Amongst Women

by John McGahern

  Amongst Women

  JOHN McGAHERN

  For Madeline

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Amongst Women

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters. This once powerful man was so implanted in their lives that they had never really left Great Meadow, in spite of jobs and marriages and children and houses of their own in Dublin and London. Now they could not let him slip away.

  ‘You’ll have to shape up, Daddy. You can’t go on like this. You’re giving us no help. We can’t get you better on our own.’

  ‘Who cares? Who cares anyhow?’

  ‘We care. We all care very much.’

  They all came at Christmas. After Christmas, Mona, the one girl who had not married, came every weekend from Dublin. Sometimes Sheila got away from her family to come with her and she drove down for a few hours as well as now and again in the middle of the week. The air fare from London was too expensive for Maggie to come regularly. Michael, their younger brother, had promised to come from London at Easter but Luke, the eldest, still would not come. All three girls planned to come to revive Monaghan Day. They had to explain to their stepmother Rose what Monaghan Day was. She had never heard of it in all her time in the house.

  The end-of-February fair in Mohill was Monaghan Day. McQuaid came every year to the house on Monaghan Day. He and Moran had fought in the same flying column in the war. McQuaid always drank a bottle of whiskey in the house when he came.

  ‘If we could revive Monaghan Day for Daddy it could help to start him back to himself. Monaghan Day meant the world to him once.’

  ‘I’m sure Daddy was far from delighted to see a bottle of whiskey drank in the house,’ Rose was doubtful about the whole idea.

  ‘He never minded McQuaid drinking the whiskey. You wouldn’t get McQuaid to the house without whiskey.’

  They clung so tenaciously to the idea that Rose felt she couldn’t stand in their way. Moran was not to be told. They wanted it to come as a sudden surprise – jolt. Against all reason they felt it could turn his slow decline around like a Lourdes’ miracle. Forgotten was the fearful nail-biting exercise Monaghan Day had always been for the whole house; with distance it had become large, heroic, blood-mystical, something from which the impossible could be snatched.

  Maggie flew over from London on the morning of the Day. Mona and Sheila met her at Dublin Airport and the three sisters drove to Great Meadow in Mona’s car. They did not hurry. With the years they had drawn closer. Apart, they could be breathtakingly sharp on the others’ shortcomings but together their individual selves gathered into something very close to a single presence.

  On the tides of Dublin or London they were hardly more than specks of froth but together they were the aristocratic Morans of Great Meadow, a completed world, Moran’s daughters. Each scrap of news any one of them had about themselves or their immediate family – child, husband, dog, cat, Bendix dishwasher, a new dress or pair of shoes, the price of every article they bought – was as fascinating to each other as if it were their very own; and any little thing out of Great Meadow was pure binding. Together they were the opposite of women who will nod and nod as they pretend to listen to another, waiting for the first pause of breath to muscle in with the growing pains and glories of their own house, the impatience showing on their faces as they wait. Mullingar was passed and they felt they had hardly said a word to one another. At the hotel in Longford they broke the journey to have tea and sandwiches, and just as the winter light began to fail they were turning in the open gate under the poisonous yew tree.

  In spite of their wish to make the visit a surprise, Rose had told Moran they were arriving.

  ‘They must think I’m on the way out.’

  ‘The opposite,’ she reassured. ‘But they think you should be getting far better.’

  ‘How can they all manage to get away together like that?’

  ‘It must have fallen that way. Isn’t it worth getting dressed up for once?’

  ‘Who cares now anyhow?’ he said automatically but changed into his brown suit. His face was flushed with excitement when they came.

  In their nervousness they offered at once the gifts they had brought: tea, fruit, duty-free whiskey – ‘It’ll be useful to have in the house even if nobody drinks it and we might need a glass’ – a printed silk headscarf, thick fur gloves.

  ‘What did you want to bring anything to me for?’ He always disliked having to accept presents.

  ‘You were complaining at Christmas that your hands were always cold, Daddy.’

  As if to turn attention away from the continual coldness of his hands, he pulled on the gloves comically and pretended to grope about the room with them like a blind man.

  ‘The gloves are only for when you go out. I’m afraid all this excitement is going to your head, Daddy.’ Rose, laughing, took the gloves away as he pretended to need them to wear about the house.

  ‘I haven’t discovered yet what brought out all the troops,’ he said when the laughing stopped.

  ‘Don’t you remember the day it is? Monaghan Day! The day when McQuaid always used to come from the fair in Mohill and we had to make the big tea.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Just as he resented gifts he resented any dredging up of the past. He demanded that the continuing present he felt his life to be should not be shadowed or challenged.

  ‘We thought it was as good an excuse as any and we were all able to get away at the same time. So here we are.’

  ‘It was a poor excuse then. McQuaid was a drunken blackguard who was with me in the war. I felt sorry for him. If I didn’t give him a square meal on Monaghan Day he’d drink himself stupid in Mohill.’

  ‘They’ve come all this way to see you and is that all the welcome they get,’ Rose chided gently. ‘Who cares about poor McQuaid, God rest him, he’s long gone.’

  ‘Who cares about anything now anyhow?’ he demanded.

