Amongst Women

by John McGahern

  As the days went by and the busy little transport box seemed to be making only slow way into the huge heap of lime, he no longer eased it out on the blade of the shovel for the wind to take it but scattered it anywhere out of sight, anywhere to be rid of it. More often because of his impatience, it blew back in his face, dusting him all over. Each night he would be more red-eyed, hardly able to drag his feet with tiredness, his face caked white with lime, lime in his eyes and ears and nostrils, his throat dry, lime thick through his hair and clothes and when he sat down to the table he felt as if he were eating lime.

  The blindman’s buff of ‘I’m the boody man’ was gone and they served his tiredness with careful silence. Rose bent over him with pure attention.

  ‘Do you think it will rain?’ he asked Rose.

  ‘The forecast is for the same dry hard weather for days.’

  ‘If it rains,’ he said gloomily, ‘if it rains that heap will set like mixed concrete and we’ll never be rid of it’; and though there was no sign of a break in the weather he covered the slowly diminishing heap at night with clear plastic, weighted down with stones.

  The girls were now too close to their exam, too anxious to do more than lift their faces to him, but out of the tiredness and filth of lime he could be seen looking often at their heads bent over the lamplit pages in what looked close to melancholy and sunken reflection.

  ‘I was in the eighth class in Moyne,’ he said and named four boys in the same class. ‘It was as far as you could go in Moyne. I was there for two years. All the others went on to be priests. Joe Brady became a Bishop in Colorado. He died two years ago. I used to write to him till then. You couldn’t go further than the eighth class without going on to be a priest.’

  ‘Even if you had money?’ Rose asked.

  ‘No one had money round Moyne,’ he smiled, aching with tiredness, filthy and white with lime. ‘We were all good in the eighth class in Moyne but I was the best in maths.’ He named the others who shone in different subjects. ‘They all went on to be priests and then the Troubles started and I left too. Strange, to this day I have never met a priest who wasn’t afraid to die. I could never make head or tails of that. It flew in the face of everything.’

  ‘If it had been a different time you’d have been a doctor or an engineer,’ Rose said.

  ‘I wouldn’t have been a doctor,’ he shivered with tiredness, ill at ease by the very suggestion of a shape other than his own. ‘These lassies will be worn out with all this study,’ Moran changed.

  ‘No, Daddy. We’re just going over something again for the exam.’

  ‘We’ve had good weather for weeks now. You’re all day inside in school. You should take your books into the fresh air.’ He returned to it again and again, the good weather held and they were compelled eventually to go outside. They went to Oakport Woods, leaving their bicycles at the big iron gate, and walking with their books over the grass to the belt of trees along Oakport Lake. The late May sun burned overhead. It would be cool and dark within the wood and there was a cold spring.

  ‘I don’t know why he had to rout us out. We have wasted all this time getting here. We’d study better at home,’ Sheila complained crossing the fields.

  ‘That’s him,’ Mona answered. ‘He’s never content with things the way they are.’

  They passed the delicate white blossoms of wild cherry, Sheila striding along in angry resentment, Mona following in her shadow. The light of water showed through the tree trunks as they drew close to the narrow wood along the lake but once on the fringe of the trees they lost all resentment at the sight of the thick floor of bluebells beneath the trees. To advance further into the wood was to trample on the colour blue.

  ‘There must be thousands.’

  ‘There’s millions!’

  Their feet left clear tracks through the floor of bluebells as if on dark snow, the soft stems crushing to pulp under their feet. At the well they left their books and went down to the shore. The water was still. Summer had not yet replaced the wheaten reeds of winter with green along the edges. Out in the lake the gulls wheeled and scolded above their young on the pile of reeds ringed with rocks that formed Seagull Island. There was no boat any longer in Nutley’s boathouse. Some boards had been torn from the side and its black paint of tar had turned pale.

  ‘I don’t like this place,’ Sheila said.

