John McGahern - Amongst Women

‘Are you awake at all there, Rose?’ he whispered before reaching out to pull aside the bedclothes.

She did not answer at first but moved or turned.

‘I’m awake,’ she said at last in a voice strained with hurt. ‘I’ll have to go away from here.’

‘I never heard such nonsense,’ he blustered. ‘Are you taking everything up as serious as some of the other people in the house? Does every move have to be Judgement Day?’

‘I was told I was no use in the house. I couldn’t go on living in a place where I was no use,’ she spoke with the quietness and desperate authority of someone who had discovered they could give up no more ground and live.

‘God, O God. Has everything to be taken like this? I never meant anything like that. The whole world knows that the house was never run right until you came. A blind man could see that the children think the earth of you. They’d cry their eyes out if they heard even a whisper of this silly talk.’

‘It didn’t sound silly to me. It sounded as if it was meant. I’ll have to go back to Glasgow and take up my life there again.’

‘God, can’t a man say anything in his own house without it being taken up wrong?’ and the quarrel circled about the two positions until he reached and took her in his arms. She neither yielded to him nor attempted to pull away.

‘I love you dearly and I love the house but I couldn’t live here if I am not wanted.’

‘I thought we’d finished with that for ever.’ He was restless by her side, clenching and unclenching his hands. He had been checked. Instead of recognition, all that the quarrel had incurred was a deepening blindness. He now knew less about her than the day they had first met in the post office, standing beside one another on the scrubbed hollow boards, waiting for the evening mail van to come.

Mona and Sheila rose earlier than usual the next morning. They had heard noises of someone rising very early and felt apprehensive. They weren’t sure if they would find Rose there at all or what way they would find her if they did. They were taken aback to find her smiling and totally at ease. The room was already warm and the furniture shone as if all the pieces had been gone over with a damp cloth.

‘You are all up a bit before your time. You could have stolen another few minutes,’ she said as if the evening had never happened. She poured their tea and sat with a cup of her own by the fire, chatting away as easily as she did every morning. ‘No danger of your brother ever getting up too early,’ she said and went to call Michael. When he came into the room, sleepy and rubbing his eyes, he too stared as if not able to believe how like all other mornings the morning was. Nothing seemed to have changed.

Moran stayed in bed until late that day, disappearing silently into the fields after eating. When the children came back from school they found that still nothing had changed. Moran was in a rage about tools and a barrow that had been left out in the rain and complained about how much money was being wasted heedlessly about the house all the time.

‘Why does he always have to go on like that?’ Sheila was emboldened from what she saw the night before to ask Rose when Moran had gone out again.

‘Daddy worries. He worries a great deal about the house.’ Rose said it with such empathy that all criticism was stopped. All they could do was to look at her but no one could read Rose’s face and they turned back to their books. They were only weeks away from the examinations halls. So much work still had to be done, so much work had to be gone over again. The chance-throw of the exam would almost certainly determine the quality of much of the rest of their lives. Sheila especially had dreams of university. Much could be won, a great deal more could be lost, and there was always England.

At this time Moran ordered an enormous load of lime that blocked the avenue. To cut down on expense he did not get the big factory spreaders but started to spread it himself with tractor and shovel. For days he backed the little transport box into the huge mound and went up and down the fields in lines, stopping the tractor every few yards to scatter the lime, tossing each shovelful on the wind for the white dust to be blown out over the grass. No matter how carefully he sliced each shovelful in an arc out on the wind, there were certain unpredictable gusts that lifted the grains and blew them back towards the tractor so that by evening his clothes were filthy with lime, his face and hands as white as chalk, accentuating the inflamed red round his eyes. The theatrical paleness of his face and hands pleased him. ‘I’m a boody man,’ he pretended to chase Rose and the children with his old charm. Rose was delighted, the clowning bringing relief back into the house after the hidden battle. It would never be over but Rose’s place in the house could never be attacked or threatened again. ‘I’m a boody man. I’m a boody man,’ he made playful sallies to left and right while everybody pretended to back away, shouting and laughing.

As the days went by and the busy little transport box seemed to be making only slow way into the huge heap of lime, he no longer eased it out on the blade of the shovel for the wind to take it but scattered it anywhere out of sight, anywhere to be rid of it. More often because of his impatience, it blew back in his face, dusting him all over. Each night he would be more red-eyed, hardly able to drag his feet with tiredness, his face caked white with lime, lime in his eyes and ears and nostrils, his throat dry, lime thick through his hair and clothes and when he sat down to the table he felt as if he were eating lime.

The blindman’s buff of ‘I’m the boody man’ was gone and they served his tiredness with careful silence. Rose bent over him with pure attention.

‘Do you think it will rain?’ he asked Rose.

‘The forecast is for the same dry hard weather for days.’

‘If it rains,’ he said gloomily, ‘if it rains that heap will set like mixed concrete and we’ll never be rid of it’; and though there was no sign of a break in the weather he covered the slowly diminishing heap at night with clear plastic, weighted down with stones.

The girls were now too close to their exam, too anxious to do more than lift their faces to him, but out of the tiredness and filth of lime he could be seen looking often at their heads bent over the lamplit pages in what looked close to melancholy and sunken reflection.

‘I was in the eighth class in Moyne,’ he said and named four boys in the same class. ‘It was as far as you could go in Moyne. I was there for two years. All the others went on to be priests. Joe Brady became a Bishop in Colorado. He died two years ago. I used to write to him till then. You couldn’t go further than the eighth class without going on to be a priest.’

‘Even if you had money?’ Rose asked.

‘No one had money round Moyne,’ he smiled, aching with tiredness, filthy and white with lime. ‘We were all good in the eighth class in Moyne but I was the best in maths.’ He named the others who shone in different subjects. ‘They all went on to be priests and then the Troubles started and I left too. Strange, to this day I have never met a priest who wasn’t afraid to die. I could never make head or tails of that. It flew in the face of everything.’

‘If it had been a different time you’d have been a doctor or an engineer,’ Rose said.

‘I wouldn’t have been a doctor,’ he shivered with tiredness, ill at ease by the very suggestion of a shape other than his own. ‘These lassies will be worn out with all this study,’ Moran changed.

‘No, Daddy. We’re just going over something again for the exam.’

‘We’ve had good weather for weeks now. You’re all day inside in school. You should take your books into the fresh air.’ He returned to it again and again, the good weather held and they were compelled eventually to go outside. They went to Oakport Woods, leaving their bicycles at the big iron gate, and walking with their books over the grass to the belt of trees along Oakport Lake. The late May sun burned overhead. It would be cool and dark within the wood and there was a cold spring.