John McGahern - By the Lake

The morning was clear. There was no wind on the lake. There was also a great stillness. When the bells rang out for Mass, the strokes trembling on the water, they had the entire world to themselves.

The doors of the house were open. Jamesie entered without knocking and came in noiselessly until he stood in the doorway of the large room where the Ruttledges were sitting. He stood as still as if waiting under trees for returning wildfowl. He expected his discovery to be quick. There would be a cry of surprise and reproach; he would counter by accusing them of not being watchful enough. There would be welcome and laughter. When the Ruttledges continued to converse calmly about a visit they were expecting that same afternoon, he could contain himself no longer. Such was his continual expectation of discovery that in his eavesdropping he was nearly always disappointed by the innocence he came upon.

“Hel-lo. Hel-lo. Hel-lo,” he called out softly, in some exasperation.

“Jamesie!” They turned to the voice with great friendliness. As he often stole silently in, they showed no surprise. “You are welcome.”

“Ye are no good. I have been standing here for several minutes and haven’t heard a bad word said about anybody yet. Not a bad word,” he repeated with mocking slowness as he came forward.

“We never speak badly about people. It’s too dangerous. It can get you into trouble.”

“Then ye never speak or if you do the pair of yous are not worth listening to.”

In his dark Sunday suit, white shirt, red tie, polished black shoes, the fine silver hair brushed back from the high forehead and sharp clean features, he was shining and handsome. An intense vividness and sweetness of nature showed in every quick, expressive movement.

“Kate.” He held out an enormous hand. She pretended to be afraid to trust her hand to such strength. It was a game he played regularly. For him all forms of social intercourse were merely different kinds of play. “God hates a coward, Kate,” he demanded, and she took his hand.

Not until she cried, “Easy there, Jamesie,” did he release his gently tightening grip with a low crow of triumph. “You are one of God’s troopers, Kate. Mister Ruttledge,” he bowed solemnly.

“Mister Murphy.”

“No misters here,” he protested. “No misters in this part of the world. Nothing but broken-down gentlemen.”

“There are no misters in this house either. He that is down can fear no fall.”

“Why don’t you go to Mass, then, if you are that low?” Jamesie changed the attack lightly.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“You’d be like everybody else round here by now if you went to Mass.”

“I’d like to attend Mass. I miss going.”

“What’s keeping you, then?”

“I don’t believe.”

“I don’t believe,” he mimicked. “None of us believes and we go. That’s no bar.”

“I’d feel a hypocrite. Why do you go if you don’t believe?”

“To look at the girls. To see the whole performance,” he cried out, and started to shake with laughter. “We go to see all the other hypocrites. Kate, what do you think about all this? You’ve hardly said a word.”

“My parents were atheists,” Kate said. “They thought that all that exists is what you see, all that you are is what you think and appear to be.”

“Give them no heed, Kate,” he counselled gently. “You are what you are and to hell with the begrudgers.”

“The way we perceive ourselves and how we are perceived are often very different,” Ruttledge said.

“Pay no heed to him either. He’s just trying to twist and turn. Thought pissed in the bed and thought he was sweating. His wife thought otherwise. You’ll get on good as any of them, Kate.” He took pruning shears from his pocket and placed them on the table. “Thanks,” he said. “They were a comfort. Pure Sheffield. Great steel.”

“I bought them from a stall in the Enniskillen market one Thursday. They weren’t expensive.”

“The North,” he raised his hand for emphasis. “The North is a great place for bargains.”

“Would you like a whiskey, Jamesie?” she asked.

“Now you’re talking, Kate. But you should know by now that ‘wilya’ is a very bad word.”

“Why bad?”

“Look at yer man,” he pointed to where Ruttledge had already taken glasses and a bottle of Powers from the cupboard and was running water into a brown jug.

“I’m slow.”

“You’re not one bit slow, Kate. You just weren’t brought up here. You nearly have to be born into a place to know what’s going on and what to do.”

“He wasn’t brought up here.”

“Not too far off, near enough to know. He wasn’t at school but he met the scholars. Good health! And more again tomorrow,” he raised his glass. “The crowd lying below in Shruhaun aren’t drinking any drinks today.”

“Good luck. What’s the news?”

“No news. Came looking for news,” he cried ritually, and then could contain his news no longer: “Johnny’s coming home from England. He’s coming home this Tuesday. Mary got the letter.”

Every summer his brother Johnny came home on holidays from the Ford factory at Dagenham. He had left for England twenty years before and never missed a summer coming home.

“I’d be glad to run you to the station,” Ruttledge offered.

“I know that well, and thanks, but no, no.” He raised the hand again. “Always go in Johnny Rowley’s car. Jim is meeting Johnny at the airport and putting him on the train. Jim is taking time off.”

Jim was Jamesie and Mary’s only child, who had been clever at school, had entered the civil service, where he had risen to a high position, and was married with four children in Dublin.

“There was a time Johnny spent the night with Jim and Lucy in Dublin.”

“Not any more. Johnny and Lucy don’t pull. He’s not awanted. It’s better, better by far the way it is. I’ll meet the train with Johnny Rowley. We’ll have several stops on the way from the station. When we get to the house, Mary will put the sirloin down. You can’t get meat in England. You’d just love to see Johnny’s face and the way he says ‘God bless you, Mary’ when she puts the sirloin in front of him on the table.”

The house and the outhouses would be freshly whitewashed for the homecoming, the street swept, the green gates painted, old stakes replaced in the netting wire that held Mary’s brown hens in the space around the hayshed. Mary would have scrubbed and freshened all the rooms. Together they would have taken the mattress from the bed in the lower room, Johnny’s old room, and left it outside to air in the sun. The holy pictures and the wedding photographs would be taken down, the glass wiped and polished. His bed would be made with crisp linen and draped with the red blanket. An enormous vase of flowers from the garden and the fields — roses and lilies and sweet william from the garden, foxglove and big sprays of honeysuckle from the hedges — would be placed on the sill under the open window to sweeten the air and take away the staleness and smell of damp from the unused room. The order for the best sirloin would already have been placed at Caroll’s in the town. The house couldn’t have been prepared any better for a god coming home to his old place on earth.

“Johnny was the best shot this part of the country has ever seen. On a Sunday when all the guns gathered and they’d be blazing away, all Johnny had to do was to raise his gun for the bird to fall like a stone. He had two of the most beautiful gun dogs, Oscar and Bran, a pointer and a red setter. He had the whole world at his feet,” Jamesie said. “He didn’t have to lift a hand. All he had to do was go round and oversee what other men were doing. Yes, he could be severe enough and strict, too, in his own way … too exact when it wasn’t needed. The whole country was leaving for England at the time and if any of them had a hope of Johnny’s job there’d be a stampede worse than for a gold rush back from England. If anybody had told us what was going to happen we wouldn’t have believed them. We’d have laughed.