  ‘We care. We care very much. We love you.’

  ‘God help your wits then. Pay no attention to me. I wrote to that older brother of yours, “My capabilities are of little matter now”, but I suppose I might be as well off writing to myself for all the answer I’m likely to get.’

  He went silent and dark and withdrew into himself, the two thumbs rotating about one another as he sat in the car chair by the fire. A quick glance between Rose and the girls was enough for them to know that it was better to make no mention of their elder brother. They began to busy themselves cheerfully with preparations for the meal, one or other of them constantly trying to engage Moran with this small thing or that, until he was drawn by their uncanny tact into the general cheerfulness. When they finally sat down to the meal it was Moran himself who brought McQuaid back into the day.

  ‘McQuaid wasn’t a bad sort but he was misfortunate with the drink. The interesting thing about him is that he was one of those people who always turn out to be lucky no matter what they do. When he started to buy he knew nothing about cattle. Yet he made a fortune. Those people always get on better in the world than decent men.’

  ‘His great hour was when he dressed up as the newspaper boy and went to meet the train,’ Sheila said tentatively. She had heard it every year on Monaghan Day for years but she was unsure if Moran would allow any talk of the war. He generally went stone-silent whenever it was mentioned.

  ‘He was lucky in that too and he had no nerves.’

  ‘He always said you were the whole brains of the column. That everything they ever went into was planned by you, down to the last detail,’ Mona was emboldened to add.

  ‘I’d gone to
school longer than the others. To the Latin school in Moyne. I could read maps, calculate distances. You’d never think it but McQuaid, like many of the others, was more or less illiterate though he could add and subtract quick enough when it concerned his pocket. It was easy to get the name of brains in those days.’

  As if he suddenly wanted to return the girls ‘favour on this Monaghan Day, he spoke to them openly about the war for the first time in their lives.’ The English didn’t seem to know right what they were doing. I think they were just going through the motions of what had worked before. Look at the train business. Imagine having a brass band meet a colonel in the middle of the bogs with the whole countryside up in arms. A child wouldn’t do it.

  ‘Don’t let anybody fool you. It was a bad business. We didn’t shoot at women and children like the Tans but we were a bunch of killers. We got very good but there was hardly a week when some of us wasn’t killed. Of the twenty-two men in the original column only seven were alive at the Truce. We were never sure we’d be alive from one day to the next. Don’t let them pull wool over your eyes. The war was the cold, the wet, standing to your neck in a drain for a whole night with bloodhounds on your trail, not knowing how you could manage the next step toward the end of a long march. That was the war: not when the band played and a bloody politician stepped forward to put flowers on the ground.

  ‘What did we get for it? A country, if you’d believe them. Some of our own johnnies in the top jobs instead of a few Englishmen. More than half of my own family work in England. What was it all for? The whole thing was a cod.’

  ‘They say you should have gone to the very top in the army after the war but you were stopped. McQuaid always said they set out to stop you,’ Sheila said with borrowed vehemence.

  ‘I was stopped all right but it wasn’t as simple as poor McQuaid made out. In an army in peacetime you have to arse- lick and know the right people if you want to get on. I was never any good at getting on with people. You should all know that by now,’ he said half humorously.

  There were tears in the girls’ eyes as they tried to smile back. Rose was quiet and watchful.

  ‘For people like McQuaid and myself the war was the best part of our lives. Things were never so simple and dear again. I think we never rightly got the hang of it afterwards. It was better if it had never happened. Tired now. You were all great girls to travel such distances to see one sick old man.’

  He took his beads from the small purse. They hung loose from his hand. ‘Anyhow it no longer matters to you or to me, but whoever has the last laugh in the whole business is going to have to spend a hell of a length of time laughing. We have to try to work as best we can and pray.’

  He looked so strained and tired that they offered to say the Rosary in his room but he brushed the offer aside. He knelt as erect as ever at the table.

  ‘Thou, O Lord, wilt open my lips,’ he called. When he came to the Dedication he paused as if searching. Then, in a sudden flash that he was sometimes capable of, he acknowledged his daughters’ continuing goodwill and love, love that usually he seemed inherently unable to return. ‘Tonight we offer up this Holy Rosary for the repose of the soul of James McQuaid.’

  When the prayers were ended the three girls kissed him goodnight in turn, and Rose went with him to their room. The girls started to wash up and tidy; very soon the litter of the evening was cleared away, the room made ready for breakfast.

  When Rose saw the table already set for morning, she said, ‘If you were around for too long I’d be spoiled rotten. I don’t know what anybody else is having but I’m going to be bad tonight and have a cigarette and hot whiskey. You all took Daddy out of himself tonight. That all of you managed to come meant the world to Daddy.’

  The next morning they were idling in the luxury of a long breakfast, enjoying the chatting in the warmth of the room, the tussocks in the white field outside the window stiff with frost, the only green grass the huge dark circles under the cypress trees, when a single shotgun blast came from the front room. They looked at one another in fear, moving quickly as one person to the room. He was standing at the open window in his pyjamas, the shotgun in his hand, staring out at the front field where the black splash of a jackdaw lay on the white ground beneath the ash tree.

