John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘I come at twelve in the jeep and pick you up.’

‘No,’ the man said, desperate for time. ‘We’ll come later on the Vespa.’

‘It’s easier if I pick you up.’

‘No. I have to work first. We’ll come about two on the Vespa.’

‘At two we’ll swim and eat the peaches and drink white wine.’

‘Yes. We want to get back.’

‘I’ll drive you back to the boats.’

The man saw that the juice stains were wider now on the blue denim as they got into the jeep.

At the café, where José still sat motionless as any lizard, the magistrate said as he stopped the jeep, ‘You soon don’t see those scum any more.’

‘They are my friends,’ the man interrupted.

‘It is because you don’t know. Soon you know you have better friends. Tomorrow we swim and eat peaches and drink wine,’ he said, his eyes openly fondling the woman’s body.

‘At two,’ the man said.

XIV

José was stiff with dignity at the red café table.

‘You have been my friend, but if I see you again with that bastard … Kaput.’ He made a chopping stroke with his hand as if breaking the back of a rabbit’s neck.

‘It seemed to all happen as if I had no choice.’

‘This time yes but not the next time.’

The woman, who had remained more blank than silent, sobbed and turned. ‘You see what he did, José?’

‘He put the peaches in your pocket?’ José looked anxiously at the man; he did not want to get involved.

When the man moved to take the peaches from the breast pockets she stopped him. ‘I am able to take them out myself.’

She took them out one by one. The skins were broken and the flesh crushed. She set them on the table, where three rolled to the outer rim.

‘You don’t want his peaches.’ José quietly swept the peaches from the table and they tumbled out into the dust of the roadway.

‘No, no,’ the woman affirmed angrily. ‘I don’t.’

She no longer sobbed but her face was firm against the man, who was more in despair than shame.

The flop-flop of Tomás’s slippers came down the café to the red tables outside. When he heard the story of the orchard, José translated what he said.

‘He said he wouldn’t serve that bastard. He sent his son out with the cognacs’; and added, ‘He has to be careful though. He has a café.’

‘Why is he so hated?’ the man asked.

‘His family were always fascists. We shot his two brothers, and when the fascists won he went into the Murcia jail with a bundle of birches. And he went from cell to cell till he broke every birch he had on the prisoners’ backs. My brother was a prisoner there but not even a fascist pig beats shackled prisoners.’ José was clinched in hatred even when he broke off to translate for Tomás who nodded that it was true.

When the woman asked Tomás if she could use his back room to wash the peach juice from her dress he came with her to show her where it was, and while they were away José leaned towards the man, ‘If you are not careful you will lose wife. That fascist pig doesn’t want to give you peaches. He wants your wife. He wants to fuck your wife.’

‘I know,’ the man said. ‘Will you have a drink?’

‘I’ll have a cognac.’

The boy came with the cognacs and as the man paid he flinched at the look he thought he saw on the boy’s face. The fishing boats with their flotilla of gulls flashing in the late sun were closing on the harbour. When the woman came from the back room her hair was combed so that it shone gold and her face was made-up.

‘You want me to come and get some fish for you?’ José asked.

‘No. Not this evening,’ the man said. ‘I think we should go.’

‘I am ready,’ the woman said coldly.

As they turned away from the harbour the small figure of José got up from the table and made his way out of habit, the black beret at its usual angle, towards the incoming boats, as the greyhounds, their legs wavering under the cages of their ribs, started to come out of their porches to search for garbage in the cool.

XV

They rode in silence on the tar but when they came to the dirt-track the woman said, ‘Please stop.’ She got off the pillion seat. ‘I’m walking to the house. If I have to look for another husband I don’t want any more scars on my face,’ and she looked hard and cold and tense, the profile lifted. The man drove ahead without speaking. The shark stank less in the cool, the bones wore little flesh, but he’d not be here, he thought, to see them bleach and break up in the sun. The light was good enough for him to see the flash of the lizards on the path move from a point of complete stillness to the next, out of way of the Vespa.

He sat in the rocking chair with the door open waiting for her to come up the path. Her mood had not changed.

‘I’d like to leave tomorrow,’ he said when she put down the crocheted woollen bag with the silver clasp and chain. He counted five drops of water from the clay jars drip into the bowls before she said, ‘Where to?’ in a tense voice.

‘To London. You said you wanted to go back to London.’

‘Running is no solution. We’ve always been moving. And what’ll you do about your white wine and peaches?’

‘We won’t be here. It is why I played for two o’clock.’

‘Why didn’t you do something when he started to push in the peaches?’ she said fiercely, and then the first dry sob came between the slow drips of water.

‘If I hit him and wound up in a Spanish jail it’d do us all a lot of good,’ he said.

‘You always have some excuse. You never give me any support. You know how awful it is to be married to a weak man. If I was married to a strong man like my father it would be different.’

‘It would be some other way but you’d be the same.’

‘I’d have support then. And what’ll we do after London?’ she stopped crying to ask, sudden demanding aggression in the voice.

‘We can decide that when we get there.’

‘It may be decided for you this time,’ she threatened.

‘Well, then it’ll be decided for me,’ he said.

With an explosive word he couldn’t catch she climbed the stairs. He heard her turning on the bed as he got the suitcases out of the garage.

He hurriedly and raggedly got them out. When he’d the gas lamp lit and was looking about for what to put first in the suitcases open on the floor, he heard her loudly at the closet as if she’d started to take out her dresses.

Later, when the man went upstairs to the room, he found she’d taken all her clothes out of the wardrobe and had arranged them on the bed ready for packing, and she was muttering, ‘Yes. It was no more than I deserved. I didn’t see to the cabbages.’

Her face was hard and tense and she was not crying.

Two cars outside the low concrete wall of Arigna School, small and blue-slated between the coal mountains; rust of iron on the rocks of the trout stream that ran past the playground; the chant of children coming through the open windows into the rain-cleaned air: it was this lured me back into the schoolroom of this day — to watch my manager, Canon Reilly, thrash the boy Walshe; to wait for the Recruiting Officer to come — but a deeper reason than the quiet picture of the school between mountains in bringing me back, can only be finally placed on something deep in my own nature, a total paralysis of the will, and a feeling that any one thing in this life is almost as worthwhile doing as any other.

I had got out of the Christian Brothers, I no longer wore the black clothes and white half-collar, and was no longer surrounded by the rules of the order in its monastery; but then after the first freedom I was afraid, it was that I was alone.