  ‘Do you remember when we used to go with Daddy in the boat on Saturdays?’

  ‘How could I forget!’ Sheila said derisively.

  Before getting down to their books they searched out a hollow straw and leaned flat across the spring to drink the water which was famed for its coldness. It was as if by drinking from the cold spring they were hoping to appease some spirit of the place so that it wouldn’t turn unfriendly to their studies; but they could not settle as they tried to read and make notes. A fly landed on a nose. A pure white butterfly tossed about in the light on the edge of the lake. Bees were moving about on the bluebells. A wren or robin scrambled about in a clump of thorns and seemed to be scolding.

  ‘This is a joke,’ Sheila closed her book. ‘I can’t take in a word here. I’m going home. What can he say? It’s too close to the exam to waste time.’

  ‘He can’t say that we didn’t make an attempt.’ Mona too was glad to leave.

  ‘We should have known better,’ came the exasperated response.

  Even Sheila grew a little afraid as they drew close to the house. Coming home so early might seem to be confronting Moran.

  ‘You are almost back before you left.’ He met them at the gate and was smiling. ‘There’s nothing like the lake and the open air for powdering through the lessons.’

  ‘We got nothing done, Daddy.’ Sheila hung her head despondently low.

  ‘I’m surprised. I thought when I saw the pair of you coming that you had just raced through everything,’ Moran laughed. There was no reason to be afraid; on the contrary, he was delighted.

  ‘There were too many things to look at, Daddy,’ Mona said apologetically.

  ‘Ye are making excuses now,’ he teased. ‘You’re just no good and weren’t able to make yourselves get down to it.’

  After they had gone in and resumed their grind in the usual places, Rose came out to him and said gently, ‘You were terrible, Daddy, to make them go down to the lake.’

  ‘What’s so terrible about it?’ he laughed, still in good humour. ‘It’s fresh air, isn’t it? They need to be rooted out of themselves from time to time. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. They’ll appreciate the inside of the house far better now.’

  This small disturbance did not deflect them for long. They read and reread, often looking quite abstracted, memorizing passages silently, their eyes far off; and when ideas eluded or baffled them they would turn to one another for help, each sister seeming to draw strength and comfort from the other’s closeness.

  Moran felt so outside their circle of concentration that he had to resort to tiptoeing into the room in an exaggerated parody of someone trying to enter unheard but his only audience was the boy, and that not often, and laughter only lifted the girls’ heads from their books for a forgotten moment.

  Each of these clear days of scattered apple and white pear tree blossom moved inexorably towards the first day when they set out without books and came home in the evening showing the pink or blue papers they had tested themselves against in the examination hall.

  ‘How do you think you did?’ Moran was waiting anxiously to ask each evening.

  ‘We don’t know, Daddy. The nun thinks we didn’t do too bad.’

  ‘Never mind. We’ll always have enough to eat here anyhow,’ he said, feeling vulnerable in the face of the power that rested in the hands of the outside.

  Then, suddenly, the exams were over. They could put their books away. But, instead of the freedom and ease they had longed for, all they felt was emptiness where once all was tension and work. They had to pass idle days of waiting that stretched ahead t
o an eternity of weeks in August.

  ‘You don’t have to worry about anything,’ Moran said constantly. ‘You don’t have to worry about a single thing.’

  In early July the waiting was broken by the excitement of Maggie coming home for the first time since she had left for London. She was coming home for three whole weeks and by the time she left for London again the exam results would be nearly due.

  Rose had already started to paint the main room of the house during the first exam. The freed girls helped her finish it, scrub tables and chairs. The old furniture was left outside in the sun to air. They scrubbed white the boards of the floor and the old brown flagstones of the hallway took on a damp glow. Michael’s front garden was beautiful with stock, beds of sweet william and marigolds that took greedily the sun from the other flowers – pansies, roses and lilies. Moran washed and polished the car, even cleared rusted machinery from around the house. He was more excited than anyone else and continually cracked jokes.

