Amongst Women

by John McGahern

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Everything is all right, Daddy.’

  ‘Be sure the chops are well done,’ he said and went out again. No sooner had the door closed than Mona, released from the tension of his presence, let slip a plate from her hands. They stood watching dumbly in horrible fascination after it shattered. Quickly they swept up the pieces and hid them away, wondering how they would replace the plate without being found out.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Maggie comforted Mona who was still pale with shock. ‘We’ll find some way round it.’ They were too sick at heart to mimic or mock this mood away. Anything broken had to be hidden until it could be replaced or forgotten.

  Outside it was cold but there was no rain. It was always cold on Monaghan Day, the traditional day poor farmers sold their winter stock and the rich farmers bought them for fattening. Moran was neither rich nor poor but his hatred and fear of poverty was as fierce as his fear of illness which meant that he would never be poor but that he and all around him would live as if they were paupers. Moran had no work in the fields but still he stayed outside in the cold, looking at hedges, examining walls, counting cattle. He was too excited to be able to stay indoors. As the light began to fail he retreated into the shelter of the fir plantation to watch the road for McQuaid’s car. If McQuaid had a big order to fill he mightn’t come till after dark.

  The light was almost gone when the white Mercedes came slowly along the road and turned into the open gate under the yew tree. Moran did not move even after the car stopped. In fact, he instinctively stepped backwards into the plantation as the car door was thrown open. Without moving he watched McQuaid struggle from the car and then stand leaning on the open door as if waiting for someone to appear. He could have called out from where he stood but he did not. McQuaid slammed the car door and walked towards the house. Not until he was several minutes within the house did Moran leave the plantation. He came slowly and deliberately across the fields to the back door. Though he had lived for weeks for this hour he now felt a wild surge of resentment towards McQuaid as he came into his own house.

  McQuaid was seated in the armchair by the fire. His powerful trunk and huge belly filled the chair and the yellow cattleman’s boots were laced halfway up the stout legs. He did not rise from the chair or acknowledge Moran’s entrance in any way except to direct the flirting banter he was having with the girls to Moran.

  ‘These girls are blooming. You better have your orchards well fenced or you’ll be out of apples by October.’

  The words were said with such good humour and aggressive sureness that it would have been impossible to take offence. Moran hardly heard; all resentment left him as quickly as it had come: McQuaid was here and it was Monaghan Day.

  ‘Michael.’ McQuaid reached out of the chair and took Moran’s hand in a firm grip.

  ‘Jimmy.’ Moran responded with the same simplicity. ‘Have you been here long?’

  ‘Not long. I had a fine talk with these girls. They are great girls.’

  Moran walked across to the curtained press where he kept medicines and took out a glass and a full bottle of Redbreast. He poured out a large measure of the whiskey and brought it to McQuaid. Maggie placed a jug of spring water on the table. ‘Say when,’ Moran poured the water into the glass. McQuaid held out the glass until it was three-quarters full.

  ‘You’ll need it after the mart,’ Moran said.

  ‘I don’t need it but I’ll do much better than that. I’ll enjoy it. Good luck everybody.’

  ‘How did it go?’ Moran asked with a heartiness that didn’t suit him.

  ‘The same as every other Monaghan Day,’ McQuaid said.

  ‘Was it good or bad?’ Moran continued.

  ‘It was neither good nor bad. It was money. All the farmers think their cattle are special but all I ever see is money. If a beast is around or below a certain sum of money I buy. If it goes over that I’m out.’

  ‘I’ve often watched you in the past and wondered how you know exactly the right time to enter the bidding, the right time to leave,’ Moran praised. His fascination with McQuaid’s mastery of his own world was boyish. He had never been able to deal with the outside. All his dealings had been with himself and that larger self of family which had been thrown together by marriage or accident: he had never been able to go out from his shell of self.

  ‘I don’t know how I know that,’ McQuaid said. ‘All I know is that it cost me a lot of money to learn.’

