Amongst Women

by John McGahern

  ‘Do you remember Eddie McIniff in Maguire’s garden on night watch?’ McQuaid asked. ‘He could see all the roads from Maguire’s garden. We were watching in case the Tans would try to infiltrate the lakes at night. Eddie used to shoot a lot of duck and could stand like a stone. One of the Maguire girls – Ellie or Molly, I think it was Molly, they were all fine looking, tall women – came out to do her morning business and hunkered down under an apple tree a few feet away from Eddie. All Eddie did was to wait a bit and then lean over without a sound and lay the gun barrel across her back cheeks. I’d love to have seen her face when she jumped,’ McQuaid laughed out loud. ‘There must be nothing colder on a bare arse than a gun barrel that was out all night.’

  Moran did not laugh. He looked helpless with the weight of his own disapproval. His two thumbs rotated about one another as they always did when he was agitated and looking for a way to strike.

  ‘McIniff was blackguard enough to do that but you’d think that at least he’d be ashamed to tell it.’

  ‘What was it but fun?’ McQuaid brushed the criticism aside. ‘Didn’t you have something to do with one of those Maguire girls? The rest of us had to scrape and scrounge for the girls, Michael, but whatever you had they always fell into your hands like ripe plums.’

  ‘That was all talk,’ Moran said, angry as ever at any baring of the inviolate secrecy he instinctively kept around himself.

  ‘Your father was a hard man for the women in his day,’ McQuaid said addressing the two girls.

  ‘I think Mr McQuaid does himself less than credit with that talk,’ Moran said with quiet dignity.

  ‘There’s even rumours that you’re courting again. Are you thinking of taking the plunge, Michael?’

  Moran held a pointed silence. The girls brought tea and sandwiches.

  ‘Ah, these girls will make some man happy,’ McQuaid said. ‘But you’re a brave man, Michael. If anything were to happen to my old dosey I’m afraid I’d live out my days in peace.’

  The girls were able to laugh openly at last without any risk. The idea of the fat old cattle dealer emerging as a romantic possibility was so preposterous that even Moran smiled.

  ‘I’d take that pension, Michael. You earned it. Take what they’ll give you. Never question the colour of money.’ The talk turned to easier waters as they drank tea.

  ‘I’ve got on without it long enough. Why should I take it from them now?’ It was plain from the blustering way he spoke that he wasn’t so sure.

  ‘It never did me no harm. There were times when I was starting in at the cattle that it stood between me and the road. It doesn’t make much difference now but a hell of a sight of worse things come through the letterbox at the end of every month.’

  ‘I was thinking of taking it,’ Moran admitted.

  ‘Wouldn’t it buy something for the girls here or put someone through school even if you didn’t want to take it for yourself? You should have taken it years ago. In this world you don’t exist without money. And there might never be another world.’ McQuaid could not resist this hit at Moran’s religiosity.

  ‘Man proposes …’ Moran said darkly.

  ‘And God stays out of it,’ McQuaid twisted round the old saw.

  The girls had washed and put away the cups and plates, covered the few squares of sandwiches that remained with a damp cloth. ‘Mr McQuaid’s room is ready,’ Maggie said as they prepared to take their leave for the night. ‘The bed is aired.’

  ‘Oh, I forgot,’ McQuaid said hastily. ‘I have to be hitting the road any minute now. I should have told you earlier but it must have slipped the old mind.’

  Moran did not protest. Covertly, leaning far back in his chair, he watched McQuaid from under hooded eyelids: in all the years they had been coming together on Monaghan Day McQuaid had always spent the night in the house.

  ‘I told my old lady I’d be home,’ McQuaid lied as he rose. ‘Otherwise she’d have gone over to one of the boys. She gets afraid on her own in the house at night.’

  Having waited long enough to see if they were needed, the two girls went up to Moran and kissed him on the lips as they did every night.

  ‘Good night, Mr McQuaid,’ they offered their hand.

  ‘That was a great meal. Ye are a great pair of girls. If you ever get up our way call in to see my old lassie,’ he took and held their hands.

  ‘Good night, Mr McQuaid,’ they repeated awkwardly before leaving the two men alone.

  McQuaid sat down but almost immediately rose again. As on all the other Monaghan Days stretching far back he had come intending to stay the night. Tonight a growing irritation at Moran’s compulsion to dominate, to have everything on his own terms or not at all, had hardened into a sudden decision to overturn the years and quit the house at once. As soon as Moran saw McQuaid on his feet again he knew the evening, all the evenings, were about to be broken up and he withdrew back into himself. He would neither plead with him to stay nor help him with his leaving.

  As soon as McQuaid met Moran’s domination of the evening with this sudden violence he was anxious to be conciliatory. ‘Well, thanks for the meal and evening, Michael. It was a great evening.’

  For a time it seemed that Moran might choose to remain seated and force McQuaid to make his own way out of the house. When he did rise in the chair it was slowly and grudgingly and he followed McQuaid out into the stone hallway as if he were finding it difficult to walk or move. He held his hand on the door’s edge in the darkness of the hallway.

  ‘Good luck, Michael,’ the old cattle dealer said a last time but Moran made no answer in the darkness.