  On the arrival day he considered going to meet Maggie in Carrick but he was afraid that he might miss her and decided to go to Boyle. He left alone before the train reached Carrick. Against Rose’s chidings he went in his old working clothes as if, perversely, to deny that the day was special in any way. ‘She’ll have to take me as she finds me. She’s back in the country now.’ After he left everyone was glued to the clock.

  ‘The train is coming into Carrick!’

  The waiting silence was broken by, ‘I’d say the train is leaving Carrick now,’ and they all went to the fields behind the house to catch a glimpse of the train as it passed. They heard the diesel engine, the quick rattle of the wheels on rails and then the caterpillar of carriages that rose above the stone walls, the small windows flashing in the sun as they were quickly drawn across their view and gone. Then they all moved to the front of the house to watch the road and wait.

  They were so intent on watching every car that they failed to pick up Moran’s until it was turning slowly in the gate under the yew tree. Moran looked stern and self-conscious as he drove up the short avenue. Maggie burst into tears at the sight of the house and the small familiar crowd waiting for her outside the wooden gate of the garden. Everyone embraced blindly and kissed one by one.

  ‘You are such a handsome one now,’ Rose looked her up and down with pleasure.

  ‘What do you think of an old fellow like myself turning up to meet such a grand lassie?’

  Rose laughed and there was a general scramble to carry the baggage into the house.

  In the house Maggie unpacked the presents she brought: a brilliant red woollen scarf for Rose, a brown V-necked pullover for Moran; Sheila and Mona were handed silken headscarves and Michael a saffron tie to go with his hair. She also brought him seeds with pictures of the flowers on the packets.

  ‘Do you think they will grow here?’ he asked, impressed that they had come all the way from London.

  A big box of soft-centred chocolates was handed round. Tea was made. She was the centre of the table. They asked her greedily about London.

  ‘What’s Luke like now?’ Sheila burst out.

  Silence fell at once. Everyone looked towards Moran who held his own pained silence.

  ‘He’s just the same,’ Maggie said and continued on about the nurses’ home while Sheila bit her tongue.

  Such was the excitement and focus on Maggie that in spite of Rose’s care to draw him into the conversation Moran began to feel out of it and grew bored.

  ‘I think it’s time to say the Rosary,’ he said earlier than usual, taking out his beads. They put newspapers down and knelt. This night Moran enunciated each repetitious word with a slow clarity and force as if the very dwelling on suffering, death and human supplication would scatter all flimsy vanities of a greater world; and the muted responses giving back their acceptance of human servitude did not improve his humour. The coughing, the rustling of the newspapers, the rasp of coat buttons on table or chair exasperated his brooding. The high spirits round the tea table had gone. Then, like a shoal of fish moving within a net, Rose and the girls started to clear the table, to brush away crumbs, to wash, to dry, to return each thing to its own place, all done with a muted energy; whispers, jokes, little scolding asides – ‘No, that goes in the other place’ or reminisce how they had made the same mistake before in order to soften any harshness in the scold, bending low in apologetic laughter. Ingratiating smiles and words were threaded in and out of the whole whirl of busyness. Amid it all was their constant awareness of Moran’s watching presence, sharpening everything they did with the danger of letting something fall and break and bring the weight of his disapproval into the small chain. All their movements were based more on habit and instinct and fear than any real threat but none the less it was an actual physical state. They would wash up the same way even if they were not watched.

  As looking down from great heights brings the urge to fall and end the terror of falling, so his very watching put pressure on them to make a slip as they dried and stacked the plates and cups. There were several alarms, bringing laughing giggles of relief when they came to nothing. Then they quietly washed and dried their own hands and returned to the general room. Moran sat on, brooding in the car chair, his thumbs idly revolving around one another.

