John McGahern - Amongst Women

‘You’d think she’d have more to do than cradle snatch,’ Maggie said furiously.

‘All I hope is that it doesn’t get to Daddy’s ears,’ Sheila said. The closed, angry circle could only be broken by men crossing the floor to ask them to dance. During the next dances he clowned around the floor. His sisters tried to ignore them but later when they looked for the couple again they were missing from the barn. Though each of the girls had many offers during the dances from men wanting to see them home, they left alone and together. After the last dance had been played and the tired musicians were preparing to play the National Anthem, only Sheila was aggressive enough to cross the floor and ask Michael, ‘Are you coming home with us?’

‘No, I have my own lift. You know Nell Morahan?’ Instead of taking her hand Sheila nodded curtly and marched away.

‘What’s the matter with her?’

‘You’ve stolen her little brother,’ he answered and called after his sisters, ‘Don’t forget to leave the back door open,’ as they left in a tight knot of indignation, pursued by his laughter.

Nell’s car was parked on the avenue. It was black and sleek and inside it smelled of new leather. Two sisters of Nell’s and her brother sat in the back, Michael with Nell in front. He was fifteen years of age and commanded the world.

As he chattered to the passengers in the back, she drove to their cottage in the Plains in silence and as she dropped them off she called, ‘I’ll not be long. I’m just leaving Michael home.’ Before she reached the yew tree at the gate she turned up a disused lane and switched off the lights. Already his hand was moving between her thighs as she drove. When she turned to him he came to her too eagerly but soon his young straining body was being steered to do as she wanted and no more. When he reached the first luxuriant peace, she made it seem as if he had reached it all on his own, tousling his hair, saying, ‘You smell lovely. Your skin is so soft,’ and kissing him over and over.

The back door had been left unlatched. When he came in, the house was dark and silent. Holding his shoes he went without making a sound to his room. But in the morning he had to face his sisters’ furious resentment. Openly and not a little proudly he met their anger. They could not take him for a child any more. Nonchalantly he ate his breakfast as they scolded. There was nothing they could do. They could not risk telling Moran. The very enclosedness of the house ensured that Moran would not hear about it in any other way. When the girls told Rose, she laughed heartily.

‘Well, didn’t poor Michael fall on his feet. Who’d ever think it?’

‘Look at their ages. We’ll be nothing but a laughing stock,’ they said angrily.

‘In a few months there will not be a word about it. Nell will go back to America and that will be that; but don’t bother Daddy with a word,’ she counselled.

‘Daddy would soon put manners on the brat.’

The full resentment turned on Nell Morahan and she kept out of their way. The sisters went only to the local dances. Nell drove with Michael to Longford where they were not known.

In a week the Christmas holidays were over. The girls went back to work. The house felt empty again. The schools opened.

Rose called Michael as she had called him on every school morning since she had come to the house and gave him breakfast.

‘You seem a little tired this morning, Michael,’ Rose teased, but all he was able to do in response was to rub his eyes.

He set off for school that morning as usual but he never went to school again. Nell met him in the car at the edge of the town and they drove to the ocean at Strandhill. When they parked at the old cannon on its wooden carriage there wasn’t another car in sight. ‘In summer it’s jammed,’ he said. The tide was far out below the rocks but the waves were mountainous, and white rain blinded the windscreen when the wipers stopped. Nell switched them on again. Crosswinds rocked the car. He found it all exciting and told Nell how good it was compared to the summers Moran had taken a cottage for a fortnight and they had all come here. ‘God, it was boring.’

‘How could it be boring by the sea? We always had to work in the fields in the summer,’ she said.

‘It was because he was here,’ he laughed uproariously at what he imagined was wit; and then, growing bored, he reached for her. She kissed him and then pushed him away playfully but firmly.

‘It’s no good for me in the morning,’ she said.

He sat sullenly away from her staring out through the semicircle the wipers made on the windscreen at the wild ocean and the long strand, the strand on which he had watched the same ocean encircle and wash away a sand castle he had made with bucket and spade not so many summers before. To Nell’s annoyance he put his feet up on the dashboard and would not take them down. As quickly as the rain had come the sky cleared and it became a different day. A weak sun shone out on the water. They left the car and climbed down over the blackened boulders to the strand. The wind, blowing the whole length of the level strand, tugged at their hair and clothes. He played and romped around her, tried to walk backwards into the wind until he nearly fell over, and then seized her hand and they both tried to run against the wind. The closer they got to the shelter of the Point the easier it was to walk. Suddenly at the Point itself they were in the shelter of the high dunes at the edge of the golf links and it was like looking back from a still room at all the turbulence of sea and wind they had waded through. This time when he reached for her she came into his arms. Her hair and face tasted of sea spray. Awkwardly they climbed together away from the calm strand, using the coarse tussocks to pull themselves up the slopes of the dunes, their shoes filling with the damp sand as they walked. In a hollow between high dunes they spread out raincoats on the sand and kicked away their shoes. She then, half-kneeling, pulled away her underthings and moved close to him for warmth. He pulled down his clothes over his thighs and entered her as she had shown him on their first night, very gently and a little timidly, in spite of the terrible urging of his need. Above them the wind whipped only at the highest tussocks and the ocean sounded far away. When he entered her for the third time she was ready to search for her own pleasure and he was now able to wait. Such was her strength that he was frightened. She shouted, seized him roughly at the hips, and forced him to move; and when it was over she opened her eyes and with her hands held his face for a quick, grateful kiss he couldn’t comprehend. The weak sun stood high above them. Feeling the damp cold, they dressed, shook the sand out of their shoes and raincoats and climbed back down to the shore. There was not even a dog chasing a stick along the whole empty strand, only several birds walking sedately along the tideline which had now come much further up on the beach. As if they had set out on a journey they felt morally bound to complete, they walked the whole way back past the cannon as far as the ruined church on the opposite point. For all his bravado Michael was full of anxiety. He would still have to go back to Moran with the schoolboy’s bundle of books in a few hours no matter what the glory was of his first-found manhood. Nell by his side had her own worries. In a few weeks she would be back in the Bronx. Michael was too young. You should take what you have while you can, plain country sense told her, but it was not so simple. She always wanted more. The whole empty strand of Strandhill was all around them and they had the whole day. There is nothing more difficult to seize than the day.

‘Do you think it’s safe?’ he asked.