  A brief moon between clouds outside sharpened the lines of boxwood that led to the wooden gate. McQuaid walked heavily and firmly to the gate. He did not bother to shut it, letting it swing open behind him. After opening the door of the Mercedes he leaned on its edge to clear his throat and spit on the yellow path.

  ‘Some people just cannot bear to come in second,’ he said loudly enough to be heard before getting into the car, reversing it round and driving away. Moran stood holding the edge of the door until the headlights disappeared and he closed the door without shutting the iron gate at the road or the small wooden gate leaning against the boxwood.

  In a cold fury he stood and sat about for a long time within, twice changing from chair to chair. After years he had lost his oldest and best friend but in a way he had always despised friendship; families were what mattered, more particularly that larger version of himself – his family; and while seated in the same scheming fury he saw each individual member gradually slipping away out of his reach. Yes, they would eventually all go. He would be alone. That he could not stand. He saw with bitter lucidity that he would marry Rose Brady now. As with so many things, no sooner had he taken the idea to himself than he began to resent it passionately.

  McQuaid had either struck true by pure chance or had picked up reliable gossip at the Mohill Fair.

  Rose Brady had come home from Glasgow to nurse her father and stayed on irresolutely after his death, one day stretching into days. She could go back to the Rosenblooms, to the big house outside Glasgow where she had lived as one of the family for twelve years. Mrs Rosenbloom had written that they all wanted her back but still she stayed with her mother and brother in the farmhouse above the small lake, the poor rock- strewn lower slopes of the mountain rising towards Arigna beyond.

  Sometimes in the evenings she had too strong a sense of being locked into the life of the farmhouse, even with the door continuously open on the summer yard, her brother away in the fields, her mother stumbling about the place with buckets, leaning on the table or the back of a chair whenever she stood to talk. One evening, as an excuse to get out of the house, she went with a letter to the post office.

  To her surprise the small room of the post office was full of people waiting for the evening mail. They all turned towards her when she entered and way was made for her to go up to the counter. People whose own names she was no lon
g certain of called out her name and she smiled and nodded by way of general response. The post office was owned by two white- haired sisters, Annie and Lizzie, far out cousins of her own, and Annie stamped the envelope for her, postmarked it and dropped it in the calico bag on the counter.

  ‘You’re still with us, Rose?’

  ‘Still here, Annie. You’ve a big crowd this evening.’

  ‘It’s for the mail van. You might as well wait yourself to see if there’s anything for the house.’

  In turn she moved aside to allow someone else room at the counter and found herself standing beside Mcran. She knew him well by sight but she had never spoken with him before.

  ‘I was very sorry about your father,’ he said.

  ‘I know that,’ she gave the formal response.

  He had been a widower for many years, she knew. He had been an army officer once and there had been trouble that caused him to leave the army. Often she had passed the stone house where he lived with his children, some of whom must now be grown. She had heard dark mutterings about him but after a few minutes of talking with him she was ready to put it down to common envy. She found him attentive, intelligent, even charming, but with a distinct sense of separateness and pride that she found refreshingly unlike any of the other local men she had known. When the mail van pulled up outside, the hum of talk about them went silent. The driver dumped the mail bag on the counter, lifting the sealed bag without speaking a word. Annie opened the bag. As soon as she started to go through the bundle of letters, all Moran’s attention was fixed on the sorting. He ignored Rose completely. From being the centre of his attention one moment all of a sudden she ceased to exist. His whole life seemed to hang on each letter in Annie’s hand, his eyes following it until she handed it into the crowd or placed it on a pile to one side and then he would fix on the next letter and the next. The tension was such that she felt sudden relief as they went out of the small room into the air.

  ‘Were you expecting an important letter?’

  ‘No,’ he laughed. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Oh, I just wondered.’

  ‘I come nearly every evening for the post. It gets you out of the place. It saves wondering the next day whether Jimmy Lynch will bring anything to the house or not.’

  The bicycle she wheeled left thin tracks in the pale dust that covered the road. At the crossroads beside the bridge they parted.

  ‘I suppose we’ll be losing you again before too long,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure when I’ll go back,’ she answered.

  She was in her late thirties, lean and strong, too neat and plain of feature ever to have been beautiful but her large grey eyes were intelligent and full of wilfulness and energy. As soon as she got home she couldn’t resist bringing up Moran’s name.

  ‘They say he’s no ornament,’ her mother said carefully.

  ‘I was talking to him in the post office.’

  She saw her mother look at her sharply. ‘They say he’s one sort of person when he’s out in the open among people – he can be very sweet – but that he’s a different sort of person altogether behind the walls of his own house.’

  ‘People talk too much about other people round here. Often the talk is just ignorant malice.’

  Her true instinct was always to work behind the usual social frameworks: family, connections, position, conventions, those established forms that can be used like weapons when they are mastered. Behind them she could work with a charm and singleness of attention that became so smooth as to be chilling, except for the friendliness of her large grey eyes. The Rosenblooms had long known that they could take her with them anywhere in society. These skills she could not use with Moran. Her interest was too great. She had too little time. There was too much of the outlaw about him that held its own fascination. Painfully and in the open she had to make all the running.

