John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘I think Africa,’ the uncertain reply came, and his sudden flush and blanching brought Ingolsby in.

‘Because somebody happens to be a teacher is no reason why they should know where Lagos is.’

‘If teachers don’t know that sort of thing who can know?’ Haydon was angered. ‘Don’t they have to teach the stuff to kids?’

‘If a teacher has to teach a geography lesson he simply looks up his information in a textbook beforehand. A doctor doesn’t go round with all his patients’ ailments in his head. He has files,’ Ingolsby explained with solid satisfaction.

‘But it’s not getting us any nearer to where the hell Lagos is?’

‘It’s in Nigeria,’ Ingolsby said.

‘It’s in Nigeria, in Africa.’ Ryan tried to smooth over the antagonism.

‘That was what I wanted to know. Thank you, Mr Ryan,’ Haydon said pointedly and buried his head in the newspaper again.

‘Amazing the actual number of places there is in this world, when you come to think,’ O’Connor added.

‘A man could spend his whole life learning the names of places and they’d still be as many as the sands of the seashore left,’ McVittie said.

The ball was idle in my hand. The tide was full, a coal boat moving out from Sligo in the channel. There were no blue spaces against Knocknarea.

Small annual calvary of the poor, mile downhill and uphill between Parkes’ and the cannon. The Calm Sea closer, inlet that ran to Ballisodare past the lobster pool, no envy there, deserted except the one day they put flags down and held the races at low tide, but still in the dead quiet the pain of voices coming across the golf links, and Jane Simpson with others there.

The first rain was loud on Haydon’s newspaper, and it was followed by a general rising and gradual procession indoors between the still sparse drops.

‘Imagine the name they called this.’ Ingolsby paused to hold a blood-orange rose towards Ryan as they went along the flowerbed.

‘I’m not so well up on flowers,’ Ryan apologized.

‘Climbing Mrs Sam McGredy. Climbing Mrs Sam McGredy,’ Ingolsby enunciated.

‘Names are a funny thing,’ Ryan said without thought.

‘Names are a funny thing, as you put it,’ Ingolsby repeated sarcastically. ‘ Peace or Ena Harkness or even the Moulin Rouge but Climbing Mrs Sam McGredy ! That’s an atom bomb,’ then he lowered his voice. ‘Never feel you have to know anything because you happen to teach. Never let them bully you with their assumptions of what you should be. Say you don’t know, that it can be discovered in books, if they’re interested. It’s only pretending to know something that’s embarrassing.’

The counsel roused impotent deeps of hatred in Ryan’s eyes as they went the last steps to the door.

A Miss Evans was the one addition to the company over lunch, and when the litter was cleared away with the sheets that served as cloth, and the old varnish of the big elliptical table shone dully about the bowl of roses put back on its centre, Mrs Parkes set a small coal fire to burn in the grate as an apology for the gloom of rain. All the bars of the evening had fallen into place. ‘The rain anywhere is bad, but at the sea, at the sea, it’s the end,’ rose as a constant sighing in the conversations. The need to escape to some other world grew fiercer, but there was no money.

‘Steal, steal, steal,’ was the one way out.

Raincoat and southwester and outside — without them noticing. Mist halfway down the slopes of Knocknarea, rain and mist blurring the sea. Past Huggards, past the peeling white swan sailing on the signboard of the Swan Hotel, steady drip from the eaves louder than the distant fall of the sea and gull cries, glow of the electric light burning inside through the mist on Peebles’ window, stationer and confectioner: shock of the warning bell ringing as you opened the door.

A girl in blue overalls behind the counter was helping a man choose postcards and they were laughing.

‘Can I help you?’ She turned.

‘I want to look round.’ It was the only possible thing, and it was lucky she was busy with the man.

Rows of comics were on the counter, hours of insensibility to the life in Parkes’, Wizard and Hotspur and Rover and Champion , whole worlds.

Put a Hotspur on top of the Wizard , both on top of the yellow pile of Rovers , and draw breath. The man was paying for the postcards. Lift the three free, put them inside the open raincoat, the elbow holding them tight against the side. Walk.

‘Any chance of seeing you in the Silver Slipper tonight?’ the man asked.

‘Stranger things happened in the world,’ she answered, and they both laughed again.

It was impossible to walk loose and casual to the door, it was one forced step after the other, having to think to walk, waiting all the time for the blow from behind. ‘Excuse me,’ it’d probably begin, and then the shame, the police. To get caught the one reason not to steal. In the next world it was only a venial sin, purgatory, and the saints alone got the through express to heaven.

Step after step and rigid step and no blow, a cash register ringing and then the warning bell above the door and the breathing relief of the wet out-of-doors to the sea blurred beyond the golf links, rain coming down same as ever before. Past Huggards and over the sodden sand of the street, raindrops brilliant in the red ruffles of the roses by the wall.

‘Where did you get the money from for that trash?’ came once I was in the room.

‘Sixpence I found down at the front yesterday.’

‘Why have you to be always stuck in that trash? Why can’t you read something good like Shakespeare that’ll be of some use to you later?’

The old tune: some use to you later.

‘I don’t imagine the comics’ll do much harm. Good taste isn’t cultivated in a day. We rise on stepping stones to greater things,’ Ingolsby intervened.

‘I suppose there’s some consolation in that.’ Ryan was anxious to escape, knowing the hostility the themes of Ingolsby’s ponderous conversations roused. They were felt as a slur or rebuke. This time he’d not escape easily. Ingolsby needed to live through his own voice too this wet evening.

‘What’s your opinion of Shakespeare’s validity for the modern world?’

‘It’s not so easy to say,’ he deferred again, his eyes anxious about the room, his wife on the sofa with Mrs O’Connor, measuring a sleeve of a pullover on their daughter; soon she’d be knitting silently and patiently again while the night came the same as every other coming into her patient life, while McVittie said to O’Connor, ‘The shops out in the country were hard hit by emigration. But we managed to survive. We branched into new lines. We got Esso to put down a petrol pump for instance. We changed with the times.’

‘It’s a cardinal law of nature that every man should have his head firmly screwed on to know how to change with the times and survive,’ O’Connor agreed.

The people in the room had broken up into their separate groups, and when Miss Evans raised her arms in a yawn out of the chair Haydon leaned forward to say, ‘There must have been right old sport last night.’

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Haydon,’ she laughed, pleased.

‘The way all women are, all on their dignity till the business gets down to brass tacks and then an almighty turn of events. And who’d object to an old roll between the sandhills after the dancing anyhow?’ he raised his voice, as if to irritate Ingolsby, who was pressing a reluctant Ryan on Wordsworth.

She laughed softly, a hint of defiance against the unconcealed hostility of the married women with their children in the laugh, smiling a little as she looked towards the windows streaming with rain.