  The girls had the freshly cut bread, butter and milk on the table. The lamb chops sizzled as they were dropped into the big pan. The sausages, black pudding, bacon, halves of tomatoes were added soon after to the sides of the pan. The eggs were fried in a smaller pan. Mona scalded the large teapot and set it to brew. The two girls were silent as they cooked and when they had to speak to one another spoke in quick, urgent whispers.

  ‘This looks like a meal fit for a king. It makes me want to roll up my sleeves,’ McQuaid said in praise and plain enjoyment at the prospect of it as the plates were put on the table. He finished his glass of whiskey with a flourish before rising from the chair.

  The two men ate in silence, with relish, waited on by the two girls. As soon as McQuaid pushed his empty plate contentedly aside he said, ‘These are great girls but where are the missing soldiers?’

  ‘Sheila is upstairs with a cold,’ Maggie pointed to the ceiling. ‘And Michael is gone to our aunt in the mountains for a week.’

  ‘Where’s Luke then?’

  The girls looked from McQuaid to Moran and back to McQuaid again but they did not speak.

  ‘We don’t know where he is,’ Moran said reluctantly. He particularly disliked parting with information about the house. ‘You couldn’t open your mouth in this house before he left but he’d be down your throat.’

  ‘If I know you I’d warrant he was given his money’s worth,’ McQuaid laughed gently and when Moran didn’t answer he added, ‘The young will have their way, Michael. Anyhow I always liked Luke. He is very straight and manly.’

  ‘I respect all my children equally,’ Moran said. ‘How are your lads?’

  ‘You know they’re all married now. I don’t see much of them unless they want something and they don’t see much of me. They’re good lads though. They work long hours.’

  ‘And the good lady?’

  ‘Oh, the old dosey’s all right. She needs plenty of shouting at or she’d go to sleep on her feet.’

  They had married young and their three sons married young as well. They lived alone now in the big cattle dealer’s house with the white railing in the middle of fields. He was seldom in the house except to eat or sleep and when he was all he ever did was yell, ‘Get the tea. Polish the boots. Kick out that bloody cat. Get me a stud. Where’s the fucking collar?’ ‘In a minute, Jimmy. Coming. On the way. It’s here in my very hand,’ his wife would race and flurry and call. Then he would be gone for days. She would spoil her cats, read library books and tend her garden and the riotous rockery of flowers along the south wall of the house that he encouraged the cattle to eat. After days of peace the door would crash open: There’s six men here with lorries. Put on the kettle. Set the table. Get hopping. Put wheels under yourself. We’re fucking starving!’ There was never a hint of a blow. So persistent was the language that it had become no more remarkable than just another wayward manner of speaking and their sons paid so little attention to it that it might well have been one of the many private languages of love.

  The dishes had been washed and put away. Mona went to join Sheila upstairs. Maggie was going visiting. Another night Moran would have questioned her but not tonight.

  Years ago Moran loaned McQuaid money when he had started in the cattle business but now McQuaid was the richer and more powerful man and they saw little of one another. They came together once a year to slip back into what McQuaid said were the days of their glory. Moran was too complicated to let anybody know what he thought of anything. Moran had commanded
a column in the war. McQuaid had been his lieutenant. From year to year they used the same handrails to go down into the past: lifting the cartwheel at the crossroads, the drilling sessions by the river, the first ambush, marching at night between the safe houses, the different characters in the houses, the food, the girls… The interrogation of William Taylor the spy and his execution by the light of a paraffin lantern among his own cattle in the byre. The Tans had swarmed over the countryside looking for them after the execution. They had lived for a while in holes cut in the turf banks. The place was watched night and day. Once the British soldiers came on Mary Duignan when she was bringing them tea and sandwiches. The Duignans were so naturally pale-faced that Mary showed no sign that anything was other than normal and she continued to bring tea and sandwiches to men working on a further turf bank. Seeing the British soldiers, the startled men sat and ate though they had just risen from a complete meal.

  ‘Mary was a topper,’ McQuaid said with emotion. ‘Only for Mary that day our goose was cooked. She was a bloody genius to think of giving the food to the men on the bank. She’s married to a carpenter in Dublin now. She has several children.’

