John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘What?’ he stopped.

‘When I was talking to the waterman you never listened to one word.’

‘I did.’

‘What?’

‘About the scorpion.’

‘Anybody’d see you were miles away but you want to be listened to yourself. And you start to pump to avoid having to listen to anything.’

‘I want to get the water up.’

‘Be honest. You’re either pumping water up. Or oiling the floor. Or walking on the beach. Or drunk in the rocking chair staring at the sea. Or running to the village for one thing or another.’

‘Someone has to get the things.’

‘Not that much. The child doesn’t always have to be running messages for Mammy.’ Her voice mimicked the singsong of a child’s voice.

‘Can’t you shut up?’

‘And you’ve done no work for more than a year now. Except run messages for Mammy.’ She continued the mimicry.

‘So I haven’t done any work. Well, I haven’t. And I want to pump the water up.’

‘That’s what you’re running from — your work and from me. I am married to a man who can neither talk nor work.’

‘You have to wait for work to come. Why don’t you do the work if you’re so keen on it, then?’

‘I’ve done the translations for the theatre.’

He was about to say in irritation that translation wasn’t work but drew it back; there had been enough quarrelling for one morning.

‘I want to pump the water up,’ he said.

‘All right, pump the water up,’ she said and went in. As he pumped, both hands on the loose rope, he heard the sharp precise taps of her typewriter through the creak of the pumping and the water falling in the tank from the upstairs room.

When the tank was full, the overflow spilling down on the crushed scorpion, he went towards the fig trees in the hollow between the house and mountain. He sat under the trees to save water. He picked a place between the blackened and dried turds under the trees. When his own smell started to rise above the sharksmell and the encircling flies, he heard the typewriter stop, and when he was close to the house the lavatory upstairs flushed.

A rush of anger came, a waste of water: and then he remembered his father’s nagging over lights left on. ‘You burn enough electricity in this house to run a power station.’ He was ashamed that the instinct to save a few pence of light had become a resentment against the waste of water.

V

He climbed the stairs in the hope of making some amends. It was not an easy life with him in this place and she had followed him from her own country. He’d offered her little, he thought, the day they married: a morning waking into electric light, left on because of the bedbugs.

She had to be at rehearsals at nine. Over breakfast they arranged to meet in the bookshop beside the theatre a half-hour before the wedding. He remembered watching her stand in the sealskin cap and white lambswool coat at the bus stop until the bus came. In less than three hours they’d be married. A man is born and marries and dies, it’d be the toll of the second bell, one more to come; and there’d be no ceremonies, no ring, no gold or silver, no friends, no common culture or tongue: they’d offered each other only themselves.

It was All Souls’ Day and the candles shone against the snow on the graves between the avenues of birches through the bus windows after crossing the bridge past the Alko factory.

Her hands were trembling on the magazine in the bookshop when he arrived. ‘I thought you’d taken the plane.’

‘I am sorry I’m a bit late.’

‘You didn’t want to come?’

‘We better hurry.’

The hall was like an unemployment exchange. She’d taken the script she had been working on at breakfast and made notes on the margins as they waited on the chairs.

‘It’s for the afternoon rehearsal,’ she explained.

A couple in their early fifties, a bald man in a grey suit and a woman in pink taffeta, heavily made-up and carrying a sheaf of roses, were chatting and laughing with another couple.

‘What kind of people are they?’ he asked.

‘Probably married so often already that the church has refused them and they have to come here.’ She continued writing on the margins of the script.

When they were called she asked the two porters to act as witnesses, tipped them when they agreed, and they followed sheepishly to the doorway of the room and remained there during the ceremony neither fully in nor out. The mayor stood with the chain of his office on his breast behind a leather-topped desk.

When the mayor asked the man to put the wedding ring on her finger, they had none, and he looked on in disapproval as she took the silver ring with the green stone the sculptor killed in the car crash had given her, and the man put it on her wedding finger. It was with the same distaste that the mayor called the porters from the doorway to sign the certificate — but they were married. As he paid the fee she joked, ‘The divorce will cost much more.’

They had coffee close to the harbour.

‘It seems as if nothing has happened,’ they said as she went back to rehearsal. He brought wine and meat and returned by bus past the glimmer of candles in the graveyard to switch on all the electric lights in the flat; two-thirty on the clock and already dusk deepening fast.

It was the night of the Arts Ball their wedding quarrel began in the depression of bands and alcohol.

‘You didn’t want to marry me,’ she said.

‘I was there, wasn’t I?’

‘You deliberately left your passport behind.’

‘I wouldn’t have gone back for it if I had.’

‘You resented being married to me — it was unconscious.’

‘I hate this house of bugs. We needn’t ever have moved from the actors’.’

‘Never have moved when they were asking me at the theatre every day if I had the sailor in their flat yet!’

It grew, until she threw the glass of whiskey, stinging his eyes, and they ran from each other in the snow, big snowflakes drifting between the trees. She went to a hotel and he back past the candles, now covered under snow, to the electric-lit room.

Was this whole day to be the shape of their lives together?

VI

The door to the roof balcony was open at the head of the stairs, and on the balcony she lay naked on the yellow bands of the collapsible deck-chair, a bundle of old press cuttings by her head. She was examining an article about herself in a woman’s magazine. It had coloured pictures of her and had been written three years before.

‘You are taking sun?’

‘Why don’t you come and take sun too?’ she asked.

‘I will later. You are reading about yourself?’

‘It’s by Eva who used to live with me. She wanted to put in that I always slept under the pillow. She thought that’d be of much interest to her readers. I didn’t let her.’ She was happy and laughing.

‘Do you ever want to go back to the theatre?’

‘No, no. I married you to get out of the theatre. It’s a system of exploitation.’

‘How?’

‘Everybody is abused and kicked, down to the actor who is the most kicked of all. It’s pure fascism.’

‘You’d never get anything done if someone didn’t impose his will.’

‘That’s what we’ve been taught and we must unlearn. There should be complete participation for everybody.’

‘It wouldn’t work.’

He turned towards the sea. A woman was riding side-saddle past on the dirt-track on a mule. She was all in black against the sea, shaded by a black umbrella she held above her head with the same hand as held the reins.

‘That’s nothing but capitalistic propaganda,’ she said. The conversation was already boring the man.

‘What would you replace them with?’ he inquired, concealing his irritation.