  ‘Are you all right, Daddy?’ they called out.

  When it was dear that he was, Rose cried, ‘You frightened the life out of us, Daddy.’

  ‘That bloody bird has been annoying me for days.’

  ‘You’ll get your death of cold standing there at the open window,’ Maggie complained and Rose brought the window down.

  ‘You didn’t miss anyhow.’ Rose was intent on laughing away the incongruity of the situation.

  ‘I don’t think Daddy ever missed,’ Mona said.

  ‘The closest I ever got to any man was when I had him in the sights of the rifle and I never missed.’ The voice was so absent and tired that it took some of the chill from the words.

  He allowed Rose to take the gun away but not before he had removed the empty shell. He dressed and had breakfast with them at the table. The gun was returned to its usual place in the corner of the room and no more mention was made of the dead jackdaw.

  ‘Tired again,’ he said simply after an hour and went back to his room.

  Maggie was taking a plane to London that night and Sheila and Mona were driving her to the airport. The two girls would not be back till the following weekend. Moran stood with Rose in the doorway watching the car drive away. He waved weakly after the car but he did not speak as Rose shut the door and they turned back into the house.

  Monaghan Day had revived nothing but a weak fanciful ghost of what had been. After Easter and many other alarms, when none of the girls was able to be in Great Meadow, Rose had her sister buy a brown Franciscan habit in the town. In spite of the hush and emptiness of the house, the two women smuggled the habit in like thieves and later that evening Rose hid it among her most intimate articles of clothing in a part of the wardrobe that Moran never opened.

  The attempt to revive Monaghan Day was a gesture as weak as a couple who marry in order to try to retrieve a lost relationship, the mind having changed the hard actual fact into what was comfortable to feel.

  On the last Monaghan Day that McQuaid came to the house Moran was on edge as he waited for him as he had been on edge every Monaghan Day, the only day in the year that McQuaid came to Great Meadow. Since morning he had been in and out of the kitchen where Maggie and Mona were cleaning and tidying and preparing for the big meal. Though Maggie was eighteen, tall and attractive, she was still as much in awe of Moran as when she had been a child. Mona, two years younger, was the more likely to clash with him, but this day she agreed to be ruled by Maggie’s acquiescence. Sheila, a year younger still, was too self-centred and bright ever to challenge authority on poor ground and she pretended to be sick in order to escape the tension of the day. Alone, the two girls were playful as they went about their tasks, mischievous at times, even carefully boisterous; but as soon as their father came in they would sink into a beseeching drabness, cower as close to being invisible as they could.

  ‘How do the lamb chops look?’ he demanded again. ‘Are these the best lamb chops you could get? Haven’t I told you time in and time out never – never – to get lamb chops anywhere but from Kavanagh’s? Has everything to be drummed in a hundred times? God, why is nothing ever made dear in this house? Everything has to be dragged out of everybody.’

  ‘Kavanagh said the steak wasn’t great but that the lamb was good,’ Maggie added but Moran was already on his way out again, muttering that not even simple things were made clear in this house and if simple things couldn’t be made clear how was a person ever to get from one day to the next in this world.

  The two girls were quiet for a long time after the door closed; then suddenly, unaccountably, they started to push one another, boisterously mimicking Moran: ‘God, O God, what did I do to deserve such a crowd? Gawd, O Gawd, not even t
he simple things are made clear,’ falling into chairs laughing.

  A loud imperious knocking came on the tongued boards of the ceiling in the middle of the rowdy relief. They stopped to listen and as they did the knocking stopped.

  ‘She’s no more sick than my big toe. Whenever there’s a whiff of trouble she takes to her bed with the asthma. She has books and sweets hidden up there,’ Mona said. They waited in silence until the knocking resumed, insistent and angry.

  ‘Boohoo!’ they responded. ‘Boohoo! Boohoo! Boohoo!’ The knocking made the boards of the ceiling tremble. She was using a boot or shoe. ‘Boohoo!’ they echoed. ‘Boohoo! Boohoo!…’

  The stairs creaked. In a moment Sheila stood angrily framed in the doorway. ‘I’ve been knocking for ages and all ye do is laugh up at me.’

  ‘We never heard. We’d laugh up at nobody.’

  ‘Ye heard only too well. I’m going to tell Daddy on the pair of ye.’

  ‘Boohoo!’ they repeated.

  ‘You think I’m joking. You’ll pay for this before it’s over.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m sick and you won’t even bring up a drink.’

  They gave her a jug of barley water and a clean glass.

  ‘You know what day it is and McQuaid is coming from the mart. He’s in and out like a devil. You can’t expect us to dance attendance up the stairs as well. If he comes in and sees you like that in the door he’ll have something to say,’ Maggie said but Sheila slipped back upstairs before she finished.

  They draped the starched white tablecloth over the big deal table. The room was wonderfully warm, the hotplate of the stove glowing a faint orange. They began to set the table, growing relaxed and easy, enjoying the formality of the room, when Moran came in again from the fields. This time he stood in the centre of the room, plainly unsure as to what had brought him in, his eye searching around for something to fasten on, like someone in mid-speech forgetting what they had to say.