  Moran poured more whiskey into the empty glass.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t chance a drop?’ McQuaid raised his glass. ‘It’s no fun drinking on your own.’

  ‘I couldn’t handle it,’ Moran said. ‘You know that. I had to give it up. Now I couldn’t look at it.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have asked you then.’

  ‘I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all.’

  The reminiscing continued – the deaths of friends, one man marching alone through the night, the terrible hard labour it was for some men to die, night marches from one safe house to another, the rain, the wet, the damp, the cold of waiting for an ambush in one place for hours.

  ‘We had them on the run by then. They were afraid to venture out except in convoys.’

  ‘People who would have spat in our faces three years before were now clapping our backs. They were falling over one another to get on the winning side.’

  ‘Many of them who had pensions and medals and jobs later couldn’t tell one end of a gun from the other. Many of the men who had actually fought got nothing. An early grave or the emigrant ship. Sometimes I get sick when I see what I fought for,’ Moran said.

  ‘It makes no sense your not taking the IRA pension. You earned it. You could still have it in the morning,’ McQuaid said.

  ‘I’d throw it in their teeth,’ Moran clenched and unclenched his hands as he spoke.

  ‘I never question the colour of any man’s money. If I’m offered it I take it,’ but Moran was too consumed to respond and McQuaid went on. ‘Then it began to get easier. We hadn’t to hide any longer. One hot day I remember leaving guns and clothes along the river bank and swimming without a stitch on. Another Sunday we went trolling, dragging an otter behind the boat. Then they tried to bring in the general.’

  ‘He wasn’t a general. He was a trumped-up colonel.’

  ‘Whatever he was we settled his hash,’ McQuaid gloated. ‘You had a great head on you the way you thought the plan through from beginning to end. You’ve been wasted ever since.’

  ‘Without you it would never have worked. You were as cool as if you were out for a stroll,’ Moran said.

  ‘You could plan. You worked it out from beginning to end. None of the rest of us had that kind of head.’

  ‘We had spies. We had men in the town for weeks. They were bringing the big fellow in on the three o’clock train. They were going to put on the big show. They had a band and a guard of honour outside the station, their backs to a row of railwaymen’s cottages. They never checked the cottages.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have found us anyhow.’

  ‘Nibs McGovern met that train every day with his trolley to pick up the papers and the Boland loaves that the shops got for special customers. He was such a fixture that no one noticed him any more. It fell into our hands.’

  ‘Looking back on it the plan couldn’t have been simpler but we must have rehearsed it forty times. We all slipped into town after dark. Only Tommy Flood, the solicitor’s clerk, gave any trouble.’

  ‘Then we nabbed Nibs,’ McQuaid laughed. ‘Just as he was getting ready to go out on the town. We were lucky there as well. Nibs didn’t go to any one pub in particular. Nibs was no trouble. He could think quick enough when he had to. We gave him whiskey and hadn’t to tie him up till the morning and that was only for his own good.’

  ‘Then there was the waiting,’ Moran said violently.

  ‘I’ll never forget it. Dressed up in Nibs’s gear,’ McQuaid said. ‘The clothes were fit to stand up on their own, they were that stiff with dust and grease. The waiting was terrible. It’s like getting old. Nothing happens and then the whole bloody thing is on top of you before you know it. The Tommies marching to the station. The band. Sound of the train getting closer and before I knew it I was out on that street pushing the trolley. The wheels were so loose I was afraid they’d fall off. The one thing we never thought of was to check the wheels. The overcoat was buttoned over the gun and the grenade. Even in the middle of summer Nibs wore that overcoat.’

  ‘I had the stopwatch on you from behind one of the windows. I followed every step. I was afraid you’d get to the slope too soon. I was afraid you could run into our fire if you got too far up on the slope.’

