Rose, surrounded by the girls, left the graveside. Michael stood a little way off with his son beside Sean Flynn and Mark O’Donoghue who had come all the way from London. Age had taken the Elvis look off Mark and except for his weathered face he could have been another civil servant like Sean. The men followed the bereaved women out of the graveyard at a hesitant, respectful distance, unsure of their place in the mourning.
But as the small tight group of stricken women slowly left the graveyard they seemed with every step to be gaining in strength. It was as if their first love and allegiance had been pledged uncompromisingly to this one house and man and that they knew that he had always been at the very living centre of all parts of their lives. Now not only had they never broken that pledge but they were renewing it for a second time with this other woman who had come in among them and married him. Their continual homecomings had been an affirmation of its unbroken presence, and now, as they left him under the yew, it was as if each of them in their different ways had become Daddy.
‘He may be gone home but he’ll always be with us,’ Maggie spoke for them all. ‘He’ll never leave us now.’
‘Poor Daddy,’ Rose echoed absently out of her own thoughts before waking and turning brightly towards the girls.
At the gate they paused firmly to wait for the men who lagged well behind on the path and were chatting and laughing pleasantly together, their children around them.
‘Will you look at the men. They’re more like a crowd of women,’ Sheila said, remarking on the slow frivolity of their pace. ‘The way Michael, the skit, is getting Sean and Mark to laugh you’d think they were coming from a dance.’
Author biography
John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934 and brought up in the Republic of Ireland. He trained to be a primary-school teacher before becoming a full-time writer, and later taught and travelled extensively. He lived in County Leitrim. The author of six highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories, he was the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship, the American-Irish Award, the Prix Etrangère Ecureuil and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Amongst Women, which won both the GPA and the Irish Times Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a four-part BBC television series. His work appeared in numerous anthologies and has been translated into many languages. In 2005, his autobiography, Memoir, won the South Bank Literature Award. John McGahern died in 2006.
by the same author
THE BARRACKS
THE DARK
NIGHTLINES
THE LEAVETAKING
GETTING THROUGH
THE PORNOGRAPHER
HIGH GROUND
THAT THEY MAY FACE THE RISING SUN
MEMOIR
CREATURES OF THE EARTH: NEW AND SELECTED STORIES
play
THE POWER OF DARKNESS
Copyright
First published in 1991
by Faber and Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House
74-77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2009
All rights reserved
© John McGahern, 1990
The right of John McGahern to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978—0—571—25018—9
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Amongst Women
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
Amongst Women Page 21