John McGahern - Amongst Women

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I think it’d be better if you wrote him,’ Rose suggested.

‘I’ll probably just earn another kick in the teeth but I’ll do it none the less.’

Moran spent a long time composing the letter. He could not resist adding recrimination. Luke answered the letter by telegram. Seldom a telegram came and nobody liked to see one come to a house. The small green envelope with the harp generally came with news of sudden death. Moran’s high- strung nervousness, which was usually concealed by slow, deliberate movements, was all on show as he looked about him like an animal in unknown territory and tore open the envelope. When he read delighted to meet maggie stop love stop luke he had to struggle to contain himself. He was barely able to conceal his fury until after he paid the postman whom he walked all the way out to the iron gate.

‘Maybe he just sent the telegram and a letter will come after a few days,’ Maggie tried to soothe.

‘No letter will come. It leaves me like a right fool out in the bloody open.’

‘I don’t know how you can say that, Daddy. You did everything decent,’ Rose said.

‘Why in the name of the Saviour do you have to put your ignorance on full display,’ he turned on her. ‘You don’t know the first thing about the business, woman.’

That the telegram was formally polite and completely ignored his own attack infuriated Moran. After he had read it aloud he crumpled the note up in his fist and thrust it into the fire as if the very sight of it was hateful.

‘Well, at least you’ll have someone to meet you at Euston,’ Rose said softly to Maggie who already knew that she would be met.

‘Of course he’ll meet her. He’ll meet her to try to turn her against me,’ shouted Moran.

‘He was polite enough,’ Rose suggested.

‘What do you know about it? What in hell do you know about anything?’

He swept his hat from the dresser and crushed it on his head and went outside as if he might break down the doors in his way. Soon they heard the sharp, swift sounds of the axe as he started to split lengths of branches into firewood.

She stood stunned. He had never spoken to her like that before. In the spreading lull she looked towards the others. They had all been there when Moran read out the telegram. Part of her expected to find them laughing at his wild reaction beyond all sense and to return her to the blessed normal but when she looked around only Maggie stood in the room. The others had slipped away like ghosts. Maggie was kneading currants through dough in a glass bowl on the sideboard, as absorbed in the kneading as if all of her life were passing through the pale dough.

‘Where have they all disappeared to all of a sudden, Maggie?’

‘They must have gone out,’ Maggie looked up from the dough with intense attention.

‘I thought I might find them laughing at poor Daddy,’ Rose said, allowing her own shock and fear to ease out in the nervous laughter, but Maggie’s face remained pale and serious.

‘I don’t know what happened to Daddy,’ Rose said.

‘Sometimes he gets like that.’

‘I never saw him so upset.’

‘He’s not been like that for a long time.’

‘Was he often like that?’

‘Before, but not for a long time now,’ Maggie admitted reluctantly and Rose did not want to learn any more. She had already more than she wanted to deal with. In the silence the sound of the sledge could be heard thudding on stones from one of the near fields. He had already abandoned the timber.

Often when talking with the girls she had noticed that whenever Moran entered the room silence and deadness would fall on them; and if he was eating alone or working in the room — setting the teeth of a saw, putting a handle in a broken spade on a wet day, taking apart the lighting plant that never seemed to run properly for long — they always tried to slip away. If they had to stay they moved about the place like shadows. Only when they dropped or rattled something, the startled way they would look towards Moran, did the nervous tension of what it took to glide about so silently show. Rose had noticed this and she had put it down to the awe and respect in which the man she so loved was held, and she was loath to see differently now. She had chosen Moran, had married him against convention and her family. All her vanity was in question. The violence Moran had turned on her she chose to ignore, to let her own resentment drop and to join the girls as they stole about so that their presences would never challenge his.

He came in very late, wary, watchful. The cheerfulness with which Rose greeted him he met with a deep reserve. She was unprepared for it and her nervousness increased tenfold as she bustled about to get his tea. Sheila and Mona were writing at side tables; Michael was kneeling at the big armchair, a book between his elbows, as if in prayer, a position he sometimes used for studying. All three looked up gravely to acknowledge their father’s presence; but, sensing his mood at once, they buried themselves again in their schoolwork.

‘Where’s Maggie?’ he demanded.

‘She went to visit some friends in the village.’

‘She seems always to be on the tramp these days.’

‘She’s going around mostly saying goodbye to people.’

‘I’m sure she’ll be missed,’ he said acidly.

Rose poured him his tea. The table was covered with a spotless cloth. As he ate and drank she found herself chattering away to him out of nervousness, a stream of things that went through her head, the small happenings of a day. She talked out of confusions: fear, insecurity, love. Her instinct told her she should not be talking but she could not stop. He made several brusque, impatient movements at the table but still she could not stop. Then he turned round the chair in a fit of hatred. The children were listening though they kept their eyes intently fixed on their school books.

‘Did you ever listen carefully to yourself, Rose?’ he said. ‘If you listened a bit more carefully to yourself I think you might talk a lot less.’

She looked like someone who had been struck without warning but she did not try to run or cry out. She stood still for a long moment that seemed to the others to grow into an age. Then, abjectly, as if engaged in reflection that gave back only its own dullness, she completed the tasks she had been doing and, without saying a word to the expectant children, left the room.

‘Where are you going, Rose?’ he asked in a tone that told her that he knew he had gone too far but she continued on her way.

It galled him to have to sit impotently in silence; worse still, that it had been witnessed. They kept their heads down in their books though they had long ceased to study, unwilling to catch his eye or even to breathe loudly. All they had ever been able to do in the face of violence was to bend to it.

Moran sat for a long time. When he could stand the silence no longer he went briskly into the other room. ‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ they heard him say. They were able to hear clearly though he had closed the door. ‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ he had to say again. ‘I lost my temper.’ After a pause they thought would never end they heard, ‘I want to be alone,’ clear as a single bell note, free of all self-assertiveness. He stayed on in the room but there was nothing he could do but withdraw.

When he came back he sat beside the litter of his meal on the table among the three children not quite knowing what to do with himself. Then he took a pencil and paper and started to tot up all the monies he presently held against the expenses he had. He spent a long time over these calculations and they appeared to soothe him.

‘We might as well say the Rosary now,’ he announced when he put pencil and paper away, taking out his beads and letting them dangle loudly. They put away their exercises and took out their beads.