John McGahern - Amongst Women

‘I’m glad to be here.’

‘We better be going in,’ Moran said.

‘We never see you nowadays except at weddings,’ Sheila said to him out of nervousness.

‘Aren’t they the best of all places?’ he responded. ‘Especially when it is your wedding, Sheila.’

‘We better be going in,’ Moran said again.

Sheila took his arm and they walked in silence up the aisle to where Sean Flynn and his brother waited at the altar rail. Only once during the ceremony did the happy couple’s eyes meet and it was in mutual sympathy at what they had agreed to put one another through.

Photos were taken outside the church while the wind blew newspapers about on the concrete and women placed steadying hands on hats and veils. Confetti was thrown. A car with white streamers took them down the road to the Avonmore Hotel. A long diagonal handle crossed the curtained glass of the hotel door.

Inside, a horseshoe desk in the hallway faced the open door to the reception room where a long table was laid. The young priest who had married them sat at the head of the table and the two families faced one another across its narrow board. Sherry or whiskey was offered but most people took orange juice. Those who drank thought it was more polite to take the sherry. Except for the priest’s promptings it was clear that they could have gone from the soup to the chicken to the sherry trifle without pausing for speech or toast. Moran made the longest speech, stressing the importance of the family. There were times when the sense of his own importance seemed to overwhelm him but never sufficiently to lose thread of the grave and carefully crafted speech. His old practice at writing letters stood him in good stead. By the time he sat down there were tears in Rose’s and the girls’ eyes. In contrast, the father of the bridegroom was the picture of acute misery as he stumbled through the whole of one short sentence welcoming Sheila into his family. While he spoke his enormous hand encircled his sherry glass as if it were a stalk of grass.

If there had been a great show of music and drinking and dancing it might have hidden the awkwardness of the occasion. Only the worn face of Sean’s mother was a study of pure emotion. He had been her first boy, her beloved. From an early age she had encouraged him at school, protecting him from the rough work of the farm; at times she had even fed him separately from his brothers and sisters. During the long summers when he came home from boarding school she made sure that he was able to read or go on walks even when his sisters were pressed into farm work. He was her special one. One day she would kneel and watch him raise the Host in the local church and after she was gone he would say Mass for her soul. When he entered the civil service instead of continuing to Maynooth, the disappointment stayed with her like a physical injury for months. Now she was losing him to another woman and he was taking on the mere life of any man with a woman. Her eyes were mutely fastened to him as he was getting ready to leave. When he took her in his arms — ‘Mind yourself, Mother!’ — at last she broke into the relief of tears. She watched the two heads framed in the back window of the car taking them to the airport disappear in the traffic. He did not look back once.

Before Sheila left with her husband she went up to Luke. ‘Now that you have found the way you’ll have to come home more often.’

‘I hope you’ll both be very happy,’ he replied and though she kissed him warmly she made it dear that she knew that he was avoiding answering her.

He was quiet throughout the afternoon, listening attentively

to anybody who spoke to him, asking polite questions, smiling, raising his glass. He sat between Mona and Michael and as Moran did not look his way there was no difficulty until the meal ended and people were preparing, with relief, to go their separate ways. Moran could be seen to be more obviously avoiding Luke. He stood in a cloud of moral injury. Noticing this, Luke went directly up to Moran. Seeing their brother go straight up to their father, the girls froze in an old fear of violence.

‘I want to thank you.’ Luke said.

‘For what?’ Moran asked.

‘For the meal, the day, for everything.’

‘I hope it never comes to such a state that you have to thank your father for a meal.’

Luke bowed to Rose who was straining close to tears. ‘I have to thank someone.’

‘Aren’t you travelling further than this after all these years?’ Moran asked as his son seemed about to turn away.

‘I have to be back in London this evening.’

‘For what?’

‘I have work to do there.’

‘There’ll be work long after you’re dead and gone.’

‘I know that but it will not be my work,’ Luke said with the first and only hint of firmness that day.

‘God help you,’ Moran said.

‘Goodbye then. If you are ever in London it would be a pleasure to see you.’

‘We’ll not be in London.’ Moran refused his son’s hand.

As he was about to go to the airport Luke said to Maggie, ‘You see, I kept my promise: I did not exist today.’

‘You could have made more of an effort after all this time,’ Maggie said reproachfully. She had left her son with a sister- in-law in London in order to be free to go to the wedding and to Great Meadow for a fortnight afterwards.

‘It was the best I could do,’ he said. ‘I left Ireland a long time ago.’

‘We all left Ireland,’ Michael, who was standing with them, chuckled. ‘I’m afraid we might all die in Ireland if we don’t get out fast,’ and he laughed louder still at his own elaboration. He too was going home to Great Meadow that evening.

The small car was full as it headed out of the city, Mona, Maggie and Michael crammed in the back. Moran drove in silence. Rose, sitting next to him, tried to lighten the slow journey with delicate titbits of small talk, each ploy more of an open suggestion to the others rather than any statement or judgement of her own. ‘So we’ve lost Sheila,’ she said at last.

‘You thought you’d got rid of me but you still have me to put up with — large as life,’ Maggie responded.

‘We did our best but weren’t able,’ Michael said.

‘You are hardly the man to speak,’ Rose reminded him.

‘I was only joking.’

‘No one is ever lost to the family unless they want to be,’ Moran said stolidly as if reciting a refrain.

‘I wonder how poor Sheila will get on with her new in-laws,’ Rose said. ‘You know how particular she is about people.’

‘They appeared to be decent hardworking people,’ Moran said.

‘The mother of the groom didn’t seem to be enjoying herself very much,’ Maggie said.

‘The poor woman did look upset. I suppose it was very strange to her.’

‘Or Sheila was stealing her darling boy.’

‘I suppose it is the old story,’ Moran said but he did not say what the story was. They were relieved that he had been drawn out of his silence.

By the time the car got to Longford they were tired and cramped. Moran did not offer to stop. If we say the Rosary now we’ll have that much out of the way by the time we get home.’

‘That makes good sense,’ Rose added.

‘We offer this Holy Rosary for Sheila’s happiness,’ Moran began.

The murmur of ‘Glory Be to the Father’ following ‘Hail Mary’ and ‘Hail Mary’ and ‘Our Father’ was as smooth and even as the purr of the engine passing Dromod, Drumsna and Jamestown. Once Michael tried to nudge Maggie into irreverent laughter as she recited her Decade but the elbow she gave him in return was sharp enough to alter his merriment. The last prayer ended as they came to the bridge in Carrick. No one spoke much afterwards except to murmur the names of the houses they passed.