John McGahern - Amongst Women

‘I’d gone to school longer than the others. To the Latin school in Moyne. I could read maps, calculate distances. You’d never think it but McQuaid, like many of the others, was more or less illiterate though he could add and subtract quick enough when it concerned his pocket. It was easy to get the name of brains in those days.’

As if he suddenly wanted to return the girls ‘favour on this Monaghan Day, he spoke to them openly about the war for the first time in their lives.’ The English didn’t seem to know right what they were doing. I think they were just going through the motions of what had worked before. Look at the train business. Imagine having a brass band meet a colonel in the middle of the bogs with the whole countryside up in arms. A child wouldn’t do it.

‘Don’t let anybody fool you. It was a bad business. We didn’t shoot at women and children like the Tans but we were a bunch of killers. We got very good but there was hardly a week when some of us wasn’t killed. Of the twenty-two men in the original column only seven were alive at the Truce. We were never sure we’d be alive from one day to the next. Don’t let them pull wool over your eyes. The war was the cold, the wet, standing to your neck in a drain for a whole night with bloodhounds on your trail, not knowing how you could manage the next step toward the end of a long march. That was the war: not when the band played and a bloody politician stepped forward to put flowers on the ground.

‘What did we get for it? A country, if you’d believe them. Some of our own johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishmen. More than half of my own family work in England. What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod.’

‘They say you should have gone to the very top in the army after the war but you were stopped. McQuaid always said they set out to stop you,’ Sheila said with borrowed vehemence.

‘I was stopped all right but it wasn’t as simple as poor McQuaid made out. In an army in peacetime you have to arse- lick and know the right people if you want to get on. I was never any good at getting on with people. You should all know that by now,’ he said half humorously.

There were tears in the girls’ eyes as they tried to smile back. Rose was quiet and watchful.

‘For people like McQuaid and myself the war was the best part of our lives. Things were never so simple and dear again. I think we never rightly got the hang of it afterwards. It was better if it had never happened. Tired now. You were all great girls to travel such distances to see one sick old man.’

He took his beads from the small purse. They hung loose from his hand. ‘Anyhow it no longer matters to you or to me, but whoever has the last laugh in the whole business is going to have to spend a hell of a length of time laughing. We have to try to work as best we can and pray .’

He looked so strained and tired that they offered to say the Rosary in his room but he brushed the offer aside. He knelt as erect as ever at the table.

‘Thou, O Lord, wilt open my lips,’ he called. When he came to the Dedication he paused as if searching. Then, in a sudden flash that he was sometimes capable of, he acknowledged his daughters’ continuing goodwill and love, love that usually he seemed inherently unable to return. ‘Tonight we offer up this Holy Rosary for the repose of the soul of James McQuaid.’

When the prayers were ended the three girls kissed him goodnight in turn, and Rose went with him to their room. The girls started to wash up and tidy; very soon the litter of the evening was cleared away, the room made ready for breakfast.

When Rose saw the table already set for morning, she said, ‘If you were around for too long I’d be spoiled rotten. I don’t know what anybody else is having but I’m going to be bad tonight and have a cigarette and hot whiskey. You all took Daddy out of himself tonight. That all of you managed to come meant the world to Daddy.’

The next morning they were idling in the luxury of a long breakfast, enjoying the chatting in the warmth of the room, the tussocks in the white field outside the window stiff with frost, the only green grass the huge dark circles under the cypress trees, when a single shotgun blast came from the front room. They looked at one another in fear, moving quickly as one person to the room. He was standing at the open window in his pyjamas, the shotgun in his hand, staring out at the front field where the black splash of a jackdaw lay on the white ground beneath the ash tree.

‘Are you all right, Daddy?’ they called out.

When it was dear that he was, Rose cried, ‘You frightened the life out of us, Daddy.’

‘That bloody bird has been annoying me for days.’

‘You’ll get your death of cold standing there at the open window,’ Maggie complained and Rose brought the window down.

‘You didn’t miss anyhow.’ Rose was intent on laughing away the incongruity of the situation.

‘I don’t think Daddy ever missed,’ Mona said.

‘The closest I ever got to any man was when I had him in the sights of the rifle and I never missed.’ The voice was so absent and tired that it took some of the chill from the words.

He allowed Rose to take the gun away but not before he had removed the empty shell. He dressed and had breakfast with them at the table. The gun was returned to its usual place in the corner of the room and no more mention was made of the dead jackdaw.

‘Tired again,’ he said simply after an hour and went back to his room.

Maggie was taking a plane to London that night and Sheila and Mona were driving her to the airport. The two girls would not be back till the following weekend. Moran stood with Rose in the doorway watching the car drive away. He waved weakly after the car but he did not speak as Rose shut the door and they turned back into the house.

Monaghan Day had revived nothing but a weak fanciful ghost of what had been. After Easter and many other alarms, when none of the girls was able to be in Great Meadow, Rose had her sister buy a brown Franciscan habit in the town. In spite of the hush and emptiness of the house, the two women smuggled the habit in like thieves and later that evening Rose hid it among her most intimate articles of clothing in a part of the wardrobe that Moran never opened.

The attempt to revive Monaghan Day was a gesture as weak as a couple who marry in order to try to retrieve a lost relationship, the mind having changed the hard actual fact into what was comfortable to feel.

On the last Monaghan Day that McQuaid came to the house Moran was on edge as he waited for him as he had been on edge every Monaghan Day, the only day in the year that McQuaid came to Great Meadow. Since morning he had been in and out of the kitchen where Maggie and Mona were cleaning and tidying and preparing for the big meal. Though Maggie was eighteen, tall and attractive, she was still as much in awe of Moran as when she had been a child. Mona, two years younger, was the more likely to clash with him, but this day she agreed to be ruled by Maggie’s acquiescence. Sheila, a year younger still, was too self-centred and bright ever to challenge authority on poor ground and she pretended to be sick in order to escape the tension of the day. Alone, the two girls were playful as they went about their tasks, mischievous at times, even carefully boisterous; but as soon as their father came in they would sink into a beseeching drabness, cower as close to being invisible as they could.

‘How do the lamb chops look?’ he demanded again. ‘Are these the best lamb chops you could get? Haven’t I told you time in and time out never — never — to get lamb chops anywhere but from Kavanagh’s? Has everything to be drummed in a hundred times? God, why is nothing ever made dear in this house? Everything has to be dragged out of everybody.’