John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘Will you come with me?’ he asked.

‘It is yourself she wants to see.’

When he got back from the hotel he was agitated. ‘She’s all right,’ he said. ‘She had a mild heart attack. She still thinks we’ll get engaged at the end of the month.’

‘I thought that was the idea.’

‘It was. If everything went well,’ he said with emphasis.

‘Did you try to discuss it with her?’

‘I tried. I wasn’t able. All she thinks of is our future. Her head is full of plans.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Clear out,’ he said. ‘There is no other way.’

As if all the irons were suddenly being truly struck and were flowing from all directions to the heart of the green, I saw that my father had started to run like the poor rabbit. He would have been better off if he could have tried to understand something, even though it would get him off nothing. Miss McCabe was not alone in her situation.

‘Where’ll you go to?’ I asked.

‘Home, of course. What are you going to do?’

‘I’ll stay here a while longer. I might go to Dublin in a few days.’

‘What if you run into her and she asks about me?’

‘I’ll tell her you had to go home. How soon are you going?’

‘As soon as I get the stuff into the boot of the car.’

Because I was ashamed of him I carried everything he wanted out to the car.

‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said as he prepared to drive away.

‘No. I don’t mind.’

I watched the car climb the hill. When it had gone out of sight I had the clear vision again of hundreds of irons being all cleanly struck and flowing from every direction into the very heart of the green.

All night the rabbit must have raced from warren to warren, the stoat on its trail. Plumper rabbits had crossed the stoat’s path but it would not be deflected; it had marked down this one rabbit to kill. No matter how fast the rabbit raced, the stoat was still on its trail, and at last the rabbit sat down in terror and waited for the stoat to slither up and cut the vein behind the ear. I had heard it crying as the stoat was drinking its blood.

I

There are times when we see the small events we look forward to — a visit, a wedding, a new day — as having no existence but in the expectation. They are to be, they will happen, and before they do they almost are not: minute replicas of the expectation that we call the rest of our life.

I used to panic when I saw my life that way, it brought the blind and overmastering desire to escape, and the religious life had seemed for long the one way out: to resign this life, to take on the habit of unchanging death-like days, the sweet passion; and when death came it could hold no terror. I had already died in life.

I no longer panic when I see that way: nature, having started to lose interest in me, is now content to let me drift away, and no longer jabs me so sharply that I must lose myself in life before it is too late.

And I have found Barnaby and Bartleby. All day and every day they are in the doorways of Abbey Street. I call them Barnaby and Bartleby but I do not know their names. They must have some shelter to go to for they disappear from the doorways about eight in winter, an hour later in the summer. I have never seen them leave. They seem to be there one moment and gone the next. I have never watched them go. I feel it would be an intrusion to draw too close and that they mightn’t leave if watched. The early morning is the one time they are busy, searching the bins with total concentration before the garbage trucks come by. They never search the same bin together or stand in the same doorway. Only in freezing weather do they come close, just inside the door of the public lavatory, and even there they keep the red coinslot weighing machine between them, their backs to the wall, above their heads the black arrow pointing to the urinal stalls within.

They seem to change doorways every two hours or so and always to the same doorway at the same time. I thought at first they might be following the sun but then noticed they still changed whether the sun was in or out. They wear long overcoats, tightly belted, with pleats at the back, that had been in fashion about fifteen years before. Often I want to ask them why have they picked on this way to get through life, but outside the certainty of not being answered I soon see it as an idle question and turn away. They never answer strangers who ask about the times of the buses out of Abbey Street. They have their different ways, too, of not answering. Bartleby, the younger and smaller, just moves his boots and averts his face sideways and down; but Barnaby stares steadily over his steel-rimmed spectacles into his interlocutor’s eyes. Otherwise, they seem to take a calm and level interest in everything that goes on outside their doorway. They must be completely law abiding, for the police hardly glance at them as they pass on patrol.

II

The same winter that I began to follow Barnaby and Bartleby I met Kate O’Mara. We met at Nora Moran’s.

Nora Moran was a painter who gave parties round people she hoped would buy her paintings or get her grants from foundations to advance her career or self-esteem; in some way they were all intertwined. We used to make fun of Nora. ‘I ran into Nora Moran today. She’s in a bad way. She’s down to her last three houses,’ after listening to her money worries in some coffee shop off the Green for hours as the coffee went cold and the cups were taken away. In our eyes she was a rich and successful woman. Still, we went to her parties, knowing we were being used as butcher’s grass or chopped-down rhododendron branches to cover up the dusty margins of the processional ways in June. We went out of respect for Nora’s early work and, less honourably, because it took a greater energy to stay away once Nora had made up her mind that we should go. As young women were not Nora’s idea of either butcher’s grass or rhododendrons, it was with surprise that I found myself facing a tall and lovely young woman at a party close to Christmas.

‘Hi,’ she said at once. ‘My name is Kate O’Mara.’

‘How do you happen to be at Nora’s?’ I asked as soon as the courtesies were over.

‘I used to work on a magazine in New York,’ she said. ‘The editor is a friend of Nora’s. We did a profile of her last year. When I was coming to Dublin everybody said I must see her.’

‘You’re here on holiday?’

‘No,’ she said, laughing. ‘I guess you won’t believe it. I came here to write.’

There are so many voices here already, and so little room. Who will hear all the voices, I thought. When I saw Nora Moran coming towards us I asked quickly, ‘Will you let me take you out some evening?’

‘Sure,’ she answered uncertainly, surprised.

I had just time to write down the telephone number before Nora came between us. ‘Well, what are you two getting up to here?’ and when the social laughter ceased, I said, ‘Kate was telling me about this profile of you …’

There was no need to say more. Nora was launched on her favourite subject.

III

‘Why were you so anxious to keep from Nora that we were going out?’ were the first words Kate asked the following Saturday when we were seated in a restaurant.

‘She’d want to come.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘It’s true. She’d control the whole world if she could,’ and then I asked, looking at her ringless fingers, ‘Were you ever married?’

‘No. Why do you ask?’ The soup spoon paused at her lips.

‘No why. It’s probably stupid. We think of Americans as much married.’

‘My mother would have a fit if she heard that. We’re Catholics from way back. Nuns and priests galore. “No one was ever divorced in my family,” my mother is fond of boasting.’