John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘Would you like to have some coffee?’ the man asked when his wife had accepted the roses.

Over the tepid coffee they listened for an hour to the state of his garden, the cost of water, and the precariousness of the world’s monetary system.

When he’d gone they examined the empty biscuit box. Huntley and Palmer figrolls it had once held, and suddenly they both started to laugh at once. The woman came into the man’s arms and lifted her mouth to be kissed.

‘We won’t fight, will we?’

‘I don’t want to fight.’

‘Don’t worry about the eyes. We’ll never have the divorce?’

‘Never.’

She started to clear the dishes from the table, humming happily as she did. ‘It’s bad to fight. It’s good to be brisk. Do you know who loves you?’

He said, ‘I think you’re very beautiful,’ glad of a respite he knew wouldn’t last for long.

II

‘Why did we come here to this shocking country in the first place?’ the woman accused.

‘It was cheap and there was sea and sun and we thought it would be a good place to work,’ he enumerated defensively.

‘And you know how much work has been done?’

‘Yes. None.’

‘We could have stayed in hotels as cheaply as it costs to rent here. Neither of us wanted to leave Barcelona when we did. But because those phoney painter bastards had to have a taxi because of their baby you came when you did. They wanted you to come to get you to pay half of their taxi fare. When we could have travelled slowly and cheaply we had that terrible fourteen-hour drive, with the baby slobbering and crying.’

He remembered the scent of orange blossom coming through the open window, small dark shapes of the orange trees outside the path of the headlights and Norman, the painter, saying, ‘Smell the orange blossom, sweetie, isn’t it marvellous, isn’t it marvellous to be here in Spain?’; and then turning back to yell into the darkness of the taxi, ‘For Christ’s sake, sweetie, can’t you get him to shut up for one minute?’

‘Yes. It was horrible but we were dependent on them for the language,’ the man said.

‘We would have managed.’ The woman enunciated each word separately, in slow derision.

‘They put us up after the crash,’ the man said.

‘Yes, but even you insisted on leaving, with him strutting naked round our beds with an erection, going on about the marvels of nudity and bringing those awful paintings up for us to see when we had no choice but to look at them.’

‘We’ve finished with those people.’

‘They practically had to shit all over you before you did anything.’

One day they came with their child to the house to swim in the sea and Norman had behaved as if in his own house. He’d gone upstairs after swimming and started to shower without asking. The man had asked them to leave. It had been the last straw.

‘They’d practically to shit all over the house before you asked them to leave,’ the woman taunted.

‘Can’t you shut up and give me some peace?’

‘And now we can’t even open doors or windows because of the shark. I don’t know what brought us to this country. Why did I ever leave my own birches?’ She started to cry.

‘Can’t you, can’t you shut up!’ the man said. ‘And you’re not going to provoke me into hitting you. That’s too easy.’

An image came of blood streaming down her finger from the splinters of a wine glass he’d swept once from her hand, the look of triumph on her face as she said, ‘Now we see the street angel in his royal colours — nothing but a mean, mean bully.’

‘You’re going to have to accept the fact of your own hatred. There’s no use absolving it temporarily by provoking me to violence.’

‘Bah,’ she said, ‘I laugh at that. I wouldn’t even bother to answer that.’

III

The man swept the dead spiders and scorpions and lizards across the floor of the empty pool and shovelled them out on to the bank. The dry scorpions broke into sections but the spiders and lizards lay stiff as in life on the bank of old mortar and gravel.

The clean floor of the pool was ready for the waterman when he came. He backed up his small tanker, originally designed to carry petrol or fuel oil, to the edge of the pool. He’d saved the money to buy the tanker by working for one year in a steel works in Düsseldorf. He connected the ragged pipe to the end of the tanker, and when he turned the brass handle the water started to run into the pool with several small jets leaking out on the way. The woman came out in a blue bathrobe trimmed with white on the edges, and the three started to watch, in the simple fascination of water filling an empty pool.

‘The fish, the fish it stinks.’ The man pointed to the shore.

‘Yes, it stinks,’ the man answered.

‘What did you think of Germany?’

‘The roads, great roads, much speed.’

Then suddenly he stiffened, gave a sharp cry of fear, and seized the shovel by the side of the pool, pointing to a scorpion between two stones close to the wall of the house. In a panic he started to beat it with the shovel until he made paste of it against the bone-hard ground. When he’d put the shovel aside he caught his ankle in his hand, miming gestures of pain.

‘Bad, bad,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen men made babies by the stings.’

‘It’s the only thing outside the humans that commits suicide,’ the woman said.

It was a favourite subject of hers, the parallels between animal and human behaviour. It bored him.

Mention of suicide suddenly brought back the early days of their relationship in that country of snow and birch trees and white houses rising out of red granite against a frozen sea, a light of metal that made the oranges and lemons shine like lamps in the harbour market. It was before they married. He was waiting for his papers to come and they were living in one of the houses along the shore close to the middle of the city.

‘It’s owned by the Actors’ Union for the actors when they get too old to act,’ she’d explained to him.

‘But how does it happen that you who are young and successful can get a room here?’

‘There’s not enough old ones. They have empty places.’

‘But where are the old, then?’

‘They’ve gone to the seaside.’

He at once accepted that the Actors’ Union had two houses, and the elderly had a choice of a house in the city or a house by the seaside, until an evening over brandies and coffee with a friend of hers, the quiet Anselm, who was more interested in the history of rocking chairs than in his legal practice, had remarked, ‘It is extraordinary that the Actors’ Union give the retired a choice of a house in the city or by the sea.’

‘Why?’

‘She said that the reason she had a room in the old actors’ house was that there were vacant rooms because some of the retired preferred to live in another house at the seaside, that they had choice.’

‘No, no.’ She’d overheard from the kitchen. ‘No, no. I meant that they’d gone to the suicide.’

He grew aware of her hostile stare at the pool’s edge. Perhaps he was neglecting the waterman. Quickly he asked him if he’d have something to drink. He wanted water. When they’d given him the drink and paid him, the waterman told them he’d to hurry away to bring two loads of water for the Canadian’s roses before lunch.

IV

As soon as the tanker moved towards the dirt-track the man started to pump the water up to the tank on the roof, though he knew the woman was staring at his back with arms folded. The wooden handle of the pump had split, was held together with a rope, and was loose and awkward about the iron spike.

‘I want to speak to you about something.’ Her voice was cold.