John McGahern - Amongst Women

The next morning the girls woke to the incessant clatter of the mowing arm circling the big meadow. Moran had started to mow. All hands would be needed. Whatever leisure the holidays had promised was now ended. The whole house would be consumed by the fever of haytime, the fear of broken weather until every wisp was won.

‘The big meadow is down. It’ll be all hands on deck from now on,’ Moran told the girls as they sat over a late breakfast. He was happy and relieved that the first part of the mowing was completed without any breakage.

‘It’ll be great if the rain keeps off,’ Rose said.

‘It might take the edge off the dancing,’ Moran teased. ‘You’ll be too tired to dance tonight anyhow.’

‘That might not be a bit of harm!’ they smiled back.

As soon as the dew had been burned off the grass, the whole house was in the hayfield, shaking out the heavy tangled lumps of grass the tedder had missed with the fork, raking what was light in from the edges. Towards evening, when the grass started to take on the dry crackle of hay, it was as if the small handshakings were springing up in the meadow. The weather did not look like breaking. Moran put the mowing arm back on the tractor and cut the second and third meadows. They had most of the big meadow up by nightfall. By then every muscle ached, and it was with deep gratitude that they turned at last to drag their feet towards the house. ‘There’ll surely be no dancing tonight.’ ‘You can say that twice over.’

They were stiff as boards the next morning. When they moved, every muscle ached but by midday they were in the fields again. Rose and Michael brought tea and sandwiches out to the field. Moran was either mowing a new field or tossing the field ahead of them with the tedder but he joined the band of girls under the shade of one of the big beeches when Rose came with the basket and can.

‘It can’t be helped, it must be done,’ he said after they had eaten and rested. Rose gathered up what was left of the sandwiches of tinned salmon and sardines. The girls rose stiffly in the green shade and turned to the sunlit meadow. Maggie and Mona were good workers. They worked silently, hardly ever looking up. Sheila hated the work. She complained of blisters on her hands and was forever making forages to the house to escape the backbreaking tedium. The boy worked in fits and bursts, especially in response to praise from Rose. Other times he stood discouraged until shouted at by Moran to do more than just stand there occupying bloody space with everybody killing themselves. Then he would lift his fork angrily and pretend to work. Rose alone was able to laugh and chat away with Maggie and at the same time get through more work than anybody else in the field.

For five whole glaring days they worked away like this, too tired and stiff at night to want to go anywhere but to bed. They had all the hay won except the final meadow when the weather broke. The girls never thought they would lift their faces to the rain in gratitude. They watched it waste the meadows for the whole day.

‘To hell with it. We’re safe now anyhow. If we don’t get the last meadow itself it will do for bedding. Only for the whole lot of you we’d not be near that far on,’ Moran was able to praise.

‘It was for nothing, Daddy.’

‘It was everything. Alone we might be nothing. Together we can do anything.’

Rose put down a big fire against the depression of the constant rain. Everybody in the house loved to move in the warmth and luxury of it, to look out from the bright room at the rain spilling steadily down between the trees. When they moved away from the fire to the outer rooms the steady constant drip of rain from the eaves in the silence was like peace falling.

Now they could dance with a clear conscience. The big regatta dances in the huge grey tent down by the quay in Carrick were just beginning but there were so few days left of the holiday that Maggie preferred to spend them about the house chatting with Rose or her sisters around the fire or talking with Michael out in the front garden among his flowerbeds; and sometimes during long breaks in the rain they would go out to where Moran was tidying up in the meadows.

By the time Maggie had to go back to London they had never felt closer in warmth, even happiness. The closeness was as strong as the pull of their own lives; they lost the pain of individuality within its protection. In London or Dublin the girls would look back to the house for healing. The remembered light on the empty hayfields would grow magical, the green shade of the beeches would give out a delicious coolness as they tasted again the sardines between slices of bread: when they were away the house would become the summer light and shade above their whole lives.

‘If we don’t do well in the exam, if we don’t get anything here,’ Sheila blurted out, as they said goodbye outside the front garden while Moran waited with the engine running to drive Maggie to the station, ‘you may see us in London soon enough.’

Such was their anxiety during the two days that were left before the exam results were due that Mona and Sheila found it hard to eat or sleep.

‘Waiting is the worst,’ Rose said sympathetically as she saw them struggling with food. ‘Once you see what’s in the envelopes everything will be all right.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ Sheila said impatiently.

‘They might be dreadful.’

‘No they won’t. Nothing is so bad as having to imagine.’

So as not to have to watch the empty road for the postman on the day that the results were due each girl went separately deep into the fields but they weren’t able to stay alone for long; and each time they came back to the road it was still empty. When at last they did see him coming they had to follow his slow path from the road, watch him lean his bicycle carefully against the wall under the yew and plod slowly up between the two rows of boxwood. Moran who had been watching as anxiously as the two girls met him at the wooden gate. They stood chatting across the gate for what seemed an age until Moran faced the house with the two envelopes tantalizingly held out. Unable to stand it any longer, Sheila went up to him and before he had time to react seized both envelopes, feverishly tearing open her own and handing the other to Mona, who appeared almost unable to take it. Mona watched Sheila more devour than read the results. Moran was so taken aback by the way Sheila had seized the envelope from his hand that he stood in amazement.

‘They’re good! They’re more than I ever thought … Read them.’ Without knowing quite what she was doing she thrust them roughly towards Moran.

‘Why haven’t you even opened yours?’ She turned to Mona. She took the letter from her hands and opened it. ‘You’ve done great too,’ she hugged her sister and they wheeled one another round on the garden path until the flowerbeds were in danger. Both girls had done well but Sheila had done brilliantly.

‘This is great,’ Rose said. ‘We’re very proud.’

Moran, reacting to the exhibition of high spirits, said firmly, ‘I think we’ll have to consider everything.’

‘What do you mean consider? ’ Sheila’s voice quavered.

‘We’ll have to consider where it will all lead to,’ he said. ‘And what we can afford. Making too much fuss of anything never brings luck.’

But in spite of his words there was a fuss about their success. They had done so well that the convent put photographs of the two girls in the local paper. Moran came back from the post office to tell them that Annie and Lizzie had been singing their praises.

‘I told them it was nothing. What else had the girls to do but study? Anybody could do it who got their chance. They nearly beat me,’ he said to the whole house, much pleased with what he had said.