  ‘The gates were closed. The train came puffing in. The fucking band struck up “God Save the King”. There were three fir trees beside the platform. They said they never grew right because of the smoke and steam. The sergeant major was shouting. They were all standing to attention. The colonel or general or whatever he was came down the platform. There was another officer with him holding a sword upright. I kept pushing the trolley, praying to Jesus the bloody wheels wouldn’t come loose. No one even looked at me or the trolley. The pair came along inspecting the troops. The one holding the sword was young. The colonel was a big stoutish man with red eyebrows. All I remember thinking of as I pushed the trolley and looked at the red face and eyebrows was, My friend, you are about to take the longest journey a man ever takes in this life. He took the full blast. The other man was still holding the sword upright as he went down. I pulled the pin out of the grenade. The line of soldiers was still half standing to attention when I went through them. I hadn’t to use the revolver. As soon as I got to the other side of the bank I threw myself down and started to roll.’

  ‘That’s all I was watching for. As soon as I saw you go down I gave the order to fire,’ Moran said. ‘Some of them were still standing to attention as they fell. They hadn’t a clue where the fire was coming from. Then a few soldiers up at the goods store fired into their own men.’

  ‘By the time I rolled to the bottom of the slope I could see the steady fire coming from the windows. I waited to get my breath before cutting across the road. I don’t think I was fired on once. The first thing I did when I got behind the houses was to get out of Nibs’s clothes.’

  ‘They were beginning to fire back from behind the station. Michael Sweeney was hit in the shoulder. I gave the order to file out. Myles Reilly and McDermott stayed at the windows. They were our two best riflemen. When we got to Donoghue’s Cross the road was cut and trees knocked. We waited for Reilly and McDermott at the cross. Then we split up, half of us for the safe houses round the lakes and the rest of us headed into the mountains. We mightn’t have bothered.’

  ‘They were afraid to put their heads out and when they did they came in a whole convoy, shooting at women and children.’

  ‘They were never the same again,’ Moran said. ‘News of it spread throughout the whole country.’

  ‘You had a great head on you, Michael,’

  ‘Only for you it couldn’t have come to anything.’

  ‘I remember clearer than yesterday his eyebrows. Not often you see an Englishman with red eyebrows. I had so much time to look at him I can hardly believe it still, pushing th
e trolley, standing up in Nibs’s clothes. I had already loosened the overcoat and was thinking as I looked at him, This very minute you are going on the longest journey a man ever takes and you haven’t a frigging clue. Then I fired.’

  ‘I was watching you with the stopwatch.’

  ‘We didn’t have to split up that day. They were afraid of their shite to come out of the towns. The country was ours again. Next we had the Treaty. Then we fought one another.’

  ‘Look where it brought us. Look at the country now. Run by a crowd of small-minded gangsters out for their own good. It was better if it never had happened.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree with that,’ McQuaid said. ‘The country is ours now anyhow. Maybe the next crowd will be better than this mixture of druids and crooks that we’re stuck with.’

  ‘Leave the priests out of it,’ Moran said sharply.

  ‘I’ll leave nobody out of it. They all got on our backs.’

  Moran did not answer. An angry brooding silence filled the room. McQuaid felt for the authority he had slowly made his own over the years, an authority that had outgrown Moran’s. He would not move. Moran rose and went outside. McQuaid did not respond to him in any way when he came in again.

  When Maggie returned she found them locked in the strained silence. Beforehand she had combed her hair by the light of the flashlamp, smoothed and rearranged her clothes but even if she hadn’t Moran would not have noticed this evening. At once, in the silence, she began to make tea and sandwiches. Mona came down from upstairs and after whispering with Maggie disappeared again upstairs with a small jug of milk and some sandwiches. At last, out of the silence, Moran noticed McQuaid’s glass was empty and attempted to pour him more whiskey.

  ‘Cap it,’ McQuaid said and covered his glass with his hand.

  ‘There were years when you were able for most of the bottle.’

  ‘Those years are gone. We’ll have the tea Maggie is making.’

  Reluctantly Moran screwed the cap back on the bottle and returned it behind the curtains of the medicine press. The tone in which Cap it had been said smarted like a cut.