John McGahern - The Collected Stories

Two evenings later, when he let himself into the flat and found Mary Kelleher there, it was as if she had never been away.

‘You didn’t expect me back so soon?’

‘I thought you’d still be in Dundalk, but I’m glad, I’m delighted.’ He took her in his arms.

‘I had as much of Dundalk as I wanted, and I missed you.’

‘How did it go?’

‘It was all right. The cousins were nice. They had a small house, crammed with things — religious pictures, furniture, photos. There was hardly place to move. Everything they did was so careful, so measured out. After a while I felt I could hardly breathe. They did everything they possibly could to make me welcome. I read the poems at last.’ She put the book with the brown cover on the table. ‘I read them again on the train coming back. I loved them.’

‘I’ve long suspected that those very pure love sonnets are all addressed to himself,’ McDonough said. ‘That was how the “ignorant bloody apes and mediocrities” could be all short-circuited.’

‘Some are very funny.’

‘I’m so glad you liked them. I’ve lived with some of them for years. Would you like to go out to eat? Say, to Bernardo’s?’ he asked.

‘I’d much prefer to stay home. I’ve already looked in the fridge. We can rustle something up.’

That weekend they went together for the long walk in the mountains that he had intended to take the day they met. They stopped for a drink and sandwiches in a pub near Blessington just before two o’clock, and there they decided to press on to Rathdrum and stay the night in the hotel rather than turn back into the city.

It was over dinner in the near empty hotel dining-room that he asked if she would consider marrying him. ‘There’s much against it. I am fifty. You would have to try to settle here, where you’ll be a stranger,’ and he went on to say that what he had already was more than he ever expected, that he was content to let it be, but if she wanted more then it was there.

‘I thought that you couldn’t be married here.’ Her tone was affectionate.

‘I meant it in everything but name, and even that can be arranged if you want it enough.’

‘How?’

‘With money. An outside divorce. The marriage in some other country. The States, for instance.’

‘Can’t you see that I already love you? That it doesn’t matter? I was half teasing. You looked so serious.’

‘I am serious. I want to be clear.’

‘It is clear and I am glad — and very grateful.’

They agreed that she would spend one week longer here in Dublin than she had planned. At Christmas he would go to New York for a week. She would have obtained her doctorate by then. James White would be surprised. There were no serious complications in sight. They were so tired and happy that it was as if they were already in possession of endless quantities of time and money.

The books and files had been taken out but no one yet had stopped him from entering his office. Tired of sitting alone listening to the rain beat on the iron, he came out on the platform where he could look down on the long queue of tractors towing in the steel tanks, the wipers making furious, relentless arcs across the windscreens as they waited. He knew all the men sitting behind the glass of the cabs by name; that he had made his first business when he came to manage the creamery years before. Often on a wet summer’s day, when there could be no rush at hay, many of them would pull in below the platform to sit and talk. The rough, childish faces would look up in a glow of pleasure at the recognition when he shouted out their names. Some would flash their lights.

Today no one looked up, but he could see them observing him in their mirrors after they had passed. They probably already knew more precisely than he what awaited him. Even with that knowledge he would have preferred it if they looked up. All his life he had the weakness of wanting to please and give pleasure.

When the Angelus bell rang from Cootehall, he began to think that they might have put off coming for him for another day, but soon after the last stroke he heard heavy boots crossing the cement. A low knock came on the door. Guard Casey was in the doorway but there was no sign of the Sergeant. Guard Guider was the other guard.

‘You know why we’re here, Jim,’ Guard Casey said.

‘I know, Ned.’ Quickly the Guard read out the statement of arrest.

‘You’ll come with us, then?’

‘Sure I’ll come.’

‘I’m sorry to have to do this but they’re the rules.’ He brought out a pair of bright handcuffs with a small green ribbon on the linking bar. Guider quickly handcuffed him to Casey and withdrew the key. The bar with the green ribbon kept the wrists apart but the hands and elbows touched. This caused them to walk stiffly and hesitantly and in step. The cement had been hosed clean but the people who worked for him were out of sight. The electric hum of the separators drowned their footsteps as they crossed to the squad car.

In the barracks the Sergeant was waiting for him with a peace commissioner, a teacher from the other end of the parish, and they began committal proceedings at once. The Sergeant was grim-faced and inscrutable.

‘I’m sorry for that Sunday in Clones,’ the creamery manager blurted out in nervousness. ‘I only meant it as a day out together.’

The grimness of the Sergeant’s face did not relent; it was as if he had never spoken. He was asked if he had a solicitor. He had none. Did he want to be represented? Did he need to be? he responded. It was not necessary at this stage, he was told. In that case, they could begin. Anything he said, he was warned, could be used against him. He would say nothing. Though it directly concerned him, it seemed to be hardly about him at all, and it did not take long. Tonight he’d spend in the barracks. The cell was already prepared for him. Tomorrow he’d be transferred to Mountjoy to await his trial. The proceedings for the present were at an end. There was a mild air of relief. He felt like a railway carriage that had been pushed by handdown rails into some siding. It suited him well enough. He had never been assertive and he had no hope of being acquitted.

Less than a month before, he had bought stand tickets for the Ulster Final and had taken the Sergeant and Guard Casey to Clones. He already knew then that the end couldn’t be far off. It must have been cowardice and an old need to ingratiate. Now it was the only part of the whole business that made him cringe.

They had set off in the Sergeant’s small Ford, Guard Casey sitting with the Sergeant in the front. They were both big men, Casey running to flesh, but the Sergeant retained some of an athlete’s spareness of feature. He had played three or four times for Cavan and had been on the fringe of the team for a few seasons several years before.

‘You were a terrible man to go and buy those stand tickets, Jim,’ Casey had said for the fifth time as the car travelled over the dusty white roads.

‘What’s terrible about it? Aren’t we all Ulster men even if we are stranded in the west? It’s a day out, a day out of all our lives. And the Sergeant here even played for Cavan.’

‘Once or twice. Once or twice. Trial runs. You could hardly call it played. I just wasn’t good enough.’

‘You were more than good enough by all accounts. There was a clique.’

‘You’re blaming the selectors now. The selectors had a job to do. They couldn’t pick everybody.’

‘More than me has said they were a clique. They had their favourites. You weren’t called “the boiler” for nothing.

A car parked round the corner forced the Sergeant to swerve out into the road. Nothing was coming.