  She came to the post office the next evening, and the next, buying tea and a comb of honey from Lizzie the first evening, posting a letter at Annie’s counter on the Friday, waiting till the mail was sorted, each time managing to leave the post office alone with Moran. They stood talking a long time at the crossroads before separating but he didn’t offer to see her over the weekend. She was able to conceal her restlessness, the pacing about, her dream of a different beginning to a new life, her impatience with the old shapes that she had used for too long; she was not young and was old enough to foresee failure. She was able to will her longing into an unexamined haze but she could not stay away from the post office on Monday. Once she appeared regularly others could observe her. Annie and Lizzie were friendly with Moran. They often discussed his family together and how hard it was for a single man to bring up children alone. Soon they began to greet Rose’s evening presence in their small clean-scrubbed room with sarcasm. This unseemly chase after love was viewed with a hostile, overall amusement, for ‘love’ had left Annie and Lizzie – and many far younger – long behind and it was valued like jaundice. This courting dance seemed to them a grotesque parody.

  Crossing the road to water the bed of dahlias and moon daisies and nasturtiums she kept on the grass margin across the road from her door at the beginning of the village, Mrs Reynolds paused to watch Rose make her way round by the bridge to the post office and muttered venomously, ‘There’s no fool like an old fool’, as if confronting the worst part of her own nature. In the two bars, and on the bridge and football field where the men gathered in the evening, there were the coarse shouts of ‘Sink log! All find their way to the dirty hollow’, followed by cheers that echoed out like firing. In the full face of the ridicule she went to the post office evening after evening, ridicule she willed not to see or notice.

  ‘Are you expecting some important letter, Rose?’ her mother inquired anxiously.

  ‘No, Mother. It just takes me out of the house for an hour or two.’

  Then her married sister arrived at the house with news of her real reason for going each evening to the post office. ‘You’d think she’d have more sense at her age. She’ll just become a laughing stock if she’s not that already.’

  ‘I hear you’re seeing Mr Moran at the post office,’ her mother ventured delicately.

  ‘Yes. He goes there every evening.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too bothered about him. And besides he has a large family of his own already.’

  ‘We’re just friends, Mother,’ she gave that little laugh and smiled the charming smile that hid the pure will. ‘All we ever talk about is his children. He is very worried about them.’

  ‘I’d be careful if I were you, Rose. It doesn’t need much to start people talking.’

  ‘Then let them talk.’

  Yet Moran made no move towards her, promised nothing, gave no hint of any reciprocation of interest, lent her no support. All he did was remain at the point where they first met. He neither went towards her nor withdrew and she saw it could not go on like that. One evening as they were forced to shelter from a sudden shower under the thick line of sycamores, she said, ‘You should call to the house some evening, Michael. I know they’d like to meet you.’

  ‘You know how hard it is to get away, Rose.’

  ‘Still, you know you’re welcome,’ she smiled and left him and he was not surprised when she did not come to the post office the next evening or the evening after. He knew that he would have to go to her if he wanted her.

  As a young man he had been pursued by many women; that he secretly despised them did not lessen his attractiveness but in later years his large family and increasing years had hung about him with a weight as great as any deformity: but he would never risk exposing himself as Rose had. Rose Brady’s attention had been as unexpected as it had been sudden and welcome. It was as if she had fallen out of a generous sky. She was much younger than he, strong, not unpleasant to look at. He had reason to suspect that she had saved money and his life could glow again in the concentration of her attention. It was unlikely that such luck would fall his wa
y again no matter how long he waited. That same week he told Maggie out of the blue that he wanted to see her alone. With great nervousness and alarm she followed him to his room.

  ‘There’s something very important that concerns all the family that I want to discuss seriously.’ He felt garbed in the robes of responsibility and consequence as he spoke. ‘What would you think if I were to bring someone new into the family?’

  Maggie looked quickly at him but without comprehension.

  ‘If I was to fill your mother’s place – the Lord have mercy on her soul – with someone new,’ he amended. ‘If I were to marry again,’

  Whether it was the sudden mention of her mother or the whole emotional portentousness with which he had charged the scene Maggie burst out sobbing. This continued for a long time during which he shuffled his feet uncomfortably, controlling his immediate impulse to shout at her to be quiet. After a while she discovered that she could hide comfortably behind the shelter of sobbing.

  ‘A woman would be able to help you in ways that I can’t,’ he said. ‘There’s only so much any man can do on his own.’

  ‘Whatever you think, Daddy.’ She knew that whatever she said would be irrelevant anyhow.

  ‘You think it would be for the best then?’ He was impatient now to conclude the whole scene.

  ‘If you think it’s for the best, Daddy.’

  ‘I know it’ll be for the best. I wouldn’t even think of it for a minute if it wasn’t best for everybody. After all these years it’ll be a real house and home again. It’ll be a place that will always be there for you to come back to.’

  She could not wait to tell Sheila and Mona. Both girls thought she was joking at first but when she recounted word for word the interview she had had with Moran they exploded into wild laughter. They did not tell their younger brother. Though they loved him as if he were their own child they left him out of all things that mattered in the running of the house.