John McGahern - Amongst Women

Eventually a letter arrived from London in response to Moran’s exasperated inquiries about his elder son. The information could hardly have been more ordinary. Maggie had seen him nearly every day at first. Now she saw him much less. When he first came, he had worked on various building sites. Now he worked in offices of the Gas Board, and was studying accountancy, mostly at night, though the Board gave him one day off each week to attend classes. Also he had become friendly with a Cockney man, older than he, who had been a french polisher and who now sold reproduction furniture to antique shops from a van. He mentioned some plan they had of buying old houses and converting them into flats for sale.

‘You see, it didn’t take him long to find the riff-raff,’ Moran said.

‘He seems to be working hard enough and studying,’ Rose tried to reassure him as always from a careful distance.

‘He’d do that all right but look at what he’s getting mixed up with as well.’

‘It may be just talk,’ she ventured edgily.

‘How does anything start but in talk?’

Outwardly it had been the easiest and quietest of times that the house had ever known but the unease did not go away. Increasingly Moran could be seen in the fields staring idly at some task he should be completing.

The fierce rush of hay was over. The apples were ripening on the trees in the garden. Their eyes were turning towards winter. Rose was beginning to go regularly again to her mother’s house. The cane basket on the handlebars of her bicycle was always full on leaving the house and full again with things from her mother’s house when she came back.

‘I see there’s hardly a day nowadays that Rose doesn’t go to her relations,’ Moran said to Sheila and Mona one Saturday they brought him a flask of tea into the fields. ‘She seldom goes empty-handed.’ Rose had asked them to take the flask out to him at four. They knew she took bread to her mother, jam she had made from the blackcurrants at the foot of the garden but the basket always came back heavy with fresh eggs, a bunch of carrots from the bog, plums that they loved, sweet hard yellow apples.

‘We don’t know,’ Sheila answered carefully.

‘How do you not know? Haven’t you both eyes in your heads?’

‘She brings things back.’

‘Only stuff they’d have to throw out otherwise!’

They knew that the accusation was untrue. They remained obstinately silent, abject looking as well, the camouflage they had learned to use for safekeeping.

‘Would you like us to tie the sheaves, Daddy?’ Mona asked.

‘That’d be a great push,’ he said.

All the girls were skilled at farm work, work they had done since they were very young. Quickly the rows were gathered into sheaves and tied. They loved the sound of swishing the sheaves made as they were stooked, the clash of the tresses of hard grain against grain, the sight of the rich ears of corn leaning delicately out on the shoulders of the stooks.

‘That was great,’ Moran said. ‘What’s left is only trimming. I can do that myself. I am sure ye have books,’ he added with unusual thoughtfulness.

‘Thanks, Daddy.’

‘Thanks yourselves.’ And then he added, ‘We could get on topping without her.’

It was not so much that she took things from the house — though his racial fear of the poorhouse or famine was deep — but that she left the house at all. Any constant going out to another house was a threat. In small things it showed. The shaving water was boiling. Did she want to scald the face off a man? God, O God, O God, did she not know anything? Look at the holes in these socks. ‘Where, O God, is that woman now? Has a whole army to be sent out to search for you whenever you’re needed?’

She did not try to defend herself. ‘Coming, Daddy. Coming,’ she would call, often arriving breathless. Not once did she protest at the unfairness. She seemed willing to go to almost any length to appease, lull his irritation to rest, contain all the exasperation by taking it within herself. This usually redoubled it. He seemed intent now on pushing to see how far he could go and she appeared willing to give way in everything in order to pacify.

The children were deeply ashamed: ‘He used to be like that when Luke was here, Rose; only it was worse.’

‘These flare-ups happen in every family. It is easy to exaggerate. I’m sure Daddy never meant any harm. These things can be taken too much to heart.’ She would not hear the accusation.

‘It’s true what Mona says.’

‘Now, these things can be exaggerated out of all proportion. Daddy may act like that — none of us are all that good — but he never means it. I know how much he loves everybody in the house.’

‘It’s just not fair.’

‘You should know you’ll not change your father now and he means everything for the best for the whole house,’ she argued forcibly but the strain was showing on her own drawn, anxious features.

Then one evening as she was tidying up the room he said as quietly as if he were taking rifle aim, ‘There’s no need for you to go turning the whole place upside down. We managed well enough before you ever came round the place.’

She did not try to answer or to turn it aside. It was again as if she had been struck, her hands barely moving along the surface of the dresser she had been wiping clean of dust, her head going low, and when she finished she went to put the damp cloth carefully beside the sink, moving a simmering saucepan from the hotplate. Such was the slowness and enclosedness of all her movements that the girls instinctively looked up from their school books to follow her closely. Moran watched every move under cover of reading the newspaper. Then, with the same shocking slowness, without a word, without looking at anyone, she went to the door, opened it, and let it close softly behind her. They heard her open and close the bedroom door likewise. There was complete silence.

Moran rattled the newspaper a few times but by the time he could look around the three children were locked back into their school books. After a while Moran tired of looking at the newspapers and went outside though it was almost night.

‘What happened?’ Michael asked laughingly, hoping to make light of what had taken place.

‘Rose went to bed,’ Mona answered without looking up from her books and though the boy thought about it for a while he did not ask anything further.

When Moran came back he was even more restless. He went through the newspaper again. Then he got pen and writing pad and sat at the table. He deliberated for a long time in front of the pad, and then suddenly rose and put it away without writing anything.

‘We better say the prayers,’ he said, taking his beads from the leather purse. As they prepared to kneel he added, ‘Open the doors in case Rose wants to hear.’ Mona went and opened both doors. At the bedroom door she called softly, ‘Rose, we’re starting the Rosary.’ But not even a whisper came from the room. Mona came in. ‘The doors are open,’ and took her place without looking at anyone.

‘Thou, O Lord, wilt open my lips.’

‘And my tongue shall announce Thy praise,’ their response was like a muted echo.

The doors stayed open but no murmur came from the other room. Moran paused after the First Decade. Rose always recited the Second Decade but when no sound whatever came from the room he nodded severely to Mona to begin. On the completion of the circle, Moran again had to recite the Last Decade. ‘Will we shut the doors, Daddy?’ Mona asked nervously after they rose from their knees.

‘What does it matter whether they are open or shut?’ he said and the doors remained open.

As soon as they finished with their books the two girls made him tea. Rose always made tea at this hour. Immediately after they tidied and washed up, they went to kiss Moran good night and slipped away to their rooms. He sat for more than an hour alone before dragging himself to the room, shutting the doors loudly behind him as he went. He did not speak in the room, allowing his clothes to fall on to the floor in the darkness, waiting for some stir or sign from Rose, but the only sound in the room was the brushing of his own clothes falling in the darkness.