John McGahern - The Collected Stories

‘They offered us a special rate before leaving college. Everybody joined.’

‘That’s your own business, of course. I never found it much use,’ he said irritably.

He left me outside the heavy iron gates of the presbytery. ‘Call in on your way back to tell us how you got on. Then I’ll bring you down to your digs.’

A light above the varnished door shone on white gravel and the thick hedge of laurel and rhododendron that appeared to hide a garden or lawn. A housekeeper led me into the front room where a very old white-haired priest sat over a coal fire.

‘You’re from the west — a fine dramatic part of the country, but no fit place at all to live, no depth of soil. Have you ever heard of William Bulfin?’ he asked as soon as I was seated by his side.

‘ Rambles in Eirinn ?’ I remembered.

‘For my ordination I was given a present of a Pierce bicycle. I rode all around Ireland that summer on the new Pierce with a copy of the Rambles. It was a very weary-dreary business pedalling through the midlands, in spite of the rich land. I could feel my heart lift, though, when at last I got to the west. It’s still no place to live. Have you met Mr Kennedy?’

‘Yes, Father. He showed me here.’

‘Does he find you all right?’

‘I think so, Father.’

‘That’s good enough for me, then. Do you think you’ll be happy here?’

‘I think so, Father.’

‘I expect you’ll see out my time. I thought the last fellow would, but he left. I dislike changes. I’m ninety-eight years old. There’s only one priest older in the whole of Ireland, a Father Michael Kelly from the Diocese of Achonry. He’s a hundred-and-two. You might have noticed the fuss when he reached the hundred?’

‘I must have missed it, Father.’

‘I would have imagined that to be difficult. I thought it excessive, but I take a special interest in him. Kelly is the first name I look for every morning on the front of the Independent .’ He smiled slyly.

The housekeeper came into the room with a steaming saucepan, two bowls, a jug of milk and water, which she set on a low table between our chairs. Then she took a pair of glasses and a bottle of Powers from a press, and withdrew.

‘I don’t drink, Father,’ I said as he raised the bottle.

‘You’re wise. The heart doesn’t need drink at your age. I didn’t touch it till I was forty, but after forty I think every man should drink a little. The heart needs a jab or two every day to remind it of its business once it crosses forty. What do you think the business of the heart is?’

‘I suppose it has many businesses, Father.’

‘You’ll never be convicted on that answer, son, but it has only one main business. That’s to keep going. If it doesn’t do that all its other businesses can be forgotten about.’

He poured himself a very large whiskey, which he drank neat, and then added a smaller measure, filling the glass with water. The Principal had been right. The saucepan was full of steaming porridge when he lifted the lid. He ladled it into the bowls with a wooden spoon, leaving place enough in the bowl for milk and a sprinkling of sugar. It was all I could do to finish what was in the bowl. I noticed how remarkably steady his hand was as he brought the spoon to his lips.

‘If a man sticks to the stirabout he’s unlikely to go very far wrong,’ he concluded. ‘I hope you’ll be happy here. Mr Kennedy is a good man. He went on our side in that strike. He kept the school open. It was presumably good for the pupils. I think, though, it brought some trouble on himself. It’s seldom wise in the long run to go against your own crowd.’

He’d risen, laying his rug aside, but before I could leave he took me by the shoulder up to a large oil painting in a heavy gilt frame above the mantel. ‘Look at it carefully. What do you see?’

‘A tropical tree. It looks like an island.’

‘Look again. It’s a trick painting,’ he said, and when I could make nothing more of it he traced lines from the tree, which also depicted a melancholy military figure in a cocked hat. ‘Napoleon, on Elba,’ he laughed.

The Kennedys had invited me to their Sunday lunch the next day. Their kitchen was pleasant and extremely warm, the two girls setting the big table and smells of roasting chicken and apple stew coming from the black-leaded range. There was wine with the meal, a sweet white wine. Afterwards, the girls cleared the table and, asking permission, disappeared into the town. Oliver sat on in the room. Kennedy filled his wife’s glass to the brim with the last of the Sauterne, rose, and got himself a whiskey from the press in place of the wine.

‘You were just like he was twenty-one years ago. Your first school. Straight from the training college. Starting out,’ Mrs Kennedy said, her face pink with the wine and cooking.

‘Teachers’ jobs were hard come by in those days. Temporary assistant teacher for one year in the Marist Brothers in Sligo was my first job. There was pay but you could hardly call it pay. Not enough to keep a wren alive.’

‘It was the first of July. I remember it well. We had a bar and grocery by the harbour and sold newspapers. He came in for the Independent. He was tall then, with a thick head of brown hair. I know it was the first of July, but I forget the year.’

‘Nineteen thirty-three. It was the year I got out of college. I bought that Independent to see if there were any permanent jobs coming up in October.’

‘We were both only twenty. They told us to wait till we had saved some money, that we had plenty of time. But we couldn’t wait. My father gave us two rooms above the grocery part of the shop. Do you ever regret not waiting?’

‘We wouldn’t have saved anyhow. There was nothing to save. And we had those years.’

I felt like an intruder. Their son sat there, shamed and fascinated, unable to cry stop, or tear himself away.

‘Those two rooms were rotten with damp, and when there were storms you should have heard the damned panes. You could have wallpapered the rooms with the number of letters beginning “The Manager regrets” that came through the letterbox that winter. Oliver here was on the way.’

‘Those two rooms were happiness,’ she said, lifting the glass of sweet wine to her lips, while her son writhed with unease on the sofa.

‘We could get no job, and then I was suddenly offered three at the same time. It’s always the same. You either get more than you want or you get nothing. We came here because the house went with the school. It meant a great deal in those days. It still does us no harm.’

I walked with Kennedy to the school on the Monday. He introduced me to the classes I was to teach. We walked together on the concrete during the mid-morning break. Eagerly, he started to talk as we walked up and down among the playing children. The regulation ten minutes ran to twenty before he rang the bell.

‘They’re as well playing in this weather. The inspectors never try to catch me out. They know the work gets done.’

It was the same at the longer lunchtime, the talk veering again to the early days of his marriage.

‘I used to go back to those two rooms for lunch. We’d just go straight to bed, grabbing a sandwich on the way out. Sometimes we had it off against the edge of the table. It was a great feeling afterwards, walking about with the Brothers, knowing that they’d never have it in the whole of their lives.’

I walked with him on that concrete in total silence. I must have been close to the perfect listener for this excited, forceful man. No one had ever spoken to me like this before. I didn’t know what to say. The children milled about us in the weak sun. Sometimes I shivered at the premonition that days like this might be a great part of the rest of my life: I had dreamed once that through teaching I would help make the world a better place.