John McGahern - Amongst Women

The prayers had done nothing to dispel the sense of night and stirring trees outside, the splattering of rain on the glass.

As Moran solemnly replaced his beads in the purse Michael complained again. ‘The house feels awful with everybody gone.’ Rose looked from Moran to the boy and back again to Moran and held her peace.

‘They’re gone anyhow,’ Moran said. ‘They have good jobs. I’ll expect they’ll be sending us money before long. We’ll all be rolling,’ Moran said half-jokingly; and as Michael started to sob he touched his thick curly hair. ‘They’ve mollied you for far too long. You’ll have to grow up and fight your corner.’

‘We’ll make tea. There’s fruit cake as well as bread and jam. I’m worn out with all the go of the last days,’ Rose said.

After Rose and the boy had gone to bed he sat on his own by the raked fire, sitting motionless, staring down at the floor. When he did get up to go to the room he looked like someone who had lost the train of thought he had set out on and had emptied himself into blankness, aware only that he was still somehow present.

Though it was in its late September glory Michael lost all interest in his garden; the falling petals stayed unswept and the flowers wilted and fell into a tangled mess. Several times Rose tried to prod him towards the garden but after a short time he would just stand in it, disheartened, looking on at the disorder before moving away. The girls had praised his green hands. His involvement in the little garden was not strong enough to survive without their praise.

He had few outside interests. He did not play football or any team games nor did he fish or hunt or swim. Knowledge and information he was able to pick up without effort and he always came close to the top of his class without appearing to study. Except for maths he showed no interest in any one subject above another and his liking for mathematics seemed to stem from the fact that it came to him so easily while others struggled. With the girls gone, his main distraction and society had gone, for out of Moran’s sight he had loved to tease and play with them and they with him. He was as tall at fifteen as he would ever be and though he would never have Moran’s dramatic good looks he was handsome. After his sisters left, he discovered that he was attractive to women but it was to older women that he was drawn. From Moran he inherited a certain contempt for women as well as a dependence on them but it did not diminish his winning ways. The one drawback was his lack of money. To go about with young women he needed money and Moran would not part with any.

He went to Rose. She gave him a little money but grew alarmed when he began to come home late at night. When she got out of bed, anxious to see that he was all right, she discovered that he smelled of drink. At school he began to earn money by doing difficult maths exercises for slower boys. Moran had been listless about the house since the girls had gone but once he discovered that Michael was coming home late at night he acted decisively. Without a word of warning he bolted every door and window in the house and waited up.

When he heard the latch of the back door being raised, he was dozing in darkness. Then he heard various windows being tried. Softly he went to the back door and drew the bolt and as soon as he heard returning footsteps he opened the door.

‘This is a nice hour,’ he said.

‘I was in town. I couldn’t get a lift back. I had to walk.’

‘What were you doing in town?’

‘There was a dance.’

‘Did you ask to go to the dance?’

‘No.’

‘No what ? No, pig!’

‘No, Daddy.’

Moran beckoned him to come in and as he was passing him in the narrow hallway he seized him and struck him violently about the head. ‘I’ll teach you to come in at this hour! I’ll teach you to go places without asking! There must have been drink at this hooley as well!’

Sheltered by his sisters, Michael was unused to any blows and angrily cried out as soon as he was struck. There would have been a violent struggle but for Rose’s appearance.

‘What an hour to come in at, Michael! You have Daddy up worried about you the whole night.’

‘I couldn’t get a lift. He hit me,’ the boy cried.

‘You haven’t seen the end of this by half. I’ll teach you one good lesson. Nobody’s coming into this house at any old hour of the night they like while I’m in charge here.’

‘Everybody’s tired now. We’ll get to bed. Anything that has to be gone into can be gone into in the morning,’ Rose said.

Moran glared at her. He seemed about to brush her out of the way to seize the boy but drew back. ‘You can thank your lucky stars the woman’s here.’

‘He hit me,’ the boy sobbed.

‘And I’ll damn well show you what it is to be hit the next time you come into the house at this hour. You’re not going to do anything you like while I’m here.’

‘I’ll go away,’ the boy shouted self-pityingly.

‘Everybody’s tired. Look at the time it is. You can’t be coming in at this time. You had poor Daddy and everybody else worried to death about you,’ Rose scolded and managed to shepherd both men to their rooms without further trouble.

‘I’ll see that gentleman in the morning,’ Moran warned. ‘He needn’t think he’s getting away with anything in this house.’

Rose got him away to school early in the morning but it was only a postponement. During the weekend Michael had the good sense to stay well in the background and Mona and Sheila came from Dublin for the weekend, which postponed any confrontation further still. Moran was so taken up with the girls and their life in Dublin that he hardly noticed him.

These visits of his daughters from London and Dublin were to flow like relief through the house. They brought distraction, something to look forward to, something to mull over after they had gone. Above all they brought the bracing breath of the outside, an outside Moran refused to accept unless it came from the family. Without it there would have been an ingrown wilting. For the girls the regular comings and goings restored their superior sense of self, a superiority they had received intact from Moran and which was little acknowledged by the wide world in which they had to work and live. That unexamined notion of superiority was often badly shaken and in need of restoration each time they came home. Each time he met them at the station his very presence affirmed and reaffirmed again as he kissed them goodbye. Within the house the outside world was shut out. There was only Moran, their beloved father; within his shadow and the walls of his house they felt that they would never die; and each time they came to Great Meadow they grew again into the wholeness of being the unique and separate Morans.

‘That boy thinks he can stroll in here any hour of the day or night he likes. I’ve warned him once and for all and I’ll not warn him again. He may not take heed and if he doesn’t I may need your help to bring him to his senses,’ Moran confided to Sheila during one of the weekends the girls came from Dublin. She nodded and listened. She did not want to know where the talk led. Tomorrow she would be back in Dublin. ‘To bring him once and for all to his senses’ was like far-off thunder that could promise any sort of weather.

Moran’s warning on the night he locked Michael out had little effect but to make him more calculating. For so many years he had been protected by the cushion of the others that he alone in the house had no residual fear of Moran. When he was going to be late he now made some excuse. Moran was often tired which was reason enough for him not to stay up to check the lateness. But the sorest point was his constant need of money.