  ‘I think we should have a cup of tea,’ Rose said with jollying encouragement towards Moran but when he only looked back out at her she just continued talking as she got kettle and teapot. ‘Maggie will want an early night. I know how tired she must be after the journey. That night boat is the worst of all, and the waiting.’ Whether it was the suggestion or pure tiredness Maggie was yawning as if in her support.

  The girls rose late the following morning. Moran had gone out already into the fields. During the long luxurious breakfast Maggie told Rose and Sheila and Mona more details of her life in London than she was able to the night before – the parties, the dances, the different bands and singers, the boys she met, her girlfriends.

  Rose had her own girlhood in Glasgow to share. Mona and Sheila were so poised on the edge of their own lives that they listened as if hearing about the living stream they were about to enter. After the long breakfast the three girls went out to visit Moran in the fields.

  They had worked so hard as children in the fields that each field and tree had become a dear presence, especially the hedges. Maggie looked for the old damson tree by McCabe’s, the crab and wild cherry. The sky overhead was cloudless. No wind stirred. Small birds flitted in the shade of the branches and bees were crawling over the red and white clover. They found Moran by the sound of malleting. He was replacing broken stakes in a barbed-wire fence in one of the meadows. The sight of his daughters in sleeveless dresses was relief from the lonely tedium of the work.

  ‘I’m planning to knock this meadow before the evening is out,’ he told them before they left and joked, ‘You’ll have to harden your hands before you leave.’

  ‘They are not that soft, Daddy.’

  As they walked away from him through the greenness, the pale blue above them, Maggie said, her voice thick with emotion, ‘Daddy is just lovely when he’s like that.’

  ‘There’s nobody who can hold a candle to him,’ Mona added. The girls in their different ways wanted to gather their father and the whole, true, heartbreaking day into their arms.

  By evening Moran’s mood had completely turned again. He changed his boots and clothes in downcast silence and ate without speaking. Whatever was bothering him was gnawing at him as he ate. They knew him so well that everyone fell into a hush and appeared to move around him on tiptoes.

  ‘Do you ever see that brother of yours at all?’ he asked without looking up as he finished, drawing his chair roughly back from the table.

  ‘I do but not all that much.’

  ‘How do you mean not all that much?’

  ‘He met me at the station …’

  ‘God, don’t you think I know that?’

  ‘He came out to the hospital e
very weekend after I first came but since then it’s only every so often he comes out. Once I met him in the West End and we went to the pictures.’ Maggie wanted to please and pacify him on this her holiday at any cost.

  ‘How does he look?’

  ‘He looks fine. He looks no different than when he was here.’

  ‘Did you mention when you wrote that he is in with some Cockney riff-raff?’

  ‘It’s something to do with converting old houses. I’m not certain what it is.’

  ‘Believe me, he wouldn’t tell what it is.’

  ‘He goes to night school though,’ she defended uneasily.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Accountancy. He’ll be qualified before too long.’

  ‘Does he ask about us at all?’

  ‘He asks if we have any news.’

  ‘Does he ever talk about coming home?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And did he not send any word to anybody when he knew you were coming home?’

  ‘Yes. He sent word. He wishes everybody the best.’

  ‘God, I don’t know what’s wrong with this house,’ Moran rose, preparing to go out. ‘Getting information from anybody is like trying to extract teeth.’

  ‘We don’t know any more than that,’ Maggie protested to Rose after he had gone. ‘I told Daddy everything we know about Luke.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Rose hushed. ‘Daddy’s like that. He takes all these things far too seriously.’

  When he came in for the night some hours later he was still agitated and fretting. ‘I don’t know,’ he said as he sat to the table. ‘I don’t know what I did to deserve it. I don’t know why things can’t be the same in this house as in every other house in the country. I don’t know why it is always me that has to be singled out.’

  Rose fussed discreetly around him but he could not remain the centre of attention for long. Maggie was going to a dance and she was taking Mona and Sheila. All three girls were dressing and their youthful excitement pulsed through the house. Rose too was caught up in the preparations.