he was speaking for multitudes.

“Then Mister Singh got to know and from then on I was more or less on the pig’s back. I have as much in my back pocket now at the end of the week than even in the best days when I was on the line at Ford’s.”

Kate made a plate of sandwiches. Johnny said he would prefer tea to another rum and black and they all had mugs of tea poured from the big red teapot.

“What is your new place like?”

“A row of old Victorian mansions facing the Forest that Mister Singh bought and turned into flats. They are nearly all professional people in the flats — men and women, you don’t ask questions. They come and they go. I have my own entrance in the basement, central heating, bathroom, phone, TV, everything laid on.”

“Do you have much to do?”

“There’s enough to keep you busy. Clever and all as these people are, some don’t know how to change a light bulb or a fuse. You name it. They do it. Most things that go wrong I can fix. If it’s something serious I call Mister Singh.

“Days I go for a bit of a walk in the Forest. You’d miss having a dog. There’s a pond at Snaresbrook where you can watch the ducks and the swans. They’re pure tame. At night I go down to the Hitchcock Hotel. A Mike Furlong from Mayo, who made his money in the building game, owns the Hitchcock. We get on the best. Mike often puts up a drink for me in the Hitchcock. Mister Singh has me do all the short lets. I haven’t made a mistake yet. Touch wood. Mister Singh drives a Bentley now. Before I left he gave me a rise and said how hard it is to find anybody steady and reliable these days.”

“It sounds as if everything has worked out well.”

“You could say it went all more or less to plan,” he agreed emphatically, lighting another cigarette. “A thing about all those old buildings is the soundproofing though all the flats are carpeted. Over the basement this darkie has a long-lease flat. He speaks several languages and works as a translator. He’s tall and thin and good-looking enough, with close fuzzy hair, in or around forty, though it’s hard to tell with darkies. His English is very posh and he nearly always wears his Oxford scarf in case you’d make any mistake. He leaves John Quinn in the pure shade as far as whore-mastering is concerned. He can be gone for weeks or days at a time but when he’s there women come and go as if there’s no tomorrow. They’re all white. I have never seen him with a black woman. Because of the poor soundproofing, lying there in the dark you can hear the whole performance as good as if you were in the room. There’s one you could set yer alarm clock to her ‘Oh My God,’ at three in the morning. They come in their own cars or taxis. He never meets them but you should see the show when they leave. I never tire watching. You’d be in stitches. The performance never changes, from woman to woman, or with the same woman from one week to the next. Oh they are all ages, from their twenties to around forty or fifty. At weekends they generally stay the whole night and leave when it’s well into the day, and that’s when you get to see the whole show.”

Johnny appeared to grow younger as he rose from the chair, shaking away years of tiredness, and with a delicate movement of the hands suggested a flicking of a long scarf back across his shoulder. He walked with extreme slowness, his arm encircling an imagined waist so tightly that it made all movement difficult, pausing every few short steps to gaze soulfully into the other’s eyes. At the point of parting he enfolded the woman in a long embrace, then held her at arms’ length, to suffer the more what he was losing and, as if unable to endure this parting, enfolded her again to draw some solace from the last unbearable embrace. Then he stood, flicking the Oxford scarf back across his shoulder, looking after the departing car or taxi as if he was supporting the weight of the loss of all life, all love, all beauty.

Johnny suddenly drew himself erect, clicked his heels smartly together and bowed low with a sweep of his arm. The Ruttledges’ applause was not feigned.

“Patrick Ryan would do it far better,” Johnny said modestly. “But I tell you that darkie is some cowboy. He’s some comedian, I tell you.”

“It couldn’t be better,” Kate said.

“You’d think some of them would catch on?”

“They just lap it up,” he said.

“Do you get to speak with him at all?” Ruttledge asked.

“No. I never get to speak with him unless there’s something wrong in the flat and he makes it clear he wants you out as soon as ever possible. He’d walk away to the window or stand and open a book. No. He’d hardly even have the time of day for Mister Singh. I’m dirt but I don’t care. What is he but a man? He can be taken out of the air like a bird if you had the mind. Anyhow he doesn’t seem to have any men friends.”

“He probably hasn’t the time.”

“We were putting the trailer on the car when you came,” Ruttledge explained. “I have to run in for a few things before the town closes. Would you be interested in the jaunt?”

“I wouldn’t mind. It’d put round a few hours. What about the bicycle?”

“We can hop it in the trailer. That’s no trouble.”

“That’s great. I was puffed after the cycle round the shore.”

They drove in silence, Johnny folded back into the comfort of the car seat. He did not look around, not at the reeds along the shore, the summer breezes rippling the surface of the lake like shoals, the green brilliance of the leaves of the wild cherry amid the common foliage; not the wildfowl or the few swans or the heron flapping out of the reeds to lead them out before swinging loftily aside and then wheeling lazily around. He was folded back into himself as into tiredness or night.