John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘But you can’t leave in the middle of a production.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t explain properly. Of course I’ll see the production through, but I won’t be renewing my contract when it expires at the end of the year.’

‘Is it salary?’ He sat down behind his big desk and motioned to her to sit.

‘No. I am leaving the theatre. I want to try to write,’ she blurted out to save explanation.

‘It’s even more precarious than the theatre, and now that you’ve made your way there why throw it over for something worse still?’ He was old and kindly and wise, though he too must have had to be ruthless in his day.

‘I must find out whether I can or not. I’ll only find out by finding out. I’ll come back if I fail.’

‘You know, contrary to the prodigal son story, few professions welcome back their renegades?’

‘I’ll take that risk.’

‘Well, I see you’re determined.’ He rose.

As soon as a production begins to take shape it devours everybody around it so that one has no need for company or friends or anything outside it, and in the evening one takes a limp life home with no other idea than to restore it so that it can be devoured anew the next day. As she went home on the tram two days before the dress rehearsal she hadn’t enough strength to be angry when she saw her photo in the evening paper and read that she was leaving the theatre to write. She was leaving to try to write. She should have been more careful. Kind as he was she should have known that the old manager would use any publicity in any way to fill the theatre. To write was better copy than the truthful try to write. She wondered tiredly if there was a photo of the coffin being lifted out of the oyster wagon or of the starving man in his summer coat in the rain outside the restaurant while the boy crunched on the oyster shells within; and whether it was due to the kindness usually reserved for the dear departed or mere luck, no production of hers had ever opened before to such glowing notices.

She left on New Year’s Eve for Spain, by boat and train, passing through Stockholm and Copenhagen, and stopping five days in Paris where she knew some people. She had with her the complete works of Chekhov, and the two sentences were more permanently engraved than ever in her mind: The word Oysters was chalked on the wagon that carried Chekhov’s body to Moscow for burial. The coffin was carried in the oyster wagon because of the fierce heat of early July.

She stayed five days in the Hôtel Celtique on the rue Odessa, and all her waking hours seemed taken up with meeting people she already knew. Most of them scraped a frugal living from translation or journalism or both and all of them wrote or wanted to be artists in one way or another. They lived in small rooms and went out to cheap restaurants and movie houses. She saw that many of them were homesick and longed for some way to go back without injuring their self-esteem and that they thought her a fool for leaving. In their eyes she read contempt. ‘So she too has got the bug. That’s all we need. One more,’ and she began to protect herself by denying that there was any foundation to the newspaper piece. On the evening before she took the train to Spain she had dinner in a Russian restaurant off the Boulevard St Michael with the cleverest of them all: the poet Seven. He had published three books of poems, and the previous year she had produced a play of his that had been taken off after a week though it was highly praised by the critics. His threadbare dark suit was spotless, and the cuffs and collar of the white shirt shone, the black bow knotted with a studied carelessness. They were waited on by the owner, a little old hen of a Russian woman who spoke heavily accented French and whose thinning hair was dyed carrot. A once powerful man played an accordion at the door.

‘Well, Eva Lindberg, can you explain to me what you’re doing haring off to Spain instead of staying up there to empty that old theatre of yours with my next play?’ The clever mordant eyes looked at her through unrimmed spectacles with ironic amusement.

‘I was offered a loan of a house.’ She was careful.

‘And they inform me you intend to write there. You know there’s not room for the lot of us.’

‘That’s just a rumour that got into a newspaper.’

‘What’ll you do down there, a single woman among hordes of randy Spaniards?’

‘For one thing I have a lot of reading to catch up on.’ She was safe now, borrowing aggression from his aggression.

‘And why did you leave the theatre?’

‘I felt I was getting stale. I wasn’t enjoying it any more.’

‘Have you money?’

‘I have enough money. What about your own work?’

He started to describe what he was working on with the mockery usually reserved for the work of others. The accordion player came round the tables with a saucer, bullying those who offered him less than a franc. They had a second carafe of red wine and finished with a peppered vodka. Warmed by the vodka, he asked her to sleep with him, his face so contorted at having to leave himself open to rejection that she felt sorry for him.

‘Why not?’ he pushed; soon he would begin to mock his own desire.

‘I’ve told you,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve had enough. I want to be alone for a time.’

She was alone for the whole of the journey the next evening and night, going early to her sleeper, changing at the frontier the next morning into the wider Spanish train, which got into Barcelona just before noon. A taximan took her to the small Hotel New York in the Gothic quarter and it proved as clean and cheap as he said it would be. She stayed five days in Barcelona and was happy. Like an army in peacetime she was doing what she had to do by being idle and felt neither guilt nor need to make a holiday.

She walked the narrow streets, went to a few museums and churches, bought a newspaper on the Ramblas, vivid with the flower stalls under the leafless trees in the cold dry weather, and ate each evening at the Casa Agut, a Catalan restaurant a few minutes walk from the hotel. She sat where she could watch the kitchen and always had gaspacho, ensalada and a small steak with a half-bottle of red Rioja, enjoying the march of the jefe who watched for the slightest carelessness, the red and white towel on his shoulder like an epaulet. After five such days she took the train to Valencia where she got the express bus to Almería. She would get off at Vera and get a taxi to the empty house on the shore. It was on this bus that she made her first human contact since leaving Paris, a Swedish homosexual who must have identified her as Scandinavian by her clothes and blonde hair and who asked if he could sit beside her. ‘How far are you going?’ she asked when she saw she was stuck with him for the journey. ‘I don’t know. South. I can go as far as I want.’ Though the hair was dyed blond the lines in the brittle feminine face showed he was sixty or more. He spoke only his own language and some English and was impressed by her facility for acquiring languages. She wondered if the homosexual love of foreignness was that having turned away from the mother or been turned away they needed to do likewise with their mother tongue. ‘Aren’t you a lucky girl to find languages so easy?’ She resented the bitchiness that inferred a boast she hadn’t made.

‘It’s no more than being able to run fast or jump. It means you can manage to say more inaccurately in several languages what you can say better in your own. It’s useful sometimes but it doesn’t seem very much to me if that’s all it achieves.’

‘That’s too deep for me.’ He was resentful and impressed and a little scared. ‘Are you on a holiday?’