John McGahern - Amongst Women

The two men ate in silence, with relish, waited on by the two girls. As soon as McQuaid pushed his empty plate contentedly aside he said, ‘These are great girls but where are the missing soldiers?’

‘Sheila is upstairs with a cold,’ Maggie pointed to the ceiling. ‘And Michael is gone to our aunt in the mountains for a week.’

‘Where’s Luke then?’

The girls looked from McQuaid to Moran and back to McQuaid again but they did not speak.

‘We don’t know where he is,’ Moran said reluctantly. He particularly disliked parting with information about the house. ‘You couldn’t open your mouth in this house before he left but he’d be down your throat.’

‘If I know you I’d warrant he was given his money’s worth,’ McQuaid laughed gently and when Moran didn’t answer he added, ‘The young will have their way, Michael. Anyhow I always liked Luke. He is very straight and manly.’

‘I respect all my children equally,’ Moran said. ‘How are your lads?’

‘You know they’re all married now. I don’t see much of them unless they want something and they don’t see much of me. They’re good lads though. They work long hours.’

‘And the good lady?’

‘Oh, the old dosey’s all right. She needs plenty of shouting at or she’d go to sleep on her feet.’

They had married young and their three sons married young as well. They lived alone now in the big cattle dealer’s house with the white railing in the middle of fields. He was seldom in the house except to eat or sleep and when he was all he ever did was yell, ‘Get the tea. Polish the boots. Kick out that bloody cat. Get me a stud. Where’s the fucking collar?’ ‘In a minute, Jimmy. Coming. On the way. It’s here in my very hand,’ his wife would race and flurry and call. Then he would be gone for days. She would spoil her cats, read library books and tend her garden and the riotous rockery of flowers along the south wall of the house that he encouraged the cattle to eat. After days of peace the door would crash open: There’s six men here with lorries. Put on the kettle. Set the table. Get hopping. Put wheels under yourself. We’re fucking starving!’ There was never a hint of a blow. So persistent was the language that it had become no more remarkable than just another wayward manner of speaking and their sons paid so little attention to it that it might well have been one of the many private languages of love.

The dishes had been washed and put away. Mona went to join Sheila upstairs. Maggie was going visiting. Another night Moran would have questioned her but not tonight.

Years ago Moran loaned McQuaid money when he had started in the cattle business but now McQuaid was the richer and more powerful man and they saw little of one another. They came together once a year to slip back into what McQuaid said were the days of their glory. Moran was too complicated to let anybody know what he thought of anything. Moran had commanded a column in the war. McQuaid had been his lieutenant. From year to year they used the same handrails to go down into the past: lifting the cartwheel at the crossroads, the drilling sessions by the river, the first ambush, marching at night between the safe houses, the different characters in the houses, the food, the girls… The interrogation of William Taylor the spy and his execution by the light of a paraffin lantern among his own cattle in the byre. The Tans had swarmed over the countryside looking for them after the execution. They had lived for a while in holes cut in the turf banks. The place was watched night and day. Once the British soldiers came on Mary Duignan when she was bringing them tea and sandwiches. The Duignans were so naturally pale-faced that Mary showed no sign that anything was other than normal and she continued to bring tea and sandwiches to men working on a further turf bank. Seeing the British soldiers, the startled men sat and ate though they had just risen from a complete meal.

‘Mary was a topper,’ McQuaid said with emotion. ‘Only for Mary that day our goose was cooked. She was a bloody genius to think of giving the food to the men on the bank. She’s married to a carpenter in Dublin now. She has several children.’

Moran poured more whiskey into the empty glass.

‘Are you sure you won’t chance a drop?’ McQuaid raised his glass. ‘It’s no fun drinking on your own.’

‘I couldn’t handle it,’ Moran said. ‘You know that. I had to give it up. Now I couldn’t look at it.’

‘I shouldn’t have asked you then.’

‘I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all.’

The reminiscing continued — the deaths of friends, one man marching alone through the night, the terrible hard labour it was for some men to die, night marches from one safe house to another, the rain, the wet, the damp, the cold of waiting for an ambush in one place for hours.

‘We had them on the run by then. They were afraid to venture out except in convoys.’

‘People who would have spat in our faces three years before were now clapping our backs. They were falling over one another to get on the winning side.’

‘Many of them who had pensions and medals and jobs later couldn’t tell one end of a gun from the other. Many of the men who had actually fought got nothing. An early grave or the emigrant ship. Sometimes I get sick when I see what I fought for,’ Moran said.

‘It makes no sense your not taking the IRA pension. You earned it. You could still have it in the morning,’ McQuaid said.

‘I’d throw it in their teeth,’ Moran clenched and unclenched his hands as he spoke.

‘I never question the colour of any man’s money. If I’m offered it I take it,’ but Moran was too consumed to respond and McQuaid went on. ‘Then it began to get easier. We hadn’t to hide any longer. One hot day I remember leaving guns and clothes along the river bank and swimming without a stitch on. Another Sunday we went trolling, dragging an otter behind the boat. Then they tried to bring in the general.’

‘He wasn’t a general. He was a trumped-up colonel.’

‘Whatever he was we settled his hash,’ McQuaid gloated. ‘You had a great head on you the way you thought the plan through from beginning to end. You’ve been wasted ever since.’

‘Without you it would never have worked. You were as cool as if you were out for a stroll,’ Moran said.

‘You could plan. You worked it out from beginning to end. None of the rest of us had that kind of head.’

‘We had spies. We had men in the town for weeks. They were bringing the big fellow in on the three o’clock train. They were going to put on the big show. They had a band and a guard of honour outside the station, their backs to a row of railwaymen’s cottages. They never checked the cottages.’

‘They wouldn’t have found us anyhow.’

‘Nibs McGovern met that train every day with his trolley to pick up the papers and the Boland loaves that the shops got for special customers. He was such a fixture that no one noticed him any more. It fell into our hands.’

‘Looking back on it the plan couldn’t have been simpler but we must have rehearsed it forty times. We all slipped into town after dark. Only Tommy Flood, the solicitor’s clerk, gave any trouble.’

‘Then we nabbed Nibs,’ McQuaid laughed. ‘Just as he was getting ready to go out on the town. We were lucky there as well. Nibs didn’t go to any one pub in particular. Nibs was no trouble. He could think quick enough when he had to. We gave him whiskey and hadn’t to tie him up till the morning and that was only for his own good.’

‘Then there was the waiting,’ Moran said violently.

‘I’ll never forget it. Dressed up in Nibs’s gear,’ McQuaid said. ‘The clothes were fit to stand up on their own, they were that stiff with dust and grease. The waiting was terrible. It’s like getting old. Nothing happens and then the whole bloody thing is on top of you before you know it. The Tommies marching to the station. The band. Sound of the train getting closer and before I knew it I was out on that street pushing the trolley. The wheels were so loose I was afraid they’d fall off. The one thing we never thought of was to check the wheels. The overcoat was buttoned over the gun and the grenade. Even in the middle of summer Nibs wore that overcoat.’