John McGahern - The Collected Stories

A green mail car crossed the bridge to the post office each morning and evening at nine o’clock and six. Stephen Maughan crossed the same bridge on his heavy carrier bicycle every Thursday evening with fresh herrings off the Sligo train, setting up the bicycle on its legs outside the post office to shout, ‘If you don’t buy you can’t fry,’ to the annoyance of the Miss Applebees within, Annie and Lizzie, with their spectacles and neat white hair and their glittering brass scales. There were two pubs, Charlie’s and Henry’s, and they both had grocery stores as well. There was a three-teacher school, a dancehall, a barracks with three guards and a sergeant.

There was much traffic on the roads, carts, bicycles, people on foot who always climbed on the walls or grass margins when the occasional motor was heard. People could be seen walking the whole seven miles to Boyle before the big matches, and after the digging of the potatoes, when the dreaded long nights had to be faced, holding wet batteries stiffly. Every summer Sunday the cattle were driven from the football field at the back of Charlie’s and the fouled lines marked white again with lime. To the slow sog of the football in the distance, handball of sorts was played against the back of Jimmy Shivnan’s forge, the bounce uncertain because of the unswept stones, and there, too, the coins were tossed from the backs of rulers and greasy pocket combs, each copper row arranged so that all the harps faced upwards before being thrown. Everywhere there was the craving for news. News, any news, passing like flame from mouth to eager mouth, slowly savoured in the eyes. ‘Bruen’s cow rolled over into a drain, was found dead on her back, the feet in the air …’ ‘Where? When? Who came on the cow? Was she long on her back? That’ll put them back a step. It’s no joke no matter who it happens to. Terror what life puts people through.’ ‘A sewing machine was the only thing left standing four floors up in a bombed factory in Coventry.’ ‘Imagine … four floors up … a sewing machine standing on a girder out there on its own … a terror … a sight.’

Suddenly the war was over. Britain had to be rebuilt. The countryside emptied towards London and Luton. The boat trains were full and talk was of never-ending overtime. After weeks in England, once-easy gentle manners, set free from the narrow rule of church and custom, grew loud, uncertain, coarse.

At home a vaguely worried church joined a dying language to declare that learning Irish would help to keep much foreign corrupting influence out. Red Algier tractors with long steering columns and the sound of low-flying airplanes — they were said to have the original Messerschmitt engine — started to replace the horse and cart. A secondary school was opened by the Brothers in the town. The word Salamanca , having endured for most of a century as a mighty ball booted on the wind out of defence in Charlie’s field, grew sails again on an open sea, became distant spires within a walled city in the sun. Race memories of hedge schools and the poor scholar were stirred, as boys, like uncertain flocks of birds on bicycles, came long distances from the villages and outlying farms to grapple with calculus and George Gordon and the delta of the River Plate.

Against this tide the Sinclairs came from London to the empty parsonage in Ardcarne, where Colonel Sinclair had grown up, where Mrs Sinclair, as a young army wife and mother, had spent happy summers with her gentle parents-in-law, the old canon and his second wife. After the war, the Colonel had settled uneasily into the life of a commuter between their house in Wimbledon and the ministry. Their son had been killed in the war and their daughter was married to a lecturer in sociology at Durham University, with two children of her own. They both wanted to live in the country, and when they discovered that the church commissioners would be only too glad to give the decaying parsonage for a nominal sum to a son of the manse, they sold the house in Wimbledon, and the Colonel took early retirement.

They stayed in the Royal Hotel while the parsonage was being restored, and as they employed local tradesmen, it was not resented. Once they moved in, the grounds, the garden and orchard, even the white paddock railings, they brought back with their own hands. They loved the house. Each year just after Christmas they went to England for two months, and every summer their daughter and her children came from Durham. Each Thursday they did a big shopping in the town, and when it was done went to the Royal Hotel for a drink. It was the one time in the week they drank at the Royal, but every evening except on Sunday, at exactly nine o’clock, their black Jaguar would cross the bridge and roll to a stop outside Charlie’s Bar. It was so punctual that people began to check their watches as it passed, the way they did with the mail van and the church bells and the distant rattle of the diesel trains across the Plains. Mrs Sinclair never left the Jaguar, but each night had three gin and tonics sitting in the car, the radio tuned to the BBC World Service, the engine running in the cold weather. It was the Colonel who brought out the drinks, handing them through the car window, but his own three large Black Bushmills he drank at the big oval table in Charlie’s front room or parlour. ‘Wouldn’t Mrs Sinclair be more comfortable in at the fire on a night the like of that?’ Charlie himself had suggested one bad night of rain and a rocking wind not long after they had started to come regularly. ‘No, Charlie. She’d not like that. Women of her generation were brought up never to set foot in bars,’ and the matter ended there; and though it caused a veritable hedgerow of talk for a few weeks, it provoked no laughter.

‘They’re strange. They’re different. They’re not brought up the like of us. Those hot climates they get sent to does things to people.’

At first, the late night drinkers entering Charlie’s used to hurry past the car and woman, but later some could be seen to pause a moment before pushing open the door as if in reflection on the mystery of the woman sitting alone drinking gin in the darkness, the car radio on and the engine running wastefully, the way they might pause coming on the otter’s feeding place along the riverbank, its little private lawn and scattering of blue crayfish shells.

When they left for England after Christmas, the car was missed like any familiar absence, and when suddenly it reappeared in March, ‘They’re back,’ would be announced with relief as well as genuine gladness.

‘How long have we been here now? How long is it since we’ve left Wimbledon?’ the Sinclairs would sometimes ask one another as the years gathered above them. Now they found they had to count; it must be three, no four, five my God, using birthdays and the deaths of friends like tracks across the sky.

‘They’re flying now.’

‘Still, it must mean we’ve been happy.’

Company they seemed not to need. Occasionally, they ran into their own class, on Thursday in the Royal, after their shopping was done, the town full of the excitement of the market, bundles of cabbage plants knotted with straw on offer all along the Shambles; but as they never had more than the one drink, and evaded exploratory invitations to tea or bridge, they became in time just a matter of hostile curiosity. ‘How did you get through the winter?’ ‘Dreadful. Up to our hocks in mud, my dear.’ ‘But the Bishop is coming for Easter.’ Mostly, the Colonel was as alone in Charlie’s parlour as Mrs Sinclair was outside in the closed car, though sometimes Charlie joined him with a glass of whiskey if the bar wasn’t busy and Mrs Charlie wasn’t on the prowl. They’d sit at the table and talk of fruit trees and vegetables and whiskey until the bell rang or Mrs Charlie was heard surfacing. Sometimes the Colonel had the doubtful benefit of a local priest or doctor or vet or solicitor out on the razzle, but if they were very drunken he just finished his drink and left politely. ‘I never discuss religion because its base is faith — not reason.’ What brought them most into contact with people was the giving away of fruit and vegetables. They grew more than they could use. To some they gave in return for small favours, more usually by proximity and chance.