John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘There, Jim.’

‘Thanks, Rose.’

The knife and fork rang often on the plate to break the aggressive sucking and swallowing of the food, but he said nothing.

‘I came on the train,’ I offered, and had to smile at how foolishly it hung in the silence till he lifted his hat with the flourish of a man in a hurry, the sweat-band still apparently intact, and went in the direction of the timber-stack.

When he’d gone she put my plate on the table. ‘There’s some dinner.’

‘Why didn’t he speak? Does he not want me in the house?’ I asked quietly as I ate.

She was stirring a mixture of meal and skim milk in a bucket for the calf with a stick.

‘Do you know, Rose?’ I’d to ask again.

‘It’s not my place to interfere. It’ll only drag more trouble into it.’

‘Well, I’ll ask him myself.’

‘What do you want to go and upset him for?’ Her voice was sharp.

‘No. I can’t stay here without knowing whether he wants me or not. The place is his.’

‘If you let it go today it’ll calm down and tomorrow it’ll be as if nothing happened,’ she reasoned in her care, but I could feel the hatred. The disappointment and pain had hardened with the years, but she could mask them better now.

In the confidence of her first days in the house she’d taken down the brown studio photo of the old wedding, Warner Artist Grafton Street , replacing it with the confetti-strewn black and white of her own, the sensible blue costume in place of the long white dress to the silver shoes. She’d been too old for white.

Against her hopes, too old for children too, the small first communion and the confirmation photos stayed on the sideboard, replaced by no other, only disappearing when the youngest left and they were alone.

All remembered her near madness in the middle of her months as she felt the last years slip.

‘For Chrisake don’t you know there’s children listening? I’m tired. Let me get to sleep.’

‘You should have stuck with your children to the grave.’

The noise of the blow came, she escaping to the fields, losing herself between the tree trunks till she’d grown cold and come in to sit numbly in a chair over the raked fire till morning. Perhaps she’d hoped he’d come, but he hadn’t, stiff with anger at the shouted insult to his maleness, more bitter since it echoed his own bitterness at growing old. The next day he’d dug the potatoes where the sheets hung on the line between two trees above the ridge, scattering clay on the sheets she’d scrubbed white for hours on the wooden scrubbing-board.

The years had gone by and now they were alone and he was her child and everything. I could understand her care and hatred, but it was getting late, and I didn’t want to stay.

I found him splitting lengths of beech beside the useless pier he’d built to absorb the glass about the house, dangerous with jagged bits. He held the length steady with his boot against the pier while he drove the wedge into the timber. I waited until it split and the wedge fell loose.

‘Can I speak to you?’

As he turned to put another length of beech into position, I said, ‘If you don’t answer I’ll just leave.’

‘Well, I’m not in America as you can no doubt see.’ He suddenly turned.

‘I can’t understand why you’ve not spoken to me since I came.’

‘You’re joking surely. Do you mean to tell me that you don’t know why?’

‘I don’t. I’d not ask you if I knew.’

‘You mean to say you know nothing about that letter you wrote in the spring?’ he accused, the voice breaking under the whole day’s resentment. ‘I had to wait till near the end of my days for a right kick in the teeth.’

There was the treacherous drag to enter the emotion, to share and touch, the white lengths of beechwood about his boots and the veins swollen dark on the back of the old hands holding the sledge. With his sleeve he wiped away tears.

‘The one important thing I ever asked you couldn’t even be bothered,’ he accused.

‘That’s not true. When you wrote you wanted to move to Dublin I went round the auctioneers, sent you lists, looked at places.’

‘And you said if I did get a place and moved that you wanted no room in it.’

‘I want to live on my own. I didn’t want you to come thinking differently.’

‘I didn’t come under illusions. You took good care of that,’ he accused bitterly. ‘And I was foolish enough to think there might be more than pure selfishness.’

I knew the wheel: fathers become children to their sons who repay the care they got when they were young, and on the edge of dying the fathers become young again; but the luck of a death and a second marriage had released me from the last breaking on this ritual wheel.

‘You are married,’ I said. It was a washing of hands.

‘Yes, I’m married,’ he said in a bitterness close to regret. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘What did she think of you leaving?’

‘She’d be hardly likely to stay here on her own if I went.’ He resented the question.

‘It’s your life and her life, for me to enter it would be simple intrusion. In the long run it’d cause trouble for everybody.’

I could hear the measured falseness of my own voice, making respectable with the semblance of reason what I wanted anyhow.

‘I’d give anything to get out of this dump,’ he changed.

‘It’s quiet and beautiful.’ The same hollowness came, I was escaping, soothing the conscience as the music did the office.

‘Quiet as a graveyard,’ he took up. ‘And stare at beauty every day and it’ll turn sicker than stray vomit. The barracks shut now, a squad car in its place. Sometimes children come to the door with raffle tickets, that’s all. But there’s plenty of funerals, so busy Mrs McGreevy’s coffin last month came out roped on the roof of the bread van, and the way they talked about her was certain proof if proof was needed that nobody seriously believes in an after-life. They were sure they’d never hear the edge of her tongue again either in hell or heaven or the duck-arsed in-between. I’d give anything to get out,’ he said with passion.

There was silence but it was easier after he’d spoken. Then he asked, ‘Are you down for long?’

‘I’ll stay till tomorrow if it’s all right.’

‘That’s about as long as you can stand us I suppose.’

‘It’s not that. I have to be at work.’

I helped him gather the tools.

‘I think Rose is giving you your old room. I want to get the last things done before night.’

‘I’ve left your case in your old room, the bed is aired,’ she said when I came in.

‘There’s no trouble any more but I have to go tomorrow, it’s to be back at the office,’ I explained.

‘The next time you must come for longer.’ It was easy in the lies that give us room.

‘I’ll do that and thank you.’

Quietly the dark came, the last tasks hurried, a shift of hens on the roost of the hen-house before the bolting of the door. Inside, the lamp was lit and he said, ‘That’s another day put down,’ as he took off his boots and socks, reek of feet and sweat as he draped socks over the boots on the floor.

‘Rose, the corns were tormenting me no end today. Any chance you’d give them a scrape with the razor?’

‘You better soak them first,’ she answered.

She placed a basin of steaming water by his chair on the floor, the water yellowing when she added Dettol. She moved the lamp closer.

He sat there, her huge old child, soaking his feet in water, protesting like a child. ‘It’s scalding, Rose,’ and she laughed back, ‘Go on, don’t be afraid.’ And when she knelt on the floor, her grey hair falling low, and dried the feet that dripped above the lighted water, I was able to go out without being noticed as she opened the bright razor.