John McGahern - The Collected Stories

She had had breakfast, and as I ate mine it grew clear that even outside the discomfort of remaining in Costello’s hostility I had no longer any reason to stay, not indeed that there seemed any reason ever to have come. A kind of anger against her for giving me no warning hardened my decision to leave at once. There was only one way she could leave, on the eleven o’clock bus, and I would leave with her on the same bus.

‘I’d like to have the bill. I’m leaving,’ I said to Costello, and as I was now meeting his aggression with aggression he did not trouble to answer. After pretending to consult some records, he presented me with the bill for the whole week. Hostile as I felt, I was forced to smile. ‘But I’ve been here only four days.’

‘You booked for a week.’

‘Well, in that case, keep the room open for me.’ I counted out what he had demanded. ‘I’ll probably come back tomorrow,’ at which he exploded: ‘No. Your type is not wanted again here,’ and he slid the difference towards me.

The tide must be far out I thought as I sat and listened to the pounding of the sea while waiting for the bus to turn at the cannon. It was a clear, fresh morning after the rain, only a few tattered shreds of white cloud in the blue sky. She did not come out until the bus was almost due. She was tense and looked as if she hadn’t slept and was afraid when she saw me. Costello carried her bags, and as they prepared to wait together at a separate distance I decided to join them.

‘I decided to leave too,’ I said, and she then turned to Costello: ‘You needn’t wait any longer, Mr Costello. I’ll be fine now. And are you sure you won’t take something?’ And when he refused for what was obviously the second time he shook her hand warmly and went in. Even then she might not have spoken if I had not said, ‘You should have let me know. It gave me no chance at all.’

‘Does it matter so much?’

‘No, not that much. But why make it more difficult than it has to be?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I had to do it this way. I couldn’t do it any other way. I didn’t mean for you to leave at all.’

The bus was coming. As it was empty the conductor told us to take our bags on the bus, and we dumped them on the front seat. The waves seemed to pound louder than ever behind us above the creaky running of the bus.

‘Did he charge you for the whole week?’ I asked.

‘I offered but he wouldn’t take it.’

‘The brute.’ I smiled. ‘He tried to charge me.’

I wanted to ask her about the evening before, about all that had gone before since we had first met at Nora Moran’s, but I knew it was all hopeless, and I was blinded by no passion; I had not even that grace: at most it had been a seed, thrown on poor ground, half wishing it might come to something, in the wrong time of year. As if my silence was itself a question, she said as the bus came into Sligo, ‘I can’t explain anything that happened. I’ll tell you some day but I can’t now.’

‘It’s all right. Don’t worry about it.’ We were back in the safety of the phrases that mean nothing. ‘Anything worth explaining generally can’t be explained anyhow.’

‘We’ll say goodbye here,’ she said when we got off the bus. ‘I’m sorry but I want to be alone.’

‘Where’ll you go?’

‘To the hotel.’ She motioned with her head. ‘I’ll get the two o’clock train. I hope you’ll ring me when you get to Dublin. I won’t be this way then.’

I turned away but saw her climb the steps, the glass door open and the doorman take her bags, a flash of light as the door closed. She would have a salad and a glass of wine and coffee, feel the expensive linen and smile at the waiter’s smiles. She would be almost back in her own world before her train left, as I was almost back in mine.

How empty the doorways were, empty coffins stood on end.

Already Barnaby and Bartleby would be in their doorway in Abbey Street firmly fitting them till night, when they would silently leave.

All the people I had met at Nora Moran’s, bowing and scraping and smiling in their doorways. Nora rushing from doorway to doorway, trying to bring all the doorways with her. ‘I never feel easy without saying goodnight to Mother’; Michael Henry climbing on the bus, ‘I don’t believe in shelling out good money to a hotel when you can be just as badly off at home. America teaches you those things,’ the vivid green of the teal’s feather in his hat as he disappeared into the years.

Kate O’Mara sitting in the big dining-room of the hotel. The Pint Drinkers’ Association, Jimmy McDermott, the last weeks in Sligo, the Kincora, the sea … everything seemed to be without shape. I understood nothing. Perhaps we had come to expect too much. Neither Barnaby nor Bartleby would tell. They didn’t know. They just lived it.

I opened both my hands. They were quite empty. A clear morning came to me. It was on the edge of a town, close to the asylum, and a crowd of presumably harmless patients were hedging whitethorns along the main road, watched over by their male nurses. One patient seemed to be having a wonderful time. He lifted every branch he cut, and after a careful examination of each sprig he began to laugh uproariously. I felt my empty hands were worthy of such uproarious mirth. Wasn’t my present calm an equal, more courteous madness?

I was free in the Sligo morning. I could do as I pleased. There were all sorts of wonderful impossibilities in sight. The real difficulty was that the day was fast falling into its own night.

If I were to die, I’d miss most the mornings and the evenings, he thought as he walked the narrow dirt-track by the lake in the late evening, and then wondered if his mind was failing, for how could anybody think anything so stupid: being a man he had no choice, he was doomed to die; and being dead he’d miss nothing, being nothing. It went against everything in his life as a priest.

The solid world, though, was everywhere around him. There was the lake, the road, the evening, and he was going to call on Gillespie. Gillespie was sawing. Gillespie was always sawing. The roaring rise-and-fall of the two-stroke stayed like a rent in the evening. When he got to the black gate there was Gillespie, his overalled bulk framed in the short avenue of alders, and he was sawing not alders but beech, four or five tractor-loads dumped in the front of the house. The priest put a hand to the black gate, bolted to the first of the alders, and was at once arrested by showery sunlight falling down the avenue. It lit up one boot holding the length of beech in place, it lit the arms moving the blade slowly up and down as it tore through the beech, white chips milling out on the chain.

Suddenly, as he was about to rattle the gate loudly to see if this would penetrate the sawing, he felt himself (bathed as in a dream) in an incredible sweetness of light. It was the evening light on snow. The gate on which he had his hand vanished, the alders, Gillespie’s formidable bulk, the roaring of the saw. He was in another day, the lost day of Michael Bruen’s funeral nearly thirty years before. All was silent and still there. Slow feet crunched on the snow. Ahead, at the foot of the hill, the coffin rode slowly forward on shoulders, its brown varnish and metal trappings dull in the glittering snow, riding just below the long waste of snow eight or ten feet deep over the whole countryside. The long dark line of mourners following the coffin stretched away towards Oakport Wood in the pathway cut through the snow. High on Killeelan Hill the graveyard evergreens rose out of the snow. The graveyard wall was covered, the narrow path cut up the side of the hill stopping at the little gate deep in the snow. The coffin climbed with painful slowness, as if it might never reach the gate, often pausing for the bearers to be changed; and someone started to pray, the prayer travelling down the whole mile-long line of the mourners as they shuffled behind the coffin in the narrow tunnel